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Jan. 19, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
42:25
The Big Lie Americans Tell Ourselves
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Well, folks, there's a big lie that we in the United States keep telling ourselves.
It's particularly true on the right, but it's true across the board.
And that lie is that we want our government to be fiscally responsible in some way, shape, or form.
That is clearly a lie, because we keep electing politicians to not be fiscally responsible in any way, shape, or form.
Regardless of who runs the government, the spending keeps going in one direction, and that direction is up.
There's a reason we are running a $34 trillion national debt this point in time and it is likely that that debt is going
to continue to accrue because nobody takes this problem particularly seriously. And they're not going
to take that problem seriously until we run smack into a wall. That is how typically fiscal crises
work. Countries spend too much money, they're unable to rein it back in because there are too
many people who become dependent on that spending of the money, and then instead of creating
some sort of plan to get out of debt, people just keep running up those debts, keep running up
those deficits until the time comes that you have to take extremely harsh, remediating action.
That is the high likelihood here.
Why do I say this?
Well, because yesterday, the House Republicans, as well as the House Democrats, passed overwhelmingly yet another continuing resolution.
And this is the way we now fund the government because we're not able to actually have serious negotiations on department-by-department level with regard to spending.
We're not able to negotiate over how much should be spent on defense or how much should be spent on education.
Instead, we sort of wrap everything up into a ball.
And then, when we can't get approval on a year-long budget, Then we go to continuing resolutions, which are these short-form budgets that continue the government spending.
And, you know, we just kind of keep the train running.
And the train will run until the train runs completely off those tracks.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Congress cleared legislation extending government funding into March.
Because again, the easiest thing in Congress is to get lost in a crowd.
but does nothing to alleviate underlying political pressures stemming from high US debt levels,
record crossings at the southern border, and an enduring war in Ukraine.
The Senate passed that measure 77 to 18, followed by House approval 314 to 108.
Because again, the easiest thing in Congress is to get lost in a crowd.
The easiest thing in Congress is to simply side with an overwhelming majority of people who say,
status quo, let's just keep doing what it is that we are doing right now.
The two votes sent the measure to President Biden's desk with time to spare ahead of a
weekend deadline.
In a replay of recent votes that underscore the fragility of the GOP majority, according to the Wall Street Journal, House Speaker Mike Johnson relied heavily on Democrats to bring that continuing resolution across the finish line.
In fact, there was a fraught moment when it seemed as though there would not be a majority of Republicans in favor of the continuing resolution.
As it turns out, he was able to get 107 Republicans to vote for as opposed to 106 against.
House internal Republican rules prevent any Republican My colleagues on the other side of the aisle have no problem with wide open borders endangering the people that I represent.
So I came very close to the wire on this particular bill.
Chip Roy, Republican from Texas, who does in fact take spending seriously.
He was blasting everybody right, left and center about not only the spending,
but the fact that nobody in Congress seems to want to solve serious problems anymore.
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle have no problem with wide open borders
endangering the people that I represent, none.
And in my constituents are the ones left holding the bag and the people of Texas are the ones left
spending 12 and a half billion dollars.
And my people are the ones who have six kids die from fentanyl poisoning
in the school district that I represent.
Yeah, it's not fun to smirk at that, is it, when we're talking about dead children from fentanyl poisoning because of wide-open borders, because of the policies of my Democrat colleagues who refuse to do anything about it.
Not a thing.
Not a thing do my colleagues do about the wide-open borders.
And I will continue to speak to my colleagues because— The House will be in order.
The gentleman will address his comments to the chair.
Well, Madam Speaker, I am addressing my comments to the chair.
The House will be in order.
I'm addressing the chair on behalf of the people that I represent who are dying in Texas because of Democrats.
Directly because of Democrat policies!
Representative Roy then added, it doesn't matter who's sitting in the speaker seat or who has the majority, we keep doing the same stupid stuff.
Which requires us to ask a pretty simple question.
Why is it that we keep doing the same stupid stuff?
Is that a matter of not having the right people in power, or is it just that the American people refuse to recognize the reality about themselves?
Which is that we constantly say that we want to balance the budget, we constantly say we want to spend less money, and then, as soon as there is a poll asking what we would like to cut, we all run for the hills and we have no idea what it is that we would like to cut.
The reason being that it's very easy to say broad things about cutting on pork barrel projects here and there.
And sure, you can cut a post office in West Virginia.
And sure, you can get rid of a bridge to nowhere in Alaska.
That is not going to touch the structural entitlement programs that millions and millions of Americans have become dependent upon and who are now unwilling to give that up.
