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Jan. 18, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:36
Davos vs. The Rest Of Us
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Well, this week, amidst all of the domestic political hubbub here in the United States, the World Economic Forum is happening over at Davos.
Now, why exactly is the World Economic Forum important?
Well, we have a video, a fact video over at YouTube you should check out for all the background on the WEF, but the short story is this.
In 1971, there was an organization that was established by a guy named Klaus Schwab, who is a German engineer, economist, and professor with a James Bond villain accent.
He created this organization so that heads of business and heads of state could talk over what he called stakeholder capitalism.
Stakeholder capitalism was a theory he was expressing that essentially suggested that if you owned a company, you ought not to answer to your shareholders.
If you managed a company, you ought not answer to profit margin or shareholders.
Instead, you ought to answer to every stakeholder in the world, meaning government, meaning people who didn't own stock in your company, meaning everyone.
Now, you might ask yourself, well then, exactly who are you accountable to?
Because it turns out that the rando who doesn't own shares in your company can't actually fire you or sell your stock or change anything about the way you run your company.
And the answer That Klaus Traub would give is, you are answerable to no one.
You, as the head of a company, should be like a king with his own little kingdom.
You, as the head of a company, you should be a lord, and the company acts as your fiefdom.
And you can pretend that you're acting in the name of the general will, but really what you are is some sort of prophet from on high brought to spread your values.
And this was the basis of stakeholder capitalism.
Now, this theory was promoted via what was called the European Management Symposium.
That's what the WEF was originally called in 1971.
By 1975, this thing grew so fast that 860 participants, including the CEOs and chairman of the largest European companies, started showing up.
And that same year, only four years after creation, the European Management Forum, the EMF, was now partnering with the United Nations.
According to the WEF website itself, after five years, the Forum had gained acceptance at the highest levels of business and government.
While not advocating policy or strategy, the Forum had become a respected organization that served as a valuable platform for business, government, civil society, and other stakeholders to confer and collaborate.
In 1987, the European Management Forum changed its name from the EMF to the WEF.
So what is the WEF today?
Well, it's the same thing except bigger, much more prominent.
10,000 people show up at the WEF every year.
But the people who are on stage, the people who are meeting in the back rooms, are all of the global influential people.
You're talking about the heads of major corporations and the heads of government.
And they all come to pat each other on the back and explore what they have in common.
What they have in common is a very peculiar set of values that you do not share with them.
It's a set of values that suggest that they are responsible for solving all of the world's problems.
What are those world problems?
Well, problems like war and peace.
They should collude and decide what system prevails Everywhere.
Problems like intolerance.
They should collude and decide what information you are capable of seeing and understanding.
Problems like the climate.
They will get together and they will restructure entire swaths of the global economy in order to fight back against climate change.
This is what they do.
And let's face it, this is a weird group of people.
Because the people at the top levels of power, particularly in the West, are a strange group of people.
They are disproportionately secular.
They are disproportionately of the political left.
They are people who do not have ties to traditional ways of life and traditional values.
They are also people who seem to have scorn for the culture that actually bore them and instead have embraced this peculiar notion of multiculturalism in which all cultures are created equal.
And that leads to this really sort of paternalistic and odd look at the WEF where people are walking in wearing $5,000 suits and $20,000 watches and then They are paying homage to poor Native Americans or natives of Europe or whatever who are showing up and breathing on them.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Yesterday at the WF, for example, we had this bizarre spectacle of a native woman of some sort with her face painted, breathing on the heads of various company owners, heads of state, top-level bureaucrats.
Here's what it looked like.
It's weird.
I want my woman.
I want my woman.
My woman, why?
Why should I...
Oof! Oof!
Oof!
Uhhhh... what?
How'd you like to have this lady sneeze on your head?
I thought they all hated COVID, but apparently they love COVID.
But again, this is all part of the show.
They care about all of the stakeholders from the most remote natives to you, the people.
And so these kind of bane knockoffs, except in the corporate garb, They've come up with all sorts of interesting and weird ways to restructure the global system in order to run the thing, in order to control you.
This is presumably why the WEF and the World Health Organization were talking a lot over the course of this week about something they call Disease X. Now, let's be frank about this.
Obviously, every government has to have some sort of contingency plan in case the country gets hit by an epidemic.
Localities have such emergency plans, but the WHO botched COVID-19 so damned badly That the notion they have any sort of leg to stand on when they preach to the rest of the world about how exactly we should deal with a future pandemic, it starts to look less as though they are attempting to create a contingency plan and more like they're sort of wish-casting something like this into existence because they really love the levels of control.
