Legacy Media say that ICE arrested a five-year-old, but is that really true? But on the other hand, the DOJ did arrest three people who stormed into a church and then proceeded to harass everybody in that church over their immigration policy. We ll get to all that in a moment.
00:00:00.000Legacy media say that ICE arrested a five-year-old, but is that really true?
00:00:04.000But on the other hand, the DOJ did arrest three people who stormed into a church and then proceeded to harass everybody in that church over their immigration policy.
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00:00:44.000So amid all of the chaos regarding the immigration situation in Minneapolis, members of the legacy media have just started to tell lies.
00:00:52.000The latest lie that is being told is that federal agents seized a five-year-old boy in an effort to bait his father.
00:00:59.000This story was first retailed apparently by the New York Times.
00:01:03.000The original report suggested a five-year-old boy wearing a Spider-Man backpack and an oversized hat was detained with his father by immigration authorities on Tuesday, one of four students recently apprehended in a suburban Minneapolis school district, according to school officials.
00:01:18.000And this was treated by the legacy media as a major story.
00:01:24.000There was a picture of this little boy wearing what appeared to be a Disney hat.
00:01:30.000And again, the idea was that he was used as bait, according to the Daily Mirror.
00:01:36.000The pre-kindergarten pupil, a kid named Liam Conejo Ramos, was pictured in a photo released by the school system standing next to a vehicle with an adult's hand on his backpack.
00:01:46.000Zina Stenfik, the superintendent of schools in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, asked at a news conference, why detain a five-year-old?
00:01:53.000However, that is not actually what happened, as you could have predicted.
00:01:57.000According to the New York Times, again, they bury this further down in the story.
00:02:00.000The boy and his father were taken to Dilley, Texas, outside San Antonio, where they are being held at an immigration detention center, according to Mark Prokosh, a lawyer working with the family.
00:02:09.000The boy and his father came to the United States from Ecuador in 2024.
00:02:19.000Well, again, according to Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, when the agents sought to detain the father, he fled on foot and he left Liam behind in the vehicle, which is a bit of a different story, as it turns out.
00:02:34.000If you're detained alongside your child and you take off and your kid is five, well, that might say something about your parenting style, to say the very least.
00:02:41.000I have four children, one of them is five years old.
00:02:43.000The insanity of being detained alongside my five-year-old daughter and just taking off is beyond measure.
00:02:50.000Apparently, Ms. Stenvik, the district superintendent, said in a statement that another adult who lived in the family's home had begged to care for Liam, but federal agents refused to allow it.
00:02:59.000Well, presumably, one of the reasons why they had refused to simply allow an adult staying in the home to take care of the boy is they don't know who the adult is.
00:03:08.000In 2024, there was a report regarding the Biden administration that found that from 2019 to 2023, more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children failed to appear for their immigration court hearings.
00:03:21.000In fact, they lost track of tens of thousands of migrant children, some of whom were reunited with family, some of whom they really don't have an idea.
00:03:28.000And so, yeah, they might not be so hot on the idea of just dropping the five-year-old with an adult who lives in the home.
00:03:36.000According to Trisha McLaughlin, the agents had tried to get Liam's mother to take the boy, but she had apparently refused.
00:03:42.000McLaughlin said that Conejo Arrayos told federal agents he wanted Liam to stay with him.
00:03:47.000Ms. Granlund said Liam's father was yelling at adults inside the home.
00:03:50.000Please do not open the door, presumably because of fears the agents would apprehend other people who are in the home and in the country illegally.
00:03:57.000Now, again, this has raised tackles because there is widespread debate over what sort of warrant is necessary, an administrative warrant or a judge-signed warrant in order to enter a home where there's probable cause to believe illegal immigrants are residing.
00:04:12.000We'll get to that legal issue in a moment.
00:04:15.000School officials have previously accused immigration agents of making the child knock on the door of his home as base so they could apprehend others, something that immigration officials denied.
00:04:24.000So, again, I cannot imagine that that is actually the case, that they just took a five-year-old and they said, we need you to knock on the door and call for mommy in order to get into the house to go get illegal immigrants.
00:04:34.000In order to detain Liam against his will, agents would need probable cause to believe he was in the country unlawfully, but they are allowed to keep the child within arrested parents if the parent requests it.
00:04:44.000Well, Vice President JD Vance was visiting at Minneapolis on Thursday, and here's what he had to say.
00:04:50.000I see this story, and I'm a father of a five-year-old, actually, a five-year-old little boy, and I think to myself, oh my God, this is terrible.
00:04:59.000Well, I do a little bit more follow-up research, and what I find is that the five-year-old was not arrested, that his dad was an illegal alien.
00:05:07.000And then when they went to arrest his illegal alien father, the father ran.
00:05:12.000So the story is that ICE detained a five-year-old.
00:05:17.000Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death?
00:05:20.000Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States of America?
00:05:24.000If the argument is that you can't arrest people who have violated laws because they have children, then every single parent is going to be completely given immunity from ever being the subject of law enforcement.
00:05:41.000Obviously, the vice president is obviously 100% right about all of this.
00:05:44.000I mean, the fact of the matter is that we have had a serious problem on our hands since there was an agreement, a consent agreement between the federal government and various judiciary bodies, the Flores Agreement going back decades, that suggested that you could not hold a child and parent together in custody when they crossed the border.
