Trump scores another win with the passage of a continuing resolution to keep the government funded through September 2019, and Democrats get blamed for the shutdown because they failed to stand up to President Trump's demands for more money for the Department of Education.
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00:00:31.000All right, so Chuck Schumer had made noises a little bit earlier this week about the possibility of holding up a continuing resolution that would fund the government all the way until September.
00:00:39.000And it was sort of unclear why he was doing that.
00:00:42.000Strategically, he had no ground to stand on because, after all, if the United States Senate, the Democratic minority, decided that they were going to filibuster the continuing resolution, there would be a government shutdown.
00:00:52.000And the Republicans would correctly say they had the votes to prevent the government shutdown, and it was Democrats who had actually created the government shutdown, at which point Chuck Schumer and the Democrats would be blamed for everything.
00:01:02.000It was a gigantic unforced error by Chuck Schumer.
00:01:08.000Democrats are, of course, very upset at Chuck Schumer because they believe that it is their duty to obstruct literally everything the Republicans do.
00:01:15.000Now, to be fair to Schumer, it was a no-win situation.
00:01:17.000On the one hand, if the continuing resolution goes forward, then President Trump continues to unleash the executive branch on itself to use those to cut, to slash, to burn, to fire.
00:01:27.000He had the ability to do that because the continuing resolution basically just says the government is going to continue to run at the same funding levels it has previously run.
00:01:35.000And this continuing resolution did not, in fact, include specific designations of where funding ought to go within each department, which would sort of force Trump to spend the money in each department.
00:01:45.000Instead, it had to have a broad overview, spend X dollars.
00:01:49.000At HHS. Spend X dollars at Department of Defense, for example.
00:01:52.000And that allowed enormous discretion inside the executive branch for President Trump to continue to allow Doge to do its work.
00:01:58.000This is what Democrats were objecting to.
00:02:00.000However, if they'd gone into government shutdown, then President Trump would have had the ability to determine who was an essential worker and who was not an essential worker.
00:02:09.000And that would have meant more firings.
00:02:11.000So Chuck Schumer got himself stuck in this box canyon.
00:02:15.000His radical left-wing base was very upset with him.
00:02:18.000For not standing up to President Trump by filibustering the continuing resolution.
00:02:22.000Here is Jasmine Crockett, who's kind of the new AOC. AOC's lost some steam, and now she's been replaced in the public mind of the crazed left as sort of the hot new thing.
00:02:32.000There's the hotter newer thing in Jasmine Crockett, the congresswoman from Texas.
00:03:11.000If you actually shut down the government, then he gets to designate people as essential workers and then furlough everybody else.
00:03:17.000So again, Democrats got themselves stuck here, and this was basically a really, really amazing play by Speaker Johnson.
00:03:23.000Speaker Johnson was somehow able to cobble together the entire Republican majority.
00:03:27.000And there's been a lot of talk about Speaker Johnson, the unworkable Republican majority, because it's so small.
00:03:31.000In some ways, he's actually benefited by that, because any single vote could be the vote that sinks a Trump agenda item, and no one wants to be the House vote except for Thomas Massey to sink a Trump...
00:03:40.000Speaking of which, we'll be having Speaker Johnson on in just a few minutes here on the show to discuss what's going on.
00:03:46.000For Democrats, according to the Wall Street Journal, a key issue in the continuing resolution was the GOP's full year continuing resolution omits the report that details where the executive branch should spend money program by program, as I mentioned.
00:03:57.000Such a report would give Democrats their best chance of defending the existence of shuttered operations in the courts.
00:04:03.000This week alone, the Education Department announced it was cutting about half its staff.
00:04:06.000The Veteran Affairs Department outlined plans to cut about $70,000 from its workforce.
00:04:10.000Now, the continuing resolution would extend funding for fiscal 2025 at prior year's levels.
00:04:15.000There would be some cuts, cutting to non-defense spending by $13 billion, increasing military spending by $6 billion.
00:04:21.000It would also unravel some portions of Joe Biden's Ridiculous Inflation Reduction Act.
00:04:26.000But overall, it really doesn't change the workings of the government all that much.
00:04:29.000It just allows Trump to keep doing what he's been doing.
00:04:32.000This, of course, is why so many wild left-wing Democrats are upset.
00:04:35.000Pramila Jayapal, who's the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, I'm very proud that House Democrats stayed united in voting against this Republican funding bill.
00:04:50.000Please don't call it a continuing resolution.
00:04:52.000It's not, because a continuing resolution keeps the levels of funding the same.
