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Dec. 15, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

53:50

The Crying Republican Surrender Caucus | Ep. 1631

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	Former House Republican Speaker John Boehner tears up while paying homage to outgoing Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Republicans prepare to cave yet again to Senate Democrats, and 2024 polls show Trump fading and Joe Biden gaining.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	And well, they finally unveiled, historically, so historic, the portrait of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.
	They have a big gallery of portraits of former Speakers of the House over at the Capitol Rotunda.
	And so they had a big event for this because Nancy Pelosi is, of course, Like her or dislike her, as I do.
	She is a historic figure.
	And so they had a big event to unveil a portrait of Nancy Pelosi.
	And everybody was super excited because she's so historic.
	She's the most historic of the historic people who have been historic in the relatively historic history of the history.
	So it was all very exciting.
	And former House Speaker John Boehner, he showed up to pay tearful tribute to Nancy Pelosi.
	I mean, so there are a couple ways to take this.
	One is, as I will take it, as just an indicator of just how pathetic the Republicans generally are in office.
	The other way to take it is that John Boehner just cries a lot.
	That dude cries a lot.
	But either way, he actually teared up while paying homage to Nancy Pelosi.
	Here's what he had to say.
	There is no other speaker of the house in the modern era, Republican or Democrat, has wielded the gavel with such authority or with such consistent results.
	That's where he geared up!
	Really?
	Like that she was a good political manipulator?
	But this does say something about the Republican Party, because that's not all that John Boehner had to say.
	He said, Which, when you hear that coming out of the mouth of John Boehner, is even weirder than when you hear it coming out of my mouth.
	The fact of the matter is no other Speaker of the House in the modern era has wielded that gavel, that's what he said, and he called her a tough cookie.
	Which used to be considered a sexist thing to say.
	Then he said, So I have a really basic question to ask actually here because I think this says a lot about the state of conservatism in the country, the state of the Republican Party generally.
	How many Democrats do you think who sit in the House of Representatives or the Senate?
	How many of them do you think have Republican kids?
	How many?
	Really, my guess is very, very, very few.
	And the reason for that is because the Republican Party is a trash heap.
	How many Republicans do you think have Democrats for kids?
	I think the answer is a lot.
	I think the answer is there are a lot of Republican legislators, a lot of Republican senators whose kids are Democrats.
	And that's not because of the disconnect between conservative values and the younger generation.
	That's always existed.
	It's always been true that the younger generation tends to be liberal until reality clocks them in the face and they become more conservative.
	Hence the old chestnut that Winston Churchill used to say, that if you're not a liberal when you're 20, then you have no heart.
	And if you're not a conservative when you're 40, you have no brain.
	That's been a long time, long standing critique of how politics works.
	And when you're younger, you tend to be more worried about compassion by the state.
	And when you're older, you realize that the family unit independence from the state is actually quite important and that you want a space for yourself aside from government.
	Understood.
	But one of the key indicators when you're talking about the most political of the political people on the planet, namely people who are in elected office for a particular party, supposedly representing a certain constituency and a certain ideology from that constituency.
	How good are they at passing those values on to the next generation?
	I think there are a lot of Republicans who are very, very bad at pushing those values to their kids.
	And I don't think that's because of the shortcoming in the values.
	I think it's because of shortcoming in them.
	I think it's because Republicans do not believe many of the things that they say and Democrats believe nearly everything that they say.
	Now, this is a critique of conservatives in elected office, supposed conservatives in elected office.
	It's also a critique of the Republican Party generally.
	So it's a critique of the Republican Party because the Republican Party is not a conservative party.
	The Republican Party is a vehicle for victory.
	Political parties are always vehicles for victory.
	That is literally their raison d'etre.
	That is the reason they exist.
	The reason the Democratic Party exists is not actually to do liberal priorities, believe it or not.
	The reason the Democratic Party exists is to get people elected to high office and to enrich the coffers of the Democratic Party to get more people elected to high office.
	In other words, it's a vehicle.
	The vehicle could be used for blue-dog Democrats, or it could be used for far-left-wing Democrats like Bernie Sanders.
	It's just a vehicle for victory.
	And when it doesn't win, then it loses its reason for being.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	The Republican Party is not a conservative party.
	It's just a vehicle for victory.
	It happens to be centered around people who are ideologically more conservative than the Democratic Party, but it could be a vehicle for liberal Republicans or it could be a vehicle for conservative Republicans.
	It is just a vehicle for victory.
	The problem for the Republican Party is that it is not a vehicle for victory anymore.
	It's lost nearly all power.
	The Republican Party has no institutional power to help select candidates to gain any sort of victory.
	So if it's not conservative and it doesn't win victory, what exactly is it that you would say that you do here if you're the Republican Party?
	If you are not achieving the ability to either select candidates who can win or to get candidates, once they win, to come together around conservative policy, what is it that you do?
	You're not an organizing party.
	You're not a winning party.
	So what is the purpose of you?
	And part of that is the simple sort of mechanisms of how parties have failed to to actually exercise authority over their own membership.
	Part of that is things like getting rid of the earmarking.
	A lot of people are very anti earmarking because they say, well, it's pork barrel kind of stuff.
	Earmarking is the process in Congress.
	Whereby, in order for me to vote for your bill, you have to give me some sort of giveaway and name the local post office after me or something and give it some money.
	And people think that's really bad.
	And on a raw level, it's not great.
	But it's also how politics works.
	And it does allow parties to actually exercise authorities over their members because then patronage matters.
	And it matters how you get staffed.
	It matters which committee you go to.
	As earmarks faded and as parties were unable to to actually cudgel their members into place, that had some pretty dire side effects, particularly for the Republican Party, which is less ideologically coherent than the Democratic Party.
	And this is what it comes down to as the Republican Party has weakened.
	It is not that the Republican Party has rebuilt itself in an ideologically consistent mode.
	Far from it.
