All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 31, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:42
Mikhail Gorbachev Is Dead | Ep. 1565
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The last leader of the USSR dies and receives the endless plaudits of the media.
Joe Biden visits Pennsylvania and spouts absolute nonsense.
And Mexican drug cartels dominate the fentanyl market.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
It's time to stand up against big tech.
Protect your data at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
First, you're paying too much for all the things right now.
That includes your cell phone service.
Now here's the thing.
You've always been paying too much for your cell phone service if you're using AT&T or Verizon or T-Mobile.
Because you are paying for a bunch of data you don't actually use.
I know they tell you you need the unlimited data.
You actually don't need the unlimited data.
What you need is what PureTalk will give you.
PureTalk makes it easy to find the right plan for you and your family.
Choose the data plan that's right for you.
From 2 gigs per month to unlimited with a mobile hotspot.
Plus, they make the switch from your current provider incredibly easy.
It's not going to take you more than 10 minutes.
It is well worth the savings.
Plus, this month, When you switch to Pure Talk, you pay for one month and get the second month for free.
I've been endorsing Pure Talk for a couple of years.
They've never made an offer of this magnitude.
Just head on over to puretalk.com, choose your plan, and enter code SHAPIRO for this special offer.
Again, that's puretalk.com, enter promo code SHAPIRO, get your second month for free.
Why would you spend too much money on one of those big wireless companies that's charging you too much?
When you could be saving a bunch of money with a company that doesn't hate your guts, head over to puretalk.com, choose that plan, enter code Shapiro for the special offer, and again, get your second month free when you do.
Well, yesterday, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the last leader of the Soviet Union before its collapse, died at the age of 91, and the media have been just feeding him.
I mean, we are talking the obituaries that would normally be due to a figure like, say, Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr., they are being piled on Mikhail Gorbachev.
The reason for that is because Mikhail Gorbachev, again, Basically made two decisions.
One was a giant mistake and the other he deserves some plaudits for.
The giant mistake was believing that he could allow cracks in the facade of the Soviet Union without the entire system collapsing underneath him.
And the thing that he deserves plaudits for is not starting a nuclear war at the very end of the Soviet Union's existence.
Those were basically the two things that he did.
And the media instead are treating him as sort of an ideological hero, as though he quote-unquote ended the Cold War.
Mikhail Gorbachev by himself would not have ended the Cold War.
Mikhail Gorbachev was a communist.
Mikhail Gorbachev is and was a Leninist.
If you read everything that he ever wrote, he was a devotee of Marxism.
He never stopped being a devotee of Marxism.
All that happened in the latter days of Mikhail Gorbachev is that he suddenly recognized that the Soviet Union was too weak to actually prop up this vast sphere of empire, and he started to essentially allow people to make their own decisions without full-on military intervention.
But that was actually a late development.
In 1986, 1985, 1986, by the time Mikhail Gorbachev actually took over, His early moves were actually quite repressive.
The notion that Mikhail Gorbachev was a humanitarian in some way is not the case.
And it seems to me that one of the reasons that the media are massaging Mikhail Gorbachev's legacy here after his death is because, and this happened at the time, they don't want to give credit to the actual heroes of the anti-communist movement.
People like Margaret Thatcher, people like Ronald Reagan, people like Pope John Paul II.
They don't want to give credit to the actual anti-communists who fought communism each and every day.
Instead, they would prefer to believe that the Soviet Union sort of was always And at the very end, their heart showed through when they saw that the empire could not survive.
They simply allowed it to collapse out of the decency and warmth of their own heart.
And you can see that in the coverage from CNN and the New York Times.
Here's CNN's obituary for Mikhail Gorbachev.
It said, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the former Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, has died at the age of 91.
Gorbachev died after a long illness, Russian state news agencies reported.
Apparently, the man credited with introducing key political and economic reforms to the USSR and helping to end the Cold War had been in failing health for some time.
Again, when we say that he helped end the Cold War, what we mean is that he read the writing on the wall, and then he made the mistake of allowing cracks to appear in a very, very weak facade, and the entire thing fell away.
The lesson, by the way, that was learned by the Chinese from watching Mikhail Gorbachev is never, ever, Allow political liberalization before economic liberalization.
So what the Chinese have done is they've strengthened their state apparatus while also getting involved in mercantilism via the free market.
Gorbachev sort of did the reverse.
He allowed for political liberalization, at least in very, very small part, in the ring of states that surrounded the actual Russian empire.
And then after that, economic liberalization took place.
So allowing any sort of political break is what led to the fall of the Soviet Union.
The only way, however, he could have held that up would have been on the basis of a stronger economy and the economy simply did not exist in the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union was always a bit of a paper tiger, not in the sense that they weren't militarily powerful, they were, but in the sense that they were retrograde economically.
And if you actually wish to have a powerful and durable empire for a long period of time, meaning more than 70 years, then what you're going to need to do is actually build up the Communism actually forbids that, which is why China has been able to strengthen itself on the basis of capitalism.
And now I think China actually is going to enter a period of economic stagnation that's going to weaken them over the course of the next couple of generations.
In any case, the obituaries have been absolutely fawning about Mikhail Gorbachev.
According to CNN, with his outgoing charismatic nature, Gorbachev broke the mold for Soviet leaders who until then had been mostly remote, icy figures.
Almost from the start of his leadership, he strove for significant reforms so the system would work more efficiently and more democratically.
Hence the two key phrases of the Gorbachev era, glasnost, openness, and perestroika, restructuring.