00:05:23.000Either proceed with the bill before us or risk Donald Trump throwing America into the chaos of a shutdown.
00:05:33.000This, in my view, is no choice at all.
00:05:39.000I believe it is my job to make the best choice for the country to minimize the harms to the American people.
00:05:48.000Therefore, I will vote to keep the government open and not shut it down.
00:05:54.000He went on to explain why with MSNBC's Chris Hayes. .
00:05:58.000To have the conflict on the best ground we have, summed up in a sentence, that they're making the middle class pay for tax cuts for billionaires, it's much, much better not to be in the middle of a shutdown, which should divert people from the number one issue we have against these bastards, sorry, these people, which is not only all these cuts, but they're ruining democracy.
00:06:59.000Jake Sherman over at Punchbowl News, which is maybe the best insider newsletter in Washington, D.C., he says, What a mess this has become for Democrats.
00:07:05.000A government funding fight that began with Democrats demanding restrictions on Trump, Elon Musk, and Doge has ended with Democrats folding and now sniping bitterly at each other.
00:07:12.000House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his leadership team distanced themselves from Schumer's decision but didn't name him in a statement on Thursday night.
00:07:19.000Other House Democrats took direct aim at Schumer, including Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, even Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee and Schumer ally, thinks it is a big mistake.
00:07:49.000As Sherman points out, Democrats never managed to put Speaker Johnson or Senate Majority Leader John Thune or Trump in a tough spot.
00:07:55.000There are plenty of policies House Democrats could have asked for in the CR, more money for certain programs, for instance, that could have placed Republicans in a bind, but they never actually did any of that.
00:08:03.000Meanwhile, Senate Democrats tried to have it both ways.
00:08:05.000They warned each other in private and in public about forcing a government shutdown, but then they tried to force a government shutdown.
00:08:12.000So this set the Democratic base up for disappointment for seemingly no reason.
00:08:16.000And they violated the first rule of politics, never interrupt your opponent while he's making a mistake.
00:08:22.000And right now, the mistake the Democrats should be focusing in on is the tariff war, because that tariff war is driving the Dow Jones Industrial Average down.
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00:11:01.000As I mentioned before, Speaker Johnson has done a masterful job of keeping together an incredibly narrow House majority.
00:11:08.000Speaker Johnson, thank you so much for the time.
00:11:10.000Let's start with the continuing resolution.
00:11:12.000So Democrats in the Senate were thinking about filibustering the continuing resolution.
00:11:16.000This is one of the great own goals that I've seen in recent history because obviously if they'd filibustered the continuing resolution, the government shutdown would have been totally on them.
00:11:24.000Credit really goes to you and the Republican majority in the House, a very slim majority.
00:11:28.000Somehow you keep cobbling together wins.
00:12:23.000And then when we get to the next FY26, the next fiscal year budget, which we're about to begin immediately after FY25 is done, then it gets real.
00:12:33.000Because then the doge cuts are included, the new revenue streams that the president and the administration are bringing about become a part of that.
00:12:39.000And we're going to be in a totally different situation.
00:12:43.000And I certainly hope the Senate does the right thing here.
00:12:45.000Speaker Johnson, one of the things that you mentioned there is sort of the open ocean that you need in order to get things done.
00:12:50.000The reality is the thing that everybody is waiting for is the one big, beautiful bill.
00:12:54.000So how are the negotiations on that going?
00:12:56.000Obviously, this wraps up a bunch of different topics into one gigantic bill.
00:13:00.000And there's been some controversy between the House and the Senate over what that looks like.
00:13:03.000The Senate had originally suggested they wanted two different bills, one that would be tax-focused, one that would be sort of immigration and defense-focused.
00:13:46.000And I want to point out, the House began this process a year ago.
00:13:49.000It was last March when I brought in all the committee chairs, deputized them to start thinking about reconciliation, put their priorities together.
00:14:17.000Because we have to allow the American people to see the results of all this good policy before the midterm elections and in time to give them relief that they desperately need.
00:14:26.000So one of the big questions that's emerging with regard to the tax bill, Speaker Johnson, is the question of baseline budgeting.
00:14:31.000So typically, the Congressional Budget Office has a 10-year budget estimated on current law because the Trump tax cuts would expire over the course of the next couple of years.
00:14:40.000The idea from some is that somehow we should treat a tax cut continuation as though that's a change in the law and then it wouldn't be deficit neutral.
00:14:47.000Maybe you can explain what's going on.
