The Ben Shapiro Show - Another Ridiculous Media LIE About ICE!

00:00:00.000 Legacy media say that ICE arrested a five-year-old, but is that really true?

00:00:04.000 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.

00:00:13.000 We'll get to all that in a moment.

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00:00:44.000 So amid all of the chaos regarding the immigration situation in Minneapolis, members of the legacy media have just started to tell lies.

00:00:52.000 The latest lie that is being told is that federal agents seized a five-year-old boy in an effort to bait his father.

00:00:59.000 This story was first retailed apparently by the New York Times.

00:01:03.000 The 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.

00:01:18.000 And this was treated by the legacy media as a major story.

00:01:22.000 It was the lead on drudge report.

00:01:24.000 There was a picture of this little boy wearing what appeared to be a Disney hat.

00:01:30.000 And again, the idea was that he was used as bait, according to the Daily Mirror.

00:01:36.000 The 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.

00:01:44.000 His father is not in sight.

00:01:46.000 Zina Stenfik, the superintendent of schools in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, asked at a news conference, why detain a five-year-old?

00:01:53.000 However, that is not actually what happened, as you could have predicted.

00:01:57.000 According to the New York Times, again, they bury this further down in the story.

00:02:00.000 The 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.

00:02:09.000 The boy and his father came to the United States from Ecuador in 2024.

00:02:12.000 Each has an act of asylum claim.

00:02:15.000 The image of the child in custody prompted an outcry.

00:02:18.000 But what exactly happened?

00:02:19.000 Well, 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.

00:02:34.000 If 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.

00:02:41.000 I have four children, one of them is five years old.

00:02:43.000 The insanity of being detained alongside my five-year-old daughter and just taking off is beyond measure.

00:02:48.000 That is crazy.

00:02:50.000 Apparently, 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.

00:02:59.000 Well, 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.

00:03:08.000 In 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.

00:03:21.000 In 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.

00:03:28.000 And 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.

00:03:34.000 They don't know who the adult is.

00:03:36.000 According to Trisha McLaughlin, the agents had tried to get Liam's mother to take the boy, but she had apparently refused.

00:03:42.000 McLaughlin said that Conejo Arrayos told federal agents he wanted Liam to stay with him.

00:03:47.000 Ms. Granlund said Liam's father was yelling at adults inside the home.

00:03:50.000 Please 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.

00:03:57.000 Now, 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.

00:04:12.000 We'll get to that legal issue in a moment.

00:04:15.000 School 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.

00:04:24.000 So, 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. 0.72

00:04:34.000 In 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.

00:04:44.000 Well, Vice President JD Vance was visiting at Minneapolis on Thursday, and here's what he had to say.

00:04:50.000 I 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.

00:04:57.000 How did we arrest a five-year-old?

00:04:59.000 Well, 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.

00:05:07.000 And then when they went to arrest his illegal alien father, the father ran.

00:05:12.000 So the story is that ICE detained a five-year-old.

00:05:15.000 Well, what are they supposed to do?

00:05:17.000 Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death?

00:05:20.000 Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States of America?

00:05:24.000 If 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.

00:05:37.000 That doesn't make any sense.

00:05:38.000 No one thinks that makes any sense.

00:05:41.000 Obviously, the vice president is obviously 100% right about all of this.

00:05:44.000 I 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.

00:06:05.000 And so children were released into the interior of the country.

00:06:08.000 And this caused the Biden administration, among other administrations, to release the parents as well, to reunify the family.

00:06:13.000 Well, now the idea is that you can't support anyone because they might have children.

00:06:17.000 And so you can't reunify the family, even if the father wants to be with the kid.

00:06:22.000 And then you get blamed if the father takes off when you hold the kid and the parent together.

00:06:27.000 What exactly are immigration agents supposed to do?

00:06:29.000 This, of course, makes everything unworkable, which I believe is the point.

00:06:33.000 Now, 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.

00:06:40.000 Again, you heard that mentioned in the story from the New York Times, that ICE agents are showing up at homes.

00:06:44.000 And based on administrative warrants, they're entering homes and they are looking for illegal immigrants.

00:06:50.000 According 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.

00:06:58.000 Over 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.

00:07:08.000 Now, what's happening here?

00:07:09.000 What they're saying is that is effectively a judge-signed warrant, or at least it's very similar.

00:07:13.000 You have a deportation order.

00:07:15.000 It has been signed by a judge, a final deportation order.

00:07:19.000 And now they're using that as the predicate for the warrant.

00:07:22.000 It is a civil warrant, not a criminal warrant.

00:07:25.000 That is the basic argument that is being made.

00:07:28.000 And 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.

00:07:41.000 And that was codified in the Immigration and Nationality Act, actually.

00:07:47.000 Now, there are restrictions on it, like you're not supposed to enter a private home without consent.

00:07:51.000 Again, the DHS has now said, well, maybe that changes because the final order of removal has already been signed.

00:07:58.000 So the person's already had due process.

00:08:00.000 It's not a matter of there has to be another judicial hearing in order to remove them.

00:08:03.000 They already have a final order pending removal.

00:08:06.000 And so once that order is already done, they've had their due process, and now it's just a question of executing the order.

00:08:12.000 All of that will end up litigated in court.

00:08:14.000 But to pretend that there is no legal basis whatsoever for what DHS and ICE are doing, that seems wrong.

00:08:20.000 According 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.

00:08:29.000 Immigration lawyers and advocates from Minnesota have documented cases of agents breaking down people's doors to arrest them without a warrant.

00:08:35.000 But again, in some of these cases, you're talking about people who have overstayed their visas by legitimately 20 years.

00:08:42.000 The 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.

00:08:51.000 He was issued a deportation order in 2009.

00:08:53.000 He was allowed to remain in the U.S. under ICE supervision.

