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Aug. 9, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:42
The Economy Is Spiraling The Drain
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Well, folks, Bidenomics is a giant fail, and we are seeing the wages of Bidenomics happening right now.
Here is the thing.
Bidenomics, which is basically the idea that if we sink extraordinary amounts of taxpayer dollars into Joe Biden's favorite companies, or if we just blow out cash spending on a wide variety of causes that help Joe Biden's favorite political Friends, that if we do all of that, that somehow jogs economic growth and leads to economic durability.
It's a lie.
It's always been a lie.
But here's the thing.
It's very difficult to explain to people why it's a lie.
Because capitalism is a much more subtle and interesting conversation than is corporatism.
Corporatism has always been in very easy sell.
Corporatism is basically the idea, it was started by Mussolini in the early 20th century, that if you work hand in glove, government and business together, And then you direct those businesses in a particular way.
This will lead to economic prosperity because it cuts out all of the evils of competition, and we all work together instead of working against one another.
In fact, the idea of the corporation as sort of a corporate body, again, goes back to early 20th century philosophy, particularly prominent in fascist circles.
Fascist economics looks very much like what much of the West pursues in terms of a mixed economy right now, meaning government subsidization, of particular businesses. A government telling business
what to do and business just going and doing it. And what that actually results in is certain
levels of economic stagnation because it cuts out innovation. When you are subsidizing certain
businesses at the cost of other businesses then what you are actually doing is you are twisting the
incentive structure in extraordinary ways.
And when you hear people in the United States who are very nostalgic for the 1950s, they, why can't, why can't we have an economy like the 1950s where the government was heavily subsidizing particular businesses, where unions were really, really strong?
The quick answer to that question is we can't have the 1950s unless you wish to destroy literally all of the Western economies on planet Earth, except for the United States.
The reason the 1950s were a boom time in the United States is because every single export market for the United States Was completely destroyed, so destroyed that we had to spend billions of dollars giving those countries money so they could buy our product.
That's what the Marshall Plan was.
So if you don't wish to, you know, devastate the entire world economy and then have the United States be the last one standing so that we can pay the unions off for manufacturing product that you could easily do elsewhere, well, then it's going to be kind of hard to square that circle.
But Joe Biden's quote unquote industrial policy, his entire redistributionist policy, it has real costs and we've been living.
With these policies for quite a while now and they are not going particularly well.
We are looking at slowing rates of growth across the West as governments decide to move away from more free market oriented economics and more toward again this corporatist model.
The reason I'm ranting about the corporatist model right now is because I don't think it's only a Bidenomics problem.
I'm also seeing it happen on the right.
I think there's a part of the right.
It does not understand how free markets work and why they are good.
There are a couple of reasons why free markets are particularly good.
One, you as an individual human being have a right to your property.
This is the basis of basically all innovation and economic growth.
It also happens to be moral.
If you put work into property, you You own that property.
It does not belong to other people.
If you then wish to live in a community where you share that property, that's your problem, and you can do that.
And in fact, that's what religious communities over time have done.
As I've said before, I give a lot of charity to my local synagogue.
My local synagogue distributes that charity.
I'm on a wide variety of causes.
I help out friends.
I give them jobs.
This is all stuff that people traditionally have done, but that doesn't make my property not my own property.
Freely alienatable and freely keepable, right?
All of that is very good just on a moral level.
But the other thing that capitalism does that no other system does is it creates positive externalities.
Capitalism ends with creating innovation.
Now it looks wasteful, capitalism, because look at all these people who are in competition.
Why can't there just be one type of shampoo on the shelf, right?
This is Bernie Sanders' routine.
Why do we have all of these different shampoo companies making tons of different types?
I only need one type of shampoo for this crazy hair.
Well, the reason is because the competition makes the price lower.
It makes it better for the consumer.
Choice is good for the consumer.
Competition is good for the consumer.
And the same thing is true in the stock market.
When people look at the stock market and they see it as a speculative enterprise, the stock market is not about the speculation.
It's not about some dude getting rich day trading.
The truth is you're not going to get rich day trading.
The number of people who have gotten truly wealthy day trading is very, very, very low.
That is not how good investors invest.
The way that good investors invest is they find what they believe is an undervalued property, and then they buy it, and then they hold it.
This is Warren Buffett's entire strategy.
Warren Buffett is a student of Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, and his basic strategy is, I find an undervalued asset where I like the business, and then I own a share of the business, and then the business grows.
That is why Warren Buffett is successful, because he's a very disciplined investor.
He does not speculate in the stock market.
In fact, he does the reverse of speculation.
He investigates the businesses that he is looking at, and then he invests in those businesses.
So when you see the stock market as a speculative gamble, it becomes a speculative gamble for you.
But that's not what the stock market is meant to do, and that's not actually what the stock market does.
What the stock market does is it creates giant pools of liquidity.
Those giant pools of liquidity make it possible for new businesses to get off the ground.
Some of those businesses will fail, but many of those businesses will succeed.
It allows innovation to happen.
And that innovation creates profit margin.
That profit margin allows more innovation to happen.
This is why the sort of socialistic idea that profit is bad is really stupid.
Profit is the incentive structure that actually allows people to create new and innovative products.
And when you take money out of those markets, out of the stock market, for example, if you're the government, because you just suck money into the government maw, and then you blow it out on your favored projects, or if you're a sort of Right-wing industrialist, proto-industrialist policy guy, and you think, what if we just suck money out of the markets and then we just blow it out on a manufacturing center in Ohio?
You're doing the same thing.
You are taking the money from where it is most efficient and where it is most likely to generate better products, better innovation, and more economic growth, and you are taking it and putting it in a place where that is less likely to happen.