00:14:48.000Yeah, I mean, so this is the Senate parliamentarian ultimately that makes a decision on this.
00:14:53.000The way it works, all this is kind of a legal fiction, Ben, really, but if the chairs of the two chambers in the budget committees agree that this is permanent policy, that we use current policy baseline, then it makes the tax cuts that we're going to extend permanent and extends it beyond 10 years.
00:15:13.000It's what President Trump wants as a priority, and it's what I think people really need and deserve.
00:15:19.000Because if you're a small business owner, for example, it's very helpful to have certainty, to know that you have, going forward into the future, certainty about what your federal tax rate is going to be.
00:15:28.000That it wouldn't fluctuate in between elections and all of that.
00:16:10.000All these things that we think can find maybe a trillion dollars in savings for the taxpayer.
00:16:15.000That's going to be a great thing, and it's all going to be wrapped into this big process.
00:16:18.000So obviously all this is really important because as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was saying yesterday and has been saying, the goal here is to provide a predictable, economically friendly future for business and investors.
00:16:27.000This, of course, brings up the turmoil in the markets.
00:16:29.000There's been a lot of turmoil in the markets over the course of the last three and a half weeks or so.
00:16:33.000A lot of talk about tariffs, reciprocal tariffs and all the rest of this.
00:16:36.000My great hope has been for the Trump administration that when President Trump says reciprocal, he means reciprocal, meaning that the goal is to get other countries to lower their tariffs so we can also lower our tariffs and then we sail off into the future together.
00:16:47.000Is that the impression that you're getting from the administration at this point?
00:16:50.000You know, and I talk to the president about this daily.
00:16:53.000I do think that's the ultimate endgame here, is that, you know, we have huge disparities, really since World War II, since we became the last great superpower.
00:17:02.000We had the responsibility of the free world placed upon our shoulders, and that's fine.
00:17:05.000America has an exceptional place and a lot of responsibility, but other countries deemed our power.
00:17:11.000To be an excuse for them to have trade disparity with us.
00:17:13.000So we've got huge imbalances with lots of countries, even close allies.
00:17:17.000President Trump is coming in and using common sense.
00:17:20.000He's saying to these countries, this isn't...
00:17:23.000Post-World War II, it's far beyond that now.
00:18:00.000Speaking of the economy, now again, if you're a Democrat right now, if you're smart, and again, I don't mean to give advice to people who I hope continue to lose from here until the end of time, but if you are smart and you're a Democrat, the thing that you are focusing in on is not the continuing resolution.
00:18:15.000By and large, it's actually doing pretty popular things.
00:18:18.000Most Americans don't like waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:18:20.000Whatever they think of Elon Musk and whatever the media's take on Musk is irrelevant.
00:18:24.000The real question is whether Americans like somebody going through the books and firing people who are useless on the federal government payroll.
00:18:31.000They're focusing in on the wrong thing.
00:18:32.000The obvious thing they should be focusing in on is the tariff controversies that are being driven by President Trump because they have a pretty clear Narrative win when it comes to the idea that this is creating havoc in the markets.
00:18:48.000The S&P 500 closed in correction territory, down more than 10% from its record high in February, according to CNN. The Dow ended the day down 537 points, 1.3%.
00:19:03.000The sell-off extended a route in U.S. markets that has been driven by the uncertainty around Trump's tariffs.
00:19:08.000And by the way, you can see this happening in real time.
00:19:10.000When President Trump does a presser, you can see the actual stock market reaction to his presser based on his answers.
00:19:17.000You'll be watching him on the main screen talking about tariffing the EU, and you will see the Dow Jones Industrial Average dip from green into red as he talks, because the markets react very quickly to what President Trump is saying.
00:19:28.000And as I've said before, even the sort of flip-flop appearance of chaos with regard to these tariffs is bad for markets.
00:19:47.000Here he was, making the case for what the administration really is focusing on, or at least should be focusing on.
00:19:53.000As I told the Business Roundtable yesterday, as I tell your viewers, what we're trying to do is create economic certainty.
00:19:59.000We're going to do it with the tax plan.
00:20:01.000We're going to do it with deregulation.
00:20:03.000And I also said to the Business Roundtable, I think it was 135 CEOs yesterday, if you came out with a plan similar to what Doge wants to do with the federal government, all your stocks would go up 15 or 20 percent.
00:20:17.000It would be considered a miraculous restructuring, cost savings, and put you on a sustainable course.
00:20:25.000And that, of course, is exactly, that's the stuff that Trump really needs to focus in on.
