Ben Shapiro and co-hosts dissect Biden’s State of the Union as a "saddest" farce—mocking his 37% approval, 20% inflation, and abrupt police-funding reversal after years of defunding chaos—while blaming Nord Stream 2 for empowering Putin. They warn Ukraine’s EU push could escalate war, criticize viral propaganda (e.g., "ghost of Kiev"), and argue Biden’s weakness risks nuclear proliferation as Japan eyes arms. Shapiro’s live rebuttal calls him a liar: Afghanistan collapse, border crisis, and socialist policies masked by empty rhetoric, urging midterm backlash to end his "record of failure." [Automatically generated summary]
You don't need to tell me I already know you missed the latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage.
Don't worry, you can make it up to me by listening to the show here.
Hopefully you can get through it before the republic collapses, but you better start listening right now.
Even the fake laughs are phoned in around here, folks.
Welcome to the Daily Wire backstage state of the union coverage.
Joining us tonight, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Andrew Clavin, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and I, your friendly neighborhood, lowercase G, lowercase K, God King.
We're going to be watching the President of the United States here in 45 minutes, or probably more likely an hour and 45 minutes.
Democrats are notoriously late for everything because they have no respect for anyone.
And Joe Biden is no exception.
I believe last week he was almost 90 minutes late to a speech.
So who knows?
We could be up all night.
But when the president does make his debut, once they get him good and doped up and propped up, we will be hearing a farcical report on the state of our union.
I say farcical because if the president were to tell the truth, he would have to cede his office tomorrow.
And then Kamala Harris would be president and all would be well and the Republic would be immediately restored.
As soon as the president finishes his remarks, we'll come back and spend a little bit of time breaking them down for you, giving you our reaction.
And then exactly 15 minutes after the president wraps his remarks, our very own Benjamin Shapiro will be giving the Daily Wire official State of the Union response.
People have been asking me all week, you know, why are you doing that?
I mean, there's already an official GOP response.
And I say, that is why we are doing it.
The whole problem with the official party response to the, and this isn't just picking on the GOP, both parties are guilty of this.
The problem with the official response to the State of the Union is that it has to go through all of the different, the party apparatus, the leadership of the party in both houses of Congress, has to go through all these staffers to get approvals.
The result of that is it isn't actually a response to the president's state of the union address.
It's actually something that's been written many days or even weeks in advance.
And that's why nobody cares about it.
It's basically like the graveyard of a political career when you get the nod to come up to the big leagues and give the response.
That's it.
That's as far.
You have reached the pinnacle of your political career.
Even for President Bobby Jindal.
Well, Rubio, President Rubio.
President Rubio.
It's just the worst thing you can be asked to do is to give this response.
So it's tepid.
It's polled.
It's overly censored.
What Ben's going to do is the exact opposite is only Ben can.
He's going to watch the president speak.
And then 15 minutes later, he is going to react to the president's speech.
And in that way, even I, a lowly God King, will not have been able to approve the things that are going to come out of Ben's mouth.
And so they will be more or less true, although with a slightly Jewish perspective.
Things will be said.
Things will be said.
That cannot be unsaid.
And I mean, look, the truth is that predicting what Joe Biden is going to say tonight is really easy.
There'll be a lot of Bill Baksha anger.
He's going to talk a little bit about the Krambadou.
He's going to talk about Afghan Abadouch.
Yep.
Right?
Like, there's a lot that he can say.
And, Candace, you made a good point that at some point we'll get angry, Joe Biden.
Yeah, out of nowhere.
He just gets angry every time he's speaking.
And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Calm down, old man.
He's going to come out against cancer.
That I'm excited about.
They've announced that he's going to come out with his new initiative, which is to cure cancer.
Very bold.
It's a very bold move on his part.
I thought so, too.
Because the pro-cancer lobby will not like that at all.
I wouldn't be surprised if some people in the GOP actually took that.
We are pretty reactionary these days.
Right-wing Twitter tonight is not going to be a place for anyone with a.
What do you mean you're against cancer?
What's wrong?
He will misread.
He'll actually read out loud the cues on the prompter at some point.
Applause.
Applause.
I just want him to whisper.
I love it.
Applause.
The sincere whisper.
Well, you know, you know, Kamala Harris already gave a State of the Union address when she went off script yesterday and said, you know, told her audience that you got what you asked for.
That's the state of the union.
People are getting what they ask for.
Good and hard.
Democracy is the theory that people deserve what they want.
Get it good and hard.
Yeah, that's right.
You know, obviously, we don't need to say too much about it now because we're going to get a chance to react directly to it.
But obviously, the state of the union is complete disrepair.
I mean, in my lifetime, our country has not been in this bad a predicament.
I mean, Jimmy Carter was president when I was born, but it was toward the end.
Like, you could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I remember Carter.
He was nowhere near this bad.
And he actually course corrected.
He did what Obama never did.
He changed his mind.
He said, oh, I was wrong about things.
He said he was wrong about business.
When the Soviets went into Afghanistan, he was shocked and realized that he had made a mistake.
I mean, he was a terrible president.
But even he.
Yeah, but he was not asleep.
The other thing is that everything that has happened in the last year is on Joe Biden.
Yes.
When you look at the worst first years of any president's in history, usually you have to go like Abraham Lincoln had an actual secession at the beginning of his presidency.
Or you have to talk about George W. Bush at 9-11.
Those are things that happened to them.
Nothing that's happening right now happened to Joe Biden.
It happened because of Joe Biden.
Joe Biden happened.
Right.
Joe Biden happened.
There was no way.
It is beyond imagining how he could have screwed things up this badly.
Like when he came into office, they're like, there's no way he can screw this up.
He's being given a vaccine.
It works.
He's going to be, he's been given a distribution plan.
He's giving an economy that's about to come back if he just gets the hell out of the way.
He's been having the Abraham Accords in the Middle East.
He's got Russia and China fairly in check.
Things will be fine, right?
I mean, like, all the old man has to do is do what he did during the campaign: go back down into the basement, drink, insure, and go to sleep.
That's all he has to do.
And somehow he managed to screw this up.
I was actually concerned Wendy ascended to the presidency that the Democrats would be undefeatable afterwards, because when you artificially shut down a roaring economy, it's going to come back.
It's going to come back.
Well, they are saying that now.
They are saying he's the greatest jobs president ever because when you lock everyone at home and then you let them go out, the numbers look pretty good.
But the question I have for this state of the union is how does he get away with it?
How does a man with a 37% approval rating whose vice president has a 27% approval rating, who the highest rated member of his cabinet is Pete Buttigieg, has a 38% approval rating?
It seems like people are so awake on these issues.
I don't really see how the gaslighting is going to work.
So what does he say beyond just pro-cancer reform right here?
You underestimate their disdain for the American people.
Joe Biden actually said people are doing great.
They're psychologically impaired by COVID, so they can't experience the happiness that I've brought to them.
He actually said that.
And I mean, I mean, he is psychologically impaired.
And he's actually, he's not totally wrong in that people have been psychologically damaged by him.
By him.
And especially kids.
And speaking of which, I mean, we're so we've got 30 minutes left of COVID, which is big news.
COVID is officially over now.
I mean, of course, it's one big coincidence that right before the State of the Union, you know, California drops the mask mandate.
New York Congress, the White House, the CDC changes their recommendations as well.
I'm pretty pissed at him because, I mean, honestly, if I had known that Joe Biden had the capacity to literally just end the pandemic with the State of the Union, why didn't he do this in like April 2020?
Or he could have just done it then.
We would have skipped two years of this suffering.
I mean, because that's what's happening.
Or the science change radically, just in time.
Or midterms are coming up, and they kind of are betting on the fact that they have a very short memory.
And it's true, we've proven over and over again that we do have a very short memory.
So like, let them get some fresh air outside and then midterms will hit.
And hopefully we can run on other things.
But this time, I don't think it's going to work.
And I think it's just because of the parents.
I really do think that that's going to be the game changer.
And I think that they're done.
And that's why the poll numbers have just been sinking.
Ben said this the last time that we were together in this forum, which is that no politician in American history has ever been stupid enough to turn parents into a voting block until Joe Biden.
