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Dec. 1, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:04
Elizabeth Warren vs. Elon Musk | Ep. 1621
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A new GDP report looks surprisingly good, and Democrats celebrate.
CNN begins laying off large numbers of employees, and the left continues its crusade to destroy Elon Musk.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Well, there was some good news for the Biden administration and actually for the country yesterday.
It turns out that the GDP numbers from the third quarter were revised up.
According to Market Watch, the economy grew at an annual 2.9% pace in the third quarter.
Updated figures show the U.S.
is on track to expand again in the waning months of 2022, despite growing worries of recession.
GDP, the official scorecard for the economy, was revised up from a 2.6% rate of growth in the preliminary reading issued last month.
GDP had actually shrunk in the first two quarters of the year, which is the technical definition of a recession.
But we were told by the left, We can no longer use that definition of a recession because after all, there was a midterm election to worry about.
Well, we had a recession in the first part of the year, technically speaking, and now we don't.
We had a third quarter that had 2.9% annualized growth, which is a decent number.
And then in fourth quarter, we're still waiting to hear what's going to happen.
Now, a lot of people are out there celebrating today.
A lot of people suggesting that basically the recession has now been escaped.
We are doing fine.
All will be well.
Joe Biden has handled this thing beautifully, and so has the Federal Reserve.
Karine Jean-Pierre, world's most untalented press secretary, yesterday she suggested we are not in a recession and there will be no recession.
Instead, we are in what they call a transition, which is their word for there's probably going to be a recession, but we're going to pretend it's not a recession.
The 700,000 manufacturing jobs that have been created in this president's administration because of the work that he's done.
And so now what we're seeing, and you've heard us talk about this, is we're seeing an economy that's going into a transition to more stable and steady growth.
So we do not foresee a recession.
The data that I just laid out that we have seen the last couple months does not show a recession.
Okay, so she's saying it.
So are some of the financial commentators over at CNBC.
Rick Santelli was saying, maybe there won't be a recession.
They looked at that revised number upward, 2.9% as opposed to 2.6%.
And the early celebration began over at CNBC.
So here's what some of the commentators had to say.
Santelli isn't saying this, by the way, because he's a Biden ally.
Santelli is not a Biden ally.
Yes, we have our second look at third quarter GDP.
Our last look was up 2.6.
Boy, we zoomed up to 2.9 percent, added three-tenths, very unusual, up 2.9.
On the consumption side, we improved by three-tenths from 1.4 up to 1.7.
Okay, so the question is where the economy goes from here.
Is this the actual beginning of a soft landing that has been foreseen by some people at the Federal Reserve?
Or is this what we would call a false spring?
Essentially, is this a false look at an optimistic economy?
And then we're about to start to really slow down in a serious way.
So there's some bad indicators in the data.
Even buried in that 2.9% figure, according to Market Watch, the main engine of the economy, consumer spending, increased at a solid 1.7% annual clip in the third quarter, the government said.
Previously, that increase was put at a softer 1.4%.
Now that, of course, is linked to inflation.
People still have a lot of money in their pocket because the government spent so much money over the course of the last couple of years and the Federal Reserve decided to inflate the currency over the course of the last couple of years before Basically slamming on the brakes.
Business spending was weak.
Okay, so the question is, what exactly drove that GDP number?
So to understand what drove the GDP number, you have to look at the generalized GDP formula, the gross domestic product.
Gross domestic product is a very, very rough estimate of what the economy is doing because it's largely based on spending.
So if you spend dollars in the American economy, that is considered a contribution to GDP.
If you take those dollars and you put them in the bank, then that is not really considered a contribution to GDP.
So GDP is calculated by looking at private consumption spending, plus investments, you put your money in the stock market, plus government spending.
So GDP really favors a Keynesian approach to government.
Throw a lot of money into the hopper.
So whenever the Biden administration throws a lot of money out there, government spending, that increases the GDP stat plus the trade deficit.
So exports minus imports.
So the big driver here is exports minus imports.
And the reason for that is because while the U.S.
economy has been wildly inflated, The truth is that the dollar versus other currencies is actually doing better because people have more faith in the future of the American economy than they do in, say, the European economy or in the Asian economy for very good reasons.
Europe's economies are all reliant on a declining demographic with heavy regulation.
Their industries are not nearly as innovative as the United States.
The United States, in other words, is still the best bet on the block.
And because of that, that means that people are buying a lot of American product right now.
And we are not buying as much product from outside the United States because of shipping Lines and supply chain problems.
So that trade deficit was reduced radically in the third quarter.
And what that means that the GDP stat is a little bit artificially boosted.