Well, I mean, he really did not have much of a choice given the fact that the Soviet Union is already on its heels in Afghanistan, given the fact that Soviet Union was being dramatically outpaced by the United States, both militarily and economically speaking.
He later said, I began these reforms and my guiding stars were freedom and democracy without bloodshed.
So the people would cease to be a herd led by a shepherd.
They would become citizens.
Hey, that's a bit of revisionist history, but CNN goes right along with it.
According to CNN, Gorbachev had humble beginnings.
He was born into a peasant family, March 2, 1931, near the Stavropol.
And as a boy, he did farm labor along with his studies, working with his father, who was a combine harvest operator.
In later life, Gorbachev said he was particularly proud of my ability to detect a fault in the combine instantly just by the sound of it.
He became a member of the Communist Party in 1952.
He completed a law degree at Moscow University in 1955, and that's when he got married.
During the early 1960s, he became head of the agriculture department for the Stavropol region.
By the end of the decade, he'd risen to the top of the party hierarchy in the region.
Now, by the way, I should mention here that if you became the top of the party hierarchy in the 1960s in the Soviet Union, this is not because you were a wonderful person.
This is because you were a both political brown noser and you had the capacity for absolute brutality.
Because the Communist Party in the Soviet Union is one of the worst institutions in the history of humanity.
So if you rise to the top of that, it's not because you're a wonderful, open-minded fellow.
As a general rule, he came to the attention of Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov, members of the Politburo, the principal policy-setting body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, according to CNN, who got him elected to the Central Committee in 1971 and arranged foreign trips for their rising star.
In 1978, he was back in Moscow.
The next year, he was chosen as a candidate member of the Politburo.
His stewardship of Soviet agriculture was not a success.
I mean, no one's was, because as it turns out, collectivization is a horrible way to do agriculture.
As he came to realize, the collective system was fundamentally flawed in more than one way.
A full Politburo member since 1980, Gorbachev became more influential in 1982 when his mentor Andropov succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary of the party.
And of course, Andropov ended up dying prematurely.
He was already pretty old by the time he took over.
Gorbachev began to argue in favor of an end to the arms race with the West, hoping to shift resources to the civilian sector.
I mean, bottom line is that, again, he was sitting atop an incredibly rickety structure.
Throughout his six years in office, Gorbachev always seemed to be moving too fast for the party establishment and too slow for more radical reformers who hoped to do away with the one-party state and the command economy.
Desperately trying to stay in control of the reform process, he seemed to have underestimated the depth of the economic crisis.
He also seemed to have a blind spot for the power of the nationality issue.
Glasnost created ever louder calls for independence from the Baltics and other Soviet republics.
In the late 1980s.
The key with Gorbachev is that he was not retrograde enough as his prior predecessors had been to actually harden defense by marching troops into countries that were thinking about breaking away.
He tried to engage in negotiations with Reagan, but it was Reagan who really drove the negotiations.
Reagan actually sat down in 1986 in Reykjavik with Gorbachev, in which they were going to discuss getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether.
And Gorbachev said, well, if you want to do that, then you also have to get rid of SDI, right?
The Star Wars Initiative, which was going to be missile defense.
And Reagan got up from the table and walked away.
And later, Gorbachev was asked, you know, why did that summit go the way that it did?
He said, we never expected that Reagan would actually get up and say no.
It was all meant as sort of a front for the calming down of the military waters for the propagation of the Soviet Union into the future.
In other words, it wasn't that Gorbachev wanted to end the Soviet Union.
I mean, he's being treated as some sort of anti-communist reformer.
That is not the case.
He was a communist who completely misread the dealings when it came to the collapse of communism.
And then, in a sort of Reversal of history.
He became the hero of the liberal reform movement despite the fact that he actually was a pretty vicious communist.
Natan Sharansky, who was held as an actual political prisoner in the Soviet Union for years, has a piece at the Washington Post about Mikhail Gorbachev.
He says, What is perhaps surprising is that Gorbachev never achieved any sort of admiration.
At home, we dissident and others in the intelligentsia, those who did not believe in the regime, who wanted change, who had even fought for decades for the very reforms Gorbachev introduced, held a more complicated view of the last Soviet leader.
For one, he was a true believer in the ideas of Marx and Lenin, and the original intention behind his pioneering reforms was to rebrand communism with a more human face.
Moreover, The moment it became clear that the people's desire for greater freedom could ultimately topple the regime, he did his best to restrain the forces he had unleashed.
During his first trips to the West, before he became leader of the Politburo, Gorbachev discovered that the Soviet Union had paid a heavy diplomatic and economic price for its treatment of dissidents.
As a result, within the first year of his ascending to power, he began to release political prisoners and longtime refuseniks.
Those are Jews who are attempting to get out of the Soviet Union and get to Israel.
When it became clear that such a policy could lead to mass immigration, he introduced new restrictions instead.
It was only after massive American pressure, including a quarter million demonstrators convening in Washington in 1987, that the Iron Curtain first began to come down and Gorbachev began to release people.
Freer immigration from the USSR led to demands by religious and national groups for self-determination Sharansky should know, because Sharansky was one of the political prisoners who was released.
This too Gorbachev resisted.
He sent troops to Georgia, Lithuania, and elsewhere.
He killed dozens of demonstrators in the process.