00:08:57.000 His most recent check-in with ICE was December 29th, 2025.

00:09:00.000 And on January 11th, immigration officers forced their way into his home and took him into custody.

00:09:05.000 They said they had a warrant.

00:09:06.000 Apparently, this would be the administrative warrant.

00:09:09.000 This will all get litigated in court.

00:09:12.000 But 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.

00:09:20.000 However, 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.

00:09:27.000 They shouldn't have to do that.

00:09:28.000 And 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.

00:09:37.000 Now, meanwhile, this sort of media coverage is leading to significant ire and rage in places like Minneapolis.

00:09:43.000 It is ratcheting up the tensions with ICE.

00:09:45.000 Again, the vice president was visiting at Minneapolis and he said, listen, the problem here is Minneapolis authorities, not ICE.

00:09:52.000 But 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.

00:10:01.000 There 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.

00:10:15.000 So 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.

00:10:30.000 It's what Minneapolis authorities are doing to prevent ICE from doing their jobs.

00:10:34.000 And that's exactly what's happening.

00:10:37.000 And Vance, of course, is right about this too.

00:10:39.000 I mean, the fact is that if local authorities were, in fact, working hand in glove with DHS, things would go a lot smoother.

00:10:45.000 Vance also pointed out that protest does not mean assault.

00:10:49.000 That 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.

00:10:55.000 A lot of these guys are unable to do their jobs without being harassed, without being doxxed, and sometimes without being assaulted.

00:11:02.000 That's totally unacceptable.

00:11:03.000 And 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.

00:11:11.000 If 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.

00:11:18.000 And I wanted to show some support for these guys.

00:11:21.000 Now, 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.

00:11:44.000 Designed 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.

00:11:54.000 According 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.

00:12:06.000 Attorney 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.

00:12:20.000 And then Pamboni later posted on X.

00:12:22.000 A second person had been arrested, followed by a third arrest announced by FBI Director Kash Patel.

00:12:28.000 Now, as always, social media tomfoolery makes these things more ridiculous.

00:12:35.000 Apparently, the White House posted a digitally altered image of one of the people who was arrested.

00:12:41.000 In the original picture, she looks composed.

00:12:43.000 In the White House image, she is apparently dramatically crying, which is like, why, why?

00:12:49.000 Like, why?

00:12:50.000 Who is doing this stupidity?

00:12:52.000 And it's enough for the legacy media to make things up.

00:12:54.000 You 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.

00:13:02.000 That's really foolish.

00:13:03.000 We'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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00:14:51.000 Now, 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.

00:15:09.000 There's no press pass to invade a sanctuary or to conspire to interrupt religious services.

00:15:13.000 The 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.

00:15:22.000 And 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.

00:15:35.000 That is his quote.

00:15:37.000 The 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.

00:15:44.000 That is a good move by the Trump administration.

00:15:47.000 Now, it doesn't mean that the people arrested aren't going to fib about it.

00:15:51.000 One of the people arrested, as mentioned, was Nakima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney.

00:15:57.000 And here she was on CNN claiming that she was welcomed into the church.

00:16:01.000 Well, I mean, under false auspices, as she then proceeds to explain.

00:16:06.000 We did not rush into that church.

00:16:08.000 We actually went and sat down and participated in the service.

00:16:12.000 And after the pastor prayed, that is when I stood up and asked him a question in response to his prayer.

00:16:20.000 And then I, and he responded to me.

00:16:23.000 And 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.

00:16:34.000 And instead of responding to me, as soon as I said the name David Easterwood, the pastor says, shame, shame.

00:16:43.000 And that is when I led us and chants justice for Renee Good and hands up, don't shoot.

00:16:48.000 Okay, so that, of course, is ridiculous.

00:16:51.000 You don't get to go into somebody else's church.

00:16:54.000 And then if you wait for five minutes and then break out into a disruption of the church service, call that permission tensor the church.

00:17:01.000 That is not, that is not right.

00:17:04.000 If 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.

00:17:11.000 Well, it turns out they didn't invite you in the house to steal the crockery.

00:17:14.000 That is a ridiculous argument.

00:17:16.000 And that one is not going to hold up in court.

00:17:18.000 Now, one of the people that the DOJ wanted to charge was Don Lemon, the former CNN talking head and host.

00:17:25.000 So Don Lemon.

00:17:26.000 And again, I know Don.

00:17:28.000 Don is a character, to say the very least.

00:17:34.000 Well, Don had pretty clearly, allegedly, allegedly, coordinated with this group to be there.

00:17:39.000 House would he know to be there?

00:17:40.000 He wasn't just attending a random church in St. Paul on that day.

00:17:44.000 That is not what was happening.

00:17:46.000 Well, he showed up and a judge in Minnesota was handed an indictment for him and rejected the indictment.

00:17:56.000 That 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.

00:18:03.000 According 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.

00:18:14.000 The magistrate judge's decision was described Thursday by two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

00:18:20.000 Their accounts emerged the same day.

00:18:22.000 Department officials announced the arrests of, again, the other three.

00:18:27.000 Well, 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.

00:18:43.000 So Keith Ellison is the attorney general of the state, and he, of course, is an ally of Don Lemon.

00:18:47.000 In 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.

00:18:55.000 This is the move.

00:18:56.000 Look, it's a wild stretch and inappropriate.

00:19:00.000 And the FACE Act, by the way, is designed to protect the rights of people seeking their reproductive rights to be protected.

00:19:10.000 And so that people, for a religious reason, cannot just use religion to break into women's reproductive health centers, right?

00:19:20.000 So 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.

00:19:32.000 But they don't mind stretching these days.

00:19:35.000 Okay, well, it's not actually a stretch.

00:19:37.000 Now, 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.

00:19:45.000 And then he said, chanting cannot be a crime.

00:19:47.000 It's freedom of expression.

