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Oct. 6, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

45:46

The Musk Twitter Takeover Is Back On! | Ep. 1587

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Time	Text
	Elon Musk moves closer to buying Twitter, revitalizing hopes of free speech as big tech censorship looms.
	OPEC cuts oil production and the White House is fighting mad.
	Plus, Joe Biden travels to Florida to visit the Hurricane Ian damage.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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	We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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	Well, as you all know, There's been big controversy over whether Elon Musk was actually going to buy Twitter originally.
	He made an offer to buy Twitter at the extraordinary price of $54.20 per share.
	Now, the reason that is an extraordinary price is because the current Twitter stock price is well below that.
	The current Twitter stock price now is $51.30.
	But until about five seconds ago, it was way lower than that.
	We are talking In the past, like, six months, it's low was somewhere around 40 bucks, 39 bucks.
	Okay, that was after it became clear that Musk wasn't actually going to buy Twitter, right?
	He sued to get out of the deal.
	There's a lot of talk that perhaps what he was actually doing was looking for an excuse to liquidate some of his Tesla stock.
	So if he actually liquidated some of his Tesla stock in order to quote-unquote buy Twitter, and then he didn't end up buying Twitter, and then he just ended up paying some sort of SEC fine, he would still have been able to liquidate some of that Tesla stock without having tanked the Tesla stock because everybody knew that he was doing so in order to buy Twitter. Bottom line is now Elon Musk is saying that he is interested in buying Twitter again. According to the Associated Press, the tumultuous saga of Elon Musk's on-again, off-again purchase of Twitter took a turn toward a conclusion on Tuesday after the mercurial Tesla CEO proposed to buy the company at the originally agreed-upon
	price of $44 billion. Musk made the surprising turnaround not on Twitter, as has been his custom, but in a letter to Twitter that the company disclosed in a filing on Tuesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
	It came less than two weeks before a trial between the two parties is scheduled to start In response, Twitter says it intends to close the transaction at $54.20 per share after receiving the letter from Musk.
	The company stopped short of saying it's dropping its lawsuit against the billionaire Tesla CEO.
	That's because if they say they're dropping their lawsuit, then presumably Musk could drag this on for months longer.
	So they're using the lawsuit as a sort of cudgel to make Musk buy the company, which is a So the first thing, honestly, it's the first time I've ever heard of a company forcing a prospective offerer to go through with a sale.
	It's a unique situation, that is for sure.
	You remember that what Musk said is, I want to buy you, but, you know, I'm noticing that you got a lot of bots over there, and I think maybe you violated our agreement.
	And Twitter was like, well, you knew that going in, and so that's what the crux of the argument was.
	According to Andrew Jennings, professor at Brooklyn Law School, quote, I don't think Twitter will give up its trial date on just Musk's word.
	It's going to need more certainty about closing.
	Well, again, the trading on the Twitter stock jumped as soon as this announcement was made.
	It moved all the way up to $52 a share, all the way down from, like I say, $39 to $40 a share for a very long time.
	A letter from Musk's lawyer dated Monday disclosed by Twitter in that SEC filing said Musk would close the merger sign in April provided that the Delaware Chancery Court enter an immediate stay of Twitter's lawsuit against him and adjourn the trial scheduled to start on October 17th.
	Again, many people are saying the reason that this happened is because his case against Twitter wasn't strong enough for him to get out of the deal, so he's avoiding the legal costs and potential fines.
	He did tweet out yesterday, quote, buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.
	So as always, Elon Musk thinking big, the idea here is that Twitter would become part of a much broader app, almost as the kind of like how Facebook eventually morphed from those status updates to your close friends, to pretty much everything.
	It's where you get your news, it's where you shop.
	He's attempting to create sort of a parallel universe here via Twitter.
	Somebody tweeted back at him, I think it would have been easier just to start X from scratch though.
	And Musk said, Twitter probably accelerates X by three to five years, but I could be wrong.
	Gotta love the fact that the guy is a very, very honest on Twitter.
	That is for sure.
	Well, this has created the predictable specter of all of the Twitter employees freaking out and running into walls.
	I mean, they're just losing their minds over there as they should, because it turns out that Twitter heretofore has been a censorship app for many members of the left, which is why you will see people Just being banned and unbanned almost randomly.
	They all happen to be on the right.
	It's very rare that somebody on the left actually gets banned.
	But somebody on the right, for no reason like libs of TikTok, will get banned and then unbanned and then banned and then unbanned.
	This will happen five, six times.
	Meanwhile, of course, President Trump is still off of Twitter.
	It is now a couple of years after January 6th.
	They banned him in the aftermath of January 6th, suggesting that he was responsible for the events of January 6th.
	And now, presumably, he will get back on.
	According to Mediaite, on the app Blind, where employee referred to Musk as an angry, triggered billionaire.
	Well, it seems mostly like you guys are angry and triggered since he actually is putting his money where his mouth is.
	You're not really triggered if you drop $44 billion to buy a company.
	That's typically not how people act.
