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March 12, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show

51:05

Spending Like There’s No Tomorrow

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	Joe Biden is cruising for a bruising in 2024 in November if things continue along the path that they are currently moving.
	He has two major problems on his hands.
	One is that he has dementia and the other is that his policy basket is just filled with holes.
	It is an awful set of policies from domestic to foreign policy.
	We got the latest look Tremendous amount of things you can cut.
	Let me be precise.
	day Joe Biden was speaking. In the middle of one of his sentences, he just froze up.
	Now, remember, Mitch McConnell just stepped down as the Senate minority leader because
	everybody is worried about his health. He's the same age as Joe Biden. Here's Joe Biden
	yesterday.
	Tremendous amount of things you can cut. Maybe precise. Tremendous amount of things you can
	do not cut.
	But the bottom line is he's still at it.
	Joe Biden is not with it.
	He's not been with it for quite a while.
	Him yelling at the moon during his State of the Union address didn't change that.
	And the widespread perception of Americans, which is correct, is that Joe Biden is too old and too senile to actually do this job.
	But that's only part of it.
	If Joe Biden's policies were wildly popular, everybody would overlook the fact that the man walks into walls.
	Everybody would be like, OK, fine.
	So he walks into walls, but at least the policies are good.
	The problem is the policies are really, really bad.
	So a couple of pieces of news, economic news this morning.
	Consumer prices rose 3.2% from one year earlier in February, which means that, remember, the inflation rate in the United States, we aim to keep that at 2%.
	That's what the Federal Reserve aims at.
	We are still clocking in at well above 3, so 50% higher than exactly what you would want.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, an underlying measure of inflation was stronger than expected last month, introducing greater uncertainty over whether and when the Federal Reserve will lower the interest rates.
	The Labor Department on Tuesday reported that its index of consumer prices rose 3.2% in February from one year earlier.
	Economists polled by the Wall Street Journal had expected 3.1%.
	Prices actually rose 0.4% from the previous month.
	That was, in fact, in line with economists' expectations.
	Core prices rose 0.4% from January.
	That's more than what economists expected.
	Core prices were up 3.8% from one year earlier.
	So that core price inflation is 3.8% again.
	Remember, we aim for 2%, so that's almost double what you are looking for.
	Okay, and what that means is that all of the interest rates are going to remain high for the foreseeable future.
	So the Federal Reserve tries to combat inflation by increasing interest rates, which is the overnight rate at which the Federal Reserve lends to banks, and the banks lend to one another, and that is then passed on to the consumer.
	The basic idea is that when you tighten up the credit, that means that fewer people are borrowing, less money flowing around the economy, means the prices tend to decrease.
	That's the reason you increase the interest rates.
	The Federal Reserve wanted to decrease the interest rates in advance of the election to get that money flowing again, to heat up the economy, to make sure that hiring stays at really high levels leading up to Biden's re-elect effort in November.
	The problem is that inflation is just not cooperating.
	And that means the interest rates are likely to stay high, which is why a few years ago you could get a mortgage for 3%, and now your mortgage is costing you like 7%.
	Which, by the way, is leading to the bizarre situation in the real estate markets right now.
	The stickiness in the real estate markets is created not by demand for single-family housing.
	The stickiness is created by the lack of actual supply.
	No one can sell their very high-priced house right now, because if they did, they would have to buy a new house And their interest rate would go from the mortgage they have now, which they took out five years ago, at 3%, and they would have to get a mortgage at 7%.
	So nobody's actually selling right now.
	So you have a very sticky real estate market that is cruising for a bruising all on its own.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, President Biden signaled optimism during a campaign event last week that the Federal Reserve was going to cut interest rates soon.
	The economic forecast in his budget released on Monday, however, offer a different message, curb your enthusiasm.
	Economic forecasts released Monday as part of the White House's 2025 budget proposal assume that three-month Treasury bill rates will average 5.1% this year, that's the same as in 2023, before declining to 4% next year and 3.3% in 2026.
	The White House last year projected a somewhat lower path for interest rates in part because it assumed a meaningful slowdown in growth in 2023 that didn't actually materialize.
	Now, the biggest problem with these high interest rates is that that actually means the way that works, because they are connected to, for example, the bond market, The way that works when the interest rates are high is that if you sell a bond and the interest rate is, say, 7% or 8% or, in this case, 5%, that means that the U.S.
	government is going to have to pay that off down the road.
	And that means that when you take new debt, new debt is more expensive.
	And that's a big problem because we are blowing out the spending like nobody's business.
	Joe Biden, again, is not on solid footing in this election cycle.
	And that means that he has a plan.
	His political plan is twofold.
	One, promise to spend as much money as anybody has in human history, more than anybody has in human history.
	And second, try to soak the rich.
	That's going to be his two pronged economic plan.
	And that's nothing new.
	I mean, we've seen that pretty much for every Democrat since Bill Clinton.
	The idea was that you would just promise the world to voters, we're going to spend money that does not exist and we're going to do so by borrowing and by taxing.
	And the taxes never actually materialized because as it turns out, tax revenue is not capable of sustaining the kind of spending we are doing, not unless you decide to really tax the middle class.
	What Democrats want is a Norwegian standard of living.
	Without the kind of oil wealth provided by the Norwegian oil industry.
	And without taxing the middle class in the way that Norway does.
	The dirty secret of living like Scandinavia is they gotta tax everybody who makes about $60,000 a year the same rates that you're taxing people who are making like $500,000 a year.
