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Oct. 12, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
59:49
Putin Ratchets Up The Pressure On The West | Ep. 1589
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Russian President Vladimir Putin ups the ante with missile strikes into Ukraine, the American economy hovers on the precipice of a serious downturn, and Kanye West unleashes a spate of conspiratorial anti-Semitic nonsense.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Well, we begin in Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin has upped the ante.
He's firing missiles again into Kiev.
He's aiming at civilian centers.
This is perfectly predictable behavior from Vladimir Putin, who has to up the ante, because after all, were he to completely lose the war in Ukraine, it would probably destabilize him inside Russia.
We actually don't know what would happen next.
If things were to be destabilized in Russia, it is possible that somebody like Viktor Shoygu, who is the head of his military intelligence operation, would take over.
That guy may be worse than Putin is.
It is possible that the country would itself fragment because there'd be no centralized authority where Putin to go.
This is not a case for Vladimir Putin remaining in power.
It is a case for a little bit of caution when it comes to predicting what happens next in the aftermath of world changing cataclysmic events.
Vladimir Putin trying to stave that off by ramping up the amount of brutality he's inflicting in Ukraine, simultaneously waiting for the winter to come.
The entire Putin strategy has been for months now that it was clear that he made a miscalculation in going into Ukraine.
He thought it was going to be a cakewalk.
It was not a cakewalk.
Instead, something like 40, 50,000 Russian troops have died in Ukraine, which is an insane number of troops.
It also happens to be clear that the Russian military has been exposed to her as a second-rate military.
That actually shouldn't be a shock because the truth is that the Russian military has been a second-rate military for pretty much all of human history.
When you talk about its intervention into wars, its main advantage has been just the number of bodies it can bring to bear.
But in terms of tactics, in terms of military weaponry, it has always been an army that is more reliant on other people overstretching than on its own tactical brilliance or technical achievements.
So the way that Putin is fighting this war is what essentially Putin did in Syria, which is you just knock down a lot of buildings, kill a lot of people, and get a lot of your own soldiers killed.
This is not unpredictable in any way.
His strategy is get to the winter, hope that the Western and Eastern Europeans are frozen out because of their lack of oil and natural gas supplies because they idiotically decided to outsource their environmental and energy policy to a Swedish young child stupid person.
And Putin's hope is that eventually the coalition just fractures and he's able to claw back some sort of victory that he can go home to his people with.
The G7 is trying to hold it together right now.
According to the U.S.
Sun, G7 leaders have vowed to hold Putin responsible following the missile strikes in Ukraine.
Vladimir Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, has urged leaders to strengthen the overall effort to help financially.
but the creation of an air shield for Ukraine. In a statement, the group said their meeting with Zelensky had taken place against the backdrop of the most recent missile attacks against civilian infrastructure in cities across Ukraine.
We condemn these attacks in the strongest possible terms and recall that indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilian populations constitute a war crime. We will hold President Putin and those responsible to account. Now, unclear exactly what they mean by that. Do they mean they're going to haul them up in front of the International Criminal Court?
Do they mean they're going to try to depose him?
Do they mean that they're going to ramp up offensive weaponry for Ukraine?
None of that is clear.
And under the surface, cracks are beginning to emerge because, as it turns out, indefinite war is not something the WETS really likes to engage in, particularly when it has significant domestic costs.
In terms of your economy, in terms of the durability of your administration, we've seen a bunch of elections that are going against the left in Europe.
And one reason is because energy prices are just so high.
And so that means that a lot of the right-wing politicians are like, guys, why is Ukraine the chief issue when you cannot even heat your home as the winter starts to cool things down?
According to the Washington Post, President Biden is now scrambling to avert cracks in the pro-Ukraine coalition.
He has held hours of conversations in recent months with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, and other foreign leaders who have not always supported the Western coalition in support of Ukraine, urging them to stand firm against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Whether through Biden's efforts or not, the White House was pleasantly surprised when Modi confronted Putin at a summit last month, lecturing him that today's era is not a war and Putin should move on to a path of peace, comments unusual for a leader who has gone to great lengths to remain neutral in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, according to a senior White House official.
As these discussions show, Biden is now pushing hard to hold together what has become a central mission of his presidency, maintaining the global and domestic coalition supporting Ukraine.
So the White House is saying, We're holding this together because we got Modi in India to say some mean words to Putin, which that's not how this works.
India continues to buy extraordinary amounts of oil at discount prices from the Russians.
So I love that the White House is trotting out a kind of secret spokespeople to the Washington Post.
Look what a great job we're doing with India is continuing to fund the war indirectly by, of course, buying oil from Russia.
Now, the real question in all of this is why precisely aren't they buying their oil from us, considering the United States is the leading energy producer on planet Earth?
And the answer As always, it's bad environmental and energy policy led by the left in the United States.
According to the Washington Post, as the war heads into its first winter, probably a bitter and brutal one, some U.S.
allies face economic headwinds fueled by the war, while at home some Republicans voice skepticism about the billions in aid going to Ukraine.
These efforts face a major test Wednesday, when the U.N.
votes on a draft resolution condemning Russia's annexation of four parts of Ukraine.
Biden and U.S.
officials have been working to convince non-aligned countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to refrain from taking a neutral position and condemn the Kremlin outright, an effort analysts said might be bolstered by Russia's barrage of missile attacks Monday on Kiev and other Ukrainian cities.
By the way, it is important to note here that while we talk about how Western powers have solidified in the face of Russian aggression here, if you're talking about sort of the global breakdown here, the best that the U.S. has done is to have a more neutral approach is hoping for here is that about half of U.N.
member states will actually condemn Russia.
100 of 193.
Which means there are 93 countries the U.S.
has basically just written off as probably in the non-aligned or aligned with Russia camp.
Which is not a great number, to be honest with you.
That is because the United States has offered no carrots and no sticks.
Basically we're just like, our moral suasion will lead countries in Latin America and Africa to be friends.
Moral suasion?
Counts for very little when you're talking about the real politique of international geopolitical affairs.
Even as Biden scrambles to hold together his global coalition, cracks are showing in political support at home for the billions in aid the United States is sending Ukraine.
Those fissures are likely to widen significantly if Republicans recapture the House on November 8th.