Now, you can pretend that that's good for the economy as a whole.
It is not.
It is good for your friends.
You want to say it's good for your friends?
Fine.
That's at least a fair argument.
I'm taking money from Bob and I'm giving it to Steve because I like Steve and I don't care about Bob.
That's at least a fair argument.
But to pretend that leads to overall economic growth is a lie.
And that sort of policy undergirds Bidenomics.
And it is leading to terrible effects for the American worker, for the American consumer, for everyone.
Because here's the thing.
When we talk about the wages of the 1950s, when we talk about bringing back the 1950s, economically speaking, you would not want to live in the 1950s, economically speaking.
You wouldn't.
You wouldn't have a cell phone.
You would not have a really nice car.
The cars from 1950 were not nearly as nice in terms of the features and things they have
as the cars today.
Your fridge would be broken half the time.
You probably wouldn't have air conditioning by statistics in 1950.
No one wants to live in 1950.
When everybody has economic nostalgia, just remind them that right now you live in a magical time
where you take your cell phone, which is a magical device that connects
to a cloud in the sky, a magical cloud, and then that magical cloud allows you
to buy any product on earth sourced from 10 different countries and arrives at your door
in two days.
Anybody in all of human history looked at that and they think they're living in some sort of magical universe.
And you're sitting here being like, I wish it were the 1950s again in industrial policy.
It's ridiculous.
We'll get to why this is actually failing in one second because Joe Biden's economy is about to start sliding into recession.
I know that everybody's happy talking this thing.
Oh, we escaped recession.
So first of all, let me point out, Stagnation was always coming.
I've been saying for two years now that inflation was not the long-term threat to the United States.
Stagnation was the long-term threat to the United States.
Joe Biden, when he came into office, was promising that for a decade we would not grow at above a 2% GDP clip.
That is not enough to keep up with the kind of debts that we have been assuming as a nation.
Stagnation is the problem.
And stagnation is created when you remove the innovative sector of the economy and instead you toss it at your friends.
Instead you toss it at your political supporters.
It's true on every side of the aisle.
Free economics creates better products, cheaper products.
It creates better jobs, creating those cheaper and better products.
You work a better job than your grandpa did.
You know what I mean?
Nostalgic for the 1950s?
Remember, your grandpa was sitting on a line somewhere, riveting for 10 hours a day.
Does that sound amazing?
You're sitting in an air-conditioned office and whining about how you're getting sciatica from typing.
Which one of those jobs is better?
Okay, there is no question about this.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
First, let's talk about the economy.
So, as we've been saying, Joe Biden's economy, not fantastic.
Plus, his economic policy, also less than fantastic.
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Okay, so what is the fallout from this kind of policy, this kind of dumb industrial policy, where we spend oodles and oodles of money on unproductive companies that could not survive in the private markets?
Well, the fallout is that places go bankrupt.
The fallout is inflationary policy in which you helicopter money all over the place and then you're shocked when all the prices go up.
So for example, if you look at Joe Biden's total inflation rate since he became president of the United States, the total inflation rate, like when you actually add all that up, consumer prices since Joe Biden took office are up 16%.
That is a huge number.
That is a really, really big number.
How about real wages?
Real wages since Joe Biden took office are down 3.5%.
Okay, so that means that your wages went down 3.5% and your prices went up 15%, which means that you now have a delta of 20%.
That is a real problem for the vast majority of American consumers.
Why?
Well, because when you helicopter money all over the place, it gives people the impression they have more money, and then they go and they spend the money, and then they spend the money, and the prices go up.
Well, right now, the fallout from this is going to be, eventually, the party comes to an end, and somebody is left without a chair.
And some of those places are going to be companies that should never have had money in the first place.
So one of Joe Biden's favorite companies was a company called Proterra.
Proterra is an electric vehicle parts supplier, and Joe Biden actually spoke about Proterra and the magic of it in 2021.
Here's Joe Biden in 2021 talking about the magic of Proterra.
Right now we're running way behind China, but you guys are getting us in the game.
You guys are getting us in the game.
It's going to make a lot of difference.
We're going to end up owning the future, I think, if we keep doing what we're doing.
When you start making a thousand buses a year, you're going to need more room for your customers, aren't you?
Yes, sir.
Ah, the electric buses.
And as we know, Kamala Harris loves electric buses.
This is one of the reasons why the government decided to get behind Proterra back in 2021.
Here's Kamala Harris yesterday praising the magic of the electric buses.
In places like St.
Cloud, Minnesota, CWA workers are building electric buses so people can get where they need to go.
Where they need to- Okay, um, there's only one problem.
Yesterday, electric vehicle parts supplier Proterra, according to Reuters, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, making it the latest company to go belly up in an industry grappling with supply chain constraints, slowing demand, and a funding drought.
Where's that funding drought coming from?
It turns out that when you get addicted to government cash, eventually the heroin supply stops coming.
The move comes weeks after Lordstown Motors filed for bankruptcy protection and put itself up for sale after failing to resolve a dispute over a promised investment from Foxconn.
Proterra's shares nearly halved in value after the ballot.
It listed its assets and liabilities in the range of $500 million to $1 billion.
The entire market cap of the company is $362 million.
In January of 2021, Proterra was valued at $1.6 billion, including debt, in a merger deal with a blank check firm.
And it was Joe Biden who was touting this firm.
Now, the difference between the government subsidizing a firm and you subsidizing a firm?
I've made investments that have gone bust, and I lose the money.
When the government makes the investment and then goes bust, you also lose the money.
That's the way that it works.
And that is why these sort of industrial policies are a fail.
Meanwhile, the Bidennomics team, they keep out going out there and proclaiming that everything is going swimmingly when we all know it's not.
