Ben Shapiro critiques President Biden's "Nazi" rhetoric as a desperate, ineffective strategy mirroring Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" pitch, arguing it ignores the peaceful transfer of power following January 6th. He highlights Biden's physical decline, citing reports of him wandering off stage and relying on his wife, alongside administrative failures like Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's unreported hospitalization and border chaos where 2.3 million migrants entered versus 6 million apprehensions. Shapiro contends these issues, including Red Sea shipping cost doubles and vaccine overreach, prove the administration's incompetence while Democrats disqualify an unconvicted Trump, suggesting Biden's campaign is crumbling under its own contradictions. [Automatically generated summary]
As the 2024 election gets closer, Joe Biden is becoming more and more desperate.
And he should be.
The world is an uglier and uglier place under President Biden.
Nearly no one believes that the country is moving in the right direction.
And Joe Biden is clearly an ailing man.
He is not with it.
Everyone knows it.
That apparently includes former President Barack Obama.
So according to the Washington Post over the weekend, quote, Former President Barack Obama has raised questions about the structure of President Biden's re-election campaign, discussing the matter directly with Biden and telling the president's aides and allies the campaign needs to be empowered to make decisions without clearing them with the White House, according to three people familiar with the conversations.
In other words, Barack Obama is telling Joe Biden to outsource his campaign to people who are not Joe Biden.
Now, apparently, Obama grew animated in discussing the election.
He recommended David Proof, who's Obama's own 2008 campaign manager, to head up Joe Biden's re-elect effort.
Other Democrats are also deeply worried about Biden's re-elect chances.
According to the Post, quote, Representative Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who is running for her state's Open Senate seat, has expressed concern to allies she might not be able to win if Biden is at the top of the ticket, according to people familiar with those conversations.
And according to Axios, quote, many high level Democrats think things are not fine.
They fear the president's political machine hasn't found the sweet spot between a chill Zen and dangerous complacency and has been way too Zen.
Biden's allies are worried that his base won't show up.
That includes Jim Clyburn.
You remember Jim Clyburn, the congressman from South Carolina whose endorsement of Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders basically turned the primary elections in 2020 toward Joe Biden.
Here's Clyburn saying that he's worried that voter turnout is just not going to happen for Joe Biden.
That is like six to seven percentage points higher than in most prior elections.
So a real statistical outlier.
Do you think that Joe Biden is going to get that kind of turnout in 2024?
The answer is not based on his performance.
So this means that Biden is already turning to his very last messaging refuge.
Stop Donald Trump.
So last week on Friday, he gave a speech in Valley Forge.
That was a weird place to effectively launch your re-election campaign, because when you think of Valley Forge, you're immediately thinking of negativity, right?
Valley Forge is not a happy place.
You're thinking a nation under attack, trying to live through its darkest moments.
Just about in the shadow of defeat.
It's not about hope or about change.
It's about soldiering through the winter.
It's about George Washington and a bunch of starving men at a fort.
It's about gangrene and frostbite.
Now, when I think about that stuff, I don't think reelect success.
If you're the president and you're running based on your record and you're running based on what a high achievement your first administration has been, opening your campaign at Valley Forge is not exactly an inspiring moment.
But we'll get to why Joe Biden picked Valley Forge in just one moment.
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Puretalk.com Okay, so Joe Biden shows up in Valley Forge to give this speech, and the entire theme of the speech is going to be how he is like George Washington, and it turns out that Donald Trump is like Hitler.
This is the entire theme of the speech, and it's going to be the theme of the campaign.
So you think that 2020 was a rough campaign?
Wait until 2024.
We're in it.
It has begun.
This is the first time, by the way, that Joe Biden has really launched against Trump in the campaign.
So he's really been attacking quote-unquote MAGA Republicans in the impression that perhaps somebody who is not Donald Trump is going to win the nomination.
I think Biden is already figuring, I have to define my opponent.
Trump is likely to be the opponent.
So he launched a full-scale frontal assault on Donald Trump, at least best he can.
Now, the optics he picks for these speeches are always a little bit strange.
So the optics he picked for his last democracy is in danger speech, which was, as I recall, before the 2022 election.
That one was in Philadelphia.
He was flanked by Marines in the background and a blood red Independence Hall.
And that is where he declared that this is a battle for the soul of the nation.
Well, this time he decided to do a general patent.
But flanking yourself with the American flag while you declare that the people who you are running against are threats to the actual democracy It's a little bit much.
It's a little much.
And this entire speech was Biden going full Hitler.
