00:00:26.000Well, today, America's critics, the left and the woke right, which is basically the new left, They say that America should cede global power to multipolarity, which means China and Russia.
00:00:38.000It makes them useful idiots for one of the world's worst regimes.
00:00:41.000President Trump has reshuffled the global order even more in America's favor.
00:00:45.000In a second, we'll get to the real story, how China is in serious trouble, how America is rising.
00:00:50.000Plus, we'll talk to the acting labor secretary about some new economic numbers.
00:00:54.000We'll get some pretty egregious jokes at the roast of Kevin Hart, and we will discuss whether indeed Elliot Page is playing Achilles in Christopher Nolan's new flick.
00:01:13.000So, as you know, this week, President Trump is headed to China to meet with the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
00:01:19.000According to Reuters, the president and Xi Jinping are set to discuss Iran, Taiwan, artificial intelligence, and nuclear weapons as they weigh extending a critical minerals deal, according to U.S. officials who have been previewing Trump's two day visit to China this week.
00:01:33.000Now, according to some sources, China is actually overconfident.
00:01:36.000They believe that they have the upper hand.
00:01:39.000Zhang Zhuang, who was a global health expert specializing in China, wrote for the New York Times over the weekend.
00:01:46.000As Beijing prepares for President Trump's visit this week, I see a dangerous new overconfidence taking hold in my native country based on misplaced notions of American decline.
00:01:53.000I fear it is fueling a sense of intransigence that is making Chinese leaders more willing to weaponize their nation's power and less likely to back down in future confrontations with the United States.
00:02:02.000The belief is partly a defense mechanism to help Chinese people cope with their own problems, a slowing economy, a collapsing property market, high unemployment, and a widespread sense of uncertainty.
00:02:11.000Now, again, one of the things that's happening here is that people in China are being allowed to see by the Chinese government.
00:02:17.000Coverage of what's happening in America, and because that coverage is very often negative about America, that is ramping up the Chinese government's perception of strength.
00:02:26.000It turns out that what we say to one another here in the United States has a massive outsized impact abroad.
00:02:32.000This is why you will see members of the woke right appearing on Iranian television in clips, or on Russian television in clips.
00:02:39.000It is true that when you say things that are untrue about the United States, and when you spread the idea that America is on her last legs, that's actually quite good for America's enemies.
00:02:48.000And as you can see, Both China and Russia are trying to claim that the new status of planet Earth ought to be multipolarity.
00:02:54.000What they mean by multipolarity is the same thing that is meant by Hassan Piker or Tucker Carlson.
00:02:59.000The idea is America must cede global power.
00:03:02.000So, Vladimir Putin, who again is a war criminal, here he was suggesting that multipolarity must be based on the UN Charter.
00:03:10.000Again, the idea of the UN Charter, which is paid for by the United States.
00:03:14.000We are the chief foundational lodestar of the United Nations.
00:03:20.000The idea that the UN ought to be a club in the hands of Russia and China is insane.
00:03:23.000Here was Putin at the Victory Day celebration.
00:03:27.000The multipolar architecture of today must be based on the charter of the United Nations organization in its fullness and its entirety.
00:03:39.000The security must be equal and indivisible, and cultural diversity and ethnic diversity of the planet must be taken into consideration, and the nations must have the right to determine their own future.
00:03:55.000So, again, the idea that Russia cares about nations determining their own future while they're attempting to destroy Ukraine wholesale is pretty astonishing.
00:04:02.000Meanwhile, their buddies in the sort of European slash Canadian world are helping them out.
00:04:08.000Canada's prime minister, Mark Carney, is calling for global cooperation based on common values and interests.
00:04:13.000Now, I'm just wondering what those common values and interests would be with, say, Russia and China, because he has been reorienting Canada away from the United States in the aftermath of the trade war with the U.S. and toward China.
00:04:23.000Here's Mark Carney again calling for a sort of multipolarity.
00:04:28.000We're making this progress in part because we've recognized, in some cases before others, the degree to which, in the new world, sovereignty requires more than a country just being able to feed, fuel, and defend itself, as important as that is.
00:04:44.000It requires access to those critical minerals, to space based communications, to sovereign cloud, AI, payment systems, clean energy, and vaccines.
00:05:01.000Geometry, a dense web of partnerships across those core strategic capabilities and issues, drawing on common values and interests, because it's those common values and interests that will assure alignment and respect to those agreements.
00:05:16.000So many common values and interests with, say, China and Russia.
00:05:19.000And of course, he was saying at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank outlet.
00:05:24.000Now, President Trump is headed over to China, and you're being told by our beloved legacy media that President Trump is somehow in a weak position.
00:05:35.000China is in the weakest global position it has been in at least a couple of decades.
00:05:40.000Go back one decade to the Obama administration.
00:05:43.000So in September 2015, Obama and Xi Jinping had a joint event at the White House urging U.S. China cooperation.
00:05:49.000Here is President Obama talking about China way back when.
00:05:53.000So greater prosperity and greater security.
00:05:55.000That's what American and Chinese cooperation can deliver.
00:05:59.000And that's why I want to say again the United States welcomes the rise of a China that is peaceful, stable, Prosperous and a responsible player in global affairs.
00:06:10.000And I'm committed to expanding our cooperation even as we address disagreements candidly and constructively.
00:06:18.000Now, again, the idea from Barack Obama was that China would be a global partner with us.