Here is Kamala Harris lying yesterday saying that wages are up and inflation is down.
Well, that all depends on your starting point.
If you start from like last month, then that's true.
If you start from when Joe Biden became president, it's wildly false.
Again, inflation is up almost 16% from when Joe Biden took office.
If you're looking at the price rate, if you're looking at wage rates, they're down 4% during that same period in real wages.
And by dynamics is working today.
The unemployment rate.
Okay, here's the evidence.
Today, the unemployment rate is near the lowest it has been in over half a century in our country.
Wages are up and inflation has fallen 12 months in a row.
I love these sorts of talking points.
Inflation has fallen 12 months in a row.
Okay, which is sort of like saying that you're doing better than you did yesterday, and you're doing better yesterday than you did the day before, and that's because 12 months ago you were hit by a truck.
Right?
So ever since then, you've been improving.
Right?
You're missing the part where you got hit by the truck.
OK, so you know what would have been amazing is if the inflation rate had not been at like 11%.
That would be amazing.
And we brought it down month over month.
By the way, when you bring it down month over month, that still means that the inflation is continuing.
It's just the rate is not changing in a positive direction.
That's like you're filling the bathtub and the water is still going up.
It's just filling a little bit more slowly than it was a minute ago.
But if they lie to you often enough, they figure that maybe they'll get away with it.
Because again, they can just point to, whenever you have a system where you can point at concentrated winners and disparate losers, it's much easier to pitch.
This is the beauty of industrial policy and corporatism.
You can point at individual companies, you say, ah, this guy's a winner.
And then you say, what did you lose?
You lost a couple of bucks.
He had a chance at winning, like amazing.
The problem is, when you have this many disparate costs, they start to add up.
And we're seeing that in spades right now for the American wage earner.
We're seeing this for American businesses.
And that the future of American growth is very, very precarious right now.
We'll get to more on that in just one second.
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Also going back to, you know, Teddy Kennedy leaving a lady dead in a river.
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Okay, so, the American consumer is going to start feeling it pretty quickly now.
Because the money is running out.
And you can see it.
It's starting, actually, forget about the consumer.
Look at the businesses.
And I pointed out, And that there is, in fact, a different measure of economic growth, different than GDP.
And that measure of economic growth doesn't look just at consumer and product spending, which is how Keynesians would look at it.
This is why they always believe that government spending is going to jog GDP, because government spending goes into consumer growth.
If the government spends a lot of money on a product, then this is called economic growth.
That's really not the way that it should work.
There's a better measure called gross output that we've been talking about.
Gross output is how businesses are investing and how businesses are spending.
And what you see is that gross output remains pretty precarious right now.
It's not looking fantastic because businesses are pulling back.
And you're seeing this in pretty much every area of American life right now.
So for example, According to the Wall Street Journal, new lending by mortgage REITs has now dried up.
So if you are worried about commercial real estate taking a dive, you should be worried.
Blackstone Mortgage Trust and KKR Real Estate Finance Trust, two of the biggest mortgage real estate investment trusts, have now halted loans to any new borrowers.
Hey, that is a serious problem.
That means that liquidity is drying up.
When liquidity dries up, it means that people can't invest it.
While these firms continue to provide financing related to existing loans, they're not originating any new loans.
That's also true of Starwood Property Trust.
Mortgage REITs, which lend to property owners instead of buying and developing real estate, like equity-oriented REITs, typically originate an average of about $10 billion in loans every quarter.
Hardly any new loans are being made right now, which means that you're going to see markets start to decline in real estate.
Well, stocks declined pretty significantly yesterday after the banks were downgraded by Moody's.
So, according to the Wall Street Journal, weak Chinese export data, which, by the way, is a reflection of the American consumer market, because we're the ones who are actually buying Chinese product.
Weak Chinese export data, a dimmer financial outlook from UPS, and a credit downgrade for 10 smaller U.S.
banks sends stock indices down on Tuesday.
Government bond prices climbed, pushing yields down.
That means people are trying to invest in government bonds at this point and get away from the stock market, which is a sign of economic weakness.
Bonds are getting more attractive compared with stocks lately, given higher yields and the risk that recession hits corporate earnings in the future.
Financial shares were stung when Moody's lowered credit ratings for 10 smaller U.S.
banks and said it was reviewing ratings for six larger ones, including Bank of New York, Mellon, and U.S.
Bancorp.
The move renewed concerns over tighter lending and the banking system's ability to withstand sharply higher interest rates.
Again, if the banks invested a lot in bonds two years ago, they're absolutely jacked.
This is what happened with Silicon Valley Bank.
They invested a lot in bonds, figuring that the government was a safe place to put the money, and then the government had to raise those interest rates radically on the new bonds, making the old bonds essentially worthless.
That's what bankrupted Silicon Valley Bank.
There are some other banks that have similar math.
So we are looking right now at persistent high inflation in Europe, tight financial conditions in Asia, a slow recovery.
All of this is negative stuff.
China is slipping into deflation right now.
According to the Wall Street Journal, tepid consumer demand and rising economic concerns in the world's second-largest economy have now tipped China into a deflationary territory for the first time in two years, adding pressure on Beijing to act more aggressively to avoid a deepening economic malaise.
Instead of experiencing a surge in prices after lifting the COVID-19 pandemic curbs late last year, China is now suffering an unusual bout of falling prices for a range of goods, from commodities like steel and coal to daily essentials and consumer products like vegetables and home appliances.
So, what happens to China?
Well, China is heavily debt-burdened.
Well, what happens to the United States?
It's also heavily debt-burdened.
Now, we are still a better bet than China.
We're still going to be able to sell our bonds.