It was Biden saying that Donald Trump was a full-scale Nazi and those who would vote for him, presumably, are little brown shirts.
That was the message of the speech.
He did not really differentiate between Donald Trump and his followers.
He did not really differentiate between Trump's followers and other Republicans.
He didn't differentiate between Trump voters who don't like January 6th and Trump voters who do like January 6th.
Everybody who would vote for Trump is apparently in that particular camp.
And that's a very dangerous play.
It's the same sort of play that Hillary Clinton tried in 2016 when she suggested that Donald Trump, again, was the leader of the deplorables.
And it turns out that no one voted for Hillary Clinton.
People just didn't show up.
And so she lost the election.
Well, what happens this time when you have an ailing, elderly, fragile old man who has tyrannically used the power of the executive in order to overthrow generations of precedent With regard to what the President can and cannot do, standing up there and declaring that his political enemies are actually enemies of the Republic itself.
So again, that's why he's at Valley Forge.
He wants the dark.
He wants the cold.
He wants you to feel that.
But he wants you to feel that not about his administration, but about Donald Trump.
For those who are not familiar with the basketball terminology, a bank shot is when you use the backboard in order to make a basket.
In other words, it requires a ricochet.
Joe Biden attacking Donald Trump as a candidate with reference to January 6th particularly as opposed to what Donald Trump will do as president or what Donald Trump's agenda is as president.
It's not gonna play because again, the date on the calendar as of today is January 8th of 2024.
We are now three full years removed from January 6th.
And in that intervening time, Donald Trump has not been the president of the United States.
For all the talk about how horrible January 6th was, and I think January 6th actually was quite horrible.
For all the talk about how January 6th was horrible, it did not actually stop the peaceful transition of power in the United States.
It did not.
Donald Trump left office on inauguration day and Joe Biden became president.
And since then, there have been three intervening years.
Since then, there have been three intervening years of this man being president.
And he doesn't want to talk about any of that, any of it.
He just wants to talk about how Donald Trump is a threat to the Republic.
And again, this would go over a lot better if this guy himself were not a threat to the Republic, as we'll discuss.
So here was Joe Biden launching into his, this really was the launch of his campaign.
No one believes that January 6th we nearly lost America.
It was a riot that went out of control and then was cleared up within three hours and then the vote was certified by Republicans.
And then Joe Biden became president of the United States.
Does anyone believe that a bunch of dolts and some people who just didn't know what the hell they were doing walking through the Capitol building was a threat to the very fabric of the most powerful republic in the history of the world?
For all the people who are saying that it was a coup, typically a coup requires you to activate the military and to use that military power in order to take control of the levers of power.
In the actual building itself, was the crowd generally armed with weaponry?
They found some knives on people, they find like, lots of guns on people, bazookas, rocket launchers, like what?
Again, you can point out that January 6th was ugly and terrible and was predicated on a lie, which is that the Vice President of the United States had the power to unilaterally overthrow the certified election results from states.
That wasn't true.
It's a bad legal theory.
And Donald Trump should never have been pushing that crap.
Is that the same thing as we almost lost it all that day?
But here's the thing.
The reason that Biden has to say that is because his implication is that if Donald Trump wins the next election, you will never vote again.
Do you think that's true?
I don't think that's true.
I don't think that's true, that if Donald Trump wins the next election, you will never vote again.
I don't think, you know, in fact, I know that's not true.
I know for a fact that's not true.
That is not a reality.
He has to, the worse his presidency looks, the worse he has to paint Trump as a fascist.
So the fact that he's going in January of 2024, like 11 months before the election, The fact that he's already going.
Trump is a Nazi.
Where do you even go from there?
How do you build a campaign beyond that?
What's worse than Nazi?
Like Trump is going to be full-on Satan?
He can't say that because too many Democrats like Satan.
Okay, particularly because the line that he spouts there, which is he says, Donald Trump's campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future.
He's literally doing an entire speech about January 6th.
The entire speech is about January 6th.
Now, again, I may not be amazing with math, but I know how calendars work.
And I know that January 6th, 2021 is in the past.
And I noticed that you're at Valley Forge and you are citing the past.
This is in fact the entire schtick of the campaign.
So you being out there saying that Donald Trump is all about the past and we're all about the future is obviously not true.
Also when he says things like, our sacred democracy is at risk.
Again, I would take that a little more seriously if I didn't believe that you were willing to overthrow pretty much every vestige of democracy in pursuit of political power.