	What's happened instead is that you have a lot of politicians who say they believe a thing and then don't actually believe the thing.
	And this is happening over and over for Republicans.
	And there's a reason that John Boehner's kids are Democrats.
	And I think that does say something about, again, people who have made politics the center of your life.
	And there are a lot of people who are Republicans across the country who have kids who are Democrat, and that's totally fine.
	But it's less fine when your literal job is to promulgate a particular set of values and you can't even promulgate them to your own kids.
	Take the world of religion.
	If you are a religious Christian, and all of your kids end up secular atheists, then from the religious Christian point of view, you have failed.
	If you're an Orthodox Jew, and your kids all end up secular atheists, from the perspective of your Judaism, you have not done your job as a parent.
	There's been some sort of, and it's not always you to blame, they're always, obviously your kids are independent actors in the world, but if all of your kids, or if multiple of your kids have moved away from what you believe to be the core ideology that matters, And if you're pretty blasé about that, if you're joking about that, if that's not something that actually kind of hurts your heart, then presumably you don't believe the values all that much.
	This is a real problem.
	Because I know many of these Republican legislators, and I know many of them do have kids who have decided to basically throw out their parents' values, which suggests that the parents aren't doing a job in their home.
	But it also suggests that many of them don't understand the opposition and don't even understand themselves.
	It suggests that many of the Republicans who go to Washington say the things that they think they need to say in order to get elected in conservative areas.
	And then they go to Washington and they cut deals.
	They go to Washington and the thing they actually believe is that the people on the other side of the aisle are friendly, chummy with them.
	And that they have lots of shared values with Democrats on the other side of the aisle.
	And that really there's not all that much wrong with the ideology of the other side.
	Now listen, I think that civility in Washington is generally a good thing.
	I think people should treat each other well.
	I also think there are times where compromise is called for.
	There are times when the best you can do is the best you can do.
	And so this isn't even a critique of John Boehner and sequestration, for example, under Barack Obama, where he signed a deal that radically cut the American military in exchange for cutting some spending.
	It was a terrible deal, but that's not what this is about.
	What this is really about is that the Republican Party, on a consistent basis, sells out the fundamental values of its own party because I think a lot of the members of the party don't actually believe the things that they say to their own constituents.
	And that's a deeper problem.
	When you have a party that is not a vehicle for victory, And the substitute for a weak party is candidates who don't actually believe the core values that they supposedly believe.
	And what you end up with is Republicans who cry and Republicans who lose.
	And that's the worst combo.
	That even the ones who win end up cutting bad deals.
	And not enough of them even win because the party is not even good at picking candidates who are capable of winning.
	And that's essentially what you have right now in the Republican Party.
	A weak party infrastructure and a group of people who are in Congress who very often do not even understand the fundamentals of their own belief system and are incapable of pushing their belief system.
	And I think that it actually says a lot.
	Can you imagine Nancy Pelosi getting up there and saying, in tribute to John Boehner, starting to cry in tribute to John Boehner, and then saying, as you know, my kids are Republicans.
	It's almost impossible to imagine that.
	But I can imagine dozens of Republicans for whom that is true.
	That is not a philosophical failing of conservatism.
	That is a failing of understanding of your own ideology and the ideology of the people that you oppose.
	And this rears its head all the time in the Republican Party on a practical level.
	The most obvious example from this past week is 12 Republicans in the Senate deciding to vote for a bill that enshrines same-sex marriage into federal law.
	fairly overtly equates opposition to same-sex marriage with opposition to interracial marriage, thereby labeling half the country bigots for believing in the concept of traditional marriage.
	And these dumbass Republicans who sit around saying, well, that was a good compromise.
	You know, it was a good middle ground.
	Well, I don't actually believe that you believe in the fundamental tenets of your own conservative system.
	I don't think that you believe that.
	That's why I think that you were able to vote for that sort of thing.
	Because if you did believe that, I don't think you can vote for that sort of thing.
	But obviously, you think that compromise and these sort of elite systems in which you work, that is your true religion.
	The true values that you care about are not the values of conservatism.
	For many of these people, it's not even your religious values.
	For many of you, your true religion is the go-along, get-along, chummy club that you have in Washington, D.C.
	with the other elites where you get to hang out with them.
	And behind closed doors, you're pretty friendly with them, and maybe you can kind of compromise.
	And then when you go back to your own kids, you can't even explain your own positions.
	And, um, I think that that is fairly common in the Republican Party, and I think it's why the Republican Party is moving from loss to loss, because there's no ideological strength in the party, and there's no actual party strength in the party.
	So speaking of the party strength in the party, I mean, if you look at how weak the Republican Party is, I'm talking about internally, its ability to actually leverage its own members into doing the things that any successful party can do.
	It's unbelievably weak.
	Not the same on the Democratic side of the aisle.
	So the Democratic side of the aisle is actually kind of shocking.
	The Democratic side of the aisle, the Democratic Party is, in fact, not super strong.
	It has many of the same systemic failings as the Republican Party.
	In other words, the Democratic Party can't simply primary somebody and get them out.
	You can have insurgent candidates like an AOC take down one of the top Democrats in the House, in her district.
	You can have the Democratic Party moving radically to the left against the wishes of its own leadership.
	But when it comes time to vote, when it comes time to vote, there is an ideological center to the Democratic Party and people who believe in the progressive transgressive belief system.
	And so you have essentially no straying from the pack in the Democratic Party.
	And when somebody does stray from the pack, it's a giant shock.
	When I challenge you this, find me a bill in which 12 Democrats moved against a core belief system of their own party and voted with Republicans for cloture on the bill.
	That sort of stuff does not happen.
	In fact, it's a major issue for Democrats when you have one Democrat, like Kyrsten Sinema, who now has to re-register as an independent, right, because she strayed from the party orthodoxy.
	She was so castigated by her own party.
	All she got all day long from her own party was just crap.
