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July 27, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:22
The Hunter Biden Sweetheart Deal Falls Apart
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Okay, well, I have to pay homage to a true hero to begin today's show.
Not all heroes wear capes, and this hero happens to be a progressive member of the so-called Squad.
He's Democrat, Representative Greg Casar of Texas.
Just a truly impressive figure.
Apparently, he declared a water and food strike, a thirst strike, on the steps of Capitol Hill.
For eight long hours, eight hours, he sat and had no food and no water.
And was apparently patted and wiped down by a series of women.
And then, finally, at long last, he took a drink.
This hero of the Republic.
And my—wow.
Wow!
Here we go.
There he is.
He's drinking water, guys.
That is, after eight hours, just astonishing.
Astonishing stuff.
Apparently he was protesting a Texas law, House Bill 2127, that essentially gets rid of a bunch of local ordinances that are unnecessary.
Okay, like the OSHA rules in Texas already make it so that you have to be able to take water breaks, you know, when it's really hot outside and such, but it doesn't matter.
We have performative politics is the essence of this.
And I felt I must comment on this today because I'm just going to point out that while this doofus is rewarding himself for taking an eight hour water break, like a break of eight hours between water and food and all of that, every observant Jew on the planet today is doing a 25 hour no water, no food fast.
All of them.
It's Tisha B'Av, which is one of the saddest days in the Jewish calendar.
It commemorates the destruction of the first temple and the second temple back in quasi-biblical times.
And, um, among a myriad of other horrifying events in Jewish history.
And right now, like, we're all not eating and we're all not drinking.
So when do we get our, our giant media coverage?
Like Greg Kasar for, for taking a break for eight hours.
Next, he's going to hold his breath for 21 seconds to end global warming or something.
Oh, these people are politicians.
We bring only the best.
Okay.
Speaking of only the best, The Hunter Biden plea deal has apparently fallen apart, and it's pretty fascinating to see what happened here because it basically reveals what a sweetheart deal this was in the first place.
Now, we were told that there was nothing wrong with the sweetheart deal.
We were told that Hunter Biden being given a diversion for gun charges, not even probation, and then being given probation on tax charges, tax evasion.
Felony tax charges.
All of that was perfectly normal.
It was totally normal.
No problem at all.
And anyone who protested it, it was just because we had a problem with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden as people.
Not because we were looking at this and saying, this dude seems really, really corrupt.
And a lot of us were fearing that this plea deal basically immunizes Hunter Biden from further charges.
Now, there were some gaps that had emerged already, pretty publicly, between Hunter Biden and his lawyers and the DOJ on the other hand.
The DOJ had sort of implied that maybe further charges might still be in the offing, but Hunter Biden's lawyers seemed very clear on the idea there would be no further charges in the offing.
And that is precisely where the judge in this particular case Put pressure.
She said, what is this plea deal exactly?
Do you guys even agree?
And the answer was, they don't.
According to the New York Times, Judge Marylin Noriega kicked off Wednesday's hearing on Hunter Biden's proposed plea deal with the Justice Department by telling lawyers they did not need to keep popping up and down every time she asked them a question.
This was not a reflection of informality.
It was a signal that she was about to subject them to three plus hours of relentless interrogation over elements of an agreement she described variously as not standard, not what I normally see, possibly unconstitutional, without legal precedent, and potentially not worth the paper it was printed on.
So the judge was like, I've never seen anything like this.
Judge Noriega stunned the participants with her scouring skepticism, which led her to refuse to greenlight the deal until she received more information from both parties.
An exhausted Mr. Biden trudged out of the federal district court in Wilmington, Delaware looking a bit stunned as his lawyers puzzled over what to do next.
You're all saying just rubber stamp the agreement, said the judge.
I'm not in a position to accept or reject it.
I need to defer.
Judge Noriega quickly zeroed in on a central component of the deal, a paragraph offering Hunter Biden broad immunity from prosecution in perpetuity for a range of matters scrutinized by the DOJ during its five-year investigation.
The judge appointed by President Trump in 2017 questioned why prosecutors had written it in a way that gave her no legal authority to reject it.
Then, in just 10 minutes of incisive questioning, she exposed serious differences between the two sides on what exactly the paragraph meant.
Chris Clark, Biden's lead lawyer, said and indemnified his client not merely for taxing gun offenses uncovered during the inquiry, but for other possible offenses stemming from his lucrative consulting deals with companies in Ukraine, China, and Romania.
Prosecutors, however, had a far narrower definition.
They saw Hunter Biden's immunity as limited to the offenses uncovered during their probe of the tax returns dating back to 2014 and his illegal purchase of a firearm in 2018 when he was a heavy drug user, they said.
When the judge asked Leo Weiss, a lead prosecutor in the case, if the investigation was still ongoing, he answered, yes.
When she asked him hypothetically if the deal would preclude an investigation into possible violation of laws regulating foreign lobbying by Biden connected with his consulting and legal work, he then replied no.
Hunter Biden then told the judge he could not agree to any deal that did not offer him broad immunity and Clark popped up angrily to declare the deal was now null and void.
So apparently the defense and prosecution first separated into two packs and they merged into a circle to hash out a new compromise and official recess was declared Clark agreed to the narrower terms and declared his previous statements quote-unquote inartful, but Judge Noriega was now unconvinced.
She thinks that there is some secret deal that's being cut.
She turned her attention to the fine print of the deal that had been struck on the gun offense, requiring Biden to participate in a two-year diversion program prohibiting him from using drugs or owning a firearm.
