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April 8, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show

55:04

Did Joe Biden Just Save Hamas?

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	It feels right now like the world is in a state of constant revolution.
	And the reason it feels like the world is in a state of constant revolutions is because our political movements, particularly on the left, have decided to worship the revolutionaries.
	I bring to you as example 1A.
	Greta Thunberg.
	Greta Thunberg is not an important person.
	There's nothing about Greta Thunberg that suggests that she knows anything about literally anything.
	She's not an environmentalist expert.
	She's not an expert on foreign policy.
	And yet, she has been held up as a model for our times.
	A person that we all ought to follow.
	A sort of Joan of Arc when it comes to the moral conscience of the West.
	Why?
	Because she's a revolutionary.
	And the West now worships revolutionaries.
	And I'll explain why that is in a moment.
	Over the weekend, she was arrested, not once, but twice, apparently, in the same day for blocking traffic at a climate protest to shout about a climate emergency.
	Here she was.
	Climate activist Greta Thunberg has been arrested twice in the Netherlands.
	Thunberg was detained along with several other protesters who tried to block a major highway into The Hague.
	Hours later, she was released by police and was re-arrested when she rejoined the protest against fossil fuel subsidies.
	Thunberg, who is now 21 years old, explained her actions saying, quote, we are in a planetary emergency.
	Okay, and she's worshipped by the left for this sort of nonsense.
	She's a professional, useless person.
	That's what you would call her.
	You would say that she has, for her entire adult life, and for much of her late childhood, been a professional, useless person, going around the planet and saying Nostradamus-like things about how the world is going to collapse, and then obstructing roads and incentivizing stupidity for literally years on end.
	But she's not the only one.
	There's a worship, when it comes to the left, for the revolution.
	The revolutionaries must always be treated with extraordinary deference.
	When it was Black Lives Matter rioters who were burning down cities, doing $2 billion in damages, the single most damaging spate of riots in American history, the entire legacy media treated this not as though this was something deeply wrong and actually evil.
	It turns out that it's evil to burn down somebody else's shop in the name of racial justice.
	They treated it as a group of people who were maybe just a little bit too passionate.
	It was just they were too committed to the cause.
	And you see this now in the treatment of these pro-Hamas protesters who are showing up at democratic events.
	These pro-Hamas protesters are, in fact, emissaries of an evil ideology.
	If you're standing for an actual genocidal terror group that wishes to impose Sharia law on its own citizens and to murder everyone else, You're the bad guy.
	But the left has treated these people with extraordinary deference.
	The New York Times has an entire piece today titled, How Gaza Protesters Are Challenging Democratic Leaders.
	Now, the normal way that a decent civilization would treat these people is as moral outcasts.
	It would shun them.
	It would say, you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
	You're moral idiots.
	And you are standing for a group of people who are legitimately the worst people on planet Earth.
	You're trying to preserve in the Gaza Strip right now, a terrorist group to continue running the Gaza Strip after subjecting that entire area To their own predations, thievery, smuggling, destruction, corruption for 20 odd years.
	But according to the New York Times, all these protesters are people to be respected and treated with kid gloves.
	Quote, in Detroit, a congressman's holiday party devolved into chaos and a broken nose after demonstrators protesting the war in Gaza appeared with bullhorns.
	In Fort Collins, Colorado, the mayor abruptly ended a meeting during which protesters demanding a ceasefire in Gaza glued their hands to a wall.
	In places as disparate as a historic church in South Carolina and radiocidic music hall in Manhattan, President Biden has been heckled and drowned out by demonstrators objecting to his support for Israel.
	Protests over the Biden administration's handling of the war are disrupting the activities of Democratic officials from city halls to Congress to the White House, complicating their ability to campaign and at times govern during a pivotal election year.
	Now again, the New York Times is not saying these protesters are wrong or bad, which they are.
	They're both wrong and bad.
	Instead, they're saying that Joe Biden should take more stock of these protesters.
	And who are these protesters?
	Well, they're the kinds of people who, in Michigan, literally chant death to America.
	We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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	Here is tape over the weekend of protesters.
	These are pro-Hamas protesters in Michigan.
	These are the voters that Joe Biden is aiming for right now, who are literally chanting, death to America in America.
	And these are the protesters that the legacy media and the Biden administration are suggesting ought to dictate foreign policy.
	Gaza has shown the entire world why these protests are so anti-America.
	Because it's the United States government that provides the funds for all of the atrocities that we just heard about.
	And this is why Imam Khomeini, who declared the International Day of Quds,
	this is why he would say to pour all of your chants and all of your shouts upon the head of America.
	They're chanting in Arabic, death to America.
	In America, in Michigan, that's what they're chanting.
	It's those protesters and it's their friends who the Biden administration are catering to.
	So the question is why?
	Why are they catering to the radicals in their own party?
	It turns out the vast majority of Americans don't like this stuff.
	So why exactly are they catering to that?
	And to understand that, you have to understand the theory of continuous revolution.
	Effectively speaking, the Democratic Party, which now represents the left in the United States, has adopted the theory of Chairman Mao, the theory of continuous revolution that was so involved in the Cultural Revolution.
	That theory is rooted originally in sort of Hegelian dialectic.
	It's rooted in Marxist revision of Hegelian dialectic.
	So, to really simplify the broad perception of the philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, one of the most important philosophers of the last 300 years, His philosophy was distilled down by a lot of people into a basic idea that history progresses through contradiction.
	That basically you have a thesis, and then you have an antithesis, a response to the thesis, and then a synthesis of the two ideas.
	And then the idea starts to fall apart, and it turns into a thesis, an antithesis, and then a synthesis again.
	And so history progresses through contradiction is the basic idea.
	Now Hegel meant this descriptively.
	He would say that you would have One country representing one idea, and a second country representing a second idea.
	They would go to war, and then they would make a peace, and the peace, out of that would come a new synthesis.
	So for example, you would have a 30 years war between Catholic countries and Protestant countries, and out of that would come the peace of Westphalia.
	Right?
	Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
	That would be the basic, very simplified version of what George Frederick Hegel was talking about.
	Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, they decided to extend that theory into the realm of economics.
	So what they suggested is that capitalism carried the seeds of its own destruction.
	Because capitalism was exploitative of the poor.
	All this is false, but this was their theory.
	Their theory was that capitalism would impoverish the poor, the poor then rise up against capitalism.
	So capitalism was the thesis, the labor movement was the antithesis, and the synthesis would be socialism and eventually communism.
	That was the basic idea that Marx and Engels put forward.
	The contradiction itself would then come to synthesis.
	Now there's only one problem.
	The problem is what happens when you've reached the synthesis that the left actually likes.
	Well, what the Hegelian theory would suggest is that then there will be an antithesis that rises and goes to war with the thesis.
	But if you've won, if you're the left and you've won, what do you do?
	Now you're stuck.
	And this is the problem in which Chairman Mao found himself.
	He had fostered a communist revolution in China, and now he was the boss man.
	He ran the entire country with an iron fist.
	Well, according to Hegelian dialectics, there should be a movement that could theoretically threaten him.
	And that threat would then emerge a new movement.
	So what did he do?
	He posited something that he called the theory of continuous revolution.
	That theory was that the party itself could embody all forms of revolution.
	There would be new revolutions.
	There'd be thesis and antithesis and synthesis, but it would all happen within the Communist Party structure.
	So he said, quote, Opposition and struggle between ideas of different kinds constantly occur within the party.
	This is a reflection within the party of contradictions between classes and between the new and the old in society.
	If there were no contradictions in the party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the party's life would come to an end.
	In other words, the only way to retain absolute power was to encompass everything, the thesis and the antithesis.
	The party was bigger than both.
	All of this would happen inside the party, and this is why he encouraged younger members of the party to go and literally beat to death older members of the party.
	This is why he encouraged some good communists to kill other good communists during the Cultural Revolution.
	If you want to see what that looked like, you should watch the first episode of The Three-Body Problem on Netflix.
	Pretty good representation of what the Cultural Revolution looked like in China.
	The younger generation, for no reason at all, being told to beat the living hell out of people of the older generation because the revolution had to be televised.
	The revolution had to continue.
	Continuous revolution.
	What does that mean?
	It means that if you are a left-wing that wishes to retain power, you've gained power in the United States, or you've gained power in Europe, you have to pay continuous homage to the revolutionaries in your own party.
	The thesis is Joe Biden.
	The antithesis is the pro-Hamas protesters.
	And the synthesis is a policy that effectively hands more power to Hamas.
	The thesis is law and order.
	The antithesis is riots in the major cities.
	The synthesis is worship of the Black Lives Matter movement.
	The thesis is normal environmentalists.
	The antithesis is Greta Thunberg sitting at a traffic stop and blocking traffic.
	And the synthesis is going to be a Green New Deal.
	That's the idea of the Democratic Party.
	The revolution will constantly be encompassed inside the party, inside the left-wing movement.
	And all you need to make this sort of happen is a little bit of celebrity cover for the revolution.
	You just need major politicians, for example, like Joe Biden, or major celebrities, like Chef Jose Andres, to repeat the nostrums of the revolutionary every so often, and then you will reach synthesis.
	And that's precisely what has been happening with regard to the Israel-Gaza war.
	So right now, the latest on the ground in the Israel-Gaza war is that the Israeli defense forces have largely pulled out from the Gaza Strip, at least major parts in the north of the Gaza Strip.
	It's not clear at this point what exactly is happening.
	Are they doing that because they're about to redeploy into Rafah, which is the last major city in the Gaza Strip, where there are apparently four Hamas battalions still remaining?
	The metaphor that has been used by Benny Gantz, who is the left-wing member of the war coalition in Israel, is that you can't put out 80% of the fire in a house and then hope that the other 20% doesn't burn down the rest of the house.
	If you're going to finish this off, you have to finish this off.
	That is Benny Gantz, not Bibi Netanyahu, who the administration has decided is the bad guy in all of this.
	And so Israel is pretty determined to go into Rafia and to finish the job in Rafia by dismantling the last of the Hamas battalions.
	And then the war will effectively be over, at least until they are able to find and rescue the hostages who are being held somewhere in the Gaza Strip that nobody knows at this point.
	So that is the current situation.
	The reason that Israel is making all of these concessions to the Biden administration Such as a military pullout appears to be just severe pressure from the Biden administration on Israel.
	That pressure is being brought about by the kinds of protesters who are shouting death to America in Dearborn, Michigan.
	Make no mistake, those are the revolutionary vanguard and they are the leaders.
	And all they require is a little bit of cover from supposed moderates, from celebrities like Chef Jose Andres.
	Folks, we'll get some more on this in just one second.
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	So Chef Jose Andres is the head of the World Central Kitchen when he is not doing his chefing.
	The World Central Kitchen does a lot of good work in bringing food into very hard-hit areas in terms of war.
	Also, he is a political radical.
	He's been a political radical for quite a while.
	Those two things are not in particular contradiction.
	You can do good things and you can do bad things.
	Life is filled with these sorts of things.
	Over the weekend, Chef Jose Andres, who has been the singular force behind pushing the Biden administration into effectively undermining Israel's military effort to extirpate a terrorist group that is currently holding over a hundred hostages, including five Americans.
	So I went on national TV where the legacy media, who of course are also part of this broad spectrum left-wing movement, He went on National TV and he suggested that what Israel is doing is a war against humanity itself, which is an incredibly vicious proposition.
	It is not true that Israel is in a war with, quote unquote, humanity itself.
	Were it war with humanity itself, the World Central Kitchen never would have been coordinated with the Israeli Defense Forces in the first place.
	It's an incredible statement from a guy whose organization has been coordinating with the military that is currently engaged in a war with another entire entity to get aid in to the civilians of the other side.
	That's a crazy statement.
	That's like the Red Cross working with the Americans during World War II to try to bring aid to German civilians.
	And then the Red Cross turning around saying America is doing a war on humanity.
	In any case, here's Chef Jose Andres, who again is a political radical on the left.
