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Feb. 21, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:39
Putin Is Settling All Family Business
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One of the great qualities of dictatorship is that dictators can hold the line even as democracies start to fade.
That, of course, is the theory of pretty much every dictator across history when faced with a democratic rival.
That is certainly the theory of Vladimir Putin today, whether it is in Ukraine or whether it's with regard to him just killing, you know, the people who oppose him, people like Alexei Navalny.
And it is becoming very clear this week That Vladimir Putin is now settling all family business.
This is the week where he feels like he has the ability to do exactly what it is that he wants.
And the reason he feels that way is because of a combination of splits on the right in the United States and a combination of splits on the left in the United States, as well as splits in the European coalition with regard to Russia.
When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, there was pretty much unanimity that this was not something that the West could allow to stand.
You couldn't have Vladimir Putin simply waltzing into Kiev, taking over the country, killing Vladimir Zelensky, and essentially setting up a puppet dictatorship and turning Ukraine into a second Belarus.
You couldn't have that because it would put Russia directly on the borders of a wide variety of NATO countries, including Hungary and Poland.
You couldn't have it because it would certainly threaten former Soviet satellite states like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, all of which are deeply fearful of a Putin-led incursion into their territory, Finland as well.
You couldn't have it because Ukraine actually is a relatively major producer of products like wheat and oil.
And mostly you couldn't have it because Vladimir Putin has interests that are antithetical to those of the West.
And for all of the talk about over the last 25 years about how Vladimir Putin was just on the cusp of moderating, how there was going to be a moment when Vladimir Putin was welcomed into the family of nations and then he would just be nice to everybody.
That never happened.
Every single president of my lifetime has tried a reset with Vladimir Putin.
George W. Bush famously looked into Putin's eyes and thought he had a sense of his soul.
And then you had Barack Obama, who literally sent Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State, to Moscow to give them a button that didn't actually say reset, but was supposed to be a reset button.
And then you had Vladimir Putin being offered flexibility by Barack Obama in 2012 in the lead up to the 2012 election.
And then Donald Trump came into the office and the basic assumption was that Donald Trump was going to lead to a warm relationship with Putin.
And now you have Joe Biden who came into office and was immediately pretty soft on Russia in terms of sort of geopolitical strategy, as George W. Bush once put it.
That take has been proved false time and time again.
Vladimir Putin is a highly intelligent, highly skilled adversary of the United States.
His interests do not align with the interests of the West.
The chief Russian motivation, and this has been true for literally centuries, is territorial ambition.
This has been true since the time of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.
I mean, if you want to go back even further, this has been true since Ivan the Terrible, in that the fact is that if you look at Russian history or have any sense of Russian history, Russia's great leaders are always measured by the amount of land they control, which makes a certain amount of geopolitical sense if you are Russia, because again, Russia is a giant step, meaning it is open to invasion from all sides.
And so if you're Russian, one of the things that historically you have attempted to do is expand your borders so as to prevent invasion from all sides.
Now, at a certain point, That defensive justification becomes an offensive strategy in which you're invading sovereign nations that exist all around you and attempting to control top-down.
But Russia has always been an empire since the time of Muscovy.
And now you are watching as Vladimir Putin tries to Expand the boundaries of what he sees as his new empire.
And he himself compared himself to Peter the Great just a couple of years ago after the invasion of Ukraine.
And when you watch the interview that he did with Tucker Carlson, where the first 35 minutes is dedicated to his idea of Russian claims to Ukraine, in which he actually sort of makes the claim that Russia has claims to Poland and Hungary as well.
When he says that sort of stuff, we ought to take that seriously.
He's actually spelling out what he actively thinks.
Now, there are a bunch of people on the left who think that Vladimir Putin is doing this because he is offended by the muscularity of the West.
That if only the West had been more conciliatory toward Vladimir Putin, then Russia would not, in fact, be an adversarial force.
That everything that Vladimir Putin does is blowback to the West.
That is the theory of people on the left who are very much vacillating with regard to what Vladimir Putin is trying to do.
And then there are a couple of theories on the right, and those theories range from the blowback theory, people ripping that off from John Mearsheimer, the foreign policy scholar, who I think is wrong about a great many things.
John Mearsheimer has sort of theorized that it's NATO's expansion that drove Putin to invade South Ossetia, for example, in Georgia, or drove Putin to invade Crimea and the Donbass region, originally in 2014, and then invade the rest of Ukraine in 2022.
There's that theory, which again is coincident with the left-wing blowback theory of American foreign policy that dates all the way back to people like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.
We'll get some more on this in just one second.
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And then there is a theory that Russia is actually a bulwark against secular leftism.
That Russia actively is a highly religious country that is very anti much of the left-wing ideology with regard to, say, gender and sex and sexuality that the West has fallen for.
And so they've built up in their minds a lot of people the idea that because Russians are socially conservative as a general matter, which they are, that this is somehow what Vladimir Putin represents, as opposed to he has a population that is socially conservative and also that is not his actual ambition.
His actual ambition is not in defense of, say, social conservatism.
His ambition is in defense of Russian territorial ambition.
It's a category error, in other words, for many people on the right.
Many people on the right have made that same category error, for example, with Sharia law countries in the Islamic world.
It suggested that because those countries are, quote-unquote, socially conservative, that somehow those countries have a commonality with, say, American conservatism, American Christian conservatism.
