Trump is making some pretty astonishing moves with regard to Russia and Ukraine. The media totally don t understand what he's doing, or they do understand and they're lying about it. Plus, we'll be joined by Harvey Dillon over at the DOJ, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders.
00:00:00.000Alright folks, a ton coming up on today's show.
00:00:02.000President Trump making some pretty astonishing moves with regard to Russia and Ukraine.
00:00:06.000The media totally don't understand what he's doing or they do understand and they're lying about it.
00:00:10.000Plus, we'll be joined by Harvey Dillon over at the DOJ first, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders.
00:00:16.000None of those people have Daily Wire plus memberships and we don't want them to have Daily Wire memberships because they suck, but we want you to get 40% off new Daily Wire plus annual memberships now with code summer at dailywireplus.com.
00:00:28.000Also, we announced she joined the Daily Wire.
00:01:42.000Well, folks, as the media and Democrats fuminate over President Trump's supposed capitulation to Vladimir Putin, precisely the opposite thing seems to actually be happening.
00:01:51.000So leave it to the media and to the left to actually deliberately misinterpret what is going on.
00:01:56.000So yesterday, President Trump met with Vladimir Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine.
00:02:00.000He also met with a bunch of European leaders, and we'll get to all of it.
00:02:03.000And the outcome of the meetings, again, you're not going to have an outcome until there's a real full negotiated outcome.
00:02:09.000But what it seems to be moving towards is some Ukrainian territorial concessions in return for Ukraine getting serious security guarantees, serious security guarantees.
00:02:20.000And it's unclear what those security guarantees would look like.
00:02:23.000It would presumably be some form of European trigger force in Ukraine that would imply a mutual defense pact.
00:02:30.000It wouldn't exactly be NATO, but it would kind of be NATO light that had been talked about by Steve Whitcoff, the special negotiator and special envoy on this issue.
00:02:37.000According to the New York Times, at the meeting among President Trump, President Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine and other European leaders on Monday in Washington, there's frequent discussion of security guarantees to make sure Russia does not invade again.
00:02:47.000Prime Minister Kirstammer of Britain has talked about assembling a force drawn from a coalition of the willing that would be stationed in Ukraine after a ceasefire or peace agreement.
00:02:55.000No one has detailed publicly what that force would look like.
00:02:58.000And it's unclear, you know, again, the details of that thing.
00:03:01.000That's what's going to have to be hashed out here.
00:03:04.000One concept is a sort of peacekeeping force presumably armed that would supplement the Ukrainian military put in place for defensive purposes.
00:03:11.000Russia will probably push back against that.
00:03:13.000The problem is to be a credible deterrent, you need tens of thousands of troops.
00:03:17.000The second possibility is a tripwire force that again would sort of trigger the possibility of the mutual defense coming into effect if Russia were to walk across the border.
00:03:26.000And a third possibility would be a sort of observer force that could be a few hundred troops or so to report on incoming military action that could be accomplished with satellites and ground cameras.
00:03:37.000The question here is what exactly Ukraine will accept and what is sufficient to guarantee that Russia does not try this again because of course they did this in 2014 and then they did it again in 2022.
00:03:47.000They have a long history of repeated aggressions against the same states grabbing territory incrementally.
00:03:54.000And so the security guarantees would have to presumably be something relatively severe.
00:03:59.000I mean, there has to be something there that is serious.
00:04:02.000Otherwise, the Ukrainians are going to say, well, you know what, we're going to keep fighting this thing because why exactly are we going to push off three years into the future the possibility that you abandon us if Russia walks across that border again?
00:04:12.000Now for the Russians' part, they're pushing back against this because their goal is to leave Ukraine utterly defenseless and prostrate before them.
00:04:20.000The New York Times points out that Russian officials had rejected that idea of the sort of NATO Article 5 like arrangement.
00:04:27.000Even before Monday's meeting, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Jakarova said that Russia, quote, categorically rejects any scenario that envisages the appearance in Ukraine of a military contingent with the participation of NATO countries.
00:04:41.000And so there is a big gap apparently between the Russians and the Europeans and Americans about what these security guarantees should look like, but we are moving towards something now, maybe we don't get there.
00:04:52.000Maybe it's possible that Russia walks away from the table, but the fact that President Trump is willing to hold Russia's feet to the fire by even talking about these kinds of significant security guarantees is a major move from the president and pretending that that's a pro-Russia move is silly.
00:05:09.000If there were a significant security guarantee, a sort of NATO light, an Article 5 light approach to Ukraine in exchange for territorial concessions in Donbass, that would be a master stroke from the President of the United States, because otherwise this thing keeps going.
00:05:37.000Apparently, the German foreign minister, a person named Johann Wadefull said, quote, we are the only European troop contributor to station a combat ready brigade in Lithuania.
00:05:44.000Doing that and also stationing troops in Ukraine would probably be too much for us, which by the way is really pathetic.
00:05:49.000You can't put like two combat ready segments of your of your military in Ukraine and also Lithuania.
00:05:57.000What are you busy doing Germany, the great industrial powerhouse on the European continent?
00:06:02.000European leaders see durable security guarantees for Ukraine according to Politico as key to any potential peace deal that may emerge between Kiev and Moscow.