	Again, America has an incredibly progressive tax system.
	People at the top of the income spectrum pay nearly all net taxes in the United States.
	That is not true in the social democracy European countries.
	Those countries start taxing people at exorbitant rates when they hit like the lower middle class.
	But that's something Democrats don't want to do because they understand that if they do that, they'll be politically unpopular with many of the people who are going to vote for them.
	So instead, they decide that they're going to promise extraordinary levels of spending, and then they're going to force Republicans into the corner because Republicans are going to say, we can't spend that much.
	This is why Joe Biden has now released his fiscal 2025 budget.
	Now this budget has no chance of passage.
	All these budgets do, Trump used to do this too, all these budgets do is they serve as the basis for all political debate for the next year.
	So basically it's a list of priorities for Joe Biden.
	We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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	So what exactly are Joe Biden's priorities?
	Well, I mean, his priorities apparently are taxing people a lot of money, cutting military spending in the face of the most chaotic world situation of the modern era.
	He wants to cut military spending because effectively that's what he does.
	He wants to maintain the spending trajectory of Social Security and Medicare.
	And somehow, he says this is going to lower the deficit.
	How's it going to do that?
	Well, he's assuming that he can radically increase taxes without that affecting the economy.
	Which, of course, is not the way any of this works.
	If you radically increase taxes, then people spend less money.
	That's the way that it tends to work.
	You can tax something to death.
	You can't tax something into prosperity.
	The Wall Street Journal goes through Joe Biden's proposed budget.
	He's proposing a $7.3 trillion budget.
	Now, this is patently insane on the face of it.
	First of all, during the pandemic, we did not spend that much money.
	In 2021, the United States government spent about $6.8 trillion.
	The same was true in 2020.
	That was during a full-scale pandemic when people were literally told to stay home and the federal government paid everyone's bills for a year.
	In this particular case, we are not in the middle of an actual fighting war in which American soldiers are directly involved.
	It's not World War II, so these levels of government spending are not justified.
	We're not even in the middle of a pandemic.
	These levels of spending are clearly unjustified.
	Joe Biden wants to spend.
	He wants to spend more money than any president has ever spent at any time.
	So what exactly would his budget do?
	It would raise taxes on wealthy people and large corporations.
	Now remember, when you tax a corporation, that cost is passed on to the people who work for the corporation.
	If you tax Daily Wire at a higher rate, that means we have less money to pay our employees.
	That's the way that works.
	He says this will somehow trim the deficit and lower the cost of prescription drugs, childcare, and housing.
	Now, when he says lower the costs of things like this, what he really means is that the federal government is going to subsidize things.
	There has yet to be a product developed by human beings that when subsidized by the federal government, the cost does not go up.
	That's the way that works.
	That is why colleges now cost way more than they used to.
	When the federal government signs a check to somebody, people raise the price of the thing.
	Literally every product the federal government has ever gotten involved with has gotten more expensive over time, as opposed to the free market, where competition brings the price down on things.
	So when people say that Joe Biden is going to somehow lower the cost of prescription drugs or childcare or housing or all the rest of this stuff, that is incorrect.
	Lower the cost to whom?
	You might say that he lowers the cost to some private consumers, but that's only in the short term.
	In the long term, the costs are going to go up, and they will certainly go up for taxpayers who are actually going to foot the bill.
	Somebody has to pay the bill.
	As the Wall Street Journal points out, the proposal is not expected to gain momentum in Congress.
	It will be a cornerstone of Biden's re-elect campaign.
	Now, supposedly, the fiscal 2025 budget would cut the deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade.
	How would it possibly cut the deficit?
	The answer is, he would tax the living hell out of everything that moves.
	So, he proposes spending $895 billion on military programs in the coming fiscal year.
	Now, if you said to me, we need to increase military spending, I would say we absolutely do.
	It's a dangerous world out there.
	The American military shield is what keeps the world order from breaking down, as we have seen.
	America in retreat leads to a vacuum in which chaos predominates.
	But Joe Biden actually isn't even increasing military spending.
	The spending is all on things like child tax credits, which are not actual tax credits.
	They're going to people who, for example, don't pay taxes.
	He also wants to spend an awful lot of money on shoring up Social Security.
	There's no plan.
	He just wants to spend money on it.
	He wants to extend tax cuts for most households after 2025, but he doesn't detail how that would be paid for.
	So he likes the Trump tax cuts, but only for the people he thinks he can pay off.
	The Wall Street Journal editorial board points out the giant failures of this budget.
	They say, start with the proposal for national defense, which would increase a mere 1% to $895 billion next fiscal year.
	That number includes various and sundry energy department programs related to national security.
	The Pentagon gets only $850 billion.
	That is a real cut in military muscle after inflation.
	That part of the deal was part of a budget deal with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
	The number is inadequate.
	Biden would spend only 3.1% of GDP on defense in 2025, and then it would continue to fall for the rest of the 10-year budget window to 2.4% of the economy in 2034.
	So, obviously, folks in Beijing are going to be super happy about that if the United States continues to cut its own military budget in the middle of a chaotic world situation.
	Biden is proposing spending $7.3 trillion in 2025.
	That is an increase of $1.1 trillion in just two years.
	Remember, he says he's fiscally responsible.
	He wants to spend 24.8% of the entire national economy.
	By way of contrast, from 1974 to 2023, the average was 21%.
