All Episodes
Jan. 11, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:14
Pete Buttigieg Can’t Make The Planes Fly On Time | Ep. 1644
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Flights across America are grounded as the FAA falls down on the job, but at least Pete Buttigieg isn't on paternity leave this time.
House Republicans move forward with a committee to investigate the deep state, and Joe Biden denies knowing anything at all about missing classified documents.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Alrighty, so this morning, a bunch of flights were grounded.
They are now flying again, but with severe delays.
According to the New York Times, the Federal Aviation Administration lifted an order to ground all flights across the United States shortly before 9 a.m.
Eastern on Wednesday after a system failure left pilots, airlines, and airports without crucial safety information for hours on end.
The agency said normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the United States.
There are more than 4,000 flights within, into, and out of the United States.
It had been delayed on Wednesday, according to FlightAware.
That was a flight tracking service.
The delays were spread across the country.
They affected multiple carriers.
Passengers across the country said their plans had been scuttled.
Airport employees sometimes knew little more than passengers did.
But the good news is that at least Pete Buttigieg is on the job.
That's the really important thing.
The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, mostly famous for not being able to fill potholes very well in South Bend, Indiana, and also being gay.
He's been just a stellar Secretary of Transportation, from near railroad strikes, to failures of supply chains, to the airlines actually not being able to get their planes in the air, thanks to FAA failures.
He's just been a godsend, truly.
And it's really his leadership and the leadership of President Biden that's so inspiring.
According to Ron Klain, the White House Chief of Staff, he said, The president directed the Department of Transportation, FAA, to restore the system quickly and safely and to determine causes.
Secretary Pete will provide the president an update later this morning.
Wow.
Wow.
I mean, that is leadership right there.
You mean Joe Biden called up Pete Buttigieg and he directed them to restore the system quickly and safely and to determine the causes?
That is some ballsy leadership right there.
I mean, other leaders, they might have directed Secretary Pete to leave the system down and then to gradually, slowly and dangerously restore the system and never figure out the causes.
But Joe Biden, that man is on the ball.
He says that the system had to be restored.
And behold, it was.
That is just grand leadership there from the president of the United States.
Of course, no one's going to really ask, you know, what sort of leadership failures led to this problem in the first place, because that might move too far up the chain.
I've never seen as many transportation problems as Undersecretary Pete.
He's just been doing a stellar, stellar job.
Apparently, the disruption was caused by an outage to a system the FAA uses to send real-time safety alerts to pilots.
Those NOTAM alerts, they're short for Notice to Air Mission, are crucial to planning flights and are used to share information about hazards in the air or on the ground, such as closed runways, airspace restrictions, and navigational signal disruptions.
So complete chaos in the air again.
This follows shortly on the holiday snafu with regard to Southwest Airlines, which became overwhelmed and canceled thousands of flights over the course of the last couple of weeks.
That airline alone canceled about 16,700 flights in the last 10 days of December.
That was about half of all U.S.
flight cancellations during that period.
What exactly does Pete Buttigieg do for a living?
Like, what exactly is it?
No one seems to know.
But he does appear on national television and explain why it is deeply important that he take his husband, Chasen, to various international events.
Because after all, other secretaries of transportation have also taken their wives to those events.
And that is standing up to the man, is talking about that sort of stuff.
So, you know, we've got the best men on it.
Top men.
Top men.
It's all gonna be great.
Meanwhile, the House Republicans are moving forward to form a committee to investigate government overreach.
This particularly would be true of the so-called deep state.
These are career employees and bureaucrats in some of the most powerful areas of the federal executive branch, the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ.
And people are fighting mad about it in the press and in the Democratic Party, which is amazing because you'll recall that there have been times in America's past where it's been the Democratic Party that has been very, very upset with the FBI.
Go back to the 1960s or go back to the 1930s.
You'll recall that the Democratic Party and the media have been very upset with the idea that the federal government should have the power to reach into people's lives and uncover information.
And in fact, they've been very much in favor of oversight.
The media particularly like oversight committees into things like the DOJ and the FBI because it is that way that the media gain all sorts of information.
However, when the shoe is on the other foot, and when it seems as though a lot of Democrat staffers are now occupying places of power in these particular agencies, now any sort of oversight is bad.
According to the Washington Post, the House on Tuesday approved a GOP resolution to create a select subcommittee Republicans say will launch a far-reaching investigation of the agencies and people that investigated Donald Trump and the Democrats described as an unprecedented breach of protocol on criminal probes and national security matters.
Ah yes, now the Democratic Party is very, very upset with the possibility of implying bad things about the FBI, the CIA, our DOJ, when they spent literally decades doing just that.
You'll recall they spent nearly all of the 2000s claiming that it was our nation's intelligence agencies that lied us into war because they just wanted oil or some such nonsense.
The subcommittee approved on a party line 221 to 211 vote will be empowered to investigate any federal agency that collects information about Americans, even in cases of an ongoing criminal investigation, a carve out at odds with the Justice Department's longstanding practice of not providing information about ongoing investigations. And the reason for this, of course, is because the FBI has completely botched itself over the course of the last seven years, going all the way back to 2015, 2016, when they were investigating the Donald Trump campaign over supposed Russian collusion based on a
very thinly veiled report commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign and then laundered into the FBI and then used as the predicate for spying on Carter Page, who is a sort of low level Trump campaign associate.
The FBI has done a horrific job throughout this entire process.
And unfortunately, the DOJ under Merrick Garland has done a similarly terrible job.