She objected strenuously to how a violation of its terms would be handled.
Typically, the DOJ could independently verify such a breach and bring charges, but Biden's team successfully lobbied to give that power to Judge Noriega herself, arguing she would be a more neutral arbiter.
But she suggested an arrangement could be unconstitutional because that would give her prosecutorial powers.
So the deal is a mess.
It is unprecedented.
I mean, even according to the New York Times, this is an unprecedented deal.
So what the hell actually went down here?
Well, CBS's Catherine Herridge was reporting from inside the courtroom.
Here's what she had to say.
A member of the U.S.
Attorney's team told the court that there was no deal, and one of the lead attorneys for Hunter Biden, Chris Clark, said as far as he was concerned, quote, the plea deal was null and void.
It was an extremely complex legal discussion over the last couple of hours, but I would boil it down to this.
It does appear that the two parties have been talking past each other for months.
In this respect, the U.S.
Attorney's Office says there's an ongoing investigation and there could be criminal charges in the future.
So this gap between the prosecution and the defense, is it real or is it fake?
So there's some pretty good indicators that actually the the People who are fibbing here are the members of the DOJ.
Once this deal was exposed to public light, and once the judge put pressure on them to actually say what it was that they were excusing Hunter Biden from, they freaked out and they realized that this would be seen by everyone as a sweetheart deal.
I'll explain in just one second.
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Okay, so what exactly went on in that courtroom?
Well, it appears that there was, in fact, a corrupt bargain between the DOJ and Hunter Biden's legal team.
And when it got exposed to public light, the DOJ freaked out.
And then after the DOJ freaked out, then so did Hunter Biden's team, because they're like, wait, are you reneging on the deal?
So Will Scharf, who is a former federal prosecutor, he has a good rundown on what he believes happened inside the courtroom.
And Annie McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor who writes for National Review, among others, he agrees with this.
Here's what Scharf says, quote, Based on conversations with people who are in the courtroom today and my experience as a former federal prosecutor, I think I know the full story of what happened with the Hunter Biden plea agreement blow-up this morning.
Bear with me, it's a little complicated.
Typically, if the government is offering to a defendant that it will either drop charges or decline to bring new charges in return for a defendant's guilty plea, that plea is structured under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11C1A.
An agreement not to prosecute Hunter for FARA violations or other crimes in return for his pleading guilty to the tax misdemeanors, for example, would usually be C1A pleas.
This is open, transparent, subject to judicial approval, etc.
In Hunter's case, however, Hunter's plea was structured under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11C1B.
which is usually just a plea in return for a joint sentencing recommendation only, and contain no information on its face about other potential charges, and contain no clear agreement by DOJ to forego prosecution of other charges.
Instead, DOJ and Hunter's lawyers effectively hid that part of the agreement in what was publicly described as a pretrial diversion agreement relating to a gun charge against Hunter for being a drug user in possession of a firearm.
So in other words, the plea deal on the tax charges normally, that would include all the different charges from which Hunter was immunized, but that's not what it said in the document.
Instead, they hid the immunity stuff in the gun charges. The pretrial diversion agreement as
written was actually much broader than the gun charge. If Hunter were to complete probation,
the pretrial diversion agreement prevented DOJ from ever bringing charges against Hunter for
any crimes relating to the offense conduct, the offense conduct discussed in the plea
agreement, which was purposefully written to include his foreign influence peddling operations in
China and elsewhere.
So in other words, the pre-trial diversion agreement about the gun charge said that if he completes this, he will then be immunized from any charge that's mentioned in the other charges, in the tax charges, which includes FARA violations.
So they're trying to hide the ball here so that it wasn't publicly available.
They put the facts in the plea agreement, but they put their non-prosecution agreement in the pre-trial diversion agreement, effectively hiding the full scope of what DOJ was offering and Hunter was obtaining through these proceedings.
Hunter's upside from the deal was vast immunity from further prosecution if he finished a couple years of probation.
The public wouldn't be any the wiser because none of this was clearly stated on the face of the plea agreement as would normally be the case.
Judge Noriega smelled a rat.
She understood the lawyers were trying to paint her into a corner and hide the ball.
Instead, she backed DOJ and Hunter's lawyers into a corner by pulling all the details out into the open and then indicating she wasn't going to approve a deal as broad as what she had discovered.
So, this is pretty amazing.
to save Faison, save its case, stated on the record, the investigation into Hunter was ongoing
and Hunter remained susceptible to prosecution under Farrah.
Hunter's lawyers exploded.
They clearly believed Farrah was covered under the deal because as written,
the pre-trial diversion agreement language was broad enough to cover it.
They blew up the deal, Hunter pled not guilty, and that's the current state of play.
So this is pretty amazing.
Hunter's lawyers and DOJ are gonna go off.
They'll try to cut a new deal, likely narrower to satisfy Judge Noreka,
but says this prosecutor, I doubt if Farrah or any charges related
to Hunter's foreign influence peddling will be included,
which could leave open the possibility of further investigations into Hunter Biden.
So it sounds like this is a sweetheart plea and it just got completely blown up by the judge.
So the real question is, why the sweetheart plea?
Who presided over the sweetheart plea?
Who made the sweetheart plea?
Why was David Weiss never given special counsel powers in order to, you know, pursue this prosecution the way that he wanted to?
Where is Merrick Garland in all this?
Why wasn't there a special prosecutor who was appointed on the Hunter Biden matters?
