Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, and co. dissect Biden’s 2023 State of the Union as a rambling, gaslighting spectacle—mocking his 6.5% inflation claims while ignoring systemic failures like plummeting literacy rates—while framing Sam Smith’s Grammy "worship" performance as mainstream Satanism. They link Hollywood’s transgressive imagery to cultural decay, dismiss the Chinese spy balloon as a distraction from Pfizer’s gain-of-function research, and ridicule Biden’s Tyree Nichols narrative for ignoring Black officers. The panel concludes his speech was a performative Trojan horse for progressive policies, with his cognitive decline possibly a calculated Democratic strategy to avoid accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
You're about to hear a very special Daily Wire backstage featuring Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Michael Canolis, Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, and me.
Join us as we talk about the Grammys' Chinese spy balloons, Biden's State of the Union speech, and so much more.
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Thanks for listening.
Madam Vice President, Mr. Speaker, my fellow Americans, welcome to the Daily Wire backstage.
I am Jeremy Boring.
I'm joined by Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro.
Andrew Klavan.
Mm-hmm.
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This is going to be basically what you're getting from us all night tonight.
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Satanic Rituals and Worship00:08:40
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Well, because 40% off may not be enough to buy the president, but it's enough to influence the culture.
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Guys, the last time we were all together, of course, it was election night, and it was disappointing, not as disappointing as having to watch the State of the Union, of course.
And Stephen Crowder was with us, which just goes to show that things happen really fast in our business.
Again, not State of the Union speeches.
They're interminable.
And the Grammys had not come out as openly satanic.
It's true.
It's true.
Sponsored by Pfizer.
So on the nose.
I'm telling you, God is just his writing is, it's really degraded over the past decades.
This writing is so on the nose.
He's casting like weird German Nazi-esque characters as the head of the World Economic Forum.
And he's got, like, and he's got the president's son being like a drug-addicted derelict who's taking money from the Chinese probably, and dad leaving classified documents next to the Corvette.
And they already used that storyline already.
And like, this is just, this is lazy, lazy writing, Chinese spy balloons.
And now the Grammys going totally satanic.
I will say about the Grammys going satanic that I think it does say something a little bit deeper about our culture, that Joe Biden was there.
There was a time when satanic imagery was at least fringe, right?
It was the counterculture, and it was rebelling against the culture.
And now it's just the culture.
It's what we just call the culture.
And the reason for that, we're going to get into your John Milton's Satan is the villain of the piece in Paradise Lost, right?
His whole thing is that he's rebelling against God, not because he's doing anything good or anything noble or anything true or beautiful, but because he would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.
And over the course of time, I think Western culture now sees Satan as the hero.
And Satan is the hero because Satan is narcissistic and into himself.
And that's exactly what you saw at the Grammys, a bunch of people who are narcissistically prancing around calling themselves non-binary gender, queer, transgender people.
Who was it you said was there?
Joe.
Joe Biden.
Dr. Joe.
Oh, God.
The surgeon's tired.
Oh, yeah.
God damn it.
I always mess that up.
I always mess that up.
It's a very good thing.
That's what's happening.
Because my lad's a real doctor.
That's what people don't understand.
When we talk about how the left is satanic or a lot of pop music is satanic, and most of it is satanic, but it's not theologically satanic.
Like, they're not literally worshiping the devil as far as they understand it.
They're worshiping what the devil worship, which is the self.
So it's kind of like a secular Satanism.
At the same time, I think we should also recognize that there's this, you know, the left likes to use the term gaslighting, which is all they do with things like this, because part of the reason that they do it is they can have the satanic ritual being broadcast by CBS.
And then conservatives react to it by saying, hey, look, there's a satanic ritual on TV.
And then the next day you get the headlines from the Daily Beast and all those saying, well, conservatives with their conspiracy theory that there was a satanic ritual in the Grammys.
But it's what literally happened.
We're just observing it.
It's a face tattoo syndrome, right?
It's like when you go into the Starbucks and the barista has a giant face tattoo and you're like giving a weird look.
He's got a face tattoo.
And then he's like, what are you staring at?
It's your face tattooed.
That's what I'm saying.
But it brings up the point of Joe Biden was there that they are now the culture and we are the counterculture.
We should stop reacting to them and just let them react to us because they do.
But they baited usually.
But if they had gotten up, if we had gotten up and sung Jesus Loves Me, This I Know, they'd have gone insane.
We should do it that way.
I mean, I would have gone insane too.
That song is terrible.
I would deserve terrible.
But the one thing is, though, when you say that they don't worship Satan per se.
They actually do worship.
They actually do worship something satanic.
I mean, there are only two ways to look at life.
One is that your body is your real you and your lust and your desire is your real you.
And the other is that your lust and desire are in the way of something even higher.
They're part of your life, but there's something even higher that you're striving for.
And what they're saying is, no, they're not.
And unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned, that's what rock and roll has been saying.
It started.
So it's only coming to fruition and it's coming to fruition in the dullest.
That number was so boring and so anodyne.
Well, do you know what's so sad about it?
With Sam Smith in particular, Sam Smith is actually, I think, a talented pop musician.
He's got the voice of an angel, now the voice of a demon.
And his songs are pretty good.
And what was amazing is his biggest hit, the one that I knew him from, was I Know I'm Not the Only One.
You know, you say I'm crazy, but you don't think I know what you've done.
And it's about this marriage where the husband goes out and cheats and it's falling apart and it's presented as this terrible tragedy.
You like that song?
I do actually like that song.
I think there's a lot of things about Michael.
No, listen, I'm a pop culture maven, you know.
But it's sung beautifully.
It's got a lot of longing and tragedy to it.
This song was about the exact same topic.
In fact, it followed the exact same formula right down to the seconds of the time codes.
The difference is this was about how funny and hot and titillating it is when daddy goes to the body shop and gets hoochie-hoochie or whatever.
And so it's so sad because he had an instinct toward beauty.
Then he sells his soul to the devil and it didn't even work.
It was a crappy song and the ratings were in the gut.
Michael, I really hate to tell you Santa's not real here, but all of his prior music, which I absolutely adore.
I love the Catholic reimagining of it.
It was not about a marriage between a man and a woman.
It was about these gay affairs.
No, wait, he's a gay guy?
Yeah.
Yes, but it was music about love and about loss.
And his music was so beautiful.
And what's really happened, because I question this myself, it's you were so talented.
You had everything.
You made it.
People were listening to your music.
Why did you have to give yourself to this sort of demonic nature that we're seeing inside of him?
What happens when you get to Hollywood that they basically say, okay, now you just have to do a demonic ritual to prove that you're really one of us?
The most bizarre part of the entire performance is a standing ovation at the end, by the way.
You can see a couple of faces.
I think like J-Lo and Ben Affleck were maybe for a second, like, should we be clapping to this or are we actually at a satanic ritual?
But they got a standing ovation.
Like, no one in the room went, okay, this might be a little far.
And they keep moving the goalpost.
By the way, this is not the first time that they went full satanic at the Grammys.
WAP.
Can we forget the WAP performance?
She was having a lot of time.
You cannot.
I will never be allowed to.
You will not be allowed to is an expert on all matters WAP.
And, you know, it's been going this way.
I think this time is the first time that they just were so in your face.
First, it's a conspiracy theory.
The left, you know, we always say it's satanic, it's demonic, Hollywood's evil.
And then they go, oh, no, we're not, no, we're not.
And then they do this.
And they acknowledged it, too.
You saw CBS tweeted out.
They said, in response to Sam Smith, said, we are ready to worship.
And it made me think, 1952, CBS would not allow I Love Lucy to use the word pregnant, so scandalous was that word.
Now, CBS News is essentially saying, hail Satan.
And it cannot be, you can't convince me that it's an accident that that was going into the break sponsored by Pfizer.
Of course it was intentional.
Of course it was intentional.
It was.
No, because look, we're a conservative media company.
We sit around thinking, okay, how do we own the lives today, right?
I mean, that's one of the things we think about.
To drink their delicious tears.
Because it's so tasty and it fills the tumblers.
They think the same way.
They're a news network.
And if you think that it was an accident, it was a mere coincidence that Pfizer was the commercial right as the devil is walking off stage.
I got to bring it in.
There's what you were saying.