	One posted to the app, we've got an angry triggered billionaire going to own us who's looking for vengeance.
	The worst financial market in years.
	Hiring freezes everywhere.
	Q4 is looking great.
	So first of all, I do love the reaction from people on the left.
	Robert Reich did the same thing.
	Another billionaire is going to own... Okay, I would like for you to name a giant tech company that is not owned by a multi-multi-millionaire.
	Really, name a big tech company that is not owned by somebody who's worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
	They do not exist.
	There is no Twitter app that is owned by, like, the homeless guy at the end of the street on Grand in Los Angeles.
	That's not how any of this works.
	Twitter employees heard news of the latest development in Musk's potential purchase while they were in a meeting discussing the company's goals in 2023, according to Bloomberg.
	Roman Chadhoury, the Twitter Director of Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability, tweeted, quote, Well, I think this person will not have a job for particularly long.
	This is just my quick prediction.
	Again, the Director of Machine Learning, Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability means, presumably, the Director of Censorship over at Twitter.
	And of course, CNN's Daniel Sullivan then tweeted, this Twitter employee sums up what I'm hearing from folks inside the company today.
	Yes, because as it turns out, Elon Musk has different ideas about censorship than you do, and this is why you are so upset.
	EJ Samson, who works in global business marketing, tweeted, I encourage every Twitter employee to go outside and take a walk.
	Twitter's head of global development, Noah Weinstein, simply indicated what a rollercoaster it has all been.
	Well, you know what?
	The good news is that Musk is actually creating a self-cleansing mechanism here at Twitter by buying presumably all these people who either out themselves and be fired or quit.
	And it'll be great because Twitter needs to be completely restaffed.
	There's a deep state over at Twitter in the same way there was a deep state in the federal government, meaning an entrenched bureaucracy that has ideas of its own.
	And all of those people can simply go away.
	That would be wonderful.
	Kevin Ruse, who's a longtime critic of open speech on the internet, he's making some predictions over at the New York Times on what exactly is going to happen now that Elon Musk takes over.
	Presumably, he's going to clean house starting with firing Twitter's chief executive, Parag Agarwal.
	According to Roos, a juicy set of text messages between Musk and his friends and business associates emerged last week as part of a legal battle.
	In them, Musk made clear he was unhappy with Twitter's current leadership, in particular with Parag Agrawal, the chief executive who took over last year from Jack Dorsey.
	The texts showed that Agrawal had initially sought to work constructively with Musk, but the two men eventually clashed.
	Agrawal at one point told Musk via text message his habit of tweeting things like, is Twitter dying, was not helping me make Twitter better.
	What did you get done this week, Musk Shotback?
	This is a waste of time.
	Yeah, man.
	Well, good.
	Good, because all these people need to go.
	Bruce says that the employees will revolt.
	Well, ooh, ah, oh no.
	So, really, go into a market that is desperately looking for people who need to learn to code.
	I mean, you already know how to code, so presumably you'll be able to find a job somewhere else.
	Twitter, more so than any other social media platform, has a vocally progressive workforce and many employees who are deeply invested in the company's mission of promoting, quote-unquote, healthy conversation.
	By healthy conversation, of course, they mean things we agree with.
	Those employees may believe, for good reason, that under Musk's leadership, Twitter will abandon many of the projects they care about in areas like trust and safety to the most Orwellian areas of the entire Twitter mechanism.
	Trust and safety.
	By trust, they mean left, and by safety, they mean left.
	They do not mean safety, as in we're going to prevent violent threats.
	The Ayatollah Khomeini is still on Twitter like everyday talking about wiping six million Jews off the planet.
	They don't seem to care about that very much.
	And when it comes to trust, they're perfectly happy to distribute misinformation so long as it comes from the left. What they really just mean is Twitter is a great mechanism for sucking in a billion people and then presuming to offer them only left-wing information in the name of truth. Some employees have already quit anticipating a must take over.
	It's a safe bet that many more will follow if the deal actually closes.
	It's worth noting that in his text with Musk, Edgar Wall claimed a large silent majority of Twitter employees supported Musk's vision.
	Virtually every Twitter employee I've spoken to, says Kevin Roose, has told me that he or she plans to leave if Musk takes over, which is great.
	Again, more jobs for those of us who aren't in favor of online censorship.
	Also, you can assume that Trump will be back, which My prediction, by the way, is that Trump on Twitter is actually not going to help Trump's brand a whole hell of a lot.
	in fact an important political leader even if people on the left would prefer to see him kept off of places like Twitter. My prediction by the way is that Trump on Twitter is actually not going to help Trump's brand a whole hell of a lot. I think one of the things that actually helped Trump over the course of the last couple of years is precisely what he should have done during his presidency which is tweet less.
	The fact that he's not in the public eye every single moment of every single day means that people aren't polarized into their beliefs about him every single moment of every single day.
	Him being on truth social means that people are a little bit removed from him.
	I think this has actually benefited him somewhat politically.
	Him being back on Twitter, he thinks it's going to help him.