00:06:05.000And so children were released into the interior of the country.
00:06:08.000And this caused the Biden administration, among other administrations, to release the parents as well, to reunify the family.
00:06:13.000Well, now the idea is that you can't support anyone because they might have children.
00:06:17.000And so you can't reunify the family, even if the father wants to be with the kid.
00:06:22.000And then you get blamed if the father takes off when you hold the kid and the parent together.
00:06:27.000What exactly are immigration agents supposed to do?
00:06:29.000This, of course, makes everything unworkable, which I believe is the point.
00:06:33.000Now, some of this is part and parcel of a new ICE policy that suggests that there does not need to be a judge-signed warrant in order to enter the home.
00:06:40.000Again, you heard that mentioned in the story from the New York Times, that ICE agents are showing up at homes.
00:06:44.000And based on administrative warrants, they're entering homes and they are looking for illegal immigrants.
00:06:50.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is asserting new powers to forcibly enter the homes of people they are hoping to arrest without a criminal warrant signed by a judge.
00:06:58.000Over the summer, lawyers at ICE and its parents' agency, the Department of Homeland Security, penned a secret memo expanding the authority by which agents may enter homes of immigrants with final deportation orders that people said.
00:07:15.000It has been signed by a judge, a final deportation order.
00:07:19.000And now they're using that as the predicate for the warrant.
00:07:22.000It is a civil warrant, not a criminal warrant.
00:07:25.000That is the basic argument that is being made.
00:07:28.000And when it comes to immigration enforcement, Supreme Court precedent suggests that administrative warrants issued by the Attorney General rather than a judge could be utilized to arrest people pending deportation.
00:07:41.000And that was codified in the Immigration and Nationality Act, actually.
00:07:47.000Now, there are restrictions on it, like you're not supposed to enter a private home without consent.
00:07:51.000Again, the DHS has now said, well, maybe that changes because the final order of removal has already been signed.
00:07:58.000So the person's already had due process.
00:08:00.000It's not a matter of there has to be another judicial hearing in order to remove them.
00:08:03.000They already have a final order pending removal.
00:08:06.000And so once that order is already done, they've had their due process, and now it's just a question of executing the order.
00:08:12.000All of that will end up litigated in court.
00:08:14.000But to pretend that there is no legal basis whatsoever for what DHS and ICE are doing, that seems wrong.
00:08:20.000According to the Wall Street Journal, DHS and ICE officials have not publicized or broadly distributed the legal decision because they felt it would invite legal scrutiny.
00:08:29.000Immigration lawyers and advocates from Minnesota have documented cases of agents breaking down people's doors to arrest them without a warrant.
00:08:35.000But again, in some of these cases, you're talking about people who have overstayed their visas by legitimately 20 years.
00:08:42.000The most prominent case concerned a Minnesota man born in Liberia whose Fourth Amendment right was violated by ICE officers when they broke down his door without his consent and without a judicial warrant.
00:08:51.000He was issued a deportation order in 2009.
00:08:53.000He was allowed to remain in the U.S. under ICE supervision.
00:08:57.000His most recent check-in with ICE was December 29th, 2025.
00:09:00.000And on January 11th, immigration officers forced their way into his home and took him into custody.
00:09:12.000But the bottom line is this: there are plenty of situations that are going to be dicing when it comes to specific enforcement of general law.
00:09:20.000However, the media should not have to make things up like they found a five-year-old boy and they used him as bait in order to go after his father.
00:09:28.000And the fact that they are having to do that means that, again, the broad policy is largely inarguable, which is why you look for bad exceptions.
00:09:37.000Now, meanwhile, this sort of media coverage is leading to significant ire and rage in places like Minneapolis.
00:09:43.000It is ratcheting up the tensions with ICE.
00:09:45.000Again, the vice president was visiting at Minneapolis and he said, listen, the problem here is Minneapolis authorities, not ICE.
00:09:52.000But the number one way where we could lower the mistakes that are happening, at least with our immigration enforcement, is to have local jurisdictions that are cooperating with us.
00:10:01.000There are some very basic things that would make Minneapolis look like, look, Memphis, Tennessee, a blue city where you do not have this chaos in immigration enforcement because the local police and the local authorities are cooperating with us.
00:10:15.000So when you look at Memphis, Tennessee, or Austin, Texas, or any other community virtually across the United States of America, and you don't see the same level of chaos in Minneapolis, the natural conclusion is that it's not what ICE is doing in Minneapolis.
00:10:30.000It's what Minneapolis authorities are doing to prevent ICE from doing their jobs.
00:10:37.000And Vance, of course, is right about this too.
00:10:39.000I mean, the fact is that if local authorities were, in fact, working hand in glove with DHS, things would go a lot smoother.
00:10:45.000Vance also pointed out that protest does not mean assault.
00:10:49.000That if you're going to protest ICE agents, that does not mean that you can obstruct federal law or go after the ICE agents physically or threaten them.
00:10:55.000A lot of these guys are unable to do their jobs without being harassed, without being doxxed, and sometimes without being assaulted.
00:11:03.000And that's one of the things that I want to send a message to is, yes, come out and protest, protest me, protest our immigration policy, but do it peacefully.