So here was the head of the WHO Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
who by the way basically just works for the government of China as we'll explore in just a moment,
talking about disease x and preparing the globe for disease x.
After we started putting a placeholder, you know, the first that came was in the disease x is covid.
So we have experience now and we are preparing based on that experience.
A lot of assessment has been done by independent panels and experts.
And based on the recommendation, we have already started many initiatives.
And then the other key in order to have better prepared and to address the disease X is the pandemic agreement.
The pandemic agreement can bring all the experience, all the challenges that we have faced and all the solutions into one.
And that agreement can help us to prepare for the future in a better way.
That's right.
All the people who failed so dramatically during COVID-19, who covered up for China.
And the WHO, remember, was a Chinese cutout.
China was actively hiding information from the rest of the world.
They knew this pandemic was spreading since about November of 2019, and they said nothing to the rest of the world.
Then they lied to the WHO that it was not being transmitted human to human.
And the WHO dutifully Repeated all that because they wanted to keep China in the fold, sponsoring the World Health Organization.
These same people are still insisting that they ought to run things going forward.
There is never any accountability because this is the beauty of a stakeholder system as opposed to a shareholder system.
When you own a share in a corporation, you have a vote.
When you have a stake in something, just broadly speaking, it kind of means nothing.
You don't have a stake in the WHO.
You don't have a share in the WHO.
You got no control over the WHO and that is what the WF is really about.
By the way, an exclusive from the Wall Street Journal.
Today, Chinese researchers isolated and mapped the virus that caused COVID-19 in late December
2019, at least two weeks before Beijing revealed details of the deadly virus to the world,
congressional investigators said, raising questions anew about what China knew in the
pandemic's crucial early days.
Documents obtained from the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services by a House committee and reviewed by the Wall Street Journal show, a Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded a nearly complete sequence of the virus's structure to a U.S.
government-run database December 28, 2019.
Chinese officials at that time were still publicly describing the disease outbreak in Wuhan as a viral pneumonia of unknown cause.
They still had not closed the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, site of one of the initial COVID-19 outbreaks.
And again, China continued to lie for like a full month that there was no dangerous human-to-human transmission.
The Chinese researcher who submitted the virus sequence, a Dr. Lily Ren of the Beijing-based Institute of Pathogen Biology, did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Well, you'll never hear of her again since her name has now been publicly reported in the press and China is an authoritarian, tyrannical government.
So, WHO did an amazing job, and naturally this means that we have to continue to include them in the world system.
All the people who botched it last time, we are going to keep them in control.
So, Disease X is one methodology of control.
Other methodologies of control, climate change.
So there's language that people on the left love to use when they're talking about controlling you, and that is the language of war.
The war on poverty is about controlling income.
It is about controlling redistribution of wealth.
The war on climate change is similarly about controlling exactly how you live your life.
This is why people in politics are constantly eager to use war language because in a war, you get to put your entire population on rations.
In a war, you get to draft people and put them in barracks.
In a war, you get to take control of literally everybody at all times, day and night.
This is why John Kerry is eager to talk about war.
He compares climate change to fighting Hitler.
This is over at the WEF.
And I'm here again today because I'm convinced that the only way we win this battle is by stepping up exponentially from where we are today and begin to treat this fight almost as if we're in a war.
I hate the war analogies because we get tired of them and they're probably overused, but unfortunately it's apt.
In World War II, when we needed to gain control over the skies and of the ocean and learn how to penetrate Hitler's defenses in order to win the Battle of Freedom, it was mid-level techs who made a lot of decisions that actually helped us win the war.
So again, that sort of language is the lever for exercising power.
Now there was one wonderful moment during the WEF.
Javier Mille, who has become my spirit animal, the president of Argentina, who is a colorful and wonderful economist, rock star, and just all around wolfman.
He was speaking at the WEF and he just laid into them and it was wonderful.
Do not surrender to the advance of the state.
The state is not the solution.
The state is the problem itself.
You are the true protagonists of this story.
And rest assured that as from today, Argentina is your staunch unconditional ally.
Thank you very much and long live freedom.
Damn it!
Today I'm here to tell you that the Western world is in danger.
And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.
Unfortunately, in recent decades, Motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others, and others motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism.
Okay, this is great stuff and good for Javier Mille.
Going to the WEF and slapping people across the head is precisely what they deserve.
But it's not just a problem inside the WEF.
There are plenty of people in the United States who hold the same peculiar globalist vision in which the elites of society ought to construct pretty much everything up to and including the demographic shape of the United States.
That's the only reason I can think why we continue to futz around over America's southern border.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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So, apparently no compromises coming on immigration.
That's because the White House refuses to just pass H.R.