And the answer there is no, they really don't.
Their ambitions are not the same as your ambitions.
And what this really reveals is a schism in the United States, broadly writ, And in the West broadly written, Europe as well, a schism about whether the West has any sense of internal solidity.
What are the values of the West?
Because if Putin is able to split the West on the basis of perceived values or perceived anti-Westernism.
And that says there are a lot of people in the West who really don't like the West very much, on the one hand, and a lot of people in the West who believe that the greater threat to the United States might be their neighbors who disagree with them about social politics, as opposed to people like Vladimir Putin.
Not that Vladimir Putin is a direct threat to people in the United States, like right this instant, but he's a very large indirect threat to people in the United States because geopolitics actually matters.
When you cut off shipping routes, when you destroy the sources of international trade, When you threaten American allies, these are things that actually will matter to American citizens writ large.
Okay, so Vladimir Putin is figuring that the history of the United States since World War II is, if you can split the American public, you can win.
And it doesn't matter how weak you are.
All you have to do is outlast.
Outlasting is the strategy.
This has been true since Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam.
It was true of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
It was true of Sharia law, Iranian forces in Iraq.
If you can outlast the United States, you will win.
And the time for outlasting is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.
So it used to be that in order to outlast the American public, you would have to wait a decade.
And now because of the velocity of social media, And because of the ability of people to see these arguments in real time and split from each other and polarize very quickly, what you're seeing is that the West is sapped of its will incredibly quickly on nearly every conflict.
When there is a conflict with true evil, You see, Western powers immediately leap to fight the evil and then pretty quickly start to doubt themselves and figure, okay, I think we're done here.
We need to move on with our lives.
Now, this would be a time when political leadership actually mattered, but there's a complete dearth of political leadership on both sides of the political aisle on these matters.
Joe Biden is utterly incapable of articulating the rationale why Americans should care if Russia invades Ukraine.
He does not even attempt to articulate it.
He just spouts words like democracy, Without taking full stock of the actual situation for Americans.
Because Americans look at Joe Biden and say things like democracy, and they say, wait, hold up a second.
Ukraine, first of all, is an extraordinarily imperfect democracy.
The Freedom House score for Ukraine is like 39.
Russia is like 7, but Ukraine is like 39.
So it's not like an amazing wellspring of democracy.
It is a burgeoning democracy at best.
And so when you say democracy over and over, Americans are like, well, is that really what Ukraine is about?
And then Americans say, well, if that's what Ukraine is really about, then why are we allies with, say, Saudi Arabia?
Because Saudi Arabia obviously is not a democracy.
By the way, a lot of our allies who are not democracy start to get very nervous when they hear democracy talk coming from Joe Biden, because they're like, OK, so what are you going to Arab spring us over here?
The real reason why the United States is pursuing A defense of Ukraine is because we have geo-strategic interest in degrading the Russian military capacity to expand beyond its own borders, threaten shipping lanes, threatening supply resources, increasing the power of enemies of America and America's allies.
Russia has formed a de facto coalition with China and Iran at this point.
And that de facto coalition threatens America's allies all around the world and threatens freedom of the seas, for example, everywhere from the Taiwan Strait to the Straits of Malacca to the Red Sea.
To the Straits of Hormuz.
That coalition is extremely dangerous.
And the United States does have a geopolitical interest in downgrading that.
But that's not something that Joe Biden can explain because he can't say words anymore.
And probably doesn't understand the words that he is saying right now.
And on the right, there's a split about whether these things even matter.
There's this bizarre idea that has arisen on large parts of the right that America can become autarkic, that suddenly global economics don't matter at all, that if things go to hell in a handbasket with regard to the freedom of the seas in these particular areas, it won't affect American citizens in any way.
Let me just explain.
If shipping starts to be truly endangered the way that it is in the Red Sea, in any of the other areas that I just mentioned, the amount of money that Americans are going to pay is going to be so much larger than whatever checks we are signing to Ukraine, it will make our heads spin.
If you loved the inflation of the first couple of years of the Biden era, wait until freedom of the seas goes away.
It's something that you're going to enjoy.
Okay, so in any case, Vladimir Putin knows all of this because all he has to do is just keep pressing.
All he has to do is keep pressing.
And so he's taking full advantage.
He sees the splits and he's exploiting those splits.
He's a smart player.
Vladimir Putin is a smart geopolitical player who sees foreign policy as a zero-sum game.
And no attempt to appease Vladimir Putin through happy talk is going to work.
Again, I went through the various administrations in the United States since Vladimir Putin took office in 2000.
Every single one of those administrations has tried a detente policy with Vladimir Putin, and all of them have failed.
Because guess what?
Every one of those administrations ends.
Every one of them has a shift in Congress.
And Vladimir Putin's still there, ruling in unitary fashion.
The downside of dictatorship is it generally means a poorly run country that has no feedback loops for improvement of the country.
You can list certain countries, by the way, that have had quasi dictatorships that have actually run fairly well.
That was true, for example, of Singapore for several decades.
But it's very rare.
More likely, it turns into a corrupt oligarchy in which the leader uses his position in order to enrich himself and his friends in order to ensure his own power and destroys his adversaries.
And one of the best ways to maintain your own power is to destroy things like internal property rights and political freedoms.