	For being a person who strayed from the orthodoxy inside the Democratic Party, from the homogeneity of the Democratic Party.
	Same thing for Joe Manchin.
	In other words, Democrats do have an ideological center, so they may not have tons of party power, but they do have an ideological center, which is how Nancy Pelosi, with a bare five-seat majority, was able to ram through the greatest spending binge in the history of the United States.
	She was able to do that because there is an ideological center.
	Meanwhile, the Republicans have no ideological center and they have no party power.
	And so basically you now have the specter inside the house of the Republicans not even being able to get their bleep together enough to elect a speaker of the house.
	That is where we currently stand.
	There are all sorts of machinations that are happening inside the House of Representatives right now.
	The House Republican caucus trying to figure out exactly what kind of speakership or if there will be a speakership of Kevin McCarthy.
	There's an Arizona representative named Andy Biggs, who has no shot at being Speaker, who has announced a challenge to McCarthy's Speakership bid.
	There are a number of other lawmakers who have said that they're not going to vote for McCarthy.
	And McCarthy, again, has a very, very small majority to work with here.
	He requires a majority of the House to vote for him in order for him to become Speaker.
	No Democrats will vote for McCarthy for Speaker, which means he needs effectively a unanimity inside the Republican Party.
	And because the Republicans did really poorly in the last election cycle, They did well in sort of the generic ballot.
	Overall, the generic ballot, the Republicans did well.
	The problem is they did really well in red areas, and in purple areas, they ran refugees from the mental institutions.
	And they did poorly in those purple areas.
	Because of that, they have a very small majority to work with.
	And that means that if just a few Republicans drop off of McCarthy's list, then he can't be Speaker of the House.
	Well, right now, that includes Andy Biggs, it includes Ralph Norman of South Carolina, it includes Matt Gaetz of Florida.
	So McCarthy was talking to Dana Perino on Fox News about this, and she said, what can you do to actually get the Republicans to vote for you for Speaker?
	Because if you can't even get people to vote for you for Speaker, then how exactly are you going to rally them around particular issues in order to pass or block legislation?
	How's that going to work?
	How are you going to keep your party in line if you can't even get them to vote for you for Speaker?
	Here's McCarthy's answer.
	There's a few that are basically saying they're never going to vote for you for Speaker, and you don't have the margin that you need in order to get there, at least maybe today?
	Look, our goal was to stop this Biden agenda, win the majority, and fire Nancy Pelosi.
	We achieved all three of those.
	I do not think at the end of the day that five Republicans are going to hold up our opportunity to secure the border.
	Or that five Republicans are going to sit back and make us not be energy independent.
	Or let this runaway spending continue.
	Because that's what will happen if we don't.
	We've got to find a way to work together for the next two years, otherwise we'll lose as individuals.
	Okay, and he happens to be right about this.
	But if there's no ideological center of the party, how do you actually get people to rally behind you?
	So what McCarthy is doing right now is he's trying to cut some sort of deal with the more right-wing members of the House of Representatives in order to try to get them to back his speakership bid.
	So according to Politico, on Friday, after a group of seven House conservatives issued a public letter outlining the demands that GOP leader Kevin McCarthy would need to meet to win their support in his bid for Speaker, a key McCarthy backer quietly reached out to several moderate Republicans with a request, according to people familiar with the conversations.
	The Freedom Caucus rabble-rousers had reiterated their demand that McCarthy would restore a 200-year-old, now infamous House rule known as the Motion to Vacate, which allows any one member to force a floor vote to oust the Speaker at any moment.
	So they want to weaken the party infrastructure even further.
	McCarthy is correct to say no to this, by the way.
	I understand that there are right-wing members of the caucus who want to be able to oust the Speaker at any possible moment, but this means you have an unworkable party majority.
	It just means absolute chaos.
	The Speaker has to have the whip hand inside his own caucus, or he doesn't have a caucus.
	It's that simple.
	Kevin McCarthy counted on the centrist Republican Governance Group, which boasts 50 members, far more than the Freedom Caucus's three dozen or so, and they said that they are going to oppose that proposed rule change.
	A few hours later, some members of the Governance Group met with McCarthy to double down on that position.
	So McCarthy is using the moderates to essentially consolidate power inside the caucus and prevent there from being a complete undermining of the Speaker's power.
	Which, by the way, needs to happen if you do actually wish to obstruct the Democrats.
	I understand trying to push McCarthy to the right from inside the caucus.
	But if the idea is that every time you disagree with him, you hold a no-confidence vote, that dude does not run the caucus.
	It's that simple.
	So it is correct.
	Now, one thing that they are going to try to do is presumably lower the threshold to trigger a vote to challenge the Speaker from 40% of the caucus to 30% of the caucus.
	Which makes some sense.
	It'd make it a little easier to get him out if it turns out that he can't hold the caucus together.
	But the fact that people want to weaken the party infrastructure at a time when the party has no ideological coherency means absolute chaos inside the Republican Party.
	And so one of two things has to happen.
	Either the Republican Party has to start exerting authority over its own members in search of victory, right?
	Go back to its core focus and core mission.
	Which means, I may not get what I like, you may not get what you like, but the Republicans continue to win elections and continue to overall push the generalized Republican agenda, even if in more moderate ways than I would like.
	Or, you need a more coherent and centralized base of ideological conservatism inside the Republican Party.
	And that's been a long-standing problem inside the Republican Party.
	Because again, many conservatives, including elected officials, do not know how to defend their own ideology, and their kids are proof of this.
	They do not understand the threat that the left poses, even the people who are in elected office.
	They seem to be more interested in back slapping and making friends on the other side of the aisle than they are in actually standing up for principle.
	And that's a serious problem.
	Again, you should be friendly with people on the other side of it.
	There's nothing wrong with that, but there is something wrong with surrendering.
	And the Republicans seem to have a really bad habit of surrendering on all the big issues.