All the third rails of American politics now form An extraordinary spider web of third rails that no one can touch under any circumstances, which is why you have seen candidates of both major parties basically decide they're no longer going to talk about the single biggest problem facing the United States in future decades.
And that is the spending problem.
Donald Trump has vowed he is not going to touch that spending problem, by the way.
Donald Trump, in fact, has campaigned from the left against fellow conservatives in the Republican Party.
He has said that if you talk about restructuring entitlement programs, this makes you a liberal.
Now, again, that makes no sense on the face of it, but it's been an effective pitch.
Why?
Because, again, as it turns out, many Americans actually don't want to talk about these things.
They would prefer to leave that bogeyman in the closet rather than open it up and simply deal with it.
This is why it frustrates me when you see all of this talk about Speaker Mike Johnson.
Let's just oust him.
Let's just get rid of Speaker Mike Johnson over something like the continuing resolution.
Okay, I suppose you can do that.
And then who will it be?
You already did this routine with Kevin McCarthy.
You already dumped Kevin McCarthy over.
Matt Gaetz did this.
Suggesting that Kevin McCarthy had given in too much to the Democrats, despite the fact that the deal that McCarthy was trying to cut was significantly more conservative than the one that actually ended up being cut.
And then they put in place Mike Johnson, who again, fine guy, good conservative, but is facing the same exact structural problems that Kevin McCarthy was facing in the first place.
Here is the reality.
In order for any serious major change to get done, you are going to have to have a unified party control over Congress, Over to the Senate, over to the presidency, and a dedication by that party to take the hit.
To take the hit.
Democrats take the hits, by the way.
This is something that Democrats are good at.
Democrats took the hit in 2010.
In 2010, they passed Obamacare.
And then they got shellacked at the polls.
It was a very, very bad midterm for them.
And they took the hit because they knew that if they could completely restructure the healthcare system, that in the end, these would become entitlements that people relied upon.
They would rather take the short-term hit for the long-term gain.
When was the last time Republicans took a short-term hit for the long-term gain?
When was the last time they passed something other than, say, a tax cut that actually fundamentally restructured how finances work in this country?
And the answer is, they don't.
And the reason they don't is because they're afraid they will be tossed out of office.
And maybe that's just a, again, a structural imbalance in the way that the two parties work.
It's very easy to get reelected suggesting you're going to spend more money that doesn't exist.
It's very hard to get reelected suggesting that you're going to cut money from the federal budget, especially from a bunch of people who Say that they need that money in the first place.
But this is why it's a point of high irritation when people suggest that it's just that Johnson is a bad guy or something.
The people who are telling you that sort of thing, the people who are telling you that it's Johnson's fault this continuing resolution got passed, that if only he had shut down the government, more government shutdowns.
Okay, we've done multiple government shutdowns in the past few years.
Has that changed the trajectory of the spending in any real significant way?
The answer, of course, is no.
The people who are on the air right now telling you that the continuing resolution should have been pushed aside in favor of something harsher, in favor of a government shutdown, in favor of a harder bargaining position with Joe Biden.
Those people are fibbing to you about the incentive structure.
The incentive structure is what the incentive structure is.
And unless you have a unified Republican control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency, you're not going to get the kind of spending cuts that make it worthwhile for you to risk your seat.
Because I'll tell you what happens.
You do a government shutdown, you're going to end up passing a continuing resolution anyway, and a bunch more people are going to lose their seats.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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So Johnson is taking all sorts of heat over this, again, from members of the right-wing press.
Is it really going to do him any damage in the long run?
I think not, but it just underscores, again, the central problem in American life.
Politicians make a living by lying to you.
And you have a choice.
Your choice is whether you like being lied to until you decide to go along with their lies or whether you don't like being lied to.
Any politician who says he can save you, save your family, save your society by spending money here or by restructuring a program there is lying to you.
The vast majority of choices in your life are up to you.
And when people rely on politicians too much, They end up shooting themselves in the foot.
And then they buy into the next grifter who comes along and suggests that he's
going to fix whatever problems are at hand.
Now, speaking of grifters, the situation on the border continues to be a full-scale
disaster area.
In fact, fascinating piece from the New York Post, this has been suggested to me, by the way,
by friends over at Border Patrol as well.
The numbers of border encounters are dropping fairly significantly since the beginning of the
This raises a question.
Why is that happening?
We recently went down to the border at the very, very beginning of the year, and the end of December had been like a high watermark in terms of number of migrant encounters at the border.