	This is not anymore about the seven men and women of World Central Kitchen that perished on this unfortunate event.
	This is happening way for too long.
	It's been six months of targeting anything that seems moves.
	This doesn't seem a war against terror.
	This doesn't seem anymore a war about defending Israel.
	This really at this point seems it's a war against humanity itself.
	Okay, that is a lie, and it's a disgusting lie.
	If it were a war against humanity itself, Israel, as I've said a thousand times, has complete air superiority over the Gaza Strip.
	They could have just killed literally hundreds of thousands of people.
	Even according to Hamas statistics, which are largely falsified, Israel has killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 32,000 people.
	According to Israeli statistics, that includes at least 13,000 terrorists.
	And one of the things about being a terrorist in the Gaza Strip is that many of the people who are considered non-terrorists Our 18-year-old men who put down a gun for five minutes and now they're non-terrorists and then they pick up the gun and now they're terrorists again.
	What happened with the World Central Kitchen is indeed a tragedy.
	Israel has not only acknowledged that, Israel has fired the officers who were in charge, despite the confusion about what actually happened.
	By the way, the Jerusalem Post did have a report about what actually happened with the World Central Kitchen.
	It turns out that war zones are really dangerous, and you don't have perfect knowledge of what's going on at any given time.
	Here is the timeline, according to the Jerusalem Post.
	quote, the drone unit saw multiple suspicious actions starting after 10 p.m. Monday.
	First, the drone unit said it saw a Hamas terrorist climb onto one of the trucks
	and fire in the air at what it called Action Point 2.
	According to the IDF, that's the Israeli Defense Force, this tactic is frequently used by Hamas to send signals to
	other Hamas fighters in the area regarding his position.
	At another action point 3, the convoy then split up.
	At action point 4, the convoy entered a hangar, which obscured which vehicles might be going in and out and who might be in the vehicles compared to who was in the vehicles before entering the hangar.
	In the first four action points, the Israeli Defense Force drone unit refrained from attacking the aid trucks because they questioned their commanders and were ordered by Division 162 Brigadier General Itzik Cohen not to, despite a suspicion that Hamas terrorists were involved.
	The Israeli Defense Forces then tried to call the aid workers but was unable to reach them.
	At the fifth action point, the aid trucks had now left the hangar.
	As events developed, the IDF tried to call the aid workers involved in the field and was unable to reach them.
	So the IDF called the World Central Kitchen.
	The World Central Kitchen headquarters tried to call its own aid workers in the field, but they did not answer.
	When vehicles left the hangar, the IDF drone unit believed these were not the same vehicles, and thought that these were Hamas vehicles, or that around four Hamas operatives had joined or taken over the convoy.
	According to the Israeli Defense Forces, attacking the trucks after all of this was a mistaken identity issue, but could not lead to criminal charges accordingly.
	The drone unit believed the order not to attack no longer applied.
	Around a kilometer later, around 1109 p.m., the drone unit believed it had the right to engage the trucks.
	Also, the drone unit had thermal imaging, not visual imaging, so it could not see the WCK aid worker sign posted on the roof of the trucks.
	Because thermal imaging looks like you see in the movies, right?
	It just shows sort of heat patterns and heat signatures.
	It doesn't show the actual details of paint on things, for example.
	When the drone unit attacked three separate times in succession, it believed the coast was clear completely to attack what it thought were clearly Hamas targets.
	So despite all that confusion, despite the fact that apparently there were Hamas terrorists who were involved in the convoy, and then there were confusions in terms of the trucks, and despite the fact I called the World Central Kitchen, the World Central Kitchen couldn't get a hold of his own people, and all of this, the commanders were fired.
	According to Chef Jose Andres, that constitutes a war against humanity.
	Why?
	The answer is because, again, the revolution must be continuous.
	Because the revolutionary movement that suggests that the West is bad and that the left can contain all of these movements at once, it must continue.
	And it's been hijacked.
	The revolutionaries have hijacked the Democratic Party at this point.
	Of course, they've also hijacked the media.
	So, the media have a perverse incentive structure here.
	Not only are they on the left, typically speaking, but also, if you are an anchor, and you display emotion, then you get clicks.
	That is the way this typically works.
	If you are more emotional, this, by the way, is nothing new.
	If you go back and you watch the old James Brooks movie, Broadcast News, It's a great movie and it's worth watching.
	It's a really good sort of indicator as how news has gone for literally decades in the United States.
	William Hurt plays a reporter in that film and he has this magical moment on camera where he's interviewing a woman and he tears up on camera and this becomes like his calling card is that he teared up on camera.
	Well, interviewing this woman and the punchline of the movie, spoiler alert after 40 years, the punchline of the movie is that there was only one camera in the room, which means that he had to cut in the film of him crying on cue afterward.
	So he recorded all those questions later and then pretended to cry.
	So I'm not suggesting that there isn't genuine emotion on the part of some of these reporters.
	I will suggest that when reporters get emotional, they're not actually doing their job for the viewer.
	So when Chris Wallace, for example, gets emotional, and how this is personal, and Israel should fight a war without killing anyone, this is nonsense and he knows it.
	Two years ago, my daughter Catherine volunteered at World Central Kitchen to help feed Ukrainian refugees who fled to Poland.
	She's the woman on the far right.
	And that man in the center, Damien Sobel, who Catherine says was incredibly kind, he is one of the seven World Central Kitchen workers Who was killed this week.
	Now I'm no military expert and I know Hamas is hiding in a civilian population.
	But there's got to be some way Israel can fight this war without killing so many innocents.
	Without killing people like Damien.
	Sometime over these six months.
	Okay, stop it there.
	So this is absolutely insane.
	Okay, the reason this is insane is not because of his sympathy.
	Obviously, that's fine.
	The point that he makes there, he is not a military expert, and he knows nothing about how military operations work, does not stop him from them suggesting military policy to the Israelis.
	And so all of this has now been taken up into the revolutionary vanguard, which is the Democratic Party at this point.
	We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
	First, it's been six months since Hamas brutally attacked Israel, launching a vicious war for Israel's very survival.