	So he wants to spend more money than we have for the last 50 years on average in the middle of a non-pandemic non-war.
	He also says that he wants to increase tax revenue So he's playing with the tax numbers because in order for you to actually suggest what tax revenue will be, you have to forecast economic growth.
	Again, Joe Biden is going to stagnate the economy.
	He is already stagnating the economy.
	We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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	The real threat to the American economy in the long term here, I've been saying this for two years, is not actually inflation.
	Inflation will come back down under control by hook or by crook.
	The Federal Reserve will do that.
	The real danger is a stagnating economy for the foreseeable future, sort of Japan path for the 1990s.
	According to Biden's budget, he foresees that debt held by the public will rise to 102.2% of the economy in 2025.
	In 2019, it was 79% of the economy.
	That means that more money, we'll be spending more money in terms of servicing our national debt than we spend on our military budget every year in the very near future.
	Public debt in his budget keeps growing to 106% of GDP in 2030.
	Interest on the debt will surpass defense spending this year when it hits $890 billion.
	It keeps climbing to $1.57 trillion over the next decade.
	That's how much money we'll just be spending on the interest payments on the debt that Joe Biden is proposing right now.
	And again, none of this makes any fiscal sense because when he says, for example, he's going to tax the rich to get out of this, that's not true.
	Even Axios is pointing this out.
	The simple fact of the matter is that there is no way to tax the rich enough to pay for the kinds of things that Joe Biden wants to pay for.
	He doesn't really want to pay for them because he knows this is not going to pass.
	The Biden budget is premised on steady non-recessionary GDP growth and a continued low unemployment rate at or just below 4%.
	So again, these are numbers that make no sense.
	It's amazing to me that Democrats continue to trot this sort of stuff out.
	But again, he's trying to pick fights with Republicans.
	That's really what this is all about.
	This is what Politico points out.
	So, for example...
	The other day, Donald Trump was asked about entitlements.
	Now, one of the things that Donald Trump has done is, for political reasons, he has suggested over the course of his career in presidential politics that he will not touch entitlements.
	He won't touch Medicare, he won't touch Medicaid, he won't touch Social Security, and all the rest.
	And I've pointed out, that's fiscally unsustainable.
	Now, on a political level, it's smart.
	Because the truth is, Americans like status quo, and every major economy has effectively run directly into austerity measures and or riots at a certain point with regard to this.
	So it's all kicked the can down the road from political level.
	If you're a politician, you want to kick the can down the road on social security and Medicare.
	Anybody who attempts to change the status quo on social security and Medicare, say George W. Bush in 2005, after he won reelection, he said he wanted to fix social security by privatizing it.
	Privatizing in that sense meant the federal government would still make you pay a social security tax, But instead of that going into a government quote-unquote lockbox, or instead of that money simply being paid out the back door, that would instead go into a privately held savings account.
	That would accrue interest, and that would actually go into the stock market, for example.
	It made a lot of sense, but everybody fussed about it, and Democrats demagogued it, so it went to death.
	So Donald Trump has avoided that.
	Well, yesterday, Donald Trump was on CNBC, and because Donald Trump is a people pleaser, he was asked Have you changed your outlook on how to handle entitlement, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Mr. President?
	into the possibility of changes to the entitlement programs.
	And Joe Biden leapt on that with both feet.
	Have you changed your outlook on how to handle entitlement, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, Mr. President?
	It seems like something has to be done or else we're gonna be stuck at 120% of debt to GDP forever.
	So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting,
	and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements.
	Tremendous bad management of entitlements.
	There's tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do.
	So I don't necessarily agree with the statement.
	Okay, so that's really not a lot of daylight in terms of, you know, he's gonna make wholesale changes to Social Security or something.
	It's enough for Biden to try and press him on it.
	So according to Politico, After committing during a State of the Union address to stop anyone in Congress who tries to raise the retirement age for Social Security benefits, Biden's budget instead calls for raising taxes on high earners to keep Social Security and Medicare from hitting insolvency within the next decade.
	Now again, realistically speaking, that's not going to save anybody.
	The population is aging way too fast for that.
	There are not enough high-income taxpayers even to pay for the kinds of bills that Joe Biden wants to pay for here.
	And let's be real about this.
	It's insane that we haven't raised the retirement age in the United States.
	It's totally crazy.
	If that were the case, Joe Biden should not be running for president.
	Joe Biden is 81 years old.
	The retirement age in the United States at which you start to receive Social Security and you are eligible for Medicare is 65.
	Joe Biden has technically been eligible for Social Security and Medicare for 16 years, and he wants to continue in office until he is 86, which is 19 years past when he would be eligible for retirement.
	No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old.
	Frankly, I think retirement itself is a stupid idea unless you have some sort of health problem.
	Everybody that I know who is elderly, who has retired, is dead within five years.
	And if you talk to people who are elderly and they lose their purpose in life by losing their job and they stop working, things go to hell in a handbasket real quick.
	But put all of that aside, just on a fiscal level and on a logical level, When Franklin Delano Roosevelt established 65 as the retirement age, the average life expectancy in the United States was 63 years old.
	Today, the average life expectancy in the United States is close to 80.
	It's totally insane that you believe that you should be able to work from the time that you are essentially 20 to the time that you are 65, which is a 45-year period.
	Pay in and then you'll receive social security benefits sufficient to support you and your family, you and your wife or whatever, for like another 20 years.