We're talking hundreds of thousands of people in one month alone.
And then, beginning of January, you saw kinda not so much.
One of the theories that was floated by Border Patrol was that basically Joe Biden had cut a deal with Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is the leader, AMLO, the leader of Mexico, to basically cut down on the illegal immigration in an election year.
And now this is being pretty openly suggested by Todd Bensman over at the New York Post.
Again, this would not be the biggest shock in the world.
Remember, Barack Obama did this with Dmitry Medvedev in 2012.
Biden has struck a secret deal with the Mexican president to help his campaign.
Again, this would not be the biggest shock in the world.
Remember, Barack Obama did this with Dmitry Medvedev in 2012.
He literally sat next to him and said, tell Vladimir I will have more
flexibility after the election.
Remember, when Donald Trump tells a foreign country he wants them to do
something for electoral purposes, that's impeachable.
When Barack Obama does it in the middle of an election cycle, that's just politics.
Apparently, according to the New York Post, daily border patrol encounters of illegal immigrants crossing the border was 12,000 to 14,000 per day at the end of December.
But according to government data confidentially shared with me, it has dropped to a still managerially catastrophic, yet smaller 4,000 to 5,000 per day.
Why exactly is that happening?
Well, there were a bunch of Biden administration diplomatic missions to Mexico City over Christmas.
Mexican media, in fact, has been reporting what was said.
Here are some of the news.
Quote, Mexican law enforcement officials are rounding up immigrants in the country's north and shipping them by bus and airplane to southern cities like Tapachula in Chiapas State and Villahermosa in Tabasco State.
They're all expected to go home or stay put alongside those continuing to enter from Guatemala.
And then, another story.
To eliminate another obvious draw, Mexican authorities have emptied and then bulldozed
at least one long-standing migrant camp, the sprawling one in Matamoros, across the Rio Grande
from Brownsville, and dug deep anti-pedestrian trenches to further deny access to popular
crossings there. It was done under US pressure, according to one Mexican newspaper.
So apparently it sounds very much as though Mexico is doing Joe Biden a favor.
In fact, according to Mexican media, this is part of a broader agreement signed by
by Mexico's Immigration Service and Border Patrol to block northbound immigrants on public
What exactly is Mexico getting in return?
AMLO has called for $20 billion to be shared among his country and some others, for starters, according to media reports.
It's also quite possible that Biden is telling AMLO that he's going to do better with Biden than he would with Trump.
That would not be a shock in any way, shape, or form.
It has become a priority to Joe Biden to get the immigration issue off the front pages.
Presumably, this is why Joe Biden is now thinking about caving on immigration, as he should.
I've been saying for months at this point that it is political malpractice for Joe Biden not to cave on immigration.
It makes no sense.
For him to effectively push the far-left open borders line in the face of terrible polling numbers when he is running in an absolute neck-and-neck dogfight with Donald Trump, it makes zero sense whatsoever.
By the way, the latest polling data has Joe Biden with a very, very slim lead over Donald Trump in a potential presidential contest.
Now remember, that would be in the popular vote lead.
Donald Trump, if he's within one point of Joe Biden nationally, good shot, he wins the Electoral College.
There are a couple of surveys that are out, one from Ipsos and one from YouGov, that give Biden a lead of between one and two percentage points.
Okay, so this is a dogfight.
No matter how you slice it, there are zero polls right now, zero polls, that have Joe Biden up on Donald Trump in any significant fashion, any true significant fashion.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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So why exactly wouldn't he go ahead and simply cave on immigration?
Well, the answer is he's now starting to.
Now he's finally starting to see political reality, which actually, by the way, for the country is a good thing.
You want President Biden to govern a lot more from the middle than he has thus far.
According to the Wall Street Journal, an immigration deal being crafted in the Senate would limit migrants' ability to claim asylum at the southern border.
A White House concession, some progressives say, shows that President Biden's leftward shift on immigration as a 2020 candidate was a blip in his long political career.
This, of course, would be paired for new war aid for Ukraine, for Israel, for Taiwan.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said after a meeting with Joe Biden on Wednesday at the White House, he said we've talked about the necessary elements to solve this problem.
He said that would require reform to the broken asylum and parole systems.
Parole is basically where Joe Biden simply declares that a bunch of people who are in the country illegally have been paroled and can thus wander the country freely.
They haven't been amnestied, but it's fine.
And as far as asylum, the current asylum system is, you come to the country, you claim, just wave your hand, you say, I fear to go home to my home country, they release you into the country within 72 hours and you're gone.