You attempted to use the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration in order to foist vaccines on 80 million people and we had to sue you to stop it.
You unilaterally declared that you could get rid of student loan debt after acknowledging you don't have the power to do that.
I mean, what power has this person not tried to irrigate to himself via the executive?
Does anyone truly believe that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are deep down devoted, quote unquote, public servants?
No one believes that.
Again, this would go a lot better if Joe Biden were not Joe Biden, but Joe Biden is Joe Biden.
Making the claim that Donald Trump is self-centered is truly, I mean, like everyone knows that.
But how is that any different from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?
The last time we had a true public servant as a president of the United States, I'm not sure it's happened in my lifetime.
We'll get to more from Joe Biden's campaign launch speech and what it means for his campaign and all the rest.
Because again, the situation in the United States is very grim right now.
Again, all of these charges would carry a lot more weight if Kamala Harris, your vice president, had tried to bail rioters out of prison during 2020.
She tried to bail them out of jail in 2020.
And again, anyone who thinks that the January 6th events were even remotely on par with prior insurrections in the United States, like, say, the Civil War, is out of their mind.
That's a crazy talk.
Like, no one takes the January 6th talk that seriously other than Democrats.
Who's he speaking to?
Who are the moderates out there who are like, you know, inflation is up 20%.
The Secretary of Defense literally got lost over the weekend.
We'll talk about that in a little while.
But I do remember when January 6th was bad.
I understand that Democrats want to make this thing like a national holiday and that every year we're going to commemorate January 6th as though it is representative of the great breach in American society.
But it really, really is not.
It really is not.
I think this math works when Joe Biden is not on the ballot.
But when Joe Biden is on the ballot, I think it's kind of a tough sell.
Then Joe Biden started talking about how he won the last election, which of course is true.
What's weird though, is that when he talked about that, he didn't talk about winning the
Electoral College, which is actually how you win elections.
That was the entire debate of the January 6th rioters and compatriots. They were talking
about the Electoral College and state certifications and all the rest. Instead, he cited the
popular vote, which again is a weird thing.
That's a weird, we don't decide presidential elections in this country based on the popular
Okay, then he suggests that Donald Trump, if he were to lose, or if he were to become president again and had the power, he would invoke the Insurrection Act to go arrest all of his enemies.
Now again, that is not... When Donald Trump talked about invoking the Insurrection Act, he was talking about to stop actual honest-to-God riots in the streets in 2020.
Or is Joe Biden just like, I guess the idea here is that if Donald Trump becomes president, then Joe Biden will end up in jail because Trump invokes the Insurrection Act to overthrow state governments or something.
With former aides, Trump plans to invoke the Insurrections Act, the Insurrection Act, which will allow him to deploy, which is not allowed to do under any circumstances, allow him to deploy U.S.
In the same speech in which he will talk about poisoning the blood of the country, he will talk about how magnets don't work in water.
That's about how seriously most people take Donald Trump's actual verbiage.
But we're supposed to believe that Donald Trump Who is buffoonish when he speaks very often, is somehow the same person who is going to invoke the Insurrection Act and send federal troops into your home to arrest you if you oppose him or something.
And he says this, the opponents of the Republic are opponents of democracy, he said, at a rally flanked by a giant backdrop of an American flag as he labeled his political opponents enemies of the Republic.
And then, of course, he lumps in all Republicans, right?
This is his main shtick.
His main shtick is that he is going to lump in pretty much everybody.
The push and pull of American history is not a fairy tale.
Every stride forward in America is met with ferocious backlash many times from those who fear progress and those who exploit that fear for their own personal gain.
From those who traffic in lies, Told for power and profit.
And again, all of this is just such projection, right?
When he says things like, the people who fear progress, meaning if you don't agree with him, those are people who exploit fear for personal gain.
He's literally standing there telling you if you don't vote for him, the Republic is over.
He's exploiting fear for personal gain.
He says, for those who traffic in lies told for power and profit.
He literally lies about the history of the United States, suggesting that because America has terrible racial history, that means that all inequality today is a form of inequity.
He says that people who are driven by grievance and grift and consumed by conspiracy and victimhood are on the other side?
His entire coalition is a coalition of the supposed victims.
For most to seek to bury history and ban books, they're literally pulling down statues.
It's truly an amazing thing.
This pitch is not going to work.
If this is Biden's final pitch, I just don't see how this connects in the same way that it did even, say, in 2022.
When Joe Biden was not actually on the ballot, right?