2.
H.R.
2 is a strong on the border security bill from the House Republicans.
Instead, they're proposing a series of changes that would remain extremely soft on illegal immigration.
Speaker Mike Johnson, to his credit, is refusing to go ahead with any sort of compromise border bill along the lines the Democrats are looking for, according to the New York Times.
Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday dug in against President Biden's efforts to revive stalled legislation to send aid to Ukraine, saying the Republican-led House would not entertain it unless Democrats agreed to a far more severe crackdown at the U.S.-Mexico border than they have been willing to consider.
He said, I told the president what I've been saying for many months.
It's that we have must have changed the border substance of policy change.
We must insist that the border be the top priority.
Well, Joe Biden had summoned the lawmakers in both parties to lecture them about Ukraine,
about the importance of repelling Russia's invasion.
But he refused to actually commit to any serious changes at the border.
Meanwhile, some of the Senate Republicans are ready to cut any sort of deal, apparently.
Senate Republicans said they are hopeful.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who's fairly soft on immigration, said the Senate could vote as soon as next week on a national security spending bill combining border measures with military assistance for Ukraine and Israel as well.
It seems to me that what is being proposed in the Senate is far too weak for Republicans in the House to sign on to.
So leading Senate Republicans are saying this is the best chance the GOP has had in years to secure serious border policy concessions from Democrats.
But I really doubt that.
I think that Joe Biden is willing to cave more than he has thus far.
So what exactly is being proposed at this point?
Well, it's something called the Dignity Act.
So, the so-called Dignity Act was originally brought up in 2023 by Representative Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida, who I know.
She's a delightful person, but she's wrong on this bill.
And other co-sponsors, including people like Veronica Escobar, Democrat of Texas.
And again, this is a fairly weak immigration bill.
It includes $25 billion for more border security like barriers and technology, and it does hire and train more personnel.
But with regard to asylum reform, it essentially says that there would be humanitarian campuses managed by CBP along the southern border where migrants would be held.
Asylum officers would then conduct asylum interviews and make final determinations on the campuses.
Migrants would have access to medical staff, licensed social workers, mental health professionals, child advocates, private organizations that provide humanitarian assistance and legal counsel.
Under that bill, within the first 15 days, the staff would provide an initial screening, including criminal background checks, biometric data, verify identification, conduct medical assessments, and migrants unable to establish a credible fear during an initial screening would be subjected to expedited removal from the United States.
Then, presumably, asylum seekers would theoretically be held for another 45 days, although it's unclear to me whether they would then be released into the United States, because otherwise things are just going to continue to swell at the border.
Obviously, one of the big problems here is how do you establish credible fear?
What exactly does credible fear look like from a migration official with The staff of these humanitarian campuses.
According to the bill, within 45 days of passing the initial credible fear interview, a trained US Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officer would review the individual's asylum claim and make a final determination.
Asylum officers must deny, approve, or refer complex or uncertain cases to an immigration judge.
So basically, you would end up with the same sort of backlog that you currently have.
For those who are referred to an immigration judge, the bill would then create a system by which asylum seekers would receive a notice to appear and then be released from the humanitarian campus.
So, this would continue to maintain catch and release, it would just do so in a more delayed fashion than is currently being applied.
This is the reason why Republicans in the House are not willing to go forward with this.
It also creates worker status for illegal immigrants who are already here in the country.
It is a very, very soft bill.
Which is precisely, of course, what Republicans are saying.
It keeps the border open.
So the question is, why don't Democrats just cave?
Seriously, why don't they just cave?
Why don't they give Republicans more of what they want?
Get some sort of actual border compromise done in the bill.
They can go back to their base and say, listen, we needed the Ukraine funding.
We needed it.
And so we had to cave.
And then they could go to moderates and say, we actually did something to stop the flow at the border.
Instead, they keep doubling down on open borders rhetoric.
And then they're blaming Republicans for, quote unquote, not wanting to fix immigration.
That dog ain't going to hunt.
Joe Biden is the one who broke the immigration system beyond all repair.
Here's Kamala Harris, the incompetent vice president of the United States, blaming Republicans for failures on immigration.
Everyone knows our immigration system is broken.
Right.
OK.
The first bill that we dropped, the first bill that we offered right after inauguration, Was to fix the immigration system.
A comprehensive plan to deal with the immigration system.
Do you think they've taken it up?
No.
We want solutions.
The solutions are at hand.
But frankly, we're in an election year.
And the folks who want to return Donald Trump to the White House would prefer to talk about a broken immigration system instead of focusing on the solutions that are at hand and engaging in bipartisan work.
