The Ben Shapiro Show - FEAR AND LOATHING: Reds Take New York

00:00:00.000 Zorn Mamdani is the new mayor-elect of New York City, and he is taking off the mask.

00:00:04.000 He's doing all the aggressive things.

00:00:06.000 How should Republicans fight back?

00:00:07.000 What are the dangers for Republicans?

00:00:09.000 Plus, President Trump's tariffs on the board at the Supreme Court.

00:00:12.000 What happens over there?

00:00:13.000 We'll get to all of it first.

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00:00:51.000 Well, folks, Zorn Mamdani campaigned as a smarmy, smiling, empathetic gentleman who only cared about affordability and just wanted to help you.

00:01:01.000 And he got a bunch of fun videos around bodegas and eating rice with his hands and speaking in various languages.

00:01:06.000 And it was all happy-dappy-doo.

00:01:08.000 And now here comes the hammer because Zorn Mamdani has made very clear that he wants to actually do all the things he said he was going to do.

00:01:16.000 And so New Yorkers are about to find out the ticket that they just bought and they're about to take the ride.

00:01:21.000 According to the New York Times, a newly empowered Zorn Mamdani on Wednesday vowed to use his convincing victory in the New York City's mayor race as a mandate to push an ambitious progressive agenda past potential obstacles from billionaire antagonists to albany bureaucracy.

00:01:34.000 In a shift from the mollifying tone he had used for months, Mr. Mamdani made clear that while he would govern for all New Yorkers, he was determined to deliver for those who had been agitating for structural change.

00:01:43.000 One of my least favorite phrases in all of politics, I'm here to govern for everyone.

00:01:46.000 Okay, that's what the government does. 0.66

00:01:48.000 The government literally makes legislation that affects everyone, but clearly you are not.

00:01:53.000 You are here to govern for the people and on behalf of the people who elected you, namely far, far left progressives and third worldists.

00:02:02.000 I mean, that is what Zorhan Mamdani is here to do.

00:02:06.000 He's here to govern on behalf of socialism and pro-jihadism and chew bubblegum.

00:02:11.000 And he's all out of bubblegum.

00:02:14.000 He said in a phone interview, quote, I'm also looking to be clear about the mandate that we won over the course of this election.

00:02:18.000 It is a mandate to deliver on the agenda that he ran on.

00:02:22.000 He had said that he was going to try to find creative ways to pay for his signature policies without radically increasing taxes.

00:02:28.000 And then he immediately reversed himself.

00:02:31.000 And then he started talking about taxing the rich.

00:02:34.000 Quote, my supporters and our movement are hungry for a politics of consistency, a politics that actually focuses on the needs of working people.

00:02:40.000 I think our tax system is an example of the many ways in which working people have been betrayed.

00:02:44.000 Now, as we talked about on the program yesterday, actually, the amount of tax revenue derived from the top of the top of the top of the income tax bracket in New York City is far out of proportion to their percentage of the population.

00:02:59.000 I mean, it is not even close.

00:03:00.000 The top 0.1% of income earners in New York pay 25% of all the tax revenue in New York City.

00:03:06.000 And he's saying that somehow this is targeting working people, which is an astonishing claim. 0.73

00:03:10.000 I mean, just on a statistical level, it's an astonishing claim.

00:03:15.000 The New York Times is trying to make excuses for all of this.

00:03:18.000 His confidence is understandable.

00:03:19.000 He's the first New York City mayoral candidate since John Lindsey to win over 1 million votes.

00:03:23.000 Now, let's be clear.

00:03:24.000 The reason he won over 1 million votes is not because he is so much more popular than all the other candidates of the last 30 years, 40 years, who have not won that number of votes.

00:03:35.000 The reason he won over 1 million votes is because there was a competitive candidate coming up behind him who was also a Democrat.

00:03:40.000 And so in order to defeat Andrew Cuomo, he had to win more than 850,000 votes.

00:03:45.000 That's the reality, but it's okay.

00:03:47.000 You know, the good news is that Democrats, again, they're going to have to own this stuff.

00:03:51.000 Now, there are no economics behind what he's attempting to do.

00:03:54.000 In order for him to actually pay for all of this, he needs the governor of New York to go along with massive tax increases.

00:04:02.000 As the Wall Street Journal points out, in order for him to get his proposals paid for, he would need to raise the highest state corporate tax rate from 7.25% to 11.5%.

00:04:15.000 Okay, that is a massive increase, a huge increase in the state corporate tax rate.

00:04:21.000 And it applies to businesses that have a physical presence in New York.

00:04:24.000 and to businesses that derive a certain amount of sales from the state.

00:04:28.000 Now, if you think the businesses won't relocate over that sort of stuff, they absolutely will.

00:04:33.000 They absolutely will.

00:04:34.000 And that requires approval from state lawmakers and Kathy Hochul.

00:04:38.000 And so if they acquiesce, it could drag down the Democratic Party.

00:04:42.000 Kathy Hochl very narrowly beat Lee Zeldin in the last New York gubernatorial election. 0.70

00:04:46.000 There's certainly no guarantee that she would defeat Elise Stefanik, who's already running dead even with her in the New York gubernatorial race. 1.00

00:04:54.000 He also wants a millionaire's tax, a two percentage point rate hike or 51% increase on the personal income tax paid by New York City's highest earners or more or those making more than a million dollars a year.

00:05:05.000 The tax rate in New York City alone on the highest income New Yorkers would move from 3.88% to 5.88%.

00:05:11.000 And that's on top of the state tax, on top of the federal tax.

00:05:15.000 And if you're a rich person, guess what?

00:05:17.000 You're mobile and you can leave.

00:05:19.000 This is how cities die, truly.

00:05:21.000 They destroy their tax base.

00:05:23.000 They decide they want to make payoffs to a particular set of citizens at the expense of the taxpaying public.

00:05:28.000 And the people who pay the taxes decide, you know what?

00:05:30.000 I'm not in.

00:05:31.000 I'm gone.

00:05:32.000 And then they leave.

00:05:33.000 And then the city, in need of more tax revenue, increases the taxes on the next richest group of people.

00:05:38.000 And then those people leave.

00:05:39.000 And this is how you destroy the tax base of a major metropolitan area.

00:05:43.000 Coming up, we'll get into Zorhan Mamdani.

00:05:45.000 How much money is he going to spend?

00:05:46.000 Where's he going to get that money?

00:05:48.000 What the hell is he talking about?

00:05:49.000 We'll get into all of that momentarily first.

00:05:51.000 Are you aware of House Bill, Section 702, that extends the right of government agencies to legally monitor American citizens and some of their internet activity without requiring a warrant?

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00:07:10.000 Alrighty, let's also talk about something that really, really matters, honoring American veterans on Veterans Day.

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00:08:37.000 The amount of money that he wants to spend is astonishing.

00:08:41.000 He wants universal childcare in New York City that would cover children from six weeks old through five years old.

00:08:49.000 Meanwhile, he also wants to spend $7 billion a year on new rent stabilized units, $70 billion in municipal debt for a decade, and he wants to freeze the rent.

00:09:01.000 Okay, now, freezing the rent, I'm just telling you, will result in no new units being built in the city.

00:09:07.000 I'm still in New York.

00:09:10.000 No one, no developer is going to build new units in the city if the rent is frozen.

00:09:14.000 There's no way to do it because why would you?

00:09:17.000 Meanwhile, he wants to spend almost a billion dollars a year on fast and free buses, which, by the way, will just become homeless shelters.

00:09:25.000 Because if it is free to ride the bus, then there is no way to kick you off the bus if you have overstayed your fare.

00:09:31.000 So people will just live on the bus.

00:09:34.000 All of this, as New York City's finest NYPD are freaking out.