	I don't mean all Republicans, but a segment of the Republican Party basically turns victory into defeat.
	By joining with Democrats and not understanding what Democrats are doing, what their actual agenda is.
	We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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	And you have to understand what the Democratic agenda is.
	One of their big agenda items, obviously, is to spend more money than God.
	They want to spend more money than has ever been created in the history of humanity.
	And they've succeeded in doing that over the past couple of years.
	Again, with some Republican support from useful Republicans, like Mitt Romney, for example, in Utah.
	Again, I've voted for when he was Governor Romney against Barack Obama in 2012.
	I don't have any sort of pathological aversion to Mitt Romney.
	But Mitt Romney's position in the Senate seems to be to be holier than thou while voting for a bunch of Democratic priorities.
	That is not something that I think stands for conservatism, and it certainly doesn't stand for victory.
	You're not winning any friends or influencing any people.
	You're just surrendering.
	Well, that battle is now coming down to the budget.
	So there's a big battle that is broken out between Mitch McConnell in the Senate and some of the House Republicans because right now there is a year-long budget deal that is on the table in the Senate.
	Now, Republicans can block it in the Senate.
	All it would take for Republicans to block this thing in the Senate is for 41 of the Republicans to vote against cloture.
	On this budget bill, Mitch McConnell's trying to ram it through anyway.
	There's no reason for him to ram that through.
	A continuing resolution that gets you through the new year and then gives you a House to negotiate with, run presumably by Republicans if they can get their act together, is a lot better deal than trying to cut a budget deal with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
	That makes no sense.
	Now, I understand that McConnell doesn't trust the House to work.
	This is part of the problem.
	Again, because McConnell is largely focused on Not ideological coherence, but sort of political victory, meaning continued maintenance of a majority or more senators getting elected or whatever it is.
	McConnell's a party man.
	I don't think he's an ideology man.
	And that has borne some fruit in terms of the Supreme Court for sure.
	It's borne much less fruit in terms of the budgeting process.
	Well, McConnell basically wants to sign off on this because he's afraid the House won't be able to get its crap together and actually pass some bills that the Senate can then get passed.
	So he is actually moving with the Democrats in opposition to people like Rand Paul.
	Now, Rand Paul is obviously super hawkish when it comes to spending.
	I'm not sure that he's voted for any budget deal in the past.
	I agree with him ideologically.
	Rand Paul is ripping on McConnell, saying, at the very least, tactically speaking, why are you undercutting the Republican Party in the House by trying to pass a deal with Nancy Pelosi in the now?
	Just pass a CR that gets you for the next six weeks or so.
	But the other thing is, 41 votes would stop the big spending.
	If 41 of us said no and held our ground until there was a compromise, we could force Democrats to reduce spending.
	We have completely and totally abdicated the power of the purse.
	Republicans are emasculated, they have no power, and they are unwilling to gain that power back.
	The only way they can get it?
	Divide the spending into 12 bills and then decide to hold one of them hostage or two of them hostage and then apply policy changes in the House.
	Okay, so Rand Paul is not wrong about any of this.
	Now again, this comes down to McConnell not trusting the House Republicans to be able to get it together.
	And here you understand his nervousness.
	I mean, they can't even get enough together to actually elect a Speaker of the House.
	That doesn't mean that it's in McConnell's playbook, or it should be in McConnell's playbook, to actually cut a deal with Pelosi and the Democrats in order to avoid giving Republicans a shot at it.
	If you don't trust your own party enough to actually give it a shot in the House, then what exactly do you believe that your party is for?
	McConnell's allies are saying that House Republicans are willing to risk a government shutdown in exchange for an uncertain shot at a better deal next year.
	And so the thing that McConnell is afraid of more than anything is posturing by House Republicans and not passing some sort of budget.
	But he has to know the Republicans will eventually cave on that because they always do.
	And so at a certain point, you actually do have to stand up for the, if you want to make a change in your party, then McConnell should go to his party.
	You should go to McCarthy and you should say, what does that deal look like?
	You tell me what that deal looks like and you ensure me that you can ram that through your caucus.
	And then I'll hold off on whatever deal I'm about to make with Schumer and Pelosi.
	The House GOP, of course, is fighting mad.
	They should be fighting mad about this.
	They just won a majority.
	And meanwhile, the Senate led by Republicans is trying to make a deal with the Democrats instead of a deal with the Republicans.
	This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Democratic Party policy, which is to continue to run the ball.
	They just run the ball up the gut over and over and over, and Republicans seem destined to constantly be on the defensive.
	And it's pathetic, and they're not going to stop.
	This has some pretty significant ramifications.
	I mean, Joe Biden, the other day, just decided to devote $36 billion to bail out his union cronies.
	We're in the middle of an inflationary spiral still, despite all of the popular press suggesting that inflation is ending.
	It is not in fact ending.
	In fact, Jerome Powell suggested it's impossible yesterday to know if recession is coming.
	He said that inflation is still high.
	We're going to continue to raise those interest rates and a recession may be on its way.
	And meanwhile, Joe Biden is ramming through $36 billion in bailouts for his buddies.
	The recent disinflation we're seeing is transitory or not, and how this affects the idea of a soft landing if you're projecting just half a percent growth for this year?
	To the extent we need to keep rates higher and keep them there for longer and inflation, you know, moves up higher and higher, I think that that narrows the runway.
	But lower inflation readings, if they persist in time, could certainly make it more possible.
	So I don't think anyone knows Whether we're going to have a recession or not, and if we do, whether it's going to be a deep one or not.
	It's just, it's not knowable.
	It's not knowable, but it's knowable that Joe Biden is going to continue spending and spending and spending.
	According to the New York Times, President Biden announced on Thursday he was investing $36 billion in federal funds to save the pensions of more than 350,000 union workers and retirees.
	A demonstration of commitment to labor just a week after a rupture over an imposed settlement of a threatened rail strike.