It is the DOJ under Merrick Garland that, for example, said that it was going to investigate parents who complained about school boards because the National School Boards Association was upset that some parents were upset That school boards were in fact indoctrinating their kids and or covering up in the case of Loudoun County, Virginia, a rape.
So the fact that the legislative branch of the federal government would like to do oversight over the executive branch of the federal government, this has always been an area of controversy.
It has always been an area Where the executive branch likes to claim that it has some sort of free hand from the legislative branch and the legislative branch likes to subpoena the executive branch.
There's always been an area of constitutional battling.
There's nothing wrong with that.
And in fact, it is very good that we have legislative oversight of the most powerful branches of the executive.
If we did not, the executive would be completely unfettered in its ability to peer into every area of American life.
So normally, as I say, the media would be in favor of this because, again, more transparency is something supposedly the media likes, except if a Democrat is running the government, in which case investigating the excesses of the executive branch, that in and of itself is an act of treason.
It's an act of so-called insurrection to do basic legislative oversight.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
First, if one of your big goals this year is to do business with companies that don't hate your guts, check out Pure Talk.
Pure Talk is the antidote to woke wireless companies.
It's proudly veteran-owned, employs a U.S.-based customer service team, and absolutely refuses to spend money on fake news networks.
Not to mention, Pure Talk's service is really, really good.
They're one of the largest networks in the country.
You can get blazing fast data talk and text for as low as $30 a month.
That's probably half of what you're paying to the big guys like Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile.
Switch over to Pure Talk in as little as 10 minutes.
You can keep your phone, and you can keep your phone number.
Here's the other thing.
If you're worried about coverage, well, they use the same tower network as one of the big guys, so you really have nothing to worry about.
The first month is guaranteed risk-free.
Try it.
If you're not completely happy with the service, you get your money back.
Go to puretalk.com and enter promo code SHAPIRO, save 50% off your very first month of coverage.
This year, make it a goal to support the companies that actually don't hate your guts.
That's puretalk.com, promo code SHAPIRO.
Pure Talk is simply smarter wireless.
Stop handing oodles of cash over to companies that really don't like you very much.
Instead, give it to a company that is not going to overcharge you and also kind of likes you.
Head on over to puretalk.com, promo code SHAPIRO for 50% off your very first month of coverage.
Also, It's the new year, which means business is getting started afresh.
And if you are a company that uses the mail a lot, you owe it to yourself to check out stamps.com.
You can't afford to spend the time schlepping that stuff down to the post office and standing in line and doing all the stuff you have to do at the post office.
Instead, do it directly from your own offices.
For many businesses, January means dealing with customer emails, returns, exchanges, and the inevitable increase in postage costs that follows.
Stamps.com teamed up with the post office to get you huge mailing and shipping discounts of up to 86% off.
It is a no-brainer for your small business, which is why we've been using it here at Daily Wire since 2017.
Print your own postage right from your home or office within minutes of signing up.
Never stress about finding the fastest and cheapest shipping solutions.
Stamps.com does the work for you.
Stamps.com is a one-stop shop for all your shipping and mailing needs.
For 20 years, Stamps.com has been indispensable for over a million businesses.
Get access to the USPS and UPS services you need to run your business right from your computer, anytime, day or night, no lines, no traffic, and no waiting.
Start the new year by saving money on mailing and shipping.
Get started with stamps.com today.
Sign up with promo code Shapiro for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and digital scale for free.
No long-term commitments or contracts.
Go to stamps.com.
Click the mic at the top of the page, enter a code Shapiro.
According to the Washington Post, the broad resolution explicitly authorizes the Select Committee to seek access to highly classified information provided by intelligence agencies to the House Intelligence Committee.
Members of that panel are often briefed on extremely sensitive information with contents that, if widely shared, could damage national security and endanger the lives of American intelligence officers and their assets.
And again, one of the reasons that the resolution authorizes the Select Committee to seek that access is because we had years of Adam Schiff lying, by who's a member of the House Intelligence Committee, lying that he had seen evidence of Russian collusion by Donald Trump Going into the press and saying that sooner or later the other shoe was going to drop and never dropped, but that did not stop him from leaking like a sieve.
By the way, the intelligence agencies have leaked like a sieve.
Every time there is a raid on Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago, for example, we get details leaked to the press in very conveniently placed fashion.
I mean, as it turns out, you have people like Andy McCabe who are working for the FBI and we're coordinating with the press to leak things beneficial to people like Andy McCabe.
So investigating all of these agencies, this again, would be a basic, proper function of government.
One congressional investigator who works on oversight issues says its mandate is whatever Jim Jordan wants to do.
To which I say, good.
This is a good thing.
Republicans who have accused Attorney General Merrick Garland of abusing investigative powers to target conservatives have compared the new committee to the Senate Church Committee formed by Democrats in 1975 to investigate civil liberties abuses by intelligence agencies.
Democrats have countered that the committee has been born out of a grudge match over the FBI's investigation of one person, Donald Trump.
Now, let's just say that that's actually true for a second.
Let's say that the reason Republicans are really, really exercised is because of the FBI's investigation of Donald Trump.
Here's my question.
So, so it turns out that the FBI was in fact violating ethics, violating regulations in the way that it pursued Trump.
They were doing so on the basis of very slim and unsubstantiated intelligence.
They were leaking to the press.
They were doing all of this while implying, if not openly stating, that Donald Trump was in fact a Russian plant.
Eli Lake has done excellent work reporting about all of this for years on end.
So-called Russiagate was a complete ginned-up bag of nonsense and the intel community continued to push it.
In fact, members of the intel community like James Comey specifically went out of their way to present Donald Trump in the very early days of his presidency.