Yeah, that's clear because again a lot of Republicans are suggesting that the amount of aid that we are providing to Ukraine, even if they're in favor of the war in Ukraine continuing because the Ukrainians want it to continue, they're saying there needs to be some sort of offer, Ampere. We can't just keep sending tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine indefinitely for a purpose that nobody truly understands at this point. A Pew research poll shows the share of Americans who are extremely or very concerned about a Ukrainian defeat fell from 55% in May to 38% in September.
Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 32% say the United States is providing too much support for the war, up from 9% in March.
That's, of course, because as the economy sinks into the mire in the United States, there's a lot less money to play with.
When everything is a boomtown, it's easy to toss tens of billions of dollars at Ukraine.
When you look around and jobs are going to start being lost in the very near future here, people are saying, why are we spending all this money over there for an outcome that is not particularly clear?
What exactly is the off-ramp?
And this is the really big problem here.
Even if you are supportive of Ukraine, I'm supportive of Ukraine.
I think that funding the Ukrainian military in its war against Russia is a good thing to do.
There needs to be an off-ramp.
What exactly is the end point here?
And when you continue to say there is no end point other than Russia loses, you have to define what it means for Russia to lose.
So Joe Biden, He did an interview with Jake Tapper last night, and he made a couple of comments that are truly unhelpful.
So comment number one, he suggested that the solution here is for Putin to take his marbles and go home.
And his suggestion is that if that happens, then Putin can probably hold on.
So that's what we're going for.
That's a pretty loose talk about how foreign policy works.
Here is Joe Biden.
His back is against the wall.
There are questions about how rational he is.
He already was a brutal dictator.
What is the off-ramp?
Is there any acceptable way that he can leave in his mind without seizing territory in a way that would not be acceptable to Ukraine?
I don't know what's in his mind, but clearly he could leave.
He could just flat leave and still probably hold his position together in Russia.
Would you be willing to meet with him at the G20?
Look, I have no intention of meeting with him, but for example, if he came to me at the G20 and said, I want to talk about the release of Greiner, I'd meet with him.
I mean, it would depend, but I can't imagine.
Look, We've taken a position.
I just did a G7 meeting this morning.
The idea, nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.
So I'm not about to, nor is anyone else prepared to negotiate with Russia about them staying in Ukraine, keeping any part of Ukraine, etc.
So there's no off-ramp here.
I mean, that's what Biden is saying.
What Biden is saying is there is no off-ramp here.
And when he says things like, Putin could probably just go home and he'd probably be okay, that's pretty speculative, is it not?
I mean, that is Joe Biden trying to assess whether Vladimir Putin would hold on to domestic power.
Maybe Putin doesn't have the same calculations since he's the actual dictator in charge of a country.
Maybe Putin is a little more worried, he's less sanguine about his ability to hold on to power should this Ukrainian war fail than Joe Biden is because Joe Biden wants Vladimir Putin to lose the war and has already said publicly That he doesn't want Vladimir Putin to remain in power.
So is it possible that Joe Biden is being, I'd say, a little bit too pithy about Vladimir Putin's interest in this war and what Vladimir Putin is likely to do next?
And what this is leading to.
I mean, listen, everybody knows how this war is going to end.
The way this war is going to end is that Russia is going to retain some of the territory that it took in 2014.
Putin is going to declare victory to his people.
Zelensky is going to declare victory to his people.
And everybody's going to go home.
That's the way this war is going to end.
Everybody knows this.
It is just a question of how we get to that end point.
Okay, Crimea is not going to be returned to Ukraine.
Areas of Luhansk and Donetsk, some will return to Ukraine, some will not return to Ukraine.
The notion that this war is going to end with a complete Russian surrender is fantasy.
It's not going to happen.
And if it were going to happen, then I have serious doubts as to whether Vladimir Putin would not use a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield.
What would his interest be in not doing that?
Considering that the best way to hang on to power, as is being shown by Kim Jong-un in North Korea, is fire off a missile test once in a while and have a nuclear weapon.
And Russia happens to have 2,500 nuclear weapons at the tip of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
What Biden is saying here makes no sense.
What makes absolutely no sense is the position that is now being articulated by the White House to the Washington Post.
Quote, when asked how long the United States can be expected to pour billions into the war effort, Biden and his top aides frequently say, as long as it takes.
Privately, U.S.
officials say neither Russia nor Ukraine is capable of winning the war outright, but they've ruled out the idea of pushing or even nudging Ukraine to the negotiating table.
They say they do not know what the end of the war looks like or how it might end up or when, insisting that is up to Kiev.
Well, is it up to Kiev considering that we're the ones who are footing the bill for this war effort?
That's an amazing statement.
We don't know how it's going to end.
We don't know what the end of the war looks like, but we're going to continue pouring money into the war.
Now listen, I understand what the American interest is in continuing to fund a war in which Ukrainians and Russians are dying in very large numbers.
The American interest, geopolitically, is weaken Russia, which takes Russia off the table as a second threat.
With regard to China, alienate Europe from China, bringing Europe back into the American camp.
All of that makes perfect sense, but those goals have been achieved.
Those goals are already done.
Now the question is going to be, what does the off-ramp look like?
And there is no off-ramp.
See, if Biden had any sort of political courage at all, which he does not, if Joe Biden were not a coward politically, what he would do right now is he would take the hit.
He would say, listen, there's got to be an off-ramp here.
Europe is about to go into a serious recession.
The United States is about to hit a very serious recession.
A lot of that is driven by energy policy.
We need to come to some sort of terminus to this war.
What that means is that we are going to push Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table to a solution that everyone already knows is going to be the end point of this conflict.
We're going to do it.
And the reason that would require courage is it would require Joe Biden to take the political hit.
It would require him to be the bad guy to Zelensky.
He would have to say to Zelensky, listen, you're not going to get everything you want from this war.
You're going to have to just deal with the fact that Crimea is going to end up in Russian hands.
You may have to end up with formally non-aligned status, although we will guarantee your security, for example, in case of another foreign invasion.
There might have to be some tough words said between Joe Biden and Vladimir Zelensky.
Why?
Because Zelensky can't go back to his own people at this point and say that he is making concessions to the Russians.
He needs to be able to say that Biden has forced him into concessions to the Russians.
That's the game that's being played right here.
But Biden doesn't have the stomach for that.
So instead, we're just going to continue to cut checks for a war that doesn't really have an endpoint.
And again, that's an amazing statement from the Washington Post.
They're saying they do not know what the endpoint is.
They do not know what the off ramp looks like.
They do not know what the goal is of the war anymore.
And yet they're continuing anyway.
Pretty astonishing stuff.