One high point, though, was that Ben Affleck's face, since you mentioned Ben Affleck, it did reflect how I feel about having to listen to the State of the Union.
I just want to point out that Matt Walsh's laryngitis voice is the sexiest voice on the panel tonight.
And for that reason, Matt, I think you should read the first ad.
Yeah, well, speaking of Satanists, that's probably not the right intro to.
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One other thing, by the way, is the uh I think it's worth noting that the guy that was performing that song with Sam Smith, Kim Petrus, right?
Purity Grift and Violations00:13:36
And they won, it was a big moment because it's two white males won best pop duo because they both don't identify as white males.
But Kim Petras transitioned surgically to become a female at the age of 16.
And this is something we're told, of course, never happens.
Well, we don't do surgical transitions of minors.
Yet, like one of the biggest pop stars in the world right now, that's literally what happened to him.
You know, I think also his real name is Tim, which is kind of clever to go from Tim to Kim.
And he goes up and he says, Look, people say that this performance was religiously not cool.
You might say it's actually burning with the eternal fires of hell.
But, you know, it's not cool.
And he says, but look, I've always been interested in religion.
But religion doesn't want me because I'm trans.
And I thought, you know, look, religion is a habit of virtue and justice to render to God what he's due.
Religion wants you.
God wants you.
God loves you.
If you say that, well, the condition of my going to church or being religious is that you have to pretend that I'm a woman, you're demanding that everybody affirm a lie.
And that's something that religion cannot do.
Oh, come on.
Shockingly, I know.
So it's like, don't, you know, these guys always do this, though.
They say it's God's fault.
It's the church's fault.
They don't want me.
They don't want me.
There's a point to what Drew was saying earlier about how anodyne the actual number was.
And it was.
I mean, it was almost bizarrely sexless.
Like, it's satanic, but there's nothing sexy about it or interesting, really.
The same with the walk performance, by the way, wasn't actually sexy.
I tend to agree, obviously.
I mean, I think that one of the things that happens is that when the taboo becomes the culture, there is no more forbidden for people to even be tempted by.
And this is one of the things that you're seeing in our culture is that, you know, by every available poll, married people have better sex lives than people who are single because what they're doing exists in the boundaries of love and also within boundaries of commitment.
But there's also something to the idea that the human being is constantly seeking the new and the fresh or whatever it is.
When nothing is new and nothing is fresh, and you've made all the taboos just the mainstream culture, there's nothing left to transgress.
So when Madonna was doing the kind of virgin slut routine back in 1980, and that's what they call it.
It's not my term for it.
That's sort of the cultural term for it.
When she was doing the kind of taking advantage of the imagery of the Virgin Mary and then subjecting that to very sexy movement, then the idea was that she was subverting expectation, but there was no expectation left for them to subvert.
And so how exactly do you transgress?
When there's nothing left to transgress, it becomes very difficult to be transgressive other than ideologically transgressive.
I'd like to add, I talked about this on my podcast because I was very interested in this.
Like, why is he doing this?
And I started talking about just the actual meaning of the word diabolical, and I played a Catholic priest.
There we go.
Very proud of that.
Obviously, the actual meaning of the word diabolical, where it comes from, and what it means is to separate and what they're actually aspiring to do.
You go, why put on this diabolical performance?
And really, when the serpent comes up to Adam and Eve, and one of the first things that they recognize after they bite into the forbidden fruit is that they feel shame, right?
Which means in order for Satan to assert dominance, he needs to remove people from their shame.
He needs to separate them from this wholesomeness and this goodness, right?
And to say, there's actually nothing wrong with you being naked.
Why do you even feel that?
So you see that Hollywood is kind of pushing for people not to think that there's anything to be shameful for.
And the androgyny.
There was a story this week that actually made me want to move away from Earth.
you know how sometimes you think i want to get out of the country but this made me want to leave the planet was this girl on the news room yeah Yeah, yeah, really.
But there was this girl on YouTube who does a show.
I think she's a gamer girl.
Twitch.
She calls herself QT Cinderella on Switch, right?
That's right, Switch the Gamer Channel.
And somebody made a mock porn of her.
They put her into what's it called?
Deep fake.
A deep fake porn thing of her.
And she was shattered.
She went online, and it was absolutely heartrending.
I mean, it was such a cruel, low, stinking thing to do.
And at the same time, she was sitting there going, you know, F the internet, F everything.
And I thought, well, yeah, you know, like, it's not her fault that the culture fell apart, but it did, and she is part of it, and she's in it, and this is what people are doing to one another.
It was one of the most disgusting acts, and conservatives were laughing at her for crying about it.
And I just thought, like, you know, it's like taxi, could we go to Mars, please?
Because I think that this is, you know, the results of worshiping Satan are not good.
They're not fun.
They're bodies stacked in rows.
They're women being abused, people treating each other like garbage.
Part of the reason, not to take this into the direction I'm talking about porn again, because I feel like that happens on every show now.
But the reason why, because I saw some of that too, conservatives were laughing at the girls who were in the deep fakes.
And the reason they were laughing about it is because the conservative argument against porn has always been this kind of like practical, well, porn feeds the sex trafficking industry and it's bad.
It's like those kinds of arguments.
And then you do AI or deep fake.
And then now those conservatives are out of arguments against porn because there's not any actual person involved.
But what they lost is like, what does porn do to, like, what is it fundamentally?
What does it do to the person consuming it?
What does it do to the culture that allows it?
We never had those arguments.
And there's, well, there's three kinds of beings.
We're just talking about demons, right?
And some beings are purely body.
They're corporeal beings.
And some beings are pure spirit.
That's angels and demons.
And then we are hylomorphic.
We're both body and spirit.
And the problem with porn is it just treats us like animals.
It treats us like we're pure meat.
And then when we see that, even people who have gotten accustomed to it in the culture, when you see that, when someone violates you and puts your head on a body or I don't know, whatever they did in the AI porn, you just think this is a violation, not just of my body.
It's obviously it's not of my body.
It's a violation of my soul.
This is, I think, one of the broader points that ties back into what happened with the Grammys and the reaction to it.
It's why the libertarian instinct, which is, well, if you don't like it, just turn it off.
The question is not whether people have the freedom to turn things on or turn things off.
The question is, what does it do to the common pool of culture in which we all live when this sort of stuff is promulgated by the biggest institutions in our culture?
We shouldn't be arguing over whether someone has the right to do it or not have the right to do it.
That's actually a secondary question.
When the primary question is, is this a good thing or a bad thing?
And people refuse to even have that argument.
They're so consumed with the secondary question of what we ought to do about it that they completely elide the first question, which is, as a society, can we agree that this stuff is just bad?
No, about that.
Well, no, we can't.
And this actually goes, I mean, obviously, the president of the United States' wife is there when a single- Well, the president of the United States is there.
The effective president, the de facto.
But I want to say that there's another piece of this that, Candace, you hit on, which is that it was actually boring, that it was sexless, that it's anodyne, that it's joyless.
And I've been thinking a lot about, you know, people love to call us grifters.
And they like to call us grifters because sometimes we say things that our audience disagrees with, which I always think that's really funny.
So you mean that in order to be authentic, I'm willing to say things that might risk some of our money going away.
That makes me a grifter.
But the greatest grift of all is the purity grift.
In politics, it's the political purity grift.
And the political purity grift says, whatever moment we're in, you must be so truly that moment that you can always stab anyone on your own side who isn't perfectly, absolutely in line with this exact moment.
But of course, you can't actually apply that across any period of time because human beings are messy, human circumstances are messy, politics changes.
Like all the people who are right now political purists, you know, if you don't support Donald Trump, they all voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.
Every one of them voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.
And if you've reached a point of political purity where you're like, Paul Ryan is the scourge of the earth, Kanye may have had a point about the Jews.
You've reached a point where this political purity nonsense reveals itself as a grift.
And in a way, what I think you're watching at the Grammys is just the left's version of the political purity grift.
Why does a guy who is so talented, who can put together such beautiful music, who can truly transcend politics, can transcend moments, can touch us all?
We've all, with all of our diverse points of view, been just as enthralled with his music as anyone on the left has been enthralled.
Why is he putting out something that means not only nothing does, it means nothing to them, because it is a virtue signal.
It is a way of appeasing the political purity grift on his side.