But the Steele dossier simply said he could then, presumably, leak that to the press and then the press would run with the allegations of the Steele dossier and all of those allegations would be out in public view because the news could then claim that it was newsworthy what was in the Steele dossier even though none of it had been substantiated.
The DOJ has declined so far to comment on the proposal.
Representative Thomas Massey of Kentucky told reporters Tuesday he'll be serving on the subcommittee.
It's unclear who else is going to be tapped by GOP leadership.
While the resolution establishing the subcommittee is ambitious, alarmingly so to Democrats who view the panel as a political attack machine disguised as an oversight body.
Ah, well, you know, Democrats, they've never used government as a political attack machine except for every single time they put their hands on government.
The workings of the subcommittee are still a little bit mysterious.
The DOJ has at times quarreled with congressional committees over what information should or should not be shared with Congress.
The new panel will consist of eight Republicans and five Democrats.
Unlike other committees, members of the subcommittee do not have to serve on the Judiciary Committee to be appointed.
Democrats are not planning to boycott the committee, according to people familiar with the matter, as McCarthy did, Kevin McCarthy, the new Speaker of the House, when he pulled his picks to serve on the House January 6th panel.
Well, that is presumably because Democrats wish to actually hamper the ongoing investigation.
Republicans refuse to participate in the January 6th committee, except for Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, specifically because they felt that the Democrats are going to rig the game.
Here, Democrats understand Republicans are probably not going to rig the game in nearly the same way, and so they may as well serve on the committee and attempt to stand in favor of these agencies.
The great irony is who Democrats are trotting out to try and protect these agencies.
So Adam Schiff, who should be summarily impeached given his role in lying to the American public repeatedly, overtly, and often about the Russiagate investigation.
He was out there ripping on any investigation to investigate the investigators.
I'm sure that he is quite afraid that maybe his name is going to come up once or twice.
And if you had any doubt about what this committee is really about, about its true focus, my colleague from Montana just confirmed this is all about deep state nonsense.
Republicans claim without merit that this subcommittee will investigate the so-called weaponization of the federal government, but what it's really intended to do ...is to undermine the legitimate investigation of President Trump's incitement of a violent attack on this building, on this Capitol, on this citadel of democracy.
Okay, this is a complete misdirection from Adam Schiff that has nothing to do with January 6th.
This has to do with the fact that the intelligence agencies did, in fact, exceed their boundaries.
Intelligence agencies did, in fact, move beyond their regulatory authority and their investigative authority to lie to courts.
And the fact that Adam Schiff is now standing for these people is because he was complicit in all of that.
Adam Schiff is one of the worst members of Congress in modern American history, and he is out there standing in favor of these investigative agencies having no oversight.
There is a reason for that.
That is because they wish for these investigative agencies who are largely staffed with career Democrats at this point, at least in the highest level positions, not the low level FBI agents who are doing a really good job, not the people who are staffing up the CIA who are doing their best, the people who are at the upper middle level management, and the people who have been put in political positions by the Biden administration.
They are doing the job that Democrats wish them to do.
Merrick Garland is overtly doing that over the DOJ, so no wonder Democrats are in favor of protecting these particular institutions.
Meanwhile, Democratic Representative Jim McGovern of the Massachusetts 2nd District, he is suggesting that Republicans are now anti-police for wanting to do oversight, which is an amazing, amazing thing.
Remember, the Republicans overall are not suggesting a complete defunding of these agencies.
There are some Republicans who have suggested defunding the FBI.
That does not have any really core level support inside the Republican caucus.
The notion that Republicans are anti-law enforcement as opposed to anti-the abuse of authority by law enforcement is absurd, and Jim McGovern has no leg to stand on right here.
And Jim McGovern, it is a ridiculous thing for Jim McGovern to suggest that he is somehow in favor of law enforcement.
He's one of the most liberal members of Congress.
Here we go.
Let's start with the subcommittee's mandate, which is recklessly broad.
Speaker McCarthy is essentially handing Mr. Jordan the power to target anyone and anything he doesn't like.
Anything and anyone he deems unconstitutional, illegal, or unethical.
Republicans claim to care about law enforcement, but this new committee is about attacking law enforcement.
It's about going after people.
It's about destroying people's careers and lives.
It's about undermining the Department of Justice, defunding the police, and settling scores on behalf of the twice impeached and disgraced former occupant of the Oval Office.
The insane gaslighting here is about defunding the police and being anti-law enforcement.
Here is a tweet from Representative Jim McGovern.
Same guy.
OK, this is circa May 29th, 2020.
Ayanna Pressley, one of the most radical members of Congress, tweeted this, quote, For too long, black and brown bodies have been profiled, surveilled, policed, lynched, choked, brutalized, and murdered at the hands of police officers.
We cannot allow these fatal injustices to go unchecked any longer.
Today, I'm introducing a resolution to condemn police brutality.
Representative Jim McGovern, who you just heard there saying, law enforcement must be protected at all costs.
We can never question law enforcement.
Law enforcement, they're the greatest people.
They're the best.
No defund the police.
He said, quote, I'm proud to stand with Representative Ayanna Pressley to introduce this important resolution.
We must demand accountability.
Then we must turn our outrage into action and demand an end to the systems of oppression and racism that lead to black and brown lives being threatened and lost.
Same exact guy saying, oh, we can't talk about defunding.
You want to defund the police?
You want to defund the police?
He's one of the most radical members of Congress doing this routine.
It's amazing, amazing stuff.
But again, it's not about principle for so many of these Democrats.
