On Tuesday night, Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro delivered his response to President Biden’s State Of The Union speech, titled “The Real State Of The Union.” The transcript of his speech, as delivered, is below:
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 percent.
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 laughingstock.
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, mewling, 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 servicemembers – 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 11 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 2 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 two 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 Buttigieg, has been on the case – I mean when he’s not taking two months off for paternity leave while nobody in the media seemed 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 defined “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 is 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 that “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 kente cloth in the Capitol Rotunda to protest America’s supposed racism, then goes home and eats gelato in front of her Subzero fridge as businesses are forced into bankruptcy by her preferred policies.
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 checkmarks 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. The great American renewal begins when their control of American lives ends.
*The CBO originally estimated that 6,252,000 would be produced. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported a 6,743,000 net change in jobs for all of 2021. This contradicts the claim that jobs growth claims were higher than what Biden produced.