Yeah, it's an incredible thing.
And the fact that he's done that is beyond.
Obviously, our president tonight, if nothing else, will be very, very sleepy.
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Andrew Breitbart's Impact00:09:52
I apologize for the horrible treatment they receive at my hand.
And they never once have said thank you.
You give them one delicious Good Ranchers steak and it's, oh, the God King.
Oh, we love you, the God King.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know what you're in for.
So I want to take a minute.
Obviously, we've talked about the president.
We're going to talk a lot more about that throughout the course of the evening.
We obviously have to talk about the situation taking place right now in Ukraine.
And I want to get to that while Ben is still with us.
He's going to have to leave a few minutes before the speech to begin mentally preparing for destroying the president with facts and logic.
But before that, I want to take a minute while we're all together to remember our friend Andrew Breitbart.
At 5.30 in the morning, 10 years ago today, when I was 33 years old, I got a phone call and it woke me, of course, because I'm not awake at 5.30 in the morning.
And it was Ben on my caller ID.
And as soon as I saw the phone at 5.30 in the morning and saw Ben's name, I knew that this call was to let me know that Andrew Breitbart had died.
Almost anyone who knew Andrew at that time knew the enormous burden that he was under, knew the enormous stress that he carried, knew that he had in some ways lost his joy in those last months because he was under such attack because of the pressure of being one of the earliest Twitter warriors, the pressure of the Shirley Sherrod sort of betrayals that he experienced on the right from some people who are friends of ours, but nevertheless, a real betrayal that he suffered.
Many of us had spoken to Andrew about his health, about the enormous burdens that he was carrying.
That's why the people who knew Andrew well didn't actually fall for the kind of conspiracy theories about him being murdered by the left, because we all knew that Andrew was a very likely, in fact, our friend Bill Whittle and I took Andrew to dinner a few months, maybe six months before he died and had what amounts to an intervention about his health.
And I said, Andrew, you are going to have a heart attack and die.
And the next, that night or the next night, he had a heart attack.
And he called me from the hospital and he said, hey, Jeremy, did you hear the news?
And I was like, yeah, Andrew, I heard the news.
He goes, you're a clairvoyant.
Like, you're an actual prophet.
And I said, yeah, it's true.
I saw what no one could say except every other person.
I said, have you learned anything?
And he said, yeah, I've got to start eating better.
And I was like, no, yes, but no, that's not the takeaway.
It's this unbelievable burden, which is why of the many lessons there are to learn from our friend Andrew Breipart, an unbelievable entrepreneur, an unbelievable happy warrior, an unbelievable fighter, and really in many ways began to teach the right to fight.
It's that happy warrior thing I think that's so important.
You know, he started off as happy warrior.
He ended up with righteous indignation.
He taught us both of those things, but we've latched onto the latter more than the former.
And the former was his true superpower.
I mean, you go back and watch Andrew skating up, rollerblading up to protesters and taking them to Appleby's.
You go back and watch the greatest media moment in modern American political history when he took over the Anthony Weiner press conference in New York.
This is a man so full of life and so full of joy for the fight.
And because today I'm the age that he was on the day that he died, I've been thinking about him all week, knowing that this was coming.
And I've just reflected on what a privilege it is for us to be alive in this place and this time and to get to fight this fight.
And sometimes it begins to feel like a burden to us.
Sometimes you feel like you're losing.
Sometimes you bemoan the fact that we were born in a time that's hard and not a time that was easy.
But what a privilege that we get to do this.
And we should approach it with that same joy that Andrew approached it when we all got to know him and spent time with him.
The thing that I remember about him most was his generosity, the way that he would just say, oh, Ben Shapiro, here's Andrew Clavin.
You want to meet him?
And people would hire us.
He couldn't pay us when he started.
Remember when he started Big Hollywood?
I think I may have written the first article for Big Hollywood.
And he couldn't pay you.
So when PJTV hired me, he was like, go, get the money, take the money.
You've got to be paid for your work because he couldn't pay you.
And he introduced you to people.
He never cared.
I mean, he said to me once, I remember one of the last times I saw him, he said to me once, whatever doesn't kill me makes me more famous.
Yeah.
I've used that line before.
And so he did care about the way he saw it, but he didn't feel like your fame took away from his fame.
It was all bringing people together.
The California movement, which has been really seminal until we left, until the Daily Wire left, was really the center of the conservative movement, is his.
He created it.
He did not introduce us directly, but we would not know each other without Andrew Breibart.
That's right.
He did not introduce us directly, but we would not know each other without Andrew Breitbart.
That's why Andrew was a hub.
There are certain people who are sort of the nodes in networks, and he was the hub of a network.
And so everybody knew each other via Andrew.
Andrew was also the most spontaneous and sweet human being.
I mean, like the characterization of him in the media by the end of his life is that he was this monstrous, vicious brute who was mean to everybody.
And anyone who knew him knew how not true this was.
And it hurt him, I think, on a really deep level to be seen that way because it was so contrary to how he was and who he was.
And so when the media started calling him racist and when the media started suggesting that he was a bigot, and Andrew was the most tolerant person I've ever met.
I mean, like wildly tolerant.
And when people characterized him that way, he got so deeply hurt.
There was a fundamental innocence about Andrew that I think was deeply marred by the process of a politics that when he first entered the movement, he thought, we're all brothers in this fight, right?
We're all on the same side, and we're all fighting the good fight.
And America, we all kind of want the same thing.
We're just having different ways of getting there.
And that's really how he approached things.
And I think politics really hit him square across the jaw a few times.
And he responded correctly, aggressively, and angrily, and in defense of other people he thought were being bullied.
And that was powerful and it was good.
And it was a good instinct.
But it's also, if you don't protect yourself, it can really, really damage you.
And I think that that was...
He was serious.
He meant to fight for the country.
And a lot of people, it's partly serious, but it's partly business.
Yeah, no, that's right.
And it's partly politics.
I don't think he ever.
He had no self-protective instincts.
Yes.
Andrew had no self-protective instincts for him.
What Andrew Breitbart.
He was barely even a conservative, right?
Yeah.
I mean, Andrew was a Hollywood left.
He was the clarcially left guy.
Yeah.
It was the Clarence Thomas issue.
It was Joe Biden.
Yeah, right.
Joe Biden made Andrew Breitbart one of us.
What Andrew loathed more than anything else was a bully.
And the way that they responded to him was to bully him in a way that they had never bullied anyone up until that time.
And they came at the guy with such a vengeance.
And I think that that's what shocked him.
I've said this before on the one-year anniversary of his death, but it always merits repeating that Andrew had this singular gift.
I've met a few very famous people who have this quality, but it's an incredibly rare quality where every person who met Andrew Breitbart felt that they were an intimate of him instantly.
If you met Andrew, you were a six.
He would tell you on the day that you met him about his health problems, his dreams, this crazy thing that happened to him in the third grade.
An open book, very generous, as you say, with himself.
And people who are like that, everyone who meets them is their friend.
The problem is it's very hard to ever get to seven.
Because you started at six, very few people ever get to seven.
And I feel that I knew Andrew well enough to know how well I didn't know Andrew.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
I was very close to Andrew, but there was an inner circle.
And that inner circle was basically his wife, his kids.
That's right.
His person, Larry, like Larry Solov, who's his business partner.
There was this very, very core group of people with whom he, I think, really was true intimate.
But for a lot of other people, it was like, I knew him for 10 years.
And people who had met him for five minutes knew him about 98% as well as I knew Andrew.
And that was his quality.
That was his magic.
But that was also, it made him kind of a lonely person because of that.
Because if everybody is your friend, then you really don't have all that many friends.
And again, I think it's because he, on a fundamental level, did not know how to guard himself.
And, you know, that sounds like a rip on Andrew, but it isn't.
It's a quality.
It's a quality.
He was such an intimate person.
It was the best thing about him.
The way that we all met him is like just the, it's an apothecary.
It's a perfect example of who he was.
The way I met Andrew Breitbart is I was 17 years old and I was writing for the UCLA Daily Bruin.
He lived in Westwood.