Why instead was this delegated to somebody who's directly answerable to the current attorney general who is directly answerable to the father of the perp in this particular case?
It's pretty amazing.
So the White House yesterday was trying to downplay all of this.
Corinne Jean-Pierre Wuerl's Roast Press Secretary, she read a statement about this yesterday.
Now, I know many people have been following the news in Delaware today and we're going to have a lot of questions.
And so here's what I'll say at the top before I turn it over to my colleague, the Admiral.
Hunter Biden is a private citizen, and this was a personal matter for him.
As we have said, the President, the First Lady, they love their son, and they support him as he continues to rebuild his life.
This case was handled independently, as all of you know, by the Justice Department under the leadership of a prosecutor appointed by the former President, President Trump.
So for anything further, as you know, and we've been very consistent from here, I'd refer you to the Department of Justice Okay, I want to point out here, Hunter is not a private citizen.
He lives in the White House with his father.
He was given a big security escort to the courthouse, where he pled not guilty.
Hunter Biden's questionable connections with his father on business are the entire matter here.
And as far as the love his parents have for him, the President and the First Lady, What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
What does that have to do with anything?
The question here is whether Hunter Biden was engaged in deep and abiding corruption with his father.
And again, I'm just going to point out that they think you are a moron.
They truly do.
The White House thinks you are stupid.
The press thinks you are an idiot.
They think that Hunter Biden was literally spending his entire adult life Going and picking up bags of cash.
And somehow Joe was magically getting richer.
And Joe was in on phone calls by witness testimony.
And Joe was being used by Hunter to threaten people.
But Joe knew nothing about this and never benefited from it in any way.
That's what they want you to believe.
Because they think you are apparently incredibly, incredibly stupid.
How stupid do they think you are?
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so how dumb do the Bidens think you are?
The answer is pretty damned dumb.
So we talked yesterday about this breaking report that one of the people who bought some of Hunter's garbage art for hundreds of thousands of dollars then received a seat on a presidential commission.
This happened to be a very wealthy Democratic donor.
Unclear whether she received the seat before or after she bought the paintings, but The real question is why she bought the paintings in the first place, and the only possible answer is to get closer to the Bidens, right?
I mean, it's an influence-peddling operation, obviously.
Well, Corinne Jean-Pierre was asked about all of this, and she was like, well, I don't see how this is a big deal.
I'd have to look into it.
Would you, though?
Elizabeth Naftali, she's made more than a dozen visits here to the White House and met with some of the President's most senior advisors.
Can you tell us a little bit more about those visits, why she was here?
I would have to look into that.
I've not been tracking these visits that you're mentioning to me.
No clue.
No clue.
It is all a mystery wrapped in an enigma.
Wrapped in a puzzle.
What a puzzle box this is.
It's like Knives Out or something.
Who knows why somebody would buy garbage finger painting from Hunter Biden for hundreds of thousands of dollars and then receive a presidential commission.
I don't know if we're going to be able to solve this one, ever.
It's just going to remain a dark mystery for the rest of time.
Meanwhile, Corinne Chompere was asked specifically about the fact that Joe Biden is very fond of cracking down on gun owners who are law-abiding.
So what's the deal with Hunter?
President Biden has spent most of his political career working on gun laws, on gun reform.
Does he believe that someone who is charged with possessing a firearm illegally
should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law?
So, here, I'm gonna be — I think I know where this question is going.
And I'm just going to continue to say, as it relates to this, the case that we're seeing in Delaware, I'm just going to not speak to that.
Uh, it is an independent matter.
No one asked about that.
This is up for the Department of Justice.
Even with the question that you're asking me, it's up to, uh, it's up to, it's a, it's one of those legal criminal matters, and it's up to that process, that legal process.
I'm just not going to speak to it here.
That is a lie.
That is a lie.
Joe Biden routinely talks about prosecuting people to the full extent of the law for tax evasion.
He's constantly talking about people who are not paying their fair share.
Meanwhile, his son is having all of his tax bills paid by Joe Biden's friends.
And by the way, the White House has pretty overtly shifted its messaging on the Hunter Biden, Joe Biden matters.
As Philip Wegman points out over RealClearPolitics, the language is undeniably different.
Yet White House officials said four different times on Wednesday, nothing has changed concerning President Biden's longstanding denial he was ever involved in the foreign business dealings of his son, Hunter.
Biden told Fox News on the campaign trail in September 2020, I've never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.
And then he repeated that later the next month, said I don't discuss business with my son.
But the verbiage shifted in June when Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel's Office, told the Washington Examiner, as we have said many times before, the president was not in business with his son.
Asked by RealClearPolitics at the Daily White House briefing on Wednesday why the language had shifted and if both statements were simultaneously true, Corine Jean-Pierre then replied, But of course, those are two very different statements.
The president has never spoken with his son about overseas business dealings.
It's not the same thing as the president is not in business with his son.
As I pointed out the other day, in business is a very vague term.
It doesn't mean anything.
I am not technically in business with my wife.
We don't jointly hold a business together.
We only have a joint bank account in Charlevoix Finances.
So what are you talking about?
It's pretty incredible that the White House thinks they're going to get away with this.
But again, with the compliant media, they think they can get away with pretty much anything.
That is why it's left to the Washington Examiner and Tim Carney to report on Joe and Hunter Biden's coziness with the Delaware Bank years and years and years ago, according to Tim Carney.
