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Dec. 23, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
41:33
The Last Republican Sellout of 2022 | Ep. 1637
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18 Senate Republicans vote for a blowout on a spending package.
Church attendance continues to drop in the United States as more Americans move south.
And FTX's Fraudmeister is out on $250 million bail.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Well, the Republican Party is absolutely incompetent.
I mean, there's no other way to put this.
What exactly has the Republican Party accomplished in the last, say, four years?
The last time the Republican Party accomplished anything is when President Trump was president and Republicans had unified control of the House and the Senate.
And since then, they've been absolutely incompetent at everything.
So incompetent That the Republicans in the Senate distrust the Republicans in the House to the extent that they voted along with Democrats by a huge margin in order to advance a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package, 4,155 pages long.
And the question is, why exactly they would do this?
Why would Mitch McConnell, as well as the other 17 Republicans who voted in favor of this thing in the Senate, why would they do that?
I mean, because this is a pretty broad spectrum group of people who voted in favor of the omnibus spending package.
It included people like McConnell, of course, but also it included Richard Shelby, Roy Blunt, John Boozman of Arkansas, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine, John Cornyn, Tom Cotton voted in favor of it, Lindsey Graham, Jim Inhofe, Jerry Moran, Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman, Mitt Romney, Mike Rounds, John Thune, Roger Wicker, and Todd Young.
These are not all quote-unquote moderate Republicans.
Some of these people are pretty conservative.
Tom Cotton is a very conservative senator.
Jim Inhofe from Oklahoma is a very conservative senator.
They voted in favor of this omnibus package anyway.
Now, Kevin McCarthy, who wants to be Speaker of the House, it is still not clear whether he actually has the votes to be Speaker of the House in the upcoming Congress.
He had threatened, along with a bunch of other Republicans in the House, that if these Senators voted in favor of the omnibus package, whatever their priorities were in the next Congress, the next Congress would not take up those priorities.
Richard Shelby of Alabama, he said, he's focused on being Speaker.
If I were in his shoes, that's what I would be focused on, trying to get enough votes.
But I don't think that intimidates anybody.
So, what exactly happened here?
Well, the answer from a political point of view is pretty obvious.
The Republicans in the House are a fractious bunch.
The majority that Republicans are going to have in the next Congress is extraordinarily slim.
I mean, we are talking about single-digit majority in the next Congress.
And because of that, that means that the Republican Party is going to have a very difficult time actually marshalling a majority on many of these votes.
Republicans are slated to have 222 votes going into the next Congress.
You require 218 for a majority, which means they have a slim four-seat margin.
And if anybody is sick, inside the Republican caucus turns into a three-seat or a two-seat margin.
When you're talking about a caucus of 222 people, there's a good shot that many of those people are not going to be there on an everyday basis.
Some will be back home, some will be sick, some of them are going to just be drunk.
A lot of drunks in Congress.
Whatever the reason, that slim margin means that the most radical elements of your party are going to have control of the party unless you have very strong leadership.
Now, one thing you can say for the Democrats is that they do have very strong leadership.
Nancy Pelosi, as much as I dislike Nancy Pelosi, she threaded the needle with an extraordinarily slim Democratic majority.
Now, she of course was working with a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate, so she had a lot of leverage to use.
If it had been only a Democratic House, then it is unclear exactly whether she would have had the leverage that normally she'd be seeking.
The Democratic Party also happens to be a lot more ideologically coherent than the Republican Party at this point.
The Democratic Party has essentially nobody in it who is pro-life.
The Democratic Party is fairly unified on economic matters.
They have some divisions on foreign policy matters.
But overall, the Democratic Party is left, the center-left has basically gone away.
It is left and then radical left.
The Republican Party has a broad swath of people, ranging from, if you look in the Senate, people like Lisa Murkowski, all the way out to people like Ted Cruz.
And what that means is very hard to cobble together a majority.
If you look in the House, the same sort of thing applies.
You have people in the Freedom Caucus, and then you have people who are kind of left-leaning Republicans from New York or from California.
What that means is that there is no margin for error in the House.
And if there is not a leader who is capable of actually whipping the votes, Then the Republicans in the Senate are very much afraid that what you'll end up with is a government shutdown.
And this is the thing Mitch McConnell fears more than anything else in life, is another one of these government shutdowns that ends with Joe Biden sitting there and laughing at the Republicans as he waits for their approval ratings to crater leading up to 2024.
And so basically what happened here is that the Republicans in the Senate did not trust the leadership in the House enough to say that when you guys take the majority, we think that we can work with you in order to come up with a cohesive strategy.