00:20:30.000Unfortunately, the stock market has now dropped, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped from a high on February 19th, which again is less than a month ago, of 44,627, all the way down to yesterday's close at 40,813.
00:20:47.000Okay, which means that the stock market has now dropped something like 3,700 points, almost more than 8% over the course of the last month.
00:20:56.000So that should be a winning case for Democrats, right?
00:20:58.000This is what they should be focusing in on.
00:20:59.000James Carville has been making this case.
00:21:01.000Again, I think James Carville is a schmuck, but James Carville is not stupid.
00:21:05.000And when he says, wait around for your opponent to make the mistake, that, of course, is good political advice.
00:21:16.000The way that it's going to succeed is focusing in on doge, on deregulation, on tax cuts, on doing the things that create a predictable investment environment.
00:21:24.000It is not helped by President Trump continuing to bang on the Canadians.
00:21:28.000Smacking around the Canadians, again, it might be fun and games.
00:21:31.000It might be enjoyable to rip on the people up north who keep putting us in words that don't need them.
00:21:37.000I just don't understand what the actual economic...
00:22:47.000If you want other countries to sympathize with the Trump agenda and everything from free market economics to foreign policy, you would like for those countries to be friendlier with the United States than you don't want to drive them into the arms of political opponents.
00:23:01.000But here's President Trump yesterday ripping on Canada again, suggesting they need to become the 50s.
00:23:48.000Again, hilarious, but not as hilarious when the Canadians, in response to all of this are like, listen, we're a little bit freaked out and so we're going to increase our tariffs.
00:23:58.000And then we get into a tariff war with the EU. And all the rest.
00:24:00.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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00:26:12.000And again, all of this is the precursor to what is supposed to happen on April 2nd.
00:26:15.000This is one of the reasons the markets are freaking out right now.
00:26:18.000Because President Trump said in his State of the Union address, and I want to actually quote it here, quote, This system is not fair to the United States and never was.
00:28:01.000And this is why markets are saying, um, it's March 14th today.
00:28:05.000In a couple of weeks, if we get President Trump radically increasing tariffs, and he's already making noises about it now, well, what are the markets going to do in just a couple of weeks?
00:28:14.000This is how people who trade in the markets think.
00:28:17.000They take in the information, and then they just determine on as objective a level as they can whether this means that markets are going to go up or whether they're going to go down.
00:28:26.000Well, yesterday, Martha McCallum over at Fox News was pressing Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who's an advocate for a lot of these tariff measures, about the Canadian tariffs.
00:29:21.000If the idea is the tariffs are going to quote-unquote bring all the jobs back to America, first of all, jobs are not an amazing gauge of the economic health of a country.
00:29:28.000They are a decent gauge if the unemployment numbers are super high.
00:29:33.000It's a good shot the economy is doing really poorly.
00:29:34.000If the unemployment numbers are really fantastic, actually you can have countries where the unemployment numbers are really fantastic that are absolute bleepholes.
00:29:43.000North Korea has a 0% unemployment rate.
00:29:49.000What you actually want for economic growth is the living standard of the American people.
00:29:53.000Is it getting better or is it getting worse?
00:29:55.000And there's so much gamesmanship that is played, all these sort of bizarre games that are played with regard to numbers, everything from the GDP to inflation rates to living standards and all the rest of it.
00:30:06.000My preferred standard is the standard that is used by the economist Marion Toopey in his book Super Abundance.
00:30:12.000And that is, how many hours do I have to work to achieve a certain good?
00:30:18.000And that is beginning cheaper and cheaper and cheaper over time for virtually every vital good in human existence.
00:30:24.000The reality is that if you were to find the equivalent of electricity 200 years ago, it would be whale oil.
00:30:31.000How many hours did you have to work for some whale oil so you could read a book at night?
00:30:34.000And the answer was you had to work a significant number of hours in order to achieve the money necessary to buy the whale oil.
00:30:40.000Today, you can flip on the light and it costs you almost nothing.
00:30:43.000And that is true for an enormous number of goods, products, and services in the United States.
00:30:46.000For all the people who are nostalgic for the 1950s, I don't see a bunch of these people sending their kids to riveting school because they want them to work on an assembly line at Ford.
00:30:54.000They're all sending their kids to college so their kids can be techies.
00:30:58.000For all of the talk about how Americans are living so much worse than they were in 1980, that is not actively true.
00:32:14.000So what are we trying to achieve here?