	It's been a long fight.
	It is not even close to over.
	As we near Passover, I'm asking you, my listeners, please provide some much-needed food, medicine, and emergency aid.
	You can be a light in this time of darkness.
	The Passover story is one of the foundational stories in the Hebrew Bible.
	Moses leads God's people out of Egypt, away from Pharaoh, out of slavery.
	The suffering of the children of Israel and their deliverance from slavery reaffirms our faith that God protects, provides for, and deeply loves his people and that he hears our prayers.
	And yet here in 2024, the Jewish people struggle once again for their freedom.
	Freedom against enemies around the world vowing their destruction.
	If you have the funds to help, would you consider donating to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews?
	Every donation is urgently needed.
	They're providing food, clothing, and financial assistance to families, the elderly, and children across Israel, as well as those evacuated from their homes in southern and northern Israel and survivors of the Nova music festival.
	Your gift today provides emergency aid to those hardest hit in Israel's war-torn areas.
	Israel needs you now more than ever.
	To give to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, visit benforthefellowship.org.
	That's benforthefellowship.org.
	God bless and thank you.
	So John Kirby, the national security spokesperson over the weekend, he suggested that the Israeli defense forces must make what he called deconfliction changes in Gaza.
	As you know, the president spoke, Donald, the president shares that grief and sorrow.
	And as we have made clear, there's going to have to be some changes to the way the Israeli defense forces are prosecuting these operations in Gaza to make sure that this doesn't happen again.
	And some of the changes we talked about, certainly more humanitarian aid and assistance getting in.
	But just as critically, Martha, there's got to be changes in the deconfliction process.
	The information flow between aid workers on the ground and the IDF in their headquarters so that this kind of targeting can't happen again.
	Okay, well, as you see from the actual process of how this happened, they tried to get in touch with the actual aid workers.
	They tried to get in touch with the World Central Kitchen.
	The World Central Kitchen tried to get in touch with its own people.
	So what changes would he actually suggest?
	There are no changes.
	As always, the narrative matters more than the fact pattern here.
	All of this has now resulted in the Biden administration doing what they've been itching to do for months at this point, which is threaten a conditional cutoff in aid to Israel in the middle of a war with Hamas.
	Now, if you want to make the world more dangerous for America and for its allies, what you do is you allow Hamas to survive.
	That is the single most dangerous thing that you could do in this region right now.
	Because if Hamas survives and walks out of those tunnels, hands held high, you can guarantee that Hezbollah, within the next year, is going to launch a serious war on Israel's northern border.
	Israel will have to respond in kind.
	When that happens, Iran will get involved, and then you will, in fact, have a giant regional war.
	What you have right now are pinprick attacks because Israel's enemies are afraid of it.
	If Hamas wins, this ridiculously vicious, horrifying, but relatively small military contingent, talking about 30,000 to 40,000 fighters, many of whom are not nearly as well equipped as the Israeli Defense Forces, if they're somehow able to survive after all of this as a governing entity in Gaza, thanks to the West, Iran could not ask, possibly, for a bigger victory at this point.
	So when the United States is talking about conditioning aid to Israel, and then they won't even spell out what the conditions look like.
	Or if they do spell it out, they're talking about like an immediate ceasefire while Hamas still holds hostages.
	Understand how insane this is.
	This is what the Biden administration said last week.
	They literally said last week that Israel should cease all fire in Gaza so that they can negotiate with Hamas, who has rejected every single proposal put forward.
	And they should do that while Hamas is holding Israeli citizens hostage.
	The United States would never do that ourselves.
	If the Mexican government were to launch a vicious raid across the American border, killing 1,200 American citizens, taking 250 hostages, we would not declare an immediate ceasefire in order to negotiate with them to free the hostages while they rejected every hostage deal.
	There's no possibility.
	Any government that did that in the United States, any president that would be immediately impeached and should be.
	So Israel can't do that.
	But that is what the United States is pressuring them to do.
	Here was John Kirby saying he's not going to rule out conditioning aid.
	Is the Biden administration position still that there should be zero conditions on aid, military aid to Israel?
	I'm not going to get ahead of the President or decisions he might or might not make going forward.
	He was very clear in his call with the Prime Minister that if we don't see some changes in their policies in Gaza and the way they're prosecuting operations, we're going to have to make some changes of our own.
	So you do think these are Israeli policies then?
	I mean, Block 8.
	They get to decide how they prosecute this war.
	It's their operation.
	We get to decide how we're going to react to that, and how we're going to administer our own policy with respect to Gaza.
	We make those decisions, and the President was clear with the Prime Minister, if there's not changes, if things don't get better, then we're going to have to make changes of our own.
	Okay, but the problem is they've not actually made explicit what those changes look like.
	Israel's been shipping in literally tons of food into the Gaza Strip every single day.
	At least two pounds of food per person in the Gaza Strip every day.
	That's how much food is going into the Gaza Strip right now.
	Most of those people are located in Rafia.
	You have at least a million and a half people in Rafia at this point, according to the current reports.
	That aid is getting in.
	The problem is there's no way to distribute it.
	It'd be one thing if the United States were saying to Israel, here are five specific things you can do.
	But they're not.
	They're basically saying, we want you to change things.
	And Israel's like, how?
	And the United States is like, we don't know, but you gotta change.
	They're doing the Chris Wallace routine.
	I don't know anything about military aid, but I know you can do better than this.
	Okay, well, magic man, tell us how.
	Really, tell like the world how.
	That'd be nice.
	Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi is doing the same thing.
	The former House Speaker and a key ally of Biden, she wouldn't do this without Biden's consent.
	They're pressuring Biden from within.
	Again, the revolutionary vanguard must be respected inside the Democratic Party so as to contain the revolution.
	She signed a letter on Friday from dozens of congressional Democrats to the president and secretary of state, Antony Blinken, urging a complete halt to all weapons transfers to Israel.
	In the face, by the way, of continuous attacks on Israel's north by Hezbollah, a much more powerful military enemy than Hamas.
