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Nov. 14, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

44:08

What The FTX? | Ep. 1610

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	By a razor-thin margin, Democrats keep control of the Senate while the House remains up for grabs, Democrats prepare for a possible post-Biden era, and a crypto-billionaire and top Democratic donor melts down.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Protect your online privacy today at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
	We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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	The Republican wave not only did not happen in the Senate, Republicans have now lost control of the Senate.
	Just terrible news all the way around.
	Adam Laxalt went down to a very, very narrow defeat in Nevada.
	Now, there are a lot of questions people are asking about the vote counting process over in Nevada because it just seems Just seems and again, I have no evidence to this effect, but I see why people are suspicious because it seems like every Republican with a large lead a week before the election result is announced suddenly has that lead chipped away over the course of like a full week.
	This is why you have to have verified and good voting procedures.
	Florida somehow is able as the third largest state in America to count all of its votes night of.
	But Nevada was still counting votes as of the Sunday after the election, like five, six days later.
	None of this is any good.
	Blacks, however, the race has been called.
	He lost to Catherine Cortez at Masto, which means the Democrats now maintain control of the Senate with Blake Masters lost in Arizona to Mark Kelly.
	And that means that the Herschel Walker runoff over in Georgia is merely for control of a 50th vote.
	It is not for control of the actual Senate at this point, which means Chuck Schumer remains the majority leader.
	The media, of course, were in a state of full-scale celebration over the weekend.
	MSNBC, CNN, they were beside themselves with happiness.
	Here's what it sounded like.
	CNN now projects that Democrats will keep control of the United States Senate, holding on to the majority they narrowly, nearly won two years ago.
	This is an extraordinary victory for the Democrats as the battle for control of the House continues to play out.
	We are making this call because we can now project That Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Basto will win re-election in Nevada.
	Democrats will maintain their majority in the United States Senate.
	And as Neil was saying earlier, this is very good news for the Biden administration.
	Oh, a huge win.
	And I think one of the things when we take a long view of this is that this may be the moment that we discover that Donald Trump is not a kingmaker any longer.
	This is it.
	His candidates did not do well.
	His election denial was not a big issue in this campaign.
	And I think that Republicans are going to have to do an awful lot of soul-searching about whether they actually ran on issues that were geared to them.
	The Democrats have retained control of the United States Senate.
	This is a remarkable conversation to be having.
	They have not only defied expectations, they have defied history.
	Man, I mean, orgasmic joy over on MSNBC and CNN over the Democrats maintaining control of the Senate, as you would expect since they are an adjunct of the Democratic Party.
	But one of the fascinating dynamics that's now broken out is how many members of the media are trying to keep Donald Trump front and center of the conversation in terms of 2024, mainly because they love him and he makes them so much money.
	So you have all the people who have made a living off of Donald Trump being the center of the political, like Mary Trump.
	No one ever heard of Mary Trump.
	Now people have heard of Mary Trump.
	So Mary Trump is out there being like, probably Trump will be the nominee in 2024, right?
	You see all these Democrats out there.
	DeSantis is even worse than Trump.
	Maybe we should go with Trump.
	It's fascinating to watch the political dynamics that break out after a situation like this, in which all the people who supposedly hate Donald Trump the most are also trying to elevate him to the center of the conversation in order to make him the nominee.
	This is one of the things that Democrats and members of the left-wing media are certainly doing.
	On the Democratic side of the aisle, they've decided, as predicted, that the basic message takeaway from them retaining the Senate is not going to be that they dodged a bullet here.
	Not that they were somehow able to basically pull an inside straight by running against a bunch of bad candidates in a bunch of swing states, ranging from Don Baldick in New Hampshire, to Blake Masters in Arizona, to Adam Laxalt in Nevada, to Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, who was also dragged down by Doug Mastroianno, running at the top of the Pennsylvania ticket, to Herschel Walker in Georgia.
	All of these are really, really weak candidates.
	In a year in which Republicans were supposed to have wind at their back instead of Democrats taking this is like, man, we really, really dodged one here.
	Instead, they're taking it as we must double down.
	We will never stop.
	Never stop.
	Never stopping.
	So Anita Dunn, advisor to the president of the United States, Joe Biden is going to keep doubling down and doubling down and like, as I said last week.
	First party to learn the correct lessons of the election, which is that people just want sane legislation.
	People just want not crazy people in the government.
	First party to recognize that wins.
	But apparently Democrats are not going to take that message away.
	They're just going to keep doubling down here.
	When you look at these polls, let me put up a graphic here from the exit poll where more people said that Biden's policies are mostly hurting the country than helping the country.
	Do you really believe this is a messaging problem?
	As the president traveled the country, and I had the opportunity to travel with him in that final week, you didn't go to a congressional district or state where the Democrats weren't running on some aspect of the president's agenda, whether it was lowering prescription drug prices or the inflation Reduction Act clean energy provisions, which obviously young voters in particular are very excited about.
	Making corporations pay their fair share, finally, the richest, wealthiest corporations in this country having to pay a minimum tax.