And meanwhile, Joe Biden is asked about Jake Tapper.
Last week, Joe Biden did a fundraiser, a DNC fundraiser, at which he pretty much explained that Vladimir Putin might use nukes and that he takes that threat pretty seriously.
And Jake Tapper asks a question that I would ask Joe Biden.
He asks, well, you know, Joe, when you say that you take Putin's threat of nuclear weapons use seriously, aren't you giving him the ball, right?
Aren't you basically saying that he is in control of what happens next?
And Biden tries to kind of shimmy his way out of it unsuccessfully.
Do you think in any way discussing this type of thing publicly, openly, Putin's possible use of nuclear weapons might have the opposite effect of what you want?
It might make some of our wobblier European allies be even more scared of confronting Putin.
Well, no, I don't think so at all.
I think, look, there was a directed, when I'm talking about, I'm talking to Putin.
He, in fact, cannot continue with impunity to talk about the use of a tactical nuclear weapon as if that's a rational thing to do.
The mistakes get made and the miscalculation could occur.
No one can be sure what would happen and it could end in Armageddon.
That's an amazing, amazing statement by Joe Biden.
Again, you know, his continued, his continued, mistakes get made, things could happen.
That's not what he said.
What he said is Armageddon could be around the corner because Putin could use nukes.
Even Max Boot, who's become a Joe Biden sycophant, he wrote in the Washington Post today, in seeking to deter Putin from using nuclear weapons, Biden might be unwittingly amplifying the Russian dictator's threats with doomsday talk and speculation about what kind of an off-ramp we can offer.
On Friday, Biden mused aloud, where does he find a way out?
Where does he find himself in a position that he does not only lose face, but lose significant power within Russia?
He said Biden shouldn't be speculating about that in public.
I mean, that is certainly correct.
But again, the fact that this has turned into sort of an ideological litmus test, as opposed to a situation in which we have to assess what America's interests are, that's always dangerous for foreign policy.
You can tell, by the way, that this has become an ideological litmus test when Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers and the woman responsible for a two-year shutdown in American schooling over masking of children for no apparent reason, announced that she was waking up in Ukraine and she was going to visit the country.
What is Randi Weingarten doing in Ukraine?
The placement of the Ukrainian flag in Twitter profiles alongside the trans rights flag is pretty telling as to how this thing is polarized.
It really shouldn't be polarized.
I think everybody should be on the side of Ukraine against Russia in this conflict.
But the fact that the greatest kind of war hawks here are now the greatest Left-wingers in America should say something about the priorities because, again, this has nothing to do with American interests and has everything to do with the idea that Ukraine is some sort of bastion of leftists.
Which, again, is completely delusional.
One of the funnier things on Twitter is the realization that Ukraine is a heavily Christian country.
This happens every so often.
People are like, wait a second, Ukraine is Christian?
Why are we supportive?
This sort of stuff happens on Twitter all the time.
But the bottom line here is that Joe Biden and his administration are not offering any solutions here.
They're just offering money, which is a dangerous game.
I mean, it's all fun and games until Vladimir Putin really feels so threatened that he uses a battlefield tactical nuclear weapon, at which point the math completely changes.
And the United States is faced with the prospect of, do we put NATO planes in the air to take out Russian troops?
Bringing to fruition the real possibility of a nose-to-nose standoff with Vladimir Putin, not just between Ukraine and Russia, with Ukraine as the proxy, but between the West and Russia, both armed with nuclear weapons.
Now meanwhile, as that conflict simmers on the front burner, not even the back burner, the economy is on the brink.
So Joe Biden admitted yesterday that we may be on the verge of a recession.
He said it could be a mild recession, and then he jabbered, and then he dropped his cheat sheet, is the thing he did with Jake Tapper.
Again, the fact that the president is carrying around cheat sheets in interviews with friendlies like Jake Tapper is somewhat disturbing.
Here was Joe Biden with Jake Tapper yesterday.
We still have real problems.
But look what we got done.
We passed so much legislation that significantly makes a point about, for example, the American Rescue Plan.
So there he goes.
He is dropping the cheat sheet.
So things are going really, really well.
And then, of course, Joe Biden jabbers nonsensically about the things that he has done for the economy, including apparently dropping a trillion, million, billion, bajillion, exquillion.
Here's Joe Biden not knowing what numbers are.
What I ran on, I said we're going to deal with energy.
Right.
And the energy problem, we're going to deal with the whole notion of global warming.
We passed $368 billion worth of help, which, as the same bankers talk about, is going to bring a trillion, $700 billion off the sidelines of investment.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Meanwhile, it's becoming clear that we are on the verge of a very serious recession in the United States.
CNN is reporting that Bank of America says the United States economy is going to start losing about 175,000 jobs per month.
So we have now hit the point at which the interest rates have ramped up sufficiently to ramp down demand in the economy.
When that happens, the jobs start to get lost.
This is the predictable effect of an inflation bubble that is being pricked by the Federal Reserve.
Overspending by the Biden administration has some actual costs, and those costs are starting to come to fruition right now.
Here's CNN reporting.
Bank of America issues this warning saying that sometime not too far from now, I guess next calendar year, we're seeing job gains right now, but they say we could see job losses of 175,000 jobs a month.
Let's show, I have this annual jobs growth chart that I think is really amazing.
It shows you, we've already got 3.8 million jobs out of this year.
That's monster job creation the past couple of years.
And that is, in and of itself, inflationary.
What Bank of America and others are saying is that number is going to slow dramatically.
I love that they're trying to spin this.
It says, look how much job creation.
Okay, guys, all that happened is that the economy tried to get back to normal and Joe Biden blew it.
The economy was going back to normal after an artificially induced coma.
And now Joe Biden has blown it to the point where we're now going to enter a recession that literally no one had predicted two years ago.
It was not on the table.
No one was talking about the possibility of recession in 2022, 2023.
Now, there are people on the left who are whining that the Federal Reserve is doing too good a job in crushing inflation despite the fact that the inflation statistics still have not really come down yet.
They're saying that the Federal Reserve is doing too harsh a job in terms of raising those interest rates.
According to the Washington Post, First, the Federal Reserve missed inflation.
Now, a growing number of critics say the central bank could be outrunning it.
Scrambling to rein in soaring consumer prices, the Fed is moving at the most aggressive pace in decades.
Officials have hiked rates five times since March.
Two more big increases will come by the end of the year.