Business investment, as we say, is in fact slowing.
Corporate profits actually fell 1.1% in the third quarter.
Adjusted pre-tax earnings declined to an annualized 2.97 trillion.
The largest contribution to growth in the third quarter came from that huge drop in the trade deficit.
The broader economy's performance was less stellar, according to MarketWatch.
So there are a lot of people, I think, who are preemptively celebrating what's going on with the economy.
All I would say is some caution is in order.
That's not stopping, by the way, the Federal Reserve.
from slowing its role in terms of increasing interest rates, nor is it stopping the Biden administration from spending oodles of money that we simply do not have.
So Jerome Powell has already signaled that the Fed is prepared to slow its rate rise pace in December, and that led to a big rebound in the stock market yesterday.
It actually took the stock market out of bear market territory for the year, and then in the futures trading this morning, the stock market started to dump a little bit again.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday, he provided a clear signal that the central bank is on track to raise interest rates by only half a percentage point at its next meeting.
There was some expectation that he might have gone 0.75 points again to just slam those breaks on particularly hard.
But if he's going 0.5 points, then the idea here would be That the economy is settling down, that the inflation is beginning to come down in a real and market way.
Powell in a speech on Wednesday said an overheated labor market needed to cool more for the Fed to be confident inflation would decline toward its 2% goal.
Because the Fed had raised rates rapidly and it takes time for those moves to influence the economy, it would make sense for officials to slow the rate increases, he said at an event at the Brookings Institution.
He said the time for moderating the pace of rate increases may come as soon as the December meeting.
Investors had been eager for evidence the central bank would slow its pace of rate rises.
Markets rallied as soon as Powell said this sort of stuff.
As I said before, it is a bad sign for any sort of industrialized economy when the word of one person getting up and saying a thing can shift the markets by 7, 8, 900 points.
That is not a good thing.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 735 points, enough to put the index back in a bull market defined as a 20% rise from a recent low.
Powell suggested Fed officials were moving into a new phase of policy tightening in which they would try to judge just how high rates needed to rise.
And my colleagues and I do not want to over tighten because cutting rates is not something that we actually want to have to do soon.
So we're slowing down.
We're going to try to find our way to what that right level is.
So instead of slamming on the brakes, the idea is we're going to ease the brakes.
Now, the problem is we actually don't know whether the breaks being slammed on so far is going to have the impact on inflation that Powell thinks that apparently it will.
It's a little bit early to tell.
And so what you could have is a prolonged period of sort of high level, but not extraordinary inflation.
I mean, you could have not the sort of 7, 8, 9 percent inflation that we've been seeing over the past months, year over year.
You could be seeing 6, 5% inflation over the coming year or so.
That's still really bad.
5% inflation is a bad number.
The Federal Reserve's target rate is 2%.
So you could be doing 250% of that.
And they would still be declaring that a success.
Which suggests to me that there's still some pain on the horizon here.
Powell reviewed signs of progress on the inflation fight, including a slowdown in interest rate sensitive sectors of the economy like housing and improving supply chain conditions.
But he said declines in rents and goods prices might be insufficient.
If firms don't also slow their hiring to bring the strong demand for labor into better balance with a shortfall in the supply of workers, labor demand has eased a little bit in recent months.
Job openings totaled a seasonally adjusted 10.3 million in October, according to the Labor Department.
That was down from 10.7 million in September, far exceeded the 6.1 million unemployed people who are seeking work in October.
So there's still a ton of people who are seeking workers, again, because consumption is outpacing supply right now, which is one of the contributors to inflation.
And so it seems as though it's a little bit early, frankly, for the Federal Reserve to be easing off of its talk about raising the interest rate.
It seems like they should be forecasting actually more pain than they are, but they're going real easy on all of this.
Again, none of this is stopping the Biden administration from trying to inject even more money into the economy, which is going to create upward pressure on that inflation rate again, and maybe mean that Jerome Powell, by easing off the brakes a little bit, is going to have to slam the brakes on again in the near future.
According to the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the Federal Reserve's loose monetary policies fueled housing inflation.
Now rising mortgage interest rates are pricing out buyers.
So the Biden administration doesn't want to deal with the impact of that.
Now they are guaranteeing million-dollar mortgages will expand taxpayer liability and the housing market dysfunction.
Congress created government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to guarantee middle-class mortgages and make housing more affordable.
Now the administration is turning a government-backed mortgage into an entitlement for the affluent in coastal areas where zoning regulations drive up prices.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency, FHFA, said Tuesday it's going to increase the maximum size of mortgages Fannie and Freddie will cover, known as the conforming loan limit, to almost $1.1 million in high-cost areas from $970,000 this year and $765,000 in 2020.