00:11:11.000If you assault a law enforcement officer, the Trump administration and the Department of Justice is going to prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.
00:11:18.000And I wanted to show some support for these guys.
00:11:21.000Now, again, when it comes to prosecuting people to the fullest extent of the law, the big story with regard to immigration over the past 24 hours is that now the DOJ is going after three people who essentially took over a church in the middle of a service in order to promote their immigration radicalism in violation of the FACE Act, which is an act that was designed to do two things.
00:11:44.000Designed to prevent people from obstructing abortion facilities on the one hand, and also designed to prevent people from storming churches, essentially, and taking them over in the middle of services.
00:11:54.000According to NPR, a prominent civil rights attorney and at least two other people involved in an anti-immigration enforcement protest disrupting a service at a Minnesota church have now been arrested, according to Trump administration officials on Thursday.
00:12:06.000Attorney General Pamboni announced the arrest of Nakima Levy Armstrong in a post on X. Again, all of that follows protesters entering the city's church in St. Paul, where a local official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement serves as a pastor.
00:12:52.000And it's enough for the legacy media to make things up.
00:12:54.000You don't need people in the social media sphere for the White House making things up and making the job of the legacy media really a lot easier.
00:13:03.000We'll get to what the church had to say, what its attorneys had to say about all this in a moment.
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00:14:51.000Now, attorneys representing Cities Church in St. Paul, which is of course the church that was victimized in this situation, they put forward a statement from Renee Carlson, the general counsel, quote, the First Amendment does not allow premeditated plots or coordinated actions to violate the sanctity of a sanctuary, disrupt worship, and intimidate small children.
00:15:09.000There's no press pass to invade a sanctuary or to conspire to interrupt religious services.
00:15:13.000The Constitution protects citizens from threats against fundamental rights by the government, but it also requires government to protect those same rights when they are jeopardized by private actors.
00:15:22.000And the director of litigation for True North Legal, a person named Doug Wardlaw, put out a statement very similarly saying, the U.S. Department of Justice acted decisively by arresting those who coordinated and carried out this terrible crime, which is to invade a church and terrorize worshipers.
00:15:37.000The arrest and the prosecutions to follow will help ensure mob aggression, like Cities Church experienced, will not be repeated in any other house of worship.
00:15:44.000That is a good move by the Trump administration.
00:15:47.000Now, it doesn't mean that the people arrested aren't going to fib about it.
00:15:51.000One of the people arrested, as mentioned, was Nakima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney.
00:15:57.000And here she was on CNN claiming that she was welcomed into the church.
00:16:01.000Well, I mean, under false auspices, as she then proceeds to explain.
00:16:23.000And then I proceeded to ask him about Pastor David Easterwood and how is it possible for him to serve as both the pastor and the director of ICE for Minnesota.
00:16:34.000And instead of responding to me, as soon as I said the name David Easterwood, the pastor says, shame, shame.
00:16:43.000And that is when I led us and chants justice for Renee Good and hands up, don't shoot.
00:16:48.000Okay, so that, of course, is ridiculous.
00:16:51.000You don't get to go into somebody else's church.
00:16:54.000And then if you wait for five minutes and then break out into a disruption of the church service, call that permission tensor the church.
00:17:04.000If you go into somebody's house claiming that you are, for example, a carpet salesperson and you want to check out the house and the person invites you in, you proceed to steal all the crockery.
00:17:11.000Well, it turns out they didn't invite you in the house to steal the crockery.
00:17:46.000Well, he showed up and a judge in Minnesota was handed an indictment for him and rejected the indictment.
00:17:56.000That judge rejected the federal prosecutor's attempt to criminally charge Don Lemon in relation to his presence this week during a protest at that St. Paul church.
00:18:03.000According to the Washington Post, this represents an extraordinary rebuke of a Justice Department that has drawn criticism for its forceful response to demonstrations against ICE officers.
00:18:14.000The magistrate judge's decision was described Thursday by two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
00:18:22.000Department officials announced the arrests of, again, the other three.
00:18:27.000Well, it turns out, shock of shocks, it turns out that the judge in this particular case, according to Bill Malugan of Fox News, actually, his wife works as an assistant attorney general in Minnesota under Keith Ellison.
00:18:43.000So Keith Ellison is the attorney general of the state, and he, of course, is an ally of Don Lemon.
00:18:47.000In fact, here he was over the course of the last 24 hours, joining Don Lemon's show to explain why Don Lemon didn't do anything wrong.
00:18:56.000Look, it's a wild stretch and inappropriate.
00:19:00.000And the FACE Act, by the way, is designed to protect the rights of people seeking their reproductive rights to be protected.
00:19:10.000And so that people, for a religious reason, cannot just use religion to break into women's reproductive health centers, right?
00:19:20.000So how they are stretching either of these laws to apply to people who protested in a church over the behavior or the perceived behavior of a religious leader is beyond me.
00:19:32.000But they don't mind stretching these days.
00:19:35.000Okay, well, it's not actually a stretch.
00:19:37.000Now, Keith Ellison is out there telling Don Lemon, quote, people have a right to lift up their voices and make their peace, and none of us are immune from the voice of the public.
00:19:45.000And then he said, chanting cannot be a crime.
00:19:52.000It turns out that the FACE Act explicitly talks about the attempts to disrupt church services.