Because if you give property rights, that may lead to the creation of a monetary base from which a threat can mount against you.
So Vladimir Putin has been very, very bad for the Russian people.
If you don't believe me, all you have to do is look at the various GDPs per capita in the former Soviet satellite states.
GDP per capita right now in states like Poland.
Poland is a former Soviet satellite state.
GDP per capita there is about $18,000.
GDP per capita.
In Estonia, a former Soviet satellite state, is $28,000.
GDP per capita in Latvia, a former Soviet satellite state, $21,000.
GDP per capita in Russia, right now, is $12,000.
Somewhere in that neighborhood.
Vladimir Putin has not been a boon to Russia.
Okay, putting all that aside again, Vladimir Putin is winning right now because all he feels he has to do is outlast.
Not only that, the weaponry that we are shipping to Ukraine in defense is much more expensive than the weaponry that Vladimir Putin is using in offense in Ukraine.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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The reason that Vladimir Putin is able to ramp up his production, which can last probably effectively another two to three years, at the levels that he is currently producing, they're spending like 6% of their GDP on defense, by which we mean offense, in places like Ukraine.
That's unsustainable for an economy that's truly unworkable in Russia.
They do not have a workable economy.
It is 50% probably based on oil profits.
They do have trading partners, of course, outside the West, but have they been economically damaged by the war in Ukraine?
Absolutely.
It's damaged everybody, but it has certainly hit Russia.
You can see it in terms of the inflation rate, but the reality is that Russia can produce kind of crappy old machinery and ammo, and it costs a lot less money than defensive machinery.
By the way, you see this all over the globe.
It costs Hamas like 50 bucks to create a Katyusha rocket that they can shoot into an Israeli city, and it costs Israel like $50,000 every time they fire an Iron Dome.
That sort of stuff happens all the time across the globe.
It's one of the reasons why the Houthis are being effective in the Red Sea right now.
Offensive measures that are basic and dumb cost almost nothing.
Defensive measures, which have to be sophisticated to stop the offensive measures, are very, very expensive.
Which is why, from a financial point of view, offense is better than defense.
From a financial point of view, during war, in the moment, right now, destroying the enemy's capacity to make war is actually easier than defending against the war that they are attempting to fight against you.
Again, all of this is just predicate to the fact that Vladimir Putin really is feeling his oats right now.
So not only did he almost certainly kill Alexei Navalny.
I say almost certainly because, you know, you try to be a little careful about these things, but he killed Alexei.
Alexei Navalny did not die of natural causes in a prison at the age of 47 after being poisoned by Vladimir Putin just about four years ago, and then immediately arrested upon his return to Russia, sentenced to a gulag for 30 plus years, and then he randomly dies.
That is not the way that works.
Especially not for Vladimir Putin, who makes a habit of killing his political opponents.
And in fact, unsurprisingly, the Kremlin has now rejected international calls, according to Axios, for an independent investigation into Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny's death in prison.
Navalny's allies and family, of course, say that they suspect high-level Russian authorities were involved in his death, which, of course, is absolutely true, I'm sure.
The European Council said Mr. Navalny's unexpected and shocking death is yet another sign of the accelerating and systematic repression in Russia.
Kremlin has, they've refused to release his body because they're afraid that if they release his body then they're gonna discover the poison on him or the bruises on him or the broken bones or whatever it is.
The country's prison services said he died suddenly after a walk.
They claimed he fell unconscious after feeling sick and could not be resuscitated.
Of course, all of this has sort of outsized impact in the West because there was a very famous HBO documentary made about Alexei Navalny, that won Best Picture, Best Documentary at the Oscars just a couple of years ago.
It is a very, very compelling documentary all about his poisoning and his attempt to track down the people who poisoned him, which he actually does.
He actually calls one of his poisoners on the phone and gets them to admit the whole thing on the phone.
The very tail end of that documentary, Alexei Navalny actually is asked, what is your message to the Russian people in case you're murdered?
And here's what he had to say.
He says, listen, I've got something very obvious to tell you.
You're not allowed to give up.
If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong.
We need to utilize this power to not give up.
We need to utilize this power to not give up.
Remember, we're a huge power that is being oppressed by these bad dudes.
We don't realize how strong we actually are.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.
So don't be inactive.
Okay, and then he was murdered.
So either his murder is a reflection of Putin feeling threatened, or his murder is a reflection of the fact that Putin thinks he can get away with nearly anything at this point.
And it seems more like the latter, especially because they're not being shy about anything that they are doing right now.
Vladimir Putin, according to the Russian news agency, the Russian government has now filed charges against Oleg Navalny, who is the brother of Alexei Navalny.
They said, wanted under an article of the criminal code.
They did not specify what article Navalny's brother was even wanted under.
So they're just arresting Alexei Navalny's relatives who are in Russia right now in an attempt to presumably quash any blowback from their decision to kill Alexei Navalny.
Not just that, on Tuesday, Russia's main security agency said that they had arrested another American citizen.
This person's a dual citizen of Russia and the United States on accusations of committing state treason by raising funds for Ukraine.
The FSB identified the detainee as a 33-year-old woman who lives in Los Angeles.
Apparently, she had raised $51 for a Ukrainian organization that bought weapons and other equipment for Ukraine's military.