The dissident Andrei Sakharov, whom Gorbachev released in late 1986, and who initially appeared to be the leader's natural ally, spent the last years of his life actively fighting against Gorbachev's attempts to save the single-party system and to avoid competition in Soviet elections.
Shortly before Sakharov died in 1989, he called me in Israel to say he could not visit as he had planned since he would not permit himself to leave Moscow for even a single day and potentially miss an opportunity to block Gorbachev's bid for unrivaled power.
In other words, events outpaced Gorbachev.
The obit for Gorbachev, again, because they're trying to deprive the actual heroes of the Cold War of their plaudits, the due plaudits.
Again, I'm talking Reagan, I'm talking Thatcher, I'm talking John Paul II, I'm talking Lech Walesa, Sakharov himself.
The attempt to recast Gorbachev as a kinder, gentler communist, it may have been what Gorbachev wanted to be, a kinder, gentler communist, but here's the thing.
It doesn't exist.
He just missed the boat.
And this is why the actual hardline communists hate Gorbachev.
They think that if Gorbachev had actually just done the Stalin thing and marched tanks into these dissident republics, that the Soviet Union would still exist today.
One of those people who believes that, by the way, is Vladimir Putin, who calls the downfall of the Soviet Union a geopolitical tragedy, the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.
A decade after the fall of the USSR, circumstances had changed, said Natan Sharansky.
Participating with Gorbachev at a conference in Poland, I was asked about the forces leading to the regime's demise.
In my response, I discussed three factors.
Sakharov and other dissidents who fought valiantly to keep the spark of freedom alive.
Western politicians like Scoop Jackson, Ronald Reagan, and Thatcher.
And finally, Gorbachev, who perceived the direction of history and responded accordingly.
Immediately after finishing my talk, I approached Gorbachev to thank him for releasing me.
I was surprised to discover he was almost offended by my remarks, saying, quote, I released you against all advice to the contrary and you listed me only in third place.
Well, I sympathized with his reaction.
At the time, I felt it was more important to amplify voices of dissonance and to emphasize his role in the transition.
If we look at the 20th century, however, from the bird's-eye perspective of history, we see how unique Gorbachev was.
In nearly every dictatorship, there are dissidents.
From time to time, there are also Western leaders willing to risk their political face to promote human rights abroad.
Gorbachev was a product of the Soviet regime, but he decided to destroy it nonetheless.
Well, really, what he decided to do was not launch a possible nuclear war and or massive conventional invasion of surrounding states as the Soviet Union was breaking down.
George Will makes this point, and he is absolutely correct.
There's a piece over at the Washington Post talking about this.
He says, President Ronald Reagan, abandoning the niceties of detente, turned up the rhetorical and military temperature on Gorbachev.
In 1983, he described the Soviet Union as the focus of evil in the modern world.
With the Strategic Defense Initiative, that's Star Wars, he launched a high-tech challenge to a Soviet Union in which 30% of hospitals lacked indoor plumbing.
Reagan sent lethal aid to people fighting the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
When Gorbachev retreated, according to historian A historian named William Taubman, who wrote Gorbachev His Life and Times.
According to Taubman, when Gorbachev retreated, it was the first time the Soviet Union had pulled back from territories it had liberated for communism.
Apparently, according to Taubman, the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster and the government's bungled response caused the scales to fall from Gorbachev's eyes regarding the comprehensive rottenness of the Soviet system.
Secretary of State George Shultz in 1987 explained to Gorbachev the world's transformation from the industrial to the information age, making the foundational Marxist distinction between capital and labor obsolete because, quote, we have entered a world in which the truly important capital is human capital, where people know how freely they exchange information and knowledge.
Gorbachev's lasting legacy, says George Will, might be in the lessons China's durable tyranny has chosen to learn from his and the Soviet Union's downfall.
Political scientist Graham Allison observes that when Xi Jinping has nightmares, the apparition he sees is Mikhail Gorbachev.
According to Allison, Xi says that Gorbachev's three ruinous errors were, quote, he relaxed political control of society before reforming the economy, he allowed the Communist Party to become corrupt, and he nationalized the Soviet military, allowing commanders to swear allegiance to the nation rather than to the party and its leader.
In 1988, when the French were about to celebrate and sensible people were about to regret a bicentennial, Gorbachev impertinently lectured the United Nations, two great revolutions, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 exerted a powerful impact on the very nature of history.
In other words, he was a true believer.
Gorbachev said in 2006 about Lenin, quote, I trusted him then and I still do.
So again, this sort of revisionist history by which Gorbachev was a communist, an anti-communist hero, is just not historically accurate and rests on the notion that it's still propagated by the left, that communism is really just a pretty extreme version of people trying to do the right thing gone wrong.
And so Gorbachev is the best version of that.
Whenever it comes to communism, the left seems sort of warm about it.
Like, you know, they just have the right idea, but they're just going a little bit too far.
That's not really the case.
But I'll tell you something that is the right idea, if you wish.
To take advantage of capitalism to its fullest extent, and I mean have a successful business, you need to market the right way.
Podium will help your small business stay ahead of the curve with modern messaging tools that make it easy for your customers to connect with your business.
So I don't know about you, but if I get a call from a business, the chances that I'm picking that up are very, very close to zero.
And the chances that I'm going to open an email from a business are also very close to zero.
It's text that makes it happen.
From healthcare providers to plumbers, over 100,000 businesses are texting with customers through Podium.
Customers love the convenience.
Businesses love the results.
One car dealer sold a $50,000 truck in just four text messages.