	I'm not sure that that's the case, but regardless of whether I think it's good or bad for Trump, it is certainly good for tech, generally speaking, for Trump to be back on sites like Twitter.
	Also, the Babylon Bee, presumably, would be unsuspended.
	The Babylon Bee, when we did an interview with Seth Dillon just a couple of weeks ago, you can go listen to it over at the Sunday Special, in which we talked about the fact that the Babylon Bee Twitter account has been banned for about a year for suggesting that men are not women and women are not men.
	We've seen Libs of TikTok, who works with Babylon Bee, also banned and then not banned and suspended and not suspended.
	So, presumably, Musk is going to end all of that.
	Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is urging Musk to reinstate her, along with other right-wing commentators, including Alex Jones, along with one-off reversal of high-profile bans.
	According to Kevin Roose, I'd expect that Musk would tear up Twitter's existing rules and rewrite new ones, and that he might dismantle Twitter's content policy and trust and safety teams, which are responsible for enforcing the platform's rules as they currently exist.
	Which is right, because again, if you actually read the Twitter rules, they are just vague enough to allow for political bias to destroy the entire free speech system.
	One friend of mine suggested that he might install someone like Blake Masters as Twitter's head of enforcement if he doesn't actually win that Senate seat in Arizona.
	And all of this is scaring the living hell out of the left.
	Why?
	Because what they are afraid of is that there might be dissemination of information they don't like and it will affect elections.
	And Kevin Roose says the quiet part out loud here, quote, it probably won't change the midterms, but 2024 could be the Elon election.
	Right, so again, what's amazing about that is that that is a tacit admission that the Twitter bans on particular figures make 2022 the Twitter election, meaning that if reversal of their current policies affects 2024, that means their current policies affect 2022.
	you.
	That is the logic of the statement that Roos is making.
	Basically, by keeping certain information off Twitter, this has affected elections like 2022, and that changing those policies will affect 2024 in a way that does not benefit the left.
	According to Ruse, the 2024 election will be a different story by then.
	If the deal is consummated, Musk will have been able to more fully mold Twitter in his own image.
	The platform could look radically different.
	More right-wing trolls, fewer guardrails against misinformation and extremism.
	Or it could be largely the same, but Musk will be still firmly in charge.
	This is pretty astonishing admission right here.
	More importantly, Twitter is going to kill some of the most unpopular features about Twitter.
	So he's getting rid, presumably, of Twitter Blue, which is the subscription-based product that gives users access to premium features like ad-free articles and an undo button for tweets.
	He's also skeptical of proposals to rebuild Twitter on a decentralized blockchain.
	He has said that that is not going to work.
	So many of the products like Twitter Blue are probably going to die.
	But here is the bottom line.
	The left is freaking out because again, their standards of censorship have been upheld by the big tech companies.
	You have the government that is basically called on big tech to shut down information it doesn't like ranging from climate change to COVID.
	To transgenderism.
	And so the reversal of that is going to change, I think, the face of how speech is done back toward what it was just a few years back before the consolidation of all media into big tech and then big tech using its censorship power to quash the ability to actually disseminate that information.
	By the way, this is not just with Twitter.
	So yesterday, Rana Romney McDaniel, who's the head of the RNC, she said publicly that Google has basically, a few weeks after elections, stopped fundraising emails from the RNC.
	They use Google's email servers in order to disseminate those emails.
	And she says that Google has used its power to prevent them from actually getting out their fundraising emails, which is pretty astonishing, actually.
	We are trying to raise public awareness.
	People should be aware that if you have a Gmail right now, Google is suppressing your turnout emails and your registration emails from the Republican Party.
	And it's not just a little bit, Maria.
	It's not going down to 5% or 10%.
	It's 0% deliverability.
	The last four months of every month, the past 10 months, they're doing it with our fundraising emails as well.
	I mean, that's pretty astonishing.
	Google is only doing that to one side of the aisle.
	Obviously, that is a serious violation of free speech principles, if not the law.
	Meanwhile, Meta, which is the Facebook parent company, they announced that they're going to give users more control over what they see on the platform.
	What I'm hoping here is that the unlocking of Twitter by Musk will allow people like Mark Zuckerberg to go back to the free speech position that he was holding in 2017-2018.
	So Zuckerberg has become a big bugaboo on the right for some good reasons, including the fact that he funded all of these efforts to quote-unquote get out the vote in areas that were heavily democratic during the 2020 election.
	But if you go back and you read the speech that Zuckerberg gave at Georgetown in 2018, it was a very pro-free speech take in which he essentially suggested that places like Facebook should not be the arbiter of politics.
	Well, perhaps Facebook, under pressure from places like Twitter, is now, for market reasons, going to move back into the free speech space.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, the social media company said users can now choose show less or show more on posts, which will allow them to curate the type of content they want on their feeds.
	Choosing show less will lower that post's ranking score on a temporary basis, and choosing show more will do the opposite, according to Facebook.
	Facebook has been working to cement its place in a changing social media landscape, with rival platforms like TikTok becoming hugely popular with younger users.