As Hunter goes to trial on all sorts of federal charges, and as the White House swears the president has not had anything to do with Hunter's corrupt businesses, it's worth turning back the clock and recalling how tightly interwoven Hunter's and Joe's undertakings have been.
Let's start in 1996, when Joe Biden easily won re-election to the Senate.
During that campaign, he sold his home to an executive at the Delaware-based credit card company MBNA for asking price.
And the bank reimbursed the buyer for $330,000 of moving expenses.
That's a bit shady, but Biden pointed out the House appraised for what it sold for.
However, here's where the Joe-MB&A-Hunter connection gets harder to deny.
Senator Biden was the champion at the time of a bankruptcy reform that financial institutions like MB&A loved.
MB&A was Senator Biden's largest source of campaign funds in that re-election.
According to Byron York, according to FEC records, MB&A became, by far, Joe Biden's biggest single source of contributions.
Company officials gave him $62,000 in the 1996 cycle.
Senator Biden and MBNA formed very tight ties.
It's clear then, right after the election, Hunter was roped in.
Hunter graduated law school in May 1996.
Within just a few months, he landed a job at MBNA.
Less than two years after graduating law school at age 28, Hunter was a senior vice president at MBNA, which was his father's largest donor.
Then Hunter passed through the revolving door to work at Bill Clinton's Commerce Department.
After Clinton left office, Hunter cashed out and he went back to MBNA.
In the years Hunter was a consultant for MBNA, MBNA was Senator Biden's largest source of campaign funds, easily.
Employees and executives at MBNA gave Biden more than 94 grand.
So, yes, the corruption is endemic here.
By the way, no one becomes a partner at a law firm after two years.
I went to Harvard Law School and then I worked at Goodwin Procter, which is a major national law firm.
You know how long it takes to become a senior associate at a major law firm?
It will take you four, five, six years to become a senior associate.
To become a partner, you're talking like 15 years.
Two years to become a partner at MBNA, a major corporation?
Yeah, there's something fishy going on here, and there always has been, of course.
But of course, as we will see in just a second, the media will rush to Joe Biden's defense because they have to.
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Okay, so leave it to the adults over at The View to make the case that the real problem here is that everybody is so mean to Hunter and his daddy.
They're just poor victims.
Here's Whoopi Goldberg, the wisest among us.
What bribery scheme?
It's so different every day.
I mean, they're either freaking out about Barbie or they're upset about Budweiser beer.
Just Bud Light.
Bud Light, okay.
That's right, you don't want the wrong thing to get out.
But I mean, what is really happening here?
How much punishment does Biden need because he won and they lost?
How much punishment is Biden getting because he won and they lost?
Yeah, he's leading a real rough life out there, Joe Biden, completely free of all criticism from the likes of Whoopi Goldberg, despite the fact that he is no longer functional and the fact that he's pretty obviously corrupt and has been corrupt for years with his son Hunter.
And I just want to hear Whoopi Goldberg explain why Hunter texted his own daughter in 2019 saying he paid dad's bills.
That's all I want.
Please explain.
But no, whenever Republicans target Democrats it's because Republicans are mean.
And whenever Democrats target a Republican it's because those Republicans must be in league with Vladimir Putin or some such nonsense.
These people trafficked on nothing but rumor and innuendo for four long years in an attempt to undermine Donald Trump's presidency.
Joe Biden, this ain't rumor and innuendo.
This is actual evidence from Hunter Biden and his business partners talking about Joe's involvement.
And she's like, ah, what's the big deal?
No problem whatsoever.
Pretty incredible stuff.
OK, meanwhile, yesterday, Mitch McConnell had a pretty significant health scare.
He was at a press conference and he just sort of froze up for a long time.
A lot of people were suspicious that he might actually be having a stroke.
bipartisan cooperation I mean obviously something disconnects here and he starts
to waver on his feet and then they guide him away from the podium.
Do you want to say anything else to the press?
Let's go back to the office.
Go ahead, John.
Let's go back to the office.
Go ahead, John.
I mean obviously something is happening now Naturally, we're not going to get the full truth about what is happening because you never get the full truth on these matters.
Senate Minority Leader McConnell stopped speaking abruptly during the opening remarks of his weekly press conference on Wednesday.
He was briefly escorted away.
McConnell later said the 81-year-old felt lightheaded for a moment.
That doesn't look like lightheaded, by the way.
And noted he came back to participate in the question and answer section of the press conference.
The incident startled fellow lawmakers and brought into the open lingering concerns regarding his injury and how long he plans to remain as the Republicans' Senate leader.
McConnell, again, is currently 81 years old.
Nancy Pelosi is currently 82 years old.
Joe Biden is currently 80 years old.
Donald Trump is currently 77 years old.
At some point, it might behoove the American people to elect leaders who are, you know, below retirement age.
And that might be actually something that is worthwhile doing.
How about just like below life expectancy, like average life expectancy in the United States?
Listen, I think that McConnell has been one of the most effective congressional practitioners for literally his entire career.
But there is something going on, and he is unwell.
And this would make the third senator who is clearly unwell inside the United States Senate.
I mean, Dianne Feinstein is no longer functional.
She's 89 years old.
And she, not only is she not functional, everyone knows she's not functional, and she's still sitting and voting in the United States Senate.
John Fetterman had a massive stroke during the last campaign, and he cannot string sentences together.
And the entire press is pretending that this is somehow A story about bravery rather than a story about people taking advantage of a person who does not have functional brain power.