00:06:09.000The issue that will be a top item on the agenda for the rest of the week.
00:06:12.000Waterfall said we're hearing signals from Washington.
00:06:15.000They're prepared to provide security guarantees.
00:06:17.000This must then be worked out together with the Europeans with Germany naturally having to play an important role.
00:06:22.000And again, as we said, Steve Whitcoff had suggested that much more robust security guarantees and EU admission might be on the table as well as an Article 5 like protection.
00:06:31.000So again, this is the direction these talks are moving.
00:06:35.000And this is to the great consternation of both the media and the Democrats who claimed that Donald Trump was a Putin cat's paw.
00:06:42.000They thought that Trump was going to welcome Zelensky to the White House yesterday by berating him and telling him he needed to basically surrender in the war.
00:06:48.000No security guarantees, no economic health, no, nothing.
00:07:18.000Zelenskyy was confronted by a reporter who had gotten on his case about not wearing a suit at the last meeting, knowing that was a buggaboo of President Trump's.
00:07:27.000Brian Glenn, who is dating Marjorie Taylor Greene, which says something about his personal judgment.
00:07:33.000In any case, he complimented Zelenskyy for wearing a suit and Zelenskyy, you look fabulous in that suit.
00:08:26.000Are you prepared to keep sending Ukrainian troops to their deaths for another couple of years or are you going to agree to redraw the maps?
00:09:01.000So, and I think we showed that we are strong people and we supported the idea of the United States, of personally of President Trump to stop this war, to make a diplomatic way of finishing this war.
00:09:16.000And we are ready for trilateral, as President said.
00:09:19.000This is a good signal about trilateral.
00:09:25.000By the way, one of the things that Zelenskyy also said is that as part of any of the security guarantees put forward by Europe and the United States, Ukraine would buy $90 billion in American weapons via Europe.
00:09:36.000NATO would essentially pay for it, not America, the rest of the NATO nations, and the United States military would benefit from it, the military-industrial complex, so to speak.
00:09:46.000The defense industries in the United States would end up benefiting from that, presumably.
00:09:51.000He said a formal agreement still had to be arranged.
00:09:54.000President Trump was asked about the possibility of a trilateral meeting between the United States, Russia, and Zelensky directly.
00:10:00.000I just spoke to President Putin indirectly, and we're going to have a phone call right after these meetings today.
00:10:14.000I think if we have a trilat, there's a good chance it may being it but he's he's expecting my call when we're finished with this meeting.
00:10:24.000Okay so as soon as that particular Oval Office head of tet ended all the Europeans showed up and you can see a picture here of the full lineup of leaders at the White House and it basically looks like a G7 convention.
00:10:39.000You got everybody from Ursula von der Leyen to Kier Starmer to Emmanuel Macron to George Maloney of Italy and a bunch of others showing up at the White House and it apparently the meetings were very warm they went very very well Mark Rudy was one of the people there is the head of NATO.
00:10:55.000He says that President Trump is a pragmatic peacemaker.
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00:14:20.000Everybody is clear, including the president, that when it comes to territory, it is the Ukrainian president who has discussed this in the trilateral and then probably more conversations after that with the Russian leadership, with Vladimir Vladimir Putin of Russia.
00:14:39.000But today it was clear that for the Ukrainians to be willing to discuss territory and as part of an overall solution to this terrible war and to stop the killing, first we need to have full clarity collectively, US, the Europeans and the others in this coalition of the willing on what security guarantees will mean.
00:15:01.000And Rudy also continued by suggesting that security guarantees were basically the main issue that is still to be hashed out here.
00:15:08.000The situation is this, that the US and some other countries have said that they are against NATO membership for Ukraine.
00:15:14.000The official NATO position since the summit in 2024 is that there is an irreversible path for Ukraine into NATO.
00:15:22.000But what we are discussing here is not NATO membership.
00:15:25.000What we are discussing here is Article 5 type of security guarantees for Ukraine and what they exactly will entail will now be more specifically discussed.
00:15:38.000Zelenskyy, for his part, he expressed gratitude to both President Trump as well as the EU leaders for their hard work on the possibility of a peace deal.
00:15:47.000I think that we had a constructive, specific meeting, and I'm very thankful to all the leaders who are here and you help a lot, and so we are happy that we have such big unity today.
00:16:09.000Okay, so again, all of this was very positive.
00:16:12.000Now, apparently in the middle of the meeting with the Europeans, President Trump stepped out to arrange a meeting or try to arrange a meeting between Vladimir Putin and Zelensky.
00:16:21.000Putin directly, according to a report from Axios.
00:16:24.000He stepped out of the room and did a little bit of He then put out a statement on Truth Social, quote, I had a very good meeting with distinguished guests, President Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine, President Emmanuel Macron of France, President Alexander Stubb of Finland, President, Prime Minister George Maloney of Italy, Prime Minister Kirstarmer of the UK, Chancellor of the the Federal Republic of Germany Friedrich Mears, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and Secretary General of NATO Mark Rudy in the White House, which ended in a further meeting in the Oval Office.
00:16:49.000During the meeting, we discussed security guarantees for Ukraine, which guarantees would be provided by the various European countries with a coordination with the United States of America.
00:16:57.000Everyone is very happy about the possibility of peace for Russia-Ukraine.