But the solutions that you want are an open border.
Again, they keep saying things like we need more processing at the border.
But what they really mean is they want to allow more people to use the asylum system to get into the country.
Until you change the actual rules with regard to who is adjudicated eligible for asylum, nothing is actually going to change.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Democrats again.
They keep trying to blame Republicans for this.
I don't think that it is going to work.
Here's Karine Jean-Pierre, world's worst press secretary, doing the same thing.
How will the president receive that message today if Johnson says this is too complicated to do right now?
Making sure that we take care of our border is not too complicated.
It's not.
It's not.
If people come together in good faith, as they've been doing in the Senate, We can get this done.
We can get this done.
And let's not forget, the president actually put forth a comprehensive immigration proposal almost three years ago.
Almost three years ago.
We had three years.
Three years to work on something.
If that was what the Speaker Johnson is concerned about, we had three years to work on it.
I mean, and it was a terrible proposal.
You had three years to do something and you didn't do it.
And the reason you didn't do it is because it's a terrible proposal.
Now, why is that happening?
Why is that happening?
The answer is, back to the WF, there is, in fact, an agenda to do away with America's southern border.
And some Democrats are more clear about this than others.
So, for example, Democratic Representative Max Frost Who's in Florida.
He says that if you want H.R.
2, which is a way of solidifying the border, changing the rules with regard to asylum, for example, what you really want to do is destroy the Statue of Liberty.
This is my favorite stupid rhetoric, is this notion that the Statue of Liberty is somehow coincident with the Constitution of the United States.
It has some poetry on it, and that's it.
It does not dictate the policy of the United States being an open immigration policy.
That's absurd.
Here is this Democratic congressperson saying the quiet part out loud.
To my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, let's be honest with immigrants who deserve better than what you're offering them.
Don't welcome immigrants if you plan to reject them.
If you keep pushing your bigoted H.R.
2 bill, then also pass this bill.
I've taken the liberty of drafting it for you.
It removes The Statue of Liberty, our largest symbol that tells people to come here.
This is who you are, removing the fabric of America.
So I want to know which Republican who supports and voted for H.R.
2 will introduce this bill.
The only people tearing down statues, by the way, right now are Democrats.
So that is absurd.
Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, she of the weeping at the border over child separations, but only when Trump is president.
She is also saying the quiet part out loud, which is they do want the open borders.
They want those open borders and they want them bad.
Virtually every single member of this committee is here today as a result of, and thanks to, more open U.S.
immigration policies.
And the idea of slamming the door when we desperately need these migrants, when we desperately need it, and what we need is an orderly process.
It's not that we don't need or want folks to come, it's that we actually have to make it easier for these individuals to participate in our economy, Get a job, support themselves, and live the American dream.
And what this conversation is about, is about defending the American dream.
The American dream, presumably, is that there be no border whatsoever.
Now again, countries can have open immigration policies so long as their economies are not giant welfare economies, so long as there is the courage of your conviction with regard to assimilation into your culture.
You can have open borders under those circumstances.
That was, in fact, a policy of the United States in the late 19th century, that sort of thing was part of American policy and didn't destroy the country.
But once you had a welfare state, it changes all the math pretty dramatically.
And not only that, once you add on to that a multicultural notion that people don't have to learn English, but they don't actually have to learn American customs and ways of life.
Then, of course, the social fabric of the country is going to fray.
But AOC doesn't care about any of that.
She's perfectly happy to see the social fabric of the country fray, because she agrees with the basic premises of many of the people at the WF, that top-down administrative control over nearly every area of life is better for you, and that borders are parochial, borders are wrong.
Of course, it's the World Economic Forum, not the National Economic Forum.
Now, there's still some Democrats, or soon-to-be former Democrats, who acknowledge the reality about this.
Joe Manchin is one of them.
The senator from West Virginia, he says, well, of course the border is worse under Biden.
Everybody knows that.
That is absolutely false.
They are living in la-la land.
It's a disaster.
And they know it's a disaster.
and said, but Donald Trump did nothing at the border, and the border's better under Joe Biden.
Do you think that's a correct assessment?
That is absolutely false.
They are living in la-la land.
It's a disaster, and they know it's a disaster.
So let's fix it.
And the only thing I would implore the president to do, to consider this and to do it immediately,
if Congress cannot come together, because the perfect could be the enemy of the good,
you have Republicans that might wanna shut everything down, throw any type of immigration out the window,
and you have Democrats who might think everything's fine.
It's not fine.
It's a disaster.
It's dangerous.
And I would implore the President to declare a national emergency and secure our border immediately if Congress can't do something this week.