Republicans would like Remain in Mexico.
Biden is not giving them Remain in Mexico so far.
This is what they should push for, by the way.
Republicans should push for Remain in Mexico as national immigration policy.
However, Joe Biden is in fact moving at this point.
He's moving again because the poll numbers for him are dire.
68% of those surveyed in a CBS News poll say they disapprove of his border policies.
So he is now moving and shifting on this particular issue.
Biden apparently again, he doesn't want remain in Mexico because he's afraid that if he says remain in Mexico, then that will give something for Trump to run on, which is weird.
And so that's bad logic.
If he did remain in Mexico, he would have to admit that Trump was right in the first place.
But also he would say that he got it right now.
So what exactly is the major issue?
Apparently, the president was originally influenced by, wait for it, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden.
It was originally Dr. Jill Biden who pushed him to the left on immigration because she was very upset with family separations and remain in Mexico.
She had visited a tent of migrants living just across the southern border in Matamoros.
One of the most dangerous cities in Mexico.
So he got rid of Remain in Mexico and all the rest.
But now it looks as though he's going to have to bring back some of this stuff.
He's still uncomfortable with bringing back any form of Remain in Mexico, according to the Wall Street Journal.
But advisors are bringing him numerous ideas on ways to run that program that give priority to migrants' safety.
So maybe he'll bring back Remain in Mexico, which, by the way, according to my friends in Border Patrol, would be the single biggest change he could make that would actually shut down mass migration to the border.
In fact, he's being pushed to his right, even by Democrats.
According to the Daily Wire, 14 House Democrats voted to denounce the Biden administration's open borders policies on Wednesday.
The group of party defectors joined with all voting Republicans in passing a resolution introduced by Representative Nathaniel Moran, Republican of Texas.
12 Democrats and 9 Republicans did not vote.
In addition to denouncing Joe Biden's border policies, the resolution condemned the national security and public safety crisis along the southwest border.
So it'll be interesting to see what exactly happens here.
Donald Trump, for his part, is doing something somewhat strange.
Trump has been suggesting that perhaps Republicans should not cut any deal with Joe Biden on immigration whatsoever.
Because if they cut a deal, then presumably he's going to be able to tout that he's more moderate on immigration than he has heretofore been.
But honestly, that is not the way the congressional politics typically ought to work.
If you can get a big concession out of a Democratic president, you do it.
And Trump can still run on it.
I mean, one thing that you're not going to see Biden run on is mass deportations.
That's exactly what Trump is running on.
Here he was yesterday.
But there are also people the countries don't want.
They're not sending their best people over.
You know, these guys are smart.
I know them.
The presidents, the dictators, the prime ministers.
Some of them call themselves prime ministers.
But they're very smart people.
And they're not sending their hard workers.
You get a lot of people coming into our country that we're not going to want.
We don't want.
And we're going to have the largest deportation in the history of this country.
Again, Trump is not going to get outflanked by Biden on immigration policy.
So congressional Republicans ought to very seriously push Joe Biden as far as they can and then take a win.
It is good to take wins from Joe Biden.
I understand that we now live in a weird universe in which somehow prying giant concessions out of Joe Biden is considered a loss of some sort.
But that's not how this works.
The Inflation Reduction Act is a loss because you got zero concessions out of Joe Biden on the Inflation Reduction Act.
You could have just killed that one outright.
But on this one, Republicans actually do, by and large, want Israel aid.
Republicans are split fairly down the middle on Ukraine aid.
They do want more aid for Taiwan, and they certainly want more border security measures.
And you get what you can get, because frankly, there's no guarantee that Donald Trump is going to be president come January 2025 anyway.
You gotta get what's on the table.
The fact that Mike Johnson and the Republicans have maneuvered Joe Biden into a bad immigration position is good for them, and if they can get a big concession out of that, they absolutely should.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Now, speaking of President Trump, I have to say it is truly amazing
to see the lengths to which the media will go in order to generate weird stories about him.
So, day before yesterday, Donald Trump was spotted coming out of a New York courthouse
and he was raising his hand.
And he was waving to the cameras.
And he appears to have some sort of strange... I don't know what they... wounds on his hand?
Red markings on his hand?
And this led to widespread speculation on the left about why Donald Trump had these things on his hands.
Here was Morning Joe suggesting that maybe it's because he was acting like a baby and banging a table.
Do we have any answer on what's on Donald Trump's, like Donald Trump has, his hands are bleeding.
Looks like he has a sore.
Is that magic marker?
Is it magic marker?
Because it looks like he has a sore on his index finger there.