And at this point, McConnell doesn't even know who he's negotiating with.
Again, this is not making an excuse for McConnell.
This is explaining the logic behind what McConnell is doing.
There is a logic.
The answer to that logic is that McConnell, other members of the Senate, they should attempt to work with members of the Republican House in order to find a consensus candidate for Speaker if they don't think McCarthy can get the job done.
Right now, they don't even know if they're negotiating with McCarthy.
Because it is not clear, thanks to Matt Gaetz and some of the other sort of more right-wing Republicans in the House, some more of the sort of Trump-MAGA Republicans in the House, many of them have said that they will not support, under any circumstances, McCarthy for Speaker.
And remember, again, he has a four-seat majority.
Which means that if five of them say no, and all the Democrats say no, McCarthy ain't the Speaker.
And we have this kind of bizarre spectacle right now of a bunch of Republicans in the House who have no plausible alternative for the Speaker of the House saying they will not vote for McCarthy.
And so McConnell doesn't even know who he's negotiating with in the House in order to craft a future strategy going into January.
So the easy solution for McConnell was we vote in favor of the Somnibus.
We assume that there will be no actual electoral blowback because honestly, when was the last time there was electoral blowback to a Republican for spending too much?
It just doesn't happen.
It really doesn't.
The American people don't like spending all this money.
And they tend to punish the party that spends the most money.
But if both parties are spending the money, nobody gets punished.
It's sort of a prisoner's dilemma.
If you look at game theory, what game theory sort of suggests is that when you have a situation in which the second best option for both parties, not the first best option, the first best option is you win, they lose.
The second best option is sort of the you both, almost you both lose scenario is sort of the second best option in prisoner's dilemma.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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neither party actually loses because there's nobody to hold accountable for the spending.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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So McConnell and these other Republicans are voting in favor of this thing in order to take a government shutdown or a debt ceiling fight off the table for the next year because they don't even know who they're negotiating with in the House.
Once again, lack of Republican leadership is an astonishing thing right now.
It really is a problem.
The Republican Party used to be a vehicle for victory, as I've talked about, because all parties are supposed to be a vehicle for victory.
They're not supposed to be.
Ideological tentpoles, they are just repositories of political momentum.
This is why you see parties replaced sometimes.
This is why you see Donald Trump able to completely hollow out the inside of the Republican Party and just take that sucker over.
Because again, whoever wins tends to have the momentum, can take over the party.
But what if there's nobody actually there to create a cohesive victory strategy for the Republican Party?
And what if many of the tools that the party used to use to punish people, so for example, punishing senators, At the state legislature level for not doing what the state wanted them to do.
That's gone away thanks to the 17th amendment.
Or let's say that in the house it used to be that the party would punish you by taking away your committee assignment.
Or punish you by trying to primary you.
Now the party doesn't do any of those things.
So, when that is the case, what that means is the party has no leverage over you.
And all the momentum in the party goes to the people who are on the TV the most.
And they have control over the future of the party.
Now, the Democratic Party has kept most of its patronage system.
The Democratic Party has indeed retained an enormous amount of power over its own members.
The Republican Party has not.
The Republican Party has basically dissolved all power at the top levels of the party.
And what that means is that without any level of cohesion, there's chaos.
And with chaos, McConnell and company are just going to look for the easiest possible political solution, which means spending enormous sums of your own money.
So the question as to what exactly the grand old party does these days is very open.
What exactly would you say the Republican Party does do these days when they are signing on the dotted line on the same bills the Democrats are signing on to?
This is not a compromise piece of legislation.
It blows out the budget, again, with another bill that no one has read and is filled with pork and is filled with bad priorities.
So what exactly does the Republican Party do?
It's a serious question.
There better be some leadership inside the Republican Party in short order or they will be in a state of collapse despite the fact that the Democratic Party is wildly unpopular.
Honestly, I cannot remember the last time a party took over the House and was considered more in disarray than the party that had just lost.
Remember, the Democrats control the House right now.
In January, they won't.
But it's the Republican Party that seems to be on the ropes in the House and the Democratic Party that seems to be in control in the House, which is an amazing spectacle and a demonstration of a complete lack of any sort of backbone or leadership capacity inside the Republican House.
So what exactly was in this monstrosity?
There's a lot in a $1.7 trillion bill.
Again, it was a bipartisan 68 to 29 vote to tee up the measure for debate in the House.
A compilation of long-stalled appropriations bills known as nominibus would provide nearly $773 billion for domestic programs and more than $850 billion for the military, covering expenses through the 2023 fiscal year, which concludes at the end of September.