00:09:39.000 I know people in the NYPD.

00:09:42.000 Everyone who can retire is going to retire.

00:09:45.000 Everybody who can find another job will find another job.

00:09:50.000 Already, the Jewish FDNY commissioner in New York handed in his resignation, Robert Tucker, one day after Mamdani's election.

00:10:00.000 He informed Mayor Eric Adams, who would step down from the roles he had held for 12 months on December 19th.

00:10:07.000 He's going to go back to running a private security firm.

00:10:11.000 Not a shock.

00:10:13.000 Many, many more people will follow because Zora Mamdani's team is extraordinarily radical, really, really radical.

00:10:19.000 The New York Post has a breakdown on the people who will be in Mamdani's year.

00:10:22.000 Now, first of all, Mamdani himself is radical.

00:10:25.000 Pretending that Mamdani is not radical is totally insane.

00:10:28.000 The man got into politics as a member of Students for Justice in Palestine, a radical anti-Israel and pro-terrorism group.

00:10:35.000 Zorhan Mamdani has repeatedly spoken up on behalf of terrorists.

00:10:38.000 It's astonishing when I hear Democrats try to claim that he's not pro-jihadist.

00:10:42.000 He literally cut a wrap on behalf of people who are in jail for funding jihad.

00:10:47.000 The Holy Land Five.

00:10:49.000 He literally posed next to an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing who has talked up the value of jihad during this campaign.

00:10:58.000 He literally went on national television and said he had no opinion on whether Hamas, a terrorist group, should disarm.

00:11:04.000 Spoiler Spoiler alert, if you're anti-jihad, typically you think all terrorist groups should disarm.

00:11:09.000 Not just Hamas.

00:11:10.000 Boko Haram should disarm.

00:11:12.000 Like, sure, why not?

00:11:13.000 They're terrorist groups.

00:11:14.000 But he had no opinions whatsoever because he actually is not in favor of Hamas, disarming.

00:11:19.000 So he is perfectly radical on all these issues, economic to foreign policy related.

00:11:24.000 But he's also surrounded by people who are extraordinarily radical.

00:11:27.000 So Linda Sarsour, a mentor and friend to Mamdani, is going to be very close to him.

00:11:35.000 She, of course, said back in 2019 when she was part of the women's march that Jewish marchers could not take part because, quote, one cannot be a feminist and a Zionist at the same time, which is kind of an astonishing thing, considering that I'm not sure how one could be a radical Islamist and a feminist at the same time.

00:11:52.000 Radical Islam does not seem to treat women particularly well or equally.

00:11:58.000 The Council on American Islamic Relations and CARE Action are going to be in his ear.

00:12:04.000 That group has long-standing and deep ties to terrorist organizations, according to Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton.

00:12:10.000 They too were unindicted co-conspirators in a 2007 terrorist funding case linking CARE to Hamas.

00:12:17.000 Political action committees connected to CARE donated more than $140,000 to Zorhan Mamdani's PAC.

00:12:25.000 They helped mobilize the Muslim vote in New York City, which, of course, got out in big numbers for Zorhan Mamdani.

00:12:30.000 Democratic Socialist of America, of which he is a charter member, is backing him, of course.

00:12:36.000 The United Federation of Teachers, which destroys public education, is backing him.

00:12:41.000 Those are the people who are surrounding him.

00:12:45.000 And then they're the people who are part of his transition team.

00:12:49.000 His transition team, just as shockingly radical as you would imagine.

00:12:56.000 Apparently, he has named a five-woman transition team, stocked with former officials from City Hall, but also he has included Lena Khan, the former FTC chair, a person who is radically, radically anti-business.

00:13:10.000 Melanie Hartzog, a former deputy mayor for health and human services under Bill de Blasio.

00:13:17.000 Alana Leopold, another Bill de Blasio holdover.

00:13:20.000 Grace Benilla, the head of the United Way of New York City and an alumna of Bloomberg, who might be the only sane person.

00:13:26.000 And Maria Torres Springer, the deputy mayor to the current mayor, Eric Adams.

00:13:31.000 He says he's going to keep Jessica Tish on as the head of the NYPD.

00:13:35.000 Nah, she's going to leave. 1.00

00:13:37.000 She's going to leave.

00:13:37.000 You watch.

00:13:38.000 She will quit. 0.98

00:13:38.000 Sometime in the next six months, she'll quit. 0.98

00:13:41.000 And by the way, she still doesn't have a former job offer, a formal job offer, according to the New York Post.

00:13:48.000 The Democratic candidate told Tish they would speak about his plan to keep her as commissioner.

00:13:54.000 But, you know, we'll have to see how all of that plays out.

00:13:58.000 Now, meanwhile, it is worth noting: Olivia Reingold has an excellent piece over at the Free Press talking about the plan that the DSA has for cities beyond New York.

00:14:07.000 And those are very, very shockingly radical plans.

00:14:12.000 According to the Free Press, they have now reviewed thousands of pages of internal Democratic Socialists of America documents, which show that the organization's leaders view Mamdani as a tool in their agenda to abolish prisons and borders and ultimately end what they call the barbaric order of capitalism.

00:14:26.000 The DSA was founded in 1982.

00:14:28.000 It's a political body dedicated to the doctrine of democratic socialism, which is a variety of socialism that simply specifies how it would like revolution to occur peacefully through subversion of democracy.

00:14:39.000 Now, again, one of the fun things about the left is that they're constantly screwing around with the definitions of terms.

00:14:46.000 Socialism, typically speaking, is the government control of the market-based order, nationalization of resources, getting rid of the pricing system, all the rest.

00:14:56.000 Now, you can have touches of socialism in a capitalist economy.

00:15:00.000 This is called a mixed system.

00:15:01.000 The United States obviously has a mixed system.

00:15:04.000 So, by the way, does Denmark?

00:15:05.000 So, does Norway.

00:15:06.000 Fully socialist countries would become countries like Cuba, North Korea.

00:15:10.000 China is sort of an economically fascist system that has maintained aspects of nationalization, but then allowed certain aspects of the private market to operate so they can actually have a workable pricing system.

00:15:24.000 When people say democratic socialism, sometimes they mean Norway, and sometimes they mean like the DSA, which is to say, like communism achieved through democratic means.

00:15:35.000 The DSA held its annual convention in August with the theme Rebirth and Beyond, reflecting on a decade of DSA's growth and preparing for a decade of party building.

00:15:42.000 There, according to Olivia Ryingold at the Free Press, delegates voted to adopt a resolution titled Principles for Party Building, which stated that the purpose of the DSA is to, quote, unite workers to win the battle for democracy and bring about socialism, not to seek a governing coalition with a perceived lesser evil under the current undemocratic political system.

00:16:00.000 A socialist party in the United States must be part of a global political movement of the working class.

00:16:05.000 So, I mean, these are just communists.

00:16:06.000 That's all.

00:16:09.000 And they have nothing to do with the traditional Democratic Party.

00:16:14.000 And yet, they have more and more play, more and more play.

00:16:22.000 They have made it a full-time job to infiltrate school boards and minorities all over the country. 0.94

00:16:29.000 And they are not being stopped.

00:16:33.000 They are not.

00:16:34.000 There's going to be a whole new wave of DSA-inspired candidates all across America.

00:16:41.000 There's one, Rura Rahman, running for Georgia governor in 2026.

00:16:46.000 She, of course, has talked about how Israel is a fascist government, which is sort of table stakes for the DSA.

00:16:55.000 She canvassed for Mamdani.

00:16:59.000 She is mainly driven, again, by the same concerns that drove Zorhan Mamdani, this sort of radical third worldism that is deeply connected, of course, to anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment.

00:17:09.000 Her bid is a long shot in that Democratic primary, but she is running.