00:06:22.000We would work with them in the same way that he wanted Iran to be a global partner or Russia to be a global partner.
00:06:27.000President Trump, you may remember when he was running back in 2016, his language with regard to China was a little different than that of Barack Obama.
00:06:36.000Here he was in 2016 running for president.
00:06:40.000When the Chinese traders come in, and they come in 20 at a time, they come in all the way.
00:06:46.000But when the Chinese come in and they want to make great trade deals and they make the best trade deals, and not anymore, when I'm there, we turn it around, folks, we turn it around.
00:06:55.000We have a $500 billion deficit, trade deficit with China.
00:07:00.000We're going to turn it around, and we have the cards.
00:07:03.000Don't forget, we're like the piggy bank that's being robbed.
00:07:22.000I have to say, it is astonishing how well President Trump has held up.
00:07:25.000There are all of these before and after photos from every president where it shows a president going into office, he looks all young and vibrant.
00:07:32.000And eight years later, he looks as though death is upon him.
00:07:46.000China is an awful, terrible, autocratic, economically fascist one party state.
00:07:51.000And they've had serious systemic problems for years, decades even.
00:07:55.000Now, those problems have been masked over the course of the last three decades or so by China's movement from a totally closed economy in the 1970s to an economy that actually engaged with world markets, that moved from communism at home into a sort of mercantilism under the predecessors to Xi Jinping, Zhang Zemin, and Hu Jintao.
00:08:16.000They actually moved from full on communism toward, again, an embrace of global markets.
00:08:20.000Even if their businesses were structured top down in China, that growth itself masked China's massive internal problems.
00:08:27.000Now, there are always moronic economists here in the West who are in love with the idea of a mercantilist centralized state, meaning a centralized state that directs where private monies should be spent and then determines what kind of trade deals can be made.
00:08:41.000Everything is government sponsored, everything is government subsidized, everything is government regulated.
00:08:44.000And a lot of economists love this stuff because it gives them the illusion of control.
00:08:48.000And over the course of sort of capitalism versus mercantilism, there's always been a group of economists.
00:08:56.000Back in the 1930s, there were economists in the United States who were very jealous of the Nazi German and Italian fascist models because they were capable of mobilizing on a broad scale.
00:09:06.000Now, both those economies were very weak.
00:09:08.000One of the things that drove Germany toward war in the late 30s is the fact that they had driven up extraordinary foreign debt because they were spending all of their money on military industrial rebuilding.
00:09:17.000But again, it was true of the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s this idea that the Soviet Union was going to bury us.
00:09:29.000Now, they can direct their economy in a few different directions with serious power.
00:09:33.000And they can take whatever they have with their economy and they can cobble it together and they can punch in one direction.
00:09:38.000So, for example, if they want to generate extraordinary levels of power, they can build lots of nuclear plants or they can dig for coal and they don't care about the environmental effects.
00:09:46.000So, they can really outproduce us in terms of energy and they have been.
00:09:49.000Or they can build some new cars that are pretty competitive by stealing and adapting Western technology, which they do.
00:09:56.000But let us be real the Chinese economy is not truly competitive with the American economy.
00:10:02.000In any serious sense, their products are not better than ours.
00:10:05.000Their services are not better than ours.
00:10:07.000Their economy is not better than ours.
00:10:32.000Our economy is, we hear this all the time.
00:10:35.000Right now, our nominal GDP per capita is $95,000 a year.
00:10:40.000The average American, right, if you just take the GDP and divide it by the number of Americans, our economy is like seven times the size of the Chinese economy on a per capita basis.
00:10:50.000Their growth rates are always lies, they're always exaggerated.
00:10:52.000All right, coming up, we'll get to all the reasons why China has serious systemic problems.
00:10:57.000First, at some point, Americans collectively decided paying 80 or 90 bucks a month for wireless service was kind of normal.
00:11:53.000If you need help, you get a U.S. based customer service team that actually answers the phone and speaks English, which in 2026 apparently qualifies as a luxury experience.
00:12:01.000Head on over to puretalk.com slash Shapiro.
00:12:04.000Get unlimited high speed data for $34.99 a month.
00:14:24.000Then there is the problem of innovation.
00:14:26.000It turns out when you nationalize all innovation, you kill it.
00:14:29.000The solution is you rob everybody else of their IP and then you try to recreate it.
00:14:33.000Some Reports suggest that Chinese IP theft costs the United States alone up to $600 billion per year.
00:14:40.000And again, that's what they did with DeepSeek.
00:14:41.000They basically robbed a bunch of IP from the United States and they tried to get chips they weren't allowed access to and hooked those all up.
00:14:48.000Does that mean they could outcompete us in a true competitive market?
00:15:02.000Again, this is from my video a couple of years ago explaining.
00:15:07.000The country's debt to GDP ratio is at least 159%.
00:15:10.000That is 60% higher than the global rate, according to the SP Global Ratings.
00:15:14.000The nation's total stock of corporate, household, and government debt is now over 300% of GDP.
00:15:19.000It comprises 15% of all debt globally, according to the Institute of International Finance.
00:15:25.000Because Chinese banks are owned by the state, their decision making is rooted in government interests rather than profitability.
00:15:31.000That means they're probably carrying trillions of dollars in bad loans.
00:15:35.000Okay, reason number four they got a problem.
00:15:37.000We're always hearing about the Chinese military.