And the political purity, the true grift in politics is to never authentically be what you are or say what you believe for fear that the dominant power of your tribe will reject you for this.
In their case, the deafness is not a matter of fact.
I'm like, none of you thought this was what you're doing.
Because if you don't stand up, you're not pure.
You're not surviving the purity test.
That's right.
And that's the whole point of liberty is we should all be disagreeing with each other.
I mean, that is the great thing about this place.
We've all been fighting with each other since we started.
But our conservatism consists of being concerned about liberty and the things that make liberty work.
I mean, I don't only think that it's bad because people are going to do things that are bad if they're free.
I think that there comes a point when it's actually threatening to the body politic of a free country to do certain things.
And I think that, look, there's plenty of things that you can do in the privacy of your home that I might disapprove of that aren't going to pick my pocket or break my leg and aren't going to threaten the polity.
But some of this stuff, when you have the establishment, the Dr. Joe Bidens of the world, supporting this kind of garbage, which is not just artistically bad, but it's also morally bad, something has gone terribly wrong.
By the way, you've lost the authority to say that.
Well, one of the things that we talk about all the time now is the distinction between adults and children, and we should allow adults to do things that children can't do.
Obviously, that's true.
Although I would say that there are certain things that adults should also not do.
There's plenty of limits, yeah.
But one of the things that we ought to say here is that popular culture is designed for kids.
Okay, to pretend that the Grammys is not directed at kids is a lie.
To pretend that was put on the Grammys was designed for adults 18 and up, it's just not true.
Okay, because if you ask a 12-year-old what exactly they're listening to, they're listening to exactly the same thing that a 15-year-old is listening to, which is exactly the same thing an 18-year-old is listening to, particularly when it comes to music.
Music happens to be an area where those boundaries are unbelievably permanent.
I would say I watched the Grammys more as a child than I did.
And what's the message that came out of that performance?
I got dinged by our publicists over at Media Matters on this point, but it's a true point, so I'll reiterate it.
Symbols have a purpose.
We live in a semiotic world.
Symbols are very, very important.
That's what makes the world intelligible.
And what was the performance?
At a physical level, it was a bunch of transvestites.
Sam Smith calls himself a pansexual or something.
The other main binary, pansexual.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I didn't want to be imprecise.
Let's get that straight.
No, good point.
Don't get it straight.
Don't get straight.
And get it very crooked, actually.
And the other one is a transgender, and then the rest were a bunch of drag queens.
And you see this in a bunch of Sam Smith's videos, too.
It was a very pro-trans performance, as we see everywhere.
And the symbol of that was the devil.
And I couldn't help but notice, very often, artistic depictions of demons and weird occult stuff is androgynous and trans and weird.
And I think the reason for this is...
Wasn't that Lil Nas X also?
Didn't have that.
Lil Nas X did the same thing.
The reason for this is, at least the traditional Christian understanding is the devil hates human beings, especially because we have flesh.
And he doesn't want to bow down to some ape that has flesh on him.
And that the fleshiness of this world is very offensive to demons that are pure spirit.
And so, you know, our publicists knocked me for making this connection.
I didn't make the connection.
Sam Smith is the one putting on the performance.
The fact that Lil Nas X made the connection, the fact that this is the symbol they're all using, should tell us something about this real political problem.
Transgenderism is really a mockery to creation itself.
I mean, it's the ultimate mockery to creation.
I got to say, I did, after seeing some of the performance, I did leave quite encouraged for the reason we've all kind of outlined already, which is that these people are really out of ideas.
They've just totally run out of ideas.
You mentioned Lil Nas X.
This exact thing was already done.
And it was done in a more shocking way even then.
He was giving a lap dance to Satan.
Right.
But even then at that time, you're like, okay, I've seen this exact imagery has been used so many times.
Well, but this is the thing.
Tribalism, cultural ubiquity, the purity grift, it is boring.
Because the thing you actually can't do in the transhumanist moment, the thing you actually can't do is transgress the popular opinion of your tribe right now.
And so to be a political purist isn't to have the right ideas.
It's to see which ideas are the most in vogue and then just emulate them.
Just repeat them back.
So all that he did is he said, oh, Lil Nas X did this and it worked.
I'll do it.
I mean, it's derivative for a reason.
It's derivative by design.
There's a reason that in dictatorships, everybody dresses like the dictator.
There's a reason that communist countries can't produce art.
It's this because you because art is transaggressive because you're trying to make statements that are not always in vogue.
You're trying to challenge an audience.
You're trying to well, speaking of purity, Jeremy, speaking of purity and how to keep one's flesh really nice and clean.
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It's so brave.
Don't shoot it down.
Let it flow.
No bomb mind.
What should we do?
What should we do?
No, no, no.
I just want to be clear that I ordered them not to do this joke, but I was overruled by my generals.
So I heard somewhere we have a $100 million entertainment budget.
How much when 10% for the big guy?
This is going to be there the whole time now?
It's going to be up for eight days, actually.
Yeah, it's going to fly over all of our important installations, and then I didn't know it was an actual balloon.
That's surprising.
Sophisticated technology.
My hearing aid and/or Corvette.
Does it contain classified documents?
What was in it?
No, this is no.
The comedy on the show has just been tremendous.
I was going to say, this is the death.
We just lost 20,000 viewers.
There's no way.
Deserve to lose those.
Yeah.
Was he snapping your hair?
Mr. President, not again, Mr. President.
This is the most fun we're going to have before he starts actually speaking.
So let's bring it all out.
Gen Zaki said.
No, Ms. Storyteller.
I want to tell you a little story.
You're not even moving the mouth while you're talking.
Would you like to do this?
No.
Walls.
No, don't.
Dogs raise ponies.
My dad was standing with me in Scranton, Pennsylvania, one day on a street.
Watching Sam Smith.
Two men.
And Mr. President, you walked with MLK, right?
But let me finish my story.
It's funny when the mouth moves.
Okay, thank you.
I can't do it all the time.
Not much.
And there were two men going at it like jackhammers on his father said, Joey, Joey said, that's what love looks like.
And I said, thanks.
Pop.
Corn pop.
That's another story.
No.
No more stories.
Thank you, President.
Thank you, President.
That's enough.
The eyes are so realistic.
I'm looking forward to the state of the Union.
Yeah, they say there's no great comedy at the Daily Wire.
That was me, I think.
What about this balloon, guys?
Yeah, we haven't talked about the balloon.
We probably should, Mr. President.
I think we all got played with this whole balloon story.
I agree.
I think the whole thing is just a sham to get him out of having to go have their meeting with the ChiComs, right?
And to get us to stop talking about Pfizer, as far as I'm concerned.
It's amazing.
We finally, there's a huge release on all this information.
You get the guy who was a year below me in college, oddly enough, the Pfizer exec guy.
He's there.
He says, yeah, we're doing directed evolution, gain of function research.
Yeah, it definitely affects menstruation.
Yeah, this, that, and the other thing.
And then what?
All of a sudden they say, hey, look, a squirrel.
Look up there.
Hey, look, there's a shiny object in the sky.
And then we all fall freely.
Do you really think they were just trying to get another Chinese conference?
Yes.
Wow.
Why?
Why would you think that?
Because I think that the Chinese are spying on us all the time.
And why Montana?
But this balloon, this balloon was the size of five greyhound bustles.
They kept showing it like as a thing at a carnival.
It was enormous.
It's like, well, you know, you can't let them fly.
Who is carrying the wizard?
The Wizard of Oz.
I agree that you shouldn't, that we should oppose Chinese spying, but they didn't even stop.
They didn't even do that.
Yeah, they didn't.
They just blew it up, made a big news story, drug it out for as long as the news cycle would allow for it to go.
Yeah.
I look smart.
No, what happened is that he's an idiot.
And he was like, oh, look, my generals told me that there is a Chinese spy balloon above American soil.
Perhaps no one will see it.
After all, I cannot, since I'm clinically blind.
And a bunch of people in Montana looked up in the sky and behold, an enormous spy balloon.
And they said, a spy balloon.
And Joe Biden said, and nothing.
Donald Trump gazed directly into the sun.
He was looking for it.
And for eight days, it floated above American soil, moving slowly past all American military installations.
And then I can tell you, honestly, like the proof is in the pudding.
The timeline is obvious.
This thing was crossing American soil early last week.