	Biden gathered top union leaders at the White House to make the commitment described by the White House as the largest ever award of federal financial support for worker and retiree pension security.
	The money came from last year's COVID-19 relief package.
	You remember that time that Joe Biden is saying that COVID is over, but also COVID is not over, so we have to dump almost $40 billion into the pockets of his best friends over at the unions?
	The money comes from COVID-19 relief packages, and it averts cuts of up to 60% in pensions for Teamster truck drivers, warehouse workers, construction workers, and food processors, mainly in the Midwest.
	Biden was joined by Sean M. O'Brien, president of the Teamsters, and Liz Schuler, president of the AFL-CIO.
	Biden said, thanks to today's announcement, hundreds of thousands of Americans can feel that sense of dignity again, knowing they've provided for their families and their future, and it's secure.
	The quote-unquote pension investment came just a week after Biden prodded Congress to pass legislation forcing a settlement in long-running dispute between the rail workers and the rail companies heading off a strike.
	So as sort of a giveaway to backfill his failure to negotiate a deal with the railroad unions, now he's just dipping into your pocket and giving money to the Teamsters pension.
	Of course, all of the unions were perfectly happy about this.
	Democrats just participating in open corruption.
	One of the most openly corrupt things in American political life is unions negotiating with the people they elect to spend your money on them.
	It's an unbelievably corrupt bargain.
	People on the left are constantly talking about corporate donations.
	Look at all those corporate donations to Republicans and Wall Street and Republicans and all that.
	And there's some truth to that.
	You know what's way worse?
	What's way worse is when the federal government actually signs the checks to the people who are getting the people elected to federal government they negotiate with.
	That's way worse.
	And the unions do it all the time.
	And Joe Biden continues to do that all the time.
	The end result of this, of course, is going to be a bloated public sector, a bloated union sector, a less competitive American economy, and stagnation.
	Now, the Democratic Party, Joe Biden, they've done an amazing job, I will say, of renaming economic stagnation.
	So Brian Deese, who's on the Council of Economic Advisors for President Biden, he says that we are seeing a transition to more stable growth.
	A transition to more stable growth is a great euphemism for get ready for some economic stagnation.
	What do you want to hear from the Federal Reserve and Chairman Powell today?
	Well, thanks for having me.
	And as you know, the Fed operates independently.
	They'll make their decisions today.
	But here's where I think we are.
	If you step back, the President about five months ago laid out what he hoped to be the framework for the trajectory of the economic recovery, talking about this transition from a historically strong recovery to a period of more steady and stable growth.
	And over the past five months is what we've seen.
	We've seen economic growth continue to be stable.
	Oh, so it's going to be a transition to, you know, we've seen robust growth, but we're going to get more stable now.
	Again, a great way of describing economic stagnation brought about by your favorite policies.
	But the Republicans continue to go along with it.
	They continue to sign on to these giant spending bills, like the one that Mitch McConnell is about to sign on to in fear of the incompetence of his own House Republicans.
	Meanwhile, the Democrats never stop.
	The agenda never stops.
	They just keep rolling forward.
	Republicans are always on defensive and Democrats keep rolling forward.
	This is true with regard to every single topic in American life.
	And we talked about, again, about the transgressive attempt to destroy the nuclear family by redefining away all the fundamental institutions of life, including the family.
	But it's not just that.
	They also would like to engage in censorship because if you oppose, for example, same sex marriage or the transing of the kids, then the idea is you must be silenced.
	So yesterday there was a hearing on the Hill in which Democrats Essentially called for censorship of all of their political opponents when it comes to the transing of the children or the indoctrination of small children into sexual orientation ideals of the left.
	Katie Porter, representative from California who narrowly won a race over in California that she probably should have lost.
	She is now saying that you're not allowed to use the term groomer because if you use the term groomer, what you are doing is you are slandering gay people, which again, seems like you're reading a little deep there.
	I do not believe that if you use the term groomer to refer to somebody who is literally grooming someone into an ideology that is the same thing as accusing them of grooming someone for sex.
	But Katie Porter does.
	And so if you use the term groomer, we have to shut you up.
	We wouldn't accept this in our families.
	We wouldn't accept this in our schools.
	There's no reason to accept it online.
	So, I mean, I think you're absolutely right.
	And it's not this allegation of groomer and pedophile.
	It is alleging that a person is criminal somehow and engaged in criminal acts merely because of their identity, their sexual orientation, their gender identity.
	Uh, no.
	I mean, a lot of people are called pedophiles whether they are gay or whether they are straight online.
	I mean, the onlines are filled with terrible words and terrible people.
	But the goal here is to, again, link speech with violence so that you can shut down the speech, which is why the Democrats brought forth a bevy of witnesses to suggest that we ought to shut down, by force of government presumably, One example of this inaction is the misuse of the term groomer.
	in industries to sort of mirror the government threat.
	We should shut down use of particular words.
	The Democrats called a witness named Olivia Hunt to explain that if you use the term groomer, then it encourages violence.
	You must never ever say that word.
	One example of this inaction is the misuse of the term groomer.
	Anti LGBTQ activists have appropriated this terminology used by survivors of childhood sexual abuse and used it to slander LGBTQ people and our allies as predatory, harmful toward children.
	This same rhetoric has subsequently been used as justification for violent anti-LGBTQ activism.
	Heavily armed protesters have made numerous attacks or attempts at intimidation against family-friendly pride events and drag performances around the country.
	Family-friendly drag events and pride performances, by the way, are not family-friendly.
	But in any case, no one is calling for violence, nor should anyone be calling for violence.
	We have a rule of law in this country.
	However, suggesting that people are in fact grooming people into an ideology and doing damage to kids in the process does not mean that you're accusing them of pedophilia, nor does it mean that you're slandering all gay people, many of whom do not believe in this sort of radical indoctrination.