00:15:38.000And yes, of course, they have a gigantic nuclear arsenal.
00:15:41.000But technologically speaking, they are way behind the United States.
00:15:45.000Now, maybe they're able to pick it up, but not if they're also lagging in AI.
00:15:48.000This is why we need to win the AI race.
00:15:50.000Because basically, the only thing that can solve Chinese demographic problems, productivity problems, and military problems is winning the AI race.
00:15:56.000This is why it's so stupid when you see people from left to the woke right making the case that AI in the United States needs to be set back.
00:16:14.000China's two million man army is indeed huge, but manpower isn't everything, as we saw in the Ukraine war.
00:16:19.000Like Russia, the Chinese military isn't up to snuff.
00:16:22.000China relies on older, less sophisticated chips, according to the RAND Corporation.
00:16:26.000What's more, China doesn't yet have the capacity to project deep water power.
00:16:30.000They have a lot of boats in their navy, and their navy is effective in coastal zones, but they have no capacity to project power beyond those zones.
00:16:37.000So, the Chinese Navy is largely a brown water navy, meaning internal waterways, or a green water navy, meaning the Taiwan Straits, immediate areas right off their coast.
00:16:46.000They do not have a serious blue water navy, meaning they can't project power all the way to, say, the Strait of Hormuz in any really serious way.
00:16:53.000And then finally, of course, China's entire governmental system is built around lack of competition.
00:16:59.000It is built around being closed to ideas.
00:17:02.000And you will always see, there are always a class of morons who will claim that centralized control, whether economically or politically is better.
00:17:10.000Thomas Friedman, of course, is one of these people.
00:17:12.000But here's the problem with Chinese centralized control.
00:17:16.000It turns out that you can't get innovation.
00:17:18.000You can't get Building, you can't get the thriving, you can't get any of it.
00:17:22.000Again, here's from that video a couple of years ago, which if you'd watched it a couple of years ago, you'd be pretty well informed as to what's happening.
00:17:29.000While fools like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times write that China's one party autocracy can impose the important policies needed to move a society forward, the reality is the reverse.
00:17:39.000Because the dictatorship is the be all end all, it can't allow the freedom and innovation necessary to grow the country and fix its problem.
00:17:46.000So here's the thing President Trump knows all of this, and he has been spending the last 10 years putting the screws to China.
00:17:51.000It is the through line on his foreign policy.
00:17:53.000People look at Trump's foreign policy.
00:19:08.000People missed what a huge development this is.
00:19:10.000OPEC, which again was a gigantic cartel designed to restrict oil supply coming from the Middle East, UAE, Saudi, they were all a part of it.
00:19:19.000UAE said, no, we're not doing that anymore.
00:19:21.000We're now going to produce oil how we want to produce oil.
00:19:23.000And they're going to take those oil winnings and they're going to invest them in tech.
00:19:26.000In military and industrial cooperation with Israel rather than opposition to Israel.
00:19:30.000If Saudi goes the way of China, they will be on the wrong side of this particular battle.
00:20:16.000The money was not free, it would be attached to constraints.
00:20:19.000Those countries which were poor would take the loans.
00:20:21.000And then Beijing would basically foreclose on the loans and take control of property and strategic areas and all the rest.
00:20:26.000And countries were joining up because, hey, free money.
00:20:29.000But it turns out that countries have been leaving the Belt and Road Initiative.
00:20:33.000And even Chinese investment in Belt and Road has been dropping pretty precipitously.
00:20:38.000According to the Institute of International Studies in Australia, Panama, Italy, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, all of them have been moving away from the Belt and Road Initiative.
00:20:48.000According to that institute, Panama's withdrawal exemplifies this dynamic.
00:20:52.000Following U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio's visit and warnings regarding Chinese influence over the Panama Canal, Panama chose not to renew its memorandum of understanding with the Belt and Road Initiative, a decision celebrated by Washington.
00:21:06.000According to the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, China has quietly begun to pull the plug on BRI infrastructure spending.
00:21:12.000China's overseas development financing shrunk from a high of more than $80 billion in new funding in 2016 to around $5 billion in 2021.
00:21:20.000In Africa, the numbers are particularly stark.
00:21:22.000They dropped from $30 billion in 2016 to $1 billion last year.
00:21:27.000And again, a huge part of this also is because China totally screwed all of planet Earth with the COVID pandemic.
00:21:34.000All right, coming up, President Trump is going to be discussing a wide variety of issues with Xi Jinping in China.
00:22:28.000No, I do not think that your giant corporate friends should know every single thing you do all the time or that hackers should be able to access your information.
00:22:35.000More and more of life happens online now.
00:23:52.000Definitely dangerous, really, really dangerous when you see people in American politics trying to shut down the development of AI.
00:23:58.000Again, responsible regulation is one thing, but the sort of populist drive toward AI bad, AI data centers bad, shut down the AI.
00:24:06.000If you want to cede power to China, that's a great way to do it.
00:24:08.000There's a reason why Bernie was joined by a bunch of Chinese cutouts at the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance in order to talk about AI.
00:24:17.000Here is Bernie Sanders standing with the Chinese.
00:24:20.000Bottom line, what I believe and what I suspect that most people in the United States, China, and around the world believe is that we need international cooperation between the nations of the world to prevent the possibility of a cataclysmic development.
00:24:39.000We need to cooperate, we need dialogue.