And one day he picked up a copy of the UCLA Daily Bruin and there's this crazy kid writing a very conservative column.
And he emailed me.
He said, I'm this guy who works at Drudge Reports.
You want to come out with me and get a burrito?
That's really what he wrote.
And I wish I still had the letter.
And we went over to like a greasy taco joint down on Westwood Boulevard.
And I watched him pig out on tacos and I ate nothing and I'm sipping like seltzer water or something.
And he's trying to tell me dirty jokes because I'm wearing a yamaka and he wants to like make me feel off.
And that was so typically Andrew.
And I think in the last part of his life, you kind of missed that because he was so ensconced in the fight.
And so I think when people watch the documentaries about Breitbart near the end of his life, or when they read his book, Righteous Indignation, which is a good book, when you read all that stuff, I think that if you want to know Andrew better, watch the earliest tapes of Andrew.
Watch him on early Red Eye with Greg Guttfeld, who he made a thing, by the way.
Andrew got Greg Guttfeld his job.
I mean, if you, if you, like the number of people that Andrew put in certain positions, because he was just.
We all live in Andrew's world.
All of us are where we are in some way because of Andrew.
And that joy that he brought is his lasting legacy.
His wife, his kids, obviously are his personal legacy.
But the legacy that he really should leave with all of us is that we should be happy for our good fortune to be in this battle.
And we should approach the battle tomorrow with some of that joy that Andrew brought to it.
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So before we lose, Ben, Ben, could you catch us up on the unfolding situation in Ukraine?
What's happened in the last five days, the last 24 hours since all the pod 12 hours since the podcast this morning?
Yeah, so I mean, about a week ago, five days ago, the Russian army invaded Ukraine, unlike sort of prior invasions.
They didn't.
By the way, wait, a small country?
A small country in Europe.
Okay.
And then Russia's a big country on its borders.
When a big country goes into a small country, could you speak?
Yeah, like the vice president of the United States.
And so basically, Russia had been threatening for months that they were going to go into Ukraine.
It was unclear how far they were going to go into Ukraine.
I think that most people thought that they were going to solidify their grasp over what's called the Donbass region, which is a region of eastern Ukraine, which is largely Russian-speaking.
They had already grabbed onto Crimea and essentially annexed it in 2014.
And that had followed on their invasion of Georgia in 2008, which was met with very little world resistance.
And so Putin had been making these sorts of noises.
The Biden administration kept saying he's going to go into Ukraine.
preparing for some sort of major military action in Ukraine.
And then Biden kept giving off signals over and over and over again.
By signals, he literally said, if you invade Ukraine, we won't do anything.
Well, he said, he said, if it's a minor incursion.
He basically said just the tip.
He said, if it's a minor incursion, then we won't do anything.
And Putin took that to mean I can do whatever the hell I want because the West historically has not really done anything.
And if they do hit me with some sanctions, they'll be temporary and not much will happen.
And so he decides, I'm going to make this power move and I'm going to ensure my legacy.
It's sort of a Peter the Great move because Putin is not actually thinking in terms of USSR.
He's thinking in terms of Peter the Great or Catherine the Great or historic Russian leaders who are attempting to recreate the sort of Russian empire.
That's how he's been thinking for a very long time.
So he invades Ukraine and he's hit with some really harsh sanctions, sanctions that do not include the natural gas and oil industry because too much of Europe is dependent on that in the United States because Joe Biden's a moron, partially dependent on that as well.
We're importing hundreds of thousands of barrels of Russian oil even at the same time that we're levying sanctions.
But there's all sorts of financial sanctions that have basically crashed the ruble.
They've turned Russian bonds into meaningless pieces of paper.
Their economy is completely shut down.
Russia's invasion was at the beginning very slow going, pretty unsuccessful.
People thought that this is going to be a very quick and easy invasion.
Putin thought because he had convinced himself that Ukrainians were going to sort of act like the Afghans after the Taliban started to make advances and just completely disintegrate the defenses, which just go away.
He thought that he was going to be able to establish full air superiority.
He was not able to do that.
Even now, he still doesn't have full air superiority.
He thought it was going to be easy.
And so now he's kind of in a morass of his own making, and it's very difficult to see how this gets resolved.
And this is the real problem right now, because Vladimir Putin has to win.
If he does not win, there's every possibility that he's no longer the head of Russia.
And this guy is a murderer.
He is a thug.
He is a very, very bad man who has literally poisoned people on British territory, who's murdered political opponents, jailed political opponents, killed dissenters, invaded several sovereign countries.
And so if he feels as though he's not going to get a victory, he is going to do what he started to do today.
And that's over the last 24 hours, he started to full-on attack civilian centers, which is not a shock because he did this to Grozhny in Chechnya in 1999, 2000.
He killed several thousand civilians in an attempt to simply bring Grozhny to its knees.
He succeeded in bringing Grozhny to its knees to a certain extent.
And so the take is that he's going to continue to exert extraordinary military pressure, particularly on civilian centers.
The West has responded with sanctions.
They've responded with military materiel.
There's been no indication that NATO is going to establish a no-fly zone.
It would be foolish to establish, in my opinion, a no-fly zone because then you come into the possibility of direct conflict with the Russians.
And when you have a rogue dictator who's mainly interested in this territorial land grab, then he does not care if he has to knock down some American jets or if he has to unleash even a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine.
I don't think that we're on the verge of an all-out both sides nuclear war, but Russian doctrine sort of suggests that if you're losing in the battlefield, the possibility of unleashing a tactical is that if you're losing on the battlefield, the possibility of using a tactical nuclear weapon in a place like Kharkiv, the second biggest city in Ukraine, you might very well do that.
He's explicitly threatened.
Yes.
So the West basically has to do two things right now, in my opinion.
They have to continue to exert pressure, and they have to offer him some sort of off-ramp.
There's got to be an off-ramp because if there's not an off-ramp, then he's just going to devastate Ukraine.
We can sit here and we can continue to pump up Zelensky.
We can continue to pump up Ukraine.
We can watch as it turns into a guerrilla war that lasts for years at a time.
Ukraine almost certainly cannot actually win.
And for that reason, like it's horrible to think that you would reward this behavior, but probably what needs to happen is that Putin needs to get those eastern provinces.
If he withdraws his troops, he can keep the eastern provinces.
We have to let up some of the sanctions because there has to be a carrot as part of it.
And then you have to make an overture to Zelensky, too, which is that if Putin withdraws and just takes those two provinces, then NATO can establish a temporary no-fly zone and start rearming Ukraine or something.
I mean, it has to be that kind of a nobody's going to, and what has to happen is a deal that no one is going to like.
The only options here are deals that not everyone is going to like.
Because the other alternative is that Putin is going to continue to insert hundreds of thousands of troops.
He's going to establish complete air superiority and he's going to bomb Ukraine into the ground.
It is important to note that when you get to a situation like this where all the choices are bad, it's because mistakes have been made along the way.
Primary among them, the destruction or at least the thwarting of the American energy industry that could have just essentially isolated Putin entirely.
Well, and the green lighting of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
Yes.
Well, they're this pipeline, right, to cut out Ukraine for bringing his energy to Europe.
And Joe Biden essentially gave it the green light.
And he's going to say in his speech tonight, he's not going to say, oh, we're changing the energy policy.
It shows you that something is terrible.
Well, there's also the new world that's sort of being established on the back of this is not one I think a lot of people are going to like because it's not just that Russia and China are very much aligned and they're both in line with Iran.
It is also that we can talk all we want about how Germany is paying its share, which they should.
I mean, they should be paying 2% of their GDP toward military budgets.
But the complete rearming of Europe has not historically gone particularly well for the world.
Japan is talking about how maybe now they want a nuclear weapon on there.
So, I mean, if you are a non-aligned country right now, you want a nuke and you want a nuke yesterday.
Because the biggest mistake the Ukraine made was giving up its nukes in 1994.
Although its nukes were actually Russian nukes, it was not really in control of those nukes.
That story that's gone out that they gave up their nukes is not entirely right.
I mean, those nukes were Russian nukes that they didn't really have the capacity to take control of without staging stuff.
All they needed was one, though.
They had 5,000 stationed in their territory.