	The letter called on the Biden administration to conduct its own probe into the Israeli airstrike.
	Quote, in light of the recent strike against aid workers and the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis, we believe it is unjustifiable to approve these weapons transfers.
	So, presumably, the idea here would be to cut off Israel's military supply in the face of a three-border war.
	Because right now, Israel is receiving incoming threats, it's actually four,
	is receiving incoming threats from the Gaza Strip.
	They're receiving incoming threats in Eilat, which is very south of Israel, from the Houthis.
	They're receiving incoming threats from the West Bank, where you still have the Palestinian Authority,
	Fatah, and Hamas operating.
	Terrorist attack in Israel almost every day at this point, at junctions in the West Bank.
	And the massive military threat on Israel's northern border in Lebanon.
	So in the middle of that, Nancy Pelosi wants to cut off aid.
	First, football season may be over.
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	Meanwhile, Senator Chris Van Hollen is doing the same routine.
	He, of course, really covets Chuck Schumer's seat as the majority leader.
	And so he's running at Chuck Schumer from the left, which is why Chuck Schumer is also running to the left.
	Here is Chris Van Hollen, moral idiot, suggesting that, again, the United States should condition aid.
	He won't mention based on what.
	What exactly are the conditions?
	Were you clear on what the White House position is?
	I'm not clear.
	First of all, I should say I'm glad Bill Burns is in Cairo.
	I hope we get a ceasefire and a return of all the hostages.
	I was glad to see the president, at least as reported out, finally say to President Netanyahu that if you don't follow my requests, that there will be consequences.
	The president and the White House have yet to lay out what consequences they have and they want to impose.
	This partnership cannot be a one-way street.
	So my view is the president needs to do what he said he was going to do, which is see if the Netanyahu government is going to implement These changes in terms of allowing more humanitarian assistance until those conditions are met, then no, we should not be sending more offensive weapons to Israel, not to stop them permanently, but to effectively use our leverage.
	That's what we're asking the President of the United States to do.
	What are your demands?
	And the answer is there are no demands.
	This is why the Biden administration last week suggested an immediate ceasefire while Hamas holds hostages and is surviving inside Rafia.
	Meanwhile, Chris Coons, another idiot Democratic senator of Delaware, he suggested, no, no, we're not being dictated to by the protesters.
	They are absolutely being dictated to by the protesters.
	Have the protesters won at the White House?
	No, let me remind you what just happened.
	Two weeks ago, President Biden signed into law our annual appropriations bill that includes $3.8 billion in support for Israel.
	I think this is a tactical disagreement that began with Prime Minister Netanyahu insisting he would go into RAFA.
	And what I have been saying and what I believe President Biden has been saying directly to Prime Minister Netanyahu is before you go in at scale and try to finish the job against Hamas, Make sure that you allow for humanitarian aid and for those civilians trapped in Rafah to move out of the way before you conduct this last stage of the ground campaign.
	That's what I understand the disagreement to be about.
	We'll find out whether Kunz is lying or not, because Israel is going to do all those things.
	Israel is going to shuttle at least a million people out of Rafah into other areas of the Gaza Strip, just to get them out of harm's way.
	Israel has increased the amount of humanitarian aid.
	Is it going to be enough for Joe Biden and his left-wing flank?
	I have serious, serious doubts.
	Okay, in just one second, we'll get to Joe Biden's flagging campaign.
	First, It has been two years of fighting.
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	Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to struggle.
	So, Joe Biden right now is running so far behind what he was in 2020.
	In 2020, he was up in the national polling data by almost seven points at this point in the race.
	Today, he is down in the national polling data By about .3 points to Donald Trump according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.
	Now, he has improved his standing a little bit in the last few weeks.
	There are four out of the last six polls that show him with a slight lead.
	NPR-PBS-Marist has him up 50-48.
	Data for Progress, which is a Democratic polling firm, has him up 1.
	Morning Consult has him up 2, 44-42.
	Rasmussen Reports has Trump up 8.
	Emerson has Trump up 1.
	The INI-TIPP poll has Biden up 3.
	So this race is basically a dead heat at this point.
	On a state-by-state basis, the states are, again, extremely tight.
	Pennsylvania, the poll average currently has Joe Biden up 0.1 points.
	That one is really close.
	Nevada, Trump is up 3.2.
	In Michigan, Trump's lead has declined a little bit.
	He was up 5 or 6 points.
	He's now down to 2.8 points.
	And in Wisconsin, Trump is up 0.6 points.
	Now, remember, if Trump wins Nevada, then he only has to win one of those other states in order for him to win the presidency.
	You made that endorsement in 2020.
	or Michigan or Pennsylvania.
	Right now, he's running dead even in two of those and ahead in Michigan.
	So, Joe Biden has a serious problem.
	It turns out people don't like him very much as President of the United States.
	And that includes apparently The Rock.
	So, The Rock came out over the weekend, he said, I regret endorsing Joe Biden in 2020.
	You made that endorsement in 2020, are you happy with the state of America?
	Am I happy with the state of America right now?
	Well that answer is no.
	Do I believe we're going to get better?
	I believe in that.
	I'm an optimistic guy and I believe we can get better.
	The endorsement that I made years ago with Biden was what I thought was the best decision for me at that time.
	And I thought back then when we talk about, hey, you know, I'm in this position where I have some influence and it's my job then.
	I felt like that then.
	It's my job now to exercise my influence and share with this.
	This is who I'm going to endorse.
	Am I going to do that again this year?
	That answer's no.
	Okay, the fact that he's not endorsing shows that he is really not sure which way to jump.
	It's not that the Rock is some sort of real Republican or anything.
	He's not.
	He's a political moderate at best.
	But the fact that he's not jumping to Biden shows that he's kind of where a lot of Americans are, which means this is going to be a late-breaking election.
	The events are going to dictate what happens between now and the election, because you know exactly what you think about Trump, and you know exactly what you think about Joe Biden.
	If people are in a better mood leading up to the election, Biden will win.
	If people are in exactly the same mood that they are right now about America, Trump is going to win.
	And Joe Biden has a serious problem on his hands, specifically because of that.