00:17:12.000 Graham Plattner is very likely to win the Senate nomination in Maine in 2026.

00:17:18.000 He, too, is a radical in the mold of Zorhan Mamdani.

00:17:23.000 He's taking some hits because he had a giant Nazi tattoo on his chest, which he then denied was a Nazi tattoo and then covered it up with an even uglier tattoo, actually.

00:17:31.000 But he is, of course, a Democratic socialist.

00:17:35.000 There's a woman named Kat Ubogazala.

00:17:38.000 She's a candidate for Illinois' 9th congressional district in 2026.

00:17:42.000 She has a lot of followers on TikTok.

00:17:44.000 She, like Mamdani, is very socially media savvy.

00:17:47.000 She was indicted by a federal grand jury recently for allegedly blocking vehicles outside an ICE facility.

00:17:53.000 Apparently, she and other protesters surrounded a federal officer's vehicle, banged on its hood and windows, etched pig on the side, and impeded movement. 0.99

00:18:02.000 Although she's not formally DSA, her platform basically mirrors DSA.

00:18:08.000 There's Shama Sawant, who I actually have met before because she was running for mayor at one point in Seattle.

00:18:14.000 Now she's running for Washington's 9th congressional district in 2026. 1.00

00:18:18.000 She's running as an independent socialist.

00:18:22.000 I mean, she's openly a socialist, openly a Marxist.

00:18:26.000 Abdul El-Syed running for U.S. Senate in Michigan in 2026.

00:18:31.000 He, again, is very much in the mold of Zarin Mamdani. 0.99

00:18:35.000 Omar Fatah, who ran for Minneapolis mayor, he came in second place in the first round of votes.

00:18:43.000 And since no candidate originally received a majority, there will now be a second round of votes.

00:18:50.000 These candidates are there.

00:18:53.000 They are very much to the left.

00:18:55.000 And the Democratic Party seems to have very little systemic immunity to them, like at all.

00:19:00.000 All it's going to cost you if they win is all your money and all your freedom.

00:19:05.000 This is basically the platform.

00:19:07.000 Zara Mamdani, well, one of the fun things about the socialists when they campaign is they campaign on happy dappy-doo, as I say.

00:19:12.000 And then the mask comes off and they say, give me your money.

00:19:14.000 So yesterday, Zor Mamdani did that.

00:19:16.000 Alrighty, coming up, Zora Mamdani, he is in fact implementing socialism because he's doing the first thing socialists do.

00:19:22.000 He's trying to take money from people.

00:19:24.000 We'll get to that in a moment.

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00:21:57.000 Exclusions apply.

00:21:59.000 Yesterday, he said he needed money from two separate sources.

00:22:01.000 First, working people needed to donate money to his transition team because, you know, sure, you're poor, but he needs your money.

00:22:08.000 And second, he needs money from the rich people to pay for all of his plans to, you know, destroy the rich people.

00:22:15.000 You know, there were a few months ago where I told supporters across the city to stop donating.

00:22:21.000 And today, I am asking them to start once again.

00:22:24.000 And I am asking them to do so because of the fact that a transition that can meet the moment of preparing for January 1st is one that will require staff.

00:22:34.000 It will require research.

00:22:35.000 It will require infrastructure.

00:22:36.000 And those are things that we will have to provide.

00:22:39.000 And I'm excited for the fact that it will be funded by the very people who brought us to this point, the working people who have been left behind by the politics of the city.

00:22:48.000 I mean, that is very exciting.

00:22:49.000 I'm sure they are very, very happy to fund Zor and Mamzani.

00:22:52.000 I mean, obviously, they're concerned with affordability.

00:22:55.000 And when you are concerned with affordability, then you want to give money to people's transition teams.

00:22:59.000 Just in my personal view, like there were times, you know, early on in my marriage when my wife and I, we were basically down to like our last couple thousand dollars in savings.

00:23:07.000 We were starting to trying to have to figure out, you know, taking out second credit cards and moving some credit around, all that.

00:23:13.000 And I remember at that time, I was very much interested in giving money to the transition team for a political candidate of my choice.

00:23:19.000 But don't worry, let's be real.

00:23:21.000 The people he wants money from are all the people that he also wants to destroy.

00:23:25.000 And so he's not asking, he is telling.

00:23:30.000 Let's dig into that because you're talking about rent-free.

00:23:32.000 You're talking about free buses.

00:23:34.000 You're talking about free childcare.

00:23:35.000 Can you do that without raising taxes?

00:23:38.000 I think you can do that.

00:23:39.000 And I think you have to raise taxes on the top 1% of New Yorkers, New Yorkers who make more than $1 million a year.

00:23:44.000 And you do that by raising taxes by them 2%.

00:23:47.000 And then you also increase the corporate tax of New York State to match that of New Jersey.

00:23:50.000 So that takes us from about 7.25 to about 11.5%, which is what we see in New Jersey.

00:23:56.000 These things together raise about $9 billion, which more than pays for our economic agenda and also starts to trump-proof ourselves.

00:24:01.000 But are you worried that can drive a lot of job creators out of New York?

00:24:05.000 So what I've heard from a number of business leaders is that the affordability crisis is also affecting their ability to attract and retain talent.

00:24:12.000 The city's inability to provide childcare means that businesses often have to provide stipends for that child care.

00:24:18.000 Right now, the absence of universal child care means that a family will pay around $22,500 a year, which is more money than many of them would spend if they sent that same kid to college 18 years later.

00:24:31.000 I mean, you got to be kidding me, but this is what they're.

00:24:34.000 OK, so here's the question for Democrats.

00:24:36.000 You're going to go along with this.

00:24:37.000 You're going to go along with this?

00:24:38.000 Truly, you have a choice on a national level.

00:24:41.000 I mean, you had a choice on a city level too, and none of you had the actual stones to come out and stop Zorhan Mamdani in the primaries.

00:24:48.000 But I understand New York, you know, it's not indicative of the rest of the country.

00:24:52.000 There are like eight registered Republicans here, and five of them voted for Curtis Leewa.

00:24:56.000 I totally get that.

00:24:58.000 However, on a national level, is this if you want to play, like, listen, as a Republican, if you wish to embrace Mamdaniism as your future, scary for the country. 0.85

00:25:06.000 I don't think it's good for the country.

00:25:07.000 I think we need two robust parties, neither of which is socialist or communist.

00:25:12.000 But if you want to do this on an electoral level, then as somebody who wants Republicans to continue to win, I very much urge you to play this game because play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

00:25:22.000 AOC, who's being widely touted as a presidential candidate in the next election, 2028, and again, I think she has some real strength in that area.

00:25:31.000 She says that the entire party must surrender to Zorhan Mamdani.

00:25:35.000 Everyone must bow their heads.

00:25:39.000 He had to not just defeat a Republican.

00:25:41.000 He had to defeat a Republican and the old guard of the Democratic Party at the same time.

00:25:47.000 He was fighting a war on two fronts and not just one.

00:25:50.000 And he still won resoundingly.

00:25:52.000 And I think the message that that sends is that the Democratic Party cannot last much longer by denying the future.

00:26:05.000 Okay.

00:26:06.000 So, yeah, you're denying the future if you deny socialism.

00:26:09.000 Well, actually, it seems to me you're more denying the past if you advocate socialism because the history of socialism is literally tens of millions of bodies stacked.

00:26:19.000 So there's that.

00:26:20.000 But don't worry, Bernie Sanders, a complete lifelong useless person who basically is like old Zorhan Mamdani.

00:26:26.000 Like never held a real job.

00:26:28.000 Complete useless artist type from when he was younger, like so useless he was kicked off a commune, but somehow has managed to turn that into a leadership position in American politics because it's a great country and anyone here can succeed.