The conforming loan limit in other areas will rise to $726,000 from $510,000 two years ago.
So that means the federal government is now essentially going to subsidize your mortgage at the same time that we are trying to actually increase the interest rates on mortgages to get the economy to stop inflating.
So the Biden administration does not actually want the consequences of a slowing economy that are necessary because of those vast inflation rates that we've seen over the course of the last couple of years.
According to the Wall Street Journal, new home construction is falling, which could weigh on the economy as housing helps drive demand for household goods.
But a correction is overdue and would prevent a housing mania that ended up in tears in 2008.
Instead, the administration wants to prop up housing demand and prices by raising the guarantee limit.
This will please realtors and the affluent, especially in California areas where the median home price exceeds the new limit, like Orange County, San Francisco and San Jose.
Sorry to state the obvious, says the Wall Street Journal, but anybody who can qualify for a million-dollar mortgage does not need the government to subsidize it with a guarantee.
The average 30-year interest rate on a jumbo loan is 6.8%, which is similar to a government-backed mortgage.
Borrowers with jumbo loans tend to have higher incomes and credit scores, but these mortgages are getting riskier because borrower monthly payments have risen faster than income.
So now, basically, you have the government stepping in and subsidizing high housing prices.
And none of this is particularly beneficial to the long-term status of the American economy.
And again, there are a lot of There are a lot of countervailing signs that the economy is not doing all as well as the Biden administration is touting right now.
For example, according to the Wall Street Journal, U.S.
economic growth actually slowed this fall, according to the Fed's Beige Book.
Businesses expressed greater uncertainty and increased pessimism for the U.S.
economy as prices and interest rates continued to rise, according to the Central Bank's latest compilation of economic anecdotes from around the country.
That's what's known as the Beige Book.
U.S.
economic activity was about, flat, or up slightly compared with a moderate average pace of growth cited in the prior report.
The Fed said five districts reported slight or modest gains in activity.
The other seven experienced no change or slight to modest declines in activity.
Improving supply chains and weakening demand lead to a slowing pace of price increases.
Consumers also increasingly sought discounts, according to the report.
Rising interest rates were weighing on spending, especially for big ticket items like cars and homes as well.
So what this looks more like to me than anything else is a bit of a false spring here in the economy.
And that should lead everybody to be pretty cautious about what they are doing in terms of government spending.
That's not stopping Congress from talking about another omnibus spending bill before the end of the year.
This is unacceptable.
Now, are Republicans in a position to actually stop the omnibus spending bill?
It's going to be a debate inside the Republican caucus right now.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, his tendency is to basically punt this thing, you would think.
Because the idea here is, OK, you let the Democrats pass it and they own it.
We won't filibuster it.
We'll just let the Democrats do it.
And then they own the consequences of that.
And they're going to spend the money anyway.
According to The Hill, Senate conservatives on Wednesday sent a letter to McConnell urging him to skip a year-end omnibus spending package and instead insist on a short-term stopgap funding measure to punt spending negotiations into next year when Republicans will control the House.
Those Senate conservatives said we believe it would be both imprudent and a reflection of poor leadership for Republicans to ignore the will of the American people and rubber stamp an omnibus spending bill that funds 10 more months of Joe Biden's agenda without any check on his reckless policies that have led to a 40-year high in inflation.
The Senators wrote the Republicans must not accept anything other than a short-term continuing resolution that funds the federal government until shortly after the 118th Congress is sworn in.
Republicans will control a small House majority next year that does give them some leverage over top-line spending numbers on the omnibus package, as well as whether to include earmarks in the legislation.
Senators Scott, Lee, Cruz, and Braun argued any stopgap spending measure to fund the government until January or February should not include any add-ons either.
McConnell told reporters on Tuesday morning there was widespread agreement at a White House meeting between Biden and congressional leaders on the need to pass the omnibus.
He said, I think there's widespread agreement we'd be better off with an omnibus than a continuing resolution, but there are significant hurdles to get over to do that.
And then he sort of softened his comments after a meeting with other Republicans.
He said, we had a robust discussion at lunch.
This will continue in the coming weeks over the way to end the session with regard to government spending.
It's a difficult choice, frankly.
If you're interested in reducing spending, probably the best way to do that would be a one-year CR.
If, on the other hand, you're concerned about the defense of our country and the funding of the Ukraine war, you're somewhat hesitant To go in that direction.
It seems as though McConnell, once again, is at war with Senate conservatives inside his own caucus.