	The Democrats also brought forth a survivor of the Club Q shooting in Colorado, and it just shows you that the narrative matters an awful lot more than the fact, because this person, who survived the shooting, or was in the club at the time, he said that the hate at the club started with hate speech.
	Now, I just have a question.
	The person who was arrested in connection with that attack, the person who was the alleged suspect, who murdered a bunch of people, that person identifies as trans, Hate starts with speech.
	Which particular speech are you linking here?
	What is your evidence?
	And the goal here is to shut people up and Democrats are making pretty clear what their goal is.
	Hate starts with speech.
	The hateful rhetoric you've heard from elected leaders is the direct cause of the horrific shooting at Club Q.
	We need elected leaders to demonstrate language that reflects love and understanding, not hate and fear.
	What evidence does he have of this?
	Has he provided any evidence of how any political rhetoric was linked directly to the shooting?
	Did someone call for violence?
	Do we even know that the suspect was a right-winger?
	We don't know any of those things.
	In fact, it seems the suspect was not.
	It seems like the suspect identified as non-gender binary.
	And now they're suggesting that this person is lying, but I'm not aware that you're allowed to do that in today's day and age.
	The minute that you suggest that you're a member of the opposite gender, every single person in the United States must immediately start referring to you as they, them, or she, her, if you're a dude.
	And even if you're an alleged criminal, like Sam Britton, who's busily stealing everybody else's luggage.
	The Democratic Party does not stop.
	They are on the move, constantly and always.
	And if the Republican Party is neither a tool for victory, nor an ideological center for conservatism, then what exactly is it that you do?
	In just a second, we'll get to the Democratic Party continuing to move forward on nearly every front, including COVID.
	The situation in Ukraine continues to get worse and worse and worse because winter is setting in.
	The conditions on the ground there are very, very ugly.
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	Okay, so again, the Democrat and the Democratic bureaucracy, they don't stop ever, which means that the Republicans actually have to be better at their jobs than Democrats.
	Unfortunately, they are significantly worse at their jobs than Democrats.
	Anthony Fauci, even on his way out the door, will not stop, can't stop, won't stop, pop star, never stop, never stopping.
	Anthony Fauci, he's very angry at Ron DeSantis.
	Ron DeSantis has launched an investigation into fraudulent claims over the vaccine.
	And as we discussed yesterday on the Extended Show with Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University, the amount of misinformation that was put out by both corporations like Pfizer and Moderna and the federal government Lying to you.
	Lying to me.
	And many of us took action, including me, on the basis of those lies.
	And when people like Anthony Fauci say that there's nothing to investigate, this raises the question as to whether he is lying or whether he is dumb.
	Because it seems like there's a lot to investigate.
	Like, for example, widespread claims, including today, that the vaccines radically cut transmission.
	Including claims like masks work against Omicron.
	Including claims like the myocarditis risks for 30-year-olds do not outweigh the risks of COVID.
	There's very specific claims that have been made over and over by people in the administration, including Anthony Fauci.
	And as it turns out, Anthony Fauci thinks he has done nothing wrong and there's nothing to investigate.
	Shocker.
	He's now asking the Florida Supreme Court to green light an investigation into, in the way he put it, is any and all wrongdoing in Florida with respect to COVID-19 vaccines.
	What's your reaction to that?
	I don't have a clue, Kate, what he's asking for.
	I mean, we have a vaccine that unequivocally is highly effective and safe and has saved literally millions of lives.
	So there's literally nothing to talk about here.
	Nothing to talk about, according to Anthony Fauci.
	His perspective, of course, mirrored by the entire legacy media, as well as the White House.
	Meanwhile, Fauci, by the way, claims we still don't understand long COVID.
	So again, Marty McHarry had a piece in the Wall Street Journal.
	One thing we do understand about long COVID is that while it exists, it is not existing in the kind of numbers that the White House continues to proclaim that it is.
	And again, if you ever talk to, like, any human being at any time, what you will see is that anybody who's had a flu has had the long flu at a certain point.
	Meaning symptoms that last well beyond the duration of the flu.
	You still don't feel great a couple of weeks later.
	But we're pretending that long COVID is a major issue and the reason we're pretending that is that we can claim that everybody needs to be vaccinated, even people who have already gotten COVID or people who have already been vaccinated in the first place.
	Then you get a booster and then another booster until 80% of your body material is comprised of the vaccine.
	Here's Anthony Fauci jabbering about long COVID.
	What is your biggest question about what still remains quite a mystery with long COVID?
	It's estimated that about a million people in this country cannot work, go back to their former employment because of the post-COVID, long COVID syndrome.
	So it's something that you're right.
	It's a bit mysterious.
	We don't know the precise pathogenic mechanism.
	There's a lot of work going into trying to figure that out, because if you want to do something about it, either to prevent or to treat it, you got to understand what the underlying mechanisms are.
	We're making some progress there, but we still don't fully understand it.
	Well, what you don't understand about it is that the number one.
	The number one coordinating factor, correlating factor For long COVID is anxiety.
	Like if you're an anxious person, you tend to report long COVID symptoms.
	Shocker.
	In other words, a lot of this is psychosomatic.
	There are some people who actually have lingering symptoms.
	And then there are a lot of people who are claiming that they have lingering symptoms.
	It turns out in many of the studies, what it shows is that people who are claiming long COVID were never diagnosed with COVID in the first place.
	They're just claiming the symptoms.
	But we're spending in this country, presumably millions of dollars over the NIH level in order to research long COVID.
	But we spent no money actually launching studies on serious mask efficacy.
	We have launched no studies on myocarditis with regard to Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, particularly among young males.
	And by the way, in Europe, they've actually banned the use of Moderna vaccines for men under the age of 30, specifically because of this sort of data that's now emerging.
	They've done no actual serious research, or at least have reflected no actual serious research, on the dangers of the vaccine, if there are any, to kids.
	They just ran out there and gave FDA approval based on a lab result that was done in like four mice or something.