That's because she had sent $50 to Razom for Ukraine, a New York-based nonprofit organization that sends assistance to the country.
And, uh, the FSB released via Russian state media a video that showed the woman wearing a white hat that covered her eyes being handcuffed and escorted by masked security service officers.
If convicted, she faces 20 years in prison.
And, of course, this makes perfect sense considering that Russia is making just a bounty off of American citizens they kidnap.
If they arrest Britney Griner for being foolish enough to fly to Russia with pot in her bag, and then they throw her in prison, they can get, like, an actual high-level Russian arms dealer released in return for that.
They're still holding the Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich.
They have no compunction about just randomly kidnapping American citizens.
This is no problem for them.
Why?
Because they're not afraid of the blowback.
At all.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Again, a Russian pilot who defected to Ukraine has now been apparently murdered.
According to the New York Times, Maxim Kuzminov pulled off a daring escape last summer when he defected to Ukraine and handed his military helicopter over to Ukrainian commandos in exchange for half a million bucks.
Ukraine trumpeted the defection as a major coup.
In Vladimir Putin's Russia, he was guilty of treason.
Ukrainian intelligence officials warned Kuzminov his life's in danger.
They urged him not to leave the country.
Instead, he moved with his money to a small resort town on Spain's Mediterranean coast.
And now, he's been found murdered.
He's 28, or was 28.
Two Spanish police officials with knowledge of the case said the body of a man found riddled with bullets last week in the coastal town of Villa Joyosa belonged to Mr. Kuzminov.
Andrey Chernyak, representative of Ukraine's military intel, said he could confirm the fact of his death.
There was no information about the possible assailants or motive.
So, very difficult to imagine that this person was not, I mean, riddled with bullets in a random town in Spain.
Sounds pretty Putin-y to me.
I mean, again, considering that this is a thing that Vladimir Putin does send his FSB to do.
And again, Putin is exploiting the divisions in the West.
That's what America's enemies would do.
It's what any country would do.
Every country who sees itself as a geopolitical opponent of another country hopes to exploit internal divisions.
The difference is that in America, we have a democracy and so internal divisions are pretty obvious and clear.
We have a free press.
Same thing is true in Europe.
For all the problems we have in America or Europe, they are not remotely the same kind of problems.
They're a different in category problem from what's happening over in Russia.
President Biden had promised that there would be significant repercussions against Russia if Navalny was killed.
Unclear exactly what those repercussions are going to be.
Putin is figuring he can withstand anything at this point.
He's got his money inside the country.
He's got his Dasha's.
He doesn't care.
According to Yahoo News, the Biden administration will impose
major sanctions on Russia in response to the death of Navalny.
John Kirby, White House National Security Communications Advisor, said the new sanctions are designed to hold Russia accountable for what happened to Navalny, as well as all its actions over the course of this vicious and brutal war that has raged in Ukraine for two years.
Unclear what that's going to be.
Apparently, they're going to unveil the sanctions package on Friday.
The question, of course, is how has that worked so far?
Because, of course, the economic sanctions have not done tremendous damage to Putin or his inner circle.
The realistic answer here is that there are actually things that Biden could do.
This is one of the things that's truly amazing about Biden.
He will use executive power to try to cram down a vaccine mandate on 80 million Americans using the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
He will attempt, illegally, to alleviate student loan debt by simply Deciding that you no longer have to pay it, using his executive power.
But the one area of American law where the president does have tremendous outsized power is in foreign policy, and Biden barely uses it.
He won't do it to shut down the border.
He won't do it to actually take measures he could take to punish, for example, the Russians.
Instead, he is weak-kneed.
And he is weak-kneed because, again, virtually everyone on all sides in the United States is incredibly divided.
What this situation highlights is really not the evil of Vladimir Putin, it's the weakness of the West.
According to Bret Stephens writing over at the New York Times, he says there are four broad approaches that could theoretically be used by Biden with regard to Putin.
According to Bill Browder, who's an investor and political activist, who has a really shocking book that he wrote about his experiences facing down Putin.
He was a financier who worked in Russia for years and years and years, and then was targeted because one of his business partners was Sergei Metnitsky, who was killed in prison by the Putin regime.
So he has a suggestion.
His suggestion is that You could enact legislation to confiscate frozen Russian bank reserves for the defense and reconstruction of Ukraine, theoretically.
Now everybody's been very unwilling to do that because they're afraid that there would be a flight from dollar assets if that sort of thing happened, which you understand, right?
If you are a foreign actor and you're afraid that the United States is going to confiscate your money if it's held in American dollars, this could harm the American dollar.
So that is a risky move.
With that said, you may have to take those sorts of risks if you hope to actually punish a dictator.
Theoretically, you could back dissidents in more significant ways and stop with these hostage trades.
If you continue with these hostage trades, Putin is just going to take more hostages.
And finally, you could actually do the thing that Biden really will not do, and that is jack up American production in the oil and natural gas sector.
Really ratchet that up.
I mean, it's an opportunity, frankly, for America's economy.
The fact that Europe is now cut off from Russian oil supplies would be an opportunity for the United States to jack up its LNG production and start shipping all of that stuff over to Europe.
Instead, Joe Biden is so enthralled to his radical left on the environment that he refuses to do any of that sort of stuff.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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But meanwhile, you have people like Nancy Pelosi, and she's spending her days theorizing about how Vladimir Putin is paying Donald Trump.