There is this fear also of escalation.
We're talking about non-aligned countries and neutral countries.
We've completely lost this sense of what are called buffer states, or even Switzerland in this battle is now taking aside.
Amazingly, it's a big Nazi pay.
And yet they're now signing on to Russian sanctions.
And there is a fear that Ukraine has been a buffer state between Russia, a relatively strong power, and Europe and the West, a very strong power.
And as Ukraine has had alternately more pro-Russian governments, alternately more pro-Western governments, this creates some tension.
But now if Zelensky is trying to apply for EU membership and trying to accelerate that process, the European Parliament has voted to advance that.
There will still be a long process.
But if you now are in a situation where Ukraine, right up on the edge, actually bordering, you know, the breadbasket of Europe is bordering Russia, is now a member of the European Union.
That would seem to me to be an escalation rather than an off-ramp.
And so it's hard to see at this point.
The problem is it's hard to ask Ukraine to continue to be a buffer state.
No, there were terrible decisions made over the last 10 years, 20 years, and crucially over the last 12 months that hasn't really led.
Let me make one outlying observation.
I know that China won't do this because I know that China is in league with Russia and they're so intent on humiliating us that they kind of like this.
If I were China, what I would do now is make peace.
I would force the Russians to make peace because then you're the big boy in town.
They need Russian oil, though.
They need Russian oil.
No, I understand.
Cigars and Propaganda00:02:45
They're the big boy in town.
What's my opinion?
I think China's already the big boy in town.
Well, it is the people that are winning in all of this.
But this is how you make it clear.
Yeah, and I totally agree that so much happened leading up to this.
And yeah, most crucially in the last 12 months.
But I think it's very difficult to discern.
I think a lot of people feel right now, it's very difficult to discern what is actually happening.
I mean, we started this entire talk talking about how nothing that we hear from Joe Biden tonight is going to be true.
And yet we seem to like switch our brains and think that everything that we're hearing about foreign wars is true.
So I find it interesting when we rely on the media for information and when we don't rely on the media for information.
And I think that we don't really know what the big play is in all this.
It feels like there's something more.
Like if this is really about taking out Russia, why aren't they talking about making America energy independent again?
Instead, they're saying, oh, this is an opportunity for us.
Now we should be talking about electric vehicles, Great New Deal.
And so it just, a lot of it, I think that more will come out with time.
Obviously, like, you know, what Russia is doing is absolutely terrible.
But I think there's a lot of information, a lot of things that are going on at play that are not being discussed just yet.
Because I don't know, whenever Hillary Clinton gets out and does any type of speech, I'm like, what are we missing?
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The Propaganda War Begins00:07:04
Part of the story, to your point, is also Ukraine is certainly winning the propaganda war.
Right.
And they've won that by a landslide.
Of course, in the West, they have a certain advantage because the institutions are on their side.
But very early on, for the first few days, there was just this barrage of just Hollywood sort of stories.
The ghost of Kiev, the Snake Island guys who said, go F yourself.
And it turns out that actually they surrendered.
The supermodels who are charging down to the front lines.
The eyelashes on them.
It turns out that they have that actually they're holding airsoft rifles.
And then a lot of the pictures of Zelensky himself actually were taken months ago, you know, and lots of things like that.
And I think that that makes sense for Ukraine to engage in war propaganda as part of any war.
And it would be malpractice not to do that.
But that does lend credence to this idea that it's actually, there's a lot that's happening.
It's sort of strange.
It's hard to discern exactly what's going on.
Like, for example, Ukraine says that they've killed 5,000 Russians already, which would mean that they've doubled American casualties in Afghanistan over the course of 20 years.
Maybe that's true.
I'll push on you just a little bit, Matt, because I do agree there's wartime propaganda.
I do agree that we've lost faith in our institutions.
I agree that our politicians lie to us.
All of that's true.
But we shouldn't lean on this propaganda situation that is happening.
Listen, it's the first social media war in modern nation states in Europe that's happened ever, right?
So there's just this constant flood of information and propaganda even possible that's never been possible at this level before.
But it isn't as though we know nothing.
Like we know that Russia has invaded Ukraine.
We know that Russia, a country with a military of almost 2 million, has invaded a country with a military of 200,000.
We know that invading a nation that doesn't want, you know, a very small nation has been invaded by, like, we do know these things.
We have photos from space of a 40-mile convoy, right?
It's also true that America didn't lose very many people by any historic metric in the war on terror because America is the only military on earth that can actually forward project power the way that we do.
We've spent 10 times as much money as the rest of the world combined for 60 years on our military.
Like the amount of capacity that America has is so enormous.
And we were fighting in truly primitive, in truly primitive lands.
When you start talking about Russia and Ukraine, you are talking about a situation where people are hurling far less sophisticated weapons at people with far less sophisticated tactics.
Do I think Ukrainians have killed 5,000 people?
I suspect all that is propaganda, of course.
But I do think that losses, you can't compare losses in a war like this to losses in a war like America goes into Afghanistan and uses highly precision weapons, satellite-guided munitions, the best-trained special operators ever to operate in human history against.
I agree with you.
And also, again, I don't blame, of course, Ukraine's going to do this.
It would be crazy not to because they have to get the West on their side, which it already would have been anyway, obviously.
But my only concern with the propaganda and why I think it's important to, first of all, I think the truth is important.
So we always have to discern truth from fiction.
But also my personal overarching concern is the United States of America and us not getting sucked into this thing that could potentially be cataclysmic and result in thousands, if not millions of American deaths.
A border dispute that has existed for a thousand years.
Right, right.
That for me is what I care about the most.
And so the effect of the propaganda when lots of Americans buy into it is that their emotions get tied up in it.
And then you start hearing more and more.
And I know the first day, everyone was saying, well, no one is suggesting that Americans would get involved militarily.
Fast forward a couple of days.
And next thing you know, you have prominent members of Congress actually saying.
You have one member of Congress and one member of the Senate.
But there's no serious move for there to even be no flies on.
Well, but that's also Saki was right there.
Also prominent members of the media.
I mean, there was Richard Engel yesterday who floated the idea that we go bomb Russian convoys.
So yes, it always starts that way.
First they're saying no one's saying it, then a few people are saying it.
And then you look at the polling data and more Americans are saying, well, maybe we should get involved in this.
And that's just my concern.
Fast forward another week, another two weeks.
Do people get sold in the middle of the middle?
I want to add to that.
I think that your point is obviously well taken and the war fever is a real thing and it does really happen to people.
But this is, you know, when I go to New York and I say to my friends and relatives, crime is really up, they frequently say to me, not in my neighborhood.
I say, your neighborhood is three blocks away from that neighborhood.
The world we're living in is a very, very small world.
This is actually on the border of Europe.
This is actually on the border of Poland.
This is on the place where wars begin.
And, you know, there is a point at which even knowing that a war would be disastrous, you have no other choice.
And that's the place you're trying.
That's the thing you're trying to avoid right now.
Ben is absolutely right when he says we don't want a no-fly zone because we don't want our pilots facing their pilots in the sky.
But at the same time, sanctions have historically not had the kind of effect we want.
And so I really think that this is a moment.
Germany gets this, oddly enough.
Germany gets this.
This is a moment when you change your policy.
This is the moment when you change the way you run your country.
And Joe Biden is not up to that task.
That means that we're going to need the people to be up to that task in a very decisive way.
And it's difficult because you're right.
So there is a way out of this, though, I think.
And it's been part of the battle of the last 10 years.
There was an article in CBS News just came out today over the real problem of the war is the war within the war, the transgender Ukrainians.
That's my favorite article.
Yes, they're not allowed out because they're men and they're supposed to fight to defend their country.
And so.
In fact, when they say women and children first, I like.
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm identifying today.
And so what this, I think, will remind a lot of liberals is that Ukraine is not your toy.
Ukraine is not this magical, mythical place that we've just decided is a liberal Western democracy with transgenderism and pride parades.
Ukraine is its own nation with its own interests and its own culture and its own way of viewing the world.
And I think it was a mistake for Ukraine to cozy up too much to NATO and to the European Union.