	That's what Democratic candidates were running on.
	Now the reality is that a lot of communities across the country haven't felt the effects on this yet because it takes a little time to implement these things.
	They're retconning this thing because what they are actually running on, and it's been clear that they're running on this all along, is the end of democracy stuff.
	And we mocked that because we said, you know, that's not what most Americans are concerned with.
	But it turns out that the candidates who people felt uncomfortable with did particularly poorly on the Republican side of the aisle than the candidates who were able to escape the democracy is a threat routine.
	Those candidates actually Did really, really well on the Republican side of the aisle.
	Any Republican who's perceived as responsible and not a quote-unquote threat to democracy did fine.
	Mike DeWine won by 20 points, upward of 20 points in Ohio.
	Ron DeSantis won by upward of 19 points in Florida.
	Greg Abbott over in Texas, blew out Beto O'Rourke.
	These races where Republicans were perceived as the responsible party, Republicans did great.
	It was all of the other races where Republicans were perceived as maybe part of the Democracy is a threat notion.
	That's where the Republicans did particularly poorly.
	But Democrats are not taking this, again, as a mandate to just not be crazy.
	They're taking this as a mandate to be as crazy as they want to be, which is why you have Elizabeth Warren out there now promoting the idea that Democrats need to double and triple and quadruple down on all of this.
	Elizabeth Warren has a piece in the New York Times today titled Democrats just held the Senate.
	Here's what we do next.
	I mean, what you should next should do next is never listen to Elizabeth Warren again, because it's Elizabeth Warren's modern monetary theory policies that have driven America into a ditch in terms of inflation, but not according to Elizabeth Warren.
	According to Elizabeth Warren, her agenda, the Bernie Sanders agenda, it is wildly popular with Americans.
	Again, everyone taking the wrong message away from the election.
	According to the New York Times, says Elizabeth Warren, President Biden presided over the best midterm elections for a party in the White House in 20 years, despite Washington insiders predicting Democrats would be wiped out.
	This electoral success belongs to Mr. Biden.
	So it's not about Trump.
	It's not about Trump picking bad candidates or Trump not funding those candidates or Trump sending out emails in the last days of the election asking for people to fundraise for the candidates in which there was like an 80-20 or 90-10 split in favor of Trump's super PAC versus the direct candidate spending.
	But she says no, it's not about any of that.
	It's about Biden.
	The magic man of Biden.
	Biden is amazing at this.
	Who ignored ivory tower economists and out of touch pundits claiming that bold action to help families was bad politics.
	Instead, Mr. Biden delivered significant economic progress for working people.
	Voters rewarded Democrats for protecting the lives and livelihoods of struggling families in a pandemic Modernizing infrastructure, not just talking about it, allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices, capping insulin costs for older Americans, making tax dodging corporations pay up on billions in profit, lowering carbon emissions and reducing utility bills and canceling student debt for over 40 million Americans.
	So she says that Democrats are doing amazing and they should do even more.
	Probably they should reverse the Trump tax cuts.
	They should probably subsidize housing and child care.
	They should pass a codification of Roe.
	Just keep going.
	Go as hard as you possibly can.
	The unfinished business of the Biden agenda and the way to help families and win elections is to continue doing all of this stuff.
	The 2022 midterms prove Democrats can beat Republican extremism.
	Instead of capitulating to election deniers, we should keep fighting for working families because when we fight for working people, we win.
	So this is going to be their takeaway, which of course provides Republicans an opportunity in 2024.
	But first, Republicans are going to have to figure out exactly who takes over the ship.
	Right now, there are a lot of questions about leadership in the Republican Party.
	That is true in the Senate.
	It is true in the House.
	It is true at the presidential level.
	So in the Senate, there are some rather large voices who are saying that Mitch McConnell, his position as Senate minority leader, should be up for question.
	Now, I think you can actually have a lot of questions about Mitch McConnell's handling of the majority leader position.
	The truth is that as a minority leader, he's been pretty good.
	As a minority leader, Mitch McConnell's job is to obstruct the worst aspect of the Biden agenda.
	And Mitch McConnell has done as much of that as he can in a filibuster-proof way.
	He's attempted to stop Joe Biden's most excessive spending items.
	He can't do that with reconciliation.
	But for example, Mitch McConnell is the guy who obstructed the nomination Of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court under Barack Obama.
	Mitch McConnell as much as Donald Trump is responsible for there being a bunch of conservatives who are now on the Supreme Court of the United States.
	McConnell in a position of obstruction is actually quite good.
	Just tactically speaking.
	McConnell in a position of leadership as a majority leader is another question.
	Because, again, you actually should have somebody who's a visionary who's capable of bringing together large swaths of people across the spectrum in order to get things done in the Senate.
	I'm not sure that McConnell is that, but as a tactical maneuvering politician in order to stop things from going on, McConnell actually has historically been very good at this.
	However, a lot of folks in the Senate are now seeing this as their opening.