A jeweler sold a $5,000 ring and coordinated curbside pickup all through text.
A dentist sent out payment requests through text and received 70% of their outstanding collections in just two weeks.
With Podium's all-in-one inbox, you can do even more than just chat.
You can get more online reviews by sending an easy-to-use link.
You can collect payments fast from anywhere and send marketing campaigns that actually get a response all by sending that quick text.
And Podium will make your business grow.
It's just that simple.
See how Podium can help you.
Watch a demo today at Podium.com slash Shapiro.
That is Podium.com slash Shapiro.
Get in touch with your customers the way they are going to want you to get in touch with them by using text.
Head on over to Podium.com slash Shapiro to get started.
Podium.
Let's grow.
The real legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev, of course, is just recognizing the reality, which is that capitalism is a far more dominant system economically than communism.
The real appeal of communism to most people is not, in fact, its economic dominance.
Because communism is never economically dominant.
The best that communism can do is redistribute resources that already exist.
It can't build.
It's a major problem with communism.
It does not create new products.
It does not create new services.
It does not create economic progress.
All it does is it takes what is there and then it just spreads it around.
And that typically leads to a degradation of resources, which is why people in Cuba are still driving around Chevys from 1957.
The real sort of legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev, hilariously enough, may be this Pizza Hut commercial that aired in Russia about how basically the Russians had traded communism in favor of Pizza Hut thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Here's this commercial.
It's pretty astonishing.
I'll read the subtitles.
There's Mikhail Gorbachev feeding them.
It is Gorbachev.
Because of him, we have economic confusion.
Because of him, we have opportunity.
Because of him, we have political instability.
Because of him, we have freedom.
Complete chaos.
Hope.
Political instability.
Because of him, we have many things.
Like Pizza Hut.
And everybody nods, including the communists.
And then the communists say, hail to Gorbachev.
And everyone says, hail to Gorbachev.
And he's happily feeding pizza to the small child sitting next to him.
Man, nothing says, honestly goodness, nothing says triumph of capitalism better than Mikhail Gorbachev appearing in a Pizza Hut commercial.
And in the end, that's Mikhail Gorbachev's legacy, is that the writing was on the wall.
He misjudged that.
And so he attempted to sort of let the cracks appear, hoping that communism would survive.
And it simply didn't.
The Chinese are not going to make the same mistake.
They're going to continue their reign of tyranny in order to stretch forward their ambitions.
And meanwhile, On the domestic political front, Joe Biden traveled to Pennsylvania in an attempt to shore up the Senate campaign of John Fetterman.
In Pennsylvania, apparently, the choice is now between a candidate in Mehmet Oz, who believes that veggie trays are crudités, and a candidate who may, in fact, be a potato.
John Fetterman is no longer functional.
He is basically admitting as much.
John Fetterman actually released a statement yesterday saying he will not debate Dr. Oz.
Now, the real reason he won't debate Dr. Oz is because he cannot get through a sentence, and he basically says as much in the statement.
He says it's because Dr. Oz is being mean to him.
And that's never been a reason for avoiding a debate ever in human history, is that the other person's mean to you.
John Fetterman is trying to say that that's what it is.
That's not what it is.
John Fetterman is not functional.
His neurons are not firing.
Here's the statement from John Fetterman, quote, I've been traveling the Commonwealth talking to voters about my vision and ideas for nearly a decade.
I'm proud of my record as mayor and as lieutenant governor.
I'm eager to put my record and my values up against Dr. Oz's any day of the week.
By the way, again, he was mayor of a town of 1,800 people.
It's smaller than many HOAs.
And he was being paid $1,800 a year or something for that and being subsidized by his family because he's a deadbeat.
As I recover from this stroke and improve my auditory processing and speech, I look forward to continuing to meet with the people of Pennsylvania.
They'll always know where I stand.
I mean, you stand with Bernie Sanders.
The question is really for, at this point, how you stand.
Today's statement from Dr. Aziz made it abundantly clear they think it is funny to mock a stroke survivor.
No, they're simply pointing out that you are running for the Senate of the United States and you are not functional.
He says, I chose not to participate in this farce.
Any sense that these challenges were done in good faith is damaged.
You mean a challenge to debate like in a normal political race?
My recovery may be a joke to Dr. Oz and his team, but it's real for me.
I will not be participating in the debate the first week of September, but look forward to having a productive discussion about how we can move forward and have a real conversation on this once Dr. Oz and his team are ready to take this seriously.
Is Dr. Oz taking it seriously?
It's about the fact that you're not functional.
So Joe Biden sent out a non-functional geriatric on behalf of a non-functional Senate candidate.
It seems like this might be of relevant concern to the voters of Pennsylvania is whether their senator is capable of forming a sentence.
But I guess not.
I mean, we have a president who's not capable of forming a sentence.
Joe Biden, by the way, worth noting here.
Remember that time that they were talking about dark Biden?
He had popped to 44% in the approval ratings.
My goodness.
He was definitely on the upswing.
According to Reuters, he is back down to 38%.
So yeah, that lasted for like one second, one single iota of time.
A millisecond, apparently.
According to Reuters and Ipsos, he's now holding near the low end of his presidency again.
I can't imagine why.
I mean, he's obviously so winning and articulate.
Here was Joe Biden.
He first of all mixed up John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro.
So Josh Shapiro is running for governor against Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.
John Fetterman is running against Mehmet Oz for Senate.
Joe Biden doesn't know that.