Instead, a lot of this is simply about protecting agencies they think are doing their work.
Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee, Democrat of Texas, doing the exact same thing.
It's so terrible.
How could you question law enforcement?
It's just terrible to question law enforcement.
Here's Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee.
I thank the gentleman very much.
Mr. Cole, I remember after 9-11 when we all worked together to ensure the protection of the American people through the Patriot Act and dealing with the FISA courts.
We worked together.
Because truth is important.
Oh, they're in favor of the Patriot Act now.
The Democrats.
They love this sort of government surveillance now.
How interesting.
How fascinating.
By the way, Sheila Jackson Leahy is also a fan of the generalized movement of money away from cops and instead toward social programming or whatever.
So it's all hypocrisy.
It's all nonsense.
And you have to wonder, why are so many people who generally hate law enforcement suddenly so in favor of the powers of law enforcement?
Why, almost as though they believe, not on a principled level in law enforcement, but in the use of law enforcement apparatuses in order to target their political opponents.
And they don't want any oversight of that sort of stuff.
And that is why they are so mad.
Well, maybe again, one of the reasons they're so mad is because if law enforcement actually does its job, And if law enforcement does not exceed its boundaries, maybe the law will be equally applied, and that would be a real problem for them.
Instead, they prefer the sort of media-driven law enforcement, the way that that's done.
Because that means that if Joe Biden hides classified documents at his presidential, vice presidential library or whatever, the Biden-Penn Center for International Diplomacy, if those documents are found over there, that's totally fine.
And we should all just kind of ignore it.
Joe Biden yesterday was asked about this breaking story about how there were documents that were found by his attorneys, classified documents, were packing up his Washington office he used after serving as vice president and turn the materials over to the National Archives in November.
Here is Joe Biden reading a prepared statement about how surprised he was those documents were found.
They found some documents in a box in a locked cabinet, or at least a closet.
And as soon as they did, they realized there were several classified documents in that box.
I was briefed about this discovery and surprised to learn that there were any government records that were taken there to that office.
But I don't know what's in the documents.
My lawyers have not suggested I ask what documents they were.
He is literally reading from a piece of paper right now.
And normally, when you're protesting your innocence, you don't read from a piece of paper.
But apparently, listen, he wants to be very careful about what he says legally here because, of course, the wall was broken.
And so he's reading from a prepared piece of paper.
We're supposed to pretend that everything is fine and on the up and up now.
Everything is fine.
Now, here's the reality.
My guess is that a bunch of classified documents ended up in Joe Biden's possession, probably by accident.
In the same way that Donald Trump, who had the power to declassify, probably just grabbed some documents and put them in the closet.
And it wasn't because he was spying and it wasn't because it was nefarious and criminal.
It was just because Donald Trump likes documents.
And Joe Biden probably did some version of the same thing.
He liked these documents.
He brought them to his library.
It turns out that they were classified.
The difference, of course, is the vice president can't summarily declassify.
The president of the United States can.
However, there is one slight problem with the Joe Biden story here, and that is the timing.
If you go back to the actual calendar with regard to when this story broke.
As it turns out, the documents were discovered according to Bloomberg on November 2nd, 2022, six days before the midterm election.
Their existence was only made public on Monday.
The revelation of the documents came as the Justice Department has appointed a special counsel to investigate former President Donald Trump's handling of classified materials at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Federal investigators recovered dozens of classified files during an FBI search of the former president's residence.
So it turns out that there were 10, 12 documents under Joe Biden's auspices.
Biden's lawyer says the documents were not the subject of any previous request or inquiry by the archives.
Since that discovery, the president's personal attorneys have cooperated with the archives and the DOJ in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden administration records are appropriately in the possession of the archives.
There is one problem, however, again, the timing.
Why is it that this was all reported to law enforcement, to the National Archives, November 2nd, six days before the election?
And again, I may not be an expert on chronology, but it is now January 11th, 2023.
We are months after this happened, and this is when we find out.
Weird!
Now, I have a feeling that if this sort of raid had happened on Donald Trump, Or if Donald Trump had turned over documents, that this would have been in the news legitimately five minutes later.
It would have been leaked by members of the so-called deep state to the press immediately because all malfeasance by members of the Trump administration was immediately leaked to the press by people who are in the Intel community.
Somehow the DOJ stayed super silent on this.
There were no leaks whatsoever.
Somehow the Intel community had nothing.
Somehow the National Archives was totally silent four months past the election.
How interesting.
How fascinating.
Almost as though the politicization of law enforcement is a bad thing and has a real impact on how people view the institutional trust they have with regard to law enforcement.
Because we all know that this is the case.
If these parties had been reversed.
If, in fact, we had been talking about a high-ranking prominent Republican who had to call up the National Archives and turn in documents six days before the election.
Well, we all know that would have been in the press five seconds later.
But if it's the president of the United States, far be it for us to say anything about this.
It's the same exact thing with the Hunter Biden story.
It turns out that Hunter Biden was under investigation by the FBI for literally a year before the 2020 election.
And that was revealed safely after the election.
Now, again, I'm all for law enforcement not leaking material, but selectively leaking material, which is what law enforcement routinely does now at the federal level.
That sort of stuff ought to be investigated.
This has become a habit throughout government.
I mean, by the way, isn't it kind of amazing that we still don't know who at the Supreme Court leaked out the early draft of Roe v. Wade being overturned?
Isn't that kind of amazing?
Why is it that leaks from one side are immediately tracked down and exposed to public view?
Leaks from the other side, we kind of throw up our hands and that sort of stuff.
It just happens after all.