What's amazing about the Fetterman story is that he has a Democratic governor in his state who will simply appoint his replacement if he steps down.
The same thing is true of Dianne Feinstein.
And yet, the status quo is so ingrained that people will not even tell people to step down, even if there's a governor of the same party.
Now, what's weird about the state of Kentucky is that in the state of Kentucky, the governor is Andy Beshear.
So if McConnell were to step down for whatever reason, He would be replaced, presumably, by a Democrat, right?
Which would actually have a massive impact on the state of the current constituency in the Senate.
The same is not true.
So you can see for political reasons why Republicans would keep McConnell in place even if McConnell were unhealthy.
You can't really see it with Feinstein or Fetterman.
But it is, again, an indicator of just how bad our leadership situation is.
That everybody in a leadership position in both parties now is really, really aged.
Now, what was amazing with the media coverage of this, so CNN's Sanjay Gupta, he immediately said, he needs to go get checked out quickly.
Now again, Joe Biden's frozen up a thousand times, and I've never heard anything remotely like this from Sanjay Gupta.
When you looked at the length of time that the senator seemed to sort of be unable to speak, freezing, as Mani described it, it was concerning.
We actually looked at that tape very closely, and I'm hoping that he will get checked out and his doctors will look at this as well, a petite mall or a mini seizure or a mini stroke.
Those types of things can cause brief symptoms like that as well.
But bottom line is, he should get checked out and should get checked out quickly
because for some of those things, timing really does make a difference.
Okay, I mean, that may very well be true, but I've never heard Sanjay Gupta say anything
like that about Joe Biden, who frequently loses trains of thought in the middle of his
of his speeches, who seems to wander off into walls.
Meanwhile, MSNBC's Nicole Wallace, she went even further, should there be impeachment proceedings if Biden froze like that?
Are you kidding?
No, there wouldn't be.
He freezes routinely.
Joe Biden is constantly forgetting where he is.
And you're the ones defending him.
I wish him well.
I wish no ill health on any human being in the arena or outside of it.
And if this were Joe Biden, there would be impeachment proceedings underway for sentis interruptus.
That's exactly right.
Our collective best wishes and prayers are for Mitch McConnell's health.
It does raise the question that Republicans like to raise about Joe Biden, which is one of age.
And I think, importantly, at least where I sit, I think we have to shut down questions of age in our body politic and focus instead on personal fitness.
Is someone capable of serving?
Are they of sound mind and the right health to continue to serve the nation?
Oh, is that what you think?
It shouldn't be about age.
Well, yeah, that would make sure that Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden never get asked simple questions ever again.
OK, meanwhile, we have new economic reports out today.
The GDP came in for the last quarter.
The economy apparently grew at 2.4 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The GDP's growth at 2.4% in the second quarter, which picked up slightly from 2% growth in the first three months of the year, means that consumer spending grew this spring at a slower pace for both goods and services.
Business investment also strengthened from April through June, with companies spending solidly on buildings and equipment.
The economy remains resilient, spending remains very high.
Again, what we are seeing is the aftermath of Joe Biden blowing so much money into the economy.
There's still tons of money in the American economy.
Economists, however, are dialing back the recession expectations.
After many had projected that a downturn would start in the middle of the year in response to Federal Reserve policy, the Fed did act to raise its benchmark interest rate to a 22-year high.
On Wednesday, and Chair Jerome Powell did not rule out another increase.
Here was Jerome Powell yesterday announcing yet another rate hike.
Since early last year, the FOMC has significantly tightened the stance of monetary policy.
Today, we took another step by raising our policy interest rate a quarter percentage point, and we are continuing to reduce our securities holdings at a brisk pace.
We've covered a lot of ground, and the full effects of our tightening have yet to be felt.
Looking ahead, we will continue to take a data-dependent approach in determining the extent of additional policy firming that may be appropriate.
Well, all of this appears to be sort of up in the air, and it feels like the economy is defying gravity right now a little bit, because we had inflation rates that were up in the, like, 10% range for a brief moment there, and now the inflation rates are still at, like, 3-point-something percent on the annualized basis.
It's supposed to be at 2%.
The Federal Reserve keeps raising the interest rates, the economy keeps chugging along, and that speaks to both the fact that the economy was pretty healthy before COVID, And it also speaks to the fact that we've blown so much money into the system that's still in people's pockets that eventually things are going to hit the skids.
Now, they may not hit the skids fast.
Everybody was sort of expecting there'd be a cliff-like recession.
There would come a point where, boom, the market just dumps.
But that may not in fact happen.
What may in fact happen is a sort of economic stagnation sets in as the spending peters out.
I think that would be fairly likely.
Now, the Federal Reserve does have tools to jack up spending again, right?
If the interest rates are the highest they've been in 22 years, this means they can lower the interest rates and they can jack up consumer spending if they actively believe that the interest rates have put inflation under control.
But do I think that we're out of the woods here with regard to the economy?
I have some serious doubts that we are out of the woods as an economy.
It feels like there's some weird kind of countervailing forces that are having an effect.
So for example, the real estate market, you would expect when the mortgage rates go up as much as they have, the real estate market would dump.
The prices would go down.
The problem is because the rates are so high, nobody is actually selling their home.
So there's nothing on the market.
So there's nothing on the market and there's nobody looking to buy and so the prices just remain exactly what they were before.
Meaning that because there's so little inventory, the prices are still really high even though the mortgage rates are really high.
It just means the entire market has gotten a lot smaller.
