BREAKING: Ben Shapiro rebuts Joe Biden's 'pathetic' State of the Union address

After President Joe Biden addressed a joint session of Congress and the nation with his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro took the opportunity to offer a rebuttal.

Shapiro was likely one of many Americans to hear the claims Biden put forth about the economy, crime, the problems at the US-Mexico border, Covid, energy prices, and Ukraine, and shake their heads in disbelief, surprised to find that the president could have such a shockingly different view about the state of the nation that what they'd experienced themselves over the past year.

Shapiro went through the items in Biden's lengthy laundry list, picking apart each one. Shapiro called Biden "pathetic," saying that he was "handed a working vaccine and the 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," Shapiro said, "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 went on. "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 he is one of the worst leaders in American history."

Foreign policy failures, a lack of stability, losing respect among our adversaries, these are all concerns Shapiro has about Biden and his ineffectual presidency. Shapiro slammed Biden's sour withdrawal from Afghanistan, which left 13 American soldiers dead from fighting during the evacuation. America leaving Afghanistan in the hands of "a group of eighth century radical Islam as barbarians" didn't sit well with him either.

"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," Shapiro said.

On energy, Shapiro took issue with Biden's shuttering of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have brought oil from Canada to the US, while the same president allowed a natural gas pipeline to be built that would benefit Russia. That pipeline was recently halted after Russia invaded Ukraine. The Keystone XL pipeline was cancelled due to climate change.

Biden's foreign policy, Shapiro said, also leaves too much room for China to make inroads in taking territory in the South China Sea, including Taiwan.

"And when it comes to our own borders, Joe Biden has ushered in the greatest wave of illegal immigration in modern history. In his first year, Joe Biden's administration was on track for 2 million border apprehensions. The reason is clear. Illegal immigrants have been openly telling media members, they're here because they believe Joe Biden will welcome them," Shapiro said.

"Meanwhile, on our northern border, Joe Biden has stood in solidarity with Justin Trudeau as he claimed emergency powers to crush freedom in Canada," he went on.

Biden's social programs are also a horror for Shapiro, who took issue with his bringing "transgenderism and diversity, equity and inclusion to the Defense Department."

"Don't you feel safer already?" Shapiro asked.

Inflation rates, energy costs, stagnation, regulations and the erasure of wage gains were all things that Biden barely noted in his speech, but which to Shapiro and millions of other Americans are huge problems. So, too, were the closures of small businesses during the pandemic under the idea of curbing the spread of Covid. A national debt of over $30 trillion, Shapiro said, could not be blamed solely on "supply chain problems."

For each aspect of the administration's policies that Biden praised, Shapiro had a counter.

"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. And at least his Vice President did help bail Black Lives Matter writers out of prison," Shapiro said.

For Shapiro and many conservatives, the real problems with the administration's approach are in society. "Joe Biden has made nearly every aspect of our society worse," Shapiro said. "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." This is also what Shapiro makes of the massive election overhaul bills that Biden keeps trying to push through Congress, to overturn states' ability to control their own elections.

Shapiro took aim, too, at that which Biden did not mention in his speech, such as this past fall when the Department of Justice determined to go after parents who speak up at school board meetings to protest critical theory indoctrination as well as Covid restrictions.

"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 from misinformation and defined misinformation as anything the White House didn't like. And then again, his lackeys said he was doing this in defense the science," Shapiro said.

"It turns out Joe Biden is not merely ruler of a president. Aspiring tyrant, hold back only by the strength of our constitutional structure, or structure, you know, 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 line, he's not gonna start telling the truth when he enters his eighth decade. Tonight, Joe Biden lied, and lied, and lied again to you," Shapiro said.