00:17:00.000At the conclusion of the meetings, I called President Putin and began the arrangements for a meeting at a location to be determined between President Putin and President Zelensky.
00:17:08.000After that meeting takes place, we'll have a trilat, which would be the two presidents plus myself.
00:17:12.000Again, this is a very good early step for war that has been going on for almost four years.
00:17:15.000Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Envoy Steve Whitcoff are coordinating with Russia and Ukraine.
00:17:21.000Thank you for your attention to this matter.
00:17:23.000So again, we'll have to see how all this plays out.
00:17:26.000President Trump then called in to Fox and Friends this morning to explain why he stepped out of the room in order to do a call with Vladimir Putin.
00:17:33.000And one of the things at the table was one of the gentlemen who's a great guy, but he said, I hope I didn't insult him.
00:17:41.000He said, well, let's meet in another month or two and let's see if we can start making some money.
00:17:46.000He said, a month or two, you can have another forty thousand people dead in a month or two.
00:18:00.000And then if that works out, if it works out, then I'll go to the trilateral and close it up.
00:18:07.000Okay, so we still there's a lot of steps between here and there.
00:18:10.000We still have to see whether Vladimir Putin actually is interested in ending the war in any serious way.
00:18:15.000Again, you have to understand that for the Russians, and we've discussed this at length, the Russian goal in Ukraine was originally to just eat the whole thing, was to eat all of Ukraine.
00:18:23.000And then it turned out that they were unable to actually achieve that.
00:18:26.000And so their simultaneous goal has been to prevent Ukraine from entering NATO, from entering the EU, from becoming quote unquote Europeanized.
00:18:34.000They want Ukraine to essentially become a satellite state in the way that Belarus is a sort of satellite state of the Russians.
00:18:40.000And they believe that Ukraine is sort of a moat in their eye, that because Ukraine has become increasingly pro European, increasingly pro western, and increasingly swiveled away from Russia, that because of that, Ukraine represents a serious impediment to the reestablishment of anything like a Russian empire.
00:18:58.000And the goal of Vladimir Putin is to reestablish Russia not just as a regional power, but as a global superpower on par with the United States, on par with China.
00:19:08.000And Ukraine represents an insult to that because Ukraine obviously was a part of the Soviet Union because there's a long history between Ukraine and Russia, including times when Russia has dominated parts of Ukraine or the whole of Ukraine.
00:19:21.000And so the idea that a giant chunk of what Putin considers to be Russia actually is turned away from Russia is an insult to him and to the new Russian empire that he's attempting to create.
00:19:32.000So the idea that he's going to accept security guarantees from the West in exchange for a little bit more territory, the only way that he believes that that will be useful to him is if he believes that the West is going to reneg, that he believes the West is basically going to pull out the same way that the West did with regard to, say, Hong Kong and China.
00:19:48.000And President Trump, for his part, he believes that he can still make a deal.
00:19:50.000And again, this is one of the things that's kind of amazing about President Trump.
00:19:54.000He's a consummate deal maker, for sure.
00:19:56.000He's very optimistic about deals all the time.
00:19:58.000He thinks he can make a deal in any situation.
00:19:59.000Now, the good thing about President Trump is that he's heterodox in his views, which means he sometimes does very creative things.
00:20:05.000But also, if things don't happen, he then will respond.
00:20:54.000So that was President Trump explaining that he thinks that Putin wants to make a deal with him for him.
00:20:59.000And we'll find out whether that's true or not.
00:21:01.000I mean, bottom line is the proof is in the pudding and none of the details have been worked out, but we are moving toward a thing.
00:21:06.000And to pretend that somehow Trump is doing Putin's work here is to ignore everything that's actually going on in favor of a pre-established narrative.
00:21:13.000That's that's the actual thing that's amazing here.
00:21:15.000There are some members of the heretofore left who at least are being honest about this.
00:21:19.000Michael McFaul, who is President Obama's Russian ambassador, he says, listen, President Trump is actually doing a pretty good job here.
00:21:27.000I think there was a very positive meeting and whoever had the idea to bring all these European leaders together in addition to President Zelensky, that was a brilliant, brilliant idea.
00:21:38.000And having it come so quickly after Alaska was also very important because now they've changed the talking points here.
00:21:46.000Just in this meeting alone, they've walked back.
00:21:49.000some of the positions that the president was echoing when he met with President Putin.
00:21:59.000So, you know, again, if you're honest, even if you're a Democrat, you should be acknowledging that President Trump not only is not doing anything wrong here, he's actually moving the ball forward.
00:22:08.000Now, whether we get to the end zone or not is an entirely separate question.
00:22:12.000And there's a lot of ground to cover between here and there.
00:22:14.000But to pretend that this was somehow a gigantic Trump capitulation to Putin is to ignore the actual reality of the situation.
00:22:22.000And it demonstrates the wild disconnect between reality and what Democrats think of President Trump.
00:22:26.000Susan W Rice, who is of course a high ranking foreign policy adviser under Barack Obama and then a domestic policy adviser under Joe Biden, former US ambassador to the United Nations.
00:22:37.000She was suggesting that Trump was somehow caving to Putin.
00:22:43.000Trump always likes to put a positive spin on his own work and even a dishonest spin in some instances frequently.