As warnings rise that the economy could soon tip into a recession, Fed leaders say they won't let up, even at the risk of a softening job market, a recession, and financial pain for American families and businesses.
In a bit of whiplash, a buildup of economists and Fed experts have started arguing the central bank is now moving too forcefully to slow the economy and overcorrecting for past mistakes.
Now, many of the people who are complaining about all of this happen to be people on the left who are very much in favor of very easy monetary policies for quite a long time.
They are afraid that because the Fed is focused so strongly on knocking down the inflation rate, they're going to tip the economy into a much more serious recession than is possibly necessary.
But again, this was all perfectly predictable as soon as the inflation started running out of control.
I mean, as Mohamed El-Erian over at Allianz was saying, The United States kept sort of tapping, tapping, tapping on the brakes when they needed to slam on the brakes, and now we have to slam on the brakes, and the predictable effect is that everybody's getting whiplash.
That is not a shock.
The IMF, by the way, is announcing that the global growth forecast is going to get cut pretty significantly.
The IMF predicts global growth will slow to 2.7% next year, that's 0.2 percentage points lower than its July forecast.
It anticipates 2023 will feel like a recession for millions around the world.
Aside from the global financial crisis and the peak of COVID-19, this is the weakest growth profile since 2001, according to the IMF, which isn't, again, that's an amazing number.
We came out of COVID.
Everybody was ready to shop.
Everybody had billed up of trillions of dollars because governments had just put money in people's bank accounts.
And now we are looking at the weakest growth profile since 2001, aside from the real estate crash of 2007, 2008, and COVID-19.
That's amazing.
The report said quote, the worst is yet to come.
For many people, 2023 will feel like a recession.
Yeah, this is what happens when you pursue garbage spending policy for years on end.
And meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to run the economy in the stupidest possible way.
I mean, as Noah Rothman of our commentary magazine says, obviously the Biden administration has been cursed by some sort of economic wish because everything is now coming to fruition all at once.
According to NBC News, the country's third largest freight rail workers union rejected a temporary agreement brokered by the Biden administration to avert a potentially crippling nationwide railroad strike, raising the possibility one could occur next month.
So going into the election, it's possible that the railroads shut down, which means all the shipping shuts down, which means massive supply chain issues.
So once again, amazing job by the Biden administration, their labor department, their wonderful Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, who is not good at his job, but also is gay.
In a statement on Monday, the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way employees division of the Teamsters said 56 percent of its more than 11,000 workers had voted against the Some of the provisions would allow workers to avoid attendance penalties for routine medical visits and hospitalizations.
The proposal included the biggest wage increases in more than four decades, but the deal did not address the number of unpaid six days for which workers would now be eligible, among other issues that were left to be negotiated in the future.
So these unions know because the Biden administration is in power and because the Biden administration is pro-union, because the unions essentially pay for the electoral victory of Democrats all across the nation, they have the Biden administration over barrel.
And so they can negotiate for whatever the hell they want at this point.
In a brief statement, the National Carriers Conference Committee, which represents the country's freight railroads in national collective bargaining negotiations, said it was disappointed with the decision.
Rejecting the tentative agreement sets in motion a status quo period in which the union will now resume negotiations with large freight carriers.
The AP reported the union will delay any strike until five days after Congress reconvenes in mid-November to allow time for additional negotiations.
Of course they will.
So the union is saying we are going to strike, but we're going to hold up just long enough for there to be an election.
But be it noted that Some sort of confiscatory deal will be signed between the unions and the Biden administration at the end of this road or there will be a major supply chain issue.
Amazing stuff from this administration.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration energy policy continues to be hot garbage.
So the Biden administration made very clear when they came into office they were going to be warm toward the Iranian mullahs and they were going to be very, very harsh on the Saudi Arabian government.
This has resulted predictably in the Saudis drawing away from the Biden administration.
That is not a shock.
The Saudis defied a U.S.
warning ahead of their OPEC plus production cuts.
And the United States is basically begging Saudi Arabia to keep pumping, even though the price of oil had already declined.
And Saudi's like, no, we're not doing that.
We're going to cut our oil output because this is what we do when prices drop.
And you guys keep saying that you're our friends.
And then I see that you're negotiating with Iran, who is our moral nemesis.
And so the Biden administration, of course, is now yelling at Saudi Arabia, because this is what the Biden administration really does, is they embrace policies that are absolutely contrary to reality.
And then when reality manifests, they get very angry at reality.
They are my two-year-old.
The other day she asked for sparkling water.
We don't have sparkling water at the house.
I say to her, we don't have sparkling water.
And she just repeats in a much louder voice, I want sparkling water!
And I say to her, if you yell about it, is the sparkling water suddenly going to manifest?
And she says, I want sparkling water!
That is the way that this That is the way that this administration works.
They yell at the Saudis.
What they want does not manifest because it doesn't make sense for the Saudis.
And then they yell at the Saudis some more.
That is apparently an actual foreign policy for this administration.
According to the Wall Street Journal, days before a major oil production cut by OPEC and its Russia-led allies, U.S.
officials called their counterparts in Saudi Arabia and other big-golf producers with an urgent appeal to delay the decision for another month, according to people familiar with the talks.
Of course, they only wanted to delay it for another month because they wanted to get it past the election.
The answer was a resounding no.
U.S.
officials warned Saudi leaders a cut would be viewed as a clear choice by Riyadh to side with Russia in the Ukraine war, and the move would weaken already waning support in Washington for the kingdom, the people said.
Saudi officials dismissed the request, which they viewed as a political gambit by the Biden administration to avoid bad news ahead of the midterms.
Yes, clearly that's what Biden was doing.
By the way, I mean, that's an amazing thing.
Remember that time that we talked about how it's really bad for a president to interfere with foreign countries for political purposes.
It is super bad for Donald Trump to call up Ukraine and ask them, for example, to go after Hunter Biden in advance of an election.
Because you don't want to manipulate foreign systems for domestic political gain.
What does it mean when you have the President of the United States calling up OPEC saying, can you put off that decision on pumping oil, not because it's good for the American people, but mainly because we want to avoid the bad news until just after this election?
The way our politics works is really, really broken.
The kingdom leaned on its OPEC allies to approve the cut, which is aimed at reducing production by 2 million barrels a day.
Yeah, sure.
I'm sure that Joe Biden had asked for a month delay because it was just a coincidence that we are in early October and the election is in early November.
What a coincidence.
What an amazing coincidence.