00:20:00.000It explicitly protects religious freedom.
00:20:03.000It imposes criminal penalties on anyone who, quote, by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates, or interferes with or attempts to injure, intimidate, or interfere with any person lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious worship at a place of religious worship.
00:20:24.000Well, because it was essentially a trade.
00:20:26.000This was a bipartisan bill signed into law in 1994.
00:20:30.000On the one hand, Democrats were saying that they wanted to protect abortion clinics from people who are obstructing the entrances.
00:20:35.000And Republicans said, we're not going to vote for that unless you also vote that you're not allowed to disrupt church services.
00:20:40.000So yes, part of the FACE Act is preventing this sort of stuff pretty clearly.
00:20:46.000But that's what Keith Ellison is all about.
00:20:47.000Again, it is not about the impartial administration of law.
00:20:53.000And so there's something a little bit problematic about the fact that the wife of the judge who's protecting Don Lemon works for Keith Ellison.
00:21:02.000Representative Tom Emmer, he says Keith Ellison needs a refresher course in law.
00:21:22.000He would prefer to prosecute cops and defend criminals rather than doing his job.
00:21:28.000And by the way, when you suggest that interrupting a faith community during, while they're worshiping is a exercise of your First Amendment rights, I would suggest he head back for a refresher course in law school because he clearly didn't learn the law because he certainly doesn't understand it.
00:21:44.000Well, that, of course, is Tom Emmer, Republican of Minnesota, and he is right about all of that.
00:21:49.000The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Fry, also came out and suggested that it was absolutely terrible, awful, in fact, for the Trump DOJ to indict people who are disrupting church services and entering churches without permission in order to do that.
00:22:04.000Jacob Frey tweeted, quote, this is a gross abuse of power.
00:22:06.000The federal government is picking and choosing who to investigate, going after protesters, and not the person who shot and killed one of our neighbors.
00:22:12.000I'm calling for Nakima to be released immediately.
00:22:17.000And I declare bankruptcy like Michael Scott.
00:22:20.000You know, that and $5 will buy you a pretty mediocre cup of coffee.
00:22:24.000But it is always incredible to see who the Minneapolis mayor will bow before and who he will instead allow to trample all over the law, including, of course, people who are attempting to violate the rights of others to worship freely in a church.
00:22:40.000Now, the question is how all of this is going to impact the 2026 midterm elections.
00:22:47.000The biggest question, of course, is whether we continue to enforce the law.
00:22:49.000But this will be a major issue in the run-up to the 2026 elections.
00:22:52.000And there are a couple of ways this could go.
00:22:55.000On the one hand, Democrats have an inherent advantage.
00:22:58.000On the generic ballot, it is an off-year election.
00:23:00.000Off-year elections typically move in favor of the party out of power.
00:23:05.000Nate Silver suggests that Democrats have some pretty good news here.
00:23:10.000The pretty good news for Democrats is that in the generic ballot, they are on average up by more than five points at this point in time.
00:23:21.000Not only that, it means that because there is a margin of error, it is possible that anything from an 11-point Democratic win to a 0.4-point Republican edge could be within that margin of error.
00:23:34.000Well, that spells potential blowout for the Democrats.
00:23:37.000And even if Republicans were to win slightly in the national popular vote, that would be a disappointment for Democrats, but they might still win back the House.
00:23:45.000So Democrats certainly have some pretty significant advantages.
00:23:51.000Does that mean that Democrats are definitely going?
00:23:54.000Well, they're acting like it, aren't they?
00:23:56.000Democrats are acting as though it is inevitable that they're going to win the 2026 elections.
00:24:01.000That is the only rationale that I can use to explain why they continue to embrace the most radical policies that Americans really are not going to like.
00:24:20.000So, if you were working for ICE, he's going to say that you will never be able to work in California again.
00:24:25.000Why is this sort of thing going to benefit Democrats generically across the country?
00:24:30.000As governor, I'll use my emergency powers and I'll tell every state agency we are not as a policy hiring ICE agents.
00:24:37.000Because right now, these guys doing this work, it's a decision.
00:24:41.000No one's holding a gun and saying you have to work for ICE.
00:24:45.000And so, when I'm governor, if you're still working for ICE, you haven't got the message that no one's asking you to do this, you won't be hired in the state.
00:24:51.000And it's part of an approach that says either we can be on our heels as the most vulnerable in our community, or we can make them react and go on offense.
00:25:00.000And so, I can't take on any other crisis until I do that first part of the job, which is to be a fighter protector for Californians.
00:25:09.000So, again, what you have right now is a bit of a game of hold my beer when it comes to immigration.
00:25:13.000On the one hand, you have an administration that, for the most part, is attempting to go after criminal illegal immigrants, but doing a terrible job rhetorically in doing so.
00:25:22.000Truly not doing a very good job rhetorically in explaining that they are going after criminal illegal immigrants.
00:25:27.000They've been trying a little bit harder in the last couple of weeks, but the reality is the polling shows that Americans do not approve of what ICE, they perceive ICE to be doing.
00:25:36.000As Karl Rove points out over at the Wall Street Journal, in a January 12th Quinnipiac University poll, 57% of all voters and 64% of independents disapprove of how ICE is enforcing immigration law.