00:26:40.000 Here's Bernie Sanders saying his ideas aren't radical.

00:26:43.000 It's not radical at all to say that we should arrest the prime minister of Israel when he calls.

00:26:46.000 It's not the radical thing to say that we should take all the rich people and we should catapult them into the ocean and steal them.

00:26:51.000 That's not radical.

00:26:53.000 What's radical is to say that not everybody deserves health care of their choice from the finest doctors, paid for by no one by magic tree money.

00:27:01.000 Here we go.

00:27:01.000 These are not radical ideas.

00:27:03.000 These are just mainstream good ideas for our markets.

00:27:07.000 What is a radical idea, if I may say so, is Trump giving a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1% and throwing 15 million people off the health care they have.

00:27:18.000 That is a radical idea.

00:27:20.000 Thinking that climate change is a hoax is a radical idea.

00:27:24.000 We cannot become accustomed to a nation in which one guy on top, Mr. Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom 52% of American society.

00:27:35.000 So I don't agree with you.

00:27:37.000 It is not radical to say that we should have the best child care system in the world if we believe in our kids and if we believe in the future of this country.

00:27:47.000 It's not radical to say that we should have efficient and fast and free bus service.

00:27:52.000 These are not radical ideas.

00:27:55.000 What is radical is that we have more income and wealth inequality than we've ever had.

00:28:02.000 I mean, again, you guys want it?

00:28:04.000 You got it.

00:28:05.000 Meanwhile, Mehdi Hassan, who, you know, fresh off of his latest spate on Al Jazeera, here he was saying socialism isn't a vile word anymore.

00:28:14.000 Well, I mean, I think that that's because Americans don't actually have a lot of experience directly with socialism.

00:28:19.000 But, you know, for whom socialism is a vile word, people who have live under socialism.

00:28:25.000 But now socialists is not a dirty word anymore, saying socialism is not a dirty word anymore.

00:28:30.000 Well, that's why they jump to communists, right?

00:28:32.000 Now they're communists.

00:28:33.000 Yeah, you socialistly jump to communists.

00:28:37.000 Socialists are not a dirty word anymore.

00:28:39.000 Democrats, listen up.

00:28:40.000 Take some lessons.

00:28:42.000 Don't get on your Ezra Klein nonsense.

00:28:44.000 Don't let Ezra Klein analyze what happened here.

00:28:50.000 Don't let Ezra Klein, who's just calling for abundance in actual useful regulation and maybe some use of capitalism, the greatest tool for the development of wealth in all of human history.

00:29:02.000 Don't let him make the decisions.

00:29:03.000 Let Jamal Bowman, an unsuccessful congressional candidate who pulled the fire alarm in order to stop a congressional vote, be your spirit guide.

00:29:11.000 Or maybe Hassan Piker, the scion of an incredibly wealthy family, a Nepo baby of Nepo babies, who lives in a $3 million mansion, shocks his dog on air, and preaches socialism at the same time. 0.89

00:29:22.000 Those guys should have, maybe, maybe Mehdi Hassan, who is a propagandist on behalf of the Qatari government while working at Al Jazeera and then moved here and made millions of dollars ripping on the United States.

00:29:33.000 Those people should be your spirit guides.

00:29:34.000 I mean, listen, if Democrats want to do this, then go for it.

00:29:37.000 Democrats seem a little bit divided on this issue.

00:29:39.000 So Chuck Schumer, who didn't say for whom he voted, he said, we're moving forward now.

00:29:44.000 We're moving forward.

00:29:47.000 I'm moving forward.

00:29:48.000 This morning, I talked with mayor-elect Mom Doni.

00:29:53.000 We had a very, very good conversation.

00:29:56.000 We said that we cared about New York City and that we look forward to working together to help the city and improve the city.

00:30:05.000 I congratulated him on running a very, very good campaign.

00:30:09.000 And the issue that he has stressed is being stressed by Democrats across the country, from one end of America to the other.

00:30:16.000 The high costs that the Trump administration is imposing on us and their failure to do anything about it.

00:30:25.000 Okay.

00:30:26.000 Well, you know, I hope that you enjoy your pusillanimous inability to simply denounce the radicals in your own coalition.

00:30:34.000 We'll see how it works for you.

00:30:35.000 Andy Bashir, the governor of Kentucky, he's doing the same thing.

00:30:37.000 They're all dodging.

00:30:38.000 They're weaving.

00:30:40.000 I didn't even know they could move this well.

00:30:43.000 Do you think that he is a leader in the Democratic Party?

00:30:49.000 I think what we're seeing is it's less about what people call themselves and more about what they're focused on.

00:30:57.000 The winner there in the New York mayor's race was unquestionably more focused on people's struggles, on the inability to afford housing, on the inability to pay the bills at the end of the week and at the end of the month.

00:31:13.000 And I think people are less focused right now on even the policy proposals.

00:31:18.000 But what they want is someone committed to trying to address it.

00:31:22.000 And I think you see that across all the races.

00:31:25.000 And that should be a wake-up call, not just to Democrats, but to everybody.

00:31:31.000 People are concerned the American dream is slipping away.

00:31:34.000 And that's a huge threat to the country.

00:31:36.000 We have to believe that if we work hard and we play by the rules, we can get ahead.

00:31:42.000 We'll talk in a minute about the message that Republicans should take away from the elections that happened a couple of nights ago.

00:31:48.000 But Democrats seem to be very divided on what the future of their party looks like.

00:31:52.000 Representative Debbie Dingell over in Michigan, she says, you know, everyone keeps focusing on Mom Downey.

00:31:56.000 You might want to focus on like Abigail Spanberger, who won by 11 points in a purple state, and Mickey Sherrill, who also won a pretty wide victory over Jack Chitterelli in New Jersey.

00:32:07.000 Do you have concerns about Momdami and the labels that this affords Republicans being used as a weapon against Democrats?

00:32:17.000 Okay, Republicans tried to make Nancy Pelosi the enemy in Europe's past. 1.00

00:32:22.000 I'm going to focus on the election of Abigail Spanberger, who is clearly a moderate, as is Mikey Sherrill.

00:32:30.000 Both women that had strong military and national intelligence background.

00:32:36.000 What I think the message from last night is people are worried.

00:32:40.000 People are scared.

00:32:42.000 They cannot afford their groceries.

00:32:45.000 They're worried about their housing costs.

00:32:47.000 They're worried about their utility bills.

00:32:49.000 And they're worried about the health care.

00:32:51.000 The Republicans can try to avoid that that's what Americans are feeling, but I am the person that back in 216 said, we're in trouble as Democrats because we weren't hearing what working men and women were talking about.

00:33:07.000 Okay, well, I mean, again, it'll be interesting to see how all of this plays out.

00:33:11.000 Hakeem Jeffries is doing the same exact thing.

00:33:13.000 What's fascinating about Hakeem Jeffries is doing here is he's tacitly admitting that Democrats have downplayed one of the key agenda elements that they were trying to push for the last 10 years.

00:33:22.000 The trans issue absolutely destroyed the Democrats. 0.83

00:33:24.000 And now Democrats have basically put that in the rearview mirror.

00:33:27.000 They have.

00:33:27.000 Mom Donnie mentioned it a little bit in New York, but New York, again, a very leftist jurisdiction.

00:33:33.000 When it comes to New Jersey or when it comes to Virginia, the Democratic candidates basically tried to run away from the trans issue by not even answering the question.

00:33:41.000 And it basically worked for them.

00:33:42.000 So long as that was not an elevated issue on everybody's mind, and so long as Democrats weren't militantly saying you must acknowledge that a boy is a girl, they've been able to sort of elide the question.