On Tuesday, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, the Saudi foreign minister, said the OPEC Plus decision was purely economic and had no political dimensions, but Joe Biden wants to make clear that it wasn't political by yelling at the Saudis.
Now apparently, Joe Biden is going to re-evaluate and potentially alter the U.S.
relationship with Saudi Arabia following the announcement by the Saudi-led coalition with Slash Oil Production.
So just to get this straight, here's how this started.
Joe Biden decided that he was going to yell at the Saudis because Mohammed bin Salman had Jamal Khashoggi, who is a Washington Post columnist, who also is a Muslim Brotherhood fellow traveler, killed in Turkey.
Fair enough.
He's going to yell at the Saudis about that, but he's going to exclusively yell at the Saudis, and he's going to realign the United States with regard to the Saudis.
Then it turns out the United States has pursued a really crap energy policy in which we reduce drilling, we create incentives for companies not to invest in energy production, and then we are reliant on places like Russia and Saudi Arabia for oil.
Now apparently we're even reliant on Venezuela.
We're trying to cut deals with Nicolas Maduro, the dictator of Venezuela, to get him to allow Chevron to continue pumping over there.
And then, when the Saudis pursue their own interests, we yell at them some more.
And that's after Joe Biden goes over there and kisses ass.
It's an amazing, amazing failure by the Biden administration.
So now what are they doing?
They're doubling down.
According to White House spokesman John Kirby, quote, in light of recent developments and the OPEC plus decision about oil production, the president believes we should review the bilateral relationship with Saudi Arabia and take a look to see if that relationship is where it needs to be.
So just to be clear about this, we will not place any pressure on Ukraine to come to some sort of terminus in its dealings with Russia.
We won't try to force an end to that war, even though we all know how that war is going to end.
We're just gonna continue to pour money into that war and people are gonna continue to die in that war.
We are not going to focus on drilling here in the United States and increasing our energy production.
We are not going to rethink our attempts to pursue a deal with, we're not gonna do any of those things.
We are just going to yell at the Saudis.
And we're going to deal with the Venezuelans, by the way.
We'll become best friends with the Venezuelans and we'll yell at the Saudis.
If any of this makes any sense to you, I'm sorry that you were dropped on your head as a small child.
It makes no sense at all.
Because the solution to this is all very clear.
One, don't alienate historic American allies while pursuing interests of historic American enemies like Iran.
Second, pump the damn oil.
This is not difficult.
But the allegiance of this administration to its own ideological predilections is so deep and so abiding that they feel the necessity to keep doubling down and doubling down and doubling down.
This is why in the middle of what is about to become a recessionary cycle, Joe Biden's administration is about to issue a rule that would force gig workers to be treated as employees.
This was a proposition in California that nearly killed Uber and Lyft, and now the Biden administration wants to nationalize it.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Biden administration is proposing a new rule that could put more gig workers on company payrolls, scrapping a Trump administration rule from 2021 that made it easier for firms to classify workers as independent contractors.
Now, by the way, when you reclassify a worker from IC status to employee status, that costs companies a lot of money.
They now have to pay for, for example, social security tax.
They now have to pay for health care.
They have to pay for all these.
Now, that sounds wonderful, except that what those companies are going to do is either one, raise prices, or two, cut workers.
That is what happens when you increase labor costs artificially, which is precisely what the Biden administration is now looking to do, which is why shares of Uber closed down 10%, Lyft dropped 12%, DoorDash declined 6% on Tuesday.
So they're pursuing all of this garbage policy in the face of a looming recession.
It's amazing.
The stubbornness.
My goodness.
Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said, quote, we have seen in many cases employers misclassify their employees as independent contractors, particularly among our nation's most vulnerable workers.
Well, their choices are going to be to be independent contractors or to be unemployed.
Those are those are the actual choices here.
Misclassification deprives workers of their federal labor protections, including the right to be paid their full legally earned wages.
Says this administration.
And they seem to operate under the presumption that these companies just have a giant Scrooge McDuck bag of cash, like a giant bank vault in the back with coins soft enough to swim in.
And that all they will do by reclassifying these workers to employee statuses is cause redistribution of those coins.
That is not how economics works.
But none of it matters.
They're like my two year old.
They're just going to keep screaming that they want the bubbly water and they want the bubbly water right now, even though the bubbly water is completely out and nobody has yet gone to the grocery store.
We have a lot more coming up in just a second.
First, this episode is sponsored by the Jordan Harbinger Show.
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Jordan dives into the minds of fascinating people from athletes, authors, and scientists to mobsters, spies, and hostage negotiators.
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Also, back in June, 2020, Candace Owens took to social media to question the narrative about George Floyd, took a barrage of criticism as a result.
Celebrities insulted her, GoFundMe de-platformed her as the attacks ramped up.
DailyWare Plus gave her a platform to speak out without fear of being silenced and supported her investigation into Black Lives Matter.
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Tonight, Candace Owens will reveal the truth in her brand new documentary, The Greatest Lie Ever Sold.
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Okay, meanwhile, the Biden administration, again, doing a terrible job.
They do rely on Joe Biden.
Joe Biden said on Jake Tapper's show that He probably will run again in 2024.
There's a reason for that, and that is because Kamala Harris is standing in the wings, and she is legitimately the worst politician maybe in American history.
I mean, she is really, really bad at this.
So, she had a couple of interviews over the weekend.
One of them, she condemned the busing of migrants to her home, and then blamed the border policy on President Trump.
That dog is not going to hunt, Vice President.
Talk about political theater.
I mean, playing games with people's lives, with their lives.
You know, there were mothers with sleeping babies getting off those buses.
And I just think it's an absolute dereliction of duty.
If you see a problem, and if we agree that we need to address it, Then, if you're a leader, participate in a solution, right?
When we first came in office, the first bill that we proposed was for a pathway for citizenship, was to fix a broken immigration system, which was broken under the previous administration.
Wait, so your proposal was to make all these people citizens.
I noticed it wasn't to close the border in any significant way.
I love this.
She's the border czar!
Joe Biden put her in charge of the border!
It's like, oh my god, illegal immigrants are getting off of buses in Washington, D.C.
Disaster area.
You are the Vice President of the United States.
She also, by the way, said that children are our future.
No one spouts platitudes with more platitudinous stupidity than Kamala Harris.
It is truly an awe-inspiring synergy of a platitudinous human being saying platitudinous things.
I truly believe that they are our children.
They are the children of our country, of our communities.
I mean, our future is really bright if we prioritize them and therefore prioritize the climate crisis and the need to address it.