00:25:46.000Now, again, what they think of what ICE is doing is not actually what ICE is doing.
00:25:51.000Many of them think that ICE is simply going and rounding people up generally at Home Depot.
00:25:56.000They are, in fact, targeting criminal operations in which illegal immigrants are involved.
00:26:02.000Sure, when you're attempting to deport some 660,000 people, which I believe is the number that they've worked on deporting thus far, when you do that, you're going to catch up some people who may not have committed an extraneous crime.
00:26:13.000But ICE has been directing its resources at the worst offenders, no question.
00:26:19.000Well, the administration needs to do a better job of explaining that.
00:26:22.000Democrats, on the other hand, can't restrict themselves to saying that the Republicans should stick to criminal illegal immigrants.
00:26:28.000Instead, they go all the way with Eric Swalwell and talk about how they're going to make it so that ICE agents are unhirable.
00:26:34.000They go with Zorn Mamdani, who says he's going to attempt to defund ICE if he ever gets the opportunity.
00:26:40.000It is amazing how everybody misreads the tea leaves.
00:26:43.000Everyone misreads what the American people want.
00:26:45.000They believe always that the American people want what they are selling, but the most extreme version of it.
00:27:16.000She had suggested that their defund the police routine was bad politics.
00:27:19.000Well, now, Virginia Democrats are shifting to far-left policies.
00:27:25.000As Virginia Kruda points out at the Daily Wire, at the top of their agenda seems to be implementing some kind of wealth tax in Virginia.
00:27:32.000Lawmakers have already introduced several competing bills that would create new tax brackets with steeper rates for higher earners.
00:27:38.000One bill would nearly double the state income tax rate for Virginians who make over a million dollars a year.
00:27:44.000Not only that, they've also decided that they're going to make it easier to pursue voter fraud.
00:27:53.000And they're teeing up bills to make the state softer on crime and illegal immigration.
00:27:58.000One bill would eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for certain offenses, including but not limited to illegal sales of cigarettes and alcohol, certain conduct punishable as involuntary manslaughter, and violations of certain provisions of protective orders.
00:28:11.000Another couple of bills pushed by Virginia Democrats would help protect illegal immigrants in Virginia.
00:28:15.000One, by barring officials from arresting illegal immigrants in courthouses, and another by fining employers who pay illegal aliens less than the established minimum wage.
00:28:26.000Why each party seems to feel the necessity to swivel all the way out to the left is absolutely beyond me.
00:28:33.000And it is bad electoral politics, just bad.
00:28:38.000Now, Gavin Newsom, what he's doing, again, I think that Gavin Newsom is not the world's best candidate.
00:28:46.000I will say that what Gavin Newsom seems to be attempting to do is fib about his pretty radical record in California while focusing in on Trump.
00:28:53.000That is the happy medium that he is pursuing.
00:28:55.000Again, he was over in Davos, and he suggests that what he is going to do is basically just attack Trump, but he's going to be moderate on policy, which is a better pitch than many of the other Democrats who seem to be swiveling way out on policy.
00:29:06.000Now, the thing about Newsom is, if you look at his policy in California, it's pretty dang radical.
00:30:36.000They can also do a bunch of stupid things.
00:30:38.000I think, frankly, they do do many stupid things by promoting the worst aspects of what seem to me very often eminently reasonable policies.
00:30:46.000But there are some factors that are moving in Republican direction if they can actually tout them properly.
00:30:51.000So, for example, the New York Times-Sienna poll, the latest poll shows that actually people are feeling better about the economy.
00:30:58.000If you take a look at people who believe that the economy is excellent or good versus the people who believe the economy is poor, right now, about 29% of Americans believe the economy is excellent or good.
00:31:10.000About 38% believe that the economy is poor.
00:31:12.000That sounds bad until you realize that that is, in fact, the best number in over four years.
00:31:20.000That you have to go back before 2022 to get to a number even remotely like that.
00:31:24.000You have to go back all the way to 2019, probably, get a number that is better than that.
00:31:29.000So people are in fact feeling better about the economy.
00:31:32.000And that may redound to President Trump's benefit.
00:31:35.000That at least is going to be the hope.
00:31:38.000And the hope should be that the administration's border policy starts to pay dividends, that people calm down about ICE, or that the Democrats continue to go out on a limb over ICE, and that there are some foreign policy wins that materialize sometime between now and the election.
00:31:56.000Now, speaking of foreign policy, there may be some major changes with regard to geopolitics over the course of the next few months.
00:32:03.000Begin in Cuba, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:32:06.000Emboldened by the U.S. ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the Trump administration is apparently searching for Cuban government insiders who can help cut a deal to push out the communist regime by the end of the year, according to people familiar with the matter, which of course would be an astonishing event if the communist regime in Cuba actually fell.
00:32:23.000That would be a game changer for a lot of Cuban Americans.
00:32:25.000It would be a game changer for the hemisphere.
00:32:27.000In the same way, that would be a game changer if the Maduro Auster resulted in Venezuela eventually democratizing and becoming a non-enemy of the United States.
00:32:35.000Again, we're already earning some geopolitical dividend by cutting China off from Venezuelan oil, for example.
00:32:43.000If Cuba were to turn into a friendly, that would change the hemispheric gravity in a pretty significant way.