And even if you turn out to be a person who is thrown out of your job at the FBI for leaking, like Andy McCabe, who I've mentioned before, you just end up as a contributor on CNN.
So it's all very convenient.
At least props to Mark Warner in Virginia, who must be feeling the heat in Virginia, a state that is turning purple again after being blue for quite a while.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, is calling for his committee to receive a briefing on the classified documents discovered in an office used by Joe Biden.
He said in a statement, Our system of classification exists in order to protect our most important national security secrets.
We expect to be briefed on what happened to both Mar-a-Lago and at the Biden office as part of our constitutional oversight obligations.
So we will find out what exactly happened, I hope, under Republican auspices.
Suffice it to say, the reason the Democrats are very upset with the Republicans taking over Congress is not because Republicans are going to move an awful lot of serious legislation.
They're not.
Democrats control the Senate.
They're not going to be able to pass anything that Joe Biden is going to sign.
That isn't some sort of surrender on spending, for example.
But Democrats are very concerned, and they should be, about the oversight powers that are about to be exercised by Jim Jordan.
Just another reason why Jim Jordan should be at the head of the Judiciary Committee exercising those powers.
You need that guy on that wall.
That is why it is better that he be there than, for example, as Speaker of the House.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
First, there are a lot of jobs out there that are still open, and it's hard to find great people to fill those jobs.
Like, for example, here at The Daily Wire, we are still looking to fill these roles in 2023.
VP of Paid Media, Senior Publicist, Senior Network Engineer.
If your company is similarly looking for people, you ought to do what we are doing and head on over to ZipRecruiter.com slash Daily Wire.
Try it for free.
ZipRecruiter uses powerful technology to find the right candidates for your job.
See a candidate you like?
You can easily send them a personal invite so they're more likely to apply.
Their user-friendly dashboard makes it easy to filter, review, and rate your candidates all from one place.
Let ZipRecruiter help you find the best people for all your roles.
Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within day one.
See for yourself.
Head on over to ZipRecruiter.com slash DailyWire.
Try ZipRecruiter for free.
Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash D-A-I-L-Y-W-I-R-E.
ZipRecruiter.com slash DailyWire.
ZipRecruiter is indeed the smartest way tire.
Indeed, there are very few good alternatives.
Head on over to ZipRecruiter.
Find yourself the best employees you possibly can.
ZipRecruiter.com slash DailyWire to get started.
And meanwhile, democratic governance across the nation continues to be an absolute bleep show.
There are two governors who addressed their respective states over the course of the last 48 hours.
Both of them laid out plans that basically demonstrate they understand their states are failing, and now they have to take, wait for it, conservative responses to their own states failing.
In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul is promising a safer and more affordable New York, according to Politico, that will reassure both residents and outsiders to build their lives in the state suffering sharp population losses.
During her second State of the State speech, but her first full-fledged event due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the newly elected governor on Tuesday introduced a plan to restore access to what she called the New York Dream, one in which people feel safe in their communities and supported by their government.
And here's what she says, quote, The question we must all ask ourselves is, are New Yorkers living their best possible lives?
If the answer is no, we have more work to do.
The reality is that dream is out of reach for too many New Yorkers.
And she alluded to the fact that there are too many people who are leaving New York.
Quote, we're already seeing signs of out migration.
We cannot ignore.
Something I know all too well from growing up in Western New York at a time when jobs are so hard to find.
We cannot allow that to happen again.
The good news is it doesn't have to be this way.
So she's now admitting that people are fleeing the state.
This is the same lady who suggested, as did her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, that Republicans ought to leave the state.
And then when all the Republicans leave the state, they're like, where are all the people going?
Why aren't they staying here?
Maybe because you're really bad at governance.
Maybe it's because of that, which is the reason, presumably, why Kathy Hochul won a relatively slim victory over a Republican opponent in a state that is entirely blue.
So, what exactly is she planning to do?
Well, she's planning to, presumably, end all cash bail.
She's talking about reinvestigating that one.
So people on the left are very upset with her.
But of course, that is something that had to happen and something Lee Zeldin focused in on.
And so now she's going to triangulate on that particular issue.
Also, she is now going to spend an enormous amount of money on building 800,000 new homes in the next decade with specific growth targets for each municipality.
She also announced a minimum wage increase above the current $15 that is tied to inflation.
So, good luck to New York businesses.
She's going to rapidly increase the minimum wage above the current $15, tied to inflation.
And also, she's going to use taxpayer dollars in order to subsidize public housing.
Good luck, guys.
If you think that this is enough triangulation to save your state, not going to happen.
But again, it is fascinating to see the certain sort of moves that Hochul is making in a more conservative direction.
She now wants a $1 billion proposal to create thousands of new units of mental health housing and open a thousand hospital beds for psychiatric patients, which, last I checked, is something that conservatives have been pushing for because they are properly pointing out that the homelessness crisis and the crime crisis in New York City is largely driven by mental illness and drug use, which of course is exactly true.
Meanwhile, the same thing is happening over in California.
You'll recall that Gavin Newsom, who desperately wants to run for president if Joe Biden should fall down the stairs conveniently for Gavin Newsom, the Androgynous Kendall of California politics, he gave his own budget proposal.
That budget proposal is now projecting climate change spending cuts and cutting spending on transportation programs because they have a $22.5 billion budget shortfall.
As it turns out, you can't just spend endless amounts of money forever, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The $297 billion spending plan released on Tuesday represents an $11 billion decrease from the current year's budget.
It comes just months after the Democrats signed a record-busting $308 billion budget, buoyed by a $100 billion surplus.