But just remember, when we sell bonds that have an interest rate of 5.5%, 5.75%, all we're really doing is saying that the government in 10 years is going to have to pay off all of that interest.
Which is going to eat up our entire government budget right now.
So we have in this country extraordinary levels of government debt.
That is paired with extraordinary levels of personal debt.
All of this is a tsunami waiting to happen.
According to Axios, U.S.
consumer credit card loans and other revolving plans as a share of GDP are now 3.7% of all GDP.
U.S.
credit card debt hit a trillion dollars for the first time toward the end of July.
This rise reflects a number of factors, including rising consumer confidence and spending power amid cooling inflation.
But again, people are spending on that credit card, which means a bunch of people are going to go bankrupt because not everybody pays off that credit card.
There are 70 million more credit card accounts open now than pre-pandemic in 2019, according to Fed researchers.
So Americans are spending an enormous amount of money on their credit cards.
Rising balances may present challenges for some borrowers.
The resumption of student loan payments this fall may add additional financial strain for many student loan borrowers, according to Fed researchers as well.
It's all fun and games until the carousel stops.
There's a good account on Twitter called the Cobacy Letter, which is a commentary on global capital markets.
The U.S.
currently has $17.1 trillion in household debt, $12 trillion in mortgages, $1.6 trillion in auto loans, $1.6 trillion in student loans, $1.0 trillion in credit card debt.
Total mortgage debt is more than double the 2006 peak.
Now, all of this is super risky.
It relies on the government to bail everybody out.
And when those bailouts stop, which eventually they will, then people are going to be in a really hard situation.
That's when you'll get more calls for more government spending, more government regulation.
This is the beauty of being a corporatist.
When your policies fail, you just call for more cowbell.
You just blame capitalism and suggest that it was capitalism's fault that all this stuff happened when it wasn't capitalism's fault in the first place.
We'll get to the impact of all of this on the 2024 race momentarily first.
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Okay, one of the ways that you can see that the easy money is drying up is because very foolish corporate policies are also starting to dry up.
Those are the preserve of the privilege.
In the same way that environmentalism is a preserve of the global privilege, the only people who care about the environment are people who can afford to do so.
They're not people who are living in Africa who are burning dung for fuel and trying to make sure that their one-year-old stays alive.
It's a bunch of rich people living in the West who are deeply worried about the polar bears and the Arctic ice caps.
Well, the same thing happens with regard to the economy.
When you have loose money policies, bad companies get money.
And bad corporate policies get promulgated.
Well, now you can see, again, this is actually, it's a good sign for the future of corporate America, but it's also a sign of an economic downturn that all these corporate firms are now getting rid of ESG and DEI.
ESG and DEI are just dragged on the profitability of these corporations.
And corporations were able to do that and they were able to virtue signal with their money and with the stock market.
They were able to do that so long as the money was still flowing.
When the money stops flowing, the first thing to go is all the virtue signaling.
Which is why the Wall Street Journal is reporting today that conservative legal activists have successfully challenged the use of affirmative action by universities.
Now they're going after diversity initiatives widely deployed across American corporations.
Some companies are already reconsidering their efforts.
In lawsuits, shareholder letters, and petitions to the EEOC, activists are using some of the same tactics that progressive groups have used to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI programs.
They are arguing companies are violating rules against race and sex discrimination, including those drawn from legislation designed to secure the rights of Black Americans.
Comcast has settled the case accusing it of illegally favoring minority-owned small businesses.
Amazon has been sued in Texas over a program offering special benefits to Black or Latino-owned delivery service contractors.
Starbucks is being sued as well.
And as you are seeing, S&P is now dropping ESG scores from debt ratings, which is exactly as it should have been in the first place.
But when the money was free and loose, you could be just as lefty as you wanted to be.
It's when the money starts to get tight that everybody turns into a conservative again.
According to The Financial Times, S&P Global has now stopped handing out scores to corporate borrowers on ESG criteria.
The debt rating agency has since 2021 published scores from 1 to 5 for a company's exposure to each element of environmental, social, and governance risks.
Payments company Visa, for example, had received a 2 for E and S and a 3 for G. First Energy, a high utility that has been charged with corruption, received a 4 score for G, S&P's second lowest grade.
Late last week, S&P reversed course, saying only taxed non-numerical scores would comprise analysis of a company's ESG matters.
The rating agency said, quote, which means effectively speaking, it's not going to matter anymore.
in our credit rating reports are most effective at providing detail and transparency
on ESG credit factors material to our rating analysis.
So they are going to continue doing the rating analysis, but they're not gonna give it a number,
which means effectively speaking, it's not gonna matter anymore.
Moody's is still rating ESG criteria on a one to five scale.
So why is this happening?
Well, supposedly it's because of evil Republican pressure.
It's not because of evil Republican pressure.
It's because corporations are saying, well, you know what I don't need in order to be profitable?
Your ESG garbage.
And in fact, investors are looking and they're going, I just want to invest in the company that's going to make me money, in the company that is profitable and run well.
And you know what I don't care about?
Whether they are showing diversity HR videos to their employees.
I don't care about that.
That makes no difference to me.
Does the company earn or does the company not earn?
Does it provide a good product or service or does it not?
So S&P is walking this stuff back.
And again, that's the first indicator that we're about to go into a fairly serious recession.
Because again, when you look at the stuff that, just like you and your household, all your frivolous spending, when it's an economic downturn, when somebody loses a job, the first thing to go is your night out at the movies and your restaurant trips.
Well, when it comes to corporate America, the first thing to go is ESG and DEI when the cuts come.
Corporate earnings are down.
That means the economy is going to drop.
Just get ready for it.