Like, how is this useful?
How?
What do you think?
We're all wondering this question, Speaker Pelosi.
What do you think Putin has on him?
I mean, it sure seems like something, as you've said a few times, given that he refuses to criticize him, that he seems to be a fanboy of him.
Are you worried at all?
First of all, first of all, we must be sure that he does not step one foot into the White House.
Not as president or not as anything.
Now we have someone who had the honor of serving in the White House, didn't consider it an honor, didn't consider his oath of office to protect and fend the Constitution.
And on this week, speaking out the way he did about Navalny shows you that he is a person without values.
He looks like he's going to be a person without dollars either, but the values are what concern us.
Yes, the dollars... I don't know what he has on him, but I think it's probably financial.
I think it's probably financial.
Either something financial he has on him, or something on the come.
Okay, so now it's just speculation about Trump and Putin as opposed to, you know, actually not slow walking the aid to Ukraine as Joe Biden has done for literal years, taking the middle position on everything.
And this is the nature of Joe Biden.
Joe Biden is the president, which means this is happening on his watch.
All of the talk about Republicans in Congress.
Yeah, Republicans in Congress are a mess.
There is no question about that.
They cannot tell their ass from their elbow.
I mean, that just is the.
That is why they have now rotated through two speakers and a bunch of speaker candidates in the course of like a year.
They're a mess.
With that said, Joe Biden is the current president of the United States, I noticed.
And it is under Joe Biden, the Ukrainian invasion took place.
And it's under Joe Biden that the American will to back Ukraine has faded.
The power of the bully pulpit would be a thing, but Joe Biden has failed to use it and he's not capable of using it.
And he has no moral clarity anyway.
It turns out that foreign policy issues affect each other.
When you abandon Afghanistan, that has impact on what Russia does in Ukraine.
And by the way, when Russia sees these sorts of half measures that you are taking with regard to Israel and Hamas, they feel the same way.
Russia is an open ally of Hamas at this point.
They've invited Hamas to Moscow.
To talk about situation over there.
And meanwhile, the Democrats are fully divided on Israel and whether to support, you know, America's democratic ally in the Middle East that provides America with intelligence resources and acts essentially as a land-based aircraft carrier for United States interests in the Middle East.
And we're telling them, you can't defend yourselves against Hamas to the extent that you take out Hamas in Rafah city.
That is what the Biden administration is completely split on this sort of stuff.
According to Politico, the Israel-Hamas conflict is opening new rifts in the House Democratic Caucus, with the second Congressional Progressive Caucus quitting the group.
Over the war, and Representative Rashida Tlaib backing an activist campaign to undermine President Joe Biden in the Michigan Democratic Primary.
The new development to underscore that more than four months in, Israel's military operations in Gaza are still causing a painful rift within the Democratic Party.
Uh, well, I mean, why?
Well, I mean, it's not Israel's military operations.
Like, this thing was not initiated by Israel.
It was initiated by Hamas, committing the greatest atrocity against Jews since World War II.
And yet, this is somehow shattering the Democratic coalition.
Largely because, again, the Democratic Party is split between their crazy wing and their actual sort of traditional base, which tends to be more pro-Israel.
The younger, insane generation that has been trained on nonsense by the garbage reporters at the Washington Post and New York Times, they continue to push the Biden administration to simply concede to Hamas.
And so what you have is a split inside the administration.
You'll have members of the Biden administration out there talking about how they need to put pressure on Israel, and then you'll simultaneously have John Kirby out there talking about how Israel is doing its best to avoid civilian casualties.
They're speaking two languages to two different groups of people.
It's wild.
And so you see these two things come into conflict for the Democratic Party.
And Russia looks at this and they say, look, you guys can't even get your act together on like the most morally obvious conflict in modern world right now.
The conflict between, again, a Democratic ally of the United States that was attacked in a fashion that for its size dwarfs 9-11.
And you can't even get on board with them extirpating a terrorist group.
You can't, like, why would Russia think that they can't outlast?
And you can see the split.
And so Nancy Pelosi was ripping on Benjamin Netanyahu because this is the way the Democrats have tried to square the circle.
They've tried to suggest that they support Israel, they just don't like Netanyahu.
The problem is none of that makes any sense.
Because the reality is, Israel has a war cabinet right now.
They have a unity government right now.
All the talk about Habibi Netanyahu is standing in the way of a Palestinian state.
No, the Palestinians have stood in the way of a Palestinian state since literally the inception of the peace process.
The so-called peace process, which was a joke.
Again, diplomacy can't incept things into reality.
You can't just wander your way into peace.
That's not the way any of that works.
And as I say again, the policy of the state of Israel with regards to the Palestinians right now is a unity policy.
In fact, today, the Israeli Knesset voted on a proposition.
That proposition was with regard to the possibility of a Palestinian state And what the proposition actually says is resolution, quote,
Israel outright rejects international dictates about a permanent arrangement with
the Palestinians.
Such an arrangement will be reached only through direct negotiations between the sides.
Without preconditions, Israel will continue to oppose unilateral recognition of a Palestinian
state. Such recognition following the October 7th massacre will be an enormous prize for terror,
a prize the likes of which have never been seen and will prevent any future peace agreement.
That was a resolution approved by Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, his chief rival.