So just a few months after they claimed a $100 billion surplus, they are now claiming a $23 billion deficit.
And so now, they're going to radically decrease the spending.
Newsom said the whiplash demonstrates the effect of California's progressive tax system on state revenues, which rely heavily on personal income taxes, particularly from the ultra-wealthy.
So in other words, your garbage progressive tax income system, which taxes the wealthy, and then the wealthy leave, and it undermines your state revenue.
Yeah, maybe you should spend less money and tax less.
And then maybe people like me and my family would not have moved from California, my business wouldn't have taken its hundred employees and moved to Nashville.
California's projected deficit comes as many other states are currently enjoying large surpluses, in large part due to a deluge of federal funds over the past three years to fight COVID.
On Monday, Texas announced a record $188.2 billion in general fund revenue and projected a $32.7 billion surplus over the two-year period ending August 2023.
In West Virginia, Governor Jim Justice is proposing tax cuts because they have a $1.3 billion surplus in that state.
In fact, an October analysis of the 15 largest states showed California was the only state experiencing year-over-year tax revenue declines.
That is largely because people are moving out of state.
It is because people are not investing in California the way they once were.
All of this has led to a $29.5 billion decline in expected state revenues over three years.
According to Newsom's budget proposal, that assumes continued but slowing economic growth.
An economic downturn would worsen those conditions even more.
A mild recession would leave California coffers $20 to $40 billion poorer.
A more severe downturn could lead to $60 billion in revenue loss.
So good luck to Governor Gavin Newsom.
Sadly, he's going to have to now cut on the spending on climate change.
And all of this is because he decided that he had endless amounts of money to spend.
And as it turns out, reality does not agree.
Meanwhile, failures of governance continue all across Democratic areas.
So L.A.
County has now declared a state of emergency over homelessness.
They say that the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles County is such a disaster area that they need extra governmental powers in order to fight it.
According to CBS News, officials in L.A.
County Tuesday approved a motion to declare a state of emergency over the region's homeless crisis.
The declaration will expedite supportive and material services for people who are unhoused.
This, of course, follows after years of allowing the homeless crisis in L.A.
County to brew.
You're talking about tens of thousands of homeless people.
Almost 100,000 homeless people last time I tracked in LA County.
And they allowed them to not just be congregated on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, but now to move into the suburbs where they are leaving open needles, where they are threatening public safety, where they're breaking into cars and homes.
And all of this is leading people to leave these areas.
Much of this is driven, of course, by left-wing policy that suggests that the police should not be able to remove people from the streets for trespass or for loitering, that they should just leave their garbage on the streets, because thanks to an ACLU settlement with the police department, this is now considered personal property.
If you just leave your garbage on a street corner, this is considered your personal property, so the cops can't move it.
L.A.
County has decided to pretend that homelessness is a civil rights issue, as opposed to an issue of crime, drug use, and mental illness, which is what it largely is.
And so now to backfill that, they have to use more government compulsion.
The emergency declaration introduced in late December was formally greenlit by the L.A.
County Board of Supervisors in a unanimous vote on Tuesday.
It came one month after a similar citywide emergency declaration was enacted by new L.A.
Mayor Karen Bass immediately after taking office.
Leaders in Long Beach have drafted their own proposal to address homelessness over there.
The new proposal from L.A.
County Supervisors mainly called for an emergency proclamation that would allow L.A.
County to hire additional staff in roles focused on addressing the area's homeless crisis.
L.A.
County's Homeless Initiative, created in 2015, outlined a comprehensive 10-year plan to address homelessness.
It is funded through Measure H, a quarter-cent sales tax increase approved by L.A.
County voters in 2017, and generating $355 million annually, which apparently is not nearly enough money.
An annual homeless count conducted last February found more than 69,000 people were homeless in the greater L.A.
area.
At this point, we should be asking ourselves a quick question.
Why is it that every major city in the United States that is run by a Democrat is in a state of emergency over something or other?
Why?
So, for example, back in December, El Paso declared a state of emergency thanks to migrant problems that led to a massive homelessness crisis on the streets.
Here is the mayor of El Paso saying just that at the time.
As we see the increase in asylum seekers into our community, and we see the temperatures dropping, and we know that Title 42 looks like it's going to be called back on Wednesday, we felt that it was the proper time today to call a state of emergency.
Okay, that was back in December.
That's El Paso.
Or you could try San Francisco, which declared in 2022 a state of emergency in the Tenderloin district because people were dying of drug overdoses on the streets.
It's only maybe 1% who come and mess it up for a few seconds and they leave.
It's a neighborhood where many felt the problems were spinning out of control.
So the mayor said it was time to launch an intervention.
Of all the bull**** that has destroyed our city.
How an array of city departments and service providers are taking on the Tenderloin's problems.
They gravitate here, they just shuffle it somewhere else.
It's been a couple of months since Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the neighborhood.
So what's changed since then and what still needs to be done?
Or maybe you'd like to try Chicago on for size.
Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois, who is widely considered a possible presidential candidate by the left wingers, he said back in 2021 that Chicago was essentially in a state of emergency over crime.
I am regularly in contact with state's attorneys across the state, and particularly the one in Cook County, and with the leaders of our court system.
And so I want to make sure that we are coordinating all the resources necessary to bring down crime in the city of Chicago.
Look, we are nearly at a state of emergency in our need to address crime.
This is how Democrats rule.
The way that Democrats govern is they propose a bunch of really, really bad policies.
And then states of emergency ensue, requiring them to activate more government resources.
This is true on literally every topic.
They pursue bad policy that, logically speaking, has bad consequences.