And while Joe Biden is happy talking this thing, it would be important to start protecting yourself.
With all of that said, Republicans would be poised to take advantage of this if they knew how to speak in free market terms, but Republicans have left that far behind.
And this is a serious problem.
In the effort to win over people in middle America, the so-called Rust Belt, The suggestion has been made that those people are desperate for manufacturing policy that quote-unquote reshores jobs and all that is is nice sounding stuff that effectively means subsidization for some at the expense of others.
That's not actually by the way.
Why Republicans are winning in Ohio and Indiana.
The reason Republicans are winning in Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, all these Midwestern Rust Belt states, it has very little to do with manufacturing policy, because guess what?
Most of those jobs didn't come back.
They all just shifted over, right?
Pittsburgh used to be a steel town, and now Pittsburgh is actually a healthcare town.
Jobs change.
It doesn't mean people don't get lost in the shuffle, which is horrible.
We have to find better ways to transition them to new careers.
We have to find better opportunities for them.
But the idea that you're bringing back like the entire manufacturing base of the United States is something that both the Republican Party and Democratic Party keep saying.
And it's not going to happen in large swaths of the manufacturing economy in the same way that agriculture used to be a mainstay of the American economy.
And now agriculture is worked by a tiny fraction of the workforce in the United States.
You don't hear people saying, well, you know what?
All those farmers who lost jobs, we need to find ways for them to go back to farming.
That's just not something people say anymore, and the reason for that is economies become more innovative, they become more efficient.
The actual reason, by the way, that Republicans are winning in red states has much more to do with the bizarre cultural policies practiced by left-coast elites than it has to do with industrial policy in the Midwest.
So as the Republican Party embraces the idea that entitlement programs should never be messed with, that we should continue spending just like Democrats do, only on different people, It's a race to the bottom at that point.
It really is.
It'd be nice if somebody in American politics had the actual balls to talk about the beauties of the free market, which is what has made America the most prosperous country in world history bar none.
Without a doubt.
Instead, we're just going to blow out our debt and we're going to continue ignoring all the systemic problems of the economy until we hit a cliff, at which point we hit a cliff.
And then, because America is perceived as capitalist but actually is corporatist, at that point they blame the free markets and they call for more government interventionism and it's a spiral to the bottom.
So, if that sounds kind of dark, it's because it is.
Again, it would be really nice if somebody in political power had the capacity to speak clearly and cogently about the economy.
But that's likely not what we're going to get.
Instead, it's going to be a race of personalities.
Speaking of which, apparently Carrie Lake is now preparing another Senate run.
She ran for governor.
She lost to a wet rag in Katie Hobbs in Arizona.
Everybody thought Carrie Lake was going to win that race.
They thought she was going to win that race because again, Katie Hobbs is a terrible candidate, like a truly awful candidate.
Carrie Lake somehow found a way to lose the race by essentially saying to a bunch of people in the middle, I don't want you to vote for me.
I mean, she actually said that pretty much.
Now, she has declared that she won.
And if this is the Republican plan for victory, I gotta say, it's really stupid.
Declaring that you won a game that you lost does not make you the winner of that game, nor should it make you the favorite for the next game.
There is no game of which I am aware that you claiming victory makes you the victor in the game.
If you just declare that you won a basketball game after you clearly lost a basketball game, does that now make you a winner who moves on to the next round?
And yet this seems to be denial is not just a river in Egypt.
Denial is apparently now a Republican electoral strategy.
If you pretend that you didn't lose an election and then you say a bunch of stuff about it that is unverifiable, then we give you the benefit of the doubt because we hate the left so much that we have decided that everything they say is a lie up to and including election results.
That's not a good way to win a reelect effort.
The Arizona Republican Party is destroying itself right now, and it's a disaster area for the Republican Party nationally, because if Republicans lose Arizona, which state do they make up in a presidential?
Remember, until about five years ago, Arizona was entirely red.
If you go back to, like, 2016, the senators from Arizona were John McCain and Jeff Flake.
It was two Republicans, and Doug Ducey was the Republican governor of Arizona.
And now, there's a Democratic senator— there are two Democratic senators and a Democrat governor in Arizona.
So, is the Arizona Republican Party shifting back toward the sort of maverick state status that actually allows it to win in the state?
Nope.
Apparently, Carrie Lake is not only running in this Senate race, she is now the far-and-away favorite in the primary race there.
Which, I gotta say, is just wild.
It's wild, especially because this is a super vulnerable seat for Democrats.
Kyrsten Sinema, the current independent senator in Arizona, she is running against Ruben Gallego.
Ruben Gallego right now is drawing a plurality of the vote.
Sinema is drawing some of the Republican vote.
And, well, if you had a strong Republican candidate who, say, didn't alienate independents, maybe fewer of those independents would go over to Kyrsten Sinema.
Right now, Kyrsten Sinema's winning like 37-38% of the vote, Gallego is at like 40-something, and Carrie Lake, if she were in that race, is in the 20s.
Okay, that ain't gonna do it.
And yet, Republicans in Arizona seem so obsessed with the idea that if they just keep relitigating 2020 and 2022 and presumably 2024 for the rest of time, that this will be an electoral strategy that leads to- I just don't understand how this has ever worked.
Name a situation in your life where looking back on a thing and just Gnawing on it over and over and over has made your life better.
Name literally one situation in your own life where something has gone wrong for you and you gnaw on it.
You just sit there and you just obsess about it endlessly.
And this has now made your life better going forward.
And yet this is what Republican Party seems to be doing not only over 2020, but over over 2022 as well now.
According to Axios, a potential three-way battle with Kyrsten Sinema running as an independent exposes deep divisions in both parties on whether to appeal to their bases or independence.