00:32:52.000Again, President Trump has been pushing Cuba pretty hard.
00:32:55.000He stated in a January 11th social media post, quote, I strongly suggest they make a deal before it's too late, no more oil or money.
00:33:02.000They've assessed that Cuba's economy is close to collapse and that the government has never been this fragile after losing their biggest benefactor in Nicolas Maduro.
00:33:09.000Officials don't have a concrete plan to end the communist government that has held power on the Caribbean island for almost seven decades, but they see what happened to Maduro as a blueprint and a warning for Cuba.
00:33:21.000So, again, what they're looking for here is a palace coup.
00:33:23.000They are not looking for some sort of full-scale Bay of Pigs style invasion.
00:33:29.000Leave aside the history of the Bay of Pigs and whether or not the JFK administration did a terrible job with it.
00:33:33.000The reality is that the American people are not up again for a gigantic invading force in Cuba fighting on the hills.
00:33:41.000But if there is somebody who is friendlier in the government willing to topple the current regime, that would change things pretty significantly.
00:33:48.000Cuba has basically been cut off from all the money.
00:33:51.000The administration is also taking aim at Cuba's overseas medical missions.
00:33:55.000That is Havana's most important source of hard currency, including through visa bans targeting Cuban and foreign officials accused of facilitating the program.
00:34:04.000So were Cuba to fall, that'd be a big win, obviously, for the president of the United States.
00:34:08.000The other big win that may be on the agenda is the situation in Iran.
00:34:14.000So reports suggest that the United States has deployed significant resources in the Persian Gulf toward Iran.
00:34:22.000According to Reuters, President Trump said on Thursday the U.S. has an armada heading toward Iran.
00:34:26.000Here was the president on Air Force One.
00:34:29.000We have a big force going toward Iran.
00:34:33.000I'd rather not see anything happen, but we're watching them very closely.
00:35:26.000A massive, we have a massive fleet heading in that direction.
00:35:31.000And maybe we won't have to use it for safety.
00:35:34.000Now, again, we will have to see what this means because just because the Iranian government said that they didn't hang a bunch of people doesn't mean they didn't murder those people or that they haven't kept those people under arrest until the moment when murder becomes more possible for them.
00:35:48.000On Tuesday, the USS Abraham Lincoln, which had been in the South China Seas, was, in fact, making its way to the region according to ship tracking data.
00:35:55.000That aircraft carrier and three accompanying destroyers were all confirmed to be heading west toward the Persian Gulf.
00:36:01.000Meanwhile, the USS George H.W. Bush is at sea in the Atlantic Ocean, bound for Europe.
00:36:06.000That aircraft carrier is conducting a live fire exercise and other training activities, as per a post on the ship's official Facebook page.
00:36:15.000So, yeah, we'll see if the president actually activates here.
00:36:20.000Reports coming out of Iran seem to be getting worse and worse in terms of what the impact was, what the regime actually did.
00:36:26.000The numbers continue to go up and up and up in terms of the number of dead and the number of wounded in Iran.
00:37:00.000And what ensures that the United States is still feared on the world stage?
00:37:05.000Because you want to make sure that if you set a red line, you don't turn into Barack Obama.
00:37:10.000Meanwhile, on the foreign policy front, the Europeans seem to be in a better mood after they pushed the president or at least dealt with the president to the point that he did not levy gigantic tariffs on the European Union.
00:37:22.000They're apparently now willing to admit some truths.
00:37:25.000The German chancellor, Friedrich Murz, he said at Davos that Europe does, in fact, have to revitalize its economy, that their forms and their regulations, their permitting processes have made the economy in Europe just weak.
00:37:38.000Germany and Europe have wasted incredible potential for growth in recent years by dragging feet on reforms and unnecessarily and excessively curtailing entrepreneurial freedoms and personal responsibility.
00:37:57.000Security and predictability take precedence over excessive regulation and misplaced perfection.
00:38:05.000We must reduce bureaucracy substantially in Europe.
00:38:10.000The single market was once created to form the most competitive economic area in the world, but instead, we have become the world champion of over-regulation.
00:38:37.000To succeed, we must face harsh realities and chart our course with clear-eyed realism.
00:38:41.000Murs did suggest, however, that Europe should continue to pursue strong transatlantic ties with the United States.
00:38:48.000So he is operating in the world of reality.
00:38:52.000So he says that, yes, the EU may have prompted some movement from the Trump administration away from going after them over Greenland.
00:39:02.000That does not mean that Europe should abandon the United States or vice versa.
00:39:07.000So it seems that overall, the president may have achieved many of his goals in Europe, get them to deregulate, get them to be stronger on their borders, get them to spend more on their defense.
00:39:16.000And, you know, as far as Greenland goes, I'm not really that concerned about small victories won in Greenland or pride out of the Europeans in Greenland nearly as much as I am about the Europeans taking seriously the threats that come from other places on the globe and the reality that we do need strong allies.
00:39:32.000And that means sometimes pushing our friends to do the right thing in order to strengthen their own economies and their own military.
00:39:39.000So that's on the positive side of the ledger.
00:39:42.000On the negative side of the ledger, the continued unwillingness of the Trump administration to face reality when it comes to Vladimir Putin seems short-sighted to me at the very least.