	The problem is the two most prominent Republicans who are running for the position of minority leader are Mitch McConnell and Rick Scott.
	Rick Scott, who is the senator from Florida, Chair of the Senate GOP's campaign arm.
	This is a problem.
	Mitch McConnell is the guy who was the chair of the Senate Leadership Fund.
	He poured some $240 million into elections in various states.
	He's been hit for not putting enough money into Blake Masters in Arizona.
	He did, however, put a ton of money into Nevada, which was lost.
	He put a ton of money into Pennsylvania, which was lost.
	The bottom line is I don't think there's a question of really spending money so much as it was bad candidate selection.
	Rick Scott, who's the head of the Senate Spending Fund, essentially.
	He was the person who was allocating money from the Senate funding campaigns.
	He also did extraordinarily poorly.
	So, the top candidates at the top of the Senate for the Republicans are nothing to write home about.
	Apparently, they're going to have a Senate fight anyway.
	Now, that is likely to roll out a little bit this week.
	My guess is that McConnell keeps control.
	A lot of folks, ranging from Marco Rubio to Ted Cruz to Mike Lee, they've suggested that, at the very least, the Senate election in Georgia should happen before there's some sort of vote on the Senate leadership, which makes some sense.
	I mean, you want the senator from Georgia, Patricia Walker, to have a vote on that particular matter.
	With that said, do I think that the leadership at the top of the Senate is going to be the main issue going forward?
	I don't.
	There are a lot of people who are critical of McConnell.
	Basically, the fight against McConnell for a lot of people has turned into a proxy fight in favor of Trump.
	One of the things that's happening here is, who do we blame for what just happened in the Senate?
	A lot of people are looking at candidate quality and the fact that Donald Trump spent almost zero dollars on the candidates that he chose.
	And then many of the candidates that he chose, the candidates who are the most Trumpy, did very poorly last week.
	And a lot of people who are anti-Trump are siding with McConnell.
	And my question is, so why not both?
	Maybe everybody is bad at their jobs.
	McConnell's allies have said that Trump's endorsed Senate candidates were poor fundraisers, according to the Wall Street Journal, and had to be propped up by outside spending.
	Trump himself was blaming McConnell, saying that he spent money in the wrong places, which again is sort of a weird critique from Trump, who spent almost no money on the candidates that he helped select.
	Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist who previously served as Chief of Staff for McConnell, pointed a finger at Rick Scott, who ran the National Republican Senatorial Committee, accusing him of making errors in strategy, fundraising, and of failing to communicate with colleagues.
	Because Scott had rolled out, for example, before the Senate elections, a plan in which he talked about how every spending bill would have to be sunsetted after five years, including Medicare and Social Security.
	Democrats picked up on that.
	They also picked up on the fact that he had suggested, I think, in principle, correctly, That everybody in the United States should have to pay some income tax so you have some skin in the game.
	That's not a horrible idea.
	It just is not one that's going to play well electorally.
	Scott said McConnell failed to lay out for voters a coherent plan for how Republicans would govern if they had the majority.
	Scott said the leadership in the Republican Senate says, no, you cannot have a plan.
	We're just going to run against how bad the Democrats are.
	And actually, they then cave in to the Democrats.
	Meanwhile, Stephen Miller, who's an advisor to former President Trump, he says, Well, actually, again, the reality here is that it's not that the Senate lacked an agenda.
	Senators always lack an agenda.
	And what exactly is the Senate agenda for the Democrats right now?
	There's a big argument going on between, say, the Elizabeth Warren crowd and the Kyrsten Sinema crowd.
	Those are not the same crowd.
	Senators all want to run for president is one of the rules of the Senate.
	And so the idea that you're going to have a unified sort of message coming out of the Senate, it would be great to have that, right?
	I would love to see that in a Senate majority leader, but it's very unlikely you're going to get it.
	The real problem, again, for the Republicans was the candidates lost.
	Not that they didn't have a particularly unified agenda on what they were going to do if they regained control.
	The answer was obstruct Joe Biden's agenda was really the answer.
	Meanwhile, control of the House remains on knife edge as well.
	It is very likely Republicans will maintain control of the House at this point, but it's going to be extremely narrow.
	There are a couple of uncalled races that are left.
	It is predicted that Republicans are going to end up with either 219 or 220 seats in the House of Representatives, which is a dramatic fail.
	They started off with 212 going into this year's election.
	Picking up eight seats was not on anybody's radar.
	People were thinking at least 15, maybe 20, maybe 40.
	The idea of eight seats, that is not a good number.
	And when you have a majority that's that narrow, there are Republicans in purple seats who can be peeled off, right?
	If you're an upstate New York Hudson Valley seat, can you be peeled off to support particular Democratic spending bills?
	Maybe.
	Maybe it makes for a very difficult, not particularly functional majority.
	Well, this has some effect on how Speaker Nominee McCarthy, right?
	Kevin McCarthy, who's the house minority leader.
	He wants to be speaker of the house.
	He's been stumping to be speaker of the house for years.