00:22:53.000And so I think that, you know, he had said for weeks, if not months, that a ceasefire immediately was necessary and that that was what he saw in Alaska.
00:23:04.000And if he didn't get it, he was going to be very angry and there were going to be severe consequences.
00:23:09.000And he melted in like a puddle of ice in the Alaska sunshine.
00:23:20.000And coming from Susan Rice, who again was a top foreign policy adviser under Barack Obama, who literally pledged flexibility to the Russians in exchange for them going quiet before the 2012 election, and then proceeded to hand over control of Syria to them, which by the way resulted in catastrophe in that entire region, and handing control of Crimea and the Donbass to them, which happened in 2014.
00:23:43.000I mean, it's an amazing thing to watch these Democrats now pretend that they are hardcore on Russia.
00:23:48.000Meanwhile, Tom Friedman, who is the dumbest human alive, I mean, Tom Friedman, columnist for the New York Times, who apparently receives all of his foreign policy knowledge from random cab drivers in random countries around the world.
00:24:00.000He appeared on CNN to explain that President Trump is acting like he's neutral between a rapist and his victim.
00:24:09.000Putin walks in, he just smacks him, he just backhands him.
00:24:12.000What the hell is Thomas Friedman talking about?
00:24:14.000What a ridiculous person Thomas Friedman is.
00:24:17.000Well, he easily could have written a tweet that said President Putin can end the war right now by getting out of Ukraine and stopping raping the country next door.
00:24:27.000So what it tells me is that we have a president who is kind of neutral between the rapist and his victim.
00:24:36.000And I find that very troubling going into this.
00:25:02.000When you are facing someone who has been as inappropriate as Trump was with Zelenskyy a few months ago, you bring your friends, you bring the democracies of the world, you bring the nations that have always been standing by us, we have stood by each other.
00:25:23.000And the West respects democracies, they respect the rights of their citizens and the idea that they're all there and it's Trump and Putin versus all the good guys.
00:25:53.000Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, is tweeting out something similar.
00:25:56.000Yesterday she tweeted out, it's curious to see the similarities between the people close with President Trump.
00:26:01.000On the one hand, we have Vladimir Putin has ordered the kidnapping of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children and uses the rape of women as a weapon of war.
00:26:07.000This conduct is eerily similar to the moral depravity of Trump's other friend Jeffrey Epstein.
00:26:12.000With his close relationships to both men, it's no surprise Trump won't release the Epstein files and wants Ukraine to see land to Putin.
00:26:34.000I think the United States should be funding Ukraine sufficient to stop the Russian invasion.
00:26:38.000In fact, I think that the United States has a strong interest in funding Ukraine and army Ukraine sufficient to push back Russian territorial gains in the Donbass, if possible.
00:26:48.000I've never changed my mind on that subject.
00:26:50.000I said that in August 2022 they should look for an off-ramp because that seemed to be the most auspicious time for an off-ramp.
00:26:57.000along the lines what Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State, was talking about.
00:27:01.000But then after Putin basically walked away and so did Zelenskyy, then the idea that you were going to let Ukraine fall to the Russians became ridiculous.
00:27:09.000So it is not as though I personally am sort of neutral on the question of what happens in Ukraine with regard to Vladimir Putin.
00:27:17.000I think the Russians are a nefarious force in the world.
00:27:18.000I think Vladimir Putin is one of the worst actors on planet Earth.
00:27:21.000And also, President Trump was not handing him to the keys of the car.
00:27:25.000I mean, that's like there's no evidence that's the case.
00:27:27.000And so the consistent lying here remains a source of astonishment to me.
00:27:32.000All right, coming up, we'll get to the latest on redistricting.
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00:29:43.000Meanwhile, remember that time that Texas Democrats, Texas Democrats, they were the resistance.
00:29:48.000They ran away bravely like Sir Robin from Monty Python.
00:29:51.000They ran, ran far away in order to prevent the Texas House from achieving a quorum, thus to prevent redistricting.
00:29:58.000Well, it turns out they came back and then the redistricting happened.
00:30:01.000According to the Wall Street Journal, roaring cheers from supporters greeted Texas House Democrats as they returned to the Capitol midday on Monday after a two-week walk out.
00:30:08.000Their return all but ensures the passage of a Republican-backed redistricting plan sought by President Trump, but the Democrats' allies think the walkout did a good job of drawing national attention to the GOP redistricting effort and generating pushback to it.
00:30:19.000So a bunch of Democrats showed up in the well of the state capital to chant about how they had really fought back.
00:30:26.000They'd put Texans first and they'd fought back by running away and then eventually coming back.
00:30:43.000Look at those stalwart heroes getting the big cheers they deserve for going on a two week unpaid vacation to Chicago and Washington, DC, and then coming back just in time for Republicans to do what they wanted to do in the first place.
00:30:55.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Texas House Democrats on Monday confirmed they were back in Austin and ready to end their 15-day quorum break after encouraging states like California to take measures to counter the proposed redistricting in Texas.
00:31:07.000Republican governor Greg Abbott ordered the second 30-day special session after the Democrats' walk out stymied the first.
00:31:13.000A procedural move disallowing members from leaving the chamber without permission remained in force on Monday.