If we think about our children, prioritizing the need to bring our country together.
And when we continue to invest in our country and invest in those priorities, I think it's for the betterment of everyone, but certainly when we think about it in terms of the future of our children, I think we have a great responsibility.
The future of our children, that's the future, will involve children who are our future.
And that future will involve children who are our future.
Children.
The Vice President of the United States.
I wonder why some Democrats are running screaming from the party.
That includes Tulsi Gabbard.
Tulsi Gabbard, this has been sort of predicted for quite a while here.
Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congressperson from Hawaii.
She ran for president and smacked around Kamala Harris, as you'll recall, over Kamala Harris being a cop.
Tulsi Gabbard was like, you bragged openly about smoking pot and then put people in jail for weed.
By the way, Kamala Harris is now saying no one should go to jail for weed, which is not what she was saying when she was Attorney General of the state of California.
But now Tulsi Gabbard has announced that she's leaving the Democratic Party.
Again, not a giant surprise.
She's hosted Tucker Carlson's show, for example.
She is, by comparison with her party, increasingly centrist slash right-wing.
Here was her explanation of why she was leaving her party.
I can no longer remain in today's Democratic Party that's under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers who are driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoking anti-white racism, who actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms that are enshrined in our Constitution,
Who are hostile to people of faith and spirituality, who demonize the police but protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, who believe in open borders, who weaponize the national security state to go after their political opponents, and above all, who are dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.
Okay, you're going to have to spot me the lie right there.
Now listen, I have significant disagreement with Tulsi Gabbard on foreign policy.
I mean, Tulsi Gabbard was, I would say, rather warm toward the Assad regime in Syria.
She's been on the isolationist left slash isolationist right for quite a while, but her characterization of this administration as an administration with no actual goals that seems to be funding wars that don't actually have an end point, Her characterization of the Democratic Party is increasingly animated by a sort of woke motivation structure.
That's obviously true.
And that is why the Democrats, I think, are going to significantly underperform the polls in about a month here.
I think that the polls right now that are showing Democrats likely to keep control of the Senate, according to FiveThirtyEight, they're saying that Democrats have about a two in three chance of retaining the Senate.
I think that that is not going to go the way they think that that is going to go.
I think the Republicans have at least a 50-50 shot of retaining the Senate at this point.
Maybe a 60-40 shot of retaining the Senate because I do not think that Democrats are all that motivated to vote in favor of the kind of candidates that are being put up.
And I think Republicans are incredibly motivated to vote against Democrats in upcoming elections.
And one of those elections that I think is going to get away from them rather quickly here, by the way, is the Pennsylvania election.
So right now, the polling is showing that that election is getting closer and closer.
That, of course, I've been predicting for quite a while.
That would be the election between John Fetterman, who is a career useless person, who presided over the death of a small town while getting paid about $7 a year and being supported by his family until he was 49 years old, but also wears Carhartt sweatshirts and Dr. Oz.
So that poll That number has been getting closer and closer.
The RealClearPolitics polling average now has Federman with just a 3.7 percentage point lead.
And John Federman, he has been disabled by his stroke.
He does not have the capacity to carry on full conversations without the aid of a closed captioning monitor because of that stroke.
That's not according to me, that's according to MSNBC.
Here's an MSNBC reporter explaining.
We had a monitor set up so that he could read my questions because he still has lingering auditory processing issues as a result of the stroke, which means he has a hard time understanding what he's hearing.
Now, once he reads the question, he's able to understand.
You'll hear he also still has some problems, some challenges with speech.
And I'll say, Katie, that just in some of the small talk prior to the interview before the closed captioning was up and running, it did seem that he had a hard time understanding our conversations.
OK, so again, is this going to cut in favor of John Fetterman?
Again, his radical record is being exposed day by day.
So I think that Pennsylvania race is no foregone conclusion in favor of the Democrats.
And meanwhile, in terms of the backlash, The backlash has begun.
A big victory for the Daily Wire Plus team and particularly for Matt Walsh.
According to Daily Wire Plus, the Vanderbilt Pediatric Gender Clinic has agreed to pause all gender transition surgeries on minors.
According to a letter from the clinic to a Tennessee lawmaker obtained by the Daily Wire, Vanderbilt told the lawmakers it would protect conscientious objectors who work at the facility and don't want to take part in those treatments.
Quote, we are pausing gender affirmation surgeries on patients under 18 while we complete this review which may take several months, the letter says.
The clinic says they've done about five such gender affirming surgical procedures per year since the clinic opened in 2018.
That follows hard on reporting done by the Daily Wire team, including Matt Walsh, Luke Rosiak, and the rest of the team over at Daily Wire pointing out that Vanderbilt has been doing gender affirming quote unquote therapies which include hormone injections and surgeries The executive noted the clinic had relied on leading medical specialty organizations like the World Professional Association of Transgender Health.
WPATH is a propaganda outfit.
It is not a medical outfit.
Apparently.
The letter, which is written by C. Wright Pinson, deputy CEO and chief health system officer at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said, quote, in addition, we understand this issue is likely to be taken up by the General Assembly in its next legislative session. As always, we'll assure that VUMC's programs comply with any new requirements which may be established as part of Tennessee law.
Governor Bill Lee, the governor of Tennessee, tweeted out, we should not allow permanent life Matt Walsh said, Meanwhile, new reporting on Black Lives Matter.
of the General Assembly, this practice should end in Tennessee.
And that of course is exactly right.
Matt Walsh said, today is an enormous victory in the battle to protect children from mutilation and abuse.
We are winning the struggle against one of the greatest evils that mankind has ever known.
The fight is far from over.
That of course is true as well.
Meanwhile, new reporting on Black Lives Matter.
According to Jazz Shaw, Black Lives Matter is spending yet more money on housing for its co-founder Patrisse Cullors.
Quote, the controversial Marxist co-founder of Black Lives Matter recently completed tens of thousands of dollars in renovations at her posh Los Angeles home, including building a new plunge pool and backyard sauna, according to a new report.
Patrisse Cullors, 39, former leader of Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, also added a children's play area for her young son outside her 2,600-foot, three-bedroom, three-bath house in Los Angeles' Topanga Canyon neighborhood, according to the photos.
The images reveal a deep plunge pool that has yet to have water added, as well as a small shed that houses the sauna.
A child swing set and covered slide is also visible in the photograph.
This is a very nice house.