Mitch McConnell is fairly good at things like, he's very good at things like stopping bad judicial nominees when he has the power to do so.
However, when it comes to spending, Mitch McConnell has been no great shakes and nor has anybody else in the Republican Party.
And part of that is due to the fact that the Republican Party is not really a repository of conservative ideas.
And part of that is the fact that every time Republicans actually try to lower spending, they get punished at the polls for it.
The problem with the American people when it comes to this is that the American people are all in favor of lowering the spending until they actually see the spending being lowered, which is why Democrats keep being able to blow out the spending until we actually hit economic crisis or recession.
Meanwhile, again, Joe Biden's people, they continue to push the most radical possible policy.
Joe Biden's energy advisor continues to say that we're going to phase out oil drilling in the United States, which is an amazing statement at a time when gas prices are still like 50 percent higher than when Joe Biden took office.
But when he says we're going to end drilling domestically, that causes the major oil producers to not want to invest long term.
Can you give me, you say we like them, we want them to produce, give me a number on how long.
Do you want them to do it for five more years?
For ten more years?
How long will we need these major oil producers to keep drilling?
What does he mean, we're going to end drilling?
When?
Well, eventually we're going to be phasing out the use of oil.
What is eventually?
What's eventually?
Because you're not going to want to invest any money in doing this if it's two or three years from now, or even five years almost.
So, I don't think we're talking about two, three years.
We're talking about longer than that.
Okay, well, what this really means in the long term for the Biden administration is probably there will be a recession next year.
When there is a recession, we will finally emerge from that recession into very slow growth, which is exactly what Barack Obama did.
Joe Biden's plans, economically speaking, are no different from Barack Obama's.
In fact, if you recall, when Joe Biden entered office, he put out his prospectus for the next few years, economically speaking.
And his suggestion was that the United States was going to grow at less than 2% GDP year on year for about the next 10 years, which is a really, really stagnating rate of growth for the world's most powerful economy.
By the way, members of the media who are pumping up the Biden economy, they're not feeling it themselves, that is for sure, because CNN is now laying off hundreds of people, according to Mediaite.
CNN chief Chris Licht announced the network will start making layoffs as part of his budget cut strategy.
They're expected to target hundreds of CNN employees.
Oliver Darcy, CNN's senior media reporter, released a letter that Licht sent out to the entire company on Wednesday.
In it, Licht announced that the first round of layoffs will impact the network's paid contributors.
The network's remaining staff would be informed of those changes tomorrow.
So you're going to see a bunch of people who were on TV no longer be on TV because CNN is really cutting.
They're having a rough time.
It turns out that they really needed Donald Trump to be president in order to succeed, economically speaking.
Licht has been vocal about his interest in reorienting CNN's editorial focus on straight news reporting.
He's also signaled the network's rating struggles and debt.
From the discovery, WarnerMedia merger could necessitate dramatic cuts for the network's projects, including hundreds of job losses.
Mediaite says that the layoffs mostly focus on paid contributors.
But the reality is that CNN is going to have to fire a bunch of its actual hosts.
I'm sorry, shifting Don Lemon from evenings into mornings, where he can continue to be a left-wing propagandist while proclaiming to Stephen Colbert that he is in fact an objective news reporter, that ain't going to cut it over at CNN.
You can also see, by the way, why the media are so desperate for Donald Trump to come back.
They want Donald Trump.
It's something to remember as we go forward into the Republican primaries and toward 2024 is that the media do not get ratings out of other Republicans.
The media don't get ratings out of Joe Biden.
The media only get ratings out of Donald Trump.
They need the opposition.
They need the battle.
It is the thing they love more than anything else.
Their goal is going to be to give Donald Trump as much attention as humanly possible, specifically because, number one, the truth is it's a win-win for them.
If Donald Trump wins, the media makes bank.
The New York Times exploded in subscribership because Donald Trump was president.
So if he wins, the media do great.
And if he loses, then the media get to brag that they stopped Donald Trump.
So it's a win-win for them in every possible way.
CNN, without Donald Trump, Is a ratings disaster area.
This is one area where Trump was totally 100% right.
And you're seeing that now as CNN is forced to lay off an enormous number of people.
In their contributorships behind the camera.
And if Licht actually wanted to do something useful, he actually would reorient CNN.
I just don't have any faith that Licht is actually going to do that.
We'll get some more on this in just one second.
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Well, meanwhile, Controversy continues to swirl around Elon Musk.
The media are out to nail Musk again because they saw Twitter as their preserve.
It was their domain.
Twitter was the place that they were going to be able to control the narrative.
And now that Musk has taken over Twitter with $44 billion of his own money and investor money, they're very angry that he did that.