	The Democrats are trying to talk their way, happy talk their way, past the economic problems the country is experiencing, and that is the continued effects of inflation.
	And while there's been a lot of talk about job growth, there was a booming job report in March.
	303,000 jobs added in March, which beat the estimates by a significant amount.
	Economists wanted 205,000 jobs.
	Instead, About 303,000 jobs were gained, but it is important to look below the top line as to where those jobs are being gained.
	71,000 of those jobs came in government.
	And when it feels that the government is sucking money out of your pocket through inflation, and then spreading that money around through government jobs, that is not something that's going to make anybody feel particularly good.
	A huge percentage of job gains under Joe Biden have been in the government sectors or in the healthcare sector where people feel like they're overspending anyway.
	That's not likely to make people feel like a booming economy is happening.
	People feel a booming economy when there's innovation.
	People feel a booming economy when they believe that there are new products and services coming online that make their life better.
	They don't really feel a booming economy when there are more government employees or when there's another administrative health worker at an insurance company.
	Obviously, the people who are working in those industries feel better, but everybody else, they kind of look and they go, I'm not sure that that is what a booming economy looks like right now.
	This is why David Axelrod, consultant to Barack Obama in 2008, he says that Joe Biden has to stop kind of the happy talk about the economy.
	I wouldn't go out there and extol the miracle of the Biden economy.
	It just drives me crazy when he does that.
	He was on the Today Show yesterday and he got asked by Al Roker about a very simple question.
	It was at the Easter Egg Hunt and Roker asked, you know, a lot of people are worried that their bucks aren't going as far.
	You know, what, what do you tell them?
	And instead of sort of doing what you'd expect Joe Biden to do, because he's a person of empathy who grew up in a working class circumstance and identify with the concern, he said, you know, I would tell him we've, you know, we've got the strongest economy in the world and, you know, we're, and he continues to do that.
	That is the wrong strategy.
	It is the wrong strategy.
	It's also the wrong strategy because there are different sectors of the economy.
	They don't all grow in exactly the same measure.
	So Joe Biden has been focused, as always, on government jobs and on white-collar jobs in major urban areas.
	Those are the places that have really grown under Joe Biden.
	Other places that are growing in spite of Joe Biden know it's in spite of Joe Biden.
	So, the Wall Street Journal has an entire piece today about Pennsylvania.
	Where they say that one of the problems that Joe Biden is experiencing in Pennsylvania is his hatred of liquefied natural gas.
	That that's a serious problem for him.
	him quote in Pennsylvania, the largest 2024 battleground state.
	President Biden's victory four years ago depended in large part on big gains among
	voters like this one, a software company manager and former Republican who is now
	part of the city's heavily Democratic professional class.
	But those gains have been overtaken by opposition from other voters who work in
	the natural gas industry, a sector that has given a boost to blue collar workers
	These energy economy voters see Biden as hostile to fracking, which taps natural gas trapped in sedimentary rock deep underground.
	The sector has drawn billions of dollars in new investment in Pennsylvania, much of it in the state's southwest quarter.
	Now, here's the thing.
	All Joe Biden would have to do to win over those voters, presumably, is just be looser on LNG.
	Stop catering to the environmentalists in his own base.
	And this goes back to the biggest problem for the Biden administration.
	If you wish to contain the revolution on your left, if you believe the passion in your consistent revolution must come from the revolutionary left, if you bow to morons like Greta Thunberg, and she is, she is not a smart human being, if you bow to dullards who are spray-painting The Mona Lisa in order to fight global warming or some such nonsense, then you are going to lose the blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania.
	If you cave to the pro-Hamas protesters in Dearborn, Michigan, you are going to lose a bunch of people in the rest of Michigan who actually are mostly concerned at this point over whether they get to keep their jobs in the auto industry, which Joe Biden is attempting to push into electrified cars well before the technology is developed enough.
	This is the problem that faces Joe Biden. So what are they doing? They're projecting onto Trump.
	So Joe Biden's spokesperson over the weekend decided to rip into Donald Trump. Donald Trump
	had a good fundraising weekend. It's his first big, good fundraising weekend in quite a while.
	He raised more than $50 million at a Saturday evening fundraiser. According to Politico,
	Trump is pushing to close a massive cash disadvantage against Joe Biden.
	Biden ended March with $192 million on hand, more than twice as much as Trump.
	But attendees at the Saturday evening event were asked to donate as much as $814,000.
	He has another big high dollar fundraiser on Wednesday in Atlanta.
	Trump wants Biden to debate him.
	Biden is definitely not going to debate him, of course.
	But Trump had a big fundraising weekend.
	And so Joe Biden's spokesperson was out there on the campaign trail, suggesting that the people who were giving to him were all racists and extremists.
	I think it stands in stark contrast to the lack of fundraising that you see out of the
	Trump campaign, but as important is how they are raising it.
	He's down in Mar-a-Lago tonight with a bunch of billionaires, people like John Paulson,
	who not only wants to cut Social Security, but he's famous for, as a hedge funder, rooting
	against the American economy, betting against the American economy.
	So I guess it's no surprise that he's investing in somebody like Donald Trump, who's rooting
	for the economy to crash.
	But the whole lot of them is a bunch of billionaire scammers, extremists, and racists who understand
	that if they fund Trump's legal fees, he's going to cut their taxes while he cuts our
	Social Security.
	And so that's just the fundamental contrast that you have between the fundraising operation
	that we're building up and how it's allowing us to communicate with the voters and the
	money that Trump's raising from a bunch of billionaires that's doing nothing more than
	paying off his legal fees right now.
	Okay, so again, everybody who's donating to Trump is a bad person.
	They tried this tactic in 2016 and it did not work.
	They tried again in 2020 and it kind of worked, but that's also because they changed all the voting rules.
	If this is what they've got going into the election, it ain't much.
	The only person who is really capable of defeating Donald Trump at this point, as always, is Donald Trump.
	It's always about whether Donald Trump will defeat himself.
	It is very rarely about whether a Democrat will defeat Donald Trump.