	I spoke at a house Republican leadership conference a couple of years ago, and I said, if you guys somehow don't maintain majority in the house, y'all deserve to be fired.
	Well, they narrowly avoided that, but not by much.
	And so McCarthy right now has the strongest base inside the Republican congressional caucus.
	With that said, it does take a majority straight up of the House to elect the Speaker.
	That's the way the Speaker gets elected.
	It's not as though a majority of Republicans then figure out who the Speaker is and then that becomes the Speaker, the way that it sort of happens with the Prime Minister in Britain.
	That's not the way that it works here.
	The way that it works is that the Republican Party has to basically unify around one candidate and make that guy Speaker.
	And when you only have a majority of a couple of seats, all it takes is like four or five Republicans peeling off and saying, listen, I'm not supporting McCarthy under any circumstances to prevent him from becoming Speaker of the House.
	So this could turn into a very, very ugly fight for Republicans.
	The big problem for the Republicans in the House is who exactly is going to be up for that position?
	And who exactly is going to go up against McCarthy?
	Who is the visionary in the House who is going to lead things forward?
	And it's hard to think of a candidate who, number one, wants to go up for it.
	Scalise doesn't want it.
	For example, Steve Scalise from Louisiana.
	He's not interested.
	He likes his position as the possible House Majority Whip.
	There have been some other names that have been floated out of town.
	Emmer has been floated.
	Yeah, I don't think any of these guys really are gonna go up against McCarthy.
	So, sort of like McConnell, who exactly replaces him?
	John Thune?
	In the House for the Republicans, who exactly is going to replace McCarthy?
	Until there's an alternative, very difficult to see the Republicans mobilizing around anybody else.
	John Carl, over at ABC News, he suggests that McCarthy is not a lock for the Speaker of the House.
	That is going to be a brutal fight.
	Well, he's going to have to make some concessions to, for example, the Freedom Caucus, that's for sure.
	Here's John Carl.
	Very hard for Kevin McCarthy to govern.
	Yeah, two points.
	First of all, McCarthy is not a lock on the Speaker anymore.
	A 3-, 4-, or 5-seat majority.
	There are, by my count, at least 8 to 10 Republicans who are adamant that they will not support Kevin McCarthy for Speaker.
	That said, there is no alternative right now.
	But remember, you need 218 votes to be elected Speaker of the House, and he does not have that.
	This is going to be a long, brutal process when they come together and make that vote.
	Okay, meanwhile, on the Democratic side of the aisle, they're all ecstatic.
	Nancy Pelosi said she's not going anywhere, despite the fact that she's 123 years old.
	So here is Nancy Pelosi triumphantly announcing that she was going to remain in her role, presumably as minority leader, but not by much.
	Another way to look at it, as somebody who's covered you for a long time, is that maybe you're emboldened and you feel more of a responsibility to stay.
	Which is it?
	So my decision will again be rooted in what the wishes of my family and the wishes of my caucus, but none of it will be very much considered until we see what the outcome of all of this is.
	And there are all kinds of ways to exert influence.
	It's just the speaker has awesome power, but I will always have influence.
	OK, again, she's basically I mean, see how happy she is.
	She's going to walk away from this thing fairly clean.
	Now, again, the main message for Republicans is you need to move away from Election 2020.
	That is the biggest message from this election.
	It was like a targeted strike by the American voter.
	If you look at the popular vote, Republicans out-polled Democrats by about 5% in the popular vote and picked up eight seats in the House and lost a seat in the Senate.
	It's the most likely possible outcome here.
	Hey, that is not a result anybody saw coming.
	If you had told me before the election, Republicans win by 5% in the generic ballot, I'd be like, wow, that's a sweep.
	They do amazing.
	But it turns out that Republicans turned out in heavy red districts.
	It turns out that redistricting meant that Republicans turned out there.
	It turns out there was under turnout in a lot of urban districts for Democrats because they just figured that they were going to win anyway.
	And in the districts that were purple, independents showed up to vote for the Democrats.
	And that was the big deciding factor here.
	And you can see it on the map.
	You can see who lost and who won.
	You can see it within states.
	The more closely you were tied to election 2020, the worse you did.
	This is not just a generalized take.
	This is a specific take.
	This is true within state.
	We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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	Take a look at New Hampshire.
	Krista Nuno wins, going away in New Hampshire.
	Meanwhile, Don Balda, who's closely tied to election 2020 and suggesting the election was not fair and all of this, he just gets cream in New Hampshire.
	Put aside whatever you think of the election 2020.
	Whatever you think, whether you think it was fraudulent, whether you think it was stolen, that doesn't matter.
	The question here is whether that is a particularly compelling message to the American people if you wish to win back power and stop the left-wing agenda.
	Just from an efficacious point of view.
	Is this a smart thing or is this a stupid thing?
	Take a look at Nevada.
	Say Adam Laxalt, who didn't really run on election 2020, but was endorsed by President Trump because he had made intimations about how he was unhappy with election 2020.
	He loses in Nevada.