And so they play this silly game now where they find people who have been laid off by Twitter, the disgruntled employees, and then they suggest that those disgruntled employees have an amazing insight into Twitter.
So, for example, they've started citing Yoel Roth, who's the former head of trust and safety over at Twitter, suggesting that the place is not safe anymore.
Well, weird.
I mean, it's almost as though you got fired.
Now you're bitter about it.
You're upset about it.
He did, by the way, admit in an interview with journalist Kara Swisher that it was a mistake for Twitter to censor the Hunter Biden story.
He said, we didn't know what to believe.
We didn't know what was true.
There was smoke, and ultimately for me, it didn't reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter, but it set off alarm bells for every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack and leak campaign alarm bells.
Asked if it was a mistake for Twitter to have blocked the story, Roth said yes, but he also suggested that the place is not safe, that it's a really bad place now that he is no longer there.
And this is contributing to, again, more democratic heartburn over Twitter.
Musk is out there saying openly that there needs to be more transparency as to what went on at Twitter while he was not in charge.
There's a person who tweeted at him the other day suggesting that there needed to be More transparency.
Twitter has shown itself to be not safe for the past 10 years and has lost users' trust.
The past theme of trust and safety is a disgrace, so it doesn't have any right to judge what's being done now," said this Twitter user.
They had a chance, but they sold their souls to a corporation.
And Musk responded directly to this person.
That's one thing that's amazing about Musk.
I mean, he's the richest man in the world, and he's just responding to randos on Twitter.
Exactly.
The obvious reality, as longtime users know, is that Twitter has failed in trust and safety for a very long time and has interfered in elections.
Twitter 2.0 will be far more effective, transparent, and even-handed.
And this, of course, is what is driving people up a wall on the left.
This is why you have Elizabeth Warren, who's ripping on Elon Musk.
I have to say, there's great irony to Elizabeth Warren suggesting that there cannot be too much power at the top of a privately held company, when she is literally the creator of the Consumer Finance Protection Board, which was, under her auspices, completely independent of any other branch of government that had its own funding mechanism, and basically With such an autocracy, the Supreme Court struck down its entire structure.
Elizabeth Warren has no problem with centralization of power.
She just wants to be the person with the bad haircut at the top of it.
Republicans say that Democrats are picking on Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is doing just fine.
But do you think that users have a right to freedom of speech, even if what they're saying is wrong or offensive?
I think that one human being should not decide how millions of people communicate with each other.
One human being should not be able to go into a dark room by himself and decide, oh, that person gets heard from, that person doesn't.
That's not how it should work.
I mean, that's an amazing statement from a person who's in favor of centralization of powers, Elizabeth Warren.
Joe Biden literally goes into a dark room.
He actually goes into his coffin at night.
And when they close that coffin, he signs a bunch of executive orders.
And this emerges as the policy of the United States.
Again, Elizabeth Warren is the creator of the Consumer Finance Protection Board, which is explicitly designed to basically control the American economy without any sort of check or balance on it.
But she's very angry that Elon Musk, who spent his own money and investor money in order to buy a company, is being actually quite transparent about how he's making these decisions.
He's just saying, I don't want this person on, I don't want this person on, I do want this person on.
And he's willing to take the flak for that.
And that's not transparent enough for Elizabeth Warren.
What she wants is a completely opaque algorithm that supposedly decides on an objective basis who's getting bad.
But everybody knows, if they've been watching Twitter for the past 10 years, that that's not how it works over at Twitter.
That it's not, it's not objective in any way, shape or form.
You see people who completely violate the rules and get away with it.
You see people who don't violate the rules and get banned.
The problem for her is not that she doesn't like one person at the top deciding, it's that she doesn't like the person at the top who is doing the deciding.
And you're seeing this all over the place now.
I mean, it is incredible how many of these left-wing government apparatuses all over the world are now cracking down on Twitter.
Like of all the companies to crack down on right now, Twitter is not the one.
We'll get to Apple in just a minute.
I mean, Apple is the one that really deserves it.
But according to Forbes, the European Union is now issuing a warning to Twitter owner Elon Musk, saying the platform will be banned entirely inside the EU unless it tightens its moderation policies and eliminates its arbitrary approach to reinstating banned users, according to the Financial Times.
Thierry Breton, who's in charge of enforcing the EU's digital laws, told Musk on Wednesday that Twitter risks being in violation of the Digital Services Act, which requires social media platforms to remove hate speech and bans ads targeting people based on political beliefs.
Breton said Musk must agree to an extensive independent audit of the platform, citing people with knowledge of the talks between the two.