He doesn't know where he is, what time it is, what planet he is on.
He is just not functioning.
Please.
Please.
Elect the Attorney General of the Senate.
Well, that'd be weird.
You can't do that.
That's not the grace.
Elect that big ol' boy to be governor.
Well, again, no.
The big ol' boy.
Yeah, he's great.
Joe Biden also seems not to know the difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, which, I mean, you'd expect him to know that.
I mean, he was actually alive for the writing of both of those.
So here he was yesterday botching this one.
We can do this.
We have to do this.
We just need to remember who we are.
We are the United States of America.
So tiring.
There is not a single thing we can not do.
So folks, let's remember who in God's name we are.
I really mean it.
Who we are.
What our values are.
Who am I again?
What we believe.
We the people.
That's how our Constitution starts, the Declaration.
We the people.
That's not a word.
Well, Joe Biden looks like he's about to fall asleep, but if you need better sleep quality, there's only one mattress you should be using.
That, of course, is Helix Sleep.
Helix has several different mattress models to choose from.
They've got soft, medium, and firm mattresses.
Mattress is great for cooling you down if you sleep hot.
Mattress is great for spinal alignment to prevent morning aches and pains.
Even a Helix Plus mattress for plus-sized sleepers.
They also have a sleep quiz that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress.
Because why exactly would you buy a mattress made for somebody else?
I took that Helix quiz.
I was matched with a Mattress model that is firm but breathable because I tend to heat up a lot at night.
And if the mattress is too soft, it hurts my back.
Helix made sure I have the mattress I need.
They'll do the same for you.
They've got a 10-year warranty.
You can try it out for 100 nights risk-free.
They'll even pick it up for you if you don't love it.
But you're going to love it.
Helix has over 12,000 five-star reviews, including one from my family.
They're financing options, flexible payment plans, make it so that a great night's sleep is never far away.
There's a reason I got a Helix Sleep mattress for my parents, for two of my sisters.
For a limited time, Helix is offering up to 350 bucks off all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners.
This is their best offer yet.
So hurry on over to helixsleep.com slash Ben.
Again, that's helixsleep.com slash Ben for up to 350 bucks off all mattress orders plus two free pillows for our listeners today.
And then Joe Biden, he was also casually racist.
So the casual racism of Joe Biden is always one of my favorite things.
Joe Biden is the chief of equity, right?
He's captain equity over here.
But he just drops like casually racist stories that would get any Republican politician canceled in just a heartbeat.
So here he was talking about how when he was younger, he was, I guess he had a job in a heavily black area, which means that everyone was great at basketball.
Uh, what now?
Media, clean up on Aisle Biden.
We're gonna need you over here with a mop.
Here's Joe Biden.
Without public trust, law enforcement can't do its job serving and protecting all the communities.
If I can just interject for a moment, my deceased son, Beau, he was the Attorney General of the state of Delaware.
And what he used to do is go down on the east side, what's called the bucket, highest crime rate in the country.
There's a place where I used to, I was the only white guy that worked as a lifeguard down in that area, on the east side.
And you know where the, you can always tell where the best basketball in the state is, and the best basketball in the city is.
is. It's where everybody shows up. Uh, you know, all the crime and basketball, playing basketball and lots of crime. And I'm not, I'm, I'm, I'm an old white man.
I do.
Joe Biden campaigning for John Fetterman.
These are the politicians we have chosen for ourselves.
Also, Joe Biden made the case for gun control by saying that, after all, you don't need a gun because if the government wants to murder you, they will do so with an F-15.
Threatening American citizens with F-15s is definitely a way to... He's about to give a speech tomorrow, by the way, on American unity.
The way apparently we are to achieve American unity is surrender your guns or he's going to napalm you.
Now you can't go out and buy an automatic weapon.
You can't go out and buy a cannon.
And for those brave right-wing Americans who say it's all about keeping America's independent and safe, if you want to fight against a country, you need an F-15.
You need something a little more than a gun.
No, I'm not joking.
Think about this.
Think about the rationale we use that's used to provide this.
And who are they shooting at?
Shooting at these guys behind me.
Shooting at these guys with an F-15, a rifle with an F-15.
By the way, his argument would be significantly more convincing if he hadn't just surrendered an entire country to a bunch of 8th century barbarians carrying AKs.
We had some F-15s that we were funding in Afghanistan, and it turns out that Joe Biden ran away from those people.
He ran away from a bunch of guys who had not taken a shower in three years because they were living in caves, firing old Soviet weaponry.
So yeah, um, no.
Joe Biden, what an inspiring figure he is.
There's so many wonderful things that he said during this speech in Pennsylvania.
Again, I'm going to keep saying it because, again, until Republicans listen, I'm just going to keep saying it.
If you're not talking about Joe Biden being an incompetent, terrible president and the fact that his candidates are similarly bad, I don't know what you're doing as a Republican.
We're going to get to the Senate in a second, because again, John Fetterman in Pennsylvania is not an alive person.
He's running as a not alive.
He's not even running.
He's stumbling as a not alive person.
And you're somehow on the defensive?
Explain.
How are you on the defensive against Joe Biden?
How?
Here's Joe Biden yesterday after calling half of Americans semi-fascists.
He says, you know, why are we talking about political violence?
Did you ever think we'd come to this point?
Well, I mean, I kind of thought that in 2020 when your vice president was bailing rioters out of jail on the faulty premise that America's police were systemically racist and America was rife with brutal bigotry.