This is why you're seeing hawkish people like Tom Cotton sign on.
He's saying we can't afford to hold up military spending.
We don't want a government shutdown.
That's why Cotton, who happens to be fiscally conservative, signed on to this thing.
It's for the military spending.
Republicans had insisted on robust Pentagon funding in months-long talks with Democrats, who secured some, but not all, of the health, education, labor, and economic spending they wanted.
The must-pass nature of the bill, it was the final major piece of legislation before Congress resets in the new year, also offered a window for lawmakers to advance other long-stalled priorities.
The sweeping omnibus is filled with provisions that would expand at some Medicaid benefits.
Help Americans save for retirement, revise the presidential electoral vote counting process, and ban TikTok on government devices.
But you could have done all of these as separate bills.
The whole purpose of an omnibus sandwich is to be a crap sandwich.
That's the entire purpose of it.
Get people to vote for $800 billion in useless spending in order to get the military spending.
Or if you are the Democrat, get people to vote for the useless spending and then bite your tongue and vote for the military spending.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said this is one of the most significant appropriations packages we have done in a long time.
He stressed that it, quote, made aggressive investment in American families, workers, and national defense.
By the way, you know what it didn't do?
Was actually preserve the border, for example.
There's no funding for closing the border.
Title 42, there was an amendment that was proposed by Mike Lee to maintain Title 42 so at least in the short term we can shut the border.
That was rejected.
There was, of course, that $45 billion in appropriations for Ukrainian weaponry.
And you can be in favor of that and still be very much against an omnibus package that includes an additional $1.65 trillion.
Mike Lee said this is an act of extortion being leveraged on the United States Senate right before Christmas.
This, of course, happens to be exactly true.
Late on Wednesday night, Lee held up consideration of the omnibus as he tried to force lawmakers to extend a controversial immigration policy implemented during the Trump administration.
Senate leaders ultimately worked out an arrangement to permit several amendment votes on the policy, known as Title 42, placating Lee, but his gambit failed.
It allowed lawmakers to finalize the bill hours later.
So, what exactly is in this bill?
Well, as I say, there is a lot that is in this bill.
According to Politico, Ukraine aid is in the bill.
That TikTok ban that was pushed by Senator Josh Hawley that barred the download of TikTok on government devices made it into the bill.
That of course is like baseline stuff.
Of course the TikTok ban should be in the bill.
We just found out over the course of the last 48 hours that TikTok actually spied on journalists.
For all the millions of people who listen to the show and who are using TikTok, get it off your phone.
They know everything about you now, the Chinese government.
CNN reported literally yesterday that TikTok parent company ByteDance had to fire four employees who improperly accessed the personal data of two journalists on the platform, according to a TikTok spokesperson named Brooke Oberwetter.
So, this bill prevents government employees from downloading TikTok on their government devices, It creates things like telehealth extensions, which are fine.
I mean, first of all, the fact that telehealth is banned in particular states is idiotic.
Of course, you should be able to consult with a doctor who happens to be out of state via the internet.
There is a lobster lifeline, which is exciting.
Maine lawmakers successfully included a pause on new regulations they warned would cripple their state's lobster industry.
There's also a bunch of tax provisions.
There's a bunch of spending on the FBI.
Which is kind of astonishing considering the scandal that has now engulfed the FBI in coordinating with social media in order to shut down information about, for example, the Hunter Biden laptop story.
So Republicans and Democrats voted for a big pay raise for the FBI, essentially.
There is a boost for the National Labor Relations Board, the single worst piece of regulatory oversight mechanism in the United States.
The NLRB is garbage.
Lawmakers increased the budget for the NLRB by $25 million for the first time in nearly a decade.
The NLRB's job is basically to yell at businesses until they do the bidding of Democrats.
What else is out?
Well, Biden had wanted $9 billion to help combat the COVID pandemic and other stuff, but that ended up out of the deal.
There was apparently a piece of legislation that would have expanded protections for pregnant workers that didn't make it into the bill.
But there are a bunch of business propositions that made it into the bill, some of which are pretty terrible.
So, for example, antitrust efforts could get a boost at the federal and state levels, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Fees would rise from merger filings.
So what this means is more government intervention in the markets.
The FDA gets new powers to oversee baby formula and cosmetics and to try to ensure that drugs granted a speedy approval undergo further testing to confirm that they work.
Giving more funding to the FDA has been obviously an amazing move.
The FDA did a horrible job during this pandemic.
Retirees could postpone mandatory withdrawals from tax-deferred retirement accounts until they are 73 or 75 instead of 72 under the current rules.