The amount of turnover in the housing market has shrunk dramatically.
So where is that money that's not being spent on real estate going?
Presumably into other consumer products.
But it does feel like at some point here, people are going to run out of money.
And when they run out of money, when the bills have to be paid, then they are going to have to start putting their houses on the market, even if that means they're going to take a loss on them.
So again, I feel like there are other shoes to drop on the economy.
I think a lot of other investors feel the same way.
There are a lot of investors, apparently, who are saying they can read the Fed's poker face, according to the Wall Street Journal.
They're suggesting that the Federal Reserve will have no reason to increase rates again, but they have no reason to say that now.
So they feel as though the Federal Reserve has basically done all it's going to do on interest rates.
And so people are kind of optimistic right now.
If you look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the course of the last couple of days, it has been very positive since the beginning of the week.
Again, I think that's because people are getting a little more optimistic about the possibility of avoiding a recession.
I remain a little bit more skeptical of that.
It's possible, but I remain skeptical that you can blow that much money into the economy with no actual effective consequence after devaluing people's savings the way that you basically have.
Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the situation on the border, plus UFO hearings in Congress first.
Let's talk about maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
So one of the things I'm missing today, because I can't eat or drink, is my balance of nature.
So here's the thing.
Not big on the veggies.
Don't like them.
Think they taste bad.
But you need them in order to remain healthy.
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Pure fruits and veggies are the only things they put in those capsules.
Balance of Nature sent a bunch of their product down to the studio for my team to try, and we love them.
So, for example, producer Jake.
That dude hates zucchini, but he does like his Balance of Nature fruit and veggie capsules.
They make him feel a lot better, and they are very easy to take.
The product is, in fact, kosher, so I can take it when it is not a fast day.
For a limited time this summer, when you become a preferred customer at Balance of Nature, they're throwing in a free fruit and veggies travel set.
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As a preferred customer, that's balanceofnature.com, promo code SHAPIRO.
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Okay.
Meanwhile, there was a big hearing on the Hill about UFOs.
Now you may ask, why am I covering this so far into the show?
Wouldn't that be like the number one news?
No, because it's bull crap.
Okay, I'm just going to put out there right now.
There are no aliens on planet Earth other than perhaps Bernie Sanders.
There are no aliens, okay?
There may be in the universe.
They haven't found us yet.
Just saying it now.
Putting down the marker.
So, I have friends like Matt Walsh who suggest that this is all evidence that yes, the aliens are real and they are here.
According to the New York Times, even by the extraordinary standards of contemporary political theater, Wednesday's House Oversight Subcommittee hearing on UFOs stood out.
There, in a somber chamber of the Rayburn House Office Building, a former national intelligence official told elected representatives, the U.S.
government is sheltering alien spacecraft.
After a succession of lawmakers rebuked what they characterized as decades of unnecessary secrecy in government programs that studied unexplained phenomena, Representative Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee, lamented a cover-up he said stretched far beyond partisan politics.
He said, the devil's been in our way.
And then he listed government entities, including the Intel community and the Pentagon.
He said it prevented Congress from obtaining government reports about UFOs.
So let me just ask you a quick question here.
Donald Trump was president of the United States.
Was he not?
You recall?
We all recall.
And do you also recall that when Donald Trump was president of the United States, he said a lot of stuff?
Do you think that if Donald Trump actively knew that there were aliens and UFOs in the possession of the United States government, he wouldn't have just tweeted that within five seconds?
Do you think the government is this amazing at secrecy?
Like they're this good at secrecy for 70 years?
Or is it that maybe they're hiding a bunch of other stuff like their own military incompetence or the fact that there are spacecraft or aircraft out there from other countries that they don't know about and they're not very good at handling?
I have to acknowledge that it's a great way for Congress people to grandstand.
And it was of both parties yesterday.
So you had Representative Jared Moskowitz yesterday.
He's a Democrat of Florida, saying it's long past time for us to know everything there is to know about unmanned space vehicles and such.
For decades, many Americans have been fascinated by objects mysterious and unexplained, and it's long past time that they got some answers.
The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena.
Those are not the words of a UFO Twitter account.
That is a direct quote from Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
That the American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena.
Okay, I understand that you all want to play the lead in the next, like, Tom Cruise sci-fi movie, but you have nothing.
I'm sorry, you have nothing.
Like, really.
And the evidence that's been provided so far amounts to people witnessing things with human eyes that they can't explain, which is like half of things that happen on a daily basis for many people, and also people claiming that they have seen documents that they say say things that they haven't actually seen.
So to take the former example, Matt Gaetz, Republican congressperson, he says that he saw an orb beyond human capability.
Was it the one that Donald Trump was like with the Saudis with?
You know, remember?
What are we even doing here?
Okay.
And when he showed us the photo that he'd taken, I asked why the video wasn't engaged, why we didn't have a FLIR system that worked.
Here's what he said.
They were out on a test mission that day over the Gulf of Mexico, and when you're on a test mission, you're supposed to have clear airspace, not supposed to be anything that shows up.
and they saw a sequence of four craft in a clear diamond formation for which there is
a radar sequence that I and I alone have observed in the United States Congress.
One of the pilots goes to check out that diamond formation and sees a large floating, what
I can only describe as an orb, again, like I said, not of any human capability that I'm
aware of.
And when he approached, he said that his radar went down, he said that his FLIR system malfunctioned,
and that he had to manually take this image from one of the lenses.
Thanks.
Weird how that keeps happening.