	That's crazy talk.
	That is not fiscally sustainable.
	The notion that if you have to raise the retirement age to 67 or 68 that everyone is going to fall apart.
	My parents are that age.
	My parents are not retired.
	And they shouldn't retire.
	It would be very bad for them to retire.
	By the way, it's disrespectful to people who are 67, 68, 69 years old to suggest that they are in the same shape as people who are 65 were in 1940.
	It's not true at all.
	Have you met a 65-year-old lately?
	65-year-olds are not old in the United States.
	They're not.
	68-year-olds are not old in the United States.
	Again, Joe Biden thinks he's not old, and that dude is running for president again, and that dude actually is old, and he's 81.
	I failed to see how a country in which our entire leadership class is 80 plus is telling you that we should have a retirement age of 65.
	It makes no sense at all.
	We'll get some more on this in just a moment.
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	Not just that, Joe Biden is also trying to pick a fight with regard to food aid for low-income families.
	His budget proposes $7.7 billion into fully funding nutrition assistance for women, infants, and children through the WIC program.
	Now again, there are a lot of studies on the WIC program and how effective it actually is.
	But the realistic answer to how effective all of this is, is that it should be done at the state and local level.
	That when you have the federal government subsidizing this stuff to the tune of billions of dollars, most of it ends up going in the trash.
	Also, Joe Biden wants to pick a fight on student debt, he wants to pick a fight on rural energy costs, and he says he wants to pick a fight on deficit reduction, as though Joe Biden is fiscally responsible, which is totally insane, of course.
	Joe Biden does not want- no one cares about deficit reduction.
	Also, deficit reduction, the very term, is so loosely used as to mean nothing.
	When Joe Biden says that he has reduced the deficit, he is talking about what the deficit was last year being reduced From the year before, for example.
	So, let me take an example.
	From personal finance.
	If you, last month, ran a deficit of $3,000, meaning that you, say, earned $4,000, but you spent $7,000, and then next month you spend $6,000, so your deficit is now $2,000.
	Are you now fiscally responsible?
	Or are you just less fiscally irresponsible, slightly, than you were last month?
	People tend to think that deficit reduction means debt reduction.
	It does not.
	The debt keeps piling up.
	You can lower the deficit and still increase the debt massively and that's exactly what Joe Biden is proposing to do.
	Now again, he's not spending money on the things that actually matter.
	This is the part that's amazing.
	So when it comes to what the United States' actual Responsibilities are on a federal level.
	They do not include things like aid to dependent women and children.
	Those are not the fundamental responsibilities of the federal government.
	You can make a case for it at the local and state level.
	The federal government was not established to do these things.
	In fact, I have an entire list of the things that the federal government was established to do.
	It's called the Constitution of the United States and it includes none of these things.
	The federal government was in fact established in order to provide for the common defense and security of the United States.
	That is the number one task of the federal government.
	And yet the federal government is actually underfunding defense at this point.
	According to Politico, The Pentagon has sent $10 billion worth of weapons to Ukraine that it still does not have the money to replace due to congressional gridlock, according to a top Defense Department official.
	By the way, regardless of whether you actually like the war in Ukraine, whether you think we should fund the war in Ukraine, whether we should fund the Ukrainians against the Russians.
	And again, my opinion on this is that we should be funding the Ukrainians against the Russians to the extent necessary to push them back from their invasion.
	But unless the Ukrainians have some sort of plan that we haven't heard about, funding the Ukrainians to the tune of trying to take back the Donbass region or Crimea doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
	But preventing Ukraine from being taken over wholesale by Russia is in America's interest.
	And by the way, degrading Russia's military capacity is also in America's interest.
	But put even that aside, even if you disagree with all of that, America should be replenishing its stockpiles.
	The fact that the Biden administration has not been able to achieve even that is really quite pathetic.
	If DoD does not get the funding to backfill its stocks, the impact of that ongoing hole will ultimately be felt by the United States' own military forces, according to a senior DoD official.
	The official said, we've not been able to, with the funding we have to date, replenish everything we've given to Ukraine.
	It will come back on our own readiness, on our own stockpile, to a certain extent, if we can't get new funding.
	Now, again, it would be worthwhile to make sure that in a very chaotic world, the United States military is prepared for eventualities.
	For their part, by the way, we should mention at this point that Europe is starting to pick up the pace.
	Donald Trump got a lot of flack for suggesting that NATO members need to pay up, that they need to pay a certain share of their GDP toward the common defense.
	He was right about that.
	Actually, even the NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, is saying so.
	He says that, you know, when people say that Donald Trump is trying to take apart NATO or something, that's not true.
	He just wants people to pay their fair share, which, by the way, is correct.
	Are you concerned about the direction the political debate is headed in the United States regarding NATO?
	I expect the United States to continue to be a staunch NATO ally, also after the elections in November, because it is in the US interest to have a strong NATO.
	NATO is a good deal for the United States.
	Because together we represent 50% of the world's military and economic might.
	It makes also the United States safer.
	Second, it is broad political support for NATO in the US Congress.
	I visited Washington just a couple of weeks ago and that was the message from both the Republican and the Democratic side.
	And thirdly, The criticism has not mainly been against NATO, but the criticism coming from former President Trump has been against NATO allies not spending enough on NATO.
	Okay, he's right.
	He's correct.
	By the way, the war by some people on NATO is totally ridiculous.
	It's truly crazy.