Also worth noting, that thing passed in the Knesset with 99 out of 120 votes.
99!
Okay, so that is a universal proposition in Israel, but Pelosi and the left, they are trying to appease their left-wing base by blaming Netanyahu, but then they're asked an obvious question.
So then why are you supporting the Israeli government?
And they can't answer that question because, again, they're constantly splitting the baby.
Isn't the danger for the U.S.
that if you don't like what Israel is doing, and the President has made it clear that some of what Israel is doing he doesn't like, and you go on supplying them with hardware to do those things, you own this operation every bit as much as they do, don't you?
No, we don't.
We have always supported Israel as our national security friend, largely because it was in our interest to do so.
Largely because we had shared values and only democracy in the region.
The behavior of Netanyahu is, in my view, inexcusable in terms of how it has affected the collateral damage to children and families and the rest.
But nobody can take away the right of any country to defend itself that has been brutally attacked in that way.
Okay, that is an absurdity.
That is not the policy of Netanyahu.
That's the policy of the entire war cabinet, and Israel has currently lost about 240 soldiers in Gaza when they have complete air superiority.
They don't need to do any of that.
They're doing that to avoid collateral damage.
But again, America's enemies, including Iran, Russia, Iran, China, they see American weakness.
They see Western divisions, and they are exploiting that weakness and division right now, which is why Houthi attacks, for example, in the Red Sea are working.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a cargo ship is at risk of sinking in the Gulf of Aden after being hit by a Yemen-based Houthi missile in the most significant strike since the Iran-backed group started launching attacks last fall.
The increasingly audacious attacks come despite weeks of U.S.
airstrikes and highlight the challenges of deterring the group.
You can't deter them.
You have to destroy them.
Because obviously, they are not deterred.
They are terrorists.
Persistent Houthi strikes are raising new questions for the Biden administration about how to bring the attacks to a halt and prevent the continuing war in the Gaza Strip from fueling a more destabilizing regional conflict.
The answer there is, you let Israel destroy its enemies, and you destroy your own enemies, and that is how you actually win wars.
But if the West refuses to win wars, then its enemies will.
In just one second, we'll get to how all of this is impacting Joe Biden's re-elect efforts.
The answer?
Things are not great.
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Okay, meanwhile...
So how's all of this chaos and inability to make a decision affecting Joe Biden's poll chances?
Well, they're not good.
A new Siena College poll actually has Joe Biden under 50% in New York.
In New York.
And by the way, this poll is insane.
It shows that Jews in New York, according to this poll, I mean, this is a real outlier poll, so we'll see if it's real or not.
53% of Jews in New York say they would vote for Trump, which is an astonishing number.
That's an astonishing number.
Because remember, the vast majority of the Jewish community By Jewish community, I mean people who are born into a Jewish family, for example, are not observant, do not care about Jewish precepts, do not care about Israel.
There is an increasing percentage of Jews who are realizing that the left really, really don't like Jews a lot.
But with that said, that is an amazing number.
Usually in every election, 70, 75, 80% of Jews vote for the Democrats because the vast majority of Jews are secular leftists who have no relationship with their religion at all.
But according to this polling data, Again, the suburbs are split 39-39.
Men are 47-40 in New York for Donald Trump, according to this Siena poll.
You know, whether that is true or not, the bottom line is that Joe Biden is in a seriously weakened position in his re-elect effort.
Again, the latest head-to-head polls between Trump and Biden continue to show Trump with a durable lead.
A Rasmussen Report poll that came out just last week shows Trump up 6, 47 to 41.
Emerson has him up 45, 44.
Morning Consult has him up 45, 41.
In other words, Joe Biden seems to be stuck in the low 40s, and there's not a lot he can do to change that, especially because, again, the thing that's reinforcing weakness on the world stage is the fact that the president is physically weak.
It's like he's the physical manifestation of his own policies.
So yesterday Joe Biden was was facing down the stairs of Air Force One again and it went real poorly.
These are the short stairs.
Again, they've tried to have him load on the short stairs so that he has fewer stairs to trip on.
Boom.
Boom.
Twice.
Twice he almost trips on the stairs.
So, again, he keeps falling up the stairs.
Things are going really, really well.
And then a reporter asked Joe Biden if Gavin Newsom is going to replace him on the ticket, and Joe Biden started speaking Swahili or something.
President, can I have an answer?
We're going to California, and we've got coming up is a plan B for 2024.
Does Gavin need to stand by?
Are you ready?
Yes, sir.
Well, I'm looking for it.
I'm looking at you.
We're looking at you.
Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
What I came to tell you was, I told you we'd be announcing sanctions on Russia.
We'll have a major package announced on Friday.
I'll be happy to sit with you all while doing that, okay?
Thank you.
Okay, so he's asked about Gavin Newsom and he's, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,
squirrel.
Things are going amazingly well for him.
Again, the reality is that his vacillation, his uncertainty, his mushiness on policy in the foreign realm is hurting the country.
His wild leftism on policy in the domestic realm is hurting the country.
And all of it comes together in the figurehead of an 81-year-old man who is no longer sentient and trips up the stairs.
All this is really bad.
So what exactly is Biden's strategy?
His strategy is highlight Trump.
Which means, once again, folks, if you wish Donald Trump to win, and I'm somebody who in a Trump versus Biden race wishes Donald Trump to win, If you wish Trump to win, then he needs to ratchet down the crazy.