00:32:16.000Well, Howard Lutnick said, again yesterday, the Commerce Secretary, that all these people, the Canadians, they need to say thank you to us.
00:32:43.000You imagine coming into this country, sitting in the Oval Office, having received $300 billion in aid from us, and military, and NATO, and all the rest, and the first words out of your mouth aren't, thank you.
00:33:13.000However, is that a way to make trade policy?
00:33:17.000Let's say the Canadians come tomorrow and they say thank you.
00:33:18.000Thank you for being the power on our southern border that protects us from enemies, foreign and domestic, and that helps drive our economy.
00:33:30.000Again, if the goal here is to lower the tariffs, I'm for it.
00:33:33.000If the goal here is just the idea that tariffs are going to make us somehow richer, again, no one is for that, including, by the way, Tesla.
00:33:40.000So Tesla sent out a letter to the administration yesterday.
00:33:45.000It sent out an unsigned letter to the administration warning that President Trump's trade war could make it a target for retaliatory tariffs against the United States and increase the cost of making vehicles in America.
00:33:55.000In an unsigned letter, this is the Financial Times reporting, addressed to U.S. Trade Representative Jamison Greer, Tesla said it supports fair trade, but warned that U.S. exporters were, quote, exposed to disproportionate impacts when other countries respond to U.S. trade actions.
00:34:08.000For example, past trade actions by the United States have resulted in immediate reactions by the targeted countries, including increased tariffs on EVs, electric vehicles, imported into those countries.
00:34:58.000Places like the EU. China's right there, and China is perfectly willing to ship its goods anywhere, cheaply, and make deals with Canada and the EU. And there's plenty of stuff that needs to get done.
00:35:09.000Again, as the Treasury Secretary, Scott Besson, suggested, what the administration should be focused on is deregulation, cuts to government, and tax cuts.
00:35:18.000Speaking of which, you can see the panic in the eyes of the public sector employee unions.
00:35:23.000One of the worst aspects of American politics is the fact that you have all of these unions that are in the public sector.
00:35:30.000And these unions are not negotiating against a profit-driven management, against a business-savvy management.
00:35:37.000Instead, they are negotiating against the taxpayer.
00:35:40.000And they are literally electing the people to negotiate on behalf of the taxpayer.
00:35:45.000So these public sector unions donate enormous amounts of money to Democrats, and then they negotiate with the Democrats for their own salary.
00:35:51.000All to be paid for by the national debt or by the taxpayers.
00:35:54.000Well, now Doge is coming in and cutting a lot of these folks.
00:36:31.000Well, I mean, the idea that the federal government is the same size it was in the 70s belies the fact that the federal budget in 1970 was approximately $195 billion.
00:36:44.000That was the total outlay of the federal government in 1970. $195 billion.
00:36:49.000Today, the annual outlay of the federal government is somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 to $7 trillion.
00:37:16.000Unfortunately, the Trump administration is facing down adversaries across the country in the form of district court judges.
00:37:22.000Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup described the mass firings that have been made by Doge as a, quote, sham strategy by the government's Central Human Resources Office to sidestep legal requirements for reducing the federal workforce.
00:37:33.000and this is one of the really terrible effects of these public sector unions they sign these long-term contracts in which people basically can't get fired which is ridiculous you should be an at-will employee of the federal government if you're working for the federal government this judge was a san francisco based appointee of president bill clinton's Shocker, shocker.
00:37:52.000He ordered the Defense, Treasury, Energy, Interior, Agriculture, and Veterans Affairs Departments to immediately offer all fired probationary employees their jobs back.
00:38:00.000The Office of Personal Management, according to the judge, had made an unlawful decision to terminate them.
00:38:06.000ALSEP said that the agencies have the authority to implement reductions in force, but they have to follow proper procedures, so they're claiming this is a procedural matter.
00:38:14.000We'll find out, because all this stuff's going to end up at the Supreme Court.
00:38:18.000By the way, so should the general principle that district court judges have the ability to issue nationwide injunctions on the basis of having jurisdiction over a small share of the United States.
00:38:29.000Well, meanwhile, the Trump administration has been cracking down on...
00:38:34.000Pro-terrorism protests at universities all over the country.
00:38:38.000And hilariously, now Colombia has decided that, you know, it might not be a great idea to have foreign exchange students who actually support terrorism.
00:38:45.000According to the Columbia University statement that was just put out yesterday, the Columbia University Judicial Board determined findings and issued sanctions to students ranging from multi-year suspensions, temporary degree revocations, and expulsions related to the occupation of Hamilton Hall last spring.