00:33:52.000 And Republicans should get used to the idea this is what Democrats will do, that they may lie about their positions on trans issues, but they are certainly going to downplay those positions in order to focus on other issues.

00:34:04.000 So that baton is not going to be nearly as potent in the future because Democrats have learned to avoid the baton.

00:34:10.000 Here is Hakeem Jeffries basically admitting as much.

00:34:14.000 Abigail Spamberger focused on the issues that matter.

00:34:17.000 Here's what Republicans did.

00:34:19.000 They spent tens of millions of dollars trying to weaponize the transgender issue. 0.93

00:34:27.000 It failed.

00:34:29.000 And they spent tens of millions of dollars criticizing Abigail Spamberger for Deeply inappropriate text messages that were sent by the attorney general candidate.

00:34:49.000 But not a dime in actually talking about what they would do for the people of Virginia because Republicans have nothing but a failed track record and a bankruptcy of ideas.

00:35:03.000 But that playbook failed spectacularly.

00:35:09.000 I mean, well, the reason it failed is not because Abigail Spamberger was right on the issue.

00:35:14.000 It's because Abigail Spamberger ducked the issue. 0.98

00:35:16.000 So Democrats are going to duck those issues in the future.

00:35:18.000 Okay, coming up, the government shutdown continues.

00:35:20.000 We'll get into the politics.

00:35:21.000 Will the filibuster be nuked?

00:35:23.000 We'll get into all of it first.

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00:36:20.000 Also, let's be blunt, gold just hit $4,000 an ounce for the first time ever.

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00:36:25.000 I recently re-upped.

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00:36:32.000 And this is a great hedge against both inflation and uncertainty.

00:36:35.000 Central banks right now are doing the same thing.

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00:36:38.000 They are driving up the prices.

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00:36:41.000 I mean, the answer is probably no.

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00:37:27.000 So what should Republicans take away from Zarmandani's victory?

00:37:32.000 But also from victories for Democrats, not just in Virginia and New Jersey, but in local races all around the country.

00:37:37.000 They won a couple of local races in sort of school boards and a couple of state legislative seats in places ranging from Georgia to Texas to Mississippi.

00:37:47.000 So Democrats had a very good night.

00:37:50.000 There are a few takeaways.

00:37:51.000 The first takeaway, obviously, is that in off-year elections, the out-of-party power.

00:37:56.000 The first lesson is that in off-year elections, as we all know, the party that is out of power tends to do very well.

00:38:02.000 Because there's always a backlash against the governing party because all problems are now attributable to them.

00:38:08.000 And there's no question that the government shutdown plays a part in this poll show that more Americans are blaming Republicans than Democrats for the government shutdown.

00:38:14.000 They sort of blame both, but it's affecting the incumbent party more than it is affecting the party that is out of power because people don't understand really how the filibuster works.

00:38:23.000 And we'll get to that in a little while.

00:38:25.000 But the other lesson for Republicans, truly, the other big lesson for Republicans is that when you are in power, it is not enough to just campaign against the Democrats.

00:38:36.000 You're going to have to actually figure out either solutions to problems via the government, or you're going to have to say the solution is not the government in the first place.

00:38:46.000 So I think that that lesson that Republicans need some sort of positive message going forward, like a defense of the things that they're doing, or at least an explanation of why government involvement isn't going to solve the problem, they need that because otherwise it just sounds like you're beating up on the guy who's not even in power in the first place.

00:39:03.000 All righty, folks, it's time for some fast facts.

00:39:09.000 So President Trump has now responded to the election of Zarin Mamdani.

00:39:12.000 He gave a speech yesterday in which he ripped on Mamdani and he said, we're going to stop the country from going communist.

00:39:17.000 Now, again, I don't think Americans like communism.

00:39:20.000 I think that the reason that they say they like socialism is really because they don't know what socialism is because the definition has been futzed.

00:39:27.000 And second, because when people think of America, they think of capitalism.

00:39:32.000 So things are going badly.

00:39:33.000 They don't like the status quo.

00:39:34.000 But here was President Trump going after Mamdani.

00:39:37.000 And as long as I'm in the White House, the United States is not going communist in any way, shape, or form.

00:39:43.000 We'll stop it.

00:39:44.000 We're going to stop it.

00:39:45.000 Stop this nonsense.

00:39:49.000 You know, I said they were voting last night.

00:39:54.000 You could have a communist or a thug.

00:39:57.000 A communist, and they took the communist, you know?

00:40:01.000 It's pretty amazing.

00:40:04.000 So, you know, again, I think that he is right.

00:40:08.000 He is right.

00:40:09.000 And it's funny.

00:40:10.000 But is it going to be enough to stop a blue wave that is going to just kind of hold the DSA a little bit at bay, but also hug them with the other arm?

00:40:18.000 Here is President Trump ripping Mamdani's victory speech, which was incredibly militant and wildly communistic.

00:40:24.000 I thought it was a very angry speech, certainly angry toward me.

00:40:28.000 And I think he should be very nice to me.

00:40:29.000 You know, I'm the one that sort of has to approve a lot of things coming to him.

00:40:33.000 So he's off to a bad start.

00:40:34.000 At one point, he says, turn the volume up.

00:40:37.000 So hear me, President Trump, when I say this.

00:40:41.000 To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.

00:40:46.000 How do you respond to that?

00:40:48.000 Does that affect anything you're going to do?

00:40:49.000 It's a very dangerous statement for him to make, actually.

00:40:53.000 And, you know, you talk about danger.

00:40:54.000 I think it's a very dangerous statement for him to make.

00:40:58.000 He has to be a little bit respectful of Washington because if he's not, he doesn't have a chance of succeeding.

00:41:05.000 And I want to make him succeed.

00:41:07.000 I want to make the city succeed.

00:41:08.000 I don't want to make him succeed.

00:41:10.000 I want to make the city succeed.

00:41:11.000 And we'll see what happens.

00:41:14.000 Well, again, we will see what happens.

00:41:16.000 Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, he said, welcome to Caracas on the Hudson.

00:41:21.000 I was thinking Venezuela is coming to New York.

00:41:24.000 I want to congratulate the people who voted for Mamdani.

00:41:27.000 And, you know, welcome to Caracas on the Hudson.

00:41:31.000 Welcome to Caracas on the Hudson.

00:41:33.000 I don't know who's going to be more responsible for the bump in Miami real estate, Maduro or Mamdani. 0.69

00:41:42.000 Okay, now, again, all of this is going to be potent, and all of that's true.

00:41:46.000 The problem for Republicans is they are the party in power.

00:41:48.000 When you are the party in power, things change.

00:41:50.000 People tend to attribute the problems in the world to you.

00:41:53.000 And so if they go to the grocery store and it's very expensive, and make no mistake, it is very expensive at the grocery store.

00:42:00.000 A week of groceries is going to cost you a lot more than it did two years ago.

00:42:05.000 It's stabilized somewhat over the course of the last year, but that doesn't mean the prices went down.

00:42:08.000 It just means the prices remain very high.

00:42:11.000 And wage gains have not really eaten into that yet.

00:42:14.000 I mean, the prices of everything feel very expensive to people right now.

00:42:16.000 And people are not wrong to feel that.

00:42:19.000 And when President Trump says things are becoming more affordable, people don't believe that they are becoming more affordable because they aren't really more affordable.

00:42:27.000 They might be more affordable compared to where it would have been if Biden were president, but we are no longer in that world.

00:42:31.000 And you can't keep living in that world as the sitting president of the United States.

00:42:35.000 Here's President Trump talking about prices.

00:42:37.000 We've done so much.

00:42:38.000 You know, energy is way down.

00:42:40.000 Look at energy.

00:42:40.000 We're going to have $2 gas a liter to do that.

00:42:42.000 That brings everything else down.