00:31:17.000House Speaker Dustin Burroughs said that Democrats who had been absent would be released only under the custody of state troopers until the body reconvenes later this week.
00:31:24.000Basically, you are coming to work whether you like it.
00:31:28.000So it turns out that that was all a giant fail.
00:31:31.000But the good news is, I guess, that JB Pritzker got to have his moment blotting out the sun.
00:31:36.000JB Pritzker put out a tweet saying, thank you, Representative Wu.
00:31:39.000This is Eugene Wu, who is a representative who fled to Illinois, one of the most gerrymandered states in America in order to prevent redistricting in Texas.
00:31:47.000Pritzker said, thank you, Representative Wu, for trusting us to defend democracy alongside you.
00:31:52.000We need more fighters like the Texas House Democrats.
00:31:59.000Now, it'll be interesting to see, by the way, how the Texas redistricting actually impacts the map because right now a bunch of districts are going to get redrawn.
00:32:09.000And in 2024, President Trump won every Republican-held house district in Texas by double digits.
00:32:17.000And there are some districts that were starting to turn red because of the large-scale movement of Hispanics away from the Democratic Party.
00:32:24.000But it is possible that in future elections, those Hispanic voters may turn back toward the Democratic Party.
00:32:29.000In fact, there's some decent poll data suggesting some disillusionment with the Republican Party on behalf of some of the Texas Hispanic population, particularly along the border with Mexico.
00:32:39.000This is a point that's being made by Eli McCown Dawson over at Nate Silver's substack that the Texas House districting might not actually achieve what it seeks to achieve because there are five Texas districts that are supposed to flip from blue to red in nine thirty second, thirty fifth congressional districts.
00:32:58.000Harris won all three of those districts in 2024 under the old congressional map.
00:33:02.000Under the new map, parts of each district would be moved into more suburban areas that voted for Trump in 2024.
00:33:08.000And that means that he would have won all three districts in 2024 and 2020.
00:33:13.000But the other two districts, the 28th and 34th are a less straightforward win for Republicans.
00:33:17.000The 28th and 34th are located in South Texas on the border with Mexico.
00:33:24.000possible that, you know, again, those are districts that Biden won actually in 2020 and that in 2024, President Trump won.
00:33:32.000But if there is a reversion to the mean in terms of Hispanic voting patterns, then you could see a world where actually Hispanics drive in Texas those districts back into the arm of the Democrats, which means you won't gain five seats, they'll essentially gain one.
00:33:47.000So again, this is the thing about redistricting.
00:33:49.000No matter how much you think you can redistrict a bunch of seats of the opposition out of existence, if the people don't like the way that the politics is going, they will vote the other way.
00:34:00.000Meanwhile, California Democrats, according to the Washington.
00:34:03.000Post, are going to take their first official steps this week in the national battle over redrawing congressional maps as they return to Sacramento to adopt a measure asking voters to approve new boundaries for 2026, 2028 and 2030 that could create as many as five new house seats for their party.
00:34:16.000The aggressive legislative maneuvering by governor Gavin Newsom and Democrats who control the legislature is intended as a check on President Trump and his effort to tilt the midterm elections in Republican favor.
00:34:57.000Now, that doesn't mean he might not be the nominee, he might be.
00:35:00.000I mean, Democrats are very susceptible, as we say, to all of this sort of posturing and virtue signaling, which is why they will cheer when Cory Booker speaks for 24 hours or Hakeem Jeffries stands up there with a catheter for 7 hours and jabbers.
00:35:12.000But, you know, is that actually going to effectuate a stop to President Trump's policies?
00:35:17.000Now, meanwhile, the media, which have been doing all the dirty work for the Democrats for literally my entire lifetime, they're in a very serious situation.
00:35:24.000So there was a report yesterday that MSNBC is now rebranding itself.
00:36:48.000But again, that is simply because they are having serious ratings problems and they've been having serious ratings problems for quite a while.
00:36:55.000MSNBC, they're trying everything they can to actually rebrand in a serious way.
00:37:00.000According to the New York Post, it was mercilessly raked over the coals by the internet.
00:37:06.000People talking about maybe it was most surely no one watching or BS now.
00:37:13.000Apparently it was they were forced to do this, I guess, because of the upcoming spin-off by by Comcast to a new publicly traded company called Versant.
00:37:20.000So a short sell whatever owns MSNBC or MS now, as they say, they're getting rid of the peacock.
00:37:28.000One former media executive told the post, I don't know what's worse, Versant or MySource News Opinion World, whoever came up with these names deserves to be shown the door.
00:37:44.000But you know, don't get a lot about their coverage.
00:37:46.000Meanwhile, joining us online is Harmony Dillon.
00:37:48.000She, of course, is assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice.
00:37:52.000And of course, before she joined the administration, her law.
00:37:54.000Her law practice focuses on a wide variety of issues, including she helped us out when we were suing the federal government over Joe Biden's vaccination mandate.
00:38:00.000Harmony, thank you so much for the time.
00:38:28.000The president has seen the news like everyone who lives here.
00:38:30.000I'm a DC resident now working at the DOJ and everyone is aware of the pervasive crime.
00:38:35.000It isn't just in one area or the other.
00:38:37.000It's literally near the White House, near Capitol Hill, and you can't escape it.