The legislation makes it easier for the president to release heating oil from the federal reserves.
I mean, it's an agglomeration of just nonsense.
I mean, there's some stuff here that's good, and there's a bunch of stuff here that's really bad.
But what this really means in the long term is that we are not getting our spending problem under control.
And we are, by the way, inflating the currency in the middle of an inflationary cycle.
Inflation still has not come down, and the Congress' solution is, what if we toss another $2 trillion in spending in there?
Now this is part of a broader problem that's about to engulf western markets, which is that governments just keep spending and spending and spending and spending.
And they can try to crack down on inflation with With their central banking procedures, but they're not going to be able to stop the economic stagnation that's to come when you just spend too much money.
As Margaret Thatcher once said, eventually you run out of other people's money.
And that is what's going to happen in Europe.
Investors are bracing for European governments led by Germany to flood the market with new debt next year as they spend heavily to shield their economies from high energy costs, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Governments in Europe are expected to increase bond issuance by 10% to 1.2 trillion euros in 2023.
It's equivalent to about 1.27 trillion dollars.
That comes as the European Central Bank steps back from its role as a voracious buyer of eurozone government bonds, with plans to start shrinking its bond portfolio starting in March.
So this flood of new debt from Germany and other eurozone countries means that they are going to start issuing more debt.
It means that you're going to see larger debt and deficits.
And this means, in the end, economic stagnation.
It also means in the United States, when you look at the measures that the White House is currently taking, when you spend this much money, and when you encourage people not to work, what you end up is less people in the workforce.
Which means that by all democratic governing strategies, when you have created a piece of policy that fails, you then create a piggyback piece of policy that also fails.
According to the Wall Street Journal, top White House economic officials are considering a renewed push for a suite of policies aimed at luring more Americans back to work.
You know what we used to call it?
To lure Americans back to work, paying them a salary.
It used to be in this country.
You didn't have to lure people back to work.
People looked for work in this country.
I have to lure people?
Like, what bizarre notion of markets is it that you lure people to work?
The lure was the pay.
You don't have to have the government luring people back to work unless the government is also paying people to stay home.
So there's a quick solution for that.
Stop paying people to stay home.
So what exactly is the White House going to do?
They're now talking about an enhanced child care and elder care benefit as they hammer out priorities for the coming year.
The question of how to find enough workers has emerged as a significant issue as the country emerges from the pandemic, with a smaller share of adults working or looking for work than in early 2020.
White House economic officials expect to brief President Biden on their thoughts over the holiday break as the administration shapes its agenda for 2023 and plans for Biden's State of the Union address.
Brian Deese, director of the White House's National Economic Council, said to the Wall Street Journal, Where are places where we can lower price pressures on the economy, lower costs for consumers, increase the productive potential of the economy?
The things we prioritize and focus on will be in that area.
He didn't make clear exactly what that would look like, but the White House is going to push for paid family leave, universal pre-K, permanent expansion of the child tax credit, etc.
So again, the idea is going to be that we are going to give you additional benefits from the government side if you go to work, as opposed to, you know, taking away the benefits that we are currently giving you to stay home and sit flat on your ass for years on end.
Which means more spending, of course, and forever.
Will Republicans actually stand up to that?
Totally unclear.
Because, I mean, let's be real about this.
If what we just saw in the Senate Republicans voting for an omnibus package with Democrats in order to avoid negotiating with Republicans, there's no reason they can't do that next year.
If the Republicans take over Congress, and if the new Speaker, whoever it is, Kevin McCarthy or anybody else, is unable to wield a durable majority in the House, you could see a bunch of Republicans just peel off and vote with the Democrats and start advancing Joe Biden's priorities.
That's how weak the party is right now.
Now the predictable result of all of this is that you are going to have a stagnating economy in the very near future.
The U.S.
labor market continues to remain very tight because, again, we spent trillions of dollars to keep people at home.
People continue to spend money.
This continues to drive up the inflation rates, which is going to mean that the Federal Reserve has to drive down all of the inflation rates through higher interest rates.
Which is going to mean long-term economic stagnation.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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They are now striking out at the electrical grid in Ukraine, so things are getting uglier.
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This is the direction in which the economy is going to move.
And Democrats can't stop, won't stop.
They're going to continue to push broader spending initiatives that please their most ardent fans.
This is why, for example, Rashid Tlaib and Cori Bush are still out there doing TikTok dances in order to encourage Joe Biden to cancel student loan debt.
And if you think that Joe Biden won't try it again, he will.
Oh no.
Yeah.
Nothing worse than Congress people doing TikTok.
I mean, first of all, no one should ever do TikTok dances.