	Facebook said soon users can decide to show more or less by selecting the three-dot menu in the upper right-hand corner.
	Facebook is also trying out something similar in its Reels offering as well.
	Again, they're trying to move toward an earlier iteration of the social media platform by boosting also its friends and family feed.
	Other social media platforms like Twitter and Meta's Instagram have also provided ways to control how feeds look to individual users, which, by the way, would be good if they would get rid of sort of the algorithmic programming of informational dissemination.
	That would definitely benefit companies like, for example, The Daily Wire, where that means our users can now actually upvote all of the content they like to see rather than seeing it artificially suppressed by the big tech companies.
	This could be, again, a return to a better time in American life where people could kind of say what they wanted and that information would just get out there, as opposed to having the gatekeepers established by the Democratic Party in place preventing that information from ever being seen by human eyes.
	And meanwhile, Joe Biden's economy is running into a real oil slick.
	Pun intended.
	OPEC right now has now agreed to restrict its production of oil despite Joe Biden going over to Saudi Arabia and kissing the ring of Mohammed bin Salman.
	He went over there after insulting the Saudis for a couple of years talking about their human rights violations.
	He apparently has no such Qualms when it comes to Iran where he's trying to cut a nuclear deal still as they're shooting people in the streets OPEC has now decided they're going to restrict their oil production because as the prices fall there's no reason for them to continue to pump oil at extraordinarily high levels so instead they're restricting supply which means the price is going to go up so while inflation is still continuing to be at really really high pitch and while you can't afford anything oil is about to go back up so again
	The Biden administration unable to apply leverage where it actually needs to be applied in any sort of successful way.
	According to Reuters, OPEC key ministers known as the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee have agreed oil production cuts of 2 million barrels per day, according to three OPEC Plus sources.
	Meanwhile, the Biden administration is fighting mad about all this as well they should be, considering that it puts the world economy on the brink.
	Higher energy prices means more contributions to inflation.
	It means higher steady pressure upward in terms of pricing.
	Also, it puts a lot of pressure on the Europeans with regard to oil and natural gas supply for the winter, as that winter is about to hit and as Russia is putting on the pressure itself.
	According to the New York Times, the OPEC and Russia's agreement to cut oil production helps Russia pretty significantly.
	Quote, Saudi Arabia and Russia, acting as leaders of the OPEC plus energy cartel, agreed on Wednesday to their first large production cut in more than two years in a bid to raise prices, countering efforts by the United States and Europe to choke off the enormous revenue that Moscow reaps from the sale of crude.
	Again, there would have been an easy way to avoid all of this, and that would have been not restricting the oil and gas leases being used, not Disincentivizing investments in the oil and natural gas industry, not allowing DEI considerations to prevent investment in the energy sector in the most efficient possible way over the course of years.
	President Biden and European leaders have urged more oil production to ease gasoline prices and punish Moscow for its aggression in Ukraine.
	Vladimir Putin has been accused of using energy as a weapon against countries opposing its invasion of Ukraine.
	The optics of the decision could not be missed.
	According to the New York Times, the White House is, of course, very, very unhappy.
	Brian Deese, Director of the National Economic Council, and Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, said, quote, Oh, you mean that counting on your friends in Russia and Saudi Arabia to make up for your bad foreign policy and energy decisions?
	You mean that didn't work out for you?
	negative impact of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Oh, you mean that counting on your friends in Russia and Saudi Arabia to make up for your bad foreign policy and energy decisions? You mean that didn't work out for you?
	Who could have predicted such a thing? By reducing output, OPEC Plus was also seeking to make a statement to energy markets about the group's cohesion during the Ukraine war and its willingness to quickly defend prices according to analysts.
	At a news conference after the meeting, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said OPEC Plus was acting amid signs of a downturn in the world economy that might cause demand for oil to weaken and prices to fall, so he would rather be preemptive than be sorry.
	And this, of course, created a price spike almost immediately.
	The Biden administration said that the president will order the Energy Department to release 10 million additional barrels of oil from the Strategic We'll get to more on this in just one second.
	lowest levels of my lifetime, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which means at some point it's going to have to be refilled.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	Be sure to write Shapiro in there.
	How did you hear about us, Fox?
	So they know that we sent you.
	Well, the administration is very, very angry about all this because it highlights all the shortcomings of, again, their energy and foreign policy.
	Corinne Jean-Pierre, our incompetent White House press secretary, she says this decision is short-sighted by OPEC Plus to cut oil production.
	It's a short-sighted decision.
	It's on its own purported self-interest that OPEC Plus made the decision upon.
	And so we see it as a mistake on this particular decision.
	You see it as a hostile act?
	Look, again, I can speak to this decision.
	It's a mistake.
	And I'll just leave it there.
	Okay, so she also maintained that the Biden administration is going to cut oil prices somehow, but she can't actually explain how.
	So that's sort of a problem.
	So as you know, we've been working on this for months.
	The president has made, has made, taken historic steps to keep gas prices down.