They say Trump wasn't on the ballot, but neither was Biden.
When Biden is on the ballot, is that what you're thinking about?
We'll get to Joe Biden in just one second.
His actual look, what's actually happening to him, because part of the problem is the person presenting this message is not a credible person presenting this message.
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One of the big problems here for Joe Biden is that if you were a ringing image of small-r republicanism, somebody who believes in democracy, he wouldn't look like a senile, decrepit messenger of a failing administration.
But that is what he looks like.
So Joe Biden concluded his speech, and one of the big problems they've been having on this campaign and throughout his presidency is that Joe Biden literally does not know where to go when these speeches end.
He doesn't know what to do.
He doesn't know where to go.
He gets easily confused.
I'm sorry if this is hurting feelings, but it happens to be the obvious case to anyone who has a functioning prefrontal cortex and retinas.
Every time Joe Biden finishes a speech, he starts wandering off into walls.
It actually is sad that the President of the United States is obviously ailing.
He's obviously ailing.
And by the way, when we talk about threats to democracy, here's kind of a threat to democracy.
What happens when you try to disqualify your political opponent from the ballot?
What happens when you stick your DOJ on your political opponent, filing no less than four different cases in various jurisdictions, some state, some federal?
What exactly?
What amounts to an assault on the Republic?
Right now, here's a polling stat for you.
Ready?
81% of Democrats believe that states should disqualify former President Trump from presidential ballots, according to a new CBS News YouGov poll.
81% 4 and 5 Democrats believe that Donald Trump should just be thrown off ballots, thrown off the ballots.
He's never been criminally convicted of anything.
He's not even being charged with insurrection, by the way.
In all the various cases where he's being charged, he is not being charged for insurrection, which would be the thing that would theoretically invoke Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
But 81% of Democrats want him summarily kicked off the ballot now.
Poll Republicans on whether they think that Joe Biden should be actually barred from the ballot.
I guarantee it, 81%.
You want to talk about insurrectionist legal theories?
So basically, the case against Trump, when it comes to January 6th, is twofold.
And you'll hear both cases made by Democrats, and usually they merge them.
One is that January 6th was, in fact, the actual insurrection.
It was like a full-scale coup attempt by Donald Trump, which is weird, since he was the President of the United States, and has the power of the executive to order around the military, which he didn't actually use.
So there's that.
But the claim is that he incited an insurrection.
So the standard for incitement is much stronger than, you need to go peacefully protest at the Capitol building.
That is not incitement of an insurrection.
Two, it wasn't an actual insurrection.
It was a bunch of morons who decided they were going to break into the Capitol building while screaming and shouting, one dressed like a weird barbarian wearing buffalo horns.
And then a bunch of people who were just kind of following along because the police officers were standing right there and they're walking between the rope lines.
So again, that's not to minimize the violence done to police officers outside the building.
Those people were arrested.
But case number one that they make is that Trump was responsible for the events of January 6th.
And I've said Trump raised the temperature.
That's not the same thing as being responsible for the actual breaking into the Capitol building.
Two is the idea that from November 4th to January 6th, Donald Trump put forward a bunch of specious legal theories that were untrue about election fraud, about certification of state election results, about what the vice president could do in the face of all of that.
And the idea is that that's insurrection.
The specious legal theories put forward into law is an attempt at insurrection.
And this is the other case that you'll hear Democrats make.
What do you call it when you activate state players in various states to literally remove your political opponent from the ballot without a criminal conviction or investigation of any sort?
What exactly would you call that?
Because if A is insurrectionist activity, then B clearly qualifies as insurrectionist activity.
It seems to me like barring your political opponent, the presumed nominee of the opposing party, from the ballot.
That seems a little insurrection-y.
That seems a little non-democratic.
And yet this is what Democrats keep saying.
By the way, when Joe Biden says things like Donald Trump is a threat to the republic and that January 6th was in fact an insurrection, he's agreeing with that legal theory.
When he suggests January 6th was an insurrection and that Donald Trump is responsible for January 6th, he's agreeing with the legal theory that says Donald Trump needs to be barred from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
Well, here is Washington, D.C.' 's Mayor Muriel Bowser, who can't stop crime but certainly wants to stop Trump from being on the ballot, talking about Trump being booted from the ballot.
I think the biggest risk of disenfranchising voters happened on January 6th, when Donald Trump tried to steal the presidency from the American people.
Make no mistake, that is exactly what he intended to do.
We are a country of laws and of constitutions.
There are qualifications for office.