	Because, again, right now, this election is a referendum on Joe Biden, not on Donald Trump.
	So, it's interesting.
	Donald Trump, as I've mentioned before, is the actual political moderate in this race in terms of his actual positions.
	So, for example, here was Donald Trump talking about what he would do as president with regard to abortion on the federal level.
	I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious baby.
	What could be more beautiful or better than that?
	Today I'm pleased that the Alabama legislature has acted very quickly and passed legislation that preserves the availability of IVF in Alabama.
	They really did a great and fast job.
	My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, The states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land.
	In this case, the law of the state.
	Many states will be different.
	Many will have a different number of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that's what they will be.
	At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people.
	You must follow your heart or, in many cases, your religion or your faith.
	Do what's right for your family and do what's right for yourself, do what's right for your children, do what's right for our country.
	Okay, so that is a lot of vagary, which is to say he's not going to do anything on the federal level with regard to pro-life legislation.
	Now, for pro-lifers like me, that's anathema.
	If you've got the power as the President of the United States, you should be passing federal legislation at the very least to push back the period during which Termination of the unborn is a possibility.
	However, is that the politically moderate position in this fight?
	Absolutely.
	Just from a positioning standpoint, he's trying to take off the table the number one issue the Democrats are going to run on with regard to, say, suburban women.
	He's trying to take it off the table, which is smart politics from him.
	Put aside the morality of it, because politics is not always moral.
	That is, in fact, the smart move, is to say Florida is Florida, California is California.
	When I'm president, every state's gonna be different.
	That's what Roe versus Wade being overturned is all about.
	So again, that's very, just politically, not morally, politically, that is smart Trump.
	That is smart Trump.
	Then you have Trump comparing himself to Nelson Mandela over the weekend, which is an actual thing that he did.
	He actually put out another truth social statement In which he said, I will gladly become a modern-day Nelson Mandela.
	It will be my great honor.
	He says, if this partisan hack wants to put me in the clink for speaking the open and obvious truth, I will gladly become modern-day Nelson Mandela.
	It will be my great honor.
	Now, again, I think it would be completely unjust and a violation of law to put Donald Trump in jail over hush money allegations that are absolute nonsense.
	With that said, is the Nelson Mandela comparison, like, great for Donald Trump?
	Not sure that it is.
	The media will focus on that, but positionally, what he's doing right now is, in fact, smart politics.
	We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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	Meanwhile, the Republican caucus continues to be a complete hellscape.
	The Republican caucus in Congress is split between a very small group of Republican Congress people who are clowns and who wish to basically do their clown act on TV for money and notoriety.
	And the vast majority of Republicans who actually would like to pass bills that they believe are the best thing they can get for America.
	That doesn't mean the best bill possible.
	Because the best bill possible is not possible when you have a Democratic Senate and a Democratic President of the United States.
	You still have to pass funding allocations.
	You still have to make sure that defense is funded.
	You still have to make sure, if you're a big fan of the entitlements, the entitlements are funded.
	These are all things you still have to do.
	But there's a group of Republican Congress people who have decided that it is very important that they be very famous.
	And in order to be very famous, they're gonna do things like challenge the speakership of the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who is more conservative on policy than any of them.
	This would be the same group of clowns who decided to oust Kevin McCarthy for no reason other than Matt Gaetz had some sort of vengeance plan against Kevin McCarthy.
	And then it turns out they replaced McCarthy, who is doing fine, with Johnson, who's even more conservative than McCarthy.
	And then Johnson, it turns out, has the same exact incentive structure as every other Speaker of the House.
	Namely, he has to get things done with an incredibly slim majority.
	Right now, effectively, a one-vote majority.
	And then the idea is that they're going to go after Johnson.
	So here's what needs to happen now.
	Mike Johnson needs to nuke the stupid rule negotiated by Kevin McCarthy to get the speakership that allows any member a motion to vacate.
	That needs to die.
	It's a dumb rule.
	It's a rule that basically allows one congressperson or a group of five or ten congresspeople to hold hostage the entire Republican caucus.
	And it means that the caucus is unworkable.
	It is so much further than the Hastert Rule.
	The Hastert Rule, which was created by Denny Hastert, who was at one time the Speaker of the House and also a person who ended up having a really, really bad criminal background, but irrelevant to the story, the Hastert Rule Basically was that the Republicans in the majority would not move a bill without a majority of the Republican House supporting it.
	Well, if that's all that the Republicans required in order to move a bill, in other words, they can move a bill, let's say 150 Republican votes and 80 Democrat votes.
	Well, then Johnson would have no problem.
	There are plenty of bills that are just like that.
	The problem he has right now is that if he moves a bill with a majority of the House Republican caucus and some Democrats, he is afraid that he's going to be ousted as speaker.
	That's not how the speakership is supposed to work.
	The Speaker is supposed to be able to do vote counting.
	The Speaker is supposed to be able to negotiate.
	Mike Johnson should nuke this dumb rule right now.
	And if he requires Democrats to help him do it, then he should get Democrats to help him do it.
	And if you don't like that, you should blame Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's the one who decided to bring the latest quixotic attempt to take down the Speaker of the House for no reason other than to get her name on TV.
	There is no logic here.
	There is no rationale here.
	There is no reason here.
	This rule needs to die.
	I'm sick of watching the Republican caucus be dominated by people who have no interest in actual conservative policy and appear to only want to get on TV and talk radio.
	It's stupid.
	It's a waste of time.
	I'm more fiscally conservative than any of these members of Congress.
	I also recognize there is a reality.
	That reality is called legislation.
	It's called a bicameral legislature.
	It is called the President of the United States of the opposing party.
	Pretending none of these things exist.
	And that if you run directly into the wall with your head down, somehow this is going to emerge with you unscathed in all of your shining glory.
	That's stupid.
	And I don't believe you when you believe that it's going to emerge with victory.
	I think that you're grandstanding.
	And that's what's been happening right now.
	So Speaker Johnson should go ahead and he should do that, like, forthwith.
	Because enough.