	So here's, you know, so if you, so gas prices, we haven't, we've seen increase in the West and the Midwest in recent weeks because of specific refinery issues.
	Okay, meanwhile, the Pete Buttigieg, our wonderful Transportation Secretary, who has not done anything so far, as I'm aware, to actually help on any level.
	I mean, let's be fair about this.
	He is gay.
	So there's that.
	I mean, that really is his pitch.
	It has continued to be his pitch because it certainly isn't being a very good Secretary of Transportation.
	I'm not aware of any problem he has solved in his time as Secretary of Transportation.
	We have narrowly averted a railroad strike.
	Which had very little to do with Pete Buttigieg and the fact that that strike was even threatened is kind of crazy.
	We still have supply chain issues and we are two years in to the Biden term.
	But he is historic, and that's the thing that really matters in this administration.
	You can be as incompetent as you want to be so long as you are a historic appointee, meaning that you check certain intersectional boxes to get your job.
	Pete Buttigieg, he says that the OPEC production cuts are actually, they're good because what they're going to do is boost green energy.
	Again, you gotta love the silver linings crowd over here.
	So you're paying a bajillion dollars for gas.
	If you're in California, you're paying north of $6 a gallon per gas.
	And Pete Buttigieg says, well, the good news is this means eventually we will all invest in electric cars.
	You know, I definitely think we'll be in a better situation when we're not dependent on a commodity that is largely being produced in foreign dictatorships.
	It's one of many, many reasons why American energy security will benefit from homegrown clean energy, which is, of course, exactly the direction we're trying to go into for the long term.
	Uh-huh.
	So, it's actually good, guys.
	Just understand, you're making a sacrifice for the planet.
	I hope that you're into that.
	Meanwhile, Pete Buttigieg also says that it's complicated, you know?
	There are costs.
	Green energy transitions are complicated, guys.
	Just deal with it.
	It's not like we can assume that just tomorrow the sun's going to come up and we don't need any fossil fuels, right?
	We're in a transition, and transitions are complicated.
	And again, it's one of the reasons why you saw the president act so aggressively to bring gas prices down, make it easier for Americans to afford gas, because most Americans are driving a gas-powered car.
	He is doing an amazing thing, bringing the gas prices down.
	You may not have noticed it because he's not, but he is, says Pete Buttigieg.
	Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve continues to raise those interest rates as they have to do in order to drive out the inflation.
	Jason Furman is an Obama former economic advisor.
	He has a piece in the Wall Street Journal saying that the Fed has to stay the course against inflation.
	The left has been pushing back very hard against the Federal Reserve because they are concerned that it's going to sink the economy under Joe Biden, and this will lead to a Republican resurgence.
	But Jason Furman, who again works for Obama, and at least is still tethered to the earth, he says, yeah, you know, there's only one way to quash the inflation problem, and that is to raise the interest rates.
	He says a growing chorus is urging the Federal Reserve to slow down lest it break things.
	If you're paying attention, you should be nervous about growing financial strains in the U.S.
	and around the world.
	But the underlying U.S.
	inflation rate is worse, and employment is stronger than they were when the Fed announced the tapering of asset purchases in November 2021.
	Until there has been tangible progress on inflation, not mere wishful forecasts, the Fed should not let up, a process that could easily take the Fed funds rate above 5% next year.
	Those urging the Fed to slow down make four reasonable but uncompelling arguments.
	The first is that monetary policy works with long and variable lags.
	Let the medicine that has already been administered do its work before continuing to step up the dosage.
	One issue with this view is that two-thirds of the tightening, as measured by Goldman Sachs, actually happened more than five months ago.
	A lot of tightening is already working, and it still isn't doing enough.
	More important, in the past three months, the Fed's preferred price index measure, Core Personal Consumption Expenditures, PCE, has risen at a 5% annual rate.
	More troubling, this rate was actually held down by financial factors, like the large decline in the imputed price of investment advice, a component of the index, even though no one actually pays it, that resulted from declining asset values, which means A more reliable median PCE price index grew at a 6.9% annual rate over that same period.
	Furman says optimists point to signs that inflation will moderate.
	The latest signal is the large decline in job openings, but there are also falling home prices, falling shipping costs, falling commodity prices.
	But with the recent improvement, labor markets are still much tighter than at any point before the pandemic.
	There are other arguments that there might be an unnecessary recession, but again, the risk associated with doing too little means a continued inflation bubble that does not soften.
	Also, the notion that the Federal Reserve is breaking up financial markets because stocks are down and the dollar is strong and liquidity is drying up.
	But that is what the central bank is trying to achieve.
	You're just complaining about what exactly they're trying to do working.
	And then finally, there's an argument that the strong dollar and high U.S.
	interest rates are wreaking havoc around the world, exporting inflation, forcing countries to raise their own interest rates more than they would like, leading to capital outflows.
	These conditions make debt repayments by emerging and developing economies more difficult.
	All this has a certain amount of unfortunate truth to it, says Fuhrman.