On about Friday, this started to become a major issue for Joe Biden.
And everyone on the left came out and said, you can't shoot this thing down.
Why would we shoot this thing down?
We can never shoot it down.
If you question him shooting the thing down, it's because you just don't understand foreign policy or politics.
Of course he's not going to shoot it down.
We're fully in control.
And then Saturday morning, the schmuck comes out and he's like, well, I said on Wednesday, we should shoot it out.
And apparently everybody ignored him.
And then it floats all the way to the other.
It's like, it's overwater.
No.
And then they send the F-22 to kill it.
Like, the whole thing is ridiculous.
And the clearest attempt that it was obvious indicator that it was an attempt to backfill is that they sent out anonymous Defense Department officials who tried to claim that this happened during the Trump administration.
Unbelievable.
It's a lie.
It did not happen during the Trump.
They were calling him xenophobic pink Chinese people.
And then now they're like, oh, no, he did let them float balloons.
I mean, that was the most ridiculous part.
The PR maneuver to try to blame Trump was like, wow.
And then you saw the response after all the officials, not just pro-Trump ones, but John Bolton.
You mentioned, who said, I've never heard any of this.
They said, oh, well, yeah, we, no, they were there, but we didn't see him.
We missed it.
But we definitely know they have totally the same thing as a giant Chinese spy balloon flinging across the entire continent over the course of a week.
Can I just be up to twist it into a dog though?
Are you going to hold out the whole time?
I think how dare you suggest that the president is a meat puppet of other people by others, outsiders.
The president is his own paper bag.
How dare you see that?
Is that what symbolism is?
Well, you're the one that said that.
Release Of 911 Tape00:06:30
Hold on.
I'm seeing symbols.
Who's going to be the most excited when he comes in?
That's what you really wonder, right?
Like when he walks in and they do like, they all pretend to be excited and like as if our celebrating celebrates his sister.
I invited Baulos.
He's a fan of no, because he's famous.
Like, why is it like, why is it that they're not going to be able to, you know, hope they fly the Ukrainian flag again.
And Bono said, I mean, this is crazy.
Literally, what is he doing here?
I told you, when I was a young man, when I was an actor, I had a job as a fake Semelier at George Soros' wedding.
It's one of my weirdest jobs I ever had.
Do you know who was at the wedding?
Bono.
He's at like every liberal event in the world.
So clearly they invited Paul Pelosi so that Joe Biden can point up there and be like, and there were people, there were people in this room who wanted him to be hit in the head by a weird naked man who he'd called for Zagreb.
Right, exactly.
That is why they're doing that.
Other people are a bunch of cancer survivors that he can talk about his cancer moonshot, because as we all know, the thing that prohibits science from solving cancer is that we don't have sufficient commitment to solving cancer.
That's it.
If we just focus on cancer more, that will do it.
That's an exciting one.
And he's also having the family of Tyree Nichols, who they didn't care about five minutes ago and will not care about five minutes from now.
But Joe Biden can pretend that he cares deeply about the fate of.
Yeah, Ben, you talked about this on your show last week about how disgusting it is that politicians show up at funerals like that.
I'd never actually thought about it.
It is genuinely disgusting.
You listen to the speeches that Amala Harris and Al Sharpton gave at that funeral, and it is just a political stump.
It's gross.
And they do it all the time.
So you remember the Paul Wellstone funeral where they showed up at the Paul Wellstone funeral.
Paul Wellstone was a senator from Minnesota.
He died in a plane crash and they basically held a political rally.
And then you remember that there was the Arizona shooting and Barack Obama showed up at the memorial for victims of the Arizona shooting.
He did a whole gun control pitch.
And then he did the same thing in Dallas.
And people showing up randomly at the funerals of people they don't know and then giving speeches there is disgusting.
I'm sorry.
George Floyd's funeral, the three-day funeral, anything have been closer than that.
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I only wish you had hair for me to smell.
Don't let that stop you.
Can we talk?
Can we talk about the Paul Pelosi thing for a second?
Because we just saw Paul Pelosi.
Can we talk about the Paul Pelosi thing for a second?
I think it was a totally botched conservatives botched the whole story completely.
Of course.
And I don't blame people for speculating because they're being weirdly secretive about things.
They just released a 911 tape.
Selective leaks.
And then we find out later that they only didn't release it because the 911 operator completely makes a fool of herself.
And I think that was the issue with that.
But the real story with the whole, which I said from the beginning, it's like it's very plausible that this really was just a homeless drug addict in San Francisco that broke into the house.
There's no reason to get into any theories about gay lovers and all that kind of stuff.
Damn.
So the real story is that the crime problem in San Francisco is so bad that even Nancy Pelosi's house isn't safe.
And that should have always been the point, but instead we went into this whole thing about I do think one thing that is true, though, is that when these incidents tend to happen to her, they keep it very hush-hush.
Let's just give you an example on the right.
Brad Parscow, when he got arrested, that tape was out before he made it into the cruiser.
It was like circulating on Twitter.
Unbelievable how quickly it was released.
And for whatever reason, when it involves her husband, it's so hush-hush.
They go through everything not to give the public any information.
In this situation, actually, when it actually was revealed, I thought this would have helped them, right?
It actually would have put to bed a lot of the conspiracies.
When I saw it, as much as I detest Nancy Pelosi, you can't see an 80-year-old get hit like that and not feel a tremendous benefit.
I mean, like, I was like, wow, I feel really bad if he actually went through this.
This is an old man that's getting beat up in his own house.
And you hear the call, and it's like he's in such pain for the dispatcher to understand.
No, this is a hostage situation.
I need you to just, you know, have a basic level like you're irritable.
She's like, okay, bye.
He's like, no, not by.
Remember how they originally played it?
That she did an amazing job?
Yeah.
She saw this.
They did for like weeks.
It was the subtleties of what he was saying, and she could see his coded language.
It really was an amazing thing.
They took down that reporter at NBC, and he actually factually stated.
So there was a lot of room for conspiracy because they were being plausible that this was exactly as it has been described to us.
But the problem is they've created an environment where it is also plausible that if Paul Pelosi were hit in the head by a gay naked lover, they also wouldn't tell us.
And the media is now so uninvested in ever scrutinizing anything that could have any negative consequence for the Democrats that we're ready for, the conspiracy is happening all the time right there in the other.
So we're ready to not believe or believe anything on that basis.
We were all asking who's lying and who's covering up.
Is it the Democrats or the Republicans?
What everybody seemed to miss here is there was a third party that could have been lying and trying to hush stuff up, and it was the cops.
Who released the information to the press that, oh, actually, he referred to the invader as a friend on the phone call?
Who released to the press, oh, he was in his underwear?
Oh, he had a drink.
Oh, he had this.
It was the cops who were releasing that to fuel the conspiracy theories to cover their own dairy errors because they were incompetent.
Rifle Coffee and Pandemic Trajectories00:04:51
Can we talk for a second about what the political situation is for Joe Biden going into the State of the Union?
Because I know, I know.
If we have to.
I hate the State of the Union more than any of you, probably all of you combined, with the fiery, passionate hatred of a thousand sons.
I mean, I despise it.
I think it's a monarchic institution that elevates the Article II branch of government above the Article I branch of government.
Those are references to articles that Joe Biden's judges don't know about.
And the pathetic spectacle of a doddering old fool walking down the aisle to the throngs of cheering morons, pretending that they like him and care about him, while we all sit here for 60 minutes and watch him read a canned speech from a teleprompter in which he pledges to do a bunch of things that he will not do and lies a bunch is the worst thing in the world.
But what exactly is he trying to do?
Is this, as they say, the launch of his second successful president?
I was going to say his second presidential campaign.
Then I had to correct myself because he's run for president like one million times.
So presumably he's running again or at least being ambulatorily wheeled again toward the presidency.
What does he have to do here?
Well, I think that the one thing that always gets me about Joe Biden is after four years of listening to how Donald Trump lied about this and lied about that, and no one's going to defend Donald Trump as the icon of truth.
He was kind of a carny barker, exaggerated things.
This guy lies with such aggression that it's offensive.
It is offensive to be told that you can afford bread when you can't.
It's offensive to be told that everything is tickety boo when everything is going down the crapper.
This immediate moment, he has had this jobs report, which I'm suspicious of.