	Enough of the Republican caucus being held hostage by, again, a very small group of malcontents in comparison to the broad majority of Republican legislators who are just coming from their districts trying to do their job.
	This is not a question of purity.
	This is a question of practicality.
	Guess what?
	None of you people in Congress are pure enough for me when it comes to your principles.
	None of you.
	I'm full-scale pro-life.
	I'm full-scale small government.
	I'm full-scale anti-entitlement.
	I'm full-scale all of those things.
	Also, I live in a world where reality exists, and this is incredibly dumb.
	You gotta let the speaker do his job, and if you won't, if you can be challenged every five seconds, it's a stupid rule and it needs to be nuked immediately.
	Meanwhile, Speaker Johnson is preparing to unwrap a mystery Ukraine aid package, according to the Wall Street Journal.
	He's pledging to bring up Ukraine aid for a vote in the House soon after Congress returns from Easter recess in coming days.
	What the bill will look like will support it remains unsettled because of fractures among Republicans and Democrats over both aid for Kiev and related assistance for Israel.
	So as it turns out right now, there's a big split in the Republican Party over aid to Ukraine, and there's a big split in the Democratic Party over aid to Israel.
	And so cobbling the two together, If that bill were to pass, it would pass with probably 300 plus votes in the House of Representatives right now with a broad majority of Republicans and probably a majority of Democrats in favor.
	It's being held up right now because of all of those splits and really because of this inability to marginalize the marginal.
	Now, is the bill going to be perfect?
	No, it's going to include a bunch of crap I don't want.
	Again, that's not how bills work.
	You're not going to get to perfect.
	The question that I have for many of the Republicans who are opposed to Ukraine aid is what is the objection to the Ukraine aid?
	Not in the amount.
	That's a reasonable objection.
	Not in the verification procedures as to where the aid goes.
	That's a reasonable objection.
	My question is, if you are a person who full scale believes that we ought to
	withdraw aid from Ukraine, what is the American hard, realpolitik national
	interest in watching Russia just take the country? That's my question. Do you
	believe that without American aid, including the American weaponry, that really is what the aid is?
	When we sign a check to Ukraine, we're not actually signing a check to Ukraine.
	We're getting credit on a ledger, and then Ukraine uses it to buy our old weaponry.
	And that's actually what's happening.
	But...
	If you believe that we should cut off aid to Ukraine, here's the question.
	Are you willing to watch as Vladimir Putin marches into Kiev?
	Is that what you're willing to do?
	If the answer is yes, okay, we can have that argument about whether you think that's in America's interest and why.
	If you're not, then what we're really arguing about is just how much aid should be given to Ukraine to make sure, for example, that they don't lose additional territory.
	There are really a couple of separate arguments that are happening about Ukraine.
	Argument number one is the how much territory should Ukraine be given the ability to win back if they had that ability at all?
	And my answer here has been that Ukraine has tried multiple times to win back the Donbass and Crimea.
	Those regions of the country are largely pro-Russian in terms of the citizenry.
	They were even before the invasion of those areas by Russia in 2014.
	With that said, You can make the case that we shouldn't be giving aid sufficient for, it's a waste of money, it's a waste of time, it's a waste of manpower, to try to take those areas back.
	You can make the point that you think that the lines of conflict should be frozen as they are.
	This is kind of where President Trump is.
	He's saying, you know, freeze the lines of conflict where they are.
	I've been making that case, by the way, since like April 2022, May 2022.
	Okay, but if Vladimir Putin is not willing to do that, if he's not willing to make the deal, are you willing to simply abandon Ukraine and let Putin march into Kiev?
	And if so, please explain how this is in America's national interest.
	Please, someone.
	And the answer is, no one will.
	In fact, many of the same people who are saying that aid to Ukraine should be cut off completely cannot explain why it would be in America's interest to cut off the aid completely.
	We don't have American boots on the ground in Ukraine.
	If you want Russia running directly up against NATO, make sure that they are directly abutting several NATO members, including Poland.
	That hasn't historically been bad at all.
	That's worked out perfectly historically in the past.
	So again, Congress is not a pure place.
	Congress is a place where you cut deals.
	And that is the reality of the situation.
	Now, a GOP representative, Mike Turner from Ohio, he says that he doesn't believe that Johnson is at risk of being removed from the speakership if the Ukraine aid gets passed.
	But here's my point.
	That shouldn't even be a question.
	Either you like your Speaker or you don't.
	If you don't, you should get rid of him and replace him, and you should do so forthwith.
	If you do, you should protect him such that you can't have a couple of grandstanding politicians who are holding up the business of the Congress.
	Here's Mike Turner.
	I don't think he's at any risk.
	I think that what people have been referring to as the chaos caucus, those individuals who are seeking attention for themselves and trying to stop all of the important work in Congress, are now seen as merely disruptive.
	Hakeem Jeffries, minority leader on the Democratic side, has made it clear that the Democrats will not join with efforts to unseat Johnson as we, this year, approaching the election, undertake the most important work of Congress.
	Okay, bottom line here is, if you're a Republican, you shouldn't want the Speaker of the House held hostage by people who are on the margin.
	security packages pass and of course that our foreign surveillance reauthorization
	act passes.
	Okay, bottom line here is if you're a Republican, you shouldn't want the Speaker of the House
	held hostage by people who are on the margin.
	You shouldn't.
	It is bad policy and it means you will lose.
	Here's your other choice.
	The other choice is you can continue to have the Speaker of the House unable to do his job.
	He is the most conservative Speaker of the House in American history, Mike Johnson.
	Look at his policy preferences.
	Look at his voting record.
	This guy is super conservative.
	And look at that and tell me that what you would rather have is, again, the Congressional Clown Show, as they mentioned the Chaos Caucus, holding up everything.
	So the Democrats win in November, and then you don't have to worry about it, then you're in the minority and you can all rail against the moon, as much as you damn well please.
	Alrighty, coming up, it's time to once again pay homage to John Fetterman.
	John Fetterman, wow, he's actually saying good things.
	Again, if you're not a member, become a member, use code Shapiro.
	Check out for two months free on all annual plans.

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