	So in other words, the agenda never stops.
	It never stops.
	So who's going to obstruct the agenda now?
	I think on some of this stuff, House Republicans will obstruct the agenda, but on the broader Democratic agenda, which is constantly pushing bigger spending, more social progressivism, breakdown in fundamental societal institutions.
	Do I trust the Republican Party to do any of that?
	The answer is no, because why?
	What evidence do I have that they have really stopped anything bad other than they've preserved the Supreme Court?
	That is the single thing that you can point to over the course of the last 10 years.
	Where you can say with certainty that Republicans actually did the right thing.
	And it was a singular move to obstruct Democrats.
	It was not actually a move forward as much as it was just a move to stop Democrats.
	And then Republicans got very, very lucky in 2016 when Trump was elected and he was actually able to select replacements for three Supreme Court justices.
	That is all that happened here.
	But in terms of the Republican Party more generally, you have to understand the shortcomings of the Republican Party in order to truly understand why so many people were attracted to Trump.
	Now this brings us to Trump.
	So President Trump obviously has declared his intention to run again.
	His campaign thus far has been incredibly lackluster.
	In fact, what the polls show is that President Trump has dropped well behind Joe Biden in any re-elect polls.
	They also show that he has dropped behind Ron DeSantis in many of the primary polls.
	The reason for that is because many of the reasons that people resonated to Trump in the first place are not present in the current Trump incarnation.
	So if you're, like me, very frustrated with a Republican party that trots out as its former Speaker of the House, a person who cries over Nancy Pelosi and talks about how his daughters are now Democrats, if this frustrates you to no end, then you might be in favor of someone who fights, right?
	This is the he-fights stuff.
	This is where it came from.
	It came from the fact that Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee in 2012.
	ran a rather genteel campaign against Barack Obama after having run John McCain, who ran a rather genteel campaign against Barack Obama in 2008.
	They both lost.
	Mitt Romney now votes for many Democratic priorities in the Senate in Utah and refuses to endorse people like Mike Lee, actual constitutional conservatives in the state of Utah.
	We'll sit that one out while maybe Evan McMullin runs against him.
	And so many Republicans are like, I don't like that brand of Republicanism.
	You know, the kind that actually doesn't stand up for, it seems, much of anything.
	Well, what exactly do you do here?
	So a lot of people resonated to Trump because Trump was rude and uncivil and because he would break things.
	And so his anger reflected their own.
	Well, right now, Trump's anger is not reflecting their own.
	Trump is angry at things that most Americans are not top of mind about.
	Trump is mostly personally peeved that he lost the 2020 election.
	And now his ask is of the Republicans that they spend inordinate amounts of time Focusing on this.
	And not only that, Trump basically promised two things when he came into office in 2016 and during his campaign in 2015-2016.
	He promised to rectify both of the problems that I've been talking about the Republican Party.
	One was an ideological coherence.
	So Trump was never ideologically coherent, but the idea was that you knew that he was anti-left.
	You didn't know whether how right he was, but you knew he was anti-left.
	You knew he was going to punch your opponents in the face.
	That was the appeal of his campaign.
	And two, he was going to win.
	So the Republican Party, again, had to provide you one of these two things, and it provided you neither.
	It did not provide you victory, and it did not provide you with ideological coherence.
	And so, if you get neither, then Trump pledged sort of both.
	Right now, again, as a person, not ideologically, that doesn't matter.
	He was anti-left, and that's what people liked about him, right?
	He was anti-Hillary, and people knew that he was anti-Hillary, and that he was not going to cave to Hillary Clinton, right?
	That was the pitch.
	And the pitch was, he could win.
	He won in 2016, and it seemed as though the Republican dreams had been fulfilled.
	And then, he proceeded to lose in 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022.
	And so, the promise that Trump had made in 2015-2016, and then fulfilled a lot in 2017-2018, has basically now dissipated.
	In other words, both of the main problems with the Republican Party that Trump was set to rectify, are no longer present in Trump.
	This is the reason why he's fading in the polls.
	He doesn't appear ideologically coherent.
	It appears as though he's spending all of his days fulminating over election 2020 to the point where he's actually undermining Republican victory in particular areas and actually forwarding Democratic goals in particular areas by celebrating when Republicans lose in, for example, in, for example, Georgia, right?
	Or, or suggesting that it's not, it's not a terrible thing that Don Balduc lost in New Hampshire after having elevated Don Balduc.
	That's ripping on the Colorado Senate Republican who lost because that person didn't like Trump.
	So he's not facilitating victory and he's also not facilitating ideological coherence.
	And everybody can see that.
	If it's all about Trump's personal petty grievances, then Republicans are not going to resonate to that, and that's what's being reflected in the polls right now.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, Republican primary voters have high interest in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who, by the way, does provide both.
	DeSantis is extremely ideologically coherent, and he's been incredibly successful in the state of Florida.
	He's offering you the two things the Republican Party has failed to offer you.
	This is a guy who's highly disciplined, not just in terms of his policies, which are very conservative, but he's highly disciplined in how he actually runs campaigns.
	He's a person who turned a 0.4% victory in 2018 into a 20 point victory in 2022 and turned the entire state blood red here in Florida.
	And he also happens to be pushing extremely conservative policies across the board that are successful.
	I'm explaining why DeSantis is picking up ground and Trump seems to be losing ground.
	And it's not because people hate Trump or anti-Trump.
	It's because Trump has lost the thread.
	Republican primary voters, again, are looking at Ron DeSantis as that potential 2024 nominee.
	In a hypothetical contest between the two, DeSantis beats Trump 52-38 among likely GOP primary voters contemplating a race in which the first nomination votes will be cast in just over a year.
	The poll, according to the Wall Street Journal, found that DeSantis is both well-known and well-liked among Republicans who say they are likely to vote in a party primary or nominating contest.
	86% view the Florida governor favorably, compared with 74% who hold a favorable view of Trump.