00:38:41.000And so this is what is happening is now we're seeing a completely ineffective local law enforcement.
00:38:46.000So the federal government is taking over.
00:38:48.000You're seeing our U.S. attorney, Judge Pirro prosecuting street crime.
00:38:54.000There's arrests happening overnight, dozens and dozens.
00:38:57.000And this is the type of law enforcement that the local authorities could have done for the last several decades and simply for political reasons chose not to do.
00:39:06.000And so I personally feel much safer as a DC resident and I'm hearing that from people who aren't involved in politics as well.
00:39:13.000I wish this could happen all over the country, but of course the president has the authority to do it here and not elsewhere.
00:39:18.000Our Attorney General here in the building, Pam Bondi, is also very invested in this.
00:39:24.000And, you know, this is just a whole night and day situation here in DC.
00:39:30.000Yeah, it's kind of amazing the difference between the chattering classes on TV, what they're saying about this, talking about tyranny, and what is actually happening in the District of Columbia, where the federal government does have plenary power to actually do things like prevent crime, because of course it is a federal district.
00:40:01.000I mean, you do see crime tape all over the place before this happened and the crime is pervasive.
00:40:07.000And so I actually moved to New York in the 1990s when Rudy Giuliani was the mayor and it was a similar situation where overnight you start to use that broken window theory and prosecute all the street crime and the turnstile jumpers and all that.
00:40:24.000And suddenly, the whole tone of the place chang picks up, value goes up, people move in.
00:40:30.000I hope that happens to our city as well.
00:40:34.000Well, meanwhile, the Civil Rights Division over at the Department of Justice has changed its orientation and is actually trying to enforce civil rights, including on issues like Title IX.
00:40:44.000What's the latest on the DOJ's approach to Title IX?
00:40:48.000Well, Title IX has been something that we jumped right into at the beginning, and this has been a big priority for the Trump administration, and it's at multiple levels.
00:40:56.000So at the college level, we are engaging in conversations with universities that we're entering into settlement negotiations with, and many of those have Title IX components.
00:41:06.000For example, University of Pennsylvania has agreed to not allow boys to compete, men to compete in young women's sports.
00:41:14.000We're looking at situations where universities are requiring sororities, fraternities to admit people of the opposite sex than what their preferences is, and we're trying to get them to stop doing that.
00:41:26.000We're emphasizing privacy, but I want to also let your viewers and listeners know that we're actually also focusing on K through 12.
00:41:36.000And right here in our backyard in DC in the suburban Maryland areas, you're seeing open defiance of federal law and Title IX in these suburbs you're seeing uh these schools punish uh two boys who complained about a woman a young woman identifying as a boy coming into their locker room we believe both boys and girls have privacy rights and they're being violated by virginia schools we're seeing this happen in other schools as well and i'm engaged in litigation on behalf of the doj
00:42:07.000in california against california interscholastic federation which administers the school sports in california and allows boys to compete in girls sports take their trophies take their opportunities for scholarships and take away their self-confidence this is completely unacceptable contrary to the law and we're not going to stand for it at this Department of Justice.
00:42:28.000Actually, one report that's coming out from the backyard over there is Loudoun County.
00:42:32.000Their public schools are now going to maintain a policy apparently allowing so-called transgender students, boys who believe they are girls or the reverse, to use facilities that match their gender identity despite an order from the DOE.
00:42:42.000How is the DOJ going to be dealing with situations like this?
00:42:46.000Well, we also sent a letter to Loudoun County on this issue, and I saw this member of the school board, I believe, or administrator mouth off about this, how they're going to ignore the civil rights division of Department of Education and presumably DOJ.
00:43:15.000Meanwhile, the lamentations, the wailing, lamentations, gnashing of teeth, rending of garments on behalf of Stephen Colbert continues a pace.
00:43:23.000Yesterday, Conan O'Brien issued a statement talking about how sad he was about Stephen Colbert, who was speaking at the Television Academy Hall of Fame.
00:43:32.000He said, It's just, it's just very, very sad what happened to Stephen Colbert.
00:43:35.000Honestly, it's sadder what happened to Conan in Late Night.
00:43:38.000I'm old enough to remember when Conan was in Late Night and he's better than all these gu guys were.
00:43:42.000Here he is very, very sad about the demise of Stephen Colbert's wildly over expensive late night show.
00:43:49.000Late night television as we have known it since around 1950 is going to disappear.
00:43:55.000But those voices are not going anywhere.
00:43:58.000People like Stephen Colbert are too talented and too essential to go away.
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00:46:20.000Apparently they're more newsworthy than actual news, but I I have been told by many sources, myriad and sundry, that it's very important that we talk about Taylor Swift's new album cover.
00:46:29.000So here's what Taylor Swift's new album cover looks like.
00:46:39.000If you search Taylor Swift on Google, which I just did because I'm trying to look up her album cover, there's like actual Google graphics that appear with animation of glitter falling because she has released the Life of a Showgirl album cover.
00:46:55.000And apparently it is her in like a bathroom stall or something.
00:47:00.000I'm very confused as to what is going on here.
00:47:03.000She is bent over at the waist, putting her arms against a wall while wearing a showgirl outfit that's cut up thigh high, essentially.
00:49:19.000And meanwhile, other controversy in the cultural sphere.