00:39:00.000A bunch of pro-Hamas protesters took over buildings on campus violently.
00:39:04.000With respect to other events taking place last spring, the UJB's determinations recognized previously imposed disciplinary action.
00:39:10.000The return of suspended students will be overseen by Columbia University's Life Office.
00:39:14.000So finally, they are actually enforcing their own rules.
00:39:16.000That is only because the administration threatened to remove their federal aid dollars.
00:39:21.000Until then, they were perfectly fine with their own university being taken over by the radicals because, of course, they largely agreed with the radicals.
00:39:28.000Meanwhile, along the same lines, the controversy continues over Mahmoud Khalil.
00:39:33.000He was a foreign exchange student who apparently attained a green card.
00:39:37.000He was brought to the United States apparently to learn how to agitate because that's pretty much all he did at Columbia University.
00:39:42.000He joined up with a group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
00:39:46.000This was the group that led the violent protests at Columbia taking over buildings.
00:39:50.000He was the chief negotiator on behalf of that group.
00:39:52.000That group put out many statements in solidarity with the violent actions of Hamas.
00:39:55.000And somehow the idea is that he can't be deported now because he has a green card.
00:40:00.000Again, we're not talking about an American citizen.
00:40:03.000And by the way, the real question here is not whether he should be deported.
00:40:06.000The question is why the hell he was here as a foreign exchange student in the first place.
00:40:09.000How did he end up with a student visa?
00:40:11.000Well, yesterday, pro-Hamas protesters took over Trump Tower in New York City.
00:40:16.000And so I hope that all these people who are illegally inside Trump Tower and trespassing, I hope that they, in fact, are prosecuted.
00:40:23.000And if they are here on a student visa, then they can go home as well.
00:40:58.000And these are the people that the Democrats have decided that they truly need to reach out to.
00:41:02.000And this is the single moral issue on which they are absolutely unified, is that terrorist supporters who get in here on a student visa should be allowed to get a green card and then should be allowed to stay permanently in the country.
00:41:13.000According to the Wall Street Journal, about 300 protesters entered the Manhattan skyscraper that houses the Trump Organization and the president's New York penthouse on Thursday and then swarmed the ground floor.
00:41:22.000The New York Police Department arrested 98 pro-Palestinian protesters.
00:42:25.000With federal student aid, for example, the percentage of people who were laid off in the federal student aid arena were about 30%, so that shouldn't kill federal student aid by any stretch of the imagination.
00:42:37.000The number of people who were fired in the Institute of Education Sciences, that's more like 78%.
00:42:46.000According to Frederick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, we're talking about huge layoffs, unprecedented layoffs.
00:42:55.000So, of course, Democrats are freaking out about this.
00:42:57.000Randy Weingarten, in particular, is freaking out.
00:43:54.000There is not going to be a ceasefire, an armistice, anything like that unless there are security guarantees to Ukraine preventing this from happening again in two years when Russia has rearmed.
00:44:04.000That is the only way Ukraine will sign on to anything, and frankly, it's the only reason that Ukraine should sign on to anything.
00:44:09.000And if Vladimir Putin continues to press forward militarily, it would not be in the interests of the United States or any of our allies for him to take Eve.
00:44:18.000If you actually want to get to an off-ramp that freezes the lines where they are, you have to maintain enough pressure to keep Vladimir Putin from strolling through Kiev and rolling tanks into western Ukraine.
00:44:28.000Well, Putin apparently feels like he's got control of these negotiations, which, honestly, the United States should take as an insult.
00:44:35.000Putin said on Thursday he did not support an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine.
00:44:38.000Calling for more discussion on a permanent end to the war as Moscow's army made rapid gains toward expelling Kiev's forces from the Kursk region.
00:44:44.000Again, the interruption in aid and intelligence that the United States was trying to use to leverage Ukraine back to the table has had some significant downside impact in the Kursk region.
00:44:57.000Because they then want to trade that territory for area in Crimea or the Donbass.
00:45:01.000Putin said any pause in fighting at this point would be in Ukraine's interest because Russia is gaining on the battlefield and a host of issues would need to be resolved before a ceasefire could be reached.
00:45:09.000Those were the first official responses from Moscow after Ukraine agreed this week to US back proposal for a pause in the war.
00:45:16.000Putin spoke as President Trump's Special Envoy Steve Witkoff was due in Moscow.
00:45:20.000Trump said that he planned to speak with Putin soon and was pressing to a speedy end to the conflict.