00:19:49.000 Well, actually, not so much.

00:19:51.000 Not so much.

00:19:52.000 It turns out that the FACE Act explicitly talks about the attempts to disrupt church services.

00:20:00.000 It explicitly protects religious freedom.

00:20:03.000 It 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.

00:20:20.000 That is what it is.

00:20:21.000 That's legitimately what the law was designed to do.

00:20:24.000 Why?

00:20:24.000 Well, because it was essentially a trade.

00:20:26.000 This was a bipartisan bill signed into law in 1994.

00:20:30.000 On the one hand, Democrats were saying that they wanted to protect abortion clinics from people who are obstructing the entrances.

00:20:35.000 And Republicans said, we're not going to vote for that unless you also vote that you're not allowed to disrupt church services.

00:20:40.000 So yes, part of the FACE Act is preventing this sort of stuff pretty clearly.

00:20:46.000 But that's what Keith Ellison is all about.

00:20:47.000 Again, it is not about the impartial administration of law.

00:20:53.000 And 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.

00:21:02.000 Representative Tom Emmer, he says Keith Ellison needs a refresher course in law.

00:21:06.000 This is true.

00:21:09.000 But there's another thing he said, which is this behavior did not violate the First Amendment.

00:21:13.000 This is what they do.

00:21:14.000 They just go to talking points.

00:21:17.000 Keith Ellison is a lawyer.

00:21:19.000 He's our attorney general.

00:21:21.000 He's an embarrassment.

00:21:22.000 He would prefer to prosecute cops and defend criminals rather than doing his job.

00:21:28.000 And 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.

00:21:44.000 Well, that, of course, is Tom Emmer, Republican of Minnesota, and he is right about all of that.

00:21:49.000 The 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.

00:22:04.000 Jacob Frey tweeted, quote, this is a gross abuse of power.

00:22:06.000 The federal government is picking and choosing who to investigate, going after protesters, and not the person who shot and killed one of our neighbors.

00:22:12.000 I'm calling for Nakima to be released immediately.

00:22:15.000 Well, I mean, good for him.

00:22:17.000 And I declare bankruptcy like Michael Scott.

00:22:20.000 You know, that and $5 will buy you a pretty mediocre cup of coffee.

00:22:24.000 But 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.

00:22:40.000 Now, the question is how all of this is going to impact the 2026 midterm elections.

00:22:45.000 And that is not the biggest question.

00:22:47.000 The biggest question, of course, is whether we continue to enforce the law.

00:22:49.000 But this will be a major issue in the run-up to the 2026 elections.

00:22:52.000 And there are a couple of ways this could go.

00:22:55.000 On the one hand, Democrats have an inherent advantage.

00:22:58.000 On the generic ballot, it is an off-year election.

00:23:00.000 Off-year elections typically move in favor of the party out of power.

00:23:05.000 Nate Silver suggests that Democrats have some pretty good news here.

00:23:10.000 The 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.

00:23:21.000 Not 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.

00:23:34.000 Well, that spells potential blowout for the Democrats.

00:23:37.000 And 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.

00:23:45.000 So Democrats certainly have some pretty significant advantages.

00:23:51.000 Does that mean that Democrats are definitely going?

00:23:54.000 Well, they're acting like it, aren't they?

00:23:56.000 Democrats are acting as though it is inevitable that they're going to win the 2026 elections.

00:24:01.000 That 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.

00:24:10.000 So, for example, Eric Swalwell, one of my congressional bét noirs who is now running for governor of California, he says that he will make ICE agents unhireable in California.

00:24:20.000 So, if you were working for ICE, he's going to say that you will never be able to work in California again.

00:24:25.000 Why is this sort of thing going to benefit Democrats generically across the country?

00:24:30.000 As governor, I'll use my emergency powers and I'll tell every state agency we are not as a policy hiring ICE agents.

00:24:37.000 Because right now, these guys doing this work, it's a decision.

00:24:41.000 No one's holding a gun and saying you have to work for ICE.

00:24:45.000 And 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.

00:24:51.000 And 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.

00:25:00.000 And 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.

00:25:09.000 So, again, what you have right now is a bit of a game of hold my beer when it comes to immigration.

00:25:13.000 On 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.

00:25:22.000 Truly not doing a very good job rhetorically in explaining that they are going after criminal illegal immigrants. 0.61

00:25:27.000 They'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.

00:25:36.000 As 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.

00:25:46.000 Now, again, what they think of what ICE is doing is not actually what ICE is doing.

00:25:51.000 Many of them think that ICE is simply going and rounding people up generally at Home Depot.

00:25:55.000 That is not what ICE is doing.

00:25:56.000 They are, in fact, targeting criminal operations in which illegal immigrants are involved.

00:26:02.000 Sure, 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.

00:26:13.000 But ICE has been directing its resources at the worst offenders, no question.

00:26:19.000 Well, the administration needs to do a better job of explaining that. 0.57

00:26:22.000 Democrats, on the other hand, can't restrict themselves to saying that the Republicans should stick to criminal illegal immigrants.

00:26:28.000 Instead, they go all the way with Eric Swalwell and talk about how they're going to make it so that ICE agents are unhirable.

00:26:34.000 They go with Zorn Mamdani, who says he's going to attempt to defund ICE if he ever gets the opportunity.

00:26:40.000 It is amazing how everybody misreads the tea leaves.

00:26:43.000 Everyone misreads what the American people want.

00:26:45.000 They believe always that the American people want what they are selling, but the most extreme version of it.

00:26:49.000 And that is almost never true.

00:26:52.000 That is almost never, ever true.

00:26:55.000 That is why I cannot explain to you why exactly Virginia Democrats have decided to swing all the way to the left.