So the EU is trying to gain control over Twitter.
Now, I haven't noticed the TikTok.
Is TikTok banned in Europe?
TikTok's an actual Chinese government apparatus for gathering data.
Did they ban it in Europe?
But now they're talking about banning Twitter.
Why?
Because Musk is allowing more people on Twitter to talk.
Which demonstrates once again that the Europeans and the left generally, they have no interest in freedom of speech as a principle.
They want freedom of speech for the people who agree with them and everybody else gets to shut the hell up.
And so anybody who promises to open that thing up is going to become some sort of an enemy to them to the point where they talk about shutting down his actual company.
Musk reportedly responded by calling the Digital Services Act very sensible.
He says he's vowed that Twitter's policies will comply with applicable laws.
He would have to because otherwise it's going to get banned over there.
European officials have also expressed concern about how Twitter can enforce its policies after Musk laid off about half of his workforce.
Again, this sort of interference from government in a business like Twitter is pretty amazing stuff.
It really is.
So, the fact that the EU is now targeting Musk, the fact that Elizabeth Warren is targeting Musk, the fact that the White House has said that it's targeting Musk, I mean, even Janet Yellen is now claiming that she misspoke when she said there was no basis to actually investigate Elon Musk buying Twitter.
Bloomberg reported that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter would warrant a government review if deemed to raise national security concerns, walking back her previous comments that played down the need for scrutiny.
Yellen said if there are issues, it would be appropriate for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to take a look.
She would not comment on the potential of a review of Musk's purchase, saying she would not reveal what specifically the federal government could be looking at.
But earlier this month, she had said there was no basis for an investigation into Musk's finances.
So now, obviously, she is shifting modes.
And that, of course, followed President Joe Biden saying he would support a review of Musk and his quote-unquote relationship with other countries.
I've never seen governments crack down on any company like this, save maybe Huawei.
But aside from Huawei, which is an actual Chinese government apparatus, I do not understand why Twitter is coming under this sort of scrutiny.
Meanwhile, Apple is getting away with literally doing the bidding of the Chinese government.
And the biggest story that nobody seems to be covering very much is this story that Apple actually shut down AirDrop in China before these giant protests broke out in China.
That's an amazing story.
So Apple, it should be noted, something like 95% of all the components in an iPhone are compiled and manufactured in China.
A huge percentage of the value of the iPhone is made in China.
And because so much of their production for the iPhone 14, for example, is centralized in China, Apple just does the bidding of the Chinese government.
Pretty openly, by the way.
And they do so while propagandizing for China.
Tim Cook, the head of Apple, praised China back in 2017 for all the wonderful good it had done.
China's done an unbelievable job of lifting people out of poverty.
They've done an incredible job, I mean, far beyond what any country has done.
We were talking about mid-90s to today.
The biggest change is the number of people that have been pulled out of poverty.
By far.
And we should all applaud that.
Mark Zuckerberg, by the way, over at Facebook, he's ripping on Apple also because the App Store is dominant and essentially has monopolistic power over what is allowed on the App Store.
There was a big controversy that broke out when Twitter accused Apple of trying to ban it from the App Store for political differences.
Here is Zuckerberg going after Apple.
Windows, Android, iOS, hopefully the future ones around the metaverse that will get built.
Apple's stands out as the only one where one company can control what apps get on the device.
That wasn't the case in Windows.
That isn't really the case on Android phones.
Google might control what goes in the Play Store, but they've always made it so that you could sideload and have other app stores.
I do think Apple has sort of singled themselves out as the only company that is trying to control, like unilaterally what apps get on a device.
And I don't think that's a sustainable or good place to be.
Zuckerberg happens to be correct about this.
It is, again, quite amazing which companies have fallen under the scrutiny of Democrats on the left and which ones have not.
So Facebook in the aftermath of 2016 fell under the scrutiny of the left because they'd allowed too many companies that were not left-wing to thrive.
Twitter has now fallen under the scrutiny of the left because Elon Musk took it over.
Meanwhile, Apple is doing fine.
I mean, the most obvious example, by the way, of this, of people who are friendly with Democrats, people who are who are joining with the Democratic sort of coterie in their ideology, getting easy treatment is Sam Bankman Freed.
I mean, this is an amazing thing.
Sam Bankman Freed just bilks people out of billions of dollars over at FTX.
To recap what happened with FTX.
FTX was an exchange.
It's a crypto exchange.
And a lot of people held their money in the exchange so that they could buy and sell various forms of cryptocurrency.
There was an associated company, call it Alameda Capital, which was Alameda Research, which was actually a hedge fund that was connected to FTX.