How like all of these systems that would provide for the surveillance are, they always go down.
Just like Bigfoot.
So many people have seen Bigfoot and yet nobody seems to have gotten like a really credible good view of Bigfoot that they can then show.
Like we only, we're on a planet where everyone has a cell phone.
Like every single person with camera capabilities.
And you're telling me that no one has yet taken credible images of any of this magically.
That's just how it works.
Again, my skepticism, it's largely because I feel like many government actors, this is a way for them to avoid their day job.
It really is.
It's a great way of not having to actually legislate or investigate things that actually have consequences for the American people.
But again, it makes everybody feel kind of spicy inside, I suppose.
So one of the witnesses, the retired major, David Grush, And he told Representative Nancy Mays of South Carolina that actually he has evidence that non-human bodies were discovered at a crash site.
Non-human bodies discovered at a crash site.
So he finally found those burned Barbie dolls that we used the other day.
Anyway, here we go.
If you believe we have crashed craft, stated earlier, do we have the bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft?
As I've stated publicly already in my News Nation interview, biologics came with some of these recoveries.
Yeah.
Were they, I guess, human or non-human biologics?
Non-human, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently still on the program.
Again, like, maybe Grush is telling the truth about what he says he has seen, but also if he has seen a document in which another person testified about something that he thought he had seen from a third source, like... I just... I'm just gonna go no.
Okay?
I'm just gonna go no.
You either believe it or you don't.
I don't believe it.
I don't see the evidence for it, and I think all of this is a giant waste of time.
Apparently, pressed by Burchard about whether people have been murdered as part of a government effort to hide UFOs, Grush said he could not talk about it in a public session.
There's more evidence that Hillary Clinton is murdering everyone around her than that government agents are going around killing people to cover up UFOs.
Aye, aye, aye.
Representative Eric Burleson, Republican of Missouri, said, Yes on that.
I'm gonna go yes on that.
Okay, meanwhile, in a hearing that actually made somewhat of a difference yesterday, that should have actually been of much more concern, Alejandro Mayorkas was called in front of Congress again, and he would not answer simple questions about whether there was a limit to illegal entries into the United States, for example.
So is there a limit?
Yes or no?
Well, you've already released more than 2.1 million illegal immigrants into this country since you took office.
That's a population the size of the state of Nebraska.
So once again, I would ask you, what is the limit?
Or is there one?
Congressman, last year we expelled or removed approximately 1.4 million people who did not have a legal basis to remain in the United States, the largest number in recent history.
The answer is there is not one, right?
There is no limit.
And as Bill Malugan, who covers this stuff, has said, the situation at the border has gotten worse during Mayorkas' time in office by every single metric.
Back-to-back years of highest migrant deaths in history.
Back-to-back years of highest recorded illegal crossings in history.
1.5 million plus known gotaways.
Highest number of unaccompanied minors in recorded history via rampant human smuggling.
Back-to-back years of highest terror watchlist encounters in history.
Record fentanyl ODs and smuggling.
Cartels in rich and in control on parts of the border.
And yet, Alejandro Mayorkas is sitting there saying that everything works just fine.
In fact, he said that he's doing great.
He says, our approach to managing the border, it's working beautifully.
Here's Mayorkas.
Our approach to managing the borders securely and humanely, even within our fundamentally broken immigration system, is working.
Oh, well, I mean, if you believe that one, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that is for sale.
Alrighty, time for a quick thing that I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
There's an amazing opinion piece by a person named Blythe Roberson over at the Washington Post.
And it is called, I was immersed in hookup culture until COVID forced me into intimacy.
And this person, Blythe Robertson, talks about how she is a person who gets around, shall we say.
Quote, I never would have consented to having a boyfriend if COVID hadn't forced me.
More precisely, I would have had a boyfriend for about three months and then bailed,
which is what I was about to do in March 2020.
I was 29 and had been dating in New York City for my entire adult life,
which had meant, in the best case scenario, going to a man's house once a week,
having sex, maybe ordering food and then going home.
It wasn't just that I was particularly attracted to men incapable of emotional intimacy, though duh, it was also that I and all the young people I knew were immersed in hookup culture, a phrase I hate but that is also sadly accurate.
Before COVID-19, we dated a lot of people at once and took our time before picking just one and settling down.
It's what biological anthropologist Helen Fisher describes as slow love.
Though in my case, I'd never reached the love part.
After years of dating this way, I was becoming a guy incapable of emotional intimacy.
In my late 20s, I decided I should at least try to call someone my boyfriend, so I picked a guy, and right away, I found the experience mortifying.
Who was this person who seemed so hot and fun on the surface, but also made baffling decisions?
Who took so long to get ready to go anywhere?
Who was, inconveniently, an entire human being?
We were dating long distance.
He was in Milwaukee.
But in March 2020, I decided I didn't like being so tied to a person outside of me, especially when there were so many other options, so I flew to see him.
Then COVID happened.
So they stayed together.
And apparently, this, uh, this person enjoyed, you know, actual relationships.
And then ended up moving on, of course, because, of course.
So, this person writes, Dating long distance.
We'd basically live together anytime we were in the same state, but living together for three days is very different from living together with no endpoint in the middle of a historic period whose defining feature is you can legally hang out only with your housemates.
Before my boyfriend, I'd spent the night at a man's home almost exclusively in the case of an unforeseen major weather event.
I'd worry.
What if I'm tossing and turning a noise at this guy?
What if I fart in my sleep?