00:27:01.000 So Abigail Spanberger won the governorship of Virginia. 0.61

00:27:05.000 She was purporting to be a sort of blue dog, moderate Democrat. 1.00

00:27:09.000 She, of course, had chewed out some of the more extreme versions of the Democratic Party.

00:27:13.000 She had chewed out AOC.

00:27:14.000 She had shooted out Elhen Omar. 0.98

00:27:16.000 She had suggested that their defund the police routine was bad politics.

00:27:19.000 Well, now, Virginia Democrats are shifting to far-left policies.

00:27:25.000 As 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.

00:27:32.000 Lawmakers have already introduced several competing bills that would create new tax brackets with steeper rates for higher earners.

00:27:38.000 One bill would nearly double the state income tax rate for Virginians who make over a million dollars a year.

00:27:44.000 Not only that, they've also decided that they're going to make it easier to pursue voter fraud.

00:27:53.000 And they're teeing up bills to make the state softer on crime and illegal immigration.

00:27:58.000 One 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.

00:28:11.000 Another couple of bills pushed by Virginia Democrats would help protect illegal immigrants in Virginia.

00:28:15.000 One, by barring officials from arresting illegal immigrants in courthouses, and another by fining employers who pay illegal aliens less than the established minimum wage.

00:28:26.000 Why each party seems to feel the necessity to swivel all the way out to the left is absolutely beyond me.

00:28:32.000 It makes no sense at all.

00:28:33.000 And it is bad electoral politics, just bad.

00:28:38.000 Now, Gavin Newsom, what he's doing, again, I think that Gavin Newsom is not the world's best candidate.

00:28:46.000 I 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.

00:28:53.000 That is the happy medium that he is pursuing.

00:28:55.000 Again, 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.

00:29:06.000 Now, the thing about Newsom is, if you look at his policy in California, it's pretty dang radical.

00:29:11.000 We talked about that on his podcast.

00:29:13.000 But it is fascinating to watch him play maybe the only smart hand in the Democratic Party right now.

00:29:19.000 So I put a mirror up to Trump and Trumpism, all caps.

00:29:23.000 And it was ironic because Pravda, Fox News in America, others do, they got offended by it.

00:29:28.000 They said, well, where's his mother to wash his mouth out with soap? 1.00

00:29:32.000 I said, where the hell have you been?

00:29:34.000 You've never said a word about Trump dressing up as the Pope, tweeting out and cosplaying on the world stage.

00:29:41.000 And so the Treasury Secretary talked about a Barbie doll.

00:29:45.000 It was as if he was reading a diary and had just broken up with someone.

00:29:50.000 I mean, that was a Secretary of Treasury using valuable time yesterday on the world stage.

00:29:55.000 Some sexual, thank you for not sharing that on the official White House account.

00:30:00.000 We're deeply in their head.

00:30:01.000 I think the affordability agenda appears to be I'm living rent-free in the Trump's head, Trump administration's head.

00:30:08.000 Okay, so again, what he is doing is he is focusing all of his ire on Trump personally.

00:30:12.000 And he's talking about how he lives free in Trump's head.

00:30:14.000 And he talks about knee pads for Trump and all this kind of stuff because he doesn't want to talk policy.

00:30:19.000 Because the minute the Democrats are forced to talk policy, they've got a problem.

00:30:22.000 They have to lie and campaign as moderate Republicans or they have to go fully radical in order to entice their base.

00:30:28.000 It'll be fascinating to see what they do.

00:30:30.000 Now, again, does that mean that Republicans are going to fare better?

00:30:34.000 I mean, not necessarily.

00:30:36.000 They can also do a bunch of stupid things.

00:30:38.000 I think, frankly, they do do many stupid things by promoting the worst aspects of what seem to me very often eminently reasonable policies.

00:30:46.000 But there are some factors that are moving in Republican direction if they can actually tout them properly.

00:30:51.000 So, for example, the New York Times-Sienna poll, the latest poll shows that actually people are feeling better about the economy.

00:30:58.000 If 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.

00:31:10.000 About 38% believe that the economy is poor.

00:31:12.000 That sounds bad until you realize that that is, in fact, the best number in over four years.

00:31:20.000 That you have to go back before 2022 to get to a number even remotely like that.

00:31:24.000 You have to go back all the way to 2019, probably, get a number that is better than that.

00:31:29.000 So people are in fact feeling better about the economy.

00:31:32.000 And that may redound to President Trump's benefit.

00:31:35.000 That at least is going to be the hope.

00:31:38.000 And 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.

00:31:56.000 Now, speaking of foreign policy, there may be some major changes with regard to geopolitics over the course of the next few months.

00:32:03.000 Begin in Cuba, according to the Wall Street Journal.

00:32:06.000 Emboldened 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.

00:32:23.000 That would be a game changer for a lot of Cuban Americans.

00:32:25.000 It would be a game changer for the hemisphere.

00:32:27.000 In 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.

00:32:35.000 Again, we're already earning some geopolitical dividend by cutting China off from Venezuelan oil, for example.

00:32:43.000 If Cuba were to turn into a friendly, that would change the hemispheric gravity in a pretty significant way. 0.87

00:32:52.000 Again, President Trump has been pushing Cuba pretty hard.

00:32:55.000 He 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.

00:33:02.000 They'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.

00:33:09.000 Officials 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.

00:33:21.000 So, again, what they're looking for here is a palace coup.

00:33:23.000 They are not looking for some sort of full-scale Bay of Pigs style invasion.

00:33:29.000 Leave aside the history of the Bay of Pigs and whether or not the JFK administration did a terrible job with it.

00:33:33.000 The reality is that the American people are not up again for a gigantic invading force in Cuba fighting on the hills.

00:33:41.000 But if there is somebody who is friendlier in the government willing to topple the current regime, that would change things pretty significantly.

00:33:48.000 Cuba has basically been cut off from all the money.