	One in ten likely GOP primary voters said they don't know enough about DeSantis to venture an opinion of him.
	Among all registered voters, DeSantis is viewed favorably by 43% compared with 36% for Trump.
	Favorable views of Trump were the lowest recorded in journal polling dating to November 2021.
	They've been pulled down by the decline in positive feelings among Republicans.
	Since March, his favorability among GOP voters has fallen to 74% from 85%.
	The share who view him unfavorably has risen to 23% from 13%.
	And again, this makes sense because of the way that Trump has been acting.
	That's not unjustified.
	And it's not about antipathy for Trump.
	It's about Trump not being on top of the issues.
	That people actually care about it.
	Also, this should be a reminder to the so-called moderate Republican chorus, the Asa Hutchinson's in Arkansas or say, oh, maybe I'll run or Larry Hogan's in Maryland.
	Maybe I'll run.
	No, guys, you're the John Boehner wing.
	You're the people that we look at and we say, we don't know what your priorities are or why you wouldn't surrender to Democrats.
	You seem like you're from the sort of Mitt Romney school of Republican politics in which buddy buddy relationships across the aisle seem significantly more important than ideological coherence or victory.
	So the answer to you is no.
	In other words, the people who are now pro-DeSantis, who used to be pro-Trump, are not people who are anti-Trump.
	They are actively pro-DeSantis.
	And this is a problem for Trump in the primary.
	In 2016, there was no one who was actively... There were a few people, like me.
	I was actively pro-Ted Cruz.
	I thought that Ted Cruz would make a better president than Trump.
	I supported him in the primaries.
	So there are some people who are actively pro a candidate, but many, many people out there were actively anti-Trump.
	And it turns out that that wasn't enough to cross the finish line in the Republican Party being anti-Trump.
	The votes for DeSantis, the people who are supporting DeSantis are not doing it because they don't like Trump.
	They're doing it because they like DeSantis.
	So in other words, Hutchinson, Hogan, they're not going to be taking votes away from Ron DeSantis as part of the quote-unquote anti-Trump vote.
	What's going to happen is that they're just going to die on the vine.
	And that's the real threat to Trump, because Trump's needle in the Republican primaries in 2024, that eye of the needle is, he has to have the Republican base split about six different ways, and then he walks through with 26% of the vote.
	Because that's about all he's going to get in these primaries.
	He's not going to be getting 60% of the vote in these Republican primaries.
	He doesn't walk away with this by any stretch of the imagination.
	There's a core base of the Republican Party who still are willing to overlook Trump's foibles because they still are believers in the 2016 Trump.
	But the 2016 Trump is not the 2022 Trump.
	And all you have to do to see that is look at Donald Trump's TruthSocial account.
	If you look at Trump on TruthSocial, he just does not comment on policy ever.
	Ever!
	I mean, his latest truths are things like, our country is a mess.
	This was election interference.
	The disinformation was coming from the FBI and Facebook.
	It was coming from Adam Schiff and Democratic operatives.
	This was a very damaging story to Biden before the election and they were going to kill it.
	Bottom line, the election was rigged and stolen.
	Or Donald Trump.
	How can the January 6th unselect committee make criminal referrals when they haven't spoken about or studied those that rigged the 2020 election?
	The troops not being brought in by Pelosi.
	Or now the election fraud determinably revealed by Twitter.
	These are the real criminals.
	That is not the campaign that Republicans care about.
	I mean, it's not that Republicans necessarily even disagree with Trump.
	It's just this is not where their focus is.
	It all feels tired, and it all feels self-serving.
	And so when Trump puts out notices that he's going to be making major announcements, and it's a picture of him as a superhero, this is not the sort of stuff that I think is going to draw Republican primary voters.
	This is why he is sinking in the polls, especially because he's also sinking in the general election polls against Joe Biden, who has been dead for several years.
	Donald Trump yesterday, he put out a truth.
	It's not a tweet, it's not on Twitter.
	It's a truth.
	In which he said, America needs a superhero.
	I will be making a major announcement tomorrow.
	Thank you.
	Here was the video.
	America needs a superhero.
	And then there's a picture of him.
	And it's a meme of him pulling aside his shirt to reveal a six pack and laser eyes going everywhere.
	So I don't know what the major announcement is.
	Maybe he's going to be cast as the new Superman.
	Henry Cavill apparently is being ousted by the DC Universe as Superman.
	So maybe that's Trump's actual, that's the new thing.
	It's going to be super exciting.
	But does this feel as though Trump is going to be the superhero who saves the Republican Party?
	In 2015, 2016, to a lot of people it did.
	I think it's going to be very dicey for Trump in 2024 specifically because, again, he doesn't feel like the guy who can fill these two gaping holes in the Republican Party.
	The need for victory and the need for ideological coherence.
	Meanwhile, DeSantis looks as though he might be the guy.
	Maybe it's not DeSantis, but it certainly doesn't feel like Trump right now.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, DeSantis has become a formidable force in politics, winning a second term late last month in a landslide by 19 percentage points, reflecting big gains in support in Florida since his first election by less than half a percentage point to the governor's office in 2018.
	The journal poll shows that those who are very conservative favor Trump over DeSantis 54-38.
	Those who say they're somewhat conservative back DeSantis over Trump 59-29.
	More moderate GOP primary voters overwhelmingly favor DeSantis.
	They're not the ones who tend to dominate the primary process.
	I think those who are very conservative are going to continue to shift from Trump to DeSantis the more that Trump's antics continue and the less that he seems to be focused on the things that conservatives really, really care about.
	Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	We'll be talking with Senator Rand Paul about Anthony Fauci and Senate Republicans caving on the budget.
	Plus, we'll be talking with my business partner, Jeremy Boring.
	He's the founder of Jeremy's Razors.
	Give you an update on what's going on with Jeremy's Razors after we challenged the big guys.
	It's pretty amazing stuff.

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