Lake still has not conceded her gubernatorial loss in 2022.
The race offers a state-level experiment on the implications of a possible three-way presidential contest because Sinema is playing the sort of no-labels candidate right now.
If Lake wins GOP's primary next August, she will likely face down Gallego and Sinema in the general election.
Sinema has not officially announced whether she will seek re-election, but she has a bunch of cash on hand.
Now again, Republicans cannot afford to lose Arizona.
It's this simple.
Maybe it feels good to sort of stew in these issues.
But I'm just wondering, again, whether it's better to stew in them or it's better to win.
Republicans could do the same thing in Georgia.
I noticed that, for example, Brian Kemp won going away as governor of Georgia.
Won going away.
Even as Republicans stewed over 2020 in Georgia, Brian Kemp won running away in Georgia over Stacey Abrams, who was the scourge of Georgia in 2020, supposedly.
So, here are your choices.
You can either sit there and you can gnaw on the past, or you can win.
There's no third choice here.
Which is why, again, if Donald Trump is the nominee, he's gonna need to not re-litigate 2020 as his key motivation to victory.
That is not going to motivate independence, just not.
No one wants to re-litigate that other than the Republican base.
And it may feel good, and you may believe you're right, and maybe you are right!
Okay, I don't think the proof is there.
I don't think the evidence is there that like votes were tallied in the middle of the night.
False votes were bused into Fulton County by the box and then loaded into machines.
I think the evidence does not exist for that, but let's even say you're right.
Question.
If you just say that over and over, does that make Donald Trump president?
Because what Carrie Lake is doing on a state level is what Donald Trump is doing on a national level.
And the thing is, Donald Trump, if he's the nominee, he could redeploy and go against Biden.
He does have that capacity, but he's going to need the incentive structure to do that.
That incentive structure is going to come from the Republican base, not from the media, who wish to wait.
The media want nothing but Donald Trump relitigating 2020 for 2024.
That is their favorite thing.
It means that Donald Trump does not become president of the United States in 2024 if he does that.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, meanwhile, So, when it comes to Donald Trump's race, he can run one of two races.
One of them, he could win.
One of them, he is almost sure to lose.
The one that he can win is the one where everyone just highlights Joe Biden's failures.
We've been talking about it incessantly.
Joe Biden is a failed president.
He's a terrible president.
There is not a thing that he has touched that has not turned to garbage.
Well, here was Donald Trump on that topic yesterday, and this is totally fine stuff.
Everyone can see the stunning contrast between our incredible success and Joe Biden's horrendous failures, and that's one reason why we're leading so big in the polls.
That's really the reason, I think.
It's more enthusiasm now than 2016 or 2020, because you've seen how incompetent these people are.
It's horrible.
Okay, so all of that is fine.
If, however, Donald Trump runs on the basis of his legal cases, it's not likely to go amazing.
So yesterday, he said, I'm not in Iowa.
There's a reason I'm not in Iowa.
It's because of my legal cases.
How can my corrupt political opponent, crooked Joe Biden, put me on trial during an election campaign that I'm winning by a lot, but forcing me nevertheless to spend time and money away from the campaign trail in order to fight bogus, made-up accusations and charges?
That's what they're doing.
I'm sorry, I won't be able to go to Iowa today.
I won't be able to go to New Hampshire today because I'm sitting in a courtroom on bullsh** because his attorney general Okay, again, I agree with him on a lot of this stuff.
But is that going to win a presidential election with independents?
Is that going to be the line?
If the line is Joe Biden's a terrible president, he can win.
If the line is I can't campaign today because I'm in court, that is not a winning line.
And no matter how much Republicans are going to have to get out of their own heads, they really are.
And this is true on nearly every issue.
Republicans are insider.
Again, I get the lack of credibility of the left.
I also think they lie frequently.
Near-incessantly.
I also think that they say things that are not true, that they twist the narrative, that they do things that are truly bad.
I agree with all of that.
It also does not mean that if we are constantly looking in the mirror and just seeing what we want to see, then we are going to come away with an accurate reflection of what politics in America looks like.
I'll give you another example.
So last night, there was a special election in Ohio.
It was a special election on what they called Issue 1 on the Ohio ballot.
This election was about whether to change the Ohio State Constitution to make it so that amendments basically required a supermajority in order to be passed.
So if you want to change the Ohio State Constitution right now, you need just a sheer majority.
But instead of that, they want to make it a supermajority.
This is what was up for debate.
However...
This debate actually wasn't about the constitutional amendments.
It was about the Ohio Republican Party doing that and the left saying what they actually are attempting to do is prevent you from enshrining Roe versus Wade in the Ohio state constitution.
What they really want to do is just ban abortion in state law and then make it impossible for us to overturn because they've changed the rules of the constitutional amendment.
So that's what was on the ballot last night.
And here's how the Associated Press described the results.
So first of all, the Ohio resolution to essentially stabilize the Ohio state constitution, it went down to flaming defeat 57 to 43.
Here's how the AP described it, quote, Ohio voters on Tuesday resoundingly rejected a
Republican-backed measure that would have made it more difficult to change the state's
constitution, setting up a fall campaign that will become the nation's latest referendum
on abortion rights since the U.S.
Supreme Court overturned nationwide protections last year.
The defeat of Issue 1 keeps in place a simple majority threshold for passing future constitutional amendments, rather than the 60% supermajority that was proposed.
Its supporters said the higher bar would protect the state's foundational document from outside interest groups.
Voter opposition to the proposal was widespread, even spreading into traditionally Republican territory.
In fact, in early returns, support for the measure fell far short of Donald Trump's performance during the 2020 election in nearly every county.