00:33:51.000 The administration is also taking aim at Cuba's overseas medical missions.

00:33:55.000 That is Havana's most important source of hard currency, including through visa bans targeting Cuban and foreign officials accused of facilitating the program.

00:34:04.000 So were Cuba to fall, that'd be a big win, obviously, for the president of the United States.

00:34:08.000 The other big win that may be on the agenda is the situation in Iran.

00:34:14.000 So reports suggest that the United States has deployed significant resources in the Persian Gulf toward Iran.

00:34:22.000 According to Reuters, President Trump said on Thursday the U.S. has an armada heading toward Iran.

00:34:26.000 Here was the president on Air Force One.

00:34:29.000 We have a big force going toward Iran.

00:34:33.000 I'd rather not see anything happen, but we're watching them very closely.

00:34:37.000 I saw 837 hangings on Thursday.

00:34:43.000 They would have been dead.

00:34:44.000 Every one of them would have been hung.

00:34:46.000 This is like from a thousand years ago.

00:34:49.000 This is an ancient culture.

00:34:50.000 Very smart people, by the way.

00:34:53.000 It's an ancient culture.

00:34:55.000 837, mostly young men, were going to be hung on Thursday.

00:35:01.000 And I said, if you hang those people, you're going to be hit harder than you've ever been hit.

00:35:07.000 It'll make what we did to your Iran nuclear look like peanuts. 0.98

00:35:11.000 And an hour before this horrible thing was going to take place, they canceled it.

00:35:18.000 And they actually said they canceled it.

00:35:20.000 They didn't postpone it.

00:35:21.000 They canceled it.

00:35:22.000 So that was a good sign.

00:35:24.000 But we have an armada.

00:35:26.000 A massive, we have a massive fleet heading in that direction.

00:35:31.000 And maybe we won't have to use it for safety.

00:35:34.000 Now, 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.

00:35:48.000 On 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.

00:35:55.000 That aircraft carrier and three accompanying destroyers were all confirmed to be heading west toward the Persian Gulf.

00:36:01.000 Meanwhile, the USS George H.W. Bush is at sea in the Atlantic Ocean, bound for Europe.

00:36:06.000 That aircraft carrier is conducting a live fire exercise and other training activities, as per a post on the ship's official Facebook page.

00:36:15.000 So, yeah, we'll see if the president actually activates here.

00:36:20.000 Reports coming out of Iran seem to be getting worse and worse in terms of what the impact was, what the regime actually did.

00:36:26.000 The numbers continue to go up and up and up in terms of the number of dead and the number of wounded in Iran.

00:36:31.000 The president said a red line.

00:36:32.000 The Iranians violated the red line. 1.00

00:36:35.000 The president just said a red line, by the way.

00:36:36.000 He said that people should go out in the streets and continue to protest.

00:36:39.000 Help is on the way.

00:36:40.000 That is a pretty strong red line, and Iran violated it.

00:36:43.000 So, does it require another trigger in order for the United States to do something?

00:36:46.000 Again, doing useless things is not the goal here, and neither is a full-scale invasion of Iran.

00:36:51.000 No one would like to see hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground in the Middle East for the 1,000th time.

00:36:56.000 No one is interested in that.

00:36:57.000 The question is: what is possible?

00:36:59.000 What is doable?

00:37:00.000 And what ensures that the United States is still feared on the world stage?

00:37:05.000 Because you want to make sure that if you set a red line, you don't turn into Barack Obama.

00:37:10.000 Meanwhile, 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.

00:37:22.000 They're apparently now willing to admit some truths.

00:37:25.000 The 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.

00:37:38.000 Germany 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.

00:37:54.000 We are going to change that now.

00:37:57.000 Security and predictability take precedence over excessive regulation and misplaced perfection.

00:38:05.000 We must reduce bureaucracy substantially in Europe.

00:38:10.000 The 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.

00:38:22.000 He is right about that.

00:38:23.000 Absolutely.

00:38:24.000 He also added, this new world of great powers is being built on power, on strength, and when it comes to it, on force.

00:38:30.000 It is not a cozy place.

00:38:31.000 We do not have to accept this new reality as fate.

00:38:33.000 We're not at the mercy of this new world order.

00:38:35.000 We do have a choice.

00:38:36.000 We can shape the future.

00:38:37.000 To succeed, we must face harsh realities and chart our course with clear-eyed realism.

00:38:41.000 Murs did suggest, however, that Europe should continue to pursue strong transatlantic ties with the United States.

00:38:48.000 So he is operating in the world of reality.

00:38:52.000 So he says that, yes, the EU may have prompted some movement from the Trump administration away from going after them over Greenland.

00:39:02.000 That does not mean that Europe should abandon the United States or vice versa.

00:39:07.000 So 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.

00:39:16.000 And, 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.

00:39:32.000 And that means sometimes pushing our friends to do the right thing in order to strengthen their own economies and their own military.

00:39:39.000 So that's on the positive side of the ledger.

00:39:42.000 On 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.

00:39:53.000 apparently Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner headed on over to Russia in order to greet Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin.

00:40:12.000 So there they are.

00:40:13.000 They're meeting.

00:40:15.000 Steve Witkoff looks a lot warmer with Vladimir Putin than Jared Kushner does in that particular day.

00:40:19.000 According to Bloomberg, there was no immediate word on the outcome of the meeting, which ended well after midnight Moscow time.

00:40:25.000 That was Witkoff's seventh visit to Putin.

00:40:28.000 Now, again, Witkoff in the past has gone in there and used Putin's translator.

00:40:33.000 So I've yet to see Witkoff's extraordinary negotiating leisure domain with regard to the Ukraine-Russia deal.

00:40:40.000 U.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.

00:40:50.000 Meanwhile, the United States is apparently weighing a complete military withdrawal from Syria.