	Meanwhile, Sisolak, who's the Republican for governor in Nevada, wins.
	You can see this gap nearly everywhere.
	Nearly everywhere.
	The more closely you are tied with the election 2020 agenda, the more Joe Biden's message sort of resonated.
	The more you were seen as a person who couldn't be trusted with power.
	This was particularly true when it came to Secretary of State races all over the country.
	According to the New York Times, every person, they call them election deniers, but every person who suggested that the 2020 election was stolen, who sought to become the top election official in a critical battleground state, lost at the polls this year as voters roundly rejected partisans who promised to restrict voting and overhaul the electoral process.
	Every single one.
	That was true in Nevada.
	It was true in Arizona.
	It was true in Arizona, New Mexico, Michigan.
	The only candidate for Secretary of State position endorsed by Trump was Diego Morales, a Republican in Deep Red, Indiana.
	That's literally the only one.
	You can see this all over the map.
	Where exactly did Republicans pick up seats in the House?
	They picked them up, if you look at the map, in New York.
	All the Republicans they picked up in New York are what you would call moderate Republicans, many of whom were openly dissociated from Trump.
	They're all in the Hudson River Valley.
	The same thing is happening over in Florida.
	They picked up some seats in Florida, not because they were associated with Trump, but because they were associated with DeSantis.
	The bottom line here is that moving forward, people liked the Republican agenda, they just didn't like the Republican candidates.
	And people didn't like the Democratic agenda, but they liked the candidates better than they liked the Republican candidates.
	So what does this mean for Democrats?
	Well, these strategically smart Democrats going into 2024 are now basically getting behind Biden.
	They recognize that what Biden is, no matter what else you say about the guy, he is not perceived as a radical.
	No matter how radical he is, no matter the policies he puts in place, if there is any magic at all left in the decaying husk of Joe Biden, the magic is that he is perceived as a moderate despite the fact that he is actually a radical.
	Despite the fact he has pursued radical policies.
	And so the Democrats are smarter, like, okay, we got to keep this guy front and center.
	Because the minute that the mask is off, people don't like the candidate anymore.
	Maybe we'll find some other substitute candidate who is also perceived as moderate, but kind of unlikely because Joe Biden is perceived as particularly non-threatening to the American people, even though he's kind of threatening to the American people.
	So this is why Nancy Pelosi came out and immediately endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2024.
	And this will be a very important election, very dispositive of the direction our country will go in.
	So do you think President Biden should run again?
	Yes, I do.
	President Biden has been a great president for our country.
	He has accomplished so much.
	10 million jobs, over 10 million jobs under his leadership, working with the private sector, of course.
	He has just done so many things that are so great.
	We need a lot more show to talk about.
	Okay, so it's not really about they love everything that Joe Biden has done.
	It's really that Joe Biden is the repository of all anti-Trump sentiment in America, and he is perceived as a dead person.
	So for the same reason he won in 2020, he also did well in 2022, which is to say he was not running against the Republican policy positions.
	He was running against Donald Trump, right?
	He made that very, very clear throughout the election cycle.
	It was very obvious.
	Now, this does not stop the more passionate Democrats from doing what they always do, which is get very excited about the possibility of somebody more radical.
	So SNL over the weekend, they were speculating that Biden might die.
	They actually do want to move past Biden because, again, as much as Biden was successful, and he was, I mean, credit where credit is due, the old man lying in the basement routine worked for him again.
	Democrats want to move away from that.
	The hardcore in the media, they're already proposing that he be moved aside, which again, strategically doesn't make any sense to me because who the hell is going to come after him?
	Here was SNL speculating about the death of Joe Biden.
	You weren't allowed to do this three weeks ago.
	Now you are.
	President Biden said that he plans to run again in 2024, but won't make a final decision until early next year because it's like his doctor told them, I wouldn't plan too far ahead.
	Okay, so they're already joking.
	They're allowed to joke about this now.
	Meanwhile, EJ Dionne over at the Washington Post, he is writing openly about the possibility that Joe Biden goes away.
	He has a piece called Forget DeSantis.
	Whitmer and Shapiro are defining the future.
	He's talking about Gretchen Whitmer over in Michigan and Josh Shapiro over in Pennsylvania.
	He says in large parts of the nation, voters formed what Representative Tim Ryan called an exhausted majority desperate to move on to the problem-solving.
	Ryan, alas, lost his Senate race to J.D.
	Vance in Ohio, but two nearby Democratic victors on Tuesday effectively carried this banner and stand as the antithesis of DeSantis-ism, meaning that every gushing story about DeSantis should be balanced by pieces about Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Governor-elect Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania.
	Like DeSantis, both Democrats won landslides in states Trump carried in 2016.
	There's a bit of a difference.
	One is that Gretchen Whitmer did not win in nearly as much of a landslide as DeSantis, and she is in a much bluer state than DeSantis.
	I mean, when she won her last election, she won fairly solidly.
	DeSantis won by 30,000 votes, and he transformed that into a 20-point victory.