Sort of tangentially connected to FTX.
And Elemator Research was buying all sorts of FTT, which was a cryptocurrency created by FTX to boost its own stock price, essentially.
Where was Elemator Research getting its money?
It turns out they were getting their money directly from user accounts at FTX.
It looks pretty obviously like fraud.
It's the biggest financial scandal probably since Enron.
Certainly since Bernie Madoff.
And yet, Sam Bankman-Fried yesterday, as long as you give tens of millions of dollars to Democrats, man, you can get away with pretty much anything.
Sam Bankman-Fried yesterday was part of a New York Times Dealbook Summit alongside people like Janet Yellen.
I mean, this is post the implosion of FTX.
This is in the middle of a massive investigation that's going on into how billions of dollars suddenly went missing from user wallets over at FTX.
Meanwhile, Sam Bankman Freed is literally talking to a thousand people at this insane gathering of the Glitterati.
According to the New York Times, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the now bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, told the Dealbook Summit on Wednesday the company's downfall was caused by, quote, a massive failure of oversight on my part.
Whatever happened, why it happened, I had a duty to our shareholders, our customers, our investors, our stakeholders, the regulators of the world to do right by them, he told Andrew Ross Sorkin via video from the Bahamas.
Clearly, I didn't do a good job of that.
I didn't ever try to commit fraud on anyone.
I'm deeply sorry about what happened, he said while drinking from a can of La Croix.
He also said that spiraling losses at Alameda Research, FTX's sister company, essentially meaning that the crypto exchange was loaning Alameda large sums of money and left the trading firm with a large margin position at FTX.
He took pains not to mention Carolyn Ellison, the former chief executive of Alameda Research, by name.
Perhaps that's because he was schtipping her at the time.
He said, I wasn't running Alameda.
I don't know exactly what was going on.
I was nervous because of the conflict of interest of being too involved.
I didn't knowingly commingle funds.
If he gets away with this, isn't that, like, the greatest example of crony capitalism pretty much ever?
I did not try to commit fraud on anyone, is what he is saying publicly right now.
Meanwhile, billions of dollars are gone.
People are bankrupt.
If he made a mistake, Bankman Freed said, it was not keeping track of the size of the bad bets his clients were taking.
There is no person chiefly in charge of positional risk of customers of FTX, and that feels pretty embarrassing in retrospect, he said.
Solid, solid stuff there from Sam Bankman-Free, but again, if you give tens of millions of dollars to Democrats, you're fine.
If you're Elon Musk and you say that you might vote for Ron DeSantis, the federal government and the EU will come after you.
Just wild.
It's wild.
When you talk about crony capitalism, this is the thing that drives me up a wall.
You'll see people on the left and they'll yell and scream about crony capitalism.
And then they'll be very much in favor of boondoggle giveaways to their favorite companies.
Or obvious corporatism that favors their favorite people.
Or union cronyism, which is just a form of crony capitalism.
In other words, they're not against government intervening in the economy and working with private parties.
They just want it to be private parties that they particularly like.
Again, Sam Bang Manfred stole, apparently, like billions of dollars from people.
He got a big ovation at the end of this event because he was transparent enough to come and talk with the glitterati about it.
I mean, listen to this clip.
On behalf of everybody here and on behalf of the public, I want to thank you for engaging in it at a time, in truth, when I know you've been advised not to.
So thank you so very, very much.
Thank you.
Sam Bankman Freed everybody.
Okay. Meanwhile, Joe Biden was out there on the stump again, and he let loose with a bizarre notion.
He says, maybe he won't run again.
We'll get to that in a moment.
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And meanwhile, Joe Biden in the aftermath of a kind of shocking non-election blowout.
Joe Biden was asked yesterday essentially whether he was going to run again.
He was doing a speech and at the very end of his speech, somebody shouted, four more years.
And Joe Biden's like, oh, we'll see about that.
Thank you all very much.
Thanks.
And so he says four more years and he says sort of backhandedly.
I don't know about that.
Well, I mean, I thought that you're running for re-election, dude.
So that's kind of interesting.
Now, the rule for Biden probably is that if Joe, if Donald Trump ends up being the nominee for the Republicans, he'll run again because he thinks that he can beat Donald Trump.
But if it's anybody else, is there a possibility that he that he steps down?
I think the Democrats are gonna have a real tough time letting him go.
Who exactly do you put in his place?
Kamala Harris, the world's worst political candidate?
Or Pete Buttigieg, whose great claim to fame is being terrible at everything that he touches, but also he happens to be gay?
Or perhaps you're really in love with J.B.