00:24:43.000Do you really believe that the Chinese give two dams about safety in AI?
00:24:48.000This is a country that keeps millions of people in concentration camps.
00:24:52.000You think that they care deeply about human rights with regard to AI?
00:24:58.000And China, by the way, is stealing our tech, like at scale, according to the American Spectator.
00:25:03.000Last month, the White House accused Beijing of industrial scale theft of know-how from American AI labs.
00:25:08.000Meanwhile, U.S. prosecutors claim to have busted an international smuggling ring that funneled advanced chips worth billions of dollars to China in defiance of sanctions.
00:25:15.000The CCP is also stepping up efforts to protect China's own AI innovation, blocking a $2 billion takeover by Meta, Of a Chinese AI startup called Manus.
00:25:24.000For good measure, the authorities then banned the founders of Manus from leaving the country.
00:25:28.000They are also engaging in something called distillation.
00:25:30.000Distillation involves the creation of thousands of fake accounts for the targeted AI chatbot or tool with the accounts working together to extract information.
00:25:38.000So, for example, Anthropic said it had detected some 24,000 fraudulent accounts, which had generated more than 16 million exchanges with its powerful cloud chatbot.
00:25:48.000It accused leading Chinese labs of being behind the campaign in order to acquire powerful capabilities in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost.
00:25:56.000That is what they are doing, which is why even Jensen Huang over at NVIDIA, who wants to be able to sell sort of lower level chips to the Chinese, says that NVIDIA is not going to be selling top of the line.
00:26:06.000Here he was at the Milken Institute Global Conference last week.
00:26:10.000Should they have the latest and greatest chips?
00:26:15.000The United States, we're an American company.
00:26:17.000The United States has to write to make sure that, and we're delighted by that, and we're huge supporters of it, that the United States has the first, the most, and the best.
00:26:27.000But simultaneously, All American companies should compete globally.
00:26:33.000Because remember, in the final analysis, we're trying to maximize exports.
00:26:37.000We're trying to maximize American exports.
00:27:03.000The biggest loser with regard to the Iran situation.
00:27:06.000I mean, Iran is the biggest loser, obviously, but China is the second biggest loser because remember, 10 to 15% of their oil was coming from Iran.
00:27:15.000They want the Iranian regime to stand.
00:27:17.000But at the same time, Iran is blocking oil that is mainly going to China.
00:27:21.00054% of all Chinese oil imports are coming from the Middle East, and a huge percentage of that ain't going out.
00:27:28.000Like, we don't have a supply problem in the United States, we have a price problem in the United States.
00:27:31.000China has a supply problem because so much of their oil is coming from the Middle East in the first place.
00:27:37.000So, President Trump actually does have tremendous leverage with China with regard to Iran.
00:27:42.000According to the Financial Times, President Trump will urge Xi Jinping to curb China's support for Iran when the leaders meet in Beijing.
00:27:51.000According to one U.S. official, he said Trump would resume the previous discussions with Xi about China's support for Iran and Russia, including providing them with dual use components and potential arms exports.
00:27:59.000And again, the idea that America has no cards to play is insane.
00:28:03.000You want to, by the way, you want to end China's support for Iran?
00:28:18.000They may like that they're kind of vaguely anti American or wildly anti American, but they certainly don't like the idea that revolutionary Islam is somehow going to take over planet Earth.
00:28:28.000They're interning a million Muslims right now in China.
00:28:33.000The only reason they care about Iran is because of the oil resources.
00:28:35.000So if we decided to really put the screws to China, all we would have to do is bomb Karg Island and destroy their energy facilities in Iran.
00:28:41.000And suddenly, China switches sides because all China cares about at that point is freeing up the Iraqi oil, freeing up the Saudi oil, freeing up.
00:28:51.000Meanwhile, America, by cracking down on Iran's economic machine, has cracked down on China as well.
00:28:59.000According to Zineb Riboa, who's a research fellow with the Hudson Institute Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, we have been systematically degrading China's financial machine in Iran.
00:29:10.000Quote First, Beijing built the financial plumbing, developing methods for shadow banking, obscuring the origins of Iranian crude, rotating ship identities, layering payments through third country intermediaries.
00:29:20.000Second, its teapot refinery sector absorbed most of Iran's oil exports to China.
00:29:24.000Third, Xi used Iran as a rehearsal space, refining evasion techniques he intended to deploy on a far greater scale if Washington decided to directly pressure China.
00:29:34.000However, we have now unleashed Operation Economic Fury, and it's cracking down on all of these things.
00:29:41.000What appears to be a pressure campaign against the IRGC and another against Beijing's financial architecture is, in fact, a single operation.
00:29:48.000And President Trump is not wavering here.
00:29:53.000President Trump is doing the single most politically courageous thing I have ever seen because, again, it is always a risky game to get involved in foreign policy that involves kinetic action.
00:30:04.000That's particularly true in the Middle East.
00:30:05.000And President Trump has the cojones to actually stay the course.
00:30:09.000So Iran keeps trying to drag this out.
00:30:11.000But one of the things you should notice about what Iran is doing Iran keeps trying to fire on ships.
00:30:15.000The reason they're firing on ships is because the worst case scenario for Iran basically goes like this The worst thing that could happen for Iran is the United States decides to destroy its energy supply.
00:30:27.000And basically, they're the black knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
00:30:31.000They can lie there with no arms and no legs.