Here's Joe Biden talking about political violence, which apparently only lives on the right, which is weird since half the country burned down in 2020.
Safer America requires all of us to uphold the rule of law.
Not the rule of any one party or any one person.
Let's be clear.
You hear some of my friends in the other team talking about political violence and how it's necessary.
Think about this now.
Did any of you think, even as old as I am, you've ever been in an election where we talk about it's appropriate to use force, political violence in America?
The last one.
Literally the last election.
There was talk from your side of the aisle about this.
You know how you know how Joe Biden is trying to redirect?
Again, the entire campaign for the Democrats is Donald Trump, Donald Trump, political violence, Donald Trump, threat to democracy, Donald Trump.
That's the entire thing.
Here are the, as Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air points out, Joe Biden gave this fairly lengthy speech in which he tried to speak sentences out of his face hole and failed.
Here are how many times he mentioned some key terms.
Inflation zero, economy zero, income zero, mortgage zero, debt zero, prices zero.
But there's a lot of talk about Donald Trump and quote unquote threats to democracy.
And this is why Republicans got to be talking about the things that are hurting people every single day about inflation and spending.
We're talking about the hijacking of the education system along radical lines.
We're talking about critical race theory, all the things that are actually the day to day lives of Americans.
That's the stuff that Republicans need to be talking about.
If they do that, They can not only still do well in the House, they can, I think, take back the Senate.
Because the simple fact is, I think the Democrats are falling into a little bit of a trap here.
Joe Biden is—the Democrats have a record of going over their skis when it comes to insulting Americans.
It turns out to be a really, really bad sort of political strategy.
In 2008, Barack Obama famously insulted his political opponents in the Midwest as, quote-unquote, bitter clingers.
So they were desperately clinging.
They were jobless.
They were clinging to religion and antipathy to foreigners, and they were clinging to anti-trade rhetoric.
Basically, they're a bunch of racist rubes. Those were all of his opponents. And then you got in 2016, Hillary Clinton suggesting that her political opponents were a basket of deplorables. You remember that one? Well, now you got Joe Biden out there suggesting that his political opponents are semi-fascists and his own Senate candidates in races that they are losing right now.
Tim Ryan is losing his race against J.D. Vance in Ohio. He's out there saying, well, you know, it's not gonna be a big deal that Joe Biden called half the country semi-fascists.
The president said that a portion of the Trump movement, the extreme mega philosophy, he calls it's like semi-fascism.
Does that hurt you with the voters you need to win in November?
No, look, it's straight fashion.
If you're storming the Capitol on January 6th, if you are making bold steps to ban books and to do all of these things that are, you know, even to the point where you want to control a woman's body, to the point where if a 10-year-old girl is raped, you say that the government should mandate that pregnancy, you have a Supreme Court justice saying they want to get rid of birth control, nullify marriages, I mean, what else would you talk about?
How else do you explain this?
Yeah, keep calling it semi-fascist.
Keep doing it, guys.
Really, keep going this way.
These parties are in a running gun battle to see who can be worse at this.
It's really, really amazing.
By the way, Herschel Walker, right now, according to the latest polls in Georgia, a lot of talk about how vulnerable Herschel Walker is in Georgia against Raphael Warnock, who, by the way, is a terrible candidate.
The latest polls show that Hershel Walker's actually up in Georgia.
He's up by a couple of points over Raphael Warnock.
So everybody who's sort of surrendering the Georgia race because Walker's a bad candidate and he's not a good candidate.
They're neglecting the fact that Raphael Warnock is a terrible candidate.
And the only reason that Raphael Warnock is in the Senate in the first place is because Donald Trump decided to intervene in the 2020 Georgia special elections by saying that no one's vote would be counted anyway, so why bother voting?
Which, by the way, is why we've had trillions of additional spending that never needed to take place.
All you would have needed is for the Republicans to have won one of those Georgia seats.
Never going to get over that fact.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, another hotly fraught Senate race, Blake Masters continues to run behind Mark Kelly, but he is moderating some of his more public stances on things like election 2020.
He needs to do that.
That is a smart move.
He's in a general election now.
He's also removing some of the rhetoric on his website, his pro-life rhetoric on his website.
And there are a lot of pro-lifers who are very exercised about this.
There's no one more pro-life in America than I am.
I have been obviously and proudly pro-life my entire career.
I'm a big believer that abortion ought to be illegal, except in cases in which the mother's life is in danger.
Period.
End of statement.
With that said, the simple fact of the matter is this is not going to be solved at the federal level.
Federal legislation is not going to be brought in the United States at this point.
There just is not the public approval for it.
And so when you have Senate candidates running on abortion, there's a reason Democrats would like to federalize the abortion issue.
It's because on a federal level, Democrats have more approval for their policies than they do on a state level.
My sort of assumption is that Senate candidates and congressional candidates on the right side of the aisle are basically going to say this is a state level issue.
That is what the Supreme Court has said.
And so I am personally pro-life, but legislation is generally not going to be approached at the federal level on the abortion issue.
It's going to be approached on the state issue.
So if you want to make this an issue, you really should look at your candidates for state legislature and decide how you want to vote.
Blake Masters, he continues to push on Joe Biden.
This is actually smart.
So I think that if Blake Masters is going to recover in this race, it's going to be by focusing in on Joe Biden and moving away from some of the stuff that alienates voters, even if it's stuff that I happen to like.
In politics, it's still a business, guys.