I'm not sure I believe this jobs report, which has cut the unemployment rate to something like its lowest level in, which by the way, is actually bad for inflation, which is our real problem.
Right now, we have this tremendous problem that ordinary people are having a hard time buying the staples.
That is the state of play.
Do you like me to explain the jobs report, by the way?
The reason the jobs report came in hot at 500,000 is because they underestimated the jobs growth in November, December.
And so when you average it all out, it doesn't look nearly as good.
Right, exactly.
So you tend to get these kind of like weird snake ate the rabbit kind of bumps sometimes in the employment markets.
But the real problem is that there's only one chart that matters, and that is the line of employment before the pandemic versus after the pandemic.
Right.
So if you look at the line of employment before the pandemic, it looks like this.
The pandemic hits.
If that line were to continue, it'd be in this trajectory.
The pandemic hits, the job market goes, boom, plummets.
When it starts to recover under Trump, it takes a V-shape, right?
It goes like directly straight up back toward that line, that original line.
And then Joe Biden takes office and it levels off.
And so it's been trailing almost in parallel what the line should be, except there's all these missing jobs.
So all those missing jobs are missing.
So we've regained the jobs that we lost during the pandemic, but we should be well ahead of that considering that we're now two years out of the pandemic.
But the important thing is you have polls showing more people than ever saying they're unhappy with the government.
A, the government is the biggest problem we're facing.
That's the largest problem according to the polls.
B, people say they're worse off than they were two years ago.
A record number of people say that they are doing worse than they were doing two years ago.
And a record number of people are saying that the government is going in the wrong direction.
To have this guy stand up and say everything is great, it's just insulting, you know, and it's so it's boring and insulting, which is just a bad combination.
I'll tell you what's not a bad combination.
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You win.
Officer's Offense00:15:35
You killed it.
I believe it.
See, if I had to rage, that was correct.
You're getting strong now.
Never heard better.
They're getting strong.
Yeah, I think that it's true.
Donald Trump's lies were so offensive because of the way in which he lied.
And when I say they were offensive, people will get angry with me.
They were hilarious.
People get angry, but they were offensive.
They offended our sensibilities because we were used to being lied to the other way.
Like all of our sensibilities were sort of formed to embrace political lies.
And then he came along and offended those sensibilities.
And in some ways, that was his superpower when he did it for the good.
When he did it to cover his own rear end when he was doing bad things, when he was not being fully honest, it was a bad thing.
Trump was a mixed bag, and he's extreme in both directions.
He lies in the same way because he did that.
But they offended, they did offend the political sensibility.
And this is why the left really thought he was Hitler.
This is why people were weeping in the streets and all this crazy stuff that, I mean, people lost their minds.
The strange thing about politics is that Joe Biden's lies are so much more consequential.
They're so much more damning.
They're planned.
There's so much more planned.
He is truly one of the most corrupt people in American public life in our lifetimes.
But his lies do not offend the sensibilities of the public.
And so people at home can't afford eggs.
And he's going to get up there and say that we have a great economy.
And people will feel offense, but they'll look around and there won't be anybody screaming in the streets and there won't be any journalists fainting and there won't be any celebrities threatening to leave the country.
And so they go.
They'll be defending the lies.
But that's the press doing that.
They create that atmosphere.
I understand that that's what it is.
People at home are like the Democrat people that I know and friends with that are in my family.
Actually, they are offended.
And I think that we don't believe so because the press pretends not to be offended.
And we take that.
Yeah.
The press is telling us, oh, it's not a big deal.
And they keep moving on.
But the average American, I think, is suffering enough.
They understand that they're being lied to.
They're not happy with the entire balloon gate, Chinese balloon gate.
And so I do think that there is this disparity between what the press says and what the people actually feel.
And I think that's shown by CNN suffering, their numbers, and things of that nature, because they're no longer seeing their viewpoints reflected in what they're watching.
Numbers is a kind word to use about their audience.
And also to answer the original question of what does he need to do tonight politically?
Yes.
The answer, of course.
No, I refuse.
The answer, of course, is that it really doesn't matter at all what he says on the State of Union.
Like the State of the Union has zero political impact whatsoever.
I don't think there's any evidence that it affects the polls in any kind of long-standing way at all.
Not in a year before an election year.
Yeah.
I mean, people, whatever happens tonight, everyone has forgotten it by Thursday at the latest.
Matt?
Right.
Would you like some ice cream?
Donald Trump has already forgotten.
I'm sorry.
Joe Joe Biden has already forgotten.
Did you see the Washington Post column today saying the headline?
I'm not getting it verbatim, but it's pretty close.
Eggs are not really that expensive.
I love that.
The thesis was when you really think about it, you know, when you really think, I know you're paying five, six, ten, fifteen dollars for eggs when you can get them.
They were sold out the other day at my grocery store.
Oh, yeah.
They're not, it's really actually, these are not the droids you're looking for.
They're actually, these are not very expensive eggs.
I was the chicken farmer once.
No, you were not president.
You know, he goes into the bag and just smacks it.
This is the thing, though, that when there is no social proof to reinforce the thing that you're feeling inside, you tend to second guess yourself.
And I think this is part of what explains the poor showing that we had on election night.
Also, why did Barack Obama won re-election with the worst sort of economic indicators of any president who'd won re-election in modern life?
But there was no social proof to validate the way that people felt.
This is the power that the media has.
We get that Obama had the advantage of that 2008 crash.
So even though his economic numbers, we knew his economic numbers were bad, but they were better than when he took office.
We lost a ton of entire press corps with him.
And so they kept saying, oh, they're so much better.
Such an improvement.
So great.
I mean, there was a piece in the New York Times today, I think it was, on the op-ed page, or Knucklehead Row, as I call it, where Michelle Goldberg is a woman.
He's funny.
She's a wonderful columnist because she sees like a sort of shadow.
She sees the truth, but she's not allowed to think outside of the New York Times philosophy, so she can't quite grasp what it is.
So she wrote this thing saying, This is a great president.
This is a great, great president.
It was like listening to somebody.
Maybe this is the second sentence.
He's a great president, but he shouldn't run again.
But he shouldn't run again.
Which is the first time, which, by the way, is kind of the subtle undertone to a lot of what the problem for the Democrats, of course, is the people backing her up are Kamala Harris, the least talented human being maybe ever to walk the earth.
I mean, it is truly astonishing the levels of talent that she does not have.
They are nearly infinite.
It's like an infinite regress of talentlessness with Kamala Harris.
And so, you know, they kind of are wedded to her.
And every so often you'll see a hip piece come out about Kamala.
And it's like, okay, Pete Budigedge in the study with the wrench because you know that he's setting all of those up.
The truth is, I think that the best ally that Biden has is not even the media.
The best ally that he has is that he is a dead person.
I'm not kidding you.
It is that he is an empty bag, indeed.
Because he's a deeply unthreatening human being.
Like he's a very threatening person in terms of his actual politics.
And the stuff that he wants for the country is actually genuinely terrible and in some cases, even evil.
But he's also non-threatening because you look at him, you're like, he's such a non-entity.
Like, can you get away with that?
Like, he's walking, the president's walking into the joint.
Well, he's walking.
It's a miracle.
And you just look at him, and he does look so harmless.
He's an old man whose eyes have closed because he's got so much Botox in his forehead.
This is a guy who pooped his pants in front of the Pope.
So how exactly does he?
I wondered when he'd get it.
He's awaiting all show for that one.
The question, though, is how do you feel?
How do you generate a sense of threat around a person who is like that?
You can try to generate a sense of threat around his agenda, but he doesn't have the same sort of threatening talent.
See, it takes talent to be threatening.
Barack Obama was a threatening president specifically because he was charismatic and talented.
But I keep imagining what a textbook is going to look like 500 years from now when they show us the last president of the Republic.
He's just doddering old man.
This was the man they thought was going to...
It's threatening in a different kind of way.
I understand that he's not evil looking.
But that's the thing that looks like the Republican people say something about him.
And that's the problem is that the American people generally don't like to look directly in the mirror.
When we look at the problems that the country faces, the reality is we can blame our politicians all we want.
A lot of this is just generated by the American public.
I mean, this is a democratic republic.
And the fact is we keep electing these dolts over and over and over again.
And that's why the Chinese feel so just sanguine about floating into nearly every arena of American life and just and just being wow.