I think it was a mistake for Western governments to support that with money and with propaganda in 2013 and 2014.
I think what's probably most likely is, as you say, Putin's got to win.
Putin's got to have some kind of win here.
And I don't think the win is that Vladimir Putin is going to sit in Kiev and run that country himself.
I suspect what would happen is he will install some kind of puppet regime or some government that is more conducive to Russia's interests.
And that's what we had before 2014, and it's probably what we're going to have after this.
Only because the president's cabinet has begun entering the chamber, Ben Shapiro has to adjourn and go start working on his response to the State of the Union.
And so, Ben, many thanks to you.
Helix Sleep Quiz00:03:11
Godspeed.
Yeah.
Gamber damber samber do.
I want that to be your response.
I do want to say the only thing I want to close out on Ukraine is it is true that war fever can lead to a war.
Listen, the reason we don't want to enforce a no-fly zone is because we would decimate Russia.
The entire Russian military couldn't stand up against the American military for a week.
That's actually why we don't want to enforce the no-fly zone because we don't want to push Putin into a corner where nuclear weapons are his only option for inflicting damage on the West.
But it is almost always historically weakness that leads to major conflict.
The Second World War was created by the weakness of the West.
And so we can't simply take the position, we don't want America engaged in foreign conflict.
The end of American hegemony dramatically increases the chances of global conflict.
American hegemony has kept the peace for 60 years.
Nuclear weapons have kept the peace for 60 years.
The end of American hegemony will lead to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction into the hands of nations that care less and less and less about how those weapons get used.
We have to be strong.
Our foreign policy has to be strong.
This is the fundamental failure of Joe Biden.
We are in this situation today because of the weakness of Joe Biden, the literal goading by Joe Biden of Vladimir Putin over the last 12 months.
We have to have strength in the White House.
And if we don't have strength in the White House, global conflict is inevitable.
Peace has only ever been maintained in the 20th century and 21st century thus far by American peace.
With that said, you may be wondering, Jeremy, why are you grouchy?
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Presidential Monarchy Speeches00:03:02
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We are drawing near to the moment where everyone realized that Joe Biden is supposed to be here and he is not yet here.
We see Dr. Jill Biden walking into the chamber right now and taking her seat.
Soon, the president, in theory, will join us for what I'm sure will be a riveting discussion about the state of our union.
Candace, what are we going to get tonight?
Not much.
Not much.
I've listened.
At least I think her dress is lovely.
That's about the only thing I'm going to say tonight that's going to be a compliment.
I still think it's torturous to make us sit here and watch 45 minutes.
You know, the good thing is if anything goes wrong with the president on the podium, they can say, is there a doctor in the house?
And Joe Biden.
Don't worry, I'm here.
Let me at him.
You're a terrible president.
Just not right.
Yeah, it wasn't a very kind thing.
Drew, how many of these have you lived through?
Oh my God, 150.
I remember George Washington.
George Washington just sent a letter.
It was that.
He used to say, thank you.
Every president should send a letter.
I think I've told you guys one of the moments that really struck me during Obama's first year in office is he gave a speech, not a State of the Union address.
He had just been elected.
But this is a new thing.
It used to be that presidents gave their first State of the Union speech after they'd been in office for a year.
Now they all give a speech to a joint session like a month after they come into office.
And when Barack Obama walked up to the podium, he handed an envelope to the vice president and the speaker of the House.
And I realized how it's all pageantry.
Because the reason that presidents do that before a state of the union is because the document that they hand to the vice president, who is the president of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House, who, of course, is the head of the House of Representatives, that is fulfilling the constitutional requirement that the president deliver a state of the union address.
The speech is just fanfare and publicity.
And here Barack Obama was giving a speech that was not even the state of the union, but he was fulfilling the sort of in a vestigial way or in a symbolic way, he was handing because they don't even know why they do the things that they do.
It's a monarchical tradition, of course.
Of course it is.
But you know, the thing to remember about this is that the presidency is a kind of monarchical office.
I mean, the point of the executive, you don't want a full-on monarch, but the framers of the Constitution created it to embody that kind of spirited part of the government, right?
Remember those like Republican values they had where like George Washington would get up and like put on like a coat and say, oh, he's acting like a king.
Why Trump Talks About Lynching00:14:50
I want that back.
I want people to, these guys to just manage our resources, you know?
I do wish that if you're going to have the fanfare, you know, listen, I'm of Roman extraction.
We have a certain appreciation for these things.
I do wish they were good speeches.
I mean, I remember Trump gave one or two good ones.
A couple of good ones, yeah.
Yeah, Reagan gave, I think, like one good one.
Clinton's, he's were the worst.
I mean, his went on and on.
You do wish, though, if this is going to really embody the spirited aspect of your country, you know, give a rousing speech, buddy.
Especially since nobody listens to them.
They lay out their agenda and the Congress is like, well, I'm thanking God because if this had happened a week ago, they'd all be killing each other right now because they're not wearing masks.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But today, it's okay.
They're still doing the social distancing, though, right?
Is that a good question?
No, I think just no one showed up because there was a testing requirement.
Is that right?
So Rubio wouldn't show up.
Thomas Massey didn't show up.
I had him on my show a couple of weeks ago.
Massey, that's great.
Yeah.
He just said, I'm not showing up because it's just because I'm perfectly healthy and I don't need to submit to a test.
He's one of the few good ones.
He's great.
Yeah, he's great.
He didn't sign that anti-lynching law, which was a total.
I just, I think pro-lynching.
The pro-lynching.
Oh, my God.
Well, because lynching has to be illegal three times.
It's already illegal twice.
Now we've got to make a law to make it illegal a third time.
Yeah, well, I just want to say that.
And it also never happens.
Right.
It never happens.
It's happened once in the last 40 years.
I will tell you, though, as an Italian-American, the Italians were the victims of the lynching.
Wait, you're an Italian.
I don't know if you heard about that.
You know, the Italians were the victims of the largest mass lynching in American history.
That's true.
And so it's a very pro-Italian legislation they passed.
The other crazy thing, there was an academic study of the height of American lynching, which I don't know why this is a topic of conversation 70 years after lynching was a thing.
But during the height, the roughly, what, 58-year period of American lynching from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, there were an estimated 4,400 lynchings committed in the United States.
It's a big problem.
That's still a big problem.
4,400.
That is the number of people.
That's actually slightly more than the number of people who were murdered in just a dozen American cities just last year.
The Democrats are not putting forward any bill on how to stop the massive crime spike that they caused over the last two years.
They're solving a problem that was solved.
Well, part like Doctor Who, they're traveling back and forth.
Part of the way they get away with it, by the way, is that they expand the definition of lynching so that it's like any race-based violence.
So a Maude Arbery, they say, is a lynching.
Well, the thing about that, though, is that Maude Arbury's killers were convicted of murder and a hate crime.
So it's like, that's without this bill.
What do you need the bill for?
Another 30 years on top of the death penalty.
I don't know.
That was the other thing about the, so this anti-lynching law that they passed last night, it says that the maximum penalty for lynching is 30 years in prison.
They've actually lessened the penalty for lynching.
From death, yeah.
I don't know.
Call me a bleeding heart.
I think it should be stiffer than that.
I don't know.
That's criminal justice reform right there.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I just love how proud they all are of themselves when they do something that's absolutely meaningless.
Yeah.
They just can't pat themselves hard enough on the back for their bravery.
I think Joe Manchin has to answer for his hypocrisy.
A guy calls himself a Democrat, and yet he voted against slaughtering children.
I know.
Listen, buddy, be consistent.
Yeah, really.
Well, it is funny that in the very same night, they voted to pass historic anti-lynching legislation and also to lynch all the babies in America.
No country on earth has a savage law like that.
No other country allows babies to be killed.
North Korea, China, and Canada.
They did also try to.
They tried to pass a law against hair discrimination, which didn't go through.
But because that this is a what, you know.
We know that people are ⁇ racial minorities are protected just because they're racial minorities, but we also have to protect their heads as well because there's a specific type.
Maybe you have you experienced this, Candace?
Hair discrimination against racial minorities.
I have to say, I've experienced them.
I don't think it means what you do.