By the way, it is worth noting here that immigration is a top issue for both Democrats and Republicans in the upcoming election, which is just another reason why Donald Trump is running so durably against Joe Biden, despite all of his legal troubles, foibles, and myriad excesses.
Speaking of which, there's a brand new poll out of New Hampshire.
This is not a C-plus rated American Research Group poll.
This poll is from the St.
Anselm poll of likely voters, and it finds that Donald Trump currently has a 14-point lead on Nikki Haley in New Hampshire.
He is at 52%, Nikki Haley at 38%, and Ron DeSantis at 6%.
As I've suggested, I think that Trump has momentum.
I think, effectively speaking, just based on the data, the race for the GOP nomination is over.
But Democrats have no strategy, of course, to deal with Donald Trump other than simply targeting him as a human being.
This, of course, is Kamala Harris's plan.
Here she was yesterday suggesting that she is scared as heck.
She's running against the crazies, like, of course, Donald Trump.
What could happen if Trump ever became, God forbid, president again?
And what are you going to do to stop the crazies?
I am scared as heck, which is why I'm traveling our country.
You know, there's an old saying that there are only two ways to run for office, either without an opponent or scared.
So on all of those points, yes, we should all be scared.
But as we know, and certainly this is a table of very powerful women.
We don't run away from something when we're scared.
We fight back against it.
This is what we call a little bit of strength right here with the bouncing of the shoulders.
That's when you know that she's about to lay one on you real thick.
What's hilarious about all of this is, of course, if the entire pitch against Trump is leave our incompetence aside and focus in on the fact that Donald Trump is a big, bad, mean, orange man, that's not going to work.
Jamie Dimon, again, Jamie Dimon is not remotely a radical Republican.
The JPMorgan CEO, he was asked yesterday about Joe Biden's campaign chances.
He's like, Joe Biden's in a lot of trouble and demonizing MAGA Republicans is not going to help him.
And I think people should be a little more respectful of our fellow citizens.
And when you guys have people up here, you should always ask the why.
Not like it's a binary thing.
You support Trump, you're not supporting Trump.
Why are you supporting Trump?
It's hard to hate 75 million of your fellow Americans.
I agree.
And you know, the Democrats have done a pretty good job with the deplorables, hugging onto their Bibles and their beer and their guns.
I mean, really?
Could we just stop that stuff and actually grow up and treat other people with respect and listen to them a little bit?
I do think the economy will affect.
I think this negative talk about MAGA is going to hurt Biden's election campaign.
It's coming from Jamie Dimon.
Jamie Dimon is not some sort of wild right-winger.
He's wearing a Ukraine pin on the air while he's talking with MSNBC, talking about all of this.
Now, Democrats are banking, again, on Donald Trump's legal foibles to drag him down.
They're looking at polling, like the polling from Ipsos yesterday.
That polling found that if Donald Trump were convicted of a felony crime by a jury, that that might ding him in the polls.
So according to this poll, 59% of Americans say they would not vote for Donald Trump if he were convicted of a felony crime by a jury, as opposed to 25% who said that they would.
A majority of Republicans said they'd vote for Trump, 52 to 31, even if you were convicted of a felony crime.
Democrats, of course, split 86-8 against, but that's no shock.
They split 86-8 against Trump generally.
Independents are the ones who really shift.
66% say they would not vote for Donald Trump if convicted of a federal crime.
If he is currently in prison, Even 39% of Republicans say we're not going to vote for him if he is currently in prison.
62% of Americans overall say they would not vote for Donald Trump if he is in prison.
Now, the chance of him actually being in prison by the time we get to the election, I think, are incredibly low.
Like, very, very low based on appeals, based on the length of time it takes to actually do a trial.
I also think that some of these poll numbers about being convicted of a felony crime by a jury, I think most Americans don't even know what he's being charged with.
So the idea that he gets convicted of felony mishandling of classified documents and that a bunch of independents are like, oh, I won't vote for that guy anymore.
I just don't, I don't see that as being a real huge concern for the Trump campaign, particularly because there are a lot of obstacles that are coming down the pike for these various legal cases.
So, for example, as Politico points out, There is a case called Joseph Fisher v. United States, which the Supreme Court has agreed to hear in December.
It doesn't explicitly mention Donald Trump, but it could knock out a bunch of the January 6th charges against Trump.
At issue in that case is whether prosecutors and the Department of Justice have been improperly using a 2002 law originally aimed at curbing financial crimes to prosecute a January 6th defendant named Joseph Fisher.
Should the court side with Fisher, it would call into question the use of the same law against other January 6th defendants, including Trump.
Smith's indictment against Trump, again, carries four charges, four counts.