00:39:53.000apparently Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner headed on over to Russia in order to greet Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin.
00:40:15.000Steve Witkoff looks a lot warmer with Vladimir Putin than Jared Kushner does in that particular day.
00:40:19.000According to Bloomberg, there was no immediate word on the outcome of the meeting, which ended well after midnight Moscow time.
00:40:25.000That was Witkoff's seventh visit to Putin.
00:40:28.000Now, again, Witkoff in the past has gone in there and used Putin's translator.
00:40:33.000So I've yet to see Witkoff's extraordinary negotiating leisure domain with regard to the Ukraine-Russia deal.
00:40:40.000U.S. and Ukrainian officials have said they made significant progress on their 20-point plan, but Moscow has yet to actually acknowledge any of that as a positive.
00:40:50.000Meanwhile, the United States is apparently weighing a complete military withdrawal from Syria.
00:40:55.000Presumably, they are doing so because they now believe that the Syrian government is a friendly.
00:41:00.000It seems to me a little bit early to declare the Syrian government a friendly in this fashion, considering that they and the Turks are basically going around killing the Kurds and also going after religious minorities like the Druze in the South.
00:41:12.000The Turkish government is one of the more malign actors on the world stage right now, and pretending that they are an erstwhile American ally is foolhardy in the extreme.
00:41:21.000They are run by a radical Islamist, Rasib Tayyib Erdogan, who has gotten rid of the secularist-leaning military apparatus.
00:41:28.000He has spent a quarter century doing that, and he has converted it into an Islamist-leaning governance structure that is friendly with a wide variety of terrorist groups around the Middle East.
00:41:41.000Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, Washington is considering a complete withdrawal of American troops from Syria as Syrian President Ahmed al-Shara moved to wrest control of the northeastern part of the country from an American-backed Kurdish-led militia.
00:41:53.000So yet another presumed ally that the Americans have abandoned over the course of the last 25 years or so would be the Kurds.
00:42:02.000I mean, at this point, the Kurds must be tired of American guarantees that end with Americans basically leaving them in harm's way.
00:42:08.000The move would end a decade-long American operation in Syria, which began in 2014 when Barack Obama intervened in the country's civil war.
00:42:14.000And it would come as Shara's government ordered the U.S. military's longtime partner in the region, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, to disband the U.S. considered a drawdown in Syria before.
00:42:25.000Now, again, drawing down is not the worst idea in the world.
00:42:29.000It's just that if you believe that the Syrian government is a friend to the West, you've got another thing coming.
00:42:34.000Normalization with the Syrian government while they go after America's ally in that region in the Syrian defense forces is pretty astonishing stuff.
00:42:44.000Roughly 1,000 American troops are in Syria, most scattered across facilities in the northeast where they are co-located with the SDF.
00:42:52.000Apparently, the Pentagon is questioning the viability of the American military's mission in Syria after the SDF's defeat.
00:42:59.000Much of the assault's success was the result of Arab tribal forces who were once loyal to SDF switching sides to back the government, presumably with the help of the Turkish military.
00:43:10.000You know, pretending that Turkey has nothing to do with this would be ignorant.
00:43:13.000The fact that we continue to talk about selling them F-35s and treating them as a NATO ally is sort of insane to me.
00:43:20.000Speaking of which, if we are talking about the insanity of welcoming aboard the sort of Western alliance, countries that ought not be part of it, there's been a lot of talk about what's going to happen in Gaza.
00:43:30.000The attempt to rope in Qatar and Turkey or allow them in is foolhardy, in the extreme.
00:43:37.000These are both countries that have supported Hamas soup to nuts.
00:43:41.000This does not mean that what is being laid out by the United States in Gaza is totally impossible.
00:43:45.000It means the only way that what the United States is trying to do becomes possible is if you reckon with reality.
00:43:52.000Reality has a funny way of biting you directly in the ass if you ignore it.
00:43:56.000And pretending that without security arrangements or if you have security arrangements, including terror allies, that you're still going to be able to build a thriving society in the heart of the Gaza Strip, one of the most radicalized areas on planet Earth, that seems short-sighted at the very least.
00:44:11.000So the United States has now listed its plans for the Gaza Strip.
00:44:16.000According to the New York Times, Jared Kushner laid out an ambitious and highly speculative vision for the future of the Gaza Strip in Davos.
00:44:24.000The presentation featured slides depicting gleaming skyscrapers rising on Gaza's coast and construction of entirely new cities.
00:44:30.000The plan would require investment of at least $25 billion in the Palestinian enclave.
00:44:36.000Gaza said Jared Kushner would be rebuilt in phases, starting with the south.
00:44:39.000The southern city of Rafah would be rebuilt in two to three years.
00:44:42.000That, of course, is the area that right now is essentially protected by the Israeli defense forces.
00:44:48.000Other areas, like Khan Yunas, are not at this point, which means that Hamas is likely going to infiltrate those areas.
00:44:56.000Hamas continues to hold arms, including small arms.
00:45:00.000Jared Kushner outlined the proposal during the gathering.
00:45:04.000Here was Jared Kushner spelling it out.
00:46:00.000So Jared Kushner said that there will be demilitarization within the first hundred days.
00:46:05.000As we're creating this system, hopefully it's something that we can just document these learnings and make them available to all else who want to use them in the future.