Are you an adult?
Be an adult.
But aside from that, also you shouldn't be on TikTok because they're going to steal all your data.
So you have Congress people on TikTok giving their data to the Chinese while doing videos about canceling student loan debt.
Both of those people, I believe, went to college, which is a good reason why you should never relieve their student loan debt.
Ever, ever, ever.
And again, the Democrats will continue to pursue really bad policy.
The question is, do the Republicans have any power to stand up to it?
One of the funniest things about the Democrats' bad policy, by the way, is that they have to spend a lot of time pretending that the bad policy doesn't actually exist.
So Mayor Eric Adams is about to be hit with 1,000 illegal immigrants a day once Title 42 ends.
And this is what New York City is actually foreseeing.
He says that Joe Biden is doing fine on the border.
Things are great.
Chuck Schumer, New York Senator, managed to negotiate an increase from $150 million to $800 million for the cities that receive asylum seekers.
And we're told, according to multiple sources, that New York City is positioned to receive a large batch of that amount.
So here's New York City Mayor Eric Adams responding to that news this week.
I think the president has a good understanding of how this is a real issue.
We were able to get this omnibus bill.
It has the money in it that we need, some of the money that we need.
This is a national issue.
And that's my conversation with the president's team.
So this is the same mayor who is yelling at Greg Abbott for shipping a few illegal immigrants up to New York City.
But he's saying that Joe Biden is doing an amazing job.
Listen, there are gaps in the Biden Democrat policy wide enough to drive a Mack truck through.
Joe Biden's approval rating right now is in the low 40s at best.
And yet Republicans seem utterly incapable of taking advantage of that.
Now one reason for that, of course, is that the media are completely in the pocket of Democrats.
Nancy Pelosi, who is now leaving her position as Speaker of the House, she won't be the House Minority Leader either.
Hakeem Jeffries is about to take that over.
She gave her last weekly press briefing yesterday as Speaker of the House with apparently a bunch of crumbs on her jacket or something.
The hobbitses took the last of the lambless bread.
by Nancy Pelosi.
She actually, this is my favorite thing about the relationship between Democrats and their Praetorian Guard is that they don't even pretend that the reporters aren't their best friends.
It's really funny.
Republicans deal with reporters and they're like, God, you guys are just, I understand your opposition and we'll treat each other respectfully, but I'm going to call you out on your nonsense.
Democrats are like, go forward and do the work of the people.
They turn into, they turn into like Mr. Chips at the end of Goodbye Mr. Chips, just giving Here's Nancy Pelosi explaining to the media that they do an amazing job.
As you know, this is my this I thought last week might have been, but this is my final weekly press conference.
And some of you have been covering Congress for a long time.
Others are new.
All of you are guardians of democracy.
You've heard me say again and again, if there were one freedom in the First Amendment, the freedom of the press, that would be the one that protects and defends all the other freedoms.
It must be wonderful being a Democrat when you have an entire legacy media dedicated to your preservation and glorification.
It must be just absolutely wonderful.
And that's why you're able to move forward with Terrible policy, repeatedly.
Now, the Democrats don't just rely on the media in order to push forward their policy.
They have a bunch of forces working in their favor.
One, Republican incompetence.
Two, the media being their absolute best friends.
And three, the ability to misdirect because of one and two, to issues that do not actually take top priority for the American people, but they can spend inordinate amounts of time on.
So Joe Biden made his Christmas address the other night.
You know, he's able to mix religion and politics so long as the religion is so watered down that it doesn't actually hold by anything.
This is the rule in American politics, is you're allowed to make religious appeals, but only to things that have nothing to do with religion, or to a vague sort of spirituality that has nothing to do with the actual gospel if you're Christian, for example.
So Joe Biden, He used Christmas as a time to talk up what a unifying man he was.
I noticed that he wasn't in front of Independence Hall yelling at his political opponents and calling them fascists this time, while calling for unity.
Instead, he was in front of a bunch of twinkly lights over at the White House and explaining that he was a very unifying, unifying man.
I sincerely hope this holiday season will drain the poison that has infected our politics and set us against one another.
I hope this Christmas season marks a fresh start for our nation.
Because there's so much that unites us as Americans.
Well, actually, there is increasingly little that unites us as Americans.
This is actually what the Census Bureau is now showing.
There are a couple of pieces of data that have come out in the last 24 hours showing that when it comes to the fundamental bases upon which we predicate our social fabric, many of these things are wearing away.
And this is why you are seeing a big sort happening in American life.
So there's a certain irony to Joe Biden, who's a deeply anti-religious figure.