	Gretchen Whitmer, I believe, beat Tudor Dixon by about 11 points, and that was after she'd won her last race by, like, five.
	Meanwhile, Josh Shapiro was running against Doug Mastriano, a crazy person.
	Okay, so that was not exactly a huge victory.
	Like, everyone expected Josh Shapiro to win that race going away.
	But they're the future, and so they're already trying to think beyond.
	The bottom line here is they're thinking beyond Biden.
	They're tired of Biden.
	EJ Dionne says, Whitmer stayed true to the very practical agenda she ran on four years ago, highlighted by her sassy back-to-basics slogans, fix the damn rose.
	She raised that battle cry again in her victory speech while renewing pledges to restore safe drinking water and to improve health care and education.
	And now, again, one of the reasons that Gretchen Whitmer won big over Tudor Dixon is because the Michigan Republican Party went deep into the election 2020 stuff, which is why they no longer have pretty much any say in the governance in Michigan.
	The Democrats did really well across the board in Michigan, including in the state legislature.
	Meanwhile, Josh Shapiro is being championed by the left as a magical, magical figure.
	He was asked already about running for president of the United States, despite the fact that he's been governor for less than zero amount of time, since he actually hasn't been sworn in yet.
	OK, so I know you haven't even begun your term.
	You were just elected, but you know your name is already being mentioned in some circles as a potential future presidential contender.
	Do you have any ambition to be the first Jewish president of the United States?
	No.
	Dana, I have an ambition to get a little bit of sleep, to reintroduce myself to my kids, and then to serve the good people of Pennsylvania as their governor.
	That is all I'm focused on, and that's all I want to do.
	Okay, so they're already speculating about Joshua, and the reason is because he gave one viral speech, basically, right near the end of his campaign.
	He gave a speech in which he basically shouted a bunch of bumper sticker slogans, and this sort of stuff really gets people jazzed in the Democratic circles.
	That's not how we do things in this Commonwealth or in this country.
	And that is not freedom.
	You know, this guy loves to talk a good game about freedom, right?
	Let me tell you something.
	It's not freedom to tell women what they're allowed to do with their bodies.
	That's not freedom.
	It's not freedom to tell our children what books they're allowed to read.
	It's not freedom when he gets to decide who you're allowed to marry.
	I say love is love.
	I mean, again, bumper sticker slogans.
	Very exciting to Democrats.
	This speech is what makes this guy so compelling.
	OK, sure.
	Meanwhile, Gretchen Whitmer, she was out there lying and saying during her campaign that she won by focusing on getting kids back to school.
	No, she really, really, really did not.
	Here is Gretchen Whitmer over the weekend.
	What takeaways do you have for National Democrats about your win in Michigan?
	Well, I can tell you, we stayed focused on the fundamentals, right?
	Whether it's fixing the dam roads, or making sure our kids are getting back on track after an incredible disruption in their learning.
	Or just simply solving problems and being honest with the people.
	You know, a governor Can't fix global inflation.
	But what we can do is take actions to keep more money in people's pockets.
	Protect our right to make our own decisions about our bodies.
	And all of this was squarely front and center for a lot of Michigan voters, and I suspect that's probably true for voters across the country.
	Again, now we're getting the moderate version of Gretchen Whitmer trying to substitute herself for Joe Biden.
	But here's my mind.
	Democrats believe, again, they're taking the wrong message away, that they need to double down.
	So the question for Democrats, are you going to double down or are you going to move along a more moderate path and appear sane to the public in terms of policy?
	And the question for Republicans is, are you going to double down or are you going to appear more sane and follow candidates who actually are capable of winning right now?
	And yes, this does raise questions about 2024.
	I mean, Donald Trump is spending the weekend attacking Winsome Sears.
	Remember Winsome Sears?
	She was lieutenant governor of Virginia elect.
	Remember, she was elected with Glenn Youngkin, a black woman, military background.
	And you remember that she was a heroine to the Republicans.
	Well, she came out over the weekend.
	She's like, I don't think that Donald Trump is capable of leading the Republican Party, given his record in the last several election cycles, starting 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022.
	And Donald Trump then immediately came out and attacked Winsome Sears.
	Like, who is he not attacking at this point?
	And much of the attacks, by the way, are completely randomly unprovoked.
	I mean, at least you can suggest that the Winsome Sears response by Trump was a response.
	But he's been attacking, like, Glenn Youngkin.
	DeSantis hasn't said a word about him.
	The question for Republicans is, do you wish to win, or do you wish to feel good about yourself?
	And this is really the question for the Republican Party, more broadly speaking.
	It's the base of the Republican Party that's going to choose the direction of the Republican Party.
	The Republican Party is a vehicle.
	It is not, in fact, a leadership group.
	The Republican Party, like any other political party, is supposed to be a vehicle designed for winning elections.
	What political parties used to do is help weed out the bad candidates so that the party, which would only continue to exist if it won, could win elections.
	But now, for some odd reason, The party has been seen by the American people, by their bases, this is true for the Democrats and the Republicans, has been seen as the thought leaders.