	When you look at the history of NATO, why NATO was originally established, all the rationales for the establishment of NATO still hold.
	NATO was meant, according to the first Secretary General of NATO, to keep the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out.
	That was the original purpose of NATO.
	What that meant, and if you look at European history, it makes a lot of sense, is that a unified Germany has historically been a threat to its neighbors.
	That Germany, as a national power, is easily the strongest power on the continent.
	Whenever you have one very strong power on the continent of Europe, it has tended to threaten its neighbors.
	And we've been living in the end of history for a very long time here in the West, in the post-World War II era.
	But the reality is, for a vast majority of people on Earth, history didn't stop.
	And that's particularly true with regard to Russia.
	We'll get to more on this momentarily.
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	So I've heard a lot of loose talk recently about people saying, well, you know, Russia did want to join NATO.
	Yes, Russia wanted to join NATO to destroy NATO.
	That was the entire purpose.
	Once Russia is part of NATO, if the United States and NATO had accepted Russia as part of NATO in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's fall, then when Russia attacked another NATO member, Article 5 could not be invoked.
	That'd be the entire purpose, is to destroy NATO from within.
	You think Vladimir Putin doesn't know that?
	That he's just a good-hearted guy who wanted to join NATO in the aftermath of NATO taking the other side of what Russia wanted in the war in Serbia, for example?
	One of my favorite things about foreign policy is when people assume that the United States is the only country with agency.
	And Vladimir Putin doesn't have his own motivations and geopolitical rationales for things.
	NATO was constructed in order to maintain a balance of power on the European and Eurasian continent.
	That's what it was meant to do.
	Those rationales still exist.
	Again, in the absence of NATO, what you would see is many nations in Europe pursuing their own independent security policy.
	That sounds like fun and games until you revert to the pre-WWI and WWII period in which pretty much everybody arms up with nuclear weapons.
	There is no unified foreign policy.
	There is no American control of that foreign policy, which means less world peace.
	That's just the way it works.
	Again, go to Eastern Europe and ask them how they feel about the absence of NATO.
	Do they feel not threatened by the Russians?
	I keep hearing that the Russians are of no threat to their neighbors.
	Talk to the people in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia.
	Do they feel a little threatened?
	In Poland, do they feel a little threatened?
	The answer is yes, because they can read a history book.
	And with all of that said, Donald Trump is not anti-NATO.
	The attempt to turn Donald Trump into an anti-NATO force is silly.
	Donald Trump is very pro-NATO, so much so that he wants the other countries in NATO to up their defense spending for the collective defense.
	And the United States maintains tremendous control over the activities of NATO itself.
	The idea that it's some sort of European conglomerate that the U.S.
	has no control over is very silly.
	That's not how NATO actually works on a day-to-day level.
	The United States has tremendous control over what happens with NATO.
	Which is a good thing, because historically speaking, when the United States reverts to policy only within its own borders and leaves Europe to its own devices, we end up having to, you know, go over there and help out from time to time and expend hundreds of thousands of American lives in the process.
	You know what we haven't had to do in Europe since the advent of NATO?
	Any of that.
	Which is a very good thing.
	In any case, The foreign policy of the United States should be a muscular foreign policy in which we actually support our allies.
	The Biden administration has foregone all of that.
	The reason you're seeing chaos everywhere is because America's enemies are pushing where there's mush, as I have said.
	And the more mush the Biden administration shows, the worse things get.
	This is not a giant shock.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, authorities in Europe now say they have foiled several terror plots, some involving suspects posing as refugees, raising alarm about a growing array of threats from extremists.
	In one previously unreported investigation last December, police in Austria and Bosnia arrested two separate groups of Afghan and Syrian refugees who carried arms and ammunition, including Kalashnikov assault rifles and pistols.
	Investigators found pictures of Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe on some of the suspects' mobile phones, which they said were suggested were motivated by the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza.
	That followed the arrest late last year of a group of Tajik nationals suspected of planning attacks on the Cologne Cathedral in Germany and St.
	Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna around Christmas.
	Both churches filled with hundreds of visitors for the holiday season.
	Then on Monday, Italian authorities said they had detained three Palestinians suspected of being members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, designated as a terror group by the U.S.
	and European Union.
	The three were preparing to attack civilian and military targets in Europe, according to Italian national police.
	Investigators say that the separate incidents suggest Europe's terror threat isn't only growing, but also coming from new sources, complicating the work of security agencies.
	A wave of attacks that hit the continent starting in 2015 was largely inspired and in parts erected by ISIS.
	Now the threat is coming not just from the Islamic State Khorasan, Islamic State's Afghanistan-based successor organization, but also from Iran and its proxies in the Middle East, including Hezbollah and Hamas.
	Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, warned late last year these and other actors were being galvanized by the war in Gaza and that Jews and Jewish institutions across Europe were among the potential targets.
	But obviously, not the only targets.
	You're seeing cathedrals being targeted.
	You're seeing targets, civilian targets, being targeted that have nothing to do with Jews in Europe.
	Why?
	Because the war that is being fought by Islamic terrorists is not just against Jews.
	The reason they hate Israel is not because Israel is filled with Jews only.
	That is certainly one reason.
	It is because they see Israel as a colonialist outpost of the West, which means that the real reason they hate Israel is because they hate the West.
	They do not like the West.
	They believe that the West is an imperial occupier of its own land, by the way.
	The people who believe in Islamic Sharia law believe that Spain is still Muslim land.