00:49:23.000So apparently there have been these male cheerleaders that everybody's been steadfastastly ignoring since like 2018, but now they've broken back into the open.
00:49:32.000And some video has emerged of one Minnesota Vikings cheerleader who is a flamingly gay man who is kind of doing a Dylan Mulvaney impression without the sex change.
00:49:46.000And I'm just wondering why, like why, why is this why?
00:50:02.000looks like a complete ridiculous moron.
00:50:04.000He's dancing around and swiveling his hips and...
00:50:11.000Now again, as a conservative, I'm not a big fan of the female cheerleaders on the sideline either because I just think that it's become sort of a glorified stripper whole thing.
00:50:19.000But having a dude do it is ridiculous, like laughably ridiculous.
00:50:24.000It's like Bugs Bunny putting on a dress and lipstick and dancing around out there.
00:50:29.000And we're supposed to believe that this is sort of liberating.
00:50:39.000I will say that, as I've pointed out before, my understanding is that male cheerleading did not involve effeminate gyrations by men typically.
00:50:47.000It typically involved either like raw-raying or actually physically picking up ladies and throwing them in the air.
00:50:54.000As I suspected, this is not how cheerleading originally went.
00:50:57.000So I asked our sponsors over at Comet, what is the history of male cheerleading and when did it start to involve men dancing like women?
00:51:03.000Quote, male cheerleading has its origins in the late 19th century, specifically in the 1860s and 1870s at Ivy League College sporting events in the United States.
00:51:10.000Initially, cheerleading was exclusively a male activity, with men known as yell leaders, leading crowds with chants and basic movements focused on audience engagement and school spirit.
00:51:18.000The activity remained predominantly male until World War I and especially World War II, when men went off to fight and women began to take over roles on cheerleading.
00:51:25.000during the early male dominated years, cheerleading was not associated with dance or the more stylized movements often linked with femininity.
00:51:33.000The main role of male cheerleaders was to lead crowd chants and encourage spirit rather than performing dances.
00:51:38.000It was female cheerleaders who introduced more synchronized routines, tumbling acrobatics and the use of paper pompoms, gradually transforming cheerleading into chant focused crowd leadership to a performance-based activity involving dance elements.
00:51:48.000The transition to men participating in dance style routines similarly similar to those traditionally associated with women occurred much later.
00:51:55.000For decades, the style of male cheerleading continued to emphasize strength, athletic stunts, and cheerleading leadership rather than dance.
00:52:00.000It was only as cheerleading developed into competitive and more performance-oriented sport in the late 20th century, especially from the 1980s onward with televised competitions and camps that both male and female cheerleaders began participating in routines involving dance, tumbling and stunts.
00:52:12.000Even then, men typically performed partner stunts, tumbling and lifts while women led in dance style movements and choreography.
00:52:20.000So in other words, this is relatively new.
00:52:22.000And we mean like the last few years, this ridiculous, ridiculous, silly, stupid, idiotic, maronic looking routine in which the men are just doing female movements.
00:52:32.000And yes, women move differently than men.
00:52:35.000I love that we live in a society where what's supposed to jab an ice pick into our eye socket in order to get rid of our prefrontal cortex and we're supposed to pretend that men and women move similarly.
00:53:23.000It's like, no, it's not the same thing.
00:53:25.000Once again, you're taking turns and you're robbing them of their meaning and then you're supplanting them with an alternative, stupid meaning.
00:53:32.000And then you are pretending that, well, you think men were dancing like this smuck back in 1870 or 1940 or hell, 1990?
00:54:16.000And when you jump on, you know, the bandwagon with who is, you know, the most divisive president ever, it makes sense that you're going to be made to look.
00:54:39.000I'm not going to pick his brain to find out exactly which of those things are true.
00:54:42.000I just kind of assume that none of them are.
00:54:44.000And for the most part, I wish him well, man.
00:54:46.000I hope there's certain things that he oversees that seem to be supported in a bipartisan way, like getting terrible toxic stuff out of our kids' food.
00:54:57.000And so like, just if you just do that, that's amazing.
00:55:00.000I'd hate to be so mired in hatred for the president that any success from his administration is something I'd be, have an allergic reaction to be like, oh, well, if they do it, I don't want it to happen.
00:55:11.000I'll feed my, I'll put Clorox in my children's cereal myself.
00:55:15.000You know what I'm saying?, come on, be reasonable here.
00:55:18.000There's certain things that would be good to have.
00:55:28.000Similarly, Anthony Mackie has been actually out there saying some relatively conservative things.
00:55:33.000Again, as long as we're in the Marvel Universe, here he was a few months ago on the Pivot podcast talking about the death of the American Mail.
00:55:40.000In the past twenty years, we've been living through the death of the American Mail.
00:55:46.000They have literally killed masculinity in our homes and our communities, for one reason or another.
00:56:37.000And when you rob them of their purpose, when you rob them of their initiative, when you rob them of their roles, what you end up with is a crisis, a real crisis.
00:56:45.000Really interesting piece by Robert Putnam and Richard Reeves over at the New York Times called The Boy Crisis of 2025 meet the Boy Problem of the 1900s.
00:56:53.000In the early years of the 20th century, America had a boy problem.