I mean, if you look at his social policy, transing the children, same-sex marriage, these are policies that are directed against traditional religion.
There's a president who has suggested that basically, if you're a traditionally religious person, your religious practice needs to end at the front door of your home or at the side door of your church.
That's where your religious practice ends.
And even there, he's basically saying we can do that for now, but not for very long.
He's banking on the fact that in the United States, church attendance has been dropping, that religious adherence has been dropping.
Because if you get rid of the church, then the God becomes the state.
These two things tend to merge.
Human beings have religious impulse.
They want to follow something.
And Joe Biden believes that what people should follow is the moral suasion of government.
And so he does have some forces working in his favor here, including the lack of religious traditionalism in America right now.
According to Hannah Blow reporting for Breitbart, church attendance and general belief in God has dropped in the United States over the past few years, according to recent surveys.
A Gallup survey released over the summer found that belief in God sunk to an all-time low this year, down to 81%.
It identified young individuals and leftists as the people most likely to not believe in God.
It works the other way around, by the way.
The people who are most likely not to believe in God tend to be leftists.
It's not just the leftists don't believe in God.
It's people who don't believe in God tend to move toward the left.
As Breitbart reported at the time, according to the survey, most U.S.
adults, 81%, believe in God.
While that figure seems high, it's the lowest percentage ever recorded in the survey.
Also, there are a lot of people who say they believe in God, but what they mean by believe in God is they believe in vague spiritual forces and sort of the C.S.
Lewis description of the term.
Up until 2011, over 90% of Americans said they believed in God.
The number has continued to drop.
It's now down eight points from 89% to express belief in God in 2016, which is a radical decrease.
You're talking about a 10% decrease in just the last 10 years.
The previous low was set in 2014 when 86% said they believed in God.
When Gallup asked the same question in 1953, 54, 65, 67, 98% said they believed in God.
Also, the Hill found roughly one-fifth of Americans do not consider themselves part of a religion.
Which coincides with the percentage of Americans not expressing belief in God as well.
And again, this leaves out the fact that a huge people who say that they are part of religion aren't actually adherents to the specific tenets of the religion.
I mean, Joe Biden says that he's a religious Catholic, and then again promotes a bunch of policy that is directly against the doctrine of the Catholic Church.
Same thing for Nancy Pelosi.
A Survey Center on American Life report detailed in March 2020 found that younger generations are less likely to adhere to a religion.
Over one-third of Generation Z, 34%, consider themselves unaffiliated from religious groups.
That figure decreases to 29% among Millennials, 25% among Generation X, 18% among baby boomers, and 9% of the silent generation.
There's been a precipitous drop in church membership over the past three decades among those on the political left.
In 1998, a majority of liberals, 57%, were members of a church or other type of religious organization.
Now, 35% of liberals say that they are members of church or another religious organization.
So, when you have Joe Biden sitting there and talking about the unifying traditions of the United States in front of a bunch of Christmas trees, what he does not mean is actual traditional religion, which was the glue that bound together the social fabric of the United States.
De Tocqueville talks about this.
He talks about how religious adherence among common people who gather together in churches and communities was the glue that held together the United States in the absence of an overarching central government.
When you lose that glue, then there has to be some sort of ersatz glue that is used.
A stapler is used.
And that stapler tends to come in the form of government.
And Joe Biden knows this.
This is not just happening in the United States, by the way.
This is happening all around the world.
The secular trends that have taken over the West are going to eat the West.
They're going to destroy the West.
They're going to destroy all of the rights that people have traditionally enjoyed in the United States.
Because the thing is that what upholds the rights of people is, in fact, the fundamental institutions that undergird those rights.
Rights don't just come tabula rasa from nowhere.
Rights do not pre-exist institutions.
They coincide with institutions.
If you read Lockean philosophy, here's where John Locke was wrong.
He suggested If you read him in a particular way.
That rights are inherent and institutions are sort of artificial.
That is not correct.
Institutions pre-exist rights.
Families, the chief institution, pre-exist rights.
Rights were created in order to protect families.
In order to protect spheres of freedom within the roles and institutions that already existed.
When rights start to destroy the institutions, the rights themselves are going to fall apart.
And that's exactly what's happened in, for example, the UK.
In the UK, the institutions of church, of religion, these have become taboo.
It's also happening in Canada.
For example, it's happened all over Europe, and at least Western Europe.
Eastern Europe is still very religious.
And when you look to what's happening in Britain, you'll notice that one of the first things to go, along with freedom of religion, is freedom of speech.
There's an amazing story out of the UK yesterday in which a pro-life activist Was arrested for literally standing outside an abortion clinic.