	Although it shouldn't be exaggerated, the problems most countries face flow from their own domestic policies and high commodity price.
	Again, if you're a fiscally responsible country, the U.S.
	raising its interest rates is not going to kill you.
	If you're fiscally irresponsible, then of course, it is going to hurt you.
	And that's precisely what has happened over the course of the last 30 years or so, really, since the end of the Cold War.
	Every single industrialized economy went on a massive welfare spending binge.
	In the 90s, there was some talk about fiscal balance, and then it just got completely blown out of the water.
	And now, all of those bills are coming due, because that's what always happens when the economy cools down.
	So trying to blame all of that on the attempt to rein in the hot spending by centralized banks is nuts.
	The problem is not reining in the spending by the central banks.
	The problem is not raising interest rates.
	The problem is you guys were irresponsible, and now the credit card bills are coming due.
	And you can't push that off down the road a lot further.
	All of this is going to have some global impact.
	WTO is now projecting that world trade is going to slow sharply next year under the weight of high energy prices, rising interest rates, and war-related disruptions, raising the risk of a global recession.
	According to the WTO, total exports and imports of goods are likely to grow by just 1% in 2023.
	That'd be down from their previous forecast of 3.4% and its forecast of 3.5% for the year.
	Meanwhile, U.S.
	mortgage rates have risen for the seventh straight week.
	They're now at their highest rate in 16 years.
	They're at 6.75%.
	That is really, really high.
	I mean, if you've been alive over the course of the last 15 years, those rates are really unparalleled.
	The contract rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage rose nearly a quarter percentage point in the last week of September.
	The steady string of increases resulted in more than 14% slump last week in applications to purchase or refinance a home.
	Again, you're going to see the prices of real estate drop pretty significantly in certain markets around the country.
	Meanwhile, has any of this dissuaded the Biden administration from stopping its idiotic fiscal and economic policies outside of whatever the Federal Reserve is doing?
	The answer, of course, is no.
	Joe Biden has now been busily appointing A treasury department advisory committee on racial equity, because if there's one thing we know, it is that in times of difficult economic turmoil, what you really need is a fairer distribution of resources, not based on merit, not based on fiscal responsibility, but based on skin color.
	Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced that inaugural members of her department's Advisory Committee on Racial Equity will now be appointed.
	According to the Daily Wire, the committee will provide Yellen with advice and recommendations on, quote, efforts to advance racial equity in the economy and address acute disparities for communities of color with respect to matters such as housing and federal supplier diversity, according to a press release.
	Yes, what we need is more subprime mortgages.
	That'll definitely solve the problem.
	So who are the appointees?
	Well, there is Michael Nutter, a Democrat, former Philadelphia mayor, very much to the left, and Roosevelt Institute CEO Felicia Wong, who will serve as the vice chair.
	Yellen says, a critical piece of executing on our racial equity goals is bringing a wide set of outside perspectives and lived experiences to the decision-making table.
	See, I always thought there was going to be a financial acumen that solved this problem.
	I always thought that if you have a financial problem, typically what you want to do is bring in a financial advisor who has a record of running things well.
	But apparently, what we really need is a wide variety of perspectives.
	I've noticed, by the way, that everybody is of the same class.
	Neither Michael Nutter nor Felicia Wong are low-income people.
	I think what we really need, if we're really going to do this right, is we need populations appointed by income sector to be part of this new equity committee.
	So we need a broad spectrum of people who are earning less than $30,000 a year to give financial advice to the federal government.
	Wong is very radical.
	She co-authored a paper last year contending that police budgets should be reduced and for-profit prison systems be done away with.
	She actually did that four years before the death of George Floyd.
	She also co-authored a paper last year saying policymakers should censor race in every single decision, quote, because our racial disparities are so severe across all elements of the American economy and society.
	No policy, even if facially race-neutral, is race-neutral in practice.
	This is perfect Ibram X. Kendi.
	This is perfect Robin DiAngelo.
	There's no such thing as an actually equal policy just applied equally to everyone.
	Because people are differently situated and the rain falls on everybody equally, that means that the rain is going to hit the taller people before it hits the shorter people.
	And that means that we have to have some sort of equity policy and affirmative action policy in place.
	Quote, the design of all policy proposals, big and small, must be attentive to racial outcomes, All policy from vaccine distribution to higher education funding for tax to tax reform will have racialized effects. Recognizing this reality and always considering race and policy design is therefore vital. So presumably she is she's advocating for people of certain races to get vaccines before people of other races. Again, amazing, amazing stuff. Beyond the Committee on Racial Equity, the Treasury Department also hired a person named Janice Bowdler.
	She spearheaded JPMorgan's Chase Initiative to invest $30 billion in underserved committees as the first counselor for racial equity at the end of last year.
	The Treasury Department also tapped Wei Chen, a former official at the New York State Department of Financial Services, to serve as Chief Climate Risk Officer for the Office of Comptroller of the Currency.
	So we now have climate change extremists who are going to be helping to regulate the national banks and federal savings associations.
	I can't imagine why our economy is on the brink.