And then the bad consequences materialize.
And then they say, well, if you just give us more power, maybe we can fix the problem that we created in the first place.
It's the same thing on immigration.
Joe Biden was down in Mexico doing a meeting with the heads of Mexico and Canada.
And he literally said that he wants to make it easier for people to cross the border and get here in Mexico City.
And then we wonder why there's an immigration crisis that he's going to the border to address because of you, dude.
It's because of your policies.
People go through to have to make it through jungles and A long journey to the border, and many are victimized, not only in terms of what they have to pay, but victimized physically in other ways.
And so we're trying to make it easier for people to get here, opening up the capacity to get here, but not have them go through that god-awful process.
Oh, it's the god awful process.
That's the problem.
If we can facilitate the mentoring faster, that would definitely be it.
There is a reason that the Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is thanking Joe Biden for literally not building the wall.
He literally thanked him in the middle of this press conference for not securing the border.
It's amazing.
We have said this and I repeat it today.
I insist on this.
You, President Biden, you are the first president of the United States in a very long time that has not built Not even one meter of wall.
And that, we thank you for that, sir.
By the way, it's not even true.
Joe Biden shored up a bunch of wall that Trump already had planned.
But this is the democratic way of governance.
You govern poorly.
And then when the results of the governance materialize, you triangulate like just a little bit, just and you claim massive new government powers in order to fix the problem that you created in the first place.
Plus, you decide that you can get involved in every single aspect of everybody's lives.
We'll get to that in just one second.
Well, folks, in 2022, we launched Jeremy's Razors as a joke, but it was an important joke.
Now, just nine months and 15 premium products later, we've amassed the largest social media following of any brand in the category and taken over $10 million away from so-called men's grooming companies that despise masculinity.
But that was just the beginning.
This year, We've got even more great products and woke scorching endeavors in store.
Skip the resolutions.
Join the revolution.
We will upend the woke economy and finally give conservatives a return on their values.
Are you ready to make a change this year?
Pick up Jeremy's razor's hair, skin, beard and body care products today.
Go to dailywire.com slash Ben.
That's dailywire.com slash Ben today to get started.
OK, so Democrats really bad at running things like cities and the border and, you know, many, many things.
Because here's the thing, any politician Who refuses to actually recognize reality is bad at running things.
That's true, Republican or Democrat, whenever people say they can fix all your problems, they're just lying to you.
But everybody who's in a position of power always thinks they can fix all of the problems, or at least they're going to force you to fix the problems on your dime.
This is the secret of the new regulatory attempt to ban gas stoves, according to the Washington Post.
For years, scientists and health advocates have tried to bring attention to a secret source of air pollution sitting in 40 million homes around the United States, which jumpstarts childhood asthma, increases the risk of respiratory problems, and emits planet-warming gases.
It is the gas stove.
And now, those efforts are gaining traction.
On Monday, Richard Trumka Jr., one of the four commissioners of the U.S.
Consumer Product Safety Commission, said in an interview the agency was considering a ban on gas stoves.
Or at least standards around the amount of toxic fumes such stoves can spew into America's kitchens.
Some cities, including L.A., Seattle, and New York, have already moved to ban gas stoves in certain new homes and apartments.
And now Kathy Hochul is proposing banning gas hookups for gas stoves in new buildings in the entire state.
So, the claim is that gas stoves are burning natural gas, which means that when a gas stove is on, it releases not only fine pieces of particulate matter that can invade the lungs, but also nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and formaldehyde, all of which have been linked to various health risks.
Scientists have identified nitrogen dioxide, for example, as contributing to childhood onset of asthma and worsening asthma symptoms.
According to one study, children living in a household with gas stoves have a 42% increased likelihood of already having asthma and a 24% increased risk of developing asthma at some point in their lifetime.
Last week, scientists from the Clean Energy Think Tank RMI estimated in a peer-reviewed study that 12.7% of childhood asthmas could be attributed to living in a household with a gas stove.
Some scientists have compared the risks of gas stove use to having a smoker in the home.
Now, here's the problem.
The EPA doesn't have the power to regulate indoor air quality.
But Americans are now being pushed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission to ban gas stoves.
Now they say that they're not going to do it anytime soon.
A spokesperson said in an email, any regulatory action by the commission will involve a lengthy process.
But here is the reality.
The reality is that the science on gas stoves killing your kids of asthma is really shoddy.
It turns out that you actually have to compare the use of what you are cooking Typically, if you're talking about what generates smoke, it is the cooking materials you use that generate the smoke based on the hot pan that you are using in order to cook the thing.
And it doesn't matter if you're using an electric stove and you are frying things and it creates lots of heat, which means lots of smoke.
That is going to create particulate matter.
Same thing if you're using natural gas.
By the way, I've cooked with both of them, and let me just say, natural gas stoves are way better than electric stoves.
They work better, the fire works better, but cooking on electric stoves sucks.
But this is truly amazing.
It's also much more expensive for people in the moment, because natural gas is actually super, super cheap.
The American Gas Association pushed back against the recent research.
They said any effort to ban highly efficient natural gas stoves should raise alarm bells for the 187 million Americans who depend on this essential fuel every single day.
And again, many of the reports that are being relied upon here are just not true.
So, for example, Menier Christopher wrote in October of 2021 at Energy in Depth, California, about the municipalities in California that are seeking to pass ordinances banning the use of natural gas in homes and businesses.
But a report sponsored by the California Restaurant Association shows how many of these studies are really, really flawed.