00:42:44.000 Groceries are way down other than beef.

00:42:46.000 Now, beef is going to come down.

00:42:48.000 You know, we have to do that.

00:42:50.000 You remember when I started?

00:42:51.000 Eggs were up by four times what they were previous.

00:42:55.000 Two days in the office that they told me about eggs.

00:42:57.000 I solved that because the fact is we have prices way down.

00:43:00.000 We have prices down.

00:43:02.000 Our country's doing well.

00:43:03.000 The stock market's hitting record highs like 48 times during my nine months.

00:43:07.000 And just a couple of days ago, it hit another record high, like really record high.

00:43:13.000 It's great.

00:43:13.000 And that equates, it's not just rich people.

00:43:15.000 That's 401ks.

00:43:17.000 I mean, that equates to everybody.

00:43:19.000 And the country is doing very well.

00:43:20.000 But as Republicans, you have to talk about it because if you don't talk about it, you know, I saw that they kept talking about affordability.

00:43:27.000 Well, Biden was a disaster with affordability.

00:43:29.000 He had the highest inflation rate in the history of our country.

00:43:32.000 But you have to talk about it.

00:43:33.000 It's no good if we do a great job and you don't talk about it.

00:43:37.000 Okay, now he's not wrong about any of that, but there has never yet been a politician who tells people that their feelings about the economy are wrong, who ends up doing well in a midterm.

00:43:48.000 I remember when Barack Obama did, he said, well, people, they just don't understand.

00:43:51.000 They just don't understand what I'm saying.

00:43:52.000 I remember when he did that.

00:43:53.000 I remember that Joe Biden used to say, oh, they don't even understand the gains that we're making right now, John.

00:44:00.000 And it didn't work for him.

00:44:01.000 And so if people just don't feel good about the cost of groceries, you can't make them feel good by telling them things are great.

00:44:07.000 It just doesn't work that way, unfortunately, because sometimes people are wrong in how they, but it doesn't work that way.

00:44:14.000 And it also happens to be true that people are just paying a lot more in groceries than they did even a couple of years ago.

00:44:19.000 And when you go to the grocery store, very often, you don't think about what you paid last year for groceries.

00:44:25.000 You think, what did I pay five years ago for groceries?

00:44:28.000 And the answer is a lot less, a lot less.

00:44:30.000 And of course, a lot of that is Joe Biden.

00:44:33.000 And over the course of the last year, again, inflation has really moderated.

00:44:37.000 It's down in the 2.7 to 3% range, which is still too high on an annualized basis, but it's a lot lower than it was under Biden when for one year it spiked up into double digits.

00:44:47.000 With that said, do people feel good about the price of groceries?

00:44:49.000 The answer right now is no.

00:44:51.000 They do not feel great about the price of groceries.

00:44:55.000 In fact, I asked our sponsors over at Comet, a project of perplexity, how much does a week of groceries cost for an average American family compared to two years ago and one year ago?

00:45:04.000 So according to Comet, for an average American family, the weekly grocery cost in 2025 is around $250 to $270 a week, which is slightly higher than the past two years due to continued food price inflation.

00:45:16.000 In 2023 and 2024, families were also spending close to $270 per week.

00:45:23.000 However, if you ask Comet, what was the average price of groceries for the same families in 2021, the grocery cost for a family of four ranged from about $146 to $289.

00:45:35.000 So if you take the low end of that estimate, you are talking about a 50% increase in the course of the last four years.

00:45:42.000 And so people continue to feel that.

00:45:45.000 According to Comet, that number is about 20% increase in price.

00:45:49.000 But if you're thinking like the low end versus kind of the high end now, you're talking about 40% increase, 30%, 40%.

00:45:56.000 I mean, these are major costs to families, serious costs to families.

00:46:00.000 And so the question becomes: what can government do about that?

00:46:03.000 What can government do about that? 0.61

00:46:04.000 Now, it seems to me that there are a few things the government can do about that.

00:46:09.000 Number one, the Federal Reserve's main mandate always should have been not to get to 2% annual inflation, but to get to 0% annual inflation.

00:46:20.000 That should always have been the Federal Reserve's mission.

00:46:22.000 It is ridiculous that the Federal Reserve always had a dual mission of keeping unemployment low and also keeping inflation low.

00:46:28.000 It is not the job of the Federal Reserve to keep unemployment low.

00:46:33.000 That means that they get to mess around with the money in order to manipulate the markets every single day.

00:46:38.000 And that is a problem.

00:46:39.000 Senator Rand Paul is totally correct about this.

00:46:42.000 That is a serious, serious problem.

00:46:44.000 But beyond that, when people begin to have expectations of their government that are inaccurate, that the government can solve all your problems, you end up with actually bad policy.

00:46:53.000 And this brings us to the tariff fight.

00:46:56.000 President Trump wants to say that the tariffs that he has imposed are making life more affordable for Americans.

00:47:02.000 He said that he continues to say that that tariff fight is making the American economy stronger.

00:47:09.000 I see no evidence of this.

00:47:10.000 I think at best you can say that the tariffs haven't wildly damaged America's economy yet.

00:47:15.000 And that is due to an enormous amount of investment capital that is being deployed, particularly at the top end of the stock market.

00:47:22.000 That is because there's probably some embedded price eating that was going on as the tariffs were being negotiated and continue to roil the markets.

00:47:29.000 But the idea that we are rich because of the tariffs or the economy is doing better because of the tariffs, I see zero evidence that that is in fact the case.

00:47:37.000 But in a country where everyone demands that the government do something, right?

00:47:42.000 The Mamdani candidacy in New York is a do-something candidacy.

00:47:42.000 Let's be clear.

00:47:47.000 People don't even have an idea what he's going to do, but he says he's going to do something.

00:47:50.000 And so the idea is throw a bunch against the wall and see what sticks.

00:47:54.000 If in this country, the solution to every ill is give me more power on both sides, give me more power and I will fix, things ain't going to get fixed because it turns out that healthy, thriving, growing economies require the government to go hands off.

00:48:08.000 Now, President Trump totally understands this with regard particularly to regulation and taxation.

00:48:12.000 But when it comes to macroeconomic issues, things like subsidies or tariffs, when it comes to, quote unquote, protecting certain sectors, he goes the wrong way on this.

00:48:22.000 Now, I will say that there is something happening right now that counterintuitively could be very, very beneficial to the president.

00:48:29.000 So yesterday at the Supreme Court, there was a hearing over whether President Trump has the emergency power to simply set global tariffs on every country, up to including the Penguins in the Solomon Islands.

00:48:41.000 Does he actually have the ability to do that by claiming a national emergency?

00:48:44.000 That was the question.

00:48:45.000 And the hearing at the Supreme Court did not go particularly well.

00:48:48.000 As the Wall Street Journal says, President Trump's global tariffs ran headlong into a skeptical Supreme Court on Wednesday, with justices across the spectrum expressing doubt that a 1970s emergency powers law could be read to provide the president unilateral authority to remake the international economy and collect billions of dollars in import taxes without explicit congressional approval.

00:49:07.000 Even if the court strikes down the tariffs Trump initiated, the justices gave little indication how they might unwind the policy.

00:49:13.000 I mean, well, no, actually.

00:49:15.000 What the justice said is the tariffs would have to stop because they're not congressionally approved.

00:49:19.000 The question is, what happens to the $90 billion or so of tax revenue that was taken in via the tariffs because tariffs are a tax?

00:49:26.000 How does that get refunded?

00:49:28.000 And the answer is that it would be a very, very messy process, for sure.

00:49:32.000 But Solicitor General John Sauer, on behalf of the administration, took heat from all sides as he pressed the administration's argument that the president's power to regulate foreign financial transactions when he declares an emergency includes the authority to impose tariffs.