With my boyfriend, I learned the joys of cuddling without a clock ticking in the back of my mind.
I learned how nice it is to spend a morning thinking you're falling for someone even if those feelings are just the reflected glow of the fact you're eating breakfast, objectively, the best meal of the day.
During COVID, I learned that even if I was not constantly thrilling, even if my boyfriend and I were genuinely different in all the ways that it originally mortified me, at the end of the day, I just liked spending time with him.
And then this person says, I was in two more long-distance things after that.
The first during the Delta variant wave, the second with the guy I messaged on Hinge, day eight or nine of Omicron.
Those relationships are now over, although I still wear a mask on the subway and wash my hand, like now, instead of touching every gross thing in the city, and then immediately eating a sandwich.
COVID feels over too, but I'm grateful for how quickly I built intimacy with those men.
Without the pandemic restrictions, I don't think I would know that after my sweetheart cooks us food, I love doing all his dishes.
I decided this actually is feminist.
I told each of those three men that I love them.
You know what would be even better?
Marriage!
I know this is crazy talk.
So you constructed an entire sexual revolution around the idea that people would be happier if they hopped in and out of the sack with randos.
And then it turns out that women in particular are not particularly happy with that.
And when they are forced into isolation with a dude, by COVID, they actually quite like it.
But because they've been so trained that marriage is bad, and that long-term commitment, longer than a few months, is bad, they break up again.
And you end up telling three dudes you love them, as opposed to, you know, settling down with one dude.
But it is incredible how the sexual revolution is a failure on every single level, and yet the people who promulgated the sexual revolution are totally incapable of seeing it.
There are a bunch of Straussian readings that have come up about the Barbie movie, for example, and I'm actually kind of into them.
Many of the Straussian readings basically make the argument that the Barbie movie is an argument against feminism because the feminist world presented by Barbie is really quite garbage.
The women are actually happier for a brief moment in Kendam than they are in Barbieland.
Why?
Because Barbieland reflects the glow of second-wave feminism.
And second-wave feminism has been terrible for women.
It's made women miserable.
Instead of having a balanced life, it's told them to put off the most important parts of their life, namely marriage and childbearing, in favor of the least important parts of their life, namely making partner at a major law firm.
And now that women are kind of waking up to it, it's going to take a while for many women to wake up to it because they've so been inculcated in the idea that this is virtue now.
The new virtue is rejecting the patriarchy, not actively seeking consonance with the natural law.
Rejecting all of that.
The search for authenticity.
But what they're finding, women, is that what women authentically want is not what they were told by the feminist movement women authentically want.
And sooner or later, it's going to dawn on a large number of women that that happens to be the case.
And life is going to change.
In fact, I think that's already starting to set in.
OK, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So speaking of things that I hate.
So now, because Hollywood has no ideas, Hollywood has decided that the success of the Barbie movie means it is time for a Lena Dunham movie directing Polly Pocket.
So we've now done, I mean, we're seeing this all over the place, right?
We had the Blackberry movie, we had the Tetris movie, we had the Hot Cheetos movie.
We've had a bunch of movies about 80s products.
Beanie Babies did a movie.
Now we are getting the Polly Pocket movie that is going to be directed by Lena Dunham, who is a trash person.
I mean, Lena Dunham's, her book, in which she talks about effectively sexually abusing her small sister, Um, it's not great, Bob.
Aside from being a promulgator of precisely the worst kinds of, um, of morality that the sexual revolution has to offer in series like Girls, now they're going to have, they're now taking What you can say at its most sort of anodyne is that these are adult directors.
Lena Dunham is not a director of children's film.
She became famous for the extraordinarily sexually graphic HBO show Girls.
And so they're taking her and they are saying, why don't you do the Polly Pocket movie?
So, I suppose they say that they're almost ready to go on this, apparently.
The Mattel execs say that there's already a great script.
I doubt that because they certainly did not have a great script for Barbie.
So they're also going to put into development Thomas and Friends, American Girl, and Barney.
I assume that American Girl will actually be turned into a feminist icon who scorns America and believes that America was founded in 1619.
Thomas and Friends will be about a gay train or something.
And Barney will be about a purple dinosaur railing against global climate change, which is putting his friends and family in danger because people drive cars.
I can only imagine this is where they're going with all of this.
The Hot Wheels movie, they're doing a Hot Wheels movie that is going to be produced by J.J.
Abrams as well.
I just want to make sure this is real, because it seems so parodic.
This is from Variety, but I just want to make sure that this is not actually a parody, okay?
Because it's so stupid.
The Barney movie will be produced by Daniel Kaluuya.
Apparently, the Mattel executives say it's going to be more like Being John Malkovich or Adaptation.
I'm not kidding.
That's what it says in Variety.
The Hot Wheels movie will be grounded and gritty.
I just can't believe this is real.
It's got to be fake, right?
I mean, there's no way.
There's no way.
The Thomas and Friends, they're saying, yeah, this can't be real.
Okay, whatever.
It can't be real.
They're saying Thomas and Friends will be directed by Mark Forster of World War Z and Monsters Ball.
That can't be real.
Everybody's buying it, and it's not April Fool's, so I'm super concerned that either everyone is really gullible or it's real and I can't tell the difference.
And I'll be honest with you, I literally can't tell the difference.
Okay, I'm just going to let it go because I have no clue.
I have no clue.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
I'll be speaking with the attorney for Derek Chauvin, who is the man convicted of the killing of George Floyd.
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