Two of those are for obstruction of an official proceeding and for conspiracy to do so, but that's all under Sarbanes-Oxley.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was originally designed to make it criminal to obstruct official proceedings of the U.S.
government in financial scandals.
Not with regard to, for example, the counting of the vote.
And of course, Donald Trump taking legal means, like filing lawsuits or calling people on the phone and saying, if you could theoretically get certified as an alternative state elector for your state, would you go and talk about that in Washington?
First of all, the crime may not be a crime.
Second of all, the crime in this particular case may be completely in the wrong category, and the Supreme Court could easily say Sarbanes-Oxley was never meant to apply to Donald Trump's January 6th activities.
As Politico says, the impact of Fisher on the January 6th trial against Trump might not be known until after the Supreme Court wraps up its term in June, at which point it could knock out half of Smith's counts against Trump.
Meanwhile, the other cases that are currently in play, like, for example, the Alvin Bragg case in Manhattan, that case is a joke.
That case is a joke.
Think about it this way.
Donald Trump right now is running an incredibly durable, even campaign against Joe Biden.
Right now, he is up in many of the polls.
He is in the middle of his second defamation trial with E. Jean Carroll, and he's yelling at the judge.
I mean, literally yelling at the judge, and no one cares.
Literally yesterday, there was an exchange between Trump and a judge named Louis Kaplan, in which the judge said, Mr. Trump has the right to be present here, but that right can be forfeited.
Mr. Trump, I hope I don't have to consider excluding you from the trial.
And Trump shot back, I would love it.
And Kaplan said, I know you would, I know you would.
You just can't control yourself in the circumstances, apparently.
It's hilarious!
And no one's going to care about that.
Like, seriously, how is that going to hurt Trump?
The answer is, it's not.
Because everything is baked into the cake.
As I've said for a while, every single thing is baked into the cake except for the circumstances of the United States.
And that is not in Donald Trump's control.
That is in Joe Biden's control.
And increasingly, it's looking very bad.
We'll get to more on that in just one second, particularly some economic news.
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Okay, meanwhile, speaking of Joe Biden's economy, story out from the Wall Street Journal today, and it points out that we have a bunch of economic trains coming down those tracks.
And we are tied to those tracks.
Like, no.
It's not going to be great.
And Joe Biden is a very, very bad Dudley Do-Right.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the troubling commercial real estate market is bracing for a record amount of maturing loans, boosting the prospect of a surge in defaults as property owners are forced to refinance at higher rates.
In 2023, $541 billion in debt backed by office buildings, hotels, apartments, and other types of commercial real estate came due.
That's the highest amount ever for For a single year, according to data from TREP, commercial debt maturities are expected to continue rising, with more than $2.2 trillion coming due between now and the end of 2027.
Most of those loans have so far been repaid or extended.
In 2022 and 2023, many owners were able to exercise one- or two-year extensions built into their original loans, but those extensions are now burning off.
They are coming due.
That means many borrowers have to confront that higher-rate environment, and that is depressing property values.
So, what happens when a bunch of foreclosures happen?
Because people can't afford the higher commercial lending rates.
What happens then?
Well, it means some people are going to get laid off.
It means that inflated real estate prices are going to come down.
Because again, Joe Biden's economy was always inflated.
And what goes up must come down.
And of course, the problems are mounting for Joe Biden pretty much everywhere.
They are mounting with regard to Ukraine as well.
According to Tony Blinken, a ceasefire is nowhere in sight with regard to Ukraine.
Which is kind of amazing because just a couple of months into the war, a ceasefire was actually on the board and Vladimir Putin ended up backing away after further Ukrainian war action.
Here was Tony Blinken talking about how there is no ceasefire imminent in Ukraine.
Are we anywhere near any kind of negotiation, though, for a stable long-term ceasefire?
Look, in this moment, I don't see it.
We're always open to it, attentive to it, because more than anyone else, the Ukrainian people want this.
But there has to be a willingness on the part of Russia to engage, to negotiate in good faith, based on the basic principles that have been challenged by its aggression.
Well, good luck with that.
Meanwhile, top NATO officials are warning that things are going to get uglier before they get better in Ukraine.
According to the Associated Press, Ukraine is now locked in an existential battle for its survival almost two years into its war with Russia.
Western armies and political leaders must drastically change the way they help it fend off invading forces, according to a top NATO military officer on Wednesday.
As the war bogs down, with U.S.
and European Union funding for Ukraine's conflict-ravaged economy held up by political infighting, this NATO general is appealing for a whole-of-society approach to the challenge that goes beyond military planning.