Pritzker in Illinois, who's presiding over a giant crime wave?
Or Gavin Newsom, who's presiding over the complete destruction of his state?
Who exactly is waiting in the wings here for the Democratic Party?
You're stuck with this guy, is the problem.
And I think Joe Biden knows that.
But the big problem, of course, is that Joe Biden is incoherent and falling apart.
And all of the Democratic problems have been masked by the fact that they did better than expected in the 2022 elections.
Those problems didn't just go away.
I mean, here's Joe Biden speaking nonsense.
But my administration is doing all it can to demonstrate our commitment to those timeless ideals.
So thank you.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you for your leadership.
Thank you for your partnership.
And I'm sure I'll make mistakes, but you know me, don't hesitate to correct me when I make it.
And I know you, you won't hesitate.
But I really mean it.
I really mean it.
Well, I tell you what, no one's ever done as much as president as this administration is doing.
What?
Okay.
Then there's this weird, this is at a White House tribal nation summit.
There's a weird part of this where he says that Jill Biden is going to leave him for an Indian reservation.
That was weird.
Here we go.
In fact, last year, Jill and my wife traveled with Deb to the Cherokee Immersion School in Oklahoma.
The Cherokee Nation used part of this funding to start building a second school and revitalized the use of the Cherokee language.
By the way, she spent a lot of time on other reservations, other nations as well.
I'm worried she's not going to come home one of these days when she goes.
You think I'm joking, I'm telling you.
I hear more about the Navajos than I hear about me.
So, this is the beginning of a bad Taylor Sheridan script.
As the first lady of the United States ends up going to a Native American reservation and then just, um, and then just staying there forever.
Meanwhile, Corine Jean-Pierre is fibbing that Joe Biden has been to the border.
He has never been to the border, apparently.
But this is the favorite game of the Democratic Party, is we've been to the border when we haven't.
You remember Kamala Harris said this at one point.
She still has not been to the border.
Here is world's most untalented press secretary, Corine Jean-Pierre.
Kevin McCarthy says that he invited President Biden down to the border.
How does the President RSVP?
We know the President's never been down to the border.
The possible next speaker says that he wants him to go with him, so is he going to?
So, look, he's been there.
He's been to the border.
No, he hasn't.
And since he took office... When did he go to the border?
Since he took office, the President Biden has been taking action to fix our immigration system and secure our border.
And that's why, on day one, he put forward an immigration reform piece of legislation to deal with what is currently happening at the border.
But, you know, we're not seeing that from Republicans.
We're not seeing a willingness to work with us on fixing a situation that's been around For decades now.
Instead, they're doing political stunts.
He's not been to the border.
It's a bunch of horse nonsense.
And this is precisely what the Biden administration is full of.
I mean, they've done a very, very poor job.
Again, the fact they've done a very poor job is masked by the fact that Republicans are wildly incompetent in nearly everything.
But they continue to do a poor job.
We have a massive crisis on our southern border.
As I discussed at the top of the show, the economy is still not going great guns here.
And the fact of the matter is that we are probably seeing a fall spring.
When it comes to foreign policy, China is getting more aggressive.
Meanwhile, the White House is targeting Elon Musk and Twitter.
This is not an administration that is in control of itself.
Meanwhile, the House Democrats have decided on their new leadership class.
Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries was elected on Wednesday to lead House Democrats in the next Congress, making history as the first black person to lead either party in either chamber and taking on the responsibility of keeping the caucus united on policies and messaging as they set their sights on winning back the majority next term, according to the Washington Post.
Now, again, we're going to play this game until the end of time, which is first black person to do anything.
This game is old, guys.
We've had a black president.
We currently have a black vice president.
We have two black Supreme Court justices.
Why is this still a news story?
I just don't understand why it's that big a deal.
I don't think that it is at this point, but you have to come up with some historic reason why Hakeem Jeffries should be the leader of the Democratic Party.
Now, the truth is Hakeem Jeffries is more competent than many of the other people who are up for the post.
But there are some problems with Hakeem Jeffries as the Democratic leader.
Among those problems is that Hakeem Jeffries is kind of an election denier.
So if the entire idea here is that election denial is bad, it's weird to appoint an election denier to the top post.
He tweeted out post-2016 that Trump was not the legitimate president.
He tweeted that again in 2020.
But Democrats are moving to their younger cadre, I guess is going to be Hakeem Jeffries and company.
Again, it's a rather uninspiring group of people who are at the top of the Democratic Party.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We will be getting into the Daily Show Dishonestly Comparing Nick Fuentes to Tucker Carlson and a lot of other stuff.
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