	It makes no sense to me.
	With geniuses like this, people who are experts in climate change and racial equity, in charge of our economic policy, why is economic policy falling behind?
	No one can understand.
	It's a mystery wrapped in an enigma.
	These high IQ people who are focused completely on the wrong things.
	Why aren't they fixing the problem?
	Alrighty.
	Meanwhile, Joe Biden visited Florida yesterday.
	He visited some of the damaged sites.
	The sites damaged by Hurricane Ian and made a fool of himself.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
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	Also, this Monday is Columbus Day, the holiday you're not supposed to celebrate.
	Yes, that is a day on which Christopher Columbus apparently discovered the Americas.
	This is supposed to be a bad day, according to the left.
	It's a terrible, terrible day, except for the expansion of Western civilization across the continent of America, which truly began with the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
	Apparently that's a bad thing, say all the people who have benefited from Western civilization being on American shores and who are speaking into their iPhones right now, thanks to Western civilization reaching American shores.
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	Meanwhile, Joe Biden headed down to Florida to visit Hurricane Damage.
	So, as I've said a thousand times, I hate when presidents do this.
	I don't care who the president is.
	I think the idea of a president going and visiting a damaged site via natural disaster is completely useless.
	It shuts down the area for a significant period of time.
	It prevents help from getting in at that time because the president has to get a photo op.
	I'm not sure how it's helpful.
	I've never seen a situation in which the president had to be like, what's the president going to do?
	This is not unique to Biden.
	Trump used to do it too.
	So did Obama, so did Bush.
	Like this idea, the president's going to get out there and he's going to have both his hands on like a piece of boat.
	He's going to be shoving it over here and saving the world.
	It's just, it's very silly to me.
	In any case, Joe Biden arrives in Florida and he hangs out with Ron DeSantis.
	By hangs out, I mean he did what people typically do in this situation.
	The governor of the state is there, the president is there, they greet each other cordially, and then the president speaks and Ron DeSantis speaks.
	One thing that I will say Ron DeSantis did not do is the Chris Christie bro hug with Barack Obama, in which he pretended that Barack Obama was coming in to save the state of New Jersey, which of course was really, really silly.
	Apparently, President Biden said he was in complete lockstep with Governor Ron DeSantis during a visit to Southwest Florida.
	According to the New York Times, this amounts to a moment of détente, but what this really shows, and this has been pretty clear since Hurricane Ian, if DeSantis were botching, the response would be at the top of every newspaper in America all day long.
	Which means, because we're not hearing about it, that DeSantis is doing a really good job.
	That's what's actually happening right here.
	And the fact that Joe Biden is even admitting that DeSantis is doing a good job is fairly telling here.
	So here was Joe Biden yesterday praising Ron DeSantis for doing a good job presiding over his state in the worst natural disaster that's hit the state in probably a decade and a half.
	I think he's done a good job.
	Look, I call him the thinking before you call me a political philosopher.
	He's worked hand-in-glove.
	We have very different political philosophies.
	But he's worked hand-in-glove.
	And he's been on a team that's really dealing with this crisis.
	And he's been completely rock-steady with no difficulties.
	Biden said, quote, which, again, good for him to say.
	Good that it's true.
	Also very obvious that DeSantis is doing a good job because if Biden had the opportunity to stomp all over Ron DeSantis, a potential 2024 rival for the presidency, he absolutely Meanwhile, the President of the United States continues to say some things that nobody understands.
	He'll spill things out of his face hole and no one knows what he's talking about.
	So, for example, Joe Biden bragged about how he has personal experience with home disasters because at one point his home was hit by lightning.
	The actual story, according to the Associated Press, is that in 2004, Joe Biden's home was hit by lightning.
	There was a brief kitchen fire for about 20 minutes and it was put out.
	I don't think that's on the level of your home being literally washed away if you were on Sanibel Island or something.
	But, you know, Joe Biden always has a personal experience to call upon.
	Most of them are not true.
	Here is Joe Biden.
	I know from experience how much, how much anxiety and fear and concern there are in the people.
	We didn't lose our whole home, but lightning struck and we lost an awful lot of it about 15 years ago.
	Lightning struck and my dad said, Joey, you see that lightning over there?
	It's going to strike your kitchen.
	Okay.
	So a few years back when I was newly married, I was at my parents' house one day.
	And I decided that I was going to make myself a frying pan of scrambled eggs.
	My parents had an old-fashioned gas stove and the pilot light didn't work, so I took a match and I used it to light the old-fashioned gas stove.
	I blew out the match.
	It was out.
	I threw it in the garbage can.
	I left the room.
	A few minutes later, I saw smoke in the house.
	I ran back into the house and what I saw was that the kitchen garbage can was completely on fire because apparently there was still a spark in that in that match and it lit all of the plastic on fire. So giant flames coming out there. So I take a, uh, I take the sink, right? I take the, the, the faucet from the sink is one of those hoses that comes off the sink. I'm like, ah, I will solve this problem. And so I start firing it at the, uh, at the kitchen fire.