He said we need public and private actors to change their mindset for an era in which everything was plannable, foreseeable, controllable, and focused on efficiency to an era in which anything can happen at any time.
Does that sound like a great pitch for Joe Biden's administration?
Like that's the bumper sticker?
Biden 2024?
Anything can happen at any time?
Does that make you feel a sense of quiescence?
An internal and internal solidity? Does that make you feel secure? I
mean, the answer is, of course not, because why would it? The world has become significantly
more chaotic under Joe Biden.
That is particularly true, obviously, not just in Ukraine, but also in the Middle East.
John Kirby has now been forced to make the unfortunate statement that removing the Houthis,
Just like consideration over these years?
list in 2021, which is just one of the things the Biden administration did to encourage
Iranian aggression, that that actually was not a stupid move.
He has to say that because now, of course, they are relisting the Houthis as a terror
group.
Here was John Kirby yesterday.
Was it a mistake to take them off of the terrorist list back in 2021, just like consideration
over these years?
No.
No, it was not a mistake to take them off.
We just had to put them back on.
But sure.
No, no, no.
It was no mistake at all.
Meanwhile, the Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdullahian, he's openly threatening the United States, saying that if the United States is too unfriendly, then Iran will be unfriendly.
I noticed Iran being unfriendly in the Red Sea, in Pakistan, in Iraq.
In Syria, in Lebanon, in Northern Israel, in Southern Israel.
I noticed some unfriendliness from the Iranians, actually.
And meanwhile, the Biden administration is just running around like a chicken with its heads cut off, saying, well, we're just trying to cool the waters, cool the waters.
Can we put some more pressure on Israel to make some concessions to the power?
Just cool the waters.
Here's the Iranian foreign minister.
Again, this is the foreign minister of a country that is a second-rate power.
This does not mean the United States has to go to war with Iran.
It's just the United States should not be intimidated by Iranian proxies.
We have the largest and most able military force in the history of the world.
And we're being intimidated by, again, who these Hezbollah members, Hamas, it's ridiculous.
Here's the Iranian foreign minister threatening the world.
If they talk to us, treat us respectfully, we will do the same thing.
But anything unconstructive, the unfriendly, the behaviors of the United States, we will
retaliate to them.
It will be in the favor of the peace and security of the world if the United States would become
less hostile, would become cooperative instead of confrontational.
Oh, it's that the United States is confrontational.
Let it be known, by the way, that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is responsible for
at least 2,000 deaths of American troops in Iraq.
Iran is the most nefarious force on planet Earth in terms of spreading its terror tentacles everywhere, and they're openly sitting there at Davos and threatening the world.
It really is an amazing, amazing thing.
By the way, the West, which is currently attempting to push Israel into some sort of ceasefire with Hamas in the bizarre notion that this is going to somehow buy off Iranian proxies, Hamas is making perfectly clear who they are every single day.
New tape has now emerged from October 7th of Hamas literally sawing at the necks of dead Israelis.
Like literally chopping the heads off dead Israelis, ISIS style.
But don't worry, these are people who should be left in power to fire rockets willy-nilly into the center of Israeli civilian areas.
Because after all, the Israelis are just too mean in their own self-defense.
That's the real problem here.
CNN broadcast this yesterday.
This is one video shared with CNN by an Israeli source that we are showing you.
Security cameras at the near Oz kibbutz in southern Israel show a knife wielding gunman soaring at the necks of dead Israelis.
Well, it seems like they might have some evidence for that proposition.
In fact, that's not even the worst beheading story of the day.
According to a man named David Tahar, his son was a kid named Adir Tahar.
His son was, I believe, 19 years old, and he was murdered on October 7th, and then he was beheaded.
And apparently, they then took his head back to Gaza and tried to sell it.
Adir's father said, I demanded to see the body.
They warned me against it, but as a father, I needed to know every detail about my child's death.
Half an hour before his burial, the body arrived at the cemetery when I opened the casket, I realized what I was burying.
He was unrecognizable.
As we buried Adir, I knew I was interring my child without his face, so I had to keep searching for it.
The grieving father spent weeks searching for a lead.
I reviewed all videos and eventually found footage of my son missing a critical part of his body, said David.
Three weeks ago, during the interrogation of two Hamas terrorists arrested in Israel, they confessed that one of them had attempted to sell my son's head for $10,000 in Gaza.
The IDF then entered Gaza, searched an ice cream shop's freezer, and there, in a suitcase, they found my son's head, which had also been desecrated.
At least I was able to bury him with the little dignity that remained.
Yeah, clearly, Palestinian-Israeli peace is just over the horizon.
It's gonna happen any time now.
And probably that will make the Iranians calm down.