What's happening right now?
Xi Jinping is sending us messages.
I'm feeling threatened.
Andrew Clavin, would you like to shoot that?
I'm thinking, do you mind?
I'm looking for something sharper.
But Nick flying overhead.
The flamethrower, Michael.
The flamethrower.
The flamethrower.
No, no.
No, let's not in it.
This is the most amusing things we'll get all night.
An old man trying to prod in a balloon with a cigar.
Yes, we have reached that point in the broadcast and we haven't even begun.
Actually, that's a great metaphor for the State of the Union.
No, no, no.
Oh, my God.
It wasn't lit enough.
These Chinese are amazing.
The Rob almost made an American.
So now here's the president of the United States, or the husband of the president of the United States, wandering through the room, shaking hands with a bunch of Supreme Court justices and past Supreme Court justices, it looks like.
And you have just Kevin McCarthy standing there and Kamo Harris standing there and they clap like automatons.
And we all pretend that we like the president, which is always, that's always one of my favorite things about the State of the Union, is where the president walks in and everybody on both sides of the aisle pretends they like him.
Like for that brief moment before they start.
They're not with Trump.
I want to know if President McCarthy is going to tear up the speech.
I hope so.
I hope he makes it into like a sort of origami thing.
Let me just into a swan or something.
You know, what's amazing about the setting, though, I'm probably the most pro-State of the Union person here.
Not this.
I mean, this is going to be interminable and terrible.
But you're a monster.
Because you're a monarchist.
I'm Catholic, Italian.
But I like the looks of it are so majestic.
And the idea that we're all coming together and we actually have something in common and both houses of Congress are meeting in the same place and both parties.
So that's fiction.
Yeah, no, the idea of it, I mean, it might be a noble fiction, but I like it in theory.
And then it always makes me think, why does the opposition party feel the need to give the response to the State of the Union when you're doing it from some random room somewhere with Rubio grabbing for a bottle of water and it cannot look good?
I was so sorry to see that Sarah Sanders is giving the response because I like Sarah Sanders.
I think she's very talented.
That's the only Republican who probably won't run for president.
Yeah, that's true.
You're right.
In 2024.
But I just think let them.
Has there ever been a good one?
A good response?
No, never.
No.
There cannot be for all the reasons that Michael was saying.
I'm sorry.
The president looks so addled.
Look at him.
He does not.
He's not with us.
He's just not with us.
And he's up there.
You know how this is going to be bad?
You know this is going to be bad because the New York Times, before it even began, ran a piece about how he's overcoming his stammer.
He's been in public life for longer than I've been alive by a factor of like two.
It took him 80 years.
All right.
The president of the United States about to start.
He's handing his speech to Kevin McCarthy.
We'll be back with you at the conclusion of the speech to tell you how bad it was.
We'll see you then.
Wow.
That was in those pala horse, huh?
Franklin Roosevelt.
See, you're for fear instead of hope, and you're for darkness instead of hope.
You'll let screw light.
What you don't understand, Ben, is that Franklin Roosevelt defeated Nazi Germany, and Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union, and Joseph Robinette Biden defeated resort fees.
He said tonight.
I'm so moved.
He was very concerned about ticket fees at the airport, like significantly more concerned about that than China.
And it came much later in the speech than that.
That was actually the part where he was just listing stuff he was annoyed by and saying he'll ban them.
It's exactly how I would handle state of the United States.
It's the most relatable he's ever been.
Yeah, I know.
That'll get him elected.
So I have a few personal favorites.
You know, we're going to play the hits a little bit here.
So let's do it.
One of my personal favorites was the part where he said, I approached all these oil companies and I told them they need to start drilling.
And they said to me, well, how are we going to build new refineries when you're trying to transition away from oil?
And I say, well, we're going to need oil for at least about 10 years.
And people broke out laughing.
People broke out laughing because you're making their case because you're a sad, screamy old man.
Yeah, because you couldn't get the EPA approval to even start digging to build the refinery in 10 years.
That's the actual truth.
It is.
You know, that was serious.
I don't even have anything to say on the specifics of that speech because I felt the entire thing was like standing in a bar where the guy next to you is drunk and won't leave you alone.
He's just like, what?
Look it up.
Look it up.
Tremendously gaslit.
That's like slurry.
Tremendously gaslit throughout all of that.
I mean, people have a lot of conspiracy theories about watching the COVID shots.
You better hope it's a healthy bout of amnesia because he's pretending that he is going to be the person that is fighting against Big Pharma as if he wasn't the same person that we all just had to fight the Daily Wire.
Because OSHA tried to mandate.
Joe Biden tried to mandate via OSHA the vaccine to everybody's arm.
They're applauding as if he's the person now that's fighting.
I don't understand it.
The insulin move with Big Pharma, he stopped Trump.
Trump already did this, lowered the prices for insulin.
He blocked it.
And now he's reintroducing what Trump did.
So I think people's memories must be going.
His comment that we pay more for drugs than other countries is because they have single payer health care.
So the drug companies have no one to bargain with except the government.
And when they come to us, they have to bargain with various different people.
If they're not making profits off us, they're not making profits off anybody.
If they're not making profits off anybody, 20 years from now, when cancer might be cured, when some cancer might be cured, it won't be.
You won't even know what you missed.
You will not even know what they took away from you.
I like the part where.
So which one of you guys hit Paul Pelosi in the head with a hammer, guys?
It was all of us.
I think it was all of us.
No, it was all of us.
It was all of us.
Really, it was all of us.
Who wasn't hitting Paul Pelosi in the head with a hammer while half naked and stoned out of my eye?
It was really because, you know, the big lie and January 6th and Trump.
So that's why Paul Pelosi got hit in the head with a hammer and also unity.
But like, we need a lot of unity.
And Joe Biden wants to be like, he's standing up for all of us, especially the people who hit Paul Pelosi in the head with a hammer.
I thought that part was really profound.
And speaking of gaslighting, he brings Tyree Nichols' family on and then transitions immediately into a discussion about racist police officers when it was, of course, black police officers that killed him.
And then also, can I also say that this whole thing about the talk?
Well, white families never have to have the talk with their kids.
This is such nonsense.
When I started driving, my dad explained to me that, son, if you ever get pulled over, be respectful to the police officer.
If you don't agree with the ticket, fight it in court.
And by the way, everybody's on the wheels.
Doesn't literally every parent have that talk with kids when they start driving?
And as someone who gets stopped quite often because I drive badly, I drive too fast.
I turn on my lights.
I put on my hands on the thing.
I say officer.
It's almost the first word out of my mouth.
Because the minute they hear officer, they know that you respect them.
I roll down the window and say, I'm white.
I cannot stress this.
This is my favorite.
Cannot stress this enough, officer.
I'll start using officer.
Officer is good.
How did you like the random screaming?
Random screaming, Joe.
Well, listen.
The screaming whisperer is the, when he goes, this was an historic state of the union.
And I'm not actually joking.
It was the first time that an octogenarian has ever addressed the country as president of the United States.
Congratulations to us, man.
This is a great country.
Literally anyone can be president.
And it was an old man's speech.
It was incoherent.
It was rambling.
It was shouting.
It was all of his personal peaks.
The real giveaway too was because he's accomplished nothing and he's only failed.
The whole speech was just about the stuff that he's definitely going to get to really soon.
And by the way, the stuff he's going to get to really soon was fixing the luggage fees, right?
It wasn't even ambition.
I don't agree that he's failed.
I think he's passed a lot of stuff.
I mean, the inflate, whatever the hell they call it, the inflation reduction, the global warming.
The fact that it's bad is different than the fact that it hasn't fixed it.
He's succeeded in doing the thing he wanted to do.
Yes, yeah.
But I just mean bad.
He can't come out and say inflation is really great.
He tried to a little bit, but it didn't work.
His stuff hasn't worked.
Yeah, not yet.
Biden's Strategic Speech00:15:37
Not yet.
Now we're going to get the whole routine from the media about the Republicans were so mean to him, guys.
They were so mean to him because they kept yelling at him during the speech.
He kept yelling at us.
I thought that was great.
I've never seen, has there ever been a state of the union address where twice the president makes a claim and then walks it back in real time and yelled at him?
He actually said, because we have the transcript of what the White House releases beforehand.