The California Restaurant Association president said, quote, California chefs rely on gas stoves to grill vegetables, sear meats, and create meals of all kinds, inspired by cuisines from all over the world.
We are concerned misleading health claims could lead to the loss of flame cooking, which would dramatically impact restaurants and the work of chefs and cooks, all of whom have endured enough during COVID-19.
So there are a bunch of shortcuts and biases that have been used in many of these studies.
There was one UCLA study, by the way, showing the supposed damages of natural gas cooking.
And they ignored their own findings that indoor air quality is more a function of what is being cooked than the cooking fuel itself.
And also they don't take into account any of the unanticipated consequences of replacing natural gas with electric stoves and ovens.
The UCLA study notes, quote, there are no mitigation methods for using cooking oils with regard to foods other than the use of ventilation devices like range hoods.
We do not claim the transition to electric appliances would make a substantial difference in terms of emissions from cooking oils and foods.
And again, as it turns out, people don't have the money to just install these electric stoves.
But the idea is we are going to run your life and we are going to take away your gas stove.
And this leads people like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez to tweet out about the severe damage caused by gas stoves all over the United States.
This is one of the great juxtapositions of tweets of all time from the irrepressibly stupid Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
She tweeted out, did you know that ongoing exposure to nitrogen dioxide from gas stoves is linked to reduced cognitive performance?
Um, and then that's a picture of the stove in her apartment, which is in fact a gas stove.
Maybe, maybe, okay, I take it back.
Maybe the use of gas stoves actually does lower your IQ.
That's maybe the only thing that could explain AOC.
Now, the reality is that the federal government should be getting involved in fewer and fewer areas, but regulators have a really tough time with this thing.
And then when regulators do not get deeply involved in certain areas, they get ripped by the left-wing press.
So to his credit, Jerome Powell, the head of the Fed, he says we are not going to become a climate policymaker, which is good.
The left is trying to push the Federal Reserve into shaping monetary policy based on climate change, which is not so.
Deliberately sinking the American economy in favor of climate change priorities from Greta.
And how dare you?
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Reserve must avoid straying into political issues that aren't directly related to its economic management objectives to protect its ability to bring down inflation without interference from elected officials, according to Chair Jerome Powell.
He said bringing inflation down when it is high can require measures that aren't popular in the short term as we raise interest rates to slow the economy.
That made it all the more important for the central bank to stick to our knitting and not wander off into addressing issues that aren't directly linked to its mandate to keep inflation low and to support a strong job market.
But here is the problem.
Many Democrats would love to use the Federal Reserve as a policymaker when it comes to climate change.
The power of the regulatory state under Democrats is unbridled.
And this is why they object so strongly when it comes to the DOJ or the FBI or the CIA.
They don't like legislative oversight because the legislature is basically a vestigial organ of government, according to people on the left.
It should be regulators who know better than you how often you should shower and what sort of shower heads you should use, whether or not you should be using a gas stove or an electric stove.
And the Federal Reserve should be determining climate change policies.
It is incredible.
The problem is that many of the people who make these regulatory policies are idiots.
Which is why you end up with the federal government now promoting diversity, equity and inclusion training that says that men can get pregnant, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
Asking an Asian person for math help is a microaggression.
Reverse racism does not exist.
Men can get pregnant.
These are just a few of the lessons imparted to government workers in diversity trainings and presentations in 2021, according to documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
The materials, summarized in a December 30th editorial, show how one's fringe ideas have saturated the federal bureaucracy, from the Departments of Veterans Affairs to NASA and the military.
One NASA training states that efforts to be colorblind actually limit us.
Another identifies the words, America is a melting pot and don't you want a family as microaggressions, along with asking an Asian person to help with a math or science problem.
A thirdless perfectionism and data is king, as examples of common leadership mistakes.
Value and center lived experience, the presentation says, do not demand data in order to accept a person's individual perspective or to utilize that perspective in decision making.
The focus on subjective experience extends to the army, where two separate trainings, one for commanders and another for special staff, feature a vignette about a soldier who wants to discuss his newly confirmed pregnancy.
His newly confirmed pregnancy.
Another vignette collapses the distinction between gender and biological sex, imagining a urine collector who is uncomfortable observing soldiers who are not the same biological gender as the observer.
Many of those presentations came after President Joe Biden signed an executive order in June 2021, instructing agencies to beef up their diversity programming.
These lessons do not come cheap, by the way.
From 2020 to 2021, the CDC alone spent over $300,000 on dozens of diversity trainings, including Let's Talk About Systemic Racism, Unconscious Bias, and Privilege, and Bambi vs. Godzilla, dealing with different, diverse, and sometimes difficult people.
Solid stuff here from our federal regulatory agencies training their workers in left-wing nonsense.
And then these are the people who say we don't need any oversight at all.
Oversight is really, really bad, but we will oversee every aspect of your lives.
And then when we blow it, we'll declare an emergency and say that the only way to fight this particular emergency is for you to give us more power.
It's an ever-spiraling series of demands for more power.
They exercise power in your life, they fail, the failure causes them to exercise even more power in their life, in your life, they fail, they demand ever more power.
Ever, ever, forever.
It is an amazing aspect of democratic governance.
And this is why some oversight would go a long way.
Because when people see the regulatory excesses and the overuse of executive branch power in the federal government, maybe they'll start to think twice before handing government that power in the first place.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll get into the media's addiction to pretending that men can be women up to and including actual mosque bombers.
Yeah, that's a crazy story.
Plus, we'll examine why exactly the media are treating weird and horrible political situations in Brazil and Peru very differently.
If you're not a member, become a member and use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.
Export Selection