Newsweek wrote, oh, Blake said that women and minorities are hurting the economy.
Fake news.
Look, I don't care if every single employee at the Fed is a black lesbian, as long as they're hired for their competence and not because of what they look like or who they sleep with.
News for Joe Biden.
We are done with this affirmative action regime.
You know, I can't think of a single policy since the end of Jim Crow that's been worse or more divisive for race relations in this country.
Race quotas are wrong.
Gender quotas are wrong.
They're unjust.
They're illegal.
But the Democrats are addicted to this kind of identity politics garbage.
They just care about how you look, not whether you're the best qualified or whether you can do the best job.
You know, if you want to see the affirmative action regime on display, just look at Biden's White House.
Biden promised that he would choose a woman for his VP.
And then, of course, he chose Kamala Harris.
So incompetent, she can't even get a sentence out.
But I've never spoken to anyone who can say with a straight face that Kamala was somehow the most qualified candidate for that job.
Okay, so Blake Masters now is running on the right stuff.
And this is what Republicans should be doing.
They should be looking at their races.
They should be figuring out how to target Democrats on the issues on which Democrats are most vulnerable.
Republicans, they need the Senate.
They need the House.
They need this because the left is going after gun rights.
I mean, Joe Biden is out there saying that you don't need a gun because the government has an F-15.
Well, if you are a person who is concerned about your Second Amendment rights, but you also need all the protections that come along with owning a gun, you need to be a member of the U.S.
Concealed Carry Association.
We've seen and talked about on the show good guys with guns.
The problem is sometimes you can use a gun in the right way and you still get in trouble with the cops because it's not enough to legally and safely own a firearm to protect your family.
To fully protect yourself and your loved ones, you have to be prepared for the mental, physical, and legal ramifications of self-defense, which is why I'm a member of the U.S.
Concealed Carry Association and you should be as well.
Right now, the USCCA is giving away a free concealed carry and family defense guide and a chance to win $1,000 to buy a firearm to protect yourself and your family.
They're doing this 100% free.
Just text BEN to 87222.
In their 58-page defense guide, you will learn how to detect attackers before they see you.
What the USCCA has learned about school shootings, equipment, and training basics about the law and justice systems, how to responsibly own and store a gun, especially if you have little kids the way that I do, text BEN to 87222 for instant access to this free guide and enter for the chance to win a thousand bucks to put toward a firearm to protect your family, text BEN to 87222 right now.
Also, the time is upon us for another backstage happening tonight 6 p.m.
Central, 7 p.m.
Eastern.
It's about time, because there's more news than ever to discuss.
If you've never seen Backstage before, it's where I get together with my Daily Wire cohorts, including Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Andrew Klavan, and of course, God King Jeremy, boring for a roundtable discussion on the most burning topics of the day.
Jokes will be cracked.
Cigars will be smoked.
Not by me.
Libations will be imbibed.
Not by me.
You definitely don't want to miss this one, so tune in to join us for Backstage tonight, 6 p.m.
Central, 7 p.m.
Eastern, at dailywireplus.com.
All right, so as I say, if Republicans are not targeting Democratic weaknesses, they are making a very large-scale mistake.
I'm going to keep saying this until it gets through the thick Republican skulls.
Right now, the economy continues to stagnate.
The stock market yesterday finished lower again.
According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S.
stocks fell for a third straight session, bringing the S&P 500's decline to 5.1% over that period, as economic data fanned investors' fears that the Federal Reserve has ample runway to continue raising interest rates aggressively.
Each of the major indices declined on Tuesday, continuing a sharp sell-off in the wake of a reset in monetary policy expectations.
The S&P 500 shed 44.45 points, or 1.1%, to close at 3986.16.
44.45 points or 1.1% to close at 3986.16.
The benchmark has seen more than $1.5 trillion of its market cap wiped out since stocks began selling off on Friday.
The tech focused NASDAQ composite pulled back 134.53 points or 1.1%.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average retreated 1% as well.
Stocks began their descent after the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Friday the central bank must continue raising interest rates and hold them at a higher level until policymakers are confident inflation is under control.
Meanwhile, while the Federal Reserve is worried about inflation, this administration is pouring gasoline on the inflation fire.
Joe Biden, I cannot get over the fact that we are only a few days out from Joe Biden declaring the single most copiously profligate.
Executive action in American history, 500.
500 billion, with a B, dollars in student loan debt simply relieved.
It's just gone.
Now, it's not just gone.
Somebody's gonna have to pay it off, right?
It's gonna be you, it's gonna be me, it's gonna be the American dollar, which we'll either have to devalue or raise taxes.
Those are the only two choices, really.
When Joe Biden says that's not going to be inflationary, it's because he's lying.
And yet Brian Deese, his chief economic advisor, continues to say this.
He says, you know, don't worry, student loan forgiveness is not going to be inflationary.
How he explains this, no one can, no one understands.
It makes no sense.
If that's true, that you're looking at every possible lever to bring down inflation, why go ahead with the student loan forgiveness, which is estimated to cost hundreds of billions of dollars and potentially boost demand, all of which could be inflationary?
In terms of the inflation impact, I think a lot of independent analysts have looked at this and it's appropriate economically to look at the impact of not only The debt cancellation but also the restart of payments.
Right now nobody is making student loan payments or very small share of borrowers are making student loan payments because there's been a pause in effect because of the pandemic.
What the president announced and what we will implement is a restart of payments at the end of the year alongside the cancellation.