So, for example, if a lot of voters wanted to vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger, they wouldn't be able to do so because he is disqualified from running for president under the United States Constitution.
Yeah, that is going to be Trump's strongest argument.
Trump's strongest argument is Joe Biden is a bad president.
And Biden's apparent strongest argument is Trump is Hitler.
Now, the media are going to try and run this one up the flagpole, like all the way up the flagpole.
So Jonathan Capehart is really doing yeoman's work on behalf of the Biden administration from MSNBC.
Yet on Michael Fanone, who is one of the officers who was attacked during January 6th.
I mean, the media jumped into action, by the way, on this thing, like super fast.
The minute that Biden gave the speech, they immediately went into January 6th mode, which was like crying actual real tears on TV about January 6th, which again, happened three years ago.
Here's Jonathan Capehart literally crying on TV about this.
Joining me now in studio is Michael Fanone, former D.C.
Metropolitan Police Officer, Courage for America Council Member, and author of Hold the Line, The Insurrection, and One Cop's Battle for America's Soul.
Officer Fanone, I'm going to try to get through this.
Thank you for what you did three years ago today.
Please tell me your thoughts on this third anniversary.
unidentified
We are still in the midst of the same fight that began on January 6th, 2021.
I think my favorite part about that clip is where Fanon literally has to change his affect.
He starts off like, okay, this is gonna be like a normal interview, and then after Jonathan Capehart starts crying, he's like, okay, I also have to get, we're gonna have competitive choking up here, being very, very upset about January 6th.
Again, what this is going to come down to, if this is a battle between Biden calling Trump Hitler and Trump calling Biden incompetent, I'm sorry, Trump's going to win.
The number of people who believe, truly believe, that Donald Trump is Hitler, that number is relegated to very, very blue cities.
I know I used to live in one, and some people there actually believed that while they were sitting outside in the sunlight in Santa Monica drinking their sparkling wine while Trump was president.
It's just, it's an absurd contention.
If the battle is between the accurate definition of your opponent, Donald Trump's definition of Joe Biden as incompetent, bad at his job, Borderline senile.
And Joe Biden's portrayal of Donald Trump as a full-scale, Hitlerian threat to the republic, like a Nazi.
Only one of those is kind of accurate.
In just a second, we're going to get to the incompetence of Joe Biden because, again, every week it just seems to get worse.
We'll get to that momentarily first.
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So you remember when Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg took paternity leave to help his ailing husband who had just given birth for a couple of months and no one noticed.
He was just gone for like two months.
Everybody's like, well, where's Pete?
Well, now this is way worse, by the way.
This right here is way, way worse.
Apparently, Lloyd Austin, who is the Secretary of Defense.
Now, you may notice the United States is currently engaged tangentially But fairly seriously, in two incredibly serious conflicts, the war in Ukraine, where the United States is in fact coordinating with Ukraine, trying to provide military aid and support, and what is going on in the Middle East, where the United States in some cases is directly engaged.
We have right now aircraft carriers and battleships in the Middle East, in the Red Sea, in the Mediterranean.
We've been shooting down Houthi drones.
We have been shooting down Pirate ships, like these little inflatable boats that are being used to attack shipping.
Right now, the United States has troops that are in harm's way in Syria, in Iraq, that are being fired upon by Iranian forces.
So it makes a bit of a difference where the Defense Secretary is.
Like, this stuff is happening in real time.
So here is the problem.
According to CNN, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, the Pentagon's number two leader, was among the senior leaders kept in the dark about where the hell Lloyd Austin was.
So he checked into the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center following complications from an elective surgery.
According to Politico, the Pentagon did not tell President Joe Biden and other top officials about Defense Secretary Austin's hospitalization for three full days, according to three U.S.
So we're in the middle of all of this conflict all over the world.
Really, it's a spicy time in foreign policy.
And the Secretary of Defense just goes missing for three days.
And Joe Biden does not know.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and other senior White House aides did not know of Austin's January 1st hospitalization until the DOD sent over word on January 4th.
The official said it was highly unlikely Austin had conveyed word to Biden before Jake Sullivan was briefed on it.
If Jake didn't know, no way the president knew, said one of them, who would have told him of Austin's condition if not Jake?
If someone did tell the president, Jake would have been his first call.
Biden held a cordial conversation with Austin on Saturday night, per one of the U.S.
The president has complete trust and confidence in Secretary Austin, the official said.
But as the news of Austin's situation came as a shock to all White House staff, they were unaware the Pentagon boss was dealing with complications following an elective medical procedure.