Now, she wasn't harassing anybody.
She wasn't saying anything.
She wasn't holding a sign.
She was a person standing there.
But you are not allowed to stand there.
There's tape that actually emerged of this incident in Britain.
It's pretty incredible.
Before I ask you any questions about what's going on today, I have to caution you, which is just your rights, which is you do not have to say anything.
It may harm your defence if you do not mention one question or something that you later are in court, anything you do say may be given away.
What are you here for today?
Physically, I'm just standing here.
Okay.
Why here of all places?
I know you don't live nearby.
This is an abortion centre.
Okay.
That's why you're standing here.
Is you standing here part of the protest?
No.
I'm not protesting.
Are you praying?
I might be praying in my head.
So I'll ask you once more, will you voluntarily come with us now to the police station for me to ask you some questions about today and other days where there are allegations that you've broken the Public Spaces Protection Order?
If I've got a choice, then no.
Okay, well then you're under arrest on suspicion of failing to comply with the Public Spaces Protection Order.
Okay, so the Public Spaces Protection Order says that you are not allowed to stand outside an abortion clinic not doing anything.
Any other place in the UK you can apparently just stand there.
They could have arrested her for loitering or trespassing.
They don't.
They're arresting her because she is silently praying.
In her head.
Without moving her face.
You think that rights matter in the UK?
They do not.
We're not even talking about freedom of religion.
That'd be like freedom of speech.
How about like freedom of standing there?
According to Fox News, Isabel Von Spruce, director of the UK March for Life, was standing near the BPAS Robert Clinic in Kings Norton, Birmingham, in an area ADF UK called a censorship zone.
When police approached her after an onlooker complained she might be praying outside the abortion facility.
God forbid.
That would just be terrible.
If somebody were to pray, I mean, that's terrible.
Birmingham's authorities established a buffer zone around abortion clinics, which makes it illegal for an individual to engage in any act or attempted act of approval or disapproval as it relates to abortion and includes verbal or written means like praying or counseling.
So it is now approval or disapproval to stand there.
To literally stand there.
Vaughn Spruce says, I was exercising my freedom of thought, my freedom of religion inside the privacy of my own mind.
Nobody should be criminalized for thinking and for praying in a public space in the UK.
She says this is something I've pretty much done every week for around the last 20 years of my life.
I pray for my friends who've experienced abortion and for the women who are thinking about going through with it themselves.
Von Spruce has stood near the abortion facility while it was closed three times and said she might have been praying.
According to the ADF UK, police showed her photos of herself standing outside the facility and asked if she was praying, which she said she could not answer since she spent some time praying but got distracted at other times.
Not praying the whole time.
I mean, this sort of stuff, again, if you believe that the social fabric of the United States is going to withstand the secular encroachments that essentially argue against the rights of religion and speech, so long as they violate the tenets and belief system of the left, this is what you end up with in the UK.
And so what you're seeing in the United States is increasingly a big sort, an ideological sort happening.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
First, in case you missed it, my book club, Ben Shapiro's book club, returned last night for a brand new episode that is available to watch now exclusively on Daily Wire+.
We went through The Screwtape Letters by C.S.
Lewis.
It's a phenomenal book.
It's really moving.
It has a lot to say about the human condition, about God.
You must be an all-access member to watch.
Trust me when I say you don't want to miss it.
So head on over to dailywire.com slash Ben.
Become a member today.
Watch the latest episode of my book club.
That's dailywire.com slash Ben today.
Okay, so the decline of religion in the United States is actually causing a greater rift in the United States.
The promise was that as religion declined in the United States, that secularism would take over.
There would be sort of a vast blob and we would all be part of that vast blob together in which we got together under the auspices of government.
Instead, what's happening is that people are fleeing, fleeing the more secularized states and they are moving to more religious states.
Now, it also happens to be that a lot of those more religious states have broader economic protections, broader economic freedoms.
This is one of the things that I think the left refuses to understand, is again, rights, particularly property rights, are very much connected to viable institutions that instill social trust.
When you have a religious community, people are very respectful of other people's property rights, specifically because they know that their neighbor is not trying to screw them.
One of the things that Adam Smith talks about in his first major work, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, is the idea that you have to have viable social institutions, that people are motivated by sympathy, and this creates trust, and that when that trust exists, you can have free markets.
Well, when you have societies in which that doesn't exist, you end up with Sam Bankman Freitas, we'll get to in just one moment.
But what you are seeing in the United States is a major shift in population.
According to Pluribus News, the United States added more than 1.2 million residents over the course of the past year as population growth rebounded from pandemic-era lows.