	Instead of the party just being seen as a vehicle for winning elections, now it's like, well, the party has to define itself in terms of making me feel good.
	That's not what a party is designed to do.
	And so what this does require is a bit of leadership.
	In terms of the Republican Party, it requires leadership at the top levels to actually say that this party is about winning elections.
	It's not about pleasing people.
	It's not about pandering.
	It's about winning elections.
	And the same thing is true at the Democratic Party level.
	The Democrats are better than the Republicans are at it.
	That's why you didn't hear one word about defund the police two years after Democrats ran on defund the police in 2020.
	But if the Republicans don't get the message, they'll lose.
	And if Democrats keep doubling down on the radicalism, they will lose as well.
	All right, in just a second, I want to get into the meltdown over at FTX, because this is a fascinating story, a really fascinating story.
	And it has a lot to say about the collusion between some of the Democrats' favored donors and actual legislators and regulators about regulatory capture.
	It's a really interesting story.
	We'll get to that in a moment.
	First, it is very, very important to have a will.
	This is just like baseline human responsibility.
	God forbid something happens to you, you need to know how your assets are going to be disposed of, who's going to take care of your kids.
	It's dark stuff to think about, but once you have a will done, you'll feel so much more secure.
	That's why my wife and I have a will.
	A will is about protecting your legacy, protecting finances, ensuring medical decisions are honored when you're unable to see them through, deciding who will take responsibility.
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	Also.
	Last week, we released a brand new episode of The Search.
	In it, I sit down with newly re-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Dr. Jordan B. Peterson in Tel Aviv.
	It's a fascinating, riveting conversation I think you're really going to enjoy.
	This episode is available exclusively at DailyWire+.
	If you're not yet a member, head on over to dailywire.com slash ben to join us.
	That's dailywire.com slash ben today.
	Meanwhile, over on the surface, what just happened at FTX looks like another Wolf of Wall Street type scenario with a person taking advantage of capitalistic excesses in order to grab a huge chunk of change and party it up with his friends.
	And there is some of that here.
	But the story of Sam Bankman Freed and FTX is really a story not just about capitalist excesses, but About corporate excesses.
	It's about the fact that when there is an impression that government is going to back your play, people are willing to give you enormous sums of money.
	And how people who are involved in this sort of play spend extraordinary, giant piles of cash on their favorite legislators.
	Sam Bankman Freed, the way the media is going to play this is that Sam Bankman Freed is a quasi-libertarian who is determined, bound and determined to avoid regulation at all costs.
	And finally, if we would just regulate these guys, we need to have a hero, a hero, a regulator.
	Elizabeth Warren to crack down on Sam Bankman Freed.
	There's only one problem with this particular narrative.
	Sam Bankman Freed is one of the biggest Democratic donors on the block.
	He spent $40 million on Democrats in the last election cycle and midterm election cycle.
	So for those of you who haven't been following this saga, There is a cryptocurrency exchange called FTX.
	Now, this whole blow up over FTX has been used as a rationale for ripping on crypto generally.
	Crypto is bad.
	Bitcoin is bad.
	If it's a trustless system, then why is it that someone can betray your trust and steal all of your money?
	The answer is this was not about blockchain.
	This is about people delegated their actual money to Sam Bankman Freed over at FTX.
	They didn't keep the money in their wallet.
	They just kept it over at the FTX exchange.
	And then essentially it looks like Sam Bankman Freed and company stole the money.
	So you trusted him, right?
	That was not about the failures of blockchain.
	Blockchain worked just fine.
	That's the same thing as if you put your money in Lehman Brothers and then they just blew it.
	That's essentially what happened with FTX.
	Or you put it in Enron and they were just falsifying the accounts and moving the money around.
	That is what happened here.
	According to LiveMint.com, cryptocurrency exchange FTX was on the verge of collapse on Friday after a bailout from its rival Binance failed.
	And finally, Sam Bankman Freed actually declared bankruptcy.
	So, people lost billions of dollars, about an $8 billion bankruptcy over at FTX.
	It's a cryptocurrency exchange.
	It's sort of like the New York Stock Exchange.
	Except that people actually keep their money at FTX for purposes of trading.
	In the same way that if you have your money in an E-Trade account, it's not that it's kept in your bank account, then E-Trade draws on the bank account, you actually keep your money.
	Over at E-Trade and E-Trade can just move those trades around.
	Same thing with FTX with regard to different types of cryptocurrency.
	So yeah, you sort of have to have a brief history of FTX because it went from not existing to being worth supposedly $32 billion in about three years.
	In 2019, Sam Bankman-Fried, who's in his 20s, he's a kid, and ex-Google employee Gary Wang founded FTX, which was the owner and operator of FTX.com cryptocurrency exchange.
	In August of 2020, FTX acquired the mobile portfolio tracking application Blockfolio for $150 million.
	In 2021, July, there was a $900 million funding round valuing FTX at $18 billion.
	And then FTX started getting very public, right?
	They signed a sponsorship deal with Mercedes.