National security staffers were surprised it took the Pentagon so long to let them know of Austin's status.
The Pentagon did not make that information public until Friday evening.
They notified Congress about 15 minutes before they released a public statement.
Austin said, quote, I could have done a better job ensuring the public was appropriately informed.
I commit to doing better.
But this is important to say this was my medical procedure.
I take full responsibility for my decisions about disclosure.
Uh, then you need to resign, probably.
Because that's crazy!
Apparently he was in the ICU for four days.
For four days!
On Friday evening, as many people were turning toward their weekend, DOD spokesperson Major General Pat Ryder announced Austin had been hospitalized since January 1st.
His deputy, Kathleen Hicks, partially assumed some of his duties during that time.
But there's one problem.
CNN is now reporting that actually, she had no idea where he was.
So from January 1st, which again was a Monday, until Thursday, she did not know where he was.
So there was no one at the top of the Pentagon in a time of conflict and war.
People are assuming the Secretary of Defense at his desk doing his job.
She was on vacation in Puerto Rico at the time, and she was not informed of Austin's hospitalization until the afternoon of January 4th.
At that point, Hicks began to make contingency plans to return to Washington, D.C.
on Friday.
But, because Austin was expected to return to his full duties, albeit from the hospital, she decided to stay in Puerto Rico to ensure continuity of communications.
There are all these people around the Secretary at all times who manage him and help him on a day-to-day basis.
No one even told the White House it had won Pentagon officials?
I'm surprised that no one is using the word cover-up yet.
According to Politico, someone's head has to roll, but it's not gonna be Austin's.
I'm sure it'll be some low-level aide who was told, you need to tell my number two, and then the number two never got told, so the low-level aide ends up without a job, because that's the way it usually works in Washington, D.C.
The higher up shuttles all the responsibility down to somebody lower down, that person gets fired, and that's the end of the story.
The White House and Pentagon insist Austin's job is not in jeopardy, but they're sticking to that line, despite not even knowing what's actually been going on at the Pentagon.
The President is not in charge.
Boston surgery, medical complications, even his current condition remain unclear.
Senior defense department and White House officials still don't even know the details of the procedure.
Totally insane, totally, totally crazy.
And so, no one's in charge.
The president is not in charge, the secretary of defense is not in charge.
Number two, at the defense department, they don't even know the secretary of defense
is not in charge.
So things are going amazing.
Meanwhile, over on the border, we now have some new stats.
According to data released by the Biden administration, the Department of Homeland Security, they say that 2.3 million migrants have been allowed into the southern border, according to DHS.
The reason that seems low to me is because at least 6 million border apprehensions have taken place since Joe Biden took office.
To put that by way of perspective, during the entire four years of Donald Trump's administration, there were 1.6 million border apprehensions.
By the way, an apprehension does not mean that the person is then turned away and sent back home where they came from.
A border apprehension means they pick you up, they take you to a detention facility.
If you claim asylum, then they release you into the country within 72 hours of the date to come back for some sort of court date.
That's literally what it means.
The period of time between when you arrive in the country and are picked up by border patrol and when you're released into the interior of the United States is usually within a week, well, always within a week, and usually within 72 hours.
So when they say only 2.3 million people have entered the country, I have serious doubts that that number is accurate.
I think that number is way, way higher.
That also does not include the estimated 1 million gotaways, people who just went into the country, smuggled drugs into the country, or entered between ports of call and were not picked up by Border Patrol.
And, apparently, known gotaways only represent, maybe, I mean, they really don't know, because they don't know how many unknown gotaways.
They estimated, the CBP, that it's like 60% of all gotaways are known, which means you're talking about another 800,000 unknown gotaways, theoretically.
So you're talking about nearly 2 million people who have gotten into the country as gotaways, and you're talking about, according to DHS, 2.3 million, so that's 4.1 million.
And by the way, the numbers are way higher than that.
There's no way it's only 2.3 million people.
A DHS spokeswoman said Saturday the agency continues to report significant numbers of unauthorized migrants, including family.
But is that reality?
I really, really doubt it.
Again, all you have to do is look at the charts.
The charts are insane.
In December of 2020, which is the last month of Donald Trump, full month of Donald Trump's presidency, you're talking about approximately 80,000, 75,000 border apprehensions.
By March of 2021, when everybody now realizes Joe Biden's in office, you're looking at north of 175,000 border apprehensions.
Like, more than double.
And then in December, this last December, 300,000, apparently.