00:30:32.000That's about all they can do if we destroy their energy supplies.
00:30:35.000But the second worst thing for them is the maintenance of the blockade.
00:30:39.000And so they're trying to draw America into some sort of kinetic action that does not end with the United States blowing up their oil facilities because they would rather fight than allow the United States to continue to choke off their oil supply to and fro.
00:30:52.000So President Trump put out a statement after Iran's latest useless proposal.
00:30:57.000In which he said, Iran has been playing games with the United States and the rest of the world for 47 years, delay, delay, delay, and then finally hit payter when Barack Hussein Obama became president.
00:31:05.000He was not only good to them, he was great, actually going to their side, jettisoning Israel and all other allies, true, and giving Iran a major and very powerful new lease on life.
00:31:13.000Hundreds of billions of dollars, $1.7 billion in green cash flown into Tehran, was handed to them on a silver platter.
00:31:19.000Every bank in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland was emptied out.
00:31:21.000It was so much money that when it arrived, the Iranian thugs had no idea what to do with it.
00:31:25.000They had never seen money like this and never will again.
00:31:27.000It was taken off their plane in suitcases and satchels, and the Iranians couldn't believe their luck.
00:31:31.000They finally found the greatest sucker of all of them in the form of a weak and stupid American president.
00:31:41.000He was a disaster as our leader, but not as bad as sleepy Joe Biden.
00:31:44.000For 47 years, the Iranians have been tapping us along, keeping us waiting, killing our people with their roadside bombs, destroying protests, recently wiping out 42,000 innocent unarmed protesters, and laughing at our now great again country.
00:31:54.000They will be laughing no longer, President Trump.
00:31:58.000Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, he appeared on Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.
00:32:02.000He says, There are lots of ways we can end Iran's nuclear program.
00:32:07.000The nuclear expertise in the United States is within my department.
00:32:24.000Iran has nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60%.
00:32:29.000So close to weapons grade, way higher than any potential commercial use of it.
00:32:35.000They've lied all along that it's for a civil nuclear program, it's for their own energy.
00:32:39.000It was never about that, it was always about weapons.
00:32:43.000And the world just can't live with a nuclear armed Iran.
00:32:46.000We need to remove the nuclear material from Iran and end their enrichment activities to produce more of it.
00:32:54.000There's many ways that that can be achieved, but that must be achieved.
00:32:58.000One of the chief ways that that can be achieved, by the way, is again, destroying their actual energy facilities, and they don't have the money to pursue nuclear weapons.
00:34:34.000According to the New York Times, an Iranian government official, Hulam Hossein Mohammadi, estimated that the war has caused the loss of 1 million jobs and the direct and indirect unemployment of 2 million people.
00:34:46.000That was reported by an actual regime outlet.
00:34:50.000Mehdi Bostanchi, head of the country's Coordination Council of Industries, a body that liaises between companies and the government, Said Iran's industrial sector was going through a contraction that would affect as many as 3.5 million workers.
00:35:07.000Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, he did an interview with 60 Minutes, his first major American interview since the beginning of the war over the weekend.
00:35:14.000And he pointed out that a lot has been accomplished, but America and Israel would still have to deal with Iran's nuclear materials.
00:35:21.000It's not over because there's still nuclear material, enriched uranium, that has to be taken out of Iran.
00:35:28.000There are still enrichment sites that have to be dismantled.
00:35:33.000There are still proxies that Iran supports.
00:35:36.000There are ballistic missiles that they still want to produce.
00:35:40.000Now, we've degraded a lot of it, but all of that is still there, and there's work to be done.
00:35:46.000President Trump This war cannot end until all those things are eliminated.
00:35:50.000Well, certainly we want to get the nuclear material out.
00:35:53.000We certainly want to get the enrichment sites dismantled.
00:35:57.000We've curbed a lot, we've degraded a lot of the missile production sites.
00:36:01.000The agreement should cover all these areas, including the proxies.
00:36:04.000Can it end with, as President Trump has led now, a blockade and economic pressure on them to do it with non military means?
00:36:15.000Fine, if it can be accomplished, why not?
00:36:18.000But if not, both the United States and Israel, we both agree, President Trump and I, that if necessary, you can re engage them militarily if it's necessary.
00:36:29.000Prime Minister Netanyahu, by the way, also added that a lot of Arab countries have been strengthening alliances with Israel.
00:36:38.000And China's support for Iran has not resulted in greater support for China, but in less support for China in the region.
00:36:47.000I now see the possibility of the expansion of those agreements and the expansion and the deepening of the agreements we do have to alliances with Arab states of the kind that we never even dreamed of.
00:37:01.000And that's the result of the change in the relative power of Israel, the fact that we face down this neighborhood.
00:37:08.000Bully this killer regime in Iran that's brought quite a few of the Arab countries closer together with Israel, and that's good for peace.
00:37:17.000I'm hearing the fact from Arab countries, which I won't get into, who say All of them?
00:37:24.000But some of them, and I never heard that before, let's strengthen our alliance with Israel because that, in fact, deters Iran.
00:37:33.000Let's strengthen our alliance with Israel because we can work up our defenses as a result of it.
00:37:38.000Let's strengthen our alliance with Israel because we can do amazing things with Israel.
00:37:44.000Now, worth noting that in this interview, Netanyahu said that his goal is to draw American aid to Israel down to zero.