	They believe that half of Europe is still Muslim land.
	And that means that they're a war with actually large swaths of the West.
	So what is the Biden administration doing?
	They're attempting to pretend that none of this is actually happening.
	There was an astonishing exchange yesterday between The Pentagon Press Secretary in the press.
	Just an astonishing exchange.
	This is the Pentagon Press Secretary, Major General Pat Ryder.
	So apparently he was asked, does the Department of Defense anticipate that Hamas will try to fire on Americans who are trying to build a pier in Gaza?
	Again, this is a super stupid idea.
	Why are we deploying American troops to build a pier On the beach in Gaza.
	Are we under the weird misimpression that, like, magically the aid, if unloaded at the pier, is going to get to the people who are in need of the aid?
	Somebody's gonna have to drive the truck from the pier into Gaza.
	That's gonna have to happen.
	And you know what'll happen to those trucks?
	The same thing that's happening every time a truck goes through the Kerem Shalom crossing.
	Which means it'll be hijacked by Hamas, of course.
	Anyway, General Ryder was asked about this, that will Hamas try to fire on the operation?
	And he said, look, that's certainly a risk again.
	But if Hamas truly does care about the Palestinian people, then again, one would hope that this international mission to deliver aid to people who need it would be able to happen unhindered.
	Do you know how insane and stupid that is?
	That's like the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my entire life.
	They truly don't!
	What more evidence do you need?
	They literally use the Palestinian people as human shields.
	They hide behind women and children.
	They've systematically shot at people who are attempting to get aid.
	Hamas has.
	They kill people, like civilians, who are trying to get the aid.
	They hijack the aid.
	They literally used billions of dollars flowing into the Gaza Strip over the last 20 years to build terror tunnels and military capacity instead of feeding their own people.
	They don't have potable water over there because Hamas stole all the aid.
	And the Pentagon is still out there saying, well, if they really care about them, that fundamental misconception, which is that the people of Hamas, the people of Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy terror groups, these are all reasonable people can be talked to.
	After all, they care about, they care about humanity.
	They care about their children.
	They're just like you.
	This is so insane and crazy, but it leads to bizarre and evil foreign policy ramifications for the United States, like telling American allies like Israel, they shouldn't kill terrorists.
	Maybe better if they don't kill terrorists somehow for the United States.
	Which is weird, because it seems to me, as an American, that'd be very good if American allies spent a lot of time killing terrorists.
	That's great, we don't have to do it then.
	That's good.
	We'll get some more on this in just one second.
	First, the iconic Leftist Tears tumbler.
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	Within this box is, in fact, a tumbler.
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	New daily wire plus insider annual members get that free tumbler or put your money where your values are join us on the front line in the fight to reshape culture with an all-access membership get two leftist yours tumblers for free join now get your free leftist yours tumbler at dailywireplus.com okay meanwhile in only a delusional view of the world The sort of view that says that we should cut defense spending while spending $7.3 trillion in our budget this year.
	Only that delusional view of the world would lead to the conclusion that America has an interest in hampering Israel going into Rafah, for example.
	Rafah is chock-filled with Hamas terrorists.
	It is, in fact, the last stronghold of the Hamas terrorists.
	And yet Joe Biden yesterday suggested that he would condition aid to Israel On them not going into Rafah.
	Which again, for a historical comparison, would sort of be like the Allies approached the gates of Berlin during World War II.
	And suddenly it's like, well, no, we can't go in.
	You know, guys, we gotta stop here.
	We gotta stop here.
	That's where the terrorists are.
	It's what Israel has been doing this whole time.
	They've been condensing the terrorist population Block by block down to particular areas that they can finish them off.
	And now the Biden administration is like, no, no, no.
	Now, what's amazing about that is the Biden administration has tried to cram down every ceasefire proposal it can on Israel.
	And Israel has accepted a bunch of them.
	Hamas rejects all of them.
	Why?
	Because they know that effectively Joe Biden is now doing PR for them.
	That's the part that's truly insane.
	While Bibi Netanyahu is not caving in the face of this, the Prime Minister of Israel, the Biden administration is trying to do this ridiculous two-step, this PR two-step, where they suggest that their disagreements are just with Bibi, not with Israelis.
	And in fact, they talk about the Netanyahu government the same way they talk about Hamas.
	It's totally wild.
	They will say, well, Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.
	The Palestinian people are good and kind.
	They're not represented by Hamas in any way.
	Now, in reality, Hamas was, in fact, originally elected.
	By every available poll, Hamas is still popular inside the Gaza Strip and way more popular inside the West Bank.
	But that's the lie that the Biden administration will tell.
	Then they tell another lie, which is they suggest that the government of Israel is entirely run in authoritarian fashion by Bibi Netanyahu, which is crazy on every level.
	They have elections like every five minutes in Israel.
	The last election was held in 2022.
	It ended with a coalition government that involves a bunch of parties.
	And by the way, the coalition government that is currently running things, the war cabinet, is representative of something like 90 seats?
	In the current Knesset, because it includes a bunch of opposition parties who didn't actually originally join with Netanyahu, but did after the war.
	Again, if Bibi Netanyahu disappeared from the face of the earth today, Benny Gantz would be the prime minister and Benny Gantz would immediately pursue exactly the same policy.
	So basically it's a lie.
	When Joe Biden says this is about Netanyahu and me and we're not getting along, that is an excuse that he can use for his liberal Jewish donors.