The entire campaign for Joe Biden is going to be Donald Trump is crazy.
Yes, I'm old.
Yes, I'm senile.
I guess my policy sucks, but he's totally crazy.
That is going to be Biden's argument.
I'm not saying that.
Biden is saying that.
Here was CNN reporting that yesterday.
President Biden is ordering his campaign to get far more aggressive when it comes to his likely opponent.
This brand new reporting from CNN's MJ Lee is that Biden personally instructed his top campaign aides recently to spend even more time painting Trump as unhinged and calling out his inflammatory rhetoric.
Two sources tell MJ that the thrust of Biden's instruction was to significantly ramp up the campaign's efforts to highlight the crazy S. That Trump says in public.
CNN's MJ Lee is at the White House.
I guess I can say the S word, but maybe too early.
On the West Coast, at least.
MJ?
Yeah, Dana, you know, I think this reporting gives us some interesting insight into how the president himself
personally views his campaign.
strategy. What I was told by sources is, as you said, President Biden instructing
personally some of his top campaign aides to essentially be even more
aggressive in highlighting some of Trump's most inflammatory and wild
comments. Again, that is Biden's only strategy. It's the only thing that he can
apply at this point, which means that it's incumbent on Trump to say fewer
things. Just let Biden, just let him wither on the vine out there.
That's all.
That's all Donald Trump has to do.
So Donald Trump did an interview with Laura Ingraham last night on Fox News, and he said some good things, as always.
There's some good Trump and there's some bad Trump.
Stop providing material to your enemies.
First rule of politics, don't interrupt your opponents when they're making a mistake.
So, here's what Trump said that was good.
He said he wants a debate with Joe Biden.
Now, Joe Biden ain't gonna give him a debate.
He's not gonna give him a debate for a variety of reasons.
He's gonna be able to say that Trump wouldn't give anybody else a debate in the primaries, which is true.
He's also going to say that he's not going to debate somebody who tried to steal the election of 2020 after losing it and who is now going to be convicted of crimes and all this kind of stuff.
That's what Biden is going to say.
But Trump consistently calling for a debate and Biden running from one is a bad look for Biden.
Here was Trump yesterday on Laura's show.
You challenge him to a debate regularly on focus-specific topics.
In other words, so it's not a wide-ranging, just one debate on foreign policy.
Well, I'll do it right now on your show.
I'll challenge him right now, and we can do you, you can do anybody you want.
I'll take anybody from CNN, which is doing very poorly in the ratings, by the way, as you probably know.
I'll take anybody, because I think you have an obligation in this case.
You really have an obligation to debate.
Okay, so that's a good line for Trump.
What is a bad line for Trump is for Trump to discourage people from using mail-in ballots again.
Have we not learned our lesson at this point?
If you're the Republican Party...
You should be encouraging your people to use mail-in ballots.
Anything that gets them to vote would be the thing that you should be telling them to do.
Donald Trump told people not to vote by mail in 2020 and he lost.
If he had told people to vote by mail, there is a better than 50% chance that he would have won because that was a very close election in the swing state and Republicans refused to vote by mail because Donald Trump told them they should not vote by mail.
And the problem is this, even if 90% of the people that Donald Trump told not to vote by mail showed up on polling day and voted, 10% didn't, and those votes were never entered into the ballot box.
Why would you do this?
You know where Republicans have won broad victories?
In places like Florida, where the governor of the state, DeSantis, he actually said, yeah, go vote by mail, do whatever you have to do to vote, vote legally, do what you need to do, vote early, but vote for us.
That's how you win.
But here is Donald Trump again downgrading mail-in voting.
Why?
Why?
Unless you're actually going to fight the law in the courts and have laws changed, no return about mail-in voting, you have to play by the rules that are on the field right now.
You can't argue about the rules while the game is in process.
That's not helpful or useful.
It means you're going to lose if you do that sort of stuff.
Here is Trump ripping on mail-in ballots.
Laura's trying to save him, by the way.
That was a lot of the interview last night, is Laura Ingraham trying to save Trump from himself and Trump being like, nah, I'm gonna run directly into that tree.
That tree looks amazing.
Let's do it.
If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud.
You have mail-in voting in Florida and you won huge.
That's right.
If you have it, you're going to have it.
But you won.
Because you don't have any.
When you go into a voting place, like you go into one in a properly run state, they
look at you, they give you voter ID, you give all sorts of identification.
I mean, it would be very hard to cheat in a mass gavel.
When you send out millions, like California, I think they sent out 36 million ballots.
They don't have a voting booth in the whole place, and then millions of ballots come back.
Nobody knows where they're coming from.
But what are you going to do about it?
The way you win is by swamping them.
Swamping them with what?
In-day balloting?
It ain't gonna work.
That's not how this works.
If Democrats really up the ante on ballot harvesting in states where it is legal, and they push mail-in voting, they're going to win.
Why?
That's not even the crazy stuff.
That's just the strategic silliness.
That makes no sense.
It is politically foolish.
Encourage your own voters to vote.
Why is this so difficult?
Tell your voters to vote.
However it's legal to vote, go vote.
This is not hard.
But that's not actually the stuff that's going to play into Joe Biden's argument that Donald Trump is a crazy person.