00:37:50.000So, for all those people who are claiming that Netanyahu wants to increase American aid to Israel over time and spend more American taxpayer dollars in Israel, and there's a very strong case that the memo of understanding between Israel and the United States actually benefits the United States.
00:38:02.000Number one, it all goes back to our military industrial complex.
00:38:07.000Number two, we get access to Israeli military tech.
00:38:12.000And number three, For better or for worse, the United States is frequently yanking the chain of the Israelis when they're in the middle of aggressive military action based on that MOU.
00:38:25.000In any case, here was Netanyahu on 60 Minutes.
00:38:29.000Do you believe it's time for the state of Israel to reexamine and possibly reset its financial relationship to the United States, meaning what the United States provides to Israel on an annual basis?
00:38:52.000I want to draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have, because we receive $3.8 billion a year.
00:39:06.000And I think that it's time that we weaned ourselves from the remaining military support.
00:39:57.000The United States has always taken a strategically ambiguous position with regard to Taiwan.
00:40:03.000We constantly are saying that Taiwan is its own polity, but at the same time, there's one China policy, which is that Taiwan theoretically is a part of China, all the rest of it.
00:40:12.000We've never been clear that Taiwan is its own country, for example, because we're afraid that if we say that, then China will try to invade Taiwan.
00:40:19.000According to the Taipei Times, Taipei will be watching for any sign that Trump has unnerved partners with his transactional approach to alliances, could soften or reframe longstanding U.S. policy on Taiwan.
00:40:33.000I think it is likely that the president will continue to maintain current American positioning with regard to Taiwan.
00:40:38.000And worth noting, because of the new relationship between Japan and the United States, and obviously we have a very good relationship with Japan, we have for decades at this point, but the brand new leadership in Japan is extremely aggressive in its defense of its territorial rights and wants to ensure that Taiwan does not fall into the clutches of China and is rebuilding militarily.
00:40:58.000We're going to have allies in the region who can help us out.
00:41:00.000When it comes to the defense of Taiwan in the future.
00:41:02.000So, likely nothing will change with regard to Taiwan.
00:41:05.000And finally, they will discuss the economy.
00:41:08.000According to the Wall Street Journal, discussions will focus largely on trade issues, namely the Chinese purchases of American agricultural goods, energy products, and aerospace technologies like Boeing airplanes.
00:41:18.000The leaders will also discuss establishing a U.S. China Board of Trade that would consider how the countries can trade goods that aren't related to national security.
00:41:25.000Now, again, China's economy is a lot weaker than people tend to think it is.
00:41:32.000Probably there'll be some papering over of those differences.
00:41:34.000The reality, again, is that when it comes to the economic battle between China and the United States, we have the upper hand and it ain't particularly close.
00:41:41.000Joining me on the line is Keith Sonderling.
00:41:43.000He's the acting U.S. Secretary of Labor.
00:41:45.000Secretary Sonderling, thanks so much for the time.
00:41:52.000So, obviously, a very solid jobs report coming out late last week, suggesting 115,000 jobs added across various sectors.
00:42:01.000And the Trump administration has done a pretty great job.
00:42:03.000Job of ensuring that the jobs that are being added are in the private sector versus just adding jobs in the public sector.
00:42:08.000Let me talk about sort of the labor balance under President Trump versus President Biden.
00:42:12.000Yeah, and that's a really great point you made.
00:42:15.000And two things before I get to that, it's really important to note that once again, President Trump continues to prove the doubters wrong.
00:42:23.000Just this past jobs report 94% of the economists that Bloomberg surveyed thought the jobs would come in around 65,000, the number, and it was nearly double that.
00:42:36.000Revised upwards from 178,000 to 185,000.
00:42:40.000But when President Trump ran, he committed to right sizing the federal government and getting jobs back in the private sector, which is the exact opposite of what the Biden administration did.
00:42:50.000Their job numbers were going up because they were just continuing to hire in the federal government and have a bloated federal government.
00:42:57.000So we're pleased to report that the federal government is at its smallest size since 1966.
00:43:04.000And that saves taxpayers over $40 billion a year.
00:43:16.000And that's something that the president has really been pushing on.
00:43:19.000As we see manufacturing coming back, as we see so many different industries coming back, we're seeing the correlating construction jobs that are leading into the manufacturing jobs.
00:43:56.000I've been making the case on the show that, of course, gas prices are up during the Iran war, and then they will go wildly down once the Iran war is over, because either you will see some sort of behavior change in Iran or regime change in Iran, which will open up gas markets there.
00:44:09.000Also, one of the things people are not noticing is that UAE just broke out of OPEC, which means that they're no longer going to be cartelized in terms of actually being part of a gigantic cartel that restricts oil output.
00:44:19.000And so the price is dropping pretty precipitously when this is all over.
00:44:25.000And the president has been very clear Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, period.
00:44:30.000So, you know, the correlating gas price issue that we're seeing, it's coming down.
00:44:35.000Last week, Brent crude oil went down by a great percentage, and we're going to continue to see gas prices coming down.
00:44:41.000It is temporary, but a metric we look at at the Department of Labor, really, for the workforce is that wages continue to, wage increase continues to beat inflation.
00:44:50.000And I think that should give American confidence that they're earning more than any inflationary temporary gains related to the conflict in Iran.
00:45:00.000And you said it best, these prices are coming down, they'll continue to come down.
00:45:04.000It's temporary, and any of the economic numbers that have changed related to that are temporary and will continue to decrease.