Oh, okay.
Sorry.
I can't say I have it.
I've experienced hair discrimination, but we knew it was coming when they started talking about people having to wear their hair a certain way to swim and things like that.
All these sports rules they've now taken out of context, which we should really just be about keeping people safe on the court, like not having dreadlocks running around.
And now they've made it like it's racial and this is my heritage and it's actually not.
So yeah, it's just ridiculous.
There's a good heritage pun in there somewhere, right?
There is.
We'll find it by the end.
Yeah, it'll give us something to think about.
I will say, I don't recall a State of the Union address this sparsely populated before.
It's really remarkable.
And this is voluntarily because before they did have social distancing last year, right?
Last year wasn't a State of the Union address, right?
Last year was just Joe Biden making a speech to a joint session of the United States.
I don't know.
If there's any chance of any president abolishing the State of the Union, it would have been Trump and he didn't do it.
So we're stuck with Donald Trump was going to get rid of an opportunity and stand up in front of the camera and give a speech.
Yeah.
Good point.
Donald Trump has some good qualities.
That is not one of them.
The only thing that I was upset with Trump about, it's not that he didn't get rid of the State of the Union, which I never expected, but he said he didn't add pyrotechnics or a bald eagle just swooping through.
I mean, the guy calls himself a showman.
I know.
That's outrageous.
Just hot babes, you know, in swimsuits.
The dance numbers.
I will tell you, though, when he brought Rush and then gave him the medal during the State of the Union, that was showmanship.
That was showmanship.
the chances that President Biden does the same thing with Anthony Fauci tonight will really be something to see.
The president is now entering the chamber to tepid applause from the handful of congressional leaders who are actually there.
A handful of boards.
Who wish there was some palazos.
He's not wearing a mask.
He's shaking hands with other people not wearing masks.
What a madman.
He's so reckless.
It is truly over.
It is truly over.
And we will take you now to the chamber and to the president of the United States, and we will see you back here as soon as the president concludes.
President of the United States just concluding his State of the Union with a declaration that America, a country with spiraling unemployment, with out-of-control inflation, with ending its hegemony around the world as our enemies begin invading Europe, is strong.
So there it is.
He said it's so.
It must be.
It's basically an executive order.
You can't even contest it in the courts.
The state of our union is strong.
Michael.
It was not a state of the union address.
It began for the first 10 minutes as a state of the Putin address, which talked about this war going on in Ukraine and didn't acknowledge all of the things we should have done in the last 10 years that Biden specifically should have done.
And then you saw the turn, which was the rest of the speech, which was Biden couldn't talk about anything good that happened on his watch.
He couldn't talk about anything good that he did.
And he did talk about a lot of good things.
Not very heavy on the specifics.
He was using broad language.
But he said, things are going to be really great when I do this next year, when I do this in five years, when I do this in 10 years.
It was all about the state of the union in his imagination in the future.
He couldn't actually talk about the present state of the union today because the state of the union today is extraordinarily weak.
Even the way that he ended it, he said, the state of our union is strong, which he had to say.
And he said, but it'll be stronger next year, as if to sort of make an excuse.
It was truly, I've watched so many of these for my whole conscious political life.
I've watched every one.
It was, I don't think I'm being hyper-partisan.
A lot of them are bad too, you know, on the Republican side too.
It was the worst, saddest state of the union I've ever heard.
The state of the union is strong and it will be stronger next year is the most condemning statement I've ever heard.
Yep.
I have to take exception.
You say he was short on specifics, but he did specifically say that we have to cut costs.
And the way to do that is to cut costs.
Yes.
Yes.
While also raising wages, which is a cost.
So I don't know exactly how that works.
He also said, though, that we have to end unemployment by adding jobs.
So I don't know.
I think end unemployment by just not being unemployed anymore.
It's like Terrace Hilton, stop being poor.
You wear this shit stop.
And of course, he ends on the bold sort of anti-cancer stance, which after watching COVID spike to record highs under his watch, he's going to turn his magic touch now to cancer.
So I'm a little disturbed by that.
I thought that the most significant thing in that speech, if there's anything significant at all, which really, you know, State of the Union, there never is, but if there's anything significant, it was the entire Democrat Party admitting defeat on the defund the police movement.
Because after two years of trying to defund the police, Biden just called for funding the police and got a standing ovation from every Democrat in the room there.
So this was every Democrat who specifically had said we should defund the police stood up to applaud funding the police.
And because, of course, they actually, not only did they try to defund the police, but in many places they actually did, or at least they reduced the funding of police significantly.
And we saw just total chaos ensue because of it.
And so this was a massive defeat for the Democrats.
But they get to celebrate their defeats with applause.
That's the, you know, that's what it makes you being a Democrat.
Yeah.
I have to say, first of all, I want to thank Jeremy the God King for providing this whiskey because I've been drinking steadily throughout the show and I'm still not drunk enough to have endured that state of the union with the calm.
No, you know, what really struck me about it was the rank dishonesty.
The defund the police was a perfect example.
Don't defund the police, fund the police, and the same people who had called for defunding the police standing up.
We're going to secure the borders.
In what universe are we?
It's the worst immigration crisis in American history.
It's amazing.
In the last 12 years.
And, you know, we talked for the first, what, I don't know, 20 minutes of the speech were about Russia.
What did he say we were going to do?
I mean, he said we were standing strong and we were standing together.
But what exactly were we doing?
And how did we get into that position?
How are we going to change after telling us, after telling us that Putin wasn't going to invade for years, when Putin did invade, why?
What went wrong?
And why weren't we changing our policies in that regard?
I thought, frankly, when he said fund the police, I thought we were going to have to sedate Kansas, Candace.
But the rank dishonesty and the fact that it was an empty speech, a speech that really had nothing, provided nothing to confront the things that we're actually confronting.
Crime, inflation, weakness throughout the world.
Those are the things that we're confronting, and everybody knows it.
You can't tell people that their jobs are better or they have more money when they don't.
They know they don't.
So it's just, I don't know, it's almost an insult to sit and listen to a guy lie to you like that for 45 minutes.
Candace?
I totally agree.
I mean, it's like, hey, Nancy Pelosi, if you wanted to dramatically rip up a speech based on the lies in it, this was your time.
You actually missed your moment.
I was saying to you as we were watching it, it actually makes you miss Obama, right?
Because at least when Obama lied to your face, it sounded nice.
He was a great orator and you went, okay, nothing you said was true, but it made me feel so good when you lied, right?
With Trump, you had the opposite where it was.
It never sounded good, but he was actually telling you the truth.
And with Biden, you get neither.
It sounds horrible, and he's telling you nothing but lies.
And it's frustrating because you know that it's so contingent on American ignorance.
Like this speech is something that has been dedicated to people that he views to be low information voters.
Nothing he said made any sense, right?
I mean, he talked about America, things are going to get cheaper when we bring the jobs back here and everything's made in America.
That's actually just fundamentally not true, right?
That's the whole reason why people are sending everything to China.
And that's because of government policy.
People don't understand economics 101.
That's the point.
They have the school systems focused on CRT, right?
You're turning children into toddlers, whiny toddlers, learning about LGBTQ issues, critical race theory, all these things that mean nothing.
So they don't understand what it actually means when a man sits up and really says, I'm going to give you a little more communism.
What we need is really price controls.
The very thing that's the reason that you're living in this disaster is because there's too much government involvement.
So he pivots away from the state of the European Union address for 20 minutes.
And then he goes on and talks about how COVID's been a horrible thing that's happened to our country.
Actually, no, it hasn't.
Government policy has been a horrible thing that's happened to our country.
And in response to horrible government policy, he's offering you more horrible government policy.
We're going to have price controls with insulin.
Again, relying on American ignorance not to understand that the reason our healthcare system is a mess is because we don't have free markets there.
We don't have price transparency.
Things that Trump tried to establish.
And the latter end was just him building a pipe dream, just like a pipe dream.
He said, here are some problems.
I'm actually going to offer no solutions.
And I'm actually the person that was behind the problems.
Very frustrating to watch.
But at least we're going to kill all the babies.
But yeah, but exactly.