00:40:55.000 Presumably, they are doing so because they now believe that the Syrian government is a friendly.

00:41:00.000 It 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.

00:41:12.000 The 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. 0.53

00:41:21.000 They are run by a radical Islamist, Rasib Tayyib Erdogan, who has gotten rid of the secularist-leaning military apparatus.

00:41:28.000 He 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.

00:41:41.000 Now, 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.

00:41:53.000 So yet another presumed ally that the Americans have abandoned over the course of the last 25 years or so would be the Kurds.

00:42:02.000 I mean, at this point, the Kurds must be tired of American guarantees that end with Americans basically leaving them in harm's way.

00:42:08.000 The move would end a decade-long American operation in Syria, which began in 2014 when Barack Obama intervened in the country's civil war.

00:42:14.000 And 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.

00:42:25.000 Now, again, drawing down is not the worst idea in the world.

00:42:29.000 It's just that if you believe that the Syrian government is a friend to the West, you've got another thing coming. 0.69

00:42:34.000 Normalization with the Syrian government while they go after America's ally in that region in the Syrian defense forces is pretty astonishing stuff.

00:42:44.000 Roughly 1,000 American troops are in Syria, most scattered across facilities in the northeast where they are co-located with the SDF.

00:42:52.000 Apparently, the Pentagon is questioning the viability of the American military's mission in Syria after the SDF's defeat.

00:42:59.000 Much 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.

00:43:10.000 You know, pretending that Turkey has nothing to do with this would be ignorant.

00:43:13.000 The fact that we continue to talk about selling them F-35s and treating them as a NATO ally is sort of insane to me.

00:43:20.000 Speaking 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.

00:43:30.000 The attempt to rope in Qatar and Turkey or allow them in is foolhardy, in the extreme. 0.97

00:43:37.000 These are both countries that have supported Hamas soup to nuts. 0.99

00:43:41.000 This does not mean that what is being laid out by the United States in Gaza is totally impossible.

00:43:45.000 It means the only way that what the United States is trying to do becomes possible is if you reckon with reality.

00:43:52.000 Reality has a funny way of biting you directly in the ass if you ignore it.

00:43:56.000 And 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.

00:44:11.000 So the United States has now listed its plans for the Gaza Strip.

00:44:16.000 According to the New York Times, Jared Kushner laid out an ambitious and highly speculative vision for the future of the Gaza Strip in Davos.

00:44:24.000 The presentation featured slides depicting gleaming skyscrapers rising on Gaza's coast and construction of entirely new cities.

00:44:30.000 The plan would require investment of at least $25 billion in the Palestinian enclave.

00:44:36.000 Gaza said Jared Kushner would be rebuilt in phases, starting with the south.

00:44:39.000 The southern city of Rafah would be rebuilt in two to three years.

00:44:42.000 That, of course, is the area that right now is essentially protected by the Israeli defense forces.

00:44:48.000 Other areas, like Khan Yunas, are not at this point, which means that Hamas is likely going to infiltrate those areas.

00:44:56.000 Hamas continues to hold arms, including small arms.

00:45:00.000 Jared Kushner outlined the proposal during the gathering.

00:45:04.000 Here was Jared Kushner spelling it out.

00:45:08.000 So we did a master plan.

00:45:09.000 We brought in, I've thank you, Kirgabai, who's one of the most successful real estate developers and brilliant people I know.

00:45:14.000 He's volunteered to do this not-for-profit, really because of his heart.

00:45:18.000 He wants to do this.

00:45:19.000 And we've developed ways to redevelop Gaza. 0.70

00:45:20.000 Gaza, as President Trump's been saying, has amazing potential.

00:45:23.000 And this is for the people of Gaza.

00:45:25.000 We've developed it into zones.

00:45:26.000 In the beginning, we were toying with the idea of saying, let's build a free zone, and then we have a Hamas zone. 0.94

00:45:32.000 And then we said, you know what?

00:45:33.000 Let's just plan for catastrophic success.

00:45:35.000 Hamas signed a deal to demilitarize.

00:45:36.000 That is what we are going to enforce.

00:45:38.000 People ask us what our plan B is.

00:45:39.000 We do not have a plan B.

00:45:41.000 We have a plan.

00:45:42.000 We signed an agreement.

00:45:43.000 We are all committed to making that agreement work.

00:45:45.000 There's a master plan.

00:45:46.000 We'll be doing it in phasing.

00:45:47.000 In the Middle East, they build cities like this in, you know, two, three million people.

00:45:51.000 They build this in three years.

00:45:52.000 And so stuff like this is very doable if we make it happen.

00:45:55.000 Okay, now the question becomes, how do you disarm Hamas? 0.81

00:45:58.000 That is always the question, always.

00:46:00.000 So Jared Kushner said that there will be demilitarization within the first hundred days.

00:46:05.000 As 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.

00:46:12.000 So demilitarization, this is something we're starting now.

00:46:15.000 We have a new government in Gaza.

00:46:17.000 This 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. 0.58

00:46:24.000 And hopefully that will be successful.

00:46:26.000 Without that, we can't rebuild.

00:46:28.000 So if Hamas does not demilitarize, that will be what holds back Gaza and the people of Gaza from achieving their aspiration.

00:46:34.000 And that's very important.

00:46:35.000 So the next 100 days, we're going to continue to just be heads down and focused on making sure this is implemented.

00:46:40.000 We continue to be focused on humanitarian aid, humanitarian shelter, but then creating the conditions to move forward.

00:46:48.000 Okay, well, again, that doesn't really answer what happens if Hamas refuses to disarm.

00:46:53.000 That is the $100 billion question.

00:46:56.000 What if Hamas simply refuses to disarm? 0.73

00:46:59.000 What happens next?

00:47:00.000 Who's the enforcement body?