I don't know.
Maybe it's magic marker.
I don't know.
It looks like a cut.
I mean, that's blood, isn't it?
I don't want to speculate.
I don't know.
But was there anything that happened inside the courtroom yesterday, Lisa?
There was.
You know, there was a point in time during the day where Trump, very frustrated with Judge Kaplan, banged his hands down on the table.
I doubt that the blisters or marks that we're seeing there come from that.
But could they be exacerbated by that?
Perhaps.
Oh my gosh, here we go.
By the way, that is actually the least stupid explanation given by Democrats.
I've also heard leprosy.
I'm not kidding.
That these would be the beginning signs of leprosy.
I'm watching Papillon or something.
And then James Carville comes out and says maybe it's syphilis.
Ah, these people.
If you go to the Drudge Report, and I think it'll still be up, there's a story that talks about Trump having hand cuts.
And you can link to it.
They don't look like cuts to me.
They look like sores.
And I've asked a number of MDs what medical condition manifests itself through hand sores.
And the answer is immediate and unanimous.
Secondary syphilis.
All right.
I think I think there's a good chance this man has to clap.
And I'm not being particularly secretive about it.
I am texting the photo.
You can link to it.
It's in some operation called a daily mail at some British thing is probably your People are ridiculous.
I'm sorry, they're totally ridiculous.
Maybe the picture was doctored or whatever, but maybe this story will go somewhere.
Maybe it won't, but I'm telling you at one o'clock Eastern, I'm humping this thing
like a young dog on old furniture.
People are ridiculous.
I'm sorry.
They're totally ridiculous.
By the way, my most plausible explanation is that Donald Trump was maybe smoking a cigar
and burned himself.
Those look like burns, by the way.
They don't look actually like syphilis sores.
Just for the record, I did ask my MD wife doctor what she thought it was, and she said definitely not syphilis, because syphilis is a marking that is smaller and generally all over the hand, not in like a particular area of the hand this way, is my understanding.
I could be getting that wrong, but that's it.
The bottom line is that when we are speculating over the marks on Donald Trump's hand, as opposed to, you know, Joe Biden's terrible global policy, Joe Biden is running an uphill battle.
That's why he ought to be giving ground on the immigration issue.
As far as Donald Trump, Donald Trump's legal cases, again, it seems to me at this point, you know, this is a weird out-of-the-box call.
I just don't think they're going to amount to much.
I think after all this hubbub, it's going to be like pretty much everything else with regard to Donald Trump.
That every single time they think they got him, they don't got him.
Every single time they think they have him captured with a butterfly net, there's a giant hole in the butterfly net.
That is the latest out of Georgia, where according to the Wall Street Journal, Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis is now seeking to avoid being deposed in the divorce proceeding of a colleague she's accused of having an affair with.
Calling a recent subpoena for her testimony a form of harassment meant to derail her criminal case against former President Donald Trump.
You'll recall this bizarre case in which apparently Fannie Willis hired a dude to be the lead prosecutor in this case who has barely any prosecutorial experience.
He is in the middle of a divorce case and apparently she paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars in state money and they were jet-setting around the world and going on cruises together with that money.
In a Thursday court filing, Willis did not address whether she had a romantic relationship with Wade.
Instead, it said that because the parties agree the marriage is irretrievably broken and the concept of fault is not at issue, there's no information District Attorney Willis could provide that might prove relevant to granting or denying the divorce.
So she is trying to avoid having to testify in that particular case.
Now, Does that mean that there won't be any more shoes to drop on this?
I highly doubt it.
I highly doubt it.
I would assume there will be a bunch of motions from Team Trump, there already have been, pointing out this particular allegation.
And that is going to hurt that case pretty badly.
We'll get some more on this in just one second.
First, folks, as you can see, 2024 is going to be nuts.
You've already seen the economy.
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You already see foreign policy.
It's a disaster area.
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Meanwhile, Donald Trump is still in court with regard to this E. Jean Carroll defamation suit.
The reason I said it's not going to damage him is because he already had one E. Jean Carroll defamation suit and it didn't damage him.
So what exactly is the damage going to be now?
Either believe the lady or you don't.
I have serious doubts about E. Jean Carroll's allegations here.
She testifies that she was in a Bergman like, I don't know, 25 years ago.
Can't name the date, can't name the season, can't name the month.
And that she was raped in a dressing room, with no one hearing her not sc- like nothing.
When she wrote about this experience, by the way, later, she suggested she had to be talked into the fact that it was a rape by her friend.