And he literally had to lie in full paragraphs of his speech because he said the Republicans want to hang out Social Security and Medicare.
And the Republicans are like, no, no.
And he's like, no one wants to take your Social Security and Medicare.
Isn't that great?
And they're like, yes.
And then he just had to cut out like two paragraphs of his campaign.
stump speech.
You're right.
I mean, he walked that one back.
I did like the part where he was shouting about how no one wants to switch places with Ji Jinping, which I have some news for him.
There are a lot of Thomas Friedman.
You know, we're ignoring the real issue, though.
And this was an issue that Matt pointed out to me at the very top of the speech.
Can we talk about the weird kiss between Dr. Jill and Kamala's husband, the weird like makeout session?
And it was weird.
It was weird.
I'm going to make a personal matter here.
What they do in the public performance in a person.
Doing the Capitol.
I'm actually going to push back on this and say that it was bad optics at a political speech.
And I will enjoy for the next 10 years of American public life tweeting out the photo with funny quips.
Yes.
But if you actually watch the video of it, it's a slightly out of touch thing for them to do in a political environment.
If they did the exact same thing at the Grammys or at one of the eyes wide shut parties.
No, my point is that if we had seen them do that at an Oscars after party, no one would think anything.
Oh, they're having an affair.
Let's play.
I just want to make sure that it's down on the table.
All right.
All right.
The media are already going nuts over people yelling at Biden.
Can you just get over?
Biden was yelling at us.
That was the whole speech.
I'm super tired of this whole nonsense where a politician who gives a speech like this, no one can yell back at him.
I remember they did this with Joe Wilson also.
Remember the you lie moment?
Yeah, yeah.
It was like the biggest deal in the world.
You lie.
Okay, first of all, you guys claim that Donald Trump was a Russian plan for like four years.
For four years, and he spent tens of millions.
And you ripped up his speech.
Can we drop all this garbage about how civility must dominate?
No one can ever say to the president, you're wrong when he's clearly lying about you.
Have you ever seen British Parliament?
Right.
Like, it's the best thing.
We should do it like British Parliament.
Like the Prime Minister get up there and we should mock him.
We should all yell at him.
It's much better.
It's much better.
This is nonsense.
Or our own Congress historically, when they're beating each other over the heads with pokers from the fire.
Even when the king, or now king, previously queen for all of our lifetimes, opens the government in the UK and they summons the commoners, the House of Commons, over to the House of Lords for the inaugural speech to open the government.
They actually go through this kind of pantomime as they cross through Westminster Palace of talking loudly and kind of stomping over there as a way of saying we don't have to show respect to the king.
So even in a true monarchy, when they have a truly monarchial speech by the monarch, they don't have this idea, this faux dignity kind of concept.
But what Ben says is true, this question time where they beat the living daylights out of the prime minister is because they have this useless king that they can put their, they can project their country onto.
They can then go after their politicians as what they are, which is a line sexual.
Did you see the biggest applause line of the night, by the way?
This was actually truly sad.
That they love abortion, right?
The abortion one, when he said, well, I'm going to get up there, I, devout Catholic Joe Biden, I'm going to codify the killing of many more babies into federal law.
And it was the most enthusiastic.
Brought the House down.
By the way, he's just clapping all the Catholics.
One of my favorite parts of these speeches is where the president of the opposing party pledges to veto legislation that will never even come close to his desk.
The Republicans don't control the Senate.
They ain't passing a national abortion ban.
It's not going to happen.
I'll protect you from this thing that's never, ever going to happen.
Can we talk about just the gap between who he is and the policies he's pushing are going to be a real dilemma for the Democrats?
Because he is, in fact, as Drew says, a vehicle for all of their cherished hopes and dreams.
He's spending more money than has ever been seen in the history of mankind.
He's pushing all of their most valuable and cherished goals from transing of the children to completely restructuring the American economy.
He's doing all of those things.
But also, he's an incoherent old fool who's yelling at the clouds.
And so that is a very odd combo.
And this is one of the reasons they are begging for Republicans to run a bad candidate in 2024.
They're begging for it because anybody could tear this guy apart on stage who at least has a sentient bone in his body.
Biden is trying to trans the kids.
You know who else is trying to trans the kids?
There are actually razor companies that are advocating that he trans the kids, but there's one razor company that's not.
You know what that razor company is?
Tell us.
That would be Jeremy's Razors.
Oh, ladies.
Wow.
Look at your man.
Now back to me.
Now back at your man.
Now back to me.
Does he have a coif as healthy and hydrated and magnificent as you see here?
Of course not.
And how could he when he's using chemical-laced products from so-called men's grooming companies that hate him and his masculinity?
This Valentine's Day, get him a gift that says, I don't hate you.
Get him a Jeremy's Razors 30% off hair, body, or shave bundle.
Unlike Mr. Clavin over there, I use Jeremy's Tea Tree and Argonne oil shampoo and conditioner, and the results speak for themselves.
Stop it, AOC.
I will not date you.
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And there are people out there who think that I control you guys.
I wrote every word of that.
Why do we put all of our worst bits into the same?
It's like a greatest hits in real time.
Somebody on Twitter said Ben is a better Joe than Ben.
Oh, no.
I thought that's fair.
Put the bag away.
Put the bag.
Joe, come back.
Oh, no.
No.
Joe's back.
Oh, good.
Usually, right now I'm controlling him, but usually it's the media who are up his ass.
It's a sad story.
I do think that he cringes in shame.
He crinkles in shame.
We are literally paid political commentators.
Our only job in life is to watch the speech.
And sitting here with you guys for the last almost 90 minutes, we could not watch the speech.
We were all sitting here.
I think they just came and took it before the cameras rolled.
They had to print for us printed copies of it because it was so incomprehensible in real time.
It is interesting to me how bad he is.
And some people say, oh, there's no way he could run again.
But I do believe it's a feature, not a bug.
I believe his age, you know, we were talking as he entered the chamber that in some ways his sort of harmless aesthetic, but it's not just his harmless aesthetic.
I think it actually is his sort of disconnectedness and his mental slippage.
All of that works to their advantage because it makes him this sort of Trojan horse in whom they can plant all of their ideas.
I mean, he really is more than any president.
You know, everybody used to say that Dick Cheney really controlled George W. Bush.
And my argument is always: listen, that's nonsense.
The president is the president.
In the president is vested the power of the presidency.
But it had never occurred to me what happens when you have a president who is actually mentally incapable.
His strength, as you point out, Jeremy, is Joe Biden first entered national politics more than 50 years ago.
That's right.
And so it doesn't matter if he mumbles and slurs his words and screams and is totally divorced from reality.
People are very comfortable with him.
Do you feel bad for any person that poops their pants?
In front of the Peter.
Old or young, you just go, oh, this person can't hold their bells.
And if they do it in front of the Pope, it's hard to be like, I really, really hate this person because he pooped his pants.
And that's what you're trying to say.
You're using a lot of nice words.
That's what you're trying to say.
You feel bad for any person that poops their pants in front of the Pope.
And that is true.
You are correctly.
He can run again.
I don't think he will.
It feels to me like the media is turning on him.
I think it's purposeful.
Suddenly, they're willing to cover the Hutton Biden laptop.
They're willing to talk about his corruption.
They're willing to find the classified documents.
They knew that they were there forever.
They're not idiots.
And it seems to me like they're kind of gently kind of trying to back away from this.
And I do think Tucker Carlson had done a segment on this a few weeks ago that they may be priming Michelle Obama for a run.
And by the way, that's a serious run.
Oh, yeah.
That's not.
And I said, on a show, that's not something to mock.
Michelle Obama is not something to mock.
No, Michelle Obama does not run for president and not really president.
Well, I have to push back.
I have to push back on this idea, though, that this is a superpower of his, that he is incomprehensible and unthreatening.
It's only it is a superpower if the Republicans don't run someone against him who is a statesman with a point of view.
I think that's a good idea.
That's all right.
I know.
I'm sorry.
Unrelated.
No, but I mean, I think that Trump was in an amazing moment in history when things shifted as they had to shift.
They were shifting already.
They changed under cover of Trump so that the Republicans are now the party of the working class.
They are now the party of the ordinary man, which they weren't before.
And the Democrats are the party of the elite.