	And it goes like this.
	It stops about four feet short of the actual of the actual trash can that's on fire.
	The smoke is going everywhere.
	I run into my parents' pantry looking for some sort of bowl or something to throw water.
	All I can come up with is like the top of the cake dish.
	So I fill it with water.
	I put out the fire.
	I look and there it was.
	There it was.
	There was a mark on my parents' kitchen floor, which I promptly hid with a new kitchen Trash can, which that lasted for, I don't know, a couple of days until they realized what was going on.
	I called my wife on the phone at the time.
	She was laughing really, really hard at me.
	My parents apparently were right behind her on the freeway.
	And so she couldn't get over to help.
	And I was yelling at her that she needed to speed up so she could get home to help.
	It was just like that, the hurricane.
	It's just the same, the same thing.
	According to Joe Biden, they're all the same.
	All small home fires are exactly the same thing as your home being washed.
	Oh, I got this one.
	This one.
	Well, Joe Biden also suggested that if there's one thing that Hurricane Ian settled, it was the debate over global warming, which absolutely it did not settle because again, the data do not exist, suggesting that hurricanes have become either more common or a higher level because of global warming over the course of the last 30, 40, 50 years.
	Here's Joe Biden saying precisely the opposite.
	Colorado River looks more like a stream.
	There's a lot going on.
	And I think the one thing this has finally ended is a discussion about whether or not there's climate change, we should do something about it.
	But folks, I also want to, Jill and I have had you all in our prayers.
	Yeah, he's easy to light.
	Meanwhile, he also met with one of the mayors in Florida and dropped the line, nobody F's with a Biden, which apparently there was no context to this.
	He just sort of blurted it randomly.
	So yeah, he's doing an amazing job is I guess what we're saying here.
	Good times.
	Good times.
	It's very funny.
	Breitbart put out a movie called My Son Hunter.
	about Joe Biden.
	It's a kind of half-parodic movie about Joe Biden.
	And this is one of the lines that he uses in the movie.
	And everybody's laughing at it.
	Joe would never say anything like that, except he says stuff like that all the time, actually, as it turns out.
	Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis, again, doing a really good job over in Florida of handling this hurricane.
	So he talks about how illegal immigrant looters should be sent back to their home countries.
	Again, this is fairly popular stuff with the American public, I would think.
	We've had four looters that were arrested, I guess a couple days ago, and they need to be brought to justice, and we're not going to tolerate it, but you know, three of the four are illegal aliens.
	And so these are people that are foreigners.
	They're illegally in our country.
	And not only that, they try to loot and ransack in the aftermath of a natural disaster.
	I mean, they should be prosecuted, but they need to be sent back to their home country.
	They should not be here at all.
	Again, people on the left feel very insulted by this sort of stuff, but I fail to see anything that is remotely controversial about this.
	First of all, if you commit any crime and you're an illegal immigrant, you should be sent to your home country.
	If you're looting during a hurricane, I would imagine that the same should apply.
	Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis makes the absolutely inarguable point that if this hurricane had hit Tampa, the media would have been happier because they would have had more pictures of disaster to show and more things to blame on him.
	Because, of course, this is true.
	The media have been searching for some sort of angle to blame Ron DeSantis for.
	The one that they came up with, a dog that didn't hunt, is that only 21 hours in advance of the hurricane hitting Fort Myers, he told people they had to get out of Fort Myers.
	There's only one problem with that, which is that none of the networks said that people should get out of Fort Myers because that's not where the cone was.
	So here is Ron DeSantis pointing out this obvious truth.
	Everyone that I've talked to on the ground when we're delivering supplies, they're saying, I was watching the media.
	They told us Tampa.
	That's why I didn't leave.
	I know people personally on the island.
	Is there gonna be any accountability in the media?
	Well, look, I mean, I think part of it, quite frankly, you know, you have national regime media that they wanted to see Tampa because they thought that that'd be worse for Florida.
	That's how these people think.
	I mean, they don't care about the people of this state.
	They don't care about the people of this community.
	They want to use storms and destruction from storms as a way to advance their agenda.
	Of course, the governor of Florida is exactly right about this.
	So the fact that they've been able to come up with nearly nothing demonstrates that DeSantis is doing a good job and they should be, in fact, pretty scared of him come 2024, especially if the heir for Joe Biden, if Joe Biden does not run, the heir apparent is Kamala Harris, who repeatedly has been announcing her love of Venn diagrams.
	That's an actual thing that she's been doing.
	I don't know why, but that lady really loves Venn diagrams.
	I've actually asked my team to do a Venn Diagram.
	I love Venn Diagrams.
	I just love Venn Diagrams.
	You know the three circles, right?
	Sometimes there are more.
	Wow.
	Sometimes there are more, guys.
	Man, with people like this in power, I can't imagine why things are really going the wrong way.
	Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	We'll get into the Herschel Walker abortion story, how that's going to affect the Georgia race.
	We'll get into Rachel Maddow, who's sounding kind of insurrection-y these days.

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