00:45:11.000So, that is not something that people should worry about.
00:45:14.000People should worry about job opportunities and job opportunities for Americans and industries that have left and have been pushed out of the United States coming back.
00:45:22.000You know, this past month, we've seen historic investments.
00:45:28.000General Motors, $830 million for plants in Michigan and Ohio.
00:45:34.000And that's what matters to the American workers.
00:45:37.000High paid, High skilled jobs that left, they're coming back.
00:45:42.000One of the other areas that a lot of Americans are uncertain about is, of course, artificial intelligence.
00:45:47.000So people don't know very much about it.
00:45:48.000A lot of people are using it on their phones or using it in their businesses.
00:45:51.000But you can see that there's sort of an inverse proportion between the number of people who are using it, which is very high, and the fears about it, which are also very, very high confidence in it, very low.
00:46:00.000A lot of people are worried that they're going to lose their jobs to a guy.
00:46:03.000The evidence is precisely the opposite so far.
00:46:06.000In fact, you've seen extraordinary job gains.
00:46:09.000In, for example, construction of AI data centers, you're seeing job gains in a lot of these AI related industries.
00:46:15.000What do you make of Americans being worried about AI?
00:46:18.000Well, that's a key initiative of ours here at the Department of Labor to make sure that not only Americans have the baseline skills and understanding of what these tools can and can't do, but really to dive into what AI's impact on the workforce is.
00:46:32.000Right now, so much of the narrative being out there, whether it's related to layoffs or whether it's related to these, tools being built that may replace your job.
00:46:43.000And what we're trying to do here is work with private sector partners, work with tech companies, work with industry who's interested in these products, who's developing these products and really make sure that the American workers have those skills so they feel comfortable working side by side with AI and not fearing that's going to be their robot replacement.
00:47:02.000So we have an initiative here, both on the AI literacy side, not just for the current workforce, but future generations of workers.
00:47:09.000Working with the Department of Education to make sure that AI literacy gets into the pre K through 12 education, working with our state workforce partners, who we give a lot of money to to train the workforce.
00:47:20.000We believe that every job is going to have an AI component to it, whether you're in construction, whether you're a lawyer, or really any industries.
00:47:27.000And we're really pushing on the states when we give them federal dollars to do workforce training that they have an AI literacy component to it.
00:47:36.000So the current generation and the next generation of American workers are entering that job with the baseline skills they need and they won't have that fear.
00:47:46.000Secretary Sonderling, there's been a lot of focus on the president heading over to China this week.
00:47:49.000The president has completely reset the table over the course of his two presidencies now.
00:47:54.000With regard to China, people tend to forget that the Obama administration was treating China as not only a rising power, but somebody we should be sharing geopolitical power with, pursuing a sort of multipolarity with regard to China.
00:48:05.000The president of the United States has, since his very earliest days campaigning, pointed out that China is a geopolitical opponent of the United States and has refused to allow them to take advantage of us.
00:48:15.000What are you looking for the president to do with regard to his summit this week with Xi Jinping over in China?
00:48:21.000Well, I'm very confident that the president will do the right thing when he's over there.
00:48:25.000You know, he went there during his first term.
00:48:30.000And I know they're very much, he's very much looking forward to going this turn.
00:48:33.000But what's important for us here at the Department of Labor, you know, when it comes to that geopolitical conversation, is bringing back those industries that have left.
00:48:42.000And that's what the president does wherever he goes throughout the country and throughout the world.
00:48:47.000When he negotiates with foreign leaders, when he talks to foreign countries, companies, his main focus is getting industry back in the United States to get American workers those high skilled, high paying jobs.
00:49:17.000Meanwhile, many of the people who have been claiming that America ought to give up global power in favor of multipolarity, well, they've been saying we ought to do so in favor of Russia, right?
00:49:27.000You've heard this from Tucker Carlson of the woke right or the new left.
00:49:31.000You've been hearing this from people like the Hassan Pikers of the world.
00:49:34.000There's this horseshoe of people who think that America ought to give up power to the Russians.
00:49:39.000Well, over the weekend, President Trump announced that the leaders of Russia and Ukraine had agreed to his request for a three day ceasefire.
00:49:45.000It wasn't really very ceasefire y, shall we say?
00:49:48.000According to the Kyiv Post, despite that high profile humanitarian ceasefire, the Ukrainian general staff reported 147 combat engagements on the truce's opening day.
00:49:58.000Russian forces reportedly launched over 7,000 kamikaze drones and conducted 2,000 shelling attacks, resulting in civilian deaths in the Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
00:50:22.000They're abjectly, clearly opposed to American interests.
00:50:26.000This is another area, by the way, where President Trump's actual action versus his rhetoric have not been the same.
00:50:32.000The president has wanted an off ramp on Russia, Ukraine for a while, but you may notice the president is openly talking about moving troops out of Germany.
00:50:39.000He's not talking about bringing those troops home, he's talking about moving military bases.
00:50:45.000He's talking about taking troops from Italy and moving them into Poland, into Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, you know, like up on Russia's borders to stop them from getting aggressive.
00:50:54.000And we should point out here that Russia, this war has been a disaster for Russia, a disaster, clearly.
00:51:00.000Russian fatalities in this war, estimates suggest somewhere between 275,000 and 325,000 dead since February 2022, about 100,000 to 140,000 dead on the Ukrainian side.