00:47:01.000 Is the enforcement body going to be Turkey and Qatar kind of testifying that they've disarmed?

00:47:06.000 Will be the IDF.

00:47:07.000 Who is actually going to do the dirty work if Hamas refuses to disarm?

00:47:10.000 That remains the big question here.

00:47:12.000 Now, 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.

00:47:30.000 That means education programs that aren't run by Hamas.

00:47:35.000 It means the UNRWA becoming a non-entity in the Gaza Strip.

00:47:38.000 There are a lot of steps that have to be taken if this is going to materialize.

00:47:41.000 If it does, that'd be great.

00:47:42.000 But unless you can answer that question, how does Hamas get disarmed?

00:47:47.000 You know, I think that a lot of obstacles remain.

00:47:49.000 Meanwhile, on the cultural front, one of the great moments in culture history happened over the course of the last few days.

00:47:56.000 And 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.

00:48:10.000 It is basically Einstein for dummies, Call Her Daddy. 1.00

00:48:14.000 So, Lyndon, tell me about this magical moment.

00:48:17.000 This is insane, Ben.

00:48:19.000 I 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.

00:48:25.000 We 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.

00:48:33.000 Meanwhile, the podcast is called Call Her Daddy.

00:48:37.000 That is a play tongue-in-cheek on a podcast that started out being a hyper-sexual podcast.

00:48:43.000 The whole point was to teach girls how to entice men, how to get the guys to call them daddy and be controlling and manipulative. 0.89

00:48:54.000 So 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.

00:49:07.000 Now, we have seen other major political figures appear on Call Her Daddy.

00:49:11.000 Most famous Kamala Harris appeared on Call Her Daddy during her successful run for the presidency.

00:49:15.000 Wait, it didn't work out amazing.

00:49:17.000 So Michelle Obama shows up on this podcast.

00:49:20.000 And how did it go?

00:49:22.000 Do they have deep and important conversations about Michelle Obama's sex life or favorite positions or what?

00:49:29.000 Because I know that that sounds like a joke, but that's actually a thing that Alex Cooper does talk about on her show is stuff like that.

00:49:35.000 Yeah.

00:49:35.000 Well, she introduced the same way she kind of did the Kamala interview.

00:49:39.000 She's like, I've thought about, you know, all the way through this interview, but I'm going to go with this.

00:49:43.000 So she did the same thing with Michelle Obama. 0.76

00:49:45.000 She 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.

00:49:52.000 And 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.

00:50:03.000 And then they just go on to just talk in circles about how women are treated so awful in this country.

00:50:09.000 And all men care about is the way women look and how they dress. 0.83

00:50:14.000 And it's just not reality.

00:50:16.000 But that's what we learn about those that lean left.

00:50:19.000 They don't live in reality.

00:50:20.000 Well, one of the things that I find really hilarious about this is that apparently Michelle Obama went on there and complained about the patriarchy.

00:50:27.000 And 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.

00:50:38.000 Yeah, 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.

00:50:45.000 Like, oh, the horror of changing your name, changing how you're addressed.

00:50:49.000 That's just one other thing that women have to do that men don't. 0.99

00:50:53.000 I thought that whole segment was silly.

00:50:55.000 And then you have Alex trying to bring it back to her audience who are single women in the dating world. 1.00

00:51:00.000 And she's like, Michelle, this is something that comes up with my audience members.

00:51:04.000 You know, they're women and they are successful, which I think I'm successful. 0.57

00:51:08.000 I love success.

00:51:09.000 But she's like, they're scared to date a guy because most men don't want that.

00:51:14.000 They're going to be intimidated.

00:51:16.000 And all I can think about in my head is I'm like, no, most men don't think that.

00:51:22.000 In fact, only losers think that way.

00:51:24.000 Like, most men, I think, I don't know about you, Ben, would enjoy some more golf trips if their wife was successful.

00:51:30.000 I think they like it.

00:51:31.000 I did this segment once on Broadway in Nashville where I asked women if they would date a guy that made less in them.

00:51:37.000 100% of the answers were no.

00:51:39.000 So what's that about?

00:51:41.000 Yes.

00:51:41.000 I mean, it is sort of funny how much of this interview seemed to be projection.

00:51:46.000 There'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.

00:51:52.000 I'm not sure I can name more than like two outfits my wife has ever worn in 20 years. 0.65

00:51:59.000 It is, it is like men never think about what women are wearing.

00:52:02.000 It's such absolute nonsense.

00:52:04.000 But again, everything is the fault of the patriarchy, apparently.

00:52:07.000 Yeah, I asked my husband, I'm like, do you remember what my wedding dress looks like?

00:52:10.000 He's like, it was white.

00:52:12.000 And I was like, there you go, ladies. 0.94

00:52:15.000 Like they don't, they don't.

00:52:16.000 They don't think about that.

00:52:18.000 Well, it was good times over on Call Her Daddy, as per our usual arrangement.

00:52:22.000 And I appreciate that Lyndon Blake, Dailyware reporter, extraordinaire, suffered through that.

00:52:26.000 Lyndon, thanks for your time.

00:52:27.000 Thanks for sticking through all of that and reporting on it.

00:52:31.000 Yep, two hours.

00:52:32.000 I'll never get back.

00:52:34.000 Meanwhile, on the cultural front, we have the 2026 Oscar nominations.

00:52:38.000 I'm going to hold off on some of the rankings of these movies.

00:52:41.000 I haven't seen some of them.

00:52:42.000 I do know that One Battle After Another, which has received 13 Oscar nominations, is an incredibly overrated film.

00:52:49.000 You can go view my review of that film over on YouTube.

00:52:52.000 I thought that the film is poorly written.

00:52:54.000 I think that the film is not acted well.

00:52:58.000 I think Sean Penn particularly overacts in that film.

00:53:00.000 It is not a great Paul Thomas Anderson flick.