In any case, Donald Trump is out ripping on the judge.
You just get the feeling.
As I said earlier this week, Donald Trump's legal foibles at this point are just tinnitus.
They're just a ringing in the background in your ear, and eventually they become part of the white noise of life.
You can go to the funeral or you can go to the trial, but you can't do both.
I thought it was terrible.
I thought it was terrible.
So he would rather have me miss the funeral or go to the funeral and miss the trial.
And that's a nasty man.
He's a nasty judge.
He's a Trump-hating guy.
And it's obvious to everybody in the court.
It's a disgrace, frankly, what's happening.
It's a disgrace.
I do love Donald Trump's use of the word nasty.
He's bringing it back in his original sense, which I kind of appreciate.
Again, is any of this going to have any market impact on Trump's campaign?
I think not.
There are things that could theoretically have an impact on Trump's campaign, like, for example, him being in the news every day.
But it would have to be something that's not already part of the background information of our lives.
And that is very difficult to do with Donald Trump.
I've said this since 2015.
Donald Trump is a giant mud monster, and the more mud you throw at him, the more he just looks like a giant mud monster.
Joe Biden, that dude was supposed to be good at this and he is not good at this and it's a very, very real problem.
Now, meanwhile, the foreign affairs of the United States are in serious trouble.
If you take a look at the Middle East, obviously they continue to be in very serious trouble.
Pakistan is now apparently striking inside Iran.
So it turns out that when you don't contain Iran, Iran lashes out at pretty much everybody.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Iran's military tested and found a limit to its ability to project power this week as Pakistan responded to a missile attack with the first publicly acknowledged airstrike on Iranian territory in decades.
The Pakistani retaliation followed Iran's first direct attacks in neighboring countries since Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza began in October.
So now you have Pakistan, which is an ally of Saudi Arabia, firing at Iran.
You have Iran firing at Pakistan.
You have continuing rocket fire from Iran back to Hamas into Israel.
You have rocket fire from Iran back to Hezbollah into Israel.
You have rocket fire from Iran back to Houthis at shipping in the Red Sea.
And Joe Biden still has no plan for any of this.
In fact, it seems like the only sort of plans that are emerging are sporadic strikes on opposing positions that don't seem to be achieving anything like their purpose, and pressure on the Israelis to stop doing what they are doing.
That seems like the plan.
But guess what?
The Israelis are not going to stop because there is widespread support inside Israel to take out Hamas, as there should be.
In fact, in breaking news, 21 more hostages, their bodies were just found.
Hamas had murdered them.
So again, all of this is just going to continue because the Biden administration doesn't actually have any sort of plan for what a realistic Middle East looks like.
There's a lot of talk today about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talking about the idea that Israel ought to maintain territorial sovereignty over the entire area from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River in order to maintain security.
If anyone else has any options, I'm sure people would love to hear them.
No other options have been provided.
And every time Joe Biden and his team suggest that Israel ought to hand over land in concessions to terrorist groups, all they are doing is fomenting what Iran wants.
The reality is that terrorism is not motivated by poverty and despair.
Terrorism is motivated by hope.
Hope that the other side will be weak enough to leave you alone, to leave you living after you have committed some of the worst atrocities known to man.
It is totally insane that the Biden administration continues to pressure exactly the wrong side on this sort of thing.
Now, I will say the Biden administration has provided the military aid so far necessary for Israel to continue its war against Hamas.
That is true.
But rhetorically speaking, it does make a rather large difference when you keep signaling Two terrorists in Hamas that all they have to do is stay alive long enough and eventually they will get what they want, which is, namely, to be left alone, survival, so they can continue to plan attacks and murder Jews in the future.
It also doesn't help when you have dolts like Bernie Sanders doing this routine.
Bernie Sanders yesterday suggested that Israel is going to war with the entire Palestinian people, which is a weird take, considering, again, that Israel has now sacrificed about 200 of its own men and women in an area where they have complete air superiority and don't need to sacrifice literally any of those men.
My view from day one, Chris, has been that Israel has the right to respond to Hamas's barbaric attack on October 7th, but they do not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people, which is what we are seeing right now.
And as you've just mentioned, The humanitarian situation in Gaza now is unbelievably bad, and we're looking at the possibility of hundreds of thousands of children starving.
We cannot allow that to happen.
Israel is currently attempting to ship in more aid, and there's no one on the other end to pick up the aid.
Hamas is picking up the aid, and they're stealing the aid.
And the world is going to continue to be an incredibly fragile place because of Joe Biden.