And yeah, whatever that maternal, what was that weird frame?
It was the weirdest euphemism, because we've heard women's health care, reproductive rights.
These are weird euphemisms for abortion.
In this one, he said maternal health care.
Admitting it's a mother, it's a baby, and we're going to kill the baby.
Except for Joe Manchin, voted to kill babies up to the moment of birth.
That's savagery.
Yeah, you're just, every one of you is such an extreme right-winger.
What does our current out-of-control inflation look like?
Well, it looks like paying 47% more for fuel than you did less than a year ago.
It looks like paying 41% more for the same used vehicle if you buy it this year instead of last year.
It looks like paying almost 10% more to feed your family.
It looks like every dollar in your savings is worth less than it was one year ago.
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We are just seven minutes away from our very own Ben Shapiro giving his real State of the Union address, something you've never seen before, which is a response to the President's State of the Union address in real time,
Promised Spending, Gone Gone00:15:11
an actual reaction to what the president actually said instead of a focus group tested party committee approved boilerplate speech like we usually get and we will get at some point tonight from some governor somewhere who will never achieve any higher office because that's what happens when you give the official GOP response to the State of the Union address.
So again, probably seven minutes out from Ben giving his response.
A few things I noticed about the speech.
One, it was actually quite short for a modern State of the Union address.
It ran about an hour and 15 minutes.
That's on the shorter side of what these things run.
It's still Tuesday.
It was interminable.
It was so difficult to watch because the president said almost nothing.
The entire speech was so hollow.
It's difficult.
I've felt this about Biden from the very beginning.
It's difficult to watch the Democrats prop up a man at this advanced stage of his life in the way that they do.
It's bad for society when people in this age demographic are running the world.
It happens at moments of great global conflict.
If you look back at the First World War, we were in a very similar situation.
The people who were running Europe were all very advanced in age.
That isn't a sign of a healthy, thriving civilization.
It's one thing to say that we need adults in the room, that we need the wisdom of the ages to be present.
We don't want impestuous, youthful people who haven't been shaped and seasoned by reality.
But you also don't want people who are past their prime.
You don't want people who don't have stakes in the game.
It's very easy for an 80-year-old man to say that we're going to combat inflation by spending off all of our money.
He will not be here to pay any of the consequences of these policies that he's foisting upon the American people.
I think global conflict is upon us in particular because the boomers have been unwilling to move on from the stage.
Biden's actually a pre-boomer.
Not by much, but he's technically a pre-boomer.
But the boomers, almost all of whom actually gave us all of this left progressivism, all this left movement since the Second World War, are now like people who hit a patch of ice trying to grasp the will as hard as they can and turn against the momentum.
It's fair to say they won't leave if we keep electing them, right?
Well, they keep electing themselves.
I mean, the beauty of the boomers is that they are the boomers.
They're a very large demographic.
And they didn't have many kids, also.
Yeah, they didn't have many kids, and their kids don't have many kids.
So in one sense, I think they keep electing themselves.
Because I completely agree with this, and especially now when technology is changing everything and the internet is changing everything, you know, younger people understand it better.
I would rather, I was watching the Super Bowl and you're watching these two young coaches go against each other using new techniques.
That's what I want to see in government.
actually want to see.
I'd rather have an impetuous young person in government today at this particular moment.
The beauty is even I'd settle for someone in their 60s.
Yeah, exactly.
To me, that is an impetuous young person.
You know, I mean, seriously.
On this point of the really sad, lethargic kind of aged room, the saddest part of the whole speech to me was when Biden made some stupid point.
And then at the script that they were all following, they all stood up, the Democrats, and tried to chant USA as if they were Republicans who actually sincerely like USA.
So the Democrats, who have told us now, not just for 12 months, but for decades, that America is evil.
These are people who protest the American flag.
America.
Where was all that stuff?
You know, he talked about transgenderism at the end, but where was all the woke garbage that they've been stuffing down our throats for years?
It's a midterm term year, Drew.
I don't know if you know that.
November is coming.
It's gone.
Well, if it's gone, it's gone.
If it's gone announced, we are now rejecting everything we've told you for the last 20 years.
That's what we're doing.
Not really.
They're just saying stuff.
They're just saying.
There's no policy he's implemented to change anything.
He's just saying stuff.
The guy has a sub-35 approval rating, too.
Nothing he said tonight will amount to anything.
He has absolutely no political capital.
And in a midterm election year, Congress is going to have no will to act on any of his agenda.
So really, we just wasted an hour and a half of our lives.
And if you're alive, no, but we're engaging in political theater of the high, you know, it's of the highest order, except the quality of it's quite low.
You remember all it is?
Bill Clinton shows up to a State of the Union.
What does he say?
He says, the era of big government is over.
He says, I've heard the voters.
I get it, guys.
And he changes course.
That was a significant moment.
To your point, Candace, to what we've all been talking about, there was nothing significant.
It wasn't takeaway longer.
Nothing will change.
Clinton's lack of integrity was the best thing about it.
Because he did change his mind because he followed the voters.
Yeah.
So we're two minutes out from Ben Shapiro's real State of the Union, the first actual State of the Union rebuttal of our lifetimes.
And I got a peek during the speech at some of what Ben was working on.
He was texting with me.
It's going to be absolutely terrific.
I thought it was canceled.
He has something to rebut to.
Nothing happened.
I think the whole speech will be the State of the Union kind of sucks.
Joe Biden's old.
Enjoy your night.
He didn't say anything.
Nothing happened that entire thing.
I mean, just absolute garbage.
It's nonsense.
And it's sad, too, because I don't think this will work again because we keep talking about there is a shift happening, especially when he makes this pitch about small businesses.
You just fought small businesses in court for a year, trying to tell them what they had to do.
You didn't care if everyone was going to lose their jobs over choosing not to get a vaccination.
He made a pitch towards the end about children.
You just literally fought parents, you know, said they were domestic terrorists and we're going to enable our Department of Justice to go after them.
So it was almost like he's saying one thing and yet he's done the exact opposite and expects American people to forget.
He also said on that point, he also said that we have to stop treating each other like enemies.
Yeah.
And this is the guy who said that PTA moms are domestic terrorists.
And that half the country is neo-Nazis and Bull Conner.
He said that like a month ago.
Every part of the speech in some way was fund the police, right?
Every part of the speech was just going back on things that the same guy's been saying.
That's all the time we have for tonight.
Thank you for joining us for Backstage State of the Union.
Here is Mr. Ben Shapiro.
Ladies and gentlemen, we gather here tonight to mourn the state of our nation because the state of our nation is pathetic.
And it is pathetic in the main because of the president of the United States.
As it turns out, we all should have listened to Barack Obama.
In 2020, former President Obama said something simple yet profound about his former vice president, a man he had labeled his brother.
He said, don't underestimate Joe's ability to F things up.
Barack Obama was right.
Joe Biden came into the office on the wings of eagles.
He was handed a working vaccine and a distribution plan for that vaccine.
He was handed an economy that had been placed into an artificial coma in order to prevent the spread of COVID, but that was about to rebound to record growth rates.
He was handed a stable foreign policy and he had been blessed with the unending bounty of sycophantic media coverage welcoming him into the Oval Office with an approval rating of nearly 56%.
What did he do with these advantages?
He presided over perhaps the worst first 14 months of any presidency since the Civil War.
And unlike Abraham Lincoln, our current crisis is entirely of Joe Biden's making.
On issue after issue, Joe Biden is not merely wrong, he is aggressively wrong.
He is not merely foolish, he is stubbornly foolish.
Joe Biden became president with one goal, to enshrine himself in history as a great leader.
Today, we can safely say that he is one of the worst leaders in American history.
On foreign policy, Joe Biden has made America a laughing stock.
Our enemies don't respect us, they don't fear us, they laugh at us.
Biden promised stability.
He promised he would be the adult in the room.
Instead, he has acted like a toddler, whining, muling, throwing tantrums, and then, in the end, capitulating.
He precipitously withdrew from Afghanistan for no apparent reason and with no actual strategy, destroying a country for which America had expended thousands of lives and trillions of dollars by handing it over to a group of eighth century radical Islamist barbarians.