These are insane numbers, obviously.
And it's a real border crisis.
So, it's not just that it's a crisis at the border, it's that everybody knows it's a crisis at the border.
So, according to a brand new CBS News YouGov poll, 45% of Americans say what's happening at the border is a crisis.
30% say what's happening at the border is very serious.
18% say that it is somewhat serious.
So you are now up to, by those numbers, 93% of Americans say that it is at least somewhat serious.
75% say a crisis or very serious.
By the way, it's a crisis.
Only 7% say not much of a problem.
Hey, that is an astonishing number.
According to that same poll, immigrants in your local area have been 40% increasing, 35% haven't noticed, 25% decreasing.
As far as whether people believe that the Biden administration should be tougher, should be easier, or is handling things right, 55%.
said should be tougher in September.
It is now 63%.
Two-thirds of Americans believe that Joe Biden should be tougher on the border.
Only 16% say that Joe Biden should be easier.
And the 21% who say they're handling things right obviously doesn't understand what the hell's going on at the border.
By the way, what's actually going on at the border is two things.
One, Donald Trump's remain-in-Mexico policy was ended.
So when people come to the border and they claim asylum, by American law, they're now put into the system.
Just say, I fear to go back to my home country under America's current asylum rules.
Number two, because the United States refuses to detain full families together under the Flores settlement, and because the United States Refuses to remain in Mexico.
All you have to do is show up with a kid and basically you're gonna be released into the interior of the United States.
Joe Biden ended every policy that would have prevented mass illegal immigration.
By the way, the cartels know this.
The cartels have been redirecting American resources toward this wave of illegal migrants That's why they're doing it.
And then meanwhile, while the Border Patrol is acting as a busing and ferrying service for illegal immigrants, all of the gotaways that we're talking about, drug smugglers, criminals, those people are just entering between these points and just rushing into the interior of the United States, and Border Patrol isn't there.
It's not that we require more Border Patrol agents, it's that the Border Patrol agents we do have are basically acting as DMV agents at this point, and members of the local metropolitan busing authority, as opposed to, you know, actual Border Patrol agents.
Here's some images.
of a breach in the border wall in Arizona.
By the way, the way that you breach the border wall.
Is if there are no border patrol agents around, there are no border patrol agents around,
you just cut a hole in the wall, which is what they're doing.
So here's some video of illegal immigrants streaming through that border wall.
This would be on Thursday.
You see people just walking right on through.
Here we go in the United States.
By the way, even if they're caught at this point, Border Patrol then ask them, what are you doing here?
And they say, I fear to go home to my country.
And then what happens?
They're processed and released into the interior of the United States.
That's the way that this works.
Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, he says, yeah, of course, this is a border crisis.
But Democrats are so tied into the idea that there must be mass migration, mass illegal migration, that they are refusing border funding if it even means changing the asylum rules.
That's what's so crazy.
The single thing that is the biggest magnet driving people north of the border is this idiotic rule that if you claim asylum with no evidence whatsoever that you are being oppressed in your home country, other than your home country just kind of sucks, You are immediately admitted.
So Republicans have been saying, okay, why don't we do a few things?
Why don't we, number one, do remain in Mexico?
Number two, if you claim asylum, we have to establish at your initial hearing, before we release you into the United States, that you are likely to prevail in that claim for asylum.
You can't just say the magic words, and then abracadabra, all of the doors open.
Democrats oppose this.
Alejandro Mayorkas, the DHS secretary, he says that they would not even accept more funds if those funds were used for deportation.
When you say that Republicans won't accept the extra funding, they have a problem with the funds being used to release and transport illegal immigrants around the country.
So Congress is listening right now.
Would you accept the extra funding on the condition that the funds could only be used for detention and removal, but not release into the country?
From all parts of the political spectrum, one of the biggest issues that we have when it comes to immigration is the fact that we have an undocumented population.
Now you can fix that by trying to build a wall, or you can fix that by trying to document people and create a path to
And we'll have folks that might say, look at these systems, you know that our shelter system has weight and things like
that.
But one of the reasons that our public systems experience weight is because people don't have a documented and reliable path to work and sustain themselves, just like all of our ancestors did and our grandparents.
Yeah, the difference is that when our great-grandparents came to the United States, there wasn't a giant welfare system that was in place for public support of people who came here without any job prospects whatsoever.
Also, because of that, people were forced to assimilate much more quickly.
When my great-grandparents came to the United States in the early 20th century, they all spoke Yiddish.