00:45:25.000Here was President Trump talking about this yesterday flanked by the NATO Secretary General Mark Rudy.
00:45:30.000So we're saying, look, this is what you can get, this is what you can't get.
00:45:34.000They discussed NATO and being in NATO, and everybody knows what the answer to that is.
00:45:38.000They've known that answer for 40 years, in all fairness.
00:45:42.000So a lot of the details of a final agreement have actually been discussed.
00:45:48.000Now we're going to see whether or not Russia's there, and if they're not, it'll be a very disappointing moment for the world.
00:45:55.000And it will be a disappointing moment for the world if Vladimir Putin continues to push forward.
00:45:59.000He said, who will give orders to stop fighting?
00:46:02.000Who will determine where and by whom they were violated?
00:46:05.000Well, I mean, if you guys crossed the border into Ukraine again, then you'd be the one violating the orders.
00:46:11.000President Zelensky of Ukraine called Putin's response highly predictable and manipulative words aimed at dragging out the process by setting unworkable preconditions.
00:46:18.000And, of course, Zelensky actually is right about that.
00:46:21.000He said, Putin is afraid to tell President Trump directly he wants to continue this war and keep killing Ukrainians.
00:46:56.000So, it'll be interesting to see what happens from here.
00:46:59.000Obviously, the ire of the Trump administration should turn to the intransigent party now, and the intransigent party is not Vladimir Zelensky, who has been properly chastened by the Trump administration.
00:47:09.000The obstinate party right now is pretty obviously Vladimir Putin, who feels as though he has his opposition on the run.
00:47:16.000Well, folks, a little bit earlier this week, I had a chance to sit down with my friend Seth Dillon from the Babylon Bee to talk all things comedy, humor, and politics.
00:47:54.000The change that has happened across the world may have happened because you guys got banned at Twitter for making a joke that boys are not girls.
00:48:19.000Getting really concerned about the fact that there was these bad ideas, wokeness in particular, which he called divisive, exclusionary, hateful, a civilizational threat.
00:48:28.000He was really concerned about the spread of these bad ideas and the inability of people to push back on them and respond to them because it was considered hate speech or misinformation or whatever.
00:48:38.000So when we got kicked off for telling a joke that we weren't supposed to tell, which those are the ones we should be telling, it alarmed him.
00:48:46.000It got him really concerned and worked up about it.
00:48:50.000Maybe it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
00:48:52.000Well, I mean, again, it is kind of funny to think that you guys are that first domino in the domino, maybe, that ends with President Trump destroying DEI in the Oval Office with a baseball bat and all the rest of it.
00:50:05.000We swing back in the direction of sanity and stop doing some of the really crazy things.
00:50:11.000Like the joke that we had told about that got us kicked out of Twitter was a joke about Admiral Rachel Levine having been named, you know, she was named she.
00:50:18.000He was named Woman of the Year by USA Today.
00:50:34.000It seems like something you'd see on South Park.
00:50:36.000And so in that environment, obviously it's a target-rich environment, but it's hard to satirize what already feels like parody.
00:50:42.000But as we swing back in the direction of sanity, I think that dies down a little bit.
00:50:46.000And you've got to look for other things to make fun of.
00:50:48.000And one of the other things that seems to have happened over the course of the last 10, 15 years is I actually think people have lost a lot of their sense of humor.
00:50:55.000It used to be that you could laugh at a joke, particularly about your own side.
00:50:59.000It was okay to laugh at jokes about your own side.
00:51:01.000Things that I would say on the show in 2015 that were kind of jokes about Republicans or President Trump or Ted Cruz or whomever was running, because that was a really funny primary.
00:51:09.000I mean, 2016 was a hysterical time in American life.
00:51:11.000If you don't remember all the way back to 2016, youngins, let me just tell you, that race, that primary race was hysterically funny.
00:51:18.000That was right when the beast started, too.
00:51:27.000And it was inherently funny that President Trump became President Trump.
00:51:31.000I just remember the night of the election literally bursting out laughing hysterically for like 90 seconds live on air when it was announced that he'd won because it was so outlandish.
00:51:39.000And yet now it's obvious why that happened.
00:51:42.000And in retrospect, you can kind of see the historic moment happening.
00:51:44.000But at the time, it was really, really humorous.
00:51:47.000But everybody, I think, also was willing to laugh at things.
00:51:49.000Do you feel like people are less willing to laugh at things on pretty much all sides of the aisle in a lot of ways?