00:56:56.000Boys on the street making trouble, boys becoming truants, boys getting caught up in crime.
00:56:59.000The problem spread across the United States alongside the disruptions of technological change, immigration and growing socioeconomic inequality.
00:57:06.000Policy makers stepped in with universal public schooling, for example, but it was the civic response that was truly extraordinaryary.
00:57:11.000In less than a decade, most of today's major child-serving organizations were founded.
00:57:15.000Big Brothers, the Federated Boys' Clubs, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and 4H.
00:57:19.000Many boys and men are struggling today too.
00:57:21.000In an America once again disrupted by technological change, immigration, and growing inequality.
00:57:25.000Since 2010, suicide rates among young men have risen by a third.
00:57:28.000They are now higher than they are among middle-aged men.
00:57:31.000The share of college degrees going to men has fallen to 41%, lower than the women's share in 1970.
00:57:35.000One in ten men aged 20 to 24 is effectively doing nothing, neither enrolled in school nor working.
00:57:42.000This crisis demands a response equivalent to what the progressive era delivered, not just in public policy, but equally important from our civic institutions.
00:57:51.000And he talks about, you know, what government is attempting to do and men and boys being left behind.
00:57:57.000And he quotes, you know, a bunch of different political figures talking about this problem, pushes from Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Spencer Cox in Utah and Wes Moore in Maryland.
00:58:10.000And Moore, for example, in his 2025 State of the State address in Maryland, he said, our mission is to uplift men and boys.
00:58:16.000It's not in conflict with our values to leave no one behind.
00:58:38.000What it is about is the death of many of those same social institutions.
00:58:43.000They write, It takes a village to raise a child, but some of the villagers must be men.
00:58:47.000This is where civic institutions should come in, providing places and spaces where boys and young men learn what it means to be a grown man.
00:58:53.000But in 2025, they're struggling to fulfill that role for two main reasons.
00:58:56.000First, there are simply fewer organizations with an explicit mission to serve boys and men.
00:59:01.000Most of the ones formed during the last boy crisis have gone coed, sometimes as a result of a merger.
00:59:24.000They're now scouting America, but there's still girl scouts, for example.
00:59:27.000The YMCA banned gender discrimination in 1978.
00:59:31.000Second, there's a dearth of male volunteers making it harder to provide services for boys and young men.
00:59:36.000Only 20% of young 4H volunteers are men.
00:59:40.000Organizations are beginning to respond.
00:59:42.000There's an attempt to reach out, but one hindrance is to male volunteering is the fear of being seen as a potential predator.
00:59:47.000This has also reduced the enthusiasm among some parents for single sex environments.
00:59:51.000The abuse scandals that rocked the Catholic Church and Boy Scouts understandably led many parents to worry about their children in male-oriented organizations.
00:59:58.000Settlement for claims against the Boy Scouts has reached seven billion dollars more than the annual expenditure of many U.S. states, but the attention to child safety in those organizations is now paramount.
01:00:09.000You know what used to solve this problem was church groups.
01:00:12.000You know what used to solve this problem was social groups that were led by men for men.
01:00:15.000The thing that is not mentioned anywhere in this article is the rise of feminism, which said that it was uniquely bas bad for men to hang out together, for men to train boys to be boys.
01:00:26.000The reason that Boy Scouts of America changed to Scouting America is because of feminism.
01:00:31.000It is because of the movement to destroy maleness as a concept.
01:00:36.000The idea was that girls can also be Boy Scouts because boy has no meaning.
01:00:41.000The complete androgyny that was pushed by the left for decades on end had a predictable result, which was sure it meant that women could engage in more male-centric occupations, but it also meant that men were basically told that there was nothing special about them, nothing that they were uniquely supposed to do.
01:00:59.000You know, for most people, when you say that you should act like a man, most people know what that means.
01:01:03.000They know what that means, but we forcibly told ourselves that we weren't allowed to say things like that.
01:01:10.000There was something bad about gender stereotypes.
01:01:12.000Teaching a boy to be a man was somehow a terrible thing.
01:01:14.000You had to teach him to become an androgynist widget who might choose to become transgender or feminine later in life.
01:01:20.000Well, that's a terrible thing for a boy.
01:01:50.000And when you lose that, what you end up with is indeed androgynous widgets, atoms in a machine that are not in coordination with no molecules ever get formed.
01:01:59.000And then the society comes apart and males fail.
01:02:02.000And that's what we are watching right now.
01:02:04.000And then out of a desperate need for both attention and camaraderie, people find these groups online that essentially tell them that they are wanted and they are needed and they are necessary but only as a resistance to quote unquote the system.
01:02:20.000And the more wild and outrageous the group, the more solid the core, the more solidarity is required, the more skin in the game.
01:02:28.000And that's how you end up with the sort of polarization of men.
01:02:31.000That's how you end up with the extremism of young men.
01:02:33.000It is because it is a direct reaction to the dissolution of all the social fabric that supported young men, built them up, trained them and made them useful to the societies in which they live.
01:02:43.000Alrighty folks, the show continues for our members right now.
01:02:45.000We'll get to Fed Chair Jerome Powell has a speech today that is really.
01:02:49.000going to shape the next few months of economics in the United States.
01:02:52.000Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.
01:02:54.000If you're not a member, become a member.