So as Jazz Shaw points out over at Hot Air, the word abortion appeared nowhere in the text of issue one.
It was a proposal to raise the bar for amending the state constitution to 60% support rather than simple majority.
That's already in place in a lot of other states.
However, however, it was read by the voters as an attempt to basically protect pro-life positions.
He says, even a quick glance at the national polls will tell the same story about the state of play in American politics today.
Joe Biden is among the least popular presidents in modern American history.
Recent investigations have made it increasingly clear he is almost certainly among the most corrupt.
Nobody approves of him.
But yesterday's results in Ohio are all the proof you need.
Such a result is not going to happen like a giant romp over Joe Biden.
And that Biden could still hold on to the White House.
That's because if we allow Democrats to make next year's election all about abortion, their voters and a number of moderates and independents will ignore massive failures and the deplorable state of their country, hold their noses, and vote to keep the GOP out of power at any cost.
There is no more pro-life person in America than I am.
Okay, I am fully pro-life all the way back to point of conception, no exceptions for rape or incest.
Now, I'm as pro-life as it is possible to be.
Also, politics exists.
Republicans saying over and over to themselves that if we take the hardest pro-life position in every state in the union, this will lead to electoral victory is dumb.
It is not correct.
You're going to have to gradually convince the American people of the rightness of your positions.
Because if you don't, the backlash is going to come strong from the other side.
You're seeing this in state election after state election.
It's what's happening in Kansas, for example.
Where an overwhelmingly Republican population voted to actually enshrine abortion in Kansas constitutional law.
If Republicans feel like they are the only voters in the room, if they feel like they vote on the basis of Carrie Lake's race in 2020, or they vote on the basis of Donald Trump being victimized by law enforcement, or they vote for their nominees on the basis of who takes the most pro-life position and promises they're going to ram it down in law even without any political support for that position, they're going to lose.
Okay, gravity does exist.
The left has been assuming with the economy gravity doesn't exist.
And the left for a long time, with regard to things like crime, assumed that gravity did not exist.
Gravity continues to exist in the political realm.
Reality continues to exist in the political realm.
Now, I'll be honest with you and I'll tell you where people are straying from their central principles.
It is 100% true that if you go for a 10-week abortion ban, that is not a full abortion ban, nor it is remotely sufficient to protect human life.
It is also true, if that's the best you can get, that may be the best you can get.
Now, there are a lot of people who make a great living telling you that if you don't go for broke all the time, every time, that you're never gonna get anywhere.
And it's precisely the opposite.
If you go for broke every time, all the time, you're going to lose from here till the end of time.
Because going for broke every so often may result in the victory, but the other 98% of the time, it results in loss.
And that other 98% of the time, it matters an awful lot more.
It really does.
Victories are won incrementally.
The pro-life movement defeated Roe vs. Wade over the course of 50 years of building up an entire legal movement specifically dedicated to interpreting the Constitution as originally intended.
That took 50 years of incremental movement.
Do you think that tomorrow, if we just go for broke, that magically the country is going to snap into a place of virtue?
I don't.
I think it's a long, hard slog.
I think it's a long, hard process of convincing people, and working with people, and yes, taking incremental gains, and recognizing the gains for what they are, while also recognizing what they are not.
That is what political honesty would look like.
But very few people on either side of the political aisle actually do political honesty these days.
Instead, their business is telling you about how pure they are on every form.
And they don't worry about winning.
Instead, what they worry about is can they wrong-foot the other guy and make it look as though he's actually pusillanimous on an issue, when what he's really saying is the only way to... I agree with you on the issue.
The only way to get to the point where you win is by pursuing these very practical steps.
Or alternatively, you can shout at the win and then you can lose.
Maybe it feels good to shout at the win.
Feeling good is not politics.
Feeling good is not victory.
Victory is victory and there's no substitute for it.
All right, meanwhile, speaking of left-wing liars, the Advanced Placement Board, the college board, they're just liars.
They lie on...
On the regular.
They lie routinely.
So they lied about their AP African American History course in Florida, suggesting that it couldn't even be taught in Florida because you can't teach black history in Florida.
It's just crap.
It's not true at all.
Well now, the College Board has announced that it's going to pull its AP Psychology class from Florida schools.
It's not Florida banning the AP Psychology class.
Florida did not do that.
It is the college board saying we can't teach our AP psychology class in Florida schools.
They said, quote, Florida Department of Education has effectively banned AP
psychology in the state by instructing Florida superintendents that teaching
foundational content on sexual orientation and gender identity is
illegal under state law.
Um, that is a lie.
Here's what the Florida Department of Education says, quote, So it's the AP that is removing the course, not Florida.
Florida did not say you can't teach AP.
AP said you can't teach AP in Florida.
Why?
psych course. The other advanced course providers, including the International Baccalaureate
program, had no issue providing the college credit psychology course. So it's the AP
that is removing the course, not Florida. Florida did not say you can't teach AP. AP
said you can't teach AP in Florida. Why? Well, according to the AP standards on psychology,
one of the standards is, describe how sex and gender influence socialization and other
aspects of development.
And also, articulate the impact of social and cultural categories on self-concept and relations with others.
Now, there's nothing there that says that you have to teach a bunch of weird gender theory garbage.
You could not, right?
You could just teach that sex, of course, impacts socialization because girls are girls and boys are boys.
And gender is deeply connected with sex.
You could totally teach that in the context of the AP psych course.
But what AP is saying is that we don't want you to teach that.
So as a columnist for The Federalist points out, the College Board is equating the limits placed on teaching these two skills with removing a cornerstone of the course.
This is like saying that neglecting to explain all the unconventional ways punctuation is used for rhetorical purposes somehow makes the whole class illegitimate.