Because the markets did not bear people speaking Yiddish particularly.
Learning English was like a major, major aspect of this.
It turns out that markets are a great way to make people assimilate to American values, because if you would like to live in a market-based economy, you actually have to cater to the customer.
But when you get rid of that entire system, and then you declare there should be open immigration, of course what you end up with is a multi-cultural stew in which nobody actually assimilates.
But she's saying the quiet part out loud, which the Democrats do want an open border.
So again, when we're talking about open border, Not a great economy.
And say, DEI all over the administration versus Donald Trump is a fascist, which one of those do you think is more damaging politically?
So, when it comes to DEI, this administration has declared itself in favor of equity at every step of the American experiment.
This administration says that, in fact, equity motivates all of their policy, apparently, including immigration policy, which is why we're just going to open the border wide.
Well, I have to say, one of the great exchanges I've seen recently on television happened over the weekend.
Raihan Salaam is an author and writes over the Manhattan Institute.
He was on with Jonah Goldberg.
And on the other side of this debate were a couple of wild lefties, including Kara Swisher.
And they were talking about DEI.
And Raihan, who is not a white American, is in fact a minority American.
He'd be mumped into the people of color category.
He just goes off right here, and it's pretty spectacular.
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When a person of color fails, all of a sudden it's an indictment of an entire system that the right doesn't like.
This is so ridiculous.
She was a graduate of Exeter and Stanford with a PhD from Harvard.
And do you know why?
You have to be so excellent to get where she was.
She's a second-generation Haitian-American who came from a family that dominated the concrete industry in Haiti.
Calm in the Middle East?00:04:34
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She was not the wretched of the earth.
She was someone who shouldn't be judged on her merits.
Wait, I'm sorry, do black people have to be wretched?
No, absolutely not, but she was selected because she established the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Harvard.
She presided over a steep decline in the free speech climate, and she also targeted minority professors who dissented from her perspective.
That was a problem.
She was a person with ideas, not someone who belonged to a democratic category.
But again, diversity, equity, inclusion, shtick, that is the Biden shtick.
So again, you have lined up on the one side, Donald Trump's a fascist Nazi, or in Joe Biden's words, and on the other side, you have Joe Biden is doing equity, he's doing illegal immigration, and by the way, he's doing complete supply chain failure.
So the Houthi attacks on shipping continue across the world.
The cost of shipping has markedly increased.
There's a chart from Axios, and what it shows is the average shipping container rates for particular routes.
And what you see is they have jumped, spiked dramatically toward the end of December.
Because that's exactly when you started seeing Houthis attacking shipping in the Red Sea and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait.
In fact, what you see is that the cost of shipping from the Asia-Mediterranean From Asia to the Mediterranean areas jumped wildly from like a little bit over $2,300 a container to $5,100, like doubled.
When you look at shipping from Asia to the North American East Coast, right?
That's the stuff that we care about.
The cost of shipping went from what looks like about $2,300, $2,500 to $3,900.
$2,300, $2,500 to $3,900.
That is a massive, that's per container.
You bear that cost.
We all bear that cost.
Because Joe Biden is allowing the Houthis to basically gum up the works in the Red Sea and in the Bab-El-Mandeb Strait.
Because Democrats keep hoping that, well, you know, if we're sweet and if we're nice, then things aren't going to escalate any further, when it's precisely the opposite tack that actually gets things to calm in the Middle East.
When you want to calm things in the Middle East, you know what you do?
You make clear that if you screw with the United States, things go real bad for you.
That's the actual way you calm things in the Middle East.
It's why everyone in the Middle East was afraid to start up while Donald Trump was president, because they thought, that guy's nuts.
So instead, you have Jennifer Granholm, who is out there declaring that, you know, they kind of hope that things are going to calm down.
They're not sure exactly if they're going to calm down.
This is Secretary of Energy talking about how, you know, shipping will probably get better, even though Maersk is now saying that they're going to completely avoid the Red Sea, which, of course, creates a supply chain bottleneck.
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What will it take to actually ensure that ships can go through that area?
How complicated?
Well, obviously, yeah, there has to be this coalition effort.
I know that many commercial ship shippers are really not just they're doing what Maersk has decided to do, which is to circumvent the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.
And that may add some price.
to energy in terms of how long it takes and how much more fuel it takes to get those shipments around.
But this coalition and the active, not just monitoring, but insertion of both sanctions as well as lots of discussions behind the scenes, I think we're going to, hopefully, if it doesn't escalate further, we'll be okay.