If you want to know more about the complete waste of money and propaganda promoted by the Black Lives Matter movement, check out Candace Owens' brand new documentary that is available tonight over at dailywireplus.com, the greatest lie ever sold.
Candace goes through everything regarding the George Floyd killing, as well as the Black Lives Matter associated movement that poured tens of millions of dollars into the pockets of people who look like they pretty much just absconded with the cash.
So make sure that you check that out.
I'm sure that I've seen it.
It's a pretty amazing documentary.
Okay.
Meanwhile, Kanye West has now Kanye'd.
And I say this because I speak as a person Uh, who tweeted several years ago, live by the Kanye, die by the Kanye.
Uh, Kanye West is a person who says many things.
Some of those things are good, some of those things are very, very bad.
And so, over the weekend, while I was off on Jewish holiday, uh, Kanye West, uh, said some anti-Semitic things.
And there are no two ways about this.
The things that he said are not just like a little anti-Semitic, they're very anti-Semitic.
So, Kanye West began with something that was questionable but not anti-Semitic.
Okay, so he began with comments during a Fox News interview in which he accused Jared Kushner of cutting the Abraham Accords for money.
He said, quote, you know, he made these peace treaties.
I just think it was to make money.
OK, that's not necessarily anti-Semitic.
Jared Kushner was a person who was deeply involved in the Abraham Accords.
Politicians are routinely accused of involving themselves in particular activities in order to make money.
So it's not an anti-Semitic accusation.
It's wrong.
I don't think it's true.
I think brokering peace in the Middle East is good for everyone.
By the way, even if Jared Kushner had done it to make money, which I don't think he did, If the question is, are Abraham Accords good or bad, the answer is they are very, very good.
I mean, peace in the Middle East happens to be a very, very good thing.
But is it anti-Semitic to suggest that Jared Kushner did a thing for money?
No, Jared Kushner happens to be Jewish.
If he had done a thing for money that would not reflect on his Judaism, it could just be that he would be a guy in politics doing things for money.
There are plenty of people who do things for money in politics.
But there was a reaction.
The reaction from some people, like the American Jewish Committee, was to suggest That this was dangerous and anti-Jewish content.
Okay, and then, Kanye decided that he was going to go full anti-Semitic.
And the comments that he put out, they are anti-Semitic.
I mean, there's no two ways about them.
So, it began with an exchange that he had with P Diddy.
Give a name.
He put out a series of text messages with P. Diddy in which P. Diddy was urging him to kind of rein it in.
He apparently texted him, this ain't a game, I'ma use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me, that no one can influence or threaten me, I told you this was war, now I'm gonna get you some business.
So basically Jews are in control of the world.
Okay, so we are now getting to pretty borderline antisemitic territory, right?
The Jews are the ones who... It's the Jews.
They're telling you to call me.
And then it got a lot worse.
So, Kanye West then put out an Instagram post that reads, and I want to get the exact text of this correct, because it's pretty wild stuff here.
Jesus is Jew.
I don't know what that has to do with, I mean, fact check true?
I don't know what that has to do with anything.
Then he goes, so you might have been puzzled to this point.
Then it just gets into like pretty openly anti-Semitic territory.
Quote, I'm a bit sleepy tonight, but when I wake up, I'm going to, I'm going DEFCON 3 on Jewish people.
All caps, Jewish people.
And not DEFCON 3.
DEFCON 3.
The funny thing is I can't actually be anti-semitic because black people are actually Jew also.
You guys have toyed with me and tried to blackball anyone who ever opposes your agenda.
So again, this is an anti-semitic trope that basically you can't say bad things about Jews.
I've noticed world history, you can.
I'm just gonna put that out there.
Like, lots of people say bad things about Jews, like, a lot.
Like, it happens all the- In fact, you can sit in Congress and be on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine and be heralded as the future of the Democratic Party and say bad things about Jews on a fairly routine basis, as it turns out.
So, there's that.
I don't know what DEFCON 3 means.
I assume he means DEFCON 3, which is a weird usage because, again, the highest level of alert would be DEFCON 1.
So DEFCON 3 is kind of like mildly alert.
But DEFCON, I don't know what that is.
Is that a death threat?
On Jewish people, big capital letters.
When he says he can't be anti-semitic because he is black, he then went on, apparently while he was on Tucker Carlson, there were some comments that he made that were cut out of that interview, including him commenting that the real Jews are blacks, which is a black Hebrew Israelite conspiracy theory, suggesting that essentially the real Jews are not the Jews who have historic Jewish ethnicity.
The real Jews are black Americans who are shipped over in the transatlantic slave trade.
Those are the actual lost tribes and they are replacement for Jews.
This is resulted by the way, the black Hebrew Israelites have committed terrorist attacks against Jews in New Jersey.
Most recently, they attacked right outside a Jewish school in New Jersey at one point.
It's like a couple of years ago.
So, this is all really bad stuff.
Suffice to say, this is all very antisemitic and really, really bad stuff.
Okay, sugarcoating it is stupid and counterproductive.
It's bad no matter who says it.
It's bad whether you're on the right.
It is bad whether you're on the left.
I will condemn it no matter whether it's a person on the right saying it or whether it's a person on the left saying it.
I think that what Kanye West said last week about abortion was very good.
I think when he says anti-Semitic stuff, it's really terrible.
Period.
End of story.
All of these things can be true at once.
I don't think that it necessitates that people pretend that he didn't say it or ignore that he said it.
Again, I'm bewildered by the inability of people to hold in their mind the fact that people say good things and terrible, evil things at the same time, because that actually does happen on a fairly frequent basis.
It is worth noting here that Kanye also is bipolar.
The reason that I point this out is because his activity and his tweets are obviously associated with his self-stated bipolarism.
I mean, it is not a coincidence, I don't think, that the same week that he is saying openly anti-Semitic stuff, he's also showing porn videos to Adidas executives during a business meeting.
I'm sorry, this is not the behavior of a mentally healthy person.
So here is the difference between me saying that what Kanye is doing is not mentally healthy and what the left is doing.
So the left says, when he says, That babies are alive in the womb.
That shows he's mentally ill.
Okay, that is taking a view that is held by a broad number of Americans, including many people who I think consider themselves pro-choice, that babies have rights in the womb, at least beyond a certain point, and certainly held by pro-lifers.
It's taking that view and pathologizing that view.
Say, oh, well, he's pro-life.
That means that he's mentally ill.