And the real reason for this is because the APA, the American Psychological Association, which has always been and is a deeply, deeply partisan political organization.
Groups like that are arguing that AP Psych should actually include more content about gender and sexuality.
The APA CEO, Arthur Evans, says, quote, an advanced placement course that ignores the decades of science studying sexual orientation and gender identity would deprive students of knowledge they will need to succeed in their studies in high school and beyond.
So first of all, I guarantee you that what they're teaching in AP Psych does not actually reflect the best science.
I promise you.
Because the best science says, with regard to, for example, sexual orientation, that there is no genetic marker for sexual orientation.
That is what the actual science says right now.
There is no clear and convincing genetic marker for sexual orientation.
That is what a study of hundreds of thousands of human genomes by the Human Genome Project found.
Will that appear in the AP Psych course?
I have serious doubts that will appear because it conflicts with their entire narrative.
How about gender identity?
There is no, none convincing science that there is something called a female brain in a male body.
That is a myth.
That is a Gnostic myth.
It does not exist in science.
Because no one can actually label what a female brain looks like in a male body.
Because the brain is part of the body.
It's nonsense.
Will they teach it anyway?
That's what they want to teach.
So Florida's just saying that we can't actually teach that stuff.
And the AP is saying, well, you must teach that stuff.
So is that Florida's fault or is that the AP's fault?
Again, Florida didn't ban the AP course.
AP banned the AP course.
So stop blaming Florida for actually making sure that its kids aren't indoctrinated.
Instead, blame the AP for attempting to indoctrinate the kids.
Okay, time for some things I like.
So things that I like today.
So there is a book that was enormous in the 1970s.
It's called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
It was written by a guy who used to be sort of an English composition professor and then got very into psychology, went to University of Chicago.
This book sold just millions and millions of copies, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
It's one of my dad's favorite books.
I first read it when I was in my teens.
I reread it like this week because he kept talking about it.
I was like, I don't really remember it that well.
The book by Robert Peirsig received 120 rejections before it was actually published.
It's initial sales were at least 5 million copies worldwide.
At this point, probably sold twice that.
Which makes it, by the way, the single best-selling psychology book probably in human history.
You haven't heard of it because you didn't grow up in the 70s.
The book in the 70s was perceived as an attack on conservatism.
It is not.
It is a deeply conservative book.
So, basically what the book is, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is it's a story about the author and his son taking a motorcycle trip across the country.
And It's interspersed with his flashbacks to his days in psychology because it turns out that he had an actual psychological break and he was hospitalized and getting like electrotherapy and all of this.
And so it's a travelogue interspersed with philosophical musings and investigations into what it was that made him go crazy about philosophy in the first place.
Well, the book says a lot of the same sort of stuff that Jordan Peterson says now.
So a lot of the book is about the magic of fixing his motorcycle.
You don't have to be, by the way, a motorcycle enthusiast to actually enjoy this sort of stuff.
I'm not.
And again, what I actually do enjoy is what he calls in the book quality.
So the central idea of the book is that there is this thing called quality.
You know what it is, I know what it is, and it's undefinable.
When you try to define quality in any particular situation, you're gonna have a very hard time categorizing quality.
But you know what it is.
You know, down in the cockles of your own heart, that Beethoven is higher quality than Cardi B. Everyone knows that.
And any attempt to say that that's not true, everyone knows is crap.
Everybody knows that it's bullcrap.
It's postmodernist nonsense.
And so what he says is that this quality has been lost.
Why has it been lost?
And he breaks it down into Greek philosophy, and he basically says that there was an attempt to separate off the true from the good.
And that was because if there was no way to define the good, then presumably truth could get lost.
But what Pirsig says is, we should stop running away from the undefined term.
Stop pretending that you can define a term that you can't define, like quality or the good.
Because that is the thing that actually drives human beings.
And you can pretend that you can categorize it, that you can nail it down like a butterfly on a piece of paper, but you can't actually do that.
You know what it is in your heart?
Because that is the way that we interact with the universe, is through the prism of that good, of that quality, and it's not entirely quote-unquote subjective.
It is between you and the world.
That's why there's widespread agreement on what amounts to quality in a wide variety of areas across human life.
Now, What he doesn't, he kind of hints at it, but what he doesn't actually say is that that good, that quality, is God.
Right?
That system of values is in fact the divine.
And that is how we interact with the world, is through that prism.
That's what religion fills the gap of.
He comes very close to basically saying that in the book, but he doesn't quite say that.
But the book is really A much earlier version of make a bed.
There is such a thing as a higher value and that higher value is the thing that orients you.
That science is not that higher value because science has no values because the empirical cannot actually separate, cannot bridge what they call the is-ought gap from things around you in the universe in the physical universe to what you ought to do.
And what he says is that's an artificial gap in the first place because the way that you actually address the world is always going to be oriented through a particular perspective of quality.
Like you as a human being.
Again, a point that my friend Jordan Peterson makes all the time.
You as a human being, when you take in your sense perceptions around the world, you are discriminating among sense perceptions.
You're not taking in everything around you at an equal rate.
If you did, you'd go crazy very, very quickly.
Which means there's automatically an orientation process that is happening between you and the universe.
And that orientation process, says Peirce Egg, is quality.
And that bridge, it puts back together the true and the good.
Because it turns out that they are, in fact, enmeshed with one another.
Because you can't actually see the true unless you acknowledge the good.
So the book is well worth the read.
It's really kind of riveting reading, philosophically speaking.
I highly recommend it.
Robert Peirce's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Alrighty, guys.
The rest of the show continues right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into the situation in Oakland where residents have a new way of fighting crime.
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