Weirdly, though, there is this coterie of people who exist at the top of society in our global institutions who believe that they are doing a good job and that the true threat to international security is Donald Trump.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, Lady Ballers.
It's the hilarious story of how a group of male losers who can't win against other men decide to identify as, you know, ladies and join a women's basketball league.
Sure, it's absurd, it's ridiculous, it's laughable.
Also, it happens to be very close to reality.
Here's a quick look at what is being called the most triggering movie of the decade.
Leftists are losing it over Lady Ballers.
Nothing's changed.
This movie is a straight-up and intentional transphobic hate crime.
What?
I see you.
The Lady Ballers movie needs to be banned.
I'll cancel you.
Can I get the blinds, please?
Go to 11.
The most toxic BS you've ever seen.
You're a monster.
Yeah!
Next-level hate speech propaganda.
That's it?
That's the pitch?
Watch the most triggering comedy of the decade.
Lady Ballers, streaming exclusively on Daily Wire Plus.
Don't wait, watch Lady Ballers, the movie Hollywood didn't make, and wouldn't make, so we did, exclusively at Daily Wire Plus right now.
Meanwhile, a coterie of very powerful people globally, they're very afraid of Donald Trump.
So Joe Biden has basically set the world on fire, because it turns out that the pseudo-sophisticate take on foreign policy, which is basically that you can wish-cast peace into existence, It's false.
It's not true.
And so what they're mostly afraid of now is that people will expose their stupidity to the public view, which is something that Donald Trump tended to do with actually a shocking amount of alacrity during his first term in office.
And he would constantly sort of do away with silly shibboleths that have been spoken by the foreign policy elite.
He would break those idiocies on the wheel of reality.
And they've been very upset ever since that he did that.
And so they don't want him back.
This, presumably, is why they continue to maintain lie after lie with regard to international politics.
So over at the Continuing World Economic Forum over at Davos, various dolts, large and small, continue to maintain that Donald Trump is the truest threat to the world order.
A woman named Vera Jourova, she suggests that the biggest problem that we are about to face is disinformation, because disinformation, of course, might mean that Donald Trump gets elected.
Disinformation is a security threat.
And maybe not many noticed, but it was part of the Russian military doctrine that they will start information war.
And we are in it now.
And disinformation is a very powerful tool.
So how we think about it in the EU?
We are focusing on improving the system where the people will get the facts right.
We don't speak about opinions.
We are not correcting anyone's opinions or language.
Yeah?
This is about the facts.
Yeah, because I don't trust you to be able to distinguish between opinion and fact.
That was the VP of the European Commission.
Meanwhile, the World Bank president continues to speak factual falsehoods like we can't eradicate poverty without solving climate change, which is weird since we've done a pretty damned good job over the course of the last 45 years on this planet in eradicating extreme poverty.
Not only without solving climate change, but according to you guys, by exacerbating climate change, because it turns out that carbon-based fossil fuels are one of the great sources of human wealth ever devised.
And so merely saying that I've got a new way of thinking about things or announcing policy pronouncements will not change the reality of what we face on the ground every day.
What we have is an existential climate crisis.
We cannot think of eradicating poverty without caring about climate.
We cannot think about eradicating poverty without caring about healthcare.
We cannot think about eradicating poverty without caring about food insecurity and fragility.
These are, if you don't like it, tough luck.
Yeah, well, I mean, what if I don't think that you're right?
What if I think that you're just speaking nonsense and spouting nonsense?
What if I think that, in fact, this is a global guise for propping up bad regimes, that very often the climate change talk is about degrading some of the most Productive regimes in the history of mankind, namely places like the United States and Europe, in favor of significantly less productive regimes that are looking for subsidies and handouts.
That's precisely what is going on with China, by the way.
According to the Wall Street Journal, China is now doubling down on manufacturing to reboot its economy after a turbulent year.
The push for new growth drivers comes, as figures showed, the world's second largest economy expanded at 2023 at its weakest rate in decades.
What exactly are they going to do?
Apparently, they want to dominate global markets in emerging industries like electric vehicles, batteries, and renewable energy gear.
So they want the United States and the EU to subsidize a bunch of Green energy boondoggles where the money eventually ends up in China.
They require the subsidies.
Those are the places where they're going to earn their money.
The hope is that growth in what Chinese officials referred to as the new three industries and other favored sectors will help China's economy banish the specters of deflation and Japan-style stagnation as a real estate crunch weighs heavily on construction investment and consumer confidence.
Longer term, Beijing wants these and other high-tech manufacturing industries to be in the vanguard of its push to eventually unseat the United States as the world's largest economy.