	So that he can tell them that it's not that he's anti-Israel, it's just that he's anti-Bibi.
	Which is so stupid, it doesn't make any sense at all.
	Netanyahu rebutted that yesterday.
	He refuted Biden's criticism of him personally, and he's correct on this.
	That's exactly what the President meant.
	But if he meant by that that I'm pursuing private policies against the majority, the wish of the majority of Israelis, and that this is hurting the interests of Israel, then he's wrong on both counts.
	Number one, these are not my private policies only.
	They're policies supported by the overwhelming majority of the Israelis.
	They support the action that we're taking to destroy the remaining terrorist battalions of Hamas, They say that once we destroy the Hamas, the last thing we should do is put in Gaza, in charge of Gaza, the Palestinian Authority that educates its children towards terrorism and pays for terrorism.
	And they also support my position that says that we should resoundingly reject the attempt to ram down our throats a Palestinian state.
	That is something that they agree on and it's something that I think is also for the interest of Israel because The majority of Israelis understand that if we don't do this, what we'll have is a repetition of the October 7th massacre, which is bad for Israel, bad for the Palestinians, bad for the future of peace in the Middle East.
	So, the attempt to say that my policies are my private policies that are not supported by most Israelis is false.
	The vast majority are united as never before, and they understand what's good for Israel.
	And by the way, the deep state under the Biden administration is now purporting that they're pushing for just insanity.
	So there was an annual threat assessment that was published by Washington and it compiled U.S.
	intelligence and its conclusions are totally crazy.
	So one of them is not crazy.
	That conclusion is that Israel will probably face lingering armed resistance from Hamas for years to come.
	I'm sure that's true.
	Hamas has many people who are terrorist adjacent who will attack Israeli forces for years to come because that's what Israel has been undergoing in the West Bank for legitimately decades at this point.
	But the conclusion also is that Iranian leaders did not orchestrate or have foreknowledge of the Hamas attack against Israel.
	And that Iran is attempting to avoid all-out war, although conflict against Hezbollah could escalate, which is an easy way for the Biden administration to pretend that Iran isn't the actual head of the Hydra here, even though Iran is clearly the head of the Hydra.
	The Houthis aren't doing this on their own.
	Hamas isn't doing this on their own.
	Hezbollah's not doing this on their own.
	The craziest part of the report, though, is the language that they use with regard to an allied, democratically elected government.
	They would never use this language about, say, Vladimir Zelensky in Ukraine, by the way, who has delayed elections.
	Vladimir Zelensky is currently delaying elections indefinitely while the war in Ukraine goes on.
	They never use this sort of language.
	But with regard to Netanyahu, they do.
	quote, distrust of Netanyahu's ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public
	from its already high levels before the war and we expect large protests demanding his
	resignation in new elections. A different, more moderate government is a possibility.
	So you have the intelligence apparatus talking about regime change in Israel.
	That's the part that's totally crazy.
	By the way, there will be elections.
	And you know what will happen?
	Somebody else will be prime minister and that person will still go into Rafa if elections were held today.
	That's the way all of this works.
	But again, all of this is just cover for Joe Biden pandering to the Hamas, Nixon, Dearborn.
	That's all this is.
	And all you have to know about that is that Bernie Sanders is representative of this pathetic left-wing worldview that suggests that Israel is somehow indiscriminately bombing civilians and that Joe Biden is committing a sin by allowing Israel to kill terrorists.
	The number of lies that Bernie Sanders is able to tell, I mean, I suppose that makes sense.
	He's been a useless person his entire career.
	Literally his entire career.
	He's a useless derelict leech on the body politic.
	The fact that he's been elevated inside the Democratic Party just demonstrates that the single greatest way to gain power in the United States is to run in an election against Hillary Clinton.
	Here's Bernie Sanders.
	President Biden was heard on a hot mic after the State of the Union address saying he has to have a come to Jesus talk with Netanyahu about letting humanitarian aid into Gaza.
	Have you spoken to President Biden about whether he's had this conversation?
	If he hasn't, what is he waiting for?
	And if he already had it, has it made any difference?
	Well, I've spoken to people very high up in his administration.
	Here's the bottom line.
	Margaret, what we are seeing in Gaza today is literally an unprecedented crisis.
	It's not just the 30,000 people, two-thirds of them are women and children have already been killed.
	We are looking at the possibility of hundreds of thousands of children starving to death.
	The United States of America cannot be complicit in this mass slaughter of children.
	I mean, Bernie may as well just be on Hamas's payroll at this point with that kind of crap.
	But, you know, he has never found an authoritarian dictatorship that he doesn't love, so long as it opposed Western interests.
	He's a guy who, you know, honeymooned in Moscow, so there you have it.
	Meanwhile, bizarre coalitions forming over whether to ban TikTok in the United States.
	Let me be clear, TikTok should in fact be banned if they will not divest of their Chinese ownership.
	It is a Chinese social media apparatus.
	That is what TikTok is.
	And again, we're on TikTok because that's where the kids are and we will continue to post on TikTok and on every other outlet where the kids are because I think it's important for people to hear messages that are not actually just left-wing messages.
	With that said, TikTok is a Chinese intelligence gathering tool.
	TikTok is also a viral sickness in the United States.
	The kinds of mental illness that are being spawned by TikTok are quite real.
	And if you ever take a look at Chinese TikTok versus American TikTok, you can see the difference.