And Donald Trump has so many things going for him in this election cycle at this point.
Namely, Joe Biden is senile.
Namely, Joe Biden is an awful president on every front.
Namely, he is in fact being persecuted by Joe Biden's Department of Justice and a wide variety of other public officials who are misusing and abusing their office to target him.
All of that is true.
But you know what he doesn't have to do?
For example, compare that to what just happened to Alexei Navalny.
Again, I'm going to keep saying this because it's true.
All of the things happening to Donald Trump are unjust and they are wrong.
And they are not on the order of him being taken off a plane, arrested, put in prison, and then murdered.
That's not the same thing.
There are different versions of bad.
And he doesn't even have to... This is the problem.
If he just said that he's being targeted unfairly, it'd be true.
If he was saying that it is wrong and abuse of the constitution for the DOJ to do what it's doing, absolutely true.
Why then go the extra step of comparing yourself to a guy who was just murdered in Russian prison?
Is that helpful?
Forget about whether it's true or false.
Is it helpful?
Here was Trump yesterday doing this.
Now, in this New York civil fraud case, this Judge Arthur Engeron ruled against you for almost half a billion dollars, plus the interest that runs every day.
When I first read this, it was like $87,000 a day.
How would you put up that kind of money?
Because you have a bond to put up.
Even if you appeal, you've got to put up escrow money.
It's a lot of dough.
It is a form of Navalny.
It is a form of communism or fascism.
The guy's a nut job.
I've known this for a long time and I've said it openly.
No jury, no anything.
Okay, all that's true except for this is a form of Navalny.
Really?
Really.
Unnecessary.
I sympathize with him on every other thing that he's saying there.
It's that last step that he just can't stop.
And it's because people told him not to say that he says it.
This critique is meant to help Donald Trump's campaign.
It is not meant to harm it.
It is meant to tell people that Donald Trump ought to curb himself because if he does, he will win.
And if he does not, he will lose.
And now, it is also true that much of the stuff that the media are portraying as foolishness and craziness and all this stuff will have no impact on the race.
So there's certain stuff that may have an impact, and then there's stuff that won't have an impact.
One of the things that's not going to have an impact, but that the media made a big deal out of, is that over the weekend Donald Trump went to something called SneakerCon.
Now, this kind of stuff, it's stupid, like, it's laughable, but is it going to hurt Trump in any way?
No.
So Trump goes to, he goes to sneaker con and he's selling golden Trump sneakers.
And, uh, you know, it's funny at the very least.
least. There we go.
People are chanting after Biden.
Yeah.
Mhm. Okay. Mhm. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
That's beautiful.
This is something I've been talking about for 12 years, 13 years, and I think it's going to be a big success.
Your influences have been very positive.
They've been real influences, and they love it, and they love what we've done.
That's the real deal.
That's the real deal.
Yes, we need him!
He's a Christian!
He's a good, honest man!
They're after him for no reason!
Go out and vote for Trump!
Vote Trump!
No paper!
Go out and vote for Trump!
He's a good man!
Look at his family!
They're all good kids!
All good kids!
Yes!
Okay, so the media's gonna mock all of that, but you know what, is that gonna have any negative impact on Trump?
He raised, by the way, those sneakers, which were selling for like 400 bucks a pair, they sold out immediately.
That was like a thousand pairs for 400 grand on those sneakers.
Now, would you wear those like around the mall?
I don't know.
And will they make you run faster, jump higher?
But, is that sort of stuff going to harm Trump's campaign in any real way?
Not really.
It's the other kind of stuff that is a problem for Donald Trump.
Okay, meanwhile, the left continues to demonstrate its absolute inability to deal with the immigration issue.
New York City is a full-scale disaster area.
So, New York City is now, I'm kidding you not, they are giving migrants a debit card, according to Nicole Gelinas writing for the New York Post.
Mayor Eric Adams is giving out prepaid cash cards to migrants and apparently it will give migrants up to $10,000 each in taxpayer money with no ID check, no restrictions, no fraud control.
So why exactly give up the credit cards or the debit cards?
The mayor's office said that they were trying to solve a problem is that migrants staying in hotels don't eat all their food.
And Doc Go, the city's no-bid emergency contractor to provide migrants three meals a day, throws away up to 5,000 meals daily, wasting $7.2 million a year.
And so the idea is you give them a debit card and they go and they buy their own meals and it will save you money.
Or alternatively, if you want to incentivize people to illegally immigrate, tell them they can come to New York City and get a free $10,000 gift for doing so.
In the state of Florida, we give like a $10,000 bonus to cops who move down here because we want more cops.
What do you think happens when you give a $10,000 bonus to people who cross the border illegally?
And things are going well in New York.
Tape emerged yesterday of migrants attacking cops in a New York City migrant shelter.
here was apparently the cops are attempting to detain a suspect
at the randall's island migrant shelter and um...
And migrants started throwing objects at the cops.
Also people cursing at them in Spanish.
The suspect seen in the video is wearing a white shirt and being detained by the police.
Reportedly not a shelter resident.
Shelter security operatives eventually had to surround the cops to give them cover to exit the building with the suspect.
So things are going really well on America's southern border.
Good news, Joe Biden is in charge.
Alrighty folks, in just a second, we'll jump into the left-wing continued assault on the Supreme Court.
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