I think that those who have looked at that including Goldman Sachs and others say that basically the inflation impact in the short term is negligible.
Okay, in the short term, we were told that inflation was transitory.
In the short term, it wouldn't be a big deal.
We're now a year and a half into an inflationary cycle, 40-year high in inflation.
Don't worry, the experts will save us.
Larry Summers, who got inflation right the first time, he was out there yesterday saying, oh yeah, by the way, when you relieve student loan debt to the tune of $500 billion, half a trillion dollars, of course that's inflationary, you morons.
I did not support large-scale student debt relief because I thought it was using federal resources to make transfers, hundreds of billions of dollars, and I would have liked those resources put to better use, helping people who were poorer, who were more in need, and who would use the money to invest more in the future of the economy.
I think that it does add to demand, which does increase inflationary pressures.
Yes, when you throw a bunch of money into the economy via giant subsidies like this, it leads to price inflation.
I know.
These are shocking things to think about, except if you have a prefrontal cortex and have known that this is how the economy works always.
Meanwhile, the good news is that according to Joe Biden's team, this is all part of the plan.
So Brian Deese is back out there saying, you know, the slowdown, the economic slowdown that we're seeing, it's part of the economic transition.
It's all part of the plan, guys, just like it was all part of the plan in Afghanistan until we just surrendered the place.
It's all part of the economic plan.
Here's Brian Deese.
We are in a transition and we certainly anticipate that as part of that transition, we will see some cooling in the rate of job growth across time.
I think we have started to see that, although the labor market continues to be very strong.
And it's our expectation that we'll continue to see that as well.
But anytime that Americans have more job opportunities to get good jobs with higher wages, That's good news.
We just have to work through this transition in a way where we can get to a stable, steady source of growth for American workers and for the economy without having to give up the economic gains that we've done.
Certainly, we believe that that's possible.
And we also think that the policy we're pursuing, the legislation we passed recently, will help contribute to that.
Yeah, it's not going to, and one of the things that hurts him is that while he's saying this, all the numbers in the lower right-hand side of the screen are red.
That makes it very difficult for him to maintain that.
Meanwhile, Karine Jean-Pierre, again, being very terrible at her job, she is insisting that her quote-unquote bold climate agenda is bringing back manufacturing jobs, which is weird because we're just going to dump a bunch of money into a bunch of green projects that are not market efficient.
Here she is, again, promoting inflation.
Also today, First Solar, the largest U.S.
solar panel maker in the United States, announced it will build a new solar manufacturing facility in the United States.
These announcements will create thousands of jobs here in America, lower consumer energy costs, and cut climate pollution.
And this did not happen by accident.
Bold climate agenda and historic legislative wins are bringing manufacturing jobs back to America and turning America into a magnet for investing in clean energy manufacturing.
No one believes that America is going to be a magnet for the economy by subsidizing green energy.
Barack Obama promised the exact same thing, and then we created zero new green jobs.
Instead, what is happening, in realistic terms, is that countries are starting to revert back to older forms of energy.
So you're starting to see nuclear power plants come back online.
You're starting to see Europe, for example, which is about to experience an extraordinarily bad winter because they don't have Russian oil and natural gas to power them and heat them through the winter.
You've seen them start to say things like, well, you know what?
Maybe natural gas actually is green-friendly.
They're now reclassifying forms of energy that they said were dirty five seconds ago into clean energy in order so that they can pretend that they're not actually, quote unquote, harming the environment by using the old forms of energy that five seconds ago they said were super bad.
This administration continues to pursue bad policy on nearly every single front, including on the border, by the way.
Yesterday, the border patrol chief, Raul Ortiz, he said, Joe Biden is increasing the number of illegal immigrants at the border in extraordinary numbers.
There are no consequences for simply violating the law.
When President Biden was elected, did the number of aliens trying to illegally enter the United States increase or decrease?
Increase.
In my experience, we have seen increases when there are no consequences.
There's an assumption that if migrant populations are told that there's a potential that they may be released, that yes, you can see increases.
Open borders, high inflation, stagnating economy, cultural radicalism.
If that's the combo you want, keep voting for Joe Biden's favorite candidates.
If Republicans, I can't stress it enough.
I literally said this, by the way.
There was about a year and a half ago, I did a big event with House Republicans, and I said to them, at that event, if you guys somehow fail to take back Congress in 2022, each and every one of you should lose your jobs.
This is a target-rich environment for conservatives, given the fact that there is unilateral Democratic control of all elected branches of government, and they are failing dramatically on every single front.
It is the only thing that matters in American politics right now.
If you take the referendum, Off of the Democrats and you somehow place it onto the Republicans because you pursue either radical policy items or because you decide to redirect toward the FBI and Donald Trump.
You're making a mistake.
The Democrats and the media are holding up a shiny object for you here.
Ignore the shiny object.
Voters should too.
Because guess what?
Whatever you think of Donald Trump, Donald Trump is not on the ballot.
Whatever you think of the FBI, the FBI is not on the ballot.
Not in 2022.
So you better focus in on the people who are on the ballot and who are promulgating terrible policy all the way across the board.
All right, guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.
You don't want to miss it because we're going to be getting into Mexican drug cartels promoting the development of a serious fentanyl crisis in the United States.
The Biden administration, of course, keeping that border open.
Plus, we'll get to the DOJ now saying that Donald Trump tried to hide classified materials.
Does that justify the raid?
We'll get to that in just a moment.
▲
Export Selection