00:51:15.000It's like a two to one, maybe even three to one ratio of dead Russians versus dead Ukrainians.
00:51:19.000But, I mean, those numbers are mind boggling, truly mind boggling.
00:51:25.000By way of contrast, the number of soldiers that Russia has lost in the current war against Ukraine is larger than the total number of American soldiers lost during all of World War II.
00:52:25.000They have failed in Ukraine and they continue to fail in Ukraine.
00:52:30.000Meanwhile, Putin claims the globalists are attempting to war against Russia, just speaking all the favorite buzzwords of the woke right and the left.
00:52:41.000It's a globalist wing of the Western elites, and they are the ones who wage the war against us with the hands of the Ukrainians.
00:52:54.000Again, the idea of giving up global power to the Russians is totally insane.
00:53:15.000Some of these jokes were pretty rough.
00:53:17.000Now, again, the jokes at the Tom Brady roast were also quite rough, but this was rough in a totally different way because, frankly, most of the rough jokes were not at the expense of Kevin Hart.
00:53:29.000Pete Davidson, for no reason that I can discern, told one of the roughest jokes I can remember about Charlie Kirk.
00:53:36.000Here's what that sounded like: Tony reminds me of Charlie Kirk, and that he's definitely been on camera letting a guy unload in his throat.
00:55:39.000You may have heard this story that Elliot Page, who, again, Ellen Page has been missing for years at this point.
00:55:45.000I don't know what happened to Ellen Page.
00:55:46.000Ellen Page was good in Juno and then was good in Inception and then just disappeared from the face of the earth.
00:55:51.000And at the same exact time that Ellen Page disappeared from the face of the earth, there was another person named Elliot Page who seemed to be Ellen Page's distant relation.
00:56:00.000Bears a striking resemblance to Ellen Page, but with shorter hair, still looks female, but apparently has a prosthetic set of genitals and no breasts.
00:56:39.000So you'd be degrading from Brad Pitt, kind of uber masculine, heavily muscled Brad Pitt in 2004, to Elliott Page, a woman cosplaying as a male.
00:56:59.000So we know that Elliot Page is in the cast list.
00:57:02.000I would be rather surprised if Elliot Page were playing Achilles in the Odyssey.
00:57:07.000That would be kind of surprising to me.
00:57:08.000Now, there may be other problems with the Odyssey.
00:57:10.000It turns out that the translation that Nolan used for the Odyssey is a translation by a woman who, shall we say, is strange in her interpretation of the text.
00:57:22.000It's not the Robert Fagels translation.
00:57:24.000It's a, it's a newer translation that is a lot more colloquial and that removes some of the implications of the text, apparently.
00:57:31.000So that may be a problem, but the entire internet went nuts with this thing, like totally crazy.
00:58:57.000Except for Democrats who are divided between whether to rip the founders or proclaim that they were communist revolutionaries.
00:59:04.000So, Alexander Ocasio Cortez is trying to grab hold of that American flag by claiming that actually the American founders were Marxists of some sort at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago.
00:59:16.000My goodness, she brought the average IQ at UChicago down by at least 20 points here.
00:59:24.000The American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time.
00:59:31.000And we are declaring independence from such an extreme marriage of wealth and power and the state that the voices of everyday people did not exist.
00:59:53.000The founding fathers were pretty rich, comparatively speaking, and also were rebelling against the expropriation of property by the government.
01:00:00.000That's literally the thing they were rebelling against.
01:00:04.000But, you know, you don't have to be bright to be in Democratic politics.
01:00:07.000Apparently, you don't even have to be particularly well versed in order to teach history at Boston College.
01:00:12.000There's a woman named Heather Cox Richardson.
01:00:14.000She has the top politics Substack newsletter in the country, something like 3 million subscribers.
01:00:19.000And here she was in conversation with one David Rubenstein on C SPAN, talking about the founding fathers.
01:00:27.000Oh, I think he couldn't have written it unless he was a slave owner, which sounds weird, but that's the very contradiction at the heart of who we are as Americans.
01:00:36.000When those men, Looked out at their fields full of enslaved people and said, We are all created equal.
01:00:45.000They were writing out of we all the people that didn't look like them, didn't sound like them, didn't have the same kind of money they did.
01:00:54.000And by getting rid of the vast majority of humanity, women, people of color, black Americans, and so on, they could say, Oh, yeah, we're all created equal.
01:01:03.000But the genius of our age from their declaration of that to the present, and I hope. Beyond is recognizing that those principles, even though they had limits on them, don't have to have limits on them for us.
01:01:16.000And that's exactly what happened as soon as the Declaration comes out.
01:01:19.000You have people like Phyllis Wheatley, the black poet from Boston, writing to an indigenous preacher saying, Those are great principles, and we feel the same way.
01:01:28.000And that's what we've been doing ever since.
01:01:33.000And her idea is that Thomas Jefferson didn't know what he was writing about when he said, All men are created equal.
01:01:37.000That is a complete flattening of Thomas Jefferson as a political character.
01:01:40.000Yes, Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder.
01:01:42.000And yes, Thomas Jefferson also, particularly in this period, was fully aware of the conflict between his own slaveholding and the principles of the Declaration.
01:01:50.000This idea that the founders had to write out vast swathes of humanity to come up with all men are created equal.
01:01:58.000Just because they didn't live up to the principles they were articulating does not mean they did not understand the principles they were articulating.