00:51:54.000Yeah, I mean, it's kind of disconcerting to see it happening on the right, too.
00:51:58.000But it was becoming a major problem, you know, to the point where Seinfeld was talking about how he won't do college campuses anymore.
00:52:04.000You know, he had this kind of safe space.
00:52:14.000The ability of people to look at themselves in a critical way, especially with mockery, where they're able to actually have that introspection where they say, some of the things that I do are ridiculous too, and I should be willing to laugh at that.
00:52:25.000There's a maturity in that, and we kind of stunted our own growth, I think, as a culture by suppressing that and saying, no, your feelings should never be hurt by anything, including a joke, and humor is actually harmful.
00:53:18.000One of the things I think that you guys have done an incredibly great job at is somehow navigating the line of humor where you don't just become over-the-top edgelords.
00:53:26.000One of the things that's happened in meme world, and we all now live in meme world because the lord of all memes is the head of Twitter.
00:54:34.000And there is such a thing as sort of a political vulgarity where you say something that is so kind of gross that people laugh because it's gross and violative and taboo.
00:54:53.000Well, we've never aimed for the shock humor.
00:54:55.000We've never tried to do comedy that just puts people down to make them feel bad about themselves or goes for that shock value.
00:55:02.000What we're trying to do is really just communicate truth to a post-truth culture.
00:55:07.000And use humor as an effective way to do that.
00:55:10.000And so there are, I mean, there's a value system at play there where what we're trying to do is not just entertain and make people laugh, but make them think about whether or not these bad ideas should be taken seriously.
00:55:21.000And so those are more likely to be the things that we would challenge with our comedy rather than the kind of behavior that we would engage in.
00:55:27.000So when you look at sort of the political spectrum, a lot of the issues that were great sources of humor seem to be on their way out.
00:55:33.000The right is in the ascendancy, particularly culturally.
00:55:35.000And so a lot of the stuff that has been mined for humor by you guys, by us, we made Lady Ballers, which is an entire movie just about the idea of transgender people in sports, men playing women in sports, and all of that.
00:57:41.000I would keep an eye on the Babylon Bee headlines, and maybe those will come true in a few months because whatever we're talking about is probably going to be what they're pursuing.
00:57:50.000I think they're going to move into sort of the realm of economic insanity because they've already played out the cultural insanity.
00:57:56.000And they'll continue to do that to a certain extent.
00:57:59.000And again, I think they've kind of hit the edge cases already.
00:58:03.000I mean, when you're sitting on your hands because you can't applaud a 13-year-old cancer survivor at the State of the Union address, I'm not sure how much further you can go to hate President Trump.
00:58:12.000He's not going to be president in four years.
00:58:14.000So they're going to have to move on to whatever is the next thing.
00:58:17.000And it seems to me that the Democratic Party, if they are going to have any shot at electoral success in the future, is going to have to move away from a lot of these cultural kind of wokeness-based issues and into the sort of demagoguery of success.
00:58:28.000And you see that in a lot of the attacks on Elon, right?
00:58:31.000A lot of what they're doing right now is Elon is bad, Elon is evil, Elon is corrupt.
00:58:36.000That's my favorite one, is when they say that Elon is corrupt.
00:59:21.000So that was kind of our first foray into, you know, I guess you could kind of style that or call that a mockumentary, you know, where we're taking an idea and treating it like super seriously when it shouldn't have been taken as seriously as it was and mocking the actors involved in that.
00:59:36.000That was a fun foot in the door for us to do a larger project, a long-form project beyond just a short comedy sketch for YouTube.
00:59:44.000So we're going to dabble in more of that, try some of these other ideas that we have floating around and see if we can make some more films like that because the audience loved it.
00:59:52.000We generated a lot of subscribers with that, got a lot of really good feedback.
00:59:56.000There's a lot we learned from it that we can do differently and better the next time.
00:59:59.000And so we'll iterate on that some, but I think for the beat...
01:00:04.000The primary thing for us, what we do really well is news satire.
01:00:07.000We mimic a news publication and publish satirical headlines.
01:00:26.000Something like that I think could be really successful under the Bees brand.
01:00:31.000We have some things in the works along those lines that we're looking at, too, that we're really excited about.
01:00:35.000So where that lives and when that lands is anyone's guess.
01:00:40.000But we're excited about, you know, kind of continuing to do what we've done well that the audience really enjoys and bringing that out to a broader audience in new forms.
01:00:49.000Now, Seth Dillon, it's always great to see the Babylon Beat.