No, the stuff that suggests he's bipolar is the stuff where he's tweeting out incoherent anti-Semitic babble and showing porn videos to Adidas executives.
There's a difference in kind here.
So when I praise his pro-life views because I think that the views are correct, that can be true.
It can also be true that Kanye West suffers from, apparently, a form of manic depression.
When you are in mania, you think every idea... Unfortunately, I have members of my family, my grandfather was manic depressive, bordering on the schizophrenic.
When people are in mania, They tend to think every idea that enters their head is a wonderful idea and there is no brain mouth or brain finger filter and they just put it out there into the world as though it's a genius idea.
And this obviously characterizes what Kanye West is doing right now.
Some of what people when they are manic are saying may be correct.
Kind of like Lear's Fool.
And some of what they're saying is just crazy.
And so, when Kanye West says this, is he expressing an antisemitic thought?
Absolutely.
Is he an antisemitic person?
Or is he just... Is his bipolarism taking control?
Or does he have these belief systems that are manifesting and coming out now that the brain-mouth filter is gone?
That may well be the case.
I will note, by the way, that the amount of attention that's being paid to Kanye West's anti-Semitic comments by the media far outpaces the amount of attention that's been paid to the systematic attacks on Jews in Williamsburg, New York by black Americans over the course of the last several years, right?
That's stuff that you don't talk about in the New York Times.
Kanye says an anti-Semitic thing that's top of mind.
I understand Kanye's a very public figure.
I'm not saying it doesn't deserve the attention.
I'm saying the disparate amounts of attention paid by the media to actual physical attacks on Jews in New York City versus Kanye West saying an anti-Semitic thing is pretty dramatic.
But again, I point out his bipolarism because it's not just me pointing out his bipolarism, it's the Washington Post.
I mean, the Washington Post has an entire article titled, What Does Bipolar Disorder Feel Like?
Can It Explain Kanye's Behavior?
And the conclusion by Teddy Amanabar is, yeah, I mean, it pretty much can.
Quote, The Washington Post spoke to psychiatrists, therapists, and people diagnosed with bipolar disorder and asked them what it feels like to live with the condition, how it is treated, and how much it can affect a person's behavior.
Here is what they said.
And they talked about, you know, they talked about therapists, what it feels like when you're bipolar, when you're manic, it feels like you have a battery pack on your back and you're always on the go.
Bipolar disorders cause extreme mood swings from frenzied manic, even euphoric highs to devastating bouts of depression.
Again, I've seen it in my own family.
It obviously is true.
Erratic behavior can be a result of manic behavior.
West admitted this in a 2019 interview with David Letterman.
me to ramp up, I go high. If you don't take medication every day to keep you at a certain state, you have the potential to ramp up. It can even take you to a point where you can even end up in the hospital, you start acting erratic, as TMZ would put it.
Most experts agree during a manic phase, people with bipolar disorder may do or say things they later regret.
An otherwise loyal partner may have an affair while in a manic state, for instance, or a person may engage in more risk-taking, use drugs or gamble, or spend money well beyond their means.
Research shows that even arrest and incarceration are potential complications of bipolar disorder.
So, the idea that he is saying anti-Semitic crap on Instagram because he's having a bipolar episode here, I'm not sure why that would be outside the realm of possibility in any real... Again, you can't disconnect his behavior on Instagram from the fact that literally last week, there was a video uploaded showing Kanye West sitting with two Adidas executives in black stools, and West holds a video up in front of these people and he's showing them pornography.
I mean, we have the video.
Here's what that video looks like.
The guy's trying to avoid it.
I mean, I'm sorry, it's not normal behavior.
And then, of course, after this meeting, Kanye West started yelling at Adidas.
He says at one point, he pointed to one of the team members, quote, you guys have done wrong by the company, by the business, by the partnership.
The whole concept of this video is the guy had cheated.
So then the girl was like, well, I'm going to do the thing that's your worst nightmare.
This is your wife's worst nightmare.
Your worst nightmare is not me hitting you.
Your worst nightmare is not me playing the porn.
Your worst nightmare is not me screaming.
We've all done this.
I mean, I'm sorry, this is all bizarre behavior.
And one of West's liaisons said, what you're feeling right now is extreme discomfort.
That's exactly the point.
When someone steals this man's ideas, his creations, it's like you're stealing a child.
Again, enabling bipolar behavior, humoring it is not a good idea, just generally speaking.
And I think that that's pretty clear that this is what's happening right here.
Apparently Elon Musk called up Kanye.
He tweeted out, talk to ye today, express my concerns about his recent tweet, which I think he took to heart.
Musk's comment came after West was booted from Twitter for using the platform to express his ire toward the Jewish community.
The tweeting question remained online for only an hour before it was flagged removed for violating Twitter's rules.
By the way, that's a separate question as to whether tweets like this or posts like this should be removed from social media.
As a general rule, I don't believe that they should be removed from social media because, again, I think that giving social media the power to determine what is good speech and what is bad speech is a very, very dangerous power to be handed there.
So I can believe all these things at the same time.
One, Kanye West's views on abortion are good.
Kanye West being a fan of Trump does not make him crazy.
Saying crazy anti-semitic things is a pretty good indicator that you're suffering from bipolarity in the case of Kanye West, especially when it's incoherent bipolarity.
And also, the enabling of that is a giant mistake on behalf of Kanye.
Plus, social media should not be just taking people's posts down on the basis of incredibly vague standards.
All those things can be true at once.
All of them.
So, that is the latest on Kanye West.
I assume that at some point here, Kanye West will clarify exactly what he meant, at the very least, when he comes down from whatever manic episode he's in the middle of right now.
And this is not about me pathologizing, this is about him openly saying what his mental condition is, and diagnosticians diagnosing that mental condition.
It doesn't excuse antisemitism.
It doesn't mean antisemitism doesn't exist.
And it certainly doesn't mean that the ideology that he's speaking on behalf of, which it seems to be black Hebrew Israelitism, is not pernicious and terrible.
It is.
I think that it's worth talking about the issue in its I would say most nuanced fashion, not the issue of anti-Semitism, which is anti-Semitism, but what is going on inside the head of Kanye, which is what happens when you start attributing motives to people. You actually have to examine what the circumstances are in which they are saying things. We don't treat everybody the same depending on what their mental condition is when they say things.
So, sympathy for people who have bipolarity, no sympathy for anti-Semitic statements, I think is a fairly decent rule when it comes to situations like this one.
All right, we've reached the end of today's show.
We'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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