00:49:45.000 Now, again, the idea originally was that the president can regulate movement between territories that affect like terror groups, for example.

00:49:55.000 It wasn't that the president just gets to completely remake the economy by saying national emergency, not enough soybeans getting exported.

00:50:02.000 Now we got to have a tariff.

00:50:04.000 Tariffs are taxes.

00:50:06.000 They're congressionally allocated powers under the Constitution.

00:50:11.000 To demonstrate the scope of Trump's claim in what I thought was the most important moment, Justice Neil Gorsuch said, quote, could the president impose a 50% tariff on gas-powered cars and auto parts to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat from abroad of climate change?

00:50:27.000 And the administration said yes.

00:50:29.000 Now, I ask you again, as conservatives, is this a thing you want to do?

00:50:33.000 Is this a thing you want to, do you want the president of the United States, who very easily could be a Democrat inside the next four years, do you want President AOC having the ability on the basis of a national emergency to cancel all gas-powered cars imported into the United States, for example?

00:50:50.000 Is that a thing that you would like?

00:50:52.000 Would you like her, on the basis of national security, to be able to shut down trade with allies, for example?

00:50:59.000 or open trade with enemies.

00:51:01.000 Every power that is delegated to the office of the presidency is not delegated to a person.

00:51:05.000 It is delegated to the office.

00:51:07.000 The tariffs were always unconstitutional.

00:51:10.000 I said it the day that President Trump announced them.

00:51:10.000 They were.

00:51:14.000 Okay, now, whether you like tariffs or you don't like tariffs, if you like the tariffs, go stump for them with your congressman.

00:51:19.000 Tell Congress to pass the tariffs.

00:51:22.000 But if you, ironically, if you want the economy to actually take off like a rocket, if you want the stock market to increase by 10%, have the Supreme Court strike down the tariffs.

00:51:33.000 The stock market has been, I know so many investors, all of whom have been like, you know, I'm going to invest.

00:51:39.000 I'll probably put it at the top end of the stock market where the returns are good, the Magnificent 7.

00:51:43.000 The AI companies aren't subject to tariffs really so much because, of course, they're high-tech and a lot of what they do is cloud-based.

00:51:51.000 But if you want the rest of the stock market to actually grow, what would be great is a solid free trade regime and then let the president go and negotiate further free trade agreements with our allies, places like Japan and South Korea and the Philippines, and then box in China and then go after China.

00:52:10.000 I mean, that's how this should have been done in the first place.

00:52:14.000 So with outside expectations comes outside's responsibility.

00:52:19.000 And so if Republicans hope to survive the midterms next year, they're going to either have to come up with solutions that please the American people or they're going to have to explain why governmental solutions are not available and power ought to be delegated back to the American people.

00:52:32.000 Okay, meanwhile, this government shutdown continues.

00:52:34.000 We are now in day 37 of this government shutdown.

00:52:38.000 No one understands why we're doing this.

00:52:39.000 Truly, no one understands.

00:52:41.000 A clean CR has been available.

00:52:43.000 Continuing resolution to fund the government at current levels has been available this entire time.

00:52:47.000 The Republicans in the House passed it.

00:52:49.000 The Senate has now voted on it 14 separate times.

00:52:51.000 Democrats keep voting it down.

00:52:54.000 The only way Democrats can do that is by invoking the legislative filibuster.

00:52:57.000 They say you need 60 votes in order to be able to get this clean CR passed.

00:53:03.000 Democrats continue to maintain this is the case, even as SNAP benefits go away for a huge number of people.

00:53:09.000 Even though flights are now going to be delayed at 40 airports, they're reducing 10% of their flights in order to deal with all of this.

00:53:16.000 Democrats seem to show no qualms about what it is that they are doing at this point.

00:53:23.000 Apparently, according to Axios, Senate Democrats are taking a moment after Tuesday nights resounding off your wins before making any firm moves to reopen the government.

00:53:32.000 Victory is emboldening the party's hardliners.

00:53:34.000 Centrist Democrats seem stuck.

00:53:35.000 Now, again, not all Democrats are similarly placed.

00:53:37.000 If you are a Democrat in a purple state and you have to go home and explain to your constituents why you continue to vote for the shutdown, that's a very different thing than if you're a blue senator in a blue state where you get to go home and have all the people cheer for you because you stood up to Trump.

00:53:50.000 Yay.

00:53:52.000 Senator Chris Murphy, who of course is from Connecticut, which means that he's a blue senator from blue state, he said, quote, I think it would be very strange if on the heels of the American people having rewarded Democrats for standing up and fighting, we surrendered without getting anything for the people we've been fighting for.

00:54:07.000 House Democrats are warning of hell to pay if their Senate counterparts compromise too quickly.

00:54:11.000 But if you are a senator from, you know, Maine, which is a purplish state like Angus King, or if you are a senator from Pennsylvania, as Senator John Fetterman is, you might have some different thoughts on that.

00:54:22.000 And Democrats should really consider whether the interests of their parties are well aligned if, in fact, they lose a bunch of seats in these purple states that they need to win.

00:54:32.000 Ironically, actually, in the purplish district, the resistance is very happy about the government shutdown.

00:54:39.000 The real question is, in the purple districts that are flippable for Republicans or purple states that are flippable for Republicans in the Senate, is this shutdown going to benefit or harm Democrats?

00:54:50.000 And I think in moderate areas, it ain't great for Democrats, which is, of course, the entire impasse.

00:54:55.000 The Democratic Party itself is split on this issue.

00:54:57.000 Hakeem Jeffries continues to maintain that the GOP needs to make some sort of concessions in order for a clean CR to pass.

00:55:04.000 But unfortunately, Republicans have continued to take a my way or the highway approach.

00:55:09.000 That's what they did in their one big ugly bill.

00:55:11.000 Largest cut to Medicaid in American history, ripped food out of the mouths of children, seniors, and veterans with $186 billion cut to snap.

00:55:21.000 They did that in July.

00:55:22.000 And all of this was done so they could reward their billionaire donors with massive tax breaks.

00:55:27.000 The American people are rejecting that level of extremism.

00:55:31.000 And it's certainly our hope that Republicans will see the need to change course, sit down with us as Democrats, and we can find our way out of this, unfortunately, very painful shutdown that the American people have been experiencing.

00:55:46.000 Now, President Trump, as a piece of leverage, it's unclear whether he means this sincerely or whether he's trying to use this as a piece of leverage.

00:55:52.000 He is saying Democrats are showing zero interest in reopening.

00:55:55.000 This part is true. 0.80

00:55:57.000 So as you know, we are in the midst of a disastrous Democrat-created government shutdown.

00:56:02.000 And it is Democrat-created, but I don't think they're getting really the blame that they should.

00:56:07.000 That's now officially the longest shutdown in American history.

00:56:11.000 The Democrat radicals in the Senate have shown zero interest in reopening the government.

00:56:18.000 Okay, and of course he's right.

00:56:19.000 But then he says, actually, let's nuke the filibuster.

00:56:23.000 So the filibuster is what Democrats are using in order to stop the clean CR.

00:56:26.000 It requires 60 votes in order to get past the filibuster.

00:56:30.000 Democrats are not lending the Republicans seven votes in order to get past the filibuster.

00:56:34.000 And so President Trump is calling for a thing that many Democrats have called for in the past and some Republicans, the nuking of the filibuster, the use of the so-called nuclear option, whereby you go to the Senate parliamentarian, you ask if the filibuster can basically be overruled.

00:56:48.000 And then with 51 votes, you pass a resolution in order to change the filibuster rules.

00:56:51.000 The filibuster goes away.

00:56:52.000 And now for the rest of American history, 51 votes in the Senate will allow you to do anything.