	They raised capital at a valuation of $25 billion from a bunch of investors, including a couple of firms over in Singapore.
	In January of 2022, the U.S.
	arm of FTX, there's an international arm and a U.S.
	arm, they said it was valued at $8 billion after raising $400 million in its first funding round from investors, including SoftBank and Temasek, which is, again, a Singaporean firm.
	And then they raised even more money, and then by June, they were buying the rights to the Miami Heat Arena, to FTX Arena over there, no longer.
	And then they just kept acquiring assets.
	Basically, every time it looked like a cryptocurrency exchange was going to go down, an alternative, they would just buy it.
	So they'd buy up all of these bankrupt companies in an attempt to scale, right?
	Because then they could say, look at all the assets that we've stocked up.
	In the same way that WeWork was basically inflated because people just kept buying all sorts of empty apartment buildings and empty workspaces without any sort of intent other than to just leverage, leverage, leverage, buy all the real estate, buy it, buy it, buy it, and then go back to the investors and look how much we own.
	Same sort of thing with FTX.
	In August, a U.S.
	bank regulator ordered FTX to halt false and misleading claims it had made about whether funds of the company were insured by the government.
	They had already been making claims to people suggesting that your funds were safe.
	In fact, in their terms and conditions, it also said that if you kept your money in an FTX account, then that money would not be used for other trading.
	In other words, they wouldn't use like a fractional banking system.
	When you keep your money at Bank of America, Bank of America has to keep some of that on tap.
	They're also backed by the Federal Reserve to a certain extent to the size of the account.
	I think it's $250,000 right now.
	But they're able to send out all the rest of the money in loans, right?
	FTX was not supposed to do that.
	They were supposed to keep the money largely on hand, and instead, it turns out that they were shifting the money.
	In September, FTX's venture capital fund said they would buy a stake in SkyBridge Capital.
	In November, and this is when things started to break down, like within two weeks, the entire company just blew apart.
	Why?
	Well, there was a crypto news website called Coindesk, and they reported a leaked balance sheet.
	That showed that Alameda Research, which is Bankman Freed's crypto trading firm, was heavily dependent on FTX's native token, FTT.
	So basically, there was an associated firm, Alameda Research, which was sort of like a hedge fund.
	And it turns out that Bankman Freed was taking money from FTX, your exchange, and taking it and putting it into Alameda Research, which was run, as it turns out, by Sam Bankman Freed's girlfriend.
	And then, that money was being used in Alameda Research to buy back into FTX via their token.
	Okay, so they were basically using your money to hold up their own stock price.
	It was essentially what they were doing.
	They were using your money to hold up the valuation of their own company.
	Now, as it turns out, one of the companies that had bought a big chunk of FTX was a company called Binance.
	Binance happens to be the largest crypto exchange in the world.
	So, FTX was the second largest crypto exchange.
	Binance was the number one crypto exchange.
	Binance had bought a big chunk of FTX.
	And they'd bought, really, a lot of FTT.
	They'd bought a bunch of FTX's Bitcoin.
	A bunch of their, a bunch of their cryptocurrency.
	Well, Binance decided now's an excellent time to basically destroy our competitor.
	So they sold all of their FTT, right?
	All of their token in FTX.
	It collapsed the value of that token and people started to run on FTX essentially.
	They started saying, cash me out and give me my money.
	Well, the money didn't exist.
	Binance had suggested that then, then they did the final thing.
	Now the final straw was they said, we will come and we will bail out.
	And that is when Bankman Freed finally admitted that this thing is going to go completely belly up and people are going to lose billions and billions of dollars.
	And now it is unclear exactly where Sam Bankman Freed is.
	There's a rumor that he was going to flee to Argentina.
	He says he is still in the Bahamas.
	There's speculation over whether he's going to be prosecuted, what laws he broke.
	It turns out, according to Axios, the terms and conditions from...
	From the currency exchange, from FTX.
	The terms and conditions said he wasn't allowed to shift money from FTX formally into Alameda Research, which again, was his girlfriend's hedge fund.
	So it looks like a prosecution may well be on the way.
	But the real story of Sam Bankman-Fried is way more interesting than this.
	Because it's not just another bilking of investors.
	Instead, it is really about how somebody attempted to bluewash himself.
	This is a guy who worked hand-in-glove with Democrats in order to structure regulation that benefited him at the expense of his competitors, and then his competitors decided to finish him off because of that.
	There's a reason the Sam Bankman Freed in his late twenties was appearing on stage in like gym shorts and a t-shirt with Bill Clinton.
	By the way, good rule of thumb.
	Anybody on stage with Bill Clinton, sell your stock in that company immediately.
	If it's Elizabeth Holmes, if it's Sam Bankman Freed, doesn't matter.
	They appear on stage with Bill Clinton, sell your stock like right now.
	Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	We'll be getting into the rest of the Sam Bankman Freed FTX meltdown.
	It is a massive political story.
	Plus Dennis Prager joins us to discuss the rational Bible.

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