00:46:12.000So demilitarization, this is something we're starting now.
00:46:17.000This government will be working with Hamas on the demilitarization to really take the principles that were agreed to in the document to the next phase.
00:46:24.000And hopefully that will be successful.
00:47:12.000Now, again, the plan itself is inspiring and good if it can be achieved, but it does require the demilitarization of Hamas and it requires the denazification of Gaza, meaning that a huge percentage of the people in the Gaza Strip supported Hamas and continue ideologically to support Hamas.
00:47:30.000That means education programs that aren't run by Hamas.
00:47:35.000It means the UNRWA becoming a non-entity in the Gaza Strip.
00:47:38.000There are a lot of steps that have to be taken if this is going to materialize.
00:47:42.000But unless you can answer that question, how does Hamas get disarmed?
00:47:47.000You know, I think that a lot of obstacles remain.
00:47:49.000Meanwhile, on the cultural front, one of the great moments in culture history happened over the course of the last few days.
00:47:56.000And I know we were amiss that we did not report on this, but you know who did was Lyndon Blake, Daily Wire reporter, extraordinaire, and correspondent from Podcastland, where apparently Michelle Obama appeared on the most important podcast of our time.
00:48:10.000It is basically Einstein for dummies, Call Her Daddy.
00:48:14.000So, Lyndon, tell me about this magical moment.
00:48:19.000I know you're not the Call Her Daddy target audience, so I'm going to fill you in on what this podcast is really about.
00:48:25.000We had Michelle Obama on with Alex Cooper, and they spent the first half of the podcast talking about objectifying women and how it is so awful.
00:48:33.000Meanwhile, the podcast is called Call Her Daddy.
00:48:37.000That is a play tongue-in-cheek on a podcast that started out being a hyper-sexual podcast.
00:48:43.000The whole point was to teach girls how to entice men, how to get the guys to call them daddy and be controlling and manipulative.
00:48:54.000So it's very ironic anytime I hear Alex Cooper try to tell me about how women are objectified in this country when I'm like, you made your career on telling girls how to act in the bedroom.
00:49:07.000Now, we have seen other major political figures appear on Call Her Daddy.
00:49:11.000Most famous Kamala Harris appeared on Call Her Daddy during her successful run for the presidency.
00:49:35.000Well, she introduced the same way she kind of did the Kamala interview.
00:49:39.000She's like, I've thought about, you know, all the way through this interview, but I'm going to go with this.
00:49:43.000So she did the same thing with Michelle Obama.
00:49:45.000She opens the interview and she goes, you know, I thought we could do this way and talk about your sex life and all of that.
00:49:52.000And Michelle was like, or lack thereof, you know, and Alex goes, well, I was going to go this way and let's talk about being a woman and women empowerment.
00:50:03.000And then they just go on to just talk in circles about how women are treated so awful in this country.
00:50:09.000And all men care about is the way women look and how they dress.
00:50:20.000Well, one of the things that I find really hilarious about this is that apparently Michelle Obama went on there and complained about the patriarchy.
00:50:27.000And one of the things that came up was women taking men's names when they get married and how this is very terrible for them, which is funny because her name is Michelle Obama and no one would know who the hell she is if she were still Michelle Robinson.
00:50:38.000Yeah, she acts like it's the hardest thing ever to have to teach yourself how to write MRS period instead of M-I-S-S.
00:50:45.000Like, oh, the horror of changing your name, changing how you're addressed.
00:50:49.000That's just one other thing that women have to do that men don't.
00:50:53.000I thought that whole segment was silly.
00:50:55.000And then you have Alex trying to bring it back to her audience who are single women in the dating world.
00:51:00.000And she's like, Michelle, this is something that comes up with my audience members.
00:51:04.000You know, they're women and they are successful, which I think I'm successful.
00:51:41.000I mean, it is sort of funny how much of this interview seemed to be projection.
00:51:46.000There's a lot of talk about how men just care all the time about what women wear, to which I thought to myself, I've been married for almost 20 years.
00:51:52.000I'm not sure I can name more than like two outfits my wife has ever worn in 20 years.
00:51:59.000It is, it is like men never think about what women are wearing.
00:53:48.000I loved parts of the movie, not the whole movie, but he's really, really good in that film.
00:53:53.000Wicked for Good basically got shut out.
00:53:56.000That is not a gigantic shock, frankly, because as I mentioned on the show, the second act of Wicked is not as good as the first act of Wicked.
00:54:02.000And so it wasn't as though that was going to clean up at the Oscars.
00:54:05.000Also, Cynthia Arrivo, who is sort of the standout in the first one, is less of a main character in this movie.
00:54:11.000The one who got snubbed is Ariana Grande, who is good in the movie.
00:54:14.000I don't think she's fabulous, but I think she's good in the movie.
00:54:19.000Some of the other best picture nominees include Hamnett, which is Chloe Zhao's movie about William Shakespeare and his son Hamnett, which was supposed to serve as the inspiration for Hamlet in the movie.
00:54:33.000Haven't seen that one yet, so I'll hold off on it.
00:54:34.000F1 was nominated for Best Picture, which again, F1 is fine.
00:54:38.000It's a worse version of Top Gun Maverick and Ford versus Ferrari.