And I think that if somebody stands up who is an actual statesman, I'm not going to say it's Governor DeSantis, but it's Governor DeSantis, who stands up and says, I can do the things that you need me to do in a statesmanlike way, like the president of the United States.
I think he will wipe even Michelle Obama off the map.
I do not think that is true.
What's that?
You're a real opposition.
And I do not think another television personality, which is what Michelle Obama is, let's face it, is going to win against an actual person who stands for something.
But that's very rare.
I will say that there's something that was interesting, believe it or not, in what Biden was trying to do strategically with the speech.
And you can see it in how he backloaded all the controversial material.
So he actually backloaded, he knew everybody was going to tune out in the first 20 minutes.
So he backloaded everything that had to do with the equity agenda.
That was all backloaded, right?
The policing stuff was all backloaded.
The stuff about translating the kids, all backloaded.
Even some of the environmental stuff tended to be more backloaded.
He was focusing a lot on what he sees as the blue-collar base.
He's trying to wrest back away some of those Trump voters.
And so he's focusing a lot on protectionist economic policy, on subsidies for various types of industry, on unions, right?
He thinks that he's going to run sort of the Tim Ryan, Ohio campaign, and that this is going to stand him in good stead.
I don't think that his party is going to allow that to be the center of the media.
We just asked Senator Ryan cheering when he said when he said we need fossil fuels for 10 more years, there was like dead silence from the Democrats.
Right.
So I think that I think he's going to have trouble squaring that circle, but you can see he's trying to make that move.
He understands that in order for his coalition to be durable, he does need to expand it and win back a certain base that the Democrats have lost.
I don't think the rest of his party understands that.
It's a real problem.
On the point of wedges, though, we're knocking him because it was a horrible speech.
There is one really clever thing he did, though, and it was right at the top, which is he got those two lines in about Kevin McCarthy and about Mitch McConnell.
And they were lines to say, I'm actually looking forward to working with you, Kevin.
I hope I don't hurt your career here by saying that.
But I think, Kevin, I think you're great.
And Mitch, you know, it's going to be great to work with you too, Mitch.
And that's obviously a dig at MAGA, but it's really a dig at both those guys because he knows.
He puts them in the eyes of MAGA.
Of course, yeah.
And after the most contentious House battle in what, 150 years, I think it was, House leadership battle.
It wasn't his idea, but it was smart.
I did like the part where he's going to fight inflation by giving everybody $1,000 back on an electric car and building $500,000.
That'll work.
That'll pay for my Tesla.
It won't, by the way.
The Tesla's expensive.
It's a great car, but it was expensive.
It is true.
It is peculiar that all of the Democrat social policy now is aimed at helping well-off people.
Yeah.
From your, no, we're going to pay for your college.
No, we're going to pay for your electric car.
No, we're going to pay for your housekeeper.
No, we're going to pay for your.
Even the stuff about the non-compete clause.
They're going to want to get rid of non-compete clauses.
He pretends that this is about helping fast food employees, which like apparently maybe there are a few that are on non-compete clauses, which I can't imagine.
But I never had one when I was.
The vast majority of that is not.
Yeah, it's tech sector.
Right.
It's high income resort fees.
No one worrying about how they're going to pay for eggs at home today.
It's like, yeah, finally, resort resort fees.
This actually is a great point, is that he was talking about how very specific ways he was going to reduce very specific bills, right?
I'm going to mandate that there are no more resort fees.
I'm going to make sure there are no baggage fees.
I'm going to make sure that you can get a refund on your airline ticket.
And meanwhile, the elephant in the room is that inflation, which he says is quote unquote down, is currently running at 6.5%, which is 3.5%, which is more than three times, like 325% what they're aiming at, right?
Normally you're aiming at a 2% inflation rate.
It's running at 6.5% and that's down, right?
So he's avoiding that like the plague and instead proclaiming that he's going to lower your costs in this way and that way and just hoping that you ignore the elephant in the room.
There's so many sort of tacit lies that he was telling, his whole inflation reduction nonsense.
Like, oh, Donald Trump blew out the numbers on the deficit, and I'm bringing the deficit down.
No, it's just that the programs under Trump sunset it, and so therefore less money was spent under those programs.
Those were unanimously passed by the Republicans and the Democrats because of COVID.
I love how he blamed COVID simultaneously for the crime increase as well as for inflation, right?
And then he said, you know, COVID just kind of magically shut, COVID shut down our educational system.
No, no, no, you shut down our educational system.
He kept blaming extraneous factors for all of his problems.
Well, of course, he gets the personal credit for all.
By the way, teachers are all going to get a raise.
So there's that.
They did such an amazing job not to be able to do that.
So amazing.
Yeah, exactly.
They didn't teach during COVID.
They didn't want to go back to work.
Also, we have students that are suffering, but people can't pass basic reading exams.
Literacy exams are the lowest they've ever been in this country.
But you know what?
We're going to do?
Let's give teachers a raise.
That will definitely have a problem.
Oh, yeah, because we need, yeah, let's extend it to daycare.
It shouldn't just be 12 years, he said.
We need more years.
And that obviously is something that parents should be really paying attention to.
That's also something that he backloaded.
Go on.
That's how you fix education systems is by putting more money into it.
But if you want to fix law enforcement, you take money out of it.
Yeah, so that's whatever.
Perfectly sound argument.
One thing that Matt said that I think is absolutely true is this is not going to be a political event at all.
That usually the State of the Union has a lip afterwards that lasts like two days and it's going to go away.
And this, I think, is going to be ignored as anybody.
But the only thing about this is that, you know, it's interesting to us because we're political types and we like political stories.
And it is a political story.
It does tell us how the government is, how the strategy of the Democrats is playing out.
But aside from that, it's not actually a political event.
The only thing about it that I think helps Biden is that there keep being kind of rumors of his demise, and they are greatly exaggerated inside of his own party.
Not physically.
He's dead, but metaphysically.
They're probably on a horse like El Cid, and they're just riding around.
But the thing about what keeps happening is that they proclaimed that he was dead before the midterms.
And then the Democrats slightly overperformed it.
Political Rumors Exaggerated00:03:07
It's back.
It's back.
Go ahead.
Come on.
Oh, my God.
Oh!
You didn't break it.
You did what I'm doing nine days.
Wow.
That's amazing.
We call him.
America!
After eight days, the balloon has finally finally done.
Tell us how you did it.
Tell us how you did it, Mr. President.
You know me.
I was here the whole time.
I didn't see you anywhere though, Mr. President.
It was part of my plan.
I actually only notice now that it's an ice cream cone in his hand.
That's a nice touch.
That's a nice little touch.
Bye.
Leave that poor woman alone.
No, no, no, Mr. President.
Not again.
It's a country.
If you want to spend even more time with us, you're welcome to come over to Daily Wire+.
God knows why you would.
Yeah, I can't imagine.
But we're going to do our members block here in a few minutes, and there's still a little bit of time to get your questions in.
We're going to be taking only questions from members at the members block.
That's why we call it the members block.
Become a member, dailywireplus.com slash subscribe.
You can get 40% off because it is our president is for sale sale.
And what do we mean by our president is for sale?
Well, we literally mean that China owns the president of the United States of America.
It's a subtle, it's a subtle line.
Now I get it.
Okay.
It's a rental.
This is the worst showing.
Can you promise me a member block that paper bag Joe Biden's not going to be there?
Yeah, so I agree.
Nothing's going to come of this.
It was over before the speech was over.
Like the political impact, you know, he almost went out of his way not to dream big.
I mean, you could say that the cancer thing is big, except there was literally a plot line on the West Wing almost 20 years ago, whether or not to announce that we could cure cancer at a State of the Union.
You know what they concluded?
You can't.
No, you can't actually say that.
He's also been doing this shtick for like seven or eight years.
That's right.
Cancer moonshot.
Yeah.
Just one more year, guys.
I think he's going to do it.
I think he's going to do it.
I hate cancer.
Bold statement.
DV, someone.
Who doesn't want to be Zen Pain?
David!
Come on!
No, please take it all the way off.
Throw it all the way off the bed.
That's a good run, Joe.
Yeah.
Can we go home?
No, no.
We can't go home, but we can go do our members block.
So head over to DailyWirePlus.com right now.
For the rest of you, we're going to catch back up with you on the other side.
There are plenty more horrible political events coming this year.
And we will be here to cover each and every one of you.