Those barbarians promptly blew up 13 American service members.
And in retaliation, Joe Biden's Reaper drones eviscerated an innocent family, including seven children.
Now, millions will starve, thousands will be sold into sex slavery, and terror groups will reconstitute on the very soil from which the attacks of September 11th were launched.
And thousands of Americans were left behind to suffer under the Taliban.
Joe Biden cut off the Keystone XL pipeline and greenlit the Russian Nord Stream II pipeline, enriching Vladimir Putin and destroying America's energy independence.
Then he proceeded to futz about uselessly as Putin prepared and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, all of which paves the way for a Chinese attack on Taiwan and more aggressive Chinese moves in the South China Sea.
And when it comes to our own borders, Joe Biden has ushered in the greatest wave of illegal immigration in modern history.
In his first year, Joe Biden's administration was on track for 2 million border apprehensions.
The reason is clear.
Illegal immigrants have been openly telling media members they're here because they believe Joe Biden will welcome them.
Meanwhile, on our northern border, Joe Biden has stood in solidarity with Justin Trudeau as he claimed emergency powers to crush freedom in Canada.
But at least Joe Biden has brought transgenderism and diversity, equity, and inclusion to the Defense Department.
Don't you feel safer already?
On the economy, Joe Biden has somehow turned a historic recovery into a chaotic nightmare.
For four decades, inflation had not been a persistent problem in American life.
Today, inflation rates are running at a four-decade high, thanks to his socialistic spending plans and ridiculous regulations.
Wage gains have been erased.
Gas prices are emptying wallets, and the hundreds of thousands of small businesses that went dark thanks to democratic-induced lockdown policies will never come back, erasing the life savings, dreams, and jobs of millions of Americans.
We face future stagnation thanks to our unsustainable $30 trillion national debt.
Joe Biden blames supply chain problems, of course, but at least Joe Biden's transportation secretary, Pete Budigej, has been on the case.
I mean, when he's not taking two months off for paternity leave, well, nobody in the media seems to care.
On crime, Joe Biden has consistently sided against police and with those who would make their job harder.
He has unleashed his Department of Justice on police departments all over the country.
And innocent Americans, many of them black, have paid for his soft-on-crime policies with their lives.
A dozen major cities have recorded the highest number of homicides ever in the United States.
But at least his vice president did help bail Black Lives Matter rioters out of prison.
And then there's our society.
Joe Biden has made nearly every aspect of our society worse.
Joe Biden promised America unity when he entered office.
Instead, he labeled his fellow Americans enemies.
He encouraged businesses to bar the unvaccinated, even those with natural immunity, from public spaces.
Then he sought to have them fired from their jobs en masse in the single largest executive overreach in modern American history.
Joe Biden treated political dissenters as scum of the earth.
Biden said those who didn't agree with his plans to federalize voting procedures were aligned with Jim Crow and the Confederacy.
Biden's Justice Department cracked down on parents after being encouraged to do so by the National School Boards Association, which encouraged the DOJ to treat parents as domestic terrorists for opposing the indoctrination of their children into radical gender and race theory, for simply wanting to determine how their kids were educated.
Joe Biden's administration slurred traditionally moral Americans as retrograde bigots for the great sin of believing that men are men and women are women.
Joe Biden's White House encouraged social media to shut down critics for misinformation and define misinformation as anything the White House didn't like.
And then he and his lackeys said he was doing this in defense of the science.
As it turns out, Joe Biden is not merely a brutal failure of a president.
He's an aspiring tyrant held back only by the strength of our constitutional structure.
A structure he now wishes to overthrow by trashing the filibuster, issuing unconstitutional executive orders, and at least threatening to pack the Supreme Court.
And, of course, Joe Biden is a liar.
He doesn't lie as well as he used to.
He's no longer capable of speaking smoothly or coherently.
But if a man spends a lifetime lying, he's not going to start telling the truth when he enters his eighth decade.
Tonight, Joe Biden lied and lied and lied again to you.
For example, Joe Biden told you tonight that his plan to fight inflation will lower your costs and lower the deficit.
He said he would lower inflation by pouring more cash into the economy on top of the trillions he has already spent while we are $30 trillion in debt.
That is an insane lie.
Build Back Better would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, increase the federal budget deficit by $3 trillion over the next 10 years if all Biden's proposed temporary programs became permanent, which is what he wants.
And pouring the gasoline of government spending onto the raging fire of inflation is a perfect way to increase costs.
Only a fool would propose it.
Maybe that's why Joe Biden was telling you until the last five minutes that inflation would be temporary.
And Joe Biden told you that his American Rescue Plan, his massive boondoggle stimulus plan, created jobs, lots of jobs.
He said he created 6.5 million jobs.
That is another lie.
There is no evidence Biden's spending produced one job.
Nonpartisan projections for job growth in 2021, not including that American Rescue Plan, showed higher job growth than Biden produced.
Joe Biden said, we prepared extensively for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
That was untrue.
We were manifestly unprepared.
We reacted, as the rest of the world did and should have.
But had Joe Biden been prepared, perhaps he could have helped deter Russia's invasion rather than encouraging Vladimir Putin's miscalculation.
Joe Biden also told you tonight that corporations and the wealthiest Americans aren't paying their fair share of taxes.
That, again, is a lie.
The highest income Americans pay nearly all net income taxes after government benefits in the United States.
Joe Biden said that inflation could be blamed on exploitation by corporations.
Another lie.
Inflation is a monetary phenomenon.
Corporations didn't get more greedy last year.
Joe Biden just became president.
And Joe Biden said, we will never just accept living with COVID-19.
Another lie.
Most Americans have been living free since vaccines became available.
Only democratic panic mongering has prevented more Americans from doing the same, not COVID itself.
Joe Biden said tonight that the right to vote is under assault.
Another lie.
Widespread voter suppression is not an issue in the United States.
Joe Biden simply means he wants to rig the voting rules the way he prefers.
Lie after lie after lie.
Enough.
Enough of Joe Biden.
Enough of his bizarrely incompetent vice president who has failed upward into every job she has ever held and who can't seem to keep a straight face when asked a straight question.
Enough of his Senate majority leader who spends more time worrying about being primaried by an Instagram communist than worrying about passing solid bipartisan legislation.
Enough of his Speaker of the House who kneels in kentee cloth in the Capitol rotunda to protest America's supposed racism, then goes home and eats gelato in front of her sub-zero fridge as businesses are forced into bankruptcy by her preferred policies.
America Deserves Better00:01:55
America deserves better.
America deserves a president who sides with parents rather than corrupt teachers unions that shut down schools and mask toddlers and indoctrinate kids into the perverse lies of gender theory and the overt bigotry of critical race theory.
America deserves a president who sides with the police who protect law-abiding citizens rather than the criminals who target them or the Black Lives Matter radicals who slander America as systemically racist while pocketing tens of millions in cash.
America deserves a president who sides with innovators rather than the jealous plutocrats who seek to steal wealth they never created and use it to pay off their friends.
America deserves a president who sides with freedom of speech rather than demanding that social media companies crack down on everything he doesn't like.
America deserves a president who sides with the blue-collar workers who pay his salary, not the blue check marks on Twitter.
America deserves a president who sides with those who take their families to church every Sunday, not those who pledge to blot out our shared Judeo-Christian heritage from public life.
America deserves a president who sides with America's allies rather than surrendering to America's enemies.
America deserves a president who sides with the Constitution rather than seeking to rewrite it to push forward his bureaucratic tyranny.
We are more than a year into Joe Biden's presidency.
That year is an unblemished record of failure, viciousness, and lies.
Too many Americans have been told by the radical left and its compliant lackeys in the media that America is rooted in racism and bigotry, that freedom is dangerous, that if we listen to the experts and delegate control over our lives to them, all will be well.
Too many Americans listened.
And so we are in the midst of a great American decline.
But that decline is reversible.
It starts now.
Attend your local school board meetings, demand an end to the radical indoctrination of your children.
Join campaigns in your cities and states for candidates who care about your rights.
Vote Joe Biden's enablers out of Congress and the Senate in November, and then vote Joe Biden out of office in 2024.