Well, that's not going to happen.
And the reason it's not going to happen is because they're not actually targeting efficient sectors of the market for growth.
Instead, what they are doing is finding places that require government subsidization and redistribution in order to have everybody pay them to offshore all of that.
Well, good luck to them.
But again, this is about global financial restructuring and the people of the WF know that.
And Trump is a threat to that because he actually does like America as opposed to many of these other people who seem to have a peculiar global utopia in mind that they wish to pursue.
Meanwhile, in breaking news, President Trump apparently, according to Axios, now has a shortlist of his potential VP candidates.
And apparently, according to Axios, the shortlist is down to three.
Here are the possibilities for Donald Trump's VP candidate.
One, Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York.
She's the chair of the House GOP Conference, and according to Steve Bannon, who really is a lukewarm oniglis, he says that she's at the top.
Stefanik was the first member of Congress to endorse Trump.
She's very loyal to him, obviously.
She recently suggested that the members of the January 6th riot who are in prison, she called them hostages, which is a strange language to use about people who have been criminally convicted.
Even if you put, like, a hostage means that you have to do something to get the hostage released.
It's a weird word to use, but she also happens to be very capable.
She's an excellent speaker.
Now, all the people on the right who are claiming that Nikki Haley is no good because she is too far to the left, I should point out at this point that Elise Stefanik, her heritage action score is not particularly satisfying.
She has a 72% heritage action score.
She is more liberal than a huge, huge number of Republicans.
Her lifetime score Her lifetime heritage action score is 54%.
The average House Republican is 79%.
She's far more, I mean, she's from a district in New York.
She's far more to the left than virtually every other member of the Republican caucus.
So if you're seeking to shore up, say, the evangelical Christian vote, if that's what
you're seeking to do with that pick, the way that Trump did with Mike Pence in 2016,
Stefanik isn't going to do it.
If the idea is double down on your strengths, namely, look politically moderate by picking a bunch of positions that are sort of in the middle, a little wishy-washy, but you have some strength on a few of the sort of pro-Trump issues and also on foreign policy, Stefanik isn't too bad a pick.
Her politics honestly look very, very similar to Nikki Haley's.
Let's just be real about that.
Another candidate on the shortlist is Senator J.D.
Vance of Ohio.
He is, again, one of Trump's most outspoken defenders in a Senate GOP full of people who are not particularly in love with Trump's policies.
The people who are sort of more Paleocon-oriented, really like JD Vance.
JD has drawn a very interesting contrast from his early career.
His early career, he was very much not into the idea of sort of a grievance politics.
In fact, Hillbilly Elegy is essentially a robust defense of the meritocracy.
The suggestion is that when you become too dependent on government, it actually enervates you.
He's moved away from that.
He now talks about the idea that you do need subsidies in particular areas of the country and tariffs.
You need government involvement in a lot more areas of the economy.
J.D.
has become much more NatCon than he used to be for sure.
NatCon stands for Nationalist Conservatives.
Nationalist Conservatives tend to be more like European Conservatives.
Fine with big entitlement spending.
They tend to be more isolationist on foreign policy and they tend to be socially conservative.
So they look very much like sort of right-wing parties in Europe.
He's also very tight with Trump.
I'm not sure what that wins Trump because Ohio is a very red state.
So I'm not sure what exactly that brings him politically.
Like does it bring anybody in?
I'm not certain that it really does.
And finally, Nikki Haley.
So Haley is still on that short list.
And this is what's freaking out a lot of people who are sort of on that NatCon side of the aisle.
Nikki is widely perceived, as she is in the primaries right now, as much squishier than Trump on a wide variety of issues.
She's obviously much more hawkish on foreign policy than Trump has purported to be.
Although again, one of the weird things about Trump as president is that the stuff he said sounded a lot like Pat Buchanan.
The stuff that he did looked an awful lot like what Nikki Haley might do.
Nikki Haley is on that short list because, again, she has good approval ratings, not with Republicans, but with audiences, generally speaking.
If she were, in fact, the presidential candidate against Biden in virtually every poll, she blows him out.
She would compete well against somebody like Kamala Harris.
It's an interesting group of people.
None of them are hardcore conservatives on the political level.
Vance is the one who probably could be considered most conservative on a political level, but even on economics, he really is not.
Again, he's more NatCon in orientation.
So that is Donald Trump's shortlist right now.
It'll be fascinating as we move forward to see what that shortlist starts to look like.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We will jump into the Vaunted Ben Shapiro Show Mailbag.
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