	American TikTok is all about transing the kids.
	Chinese TikTok is all about doing math problems because China is not interested in transing its own children.
	So there's a big battle that's now broken out between people on the right over whether to ban TikTok or to force TikTok to divest of its Chinese ownership.
	According to the New York Times, House Republican leaders are moving this week to pass legislation that would force the Chinese owners of TikTok to sell the platform or face being barred in the United States.
	That's even after Donald Trump came out against targeting the popular social media app he once vowed to ban.
	Representative Steve Scalise, who's the majority leader, said on Monday that the House would try to speed the bill to passage under special procedures reserved for non-controversial legislation.
	There's a 13-page bill.
	It's the product of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which is a bipartisan committee.
	We have friends on that committee, including Mike Gallagher, who's an excellent congressperson.
	Trump issued an executive order that tried to do this, but now he's changed course.
	In an interview on CNBC recently, Trump said he considered TikTok a national security threat, but that banning it would make young people go crazy.
	And he said that any action harming the platform would benefit Facebook, which he called an enemy of the people.
	Now, I think two things can be true at once.
	Facebook can also have serious problems.
	Also, it's not owned lock, stock and barrel by the Chinese government, and it is not being used as an intelligence gathering tool by the Chinese.
	The fact that kids would go crazy over a thing does not mean that you shouldn't do it.
	My kids go crazy over stupid crap all the time and I say no to them all the time because that's my job as a parent.
	The legislation is one of several efforts over the past year aimed at curtailing TikTok because of concerns that ByteDance's relationship with Beijing poses risks to national security.
	President Biden, for his part, has said that he would sign it.
	There was Joe Biden saying that he would sign the ban on TikTok as long as it's still under Chinese ownership.
	Do you still support banning TikTok when you sign that bill?
	If they pass it, I'll sign it.
	So the question is why Trump has flipped on it. So Trump was very much in favor of going after TikTok
	not all that long ago. And let's be realistic, Donald Trump at this point should be in favor
	politically speaking.
	Forget about the morality of it, or the national security of it.
	Both have good reasons to actually curb TikTok's Chinese ownership, because the CCP is a really nefarious force in the world.
	On a political level, TikTok is pushing leftism.
	Not sure why Donald Trump would want to stand with an outlet that pushes leftism harder than any outlet that currently exists on social media.
	So why exactly is Trump flipping on this sort of thing?
	Not particularly clear.
	Apparently, according to Axios, neither Trump nor his campaign posts on TikTok, but the shift in position is a sign the former president recognizes the platform's massive appeal to younger voters, many of whom are disenchanted with Biden.
	It's a bunch of prominent MAGA figures, conservative comedians, everyone else are highly active on TikTok.
	Listen, again, we are active on TikTok.
	That does not change the reality, which is that TikTok legitimately should be separated from its Chinese ownership.
	Just last year, Donald Trump Jr.
	ripped the idea of a TikTok ban.
	Now, let me just... Tucker Carlson suggested there was a hidden agenda, saying it's a creepy, low-IQ Chinese plot that doesn't mean people trying to ban TikTok have your interests in mind.
	One potential factor at play that people are pointing out is Trump's repaired relationship with a billionaire named Jeff Yass, who has a huge financial stake in ByteDance and has spent millions backing lawmakers who support TikTok.
	Just a few days before the TikTok reversal, Trump publicly praised Yass for inviting him to a retreat held by the Club for Growth.
	Yassin previously donated almost $5 million to Vivek Ramaswamy, who also shifted on TikTok, right?
	He went from wanting to ban it, he called it digital fentanyl, to then being in favor of TikTok.
	Now again, this has nothing to do with the First Amendment.
	Forcing China to divest its ownership stake in TikTok is not, in fact, a First Amendment issue.
	TikTok can still exist.
	TikTok can just have American ownership, or foreign ownership that is not, in fact, the Chinese Communist Party.
	That'd be the basic idea here.
	I don't think that legislators, by the way, have to have your best interest in mind in order for the legislation to be good.
	In order for a piece of legislation to be beneficial.
	I think legislators very rarely have your interests in mind.
	They generally have their own interests in mind.
	That doesn't mean that the legislation emanating wouldn't be good.
	And I am bewildered as to why there are so many people who are shifting on this topic just because Donald Trump said so.
	TikTok is literally putting out ads right now demanding that people call their representatives.
	They put out an ad saying, this Wednesday, the House of Representatives will vote to ban TikTok, which means the creativity, inspiration, and communities you love will end with it.
	Together, we can work to help the communities you love.
	Call your representative today.
	Or, alternatively, you could get the Chinese party out of the business of TikTok.
	That would be the alternative.
	You know, things don't just magically become decent or conservative because Donald Trump and company endorse them.
	Conservatives were engaged in the most effective boycott In modern history, against Bud Light, until it was undercut by Donald Trump Jr., until it was undercut by the UFC, until it was undercut by Tucker Carlson, suddenly there are a bunch of people who randomly came out and said that the boycott against Bud Light had to end.
	That didn't mean that was a conservative policy.
	You should assess whether you think the policy is good or bad based on the policy, not based on who tells you that the policy is good or bad.
	Hell, if I tell you a policy is good or bad, that doesn't mean that you should simply accept it.
	You should actually determine whether you like the policy or not.
	Alrighty, coming up, we are going to get into a horrific story from Missouri.
	That would be a national news story if it involved people of different races.
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