00:56:56.000 Now, I like the filibuster.

00:56:58.000 I think the filibuster is good.

00:56:59.000 Why do I like the filibuster?

00:57:00.000 Because the Senate was supposed to be originally a deliberative body, which is where the deals got made.

00:57:06.000 And one of the obstacles to precipitous action was the filibuster.

00:57:11.000 It made people actually get together and talk with one another.

00:57:14.000 And you couldn't get anything done unless you had a broad consensus because 60 is, of course, a lot higher than 51.

00:57:19.000 I promise you, if the filibuster goes away, if by either side, if the filibuster goes away, within 10 years, Democrats will have added at least two states to the Union, both Democrat.

00:57:30.000 Democrats will have rewritten the electoral rules in the United States.

00:57:33.000 They already tried to do this in the last congressional session, and the filibuster stopped them.

00:57:37.000 Democrats will do all the magical things that they have been pledging to do.

00:57:42.000 They will.

00:57:42.000 Fundamentally, the form of government of the United States will shift.

00:57:45.000 The filibuster is sort of the last vestige of a system that requires some level of popular approval for a policy beyond bare majoritarianism.

00:57:56.000 So I'm very, very anti-killing the filibuster.

00:57:58.000 Here's what the president had to say, on the other hand.

00:58:01.000 I think it's very important.

00:58:02.000 We have to get the country open.

00:58:03.000 And the way we're going to do it this afternoon is to terminate the filibuster.

00:58:08.000 And it's possible you're not going to do that.

00:58:09.000 And I'm going to go by your wishes.

00:58:10.000 very smart people.

00:58:12.000 We're good friends.

00:58:13.000 But I think it's a tremendous mistake, really.

00:58:15.000 It would be a tragic mistake, actually.

00:58:18.000 It's time.

00:58:19.000 It's time.

00:58:20.000 If I thought they weren't going to approve, I'd sort of be with you.

00:58:24.000 It'd be fine.

00:58:25.000 I'd be neutral to with you.

00:58:27.000 But knowing that they're going to pass it as soon as they get any semblance of control, they'll pass it first thing.

00:58:33.000 Then it's like we have to do it first.

00:58:36.000 Now, again, this point that he's making here is not a bad point.

00:58:39.000 Trust has been lost to the extent that Republicans do believe that Democrats are going to nuke the filibuster at the first available opportunity.

00:58:45.000 And so the proposal that I have made is on my proposal.

00:58:48.000 My friend Jeremy Boring originally made this proposal, and I think it's right.

00:58:51.000 Republicans should say, we want a constitutional amendment to enshrine the filibuster, the Senate legislative filibuster.

00:58:58.000 We want a constitutional amendment to do that.

00:58:59.000 That requires widespread approval in the Senate to make that a permanent feature of the political landscape.

00:59:05.000 And if we don't get it, then we're nuking the filibuster because we're not just going to wait around to find out whether your goodwill ends and you decide to nuke the filibuster and destroy the necessary checks and balances that have been on the wane so long in American politics.

00:59:21.000 That I think would be a good policy to propose.

00:59:23.000 But the president's proposal that the Republicans nuke the filibuster, I'm going to assume this is a piece of leverage that the president here is doing this because he's saying to Democrats, listen, if you really want to play hardball, we'll play super, duper hardball and we'll just run you right over.

00:59:35.000 So you may as well get on board because we'll kill the filibuster and we'll pass the CR.

00:59:39.000 I assume that's what's happening.

00:59:41.000 It's unlikely to actually become reality.

00:59:43.000 There's just not enough senators who are going to destroy the filibuster right now because, you know, basically you'd need 51 senators or 50 plus the vice president to vote to break a tie in order to kill the filibuster.

00:59:53.000 I would assume that there are still 5, 10, 15 Republican senators who are not on board with killing the legislative filibuster in the Senate, probably much, much higher than that.

01:00:03.000 Okay, meanwhile, there's been a lot of talk recently about people who are quote unquote splitting the right.

01:00:08.000 One of those people, very clearly, because she's not attempting to hide it, is Marjorie Taylor Greene.

01:00:12.000 Marjorie Taylor Greene has spent the last several weeks apparently planning for her own presidential run, which, you know, all luck to her. 1.00

01:00:19.000 Frankly, I think that would be clarifying.

01:00:21.000 I think that it would be wonderful if Marjorie Taylor Greene ran for president of the United States and won 7% of the vote.

01:00:26.000 I think that would be great because Marjorie Taylor Greene's ideas are not popular ideas with the American people.

01:00:32.000 And it would be fun to watch her try, frankly.

01:00:36.000 She says that she believes she is real MAGA and that other Republicans have strayed.

01:00:39.000 I mean, to be fair, she also thinks that President Trump is not real MAGA, and she's basically said just as much.

01:00:46.000 She's yelling at Republicans all the time. 0.69

01:00:47.000 She's going on the view to hang out with people who despise President Trump, despise Republicans, and despise conservatism.

01:00:54.000 And she's being treated with kid gloves.

01:00:56.000 Here was Joy Behar.

01:00:57.000 Okay, I have a rule.

01:00:58.000 If Joy Behar is saying that you are a wonderful person, like truly great, you've done something wrong in your life.

01:01:07.000 Here is Joy Behar on the View yesterday, glossing MTG.

01:01:11.000 I have to say, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was on the show yesterday, her timing couldn't have been better.

01:01:16.000 I mean, she's basically turning on the Republicans in several areas. 1.00

01:01:20.000 Of course, continuing to say she loves Trump because why wouldn't you?

01:01:23.000 Because the retribution against her would be horrible.

01:01:27.000 So she stays there.

01:01:29.000 And then today, the Democrats pulled it out of the air and did it.

01:01:33.000 So she was right.

01:01:35.000 She's smarter than we thought. 1.00

01:01:38.000 She's so much smarter because she agrees with Joy Behar. 0.76

01:01:40.000 That's why Joy Behar thinks you're smart is if you agree with Joy Behar, because Joy Behar is the kind of person who legitimately, if intellectual firepower or electrical wattage could not toast a piece of bread on both sides lightly.

01:01:54.000 Her saying that she's very smart, Joy Behar saying that you're a smart person is a good indication you are not a very, very smart person.

01:01:59.000 So, you know, there are, in fact, people who spend all day long firing inside the tens and then presume to proclaim that if you notice that, then somehow that's splitting the party.

01:02:08.000 It's sort of a fascinating phenomenon.

01:02:10.000 Speaking of which, she continued her grievance tour against the Republican Party, of course.

01:02:14.000 She appeared on NewsNation last night where she talks about how she yelled at the Speaker of the House.

01:02:19.000 Like if you were to be able to talk to Mike Johnson right now, you would tell him what?

01:02:22.000 Tell him the same thing I told him last week and I yelled at him on the phone on our GOP conference call.

01:02:26.000 What'd you say?

01:02:27.000 Is that is where is our health care plan?

01:02:30.000 It's non-existence.

01:02:32.000 Democrats created this problem years ago, but Republicans have never fixed it.

01:02:35.000 And I said we need to be back at work and not being in session is basically pathetic.

01:02:40.000 What'd he say to you?

01:02:41.000 He gave me the same talking points he gives to the press every single day.

01:02:45.000 So clearly she's for unifying the Republican Party and victory. 0.96

01:02:51.000 Clearly.

01:02:52.000 Clearly, that's what this is all about.

01:02:54.000 Alrighty, folks, coming up, we're going to jump into your questions in the Vaunted Ben Shapiro show mailbag.

01:02:59.000 Remember, in order to have your questions answered or to even see it, you have to be a member.

01:03:03.000 Head on over to our Daily Wire Plus app.

01:03:06.000 Become a member.

The Ben Shapiro Show - November