00:53:03.000 It's obvious writing.

00:53:04.000 It's stupid.

00:53:06.000 It's a really off-putting movie for people who are not ardent leftists, frankly.

00:53:10.000 Some of the other movies that have been granted large numbers of nods, Sinners was given the most Oscar nominations ever.

00:53:18.000 Now, to be fair, it has more Oscar nominations than say All About Eve.

00:53:22.000 To be fair, there are more Oscar categories now.

00:53:24.000 So that's sort of like, you know, Roger Maris hitting 61 home runs in more games than Babe Ruth was able to play.

00:53:30.000 So I'm not sure that I follow that, but I haven't seen Sinners yet.

00:53:34.000 So I'm going to hold off on commentary on Sinners.

00:53:38.000 There's some other nominations that I think are well deserved.

00:53:40.000 Ethan Hawk was nominated for Best Lead Actor for his role in Blue Moon, in which he plays the lyricist Lorenz Hart.

00:53:46.000 He's terrific in it.

00:53:48.000 I loved parts of the movie, not the whole movie, but he's really, really good in that film.

00:53:53.000 Wicked for Good basically got shut out.

00:53:56.000 That 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.

00:54:02.000 And so it wasn't as though that was going to clean up at the Oscars.

00:54:05.000 Also, Cynthia Arrivo, who is sort of the standout in the first one, is less of a main character in this movie.

00:54:11.000 The one who got snubbed is Ariana Grande, who is good in the movie. 1.00

00:54:14.000 I don't think she's fabulous, but I think she's good in the movie. 0.70

00:54:19.000 Some 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.

00:54:33.000 Haven't seen that one yet, so I'll hold off on it.

00:54:34.000 F1 was nominated for Best Picture, which again, F1 is fine.

00:54:38.000 It's a worse version of Top Gun Maverick and Ford versus Ferrari.

00:54:38.000 It's okay.

00:54:42.000 It's like, all right.

00:54:44.000 You know, didn't love it.

00:54:45.000 Sentimental value.

00:54:47.000 Haven't seen that one yet.

00:54:49.000 Frankenstein, which again, I thought was going to be great.

00:54:51.000 And I was kind of underwhelmed by this.

00:54:52.000 Is Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, which is beautifully produced, but kind of shockingly flat in the way that it's presented.

00:55:03.000 The Secret Agent, which is a foreign film.

00:55:09.000 I haven't seen that one yet.

00:55:10.000 Marty Supreme, which is supposed to be good.

00:55:12.000 Train Dreams, which is mostly kind of like a Terrence Mallet film, kind of.

00:55:19.000 Terrence Malleck didn't do it, but it was nominated for Best Picture.

00:55:23.000 It's a movie about a man who suffers a family tragedy and then sort of travels around the country looking at pretty things.

00:55:30.000 Not, you know, again, I thought it was overrated.

00:55:32.000 Bogonia, by maybe the most overrated director working today, or at least one of the five most overrated directors, Yorgos Lanthemos.

00:55:38.000 Everything he does is obvious.

00:55:39.000 Everything that he does is far left wing.

00:55:42.000 Begonia is about a CEO, a pharmaceutical CEO who was kidnapped by people who believe she's an alien.

00:55:47.000 And spoiler alert, it goes exactly where you think it was going to go.

00:55:51.000 One battle after another, which, as I say, was wildly overrated.

00:55:55.000 And Sinners, which was nominated for 16 Academy Awards.

00:55:59.000 So those are your best picture nominees.

00:56:02.000 Kind of an underwhelming crew in a lot of ways.

00:56:06.000 On the other hand, I'm not sure what I've seen this year that rises to that level.

00:56:09.000 I'll give you better ratings once I've seen all of the movies.

00:56:11.000 I try to make a habit of seeing movies before I actually rate them or talk about whether they're good or not.

00:56:17.000 All righty, folks, coming up, we'll get to tennis players being asked about their politics.

00:56:22.000 I'm not sure why that is happening, but it seems to be happening a lot.

00:56:25.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

00:56:27.000 If you're not a member, become a member and use Coach Apiro checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

00:56:30.000 Click that link in the description and join us.

00:56:34.000 What was it like, Marlon, to be alone with God?

00:56:43.000 Is that who you think I was alone with?

00:56:49.000 Marathon, I knew your father.

00:56:51.000 I am yet convinced that he was not of this world.

00:56:57.000 All men know of the great Taliesin.

00:57:00.000 You are my father.

00:57:01.000 The gods should war for my soul.

00:57:04.000 Princess Garris, savior of our people.

00:57:10.000 I know what the bull got offered you.

00:57:13.000 I was offered the same.

00:57:15.000 And there is a new pirate work in the world.

00:57:18.000 I've seen it.

00:57:20.000 A god who sacrifices what he loves for us.

00:57:23.000 We are each given only one life, Singer.

00:57:26.000 No, we're given another.

00:57:31.000 I learned of Yezu the Christ, and I have become his follower.

00:57:35.000 He's waiting on a miracle, and I think you can give him one.

00:57:38.000 Trust in Yezu. 0.87

00:57:40.000 He is the only hope for men like us.

00:57:42.000 Fate of Britain never rests in the hands of the Great Light.

00:57:46.000 Great light, great darkness.

00:57:48.000 Such things mattered to me then.

00:57:51.000 What matters to you now, Mistress of Lies?

00:57:54.000 You, nephew, the sword of the high king.

00:58:03.000 How many lives must be lost before you accept the power you were born to wield.

00:58:11.000 So clinging to the promises of a god who has abandoned you.

00:58:14.000 I cannot take up that sword again.

00:58:17.000 You know what you must do.

00:58:20.000 Great life, forgive me.

The Ben Shapiro Show - January 23, 2026

Another Ridiculous Media LIE About ICE!

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