That is an increase attributed almost entirely to international migrants coming to the country.
So that is partially our open border.
But the more important part of this study, aside from the fact that we aren't having kids and we're importing population, the more important part of the study is where exactly population is being gained.
Population growth is not even across the states.
Almost all of the top 10 states that added the most residents were in the South.
Texas added 470,000 new residents.
Florida added 416,000 people.
North Carolina and Georgia both added more than 100,000 residents.
Arizona added 94,000.
South Carolina, Tennessee, Washington, Utah, Idaho all added tens of thousands of new residents.
The populations of Florida, Idaho, South Carolina, Texas, South Dakota, and Montana all grew by more than 1.5%.
You'll notice that in that list, the only blue state is Washington.
That is the only blue state.
And it is important to mention that in Washington, eastern Washington is very heavily red.
Rust Belt states continued a long trend of population declines.
New York's population fell by 180,000.
Illinois shed more than 100,000 people.
Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Ohio all lost population as well.
California has seen its population drop in recent years too.
The nation's largest state declined by 113,000 people last year.
The number of people who moved out of California outpaced the number who moved in by a whopping 343,000 residents, according to the Census Bureau data.
Nearly 300,000 New Yorkers moved out of the state over the last year alone.
So when we're talking about, you know, how many people overall left, some people moved in, but way more people moved out.
Texas has now joined California as the only two states with populations north of 30 million.
Florida, which only recently passed New York to become the nation's third most populous state, has more than 2.5 million more residents than the Empire State.
So, it is not a shock.
All of these states in the South are becoming more red as they become more populous.
Meanwhile, all of the states in the Northeast, in the Rust Belt, California, they are becoming blue as they become less populous.
Makes perfect sense.
A giant ideological sort is happening right now.
And the states that are going to grow the fastest are the ones that provide for economic freedom.
The states that are going to grow the fastest also happens to be those also happen to be the states with the highest levels of religious adherence.
This is not a coincidence.
The left wishes you to believe that freedom is dependent on freedom from godliness, freedom from religion, freedom from community, freedom from institutions.
The only freedom that is dependent on that is sexual libertinism.
All the other freedoms are actually very much dependent on viable social institutions that hold together a society built on trust.
And when those institutions disappear, what you end up with is a less trusting America.
Now, the great irony of what's happening economically speaking right now in terms of, say, Sam Bankman Freed, is that the entire basis of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency was supposed to be a trustless system.
The idea was you don't need social institutions in order to trust the trustless system because, obviously, cryptocurrencies are reliant on the blockchain.
The blockchain is all about verifiability and being able to track money through various mechanisms and being able to verify that certain transactions have taken place and that the money that is in your specific wallet is yours and all the rest.
But people have a tendency always to rely on trust, even when they should not.
And that's how Sam Bankman Freed took advantage of the situation.
Yesterday, he was released on $250 million bond with restrictions.
Now, was he really released on $250 million bond?
The answer is no.
Nobody put up $250 million in collateral so Sam Bankman Freed could walk around free.
That's not exactly what happened here.
Basically, the government pretended that they had set the bond that high in order so they could say that we're taking this super seriously.
In reality, his parents basically put up his house, their house, as collateral.
But the likelihood is that Bankman Freed is going to spend an awful long time in prison.
His release also followed an announcement by Damian Williams, the U.S.
Attorney for Southern District of New York, on Wednesday night that two former executives of Bankman Freed's businesses, Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, had pled guilty to federal fraud charges and were cooperating with prosecutors.
Those charges against the executives are likely to further complicate Bankman Freed's defense.
The criminal investigation into FTX and its related entities have moved with startling speed.
In under two months, FTX went from a flourishing exchange to a bankrupt entity whose executives are facing criminal charges for some of the financial world's most serious violations.
Prosecutors have said that Bankman Freed's crimes led to the implosion of his exchange in billions in customer losses.
So, again, this is what happens.
Even a trustless system, it turns out, people tend to want to trust people.
They do want to trust people.
And when you have a system In the United States, more broadly speaking in the West, that undermines fundamental basis of trust because we don't have the same values anymore.
And what is supposed to replace it is kind of niceness and civility, as opposed to common standards of behavior and common goals.
What you end up with is an Airsat social fabric that is about as comfortable as nylon.
It is not going to wear well.
And that's what's happening in the United States writ large in terms of our civil society.
So people are forming new civil societies, but they're doing so on the state level.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into the January 6th committee report, but more importantly, we'll be having on Dr. Robert Malone, famous for having been essentially censored by all of media for his questions about vaccination.
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