Again, anything can happen at any time is a very good slogan, as it turns out, for the 2024 Biden campaign.
Because it feels like anything can happen at any time.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is about to make a very critical decision that will in fact shift an enormous amount of power back to the legislature.
This is a really big story that is going largely under the radar because it's a little complicated.
According to the Washington Post, a divided Supreme Court debated whether and how to curtail the power of federal agencies on Wednesday, with liberals urging the court to defer to the judgment of government experts, and conservatives saying judges should not systematically favor government regulators over private companies, industry, or individuals in litigation.
After more than three hours of argument, it was unclear whether the court's conservative majority would overturn or simply scale back the 40-year-old precedent that is under review in a pair of cases brought by herring fishermen from New Jersey and Rhode Island.
So, very often, the circumstances surrounding very important cases are really, really small and peculiar.
Basically, there is a federal rule requiring commercial fishermen to pay for at-sea monitors.
The court decision, however, is not really about that.
It is about whether Federal regulatory agencies are capable of regulating huge swaths of American life or whether it turns out those regulations have to stand up to constitutional scrutiny.
Conservatives have been targeting a framework that was set up in 1984 under a case called Chevron USA versus Natural Resources Defense Council.
That case set up something called Chevron Deference, which suggested that if the Congress passed a law and the law wasn't specific enough, that basically regulatory agencies could then use their expertise to read the tea leaves.
They could sit there and Rorschach test this thing and come up with giant books filled with regulations based on the vague language of statute.
And then, presumably, the courts would have nothing to say about it, because if Congress really wanted to do anything about it, they could pass a new regulation taking that power away from regulatory agencies, but they hadn't, and therefore, basically, the courts could not sit in judgment on anything these regulatory agencies were doing.
That, of course, is ridiculous.
That creates a truly perverse incentive structure where Congress, these members aren't elected.
They pass a bunch of vague laws.
They're never held accountable because if something goes wrong, it's not happening because of them.
It's happening because of the regulators.
Regulators get to do whatever they want.
There's huge amounts of industry capture in the regulatory agencies.
If you are a regulatory agency and you are overseeing, for example, laws with regard to the sea, major industries are going to get into the woodwork and they are going to start writing those laws for you.
That's how so many regulations are written.
And again, congressmen are perfectly happy to kick the can over to the regulatory agencies.
It is up to the judiciary to maintain the balance of power, the checks and balances that were set up in the Constitution, which is why Chevron deference should die.
On Wednesday, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, both nominees of President Trump, took turns peppering the Biden administration with skeptical questions, as Solicitor General Elizabeth Prolonger defended the Trump administration initiative and the longstanding Chevron precedent.
Kavanaugh said Chevron has allowed federal agencies to flip-flop and oppose different rules every time a new administration takes over.
Leaving judges with little choice but to defer to the changing interpretations of agency officials, which of course is very weird.
Because if regulatory agencies can take positions that are directly opposed to one another and Congress supposedly authorized both those positions at the same time, how could that possibly be?
How could that be?
Gorsuch has called long ago for getting rid of Chevron deference.
Of course, Democrats are very much in favor of it because they believe in a bureaucratic administrative centralized government where elections don't matter so much in the legislative branch, where everything can be done by a powerful executive branch.
This is a model of government first pushed by Woodrow Wilson in the early 20th century.
The notion of a bureaucratic administrative government of experts who would administer the government on your behalf.
For the people.
Looks very much like that WEF globalist centralized power idea, except applied to the American government.
It'll be interesting to see which way Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett go on this one.
It is possible that what they do is they say, we don't like how this particular regulation is being purveyed.
It's also possible they get rid of Chevron deference entirely.
They should.
They should get rid of Chevron's deference entirely.
The notion that, again, regulatory agencies ought to be unanswerable entirely when it comes to their interpretations of statute by the judiciary hands way too much power to the executive branch of government.
A restoration, by the way, of checks and balances in government where the legislature legislates and the executive branch executes and the judiciary adjudicates.
That would be the single best thing that could happen in the United States to restore any level of credibility in our government.
Is right now we think Congress is incompetent because they don't even do the legislating.
They pass giant omnibus packages.
And then we think the executive grabs too much power and thus is incompetent because they have too much power over our lives and we didn't let say Anthony Fauci who's a bureaucratic administrator.
And then we think the judiciary just sits there and does nothing about any of this.
When the various branches of government do what they were supposed to do in the first place, they reestablish their credibility.
That's why it would be excellent if the Supreme Court did get rid of Chevron deference.
Already coming up, we're going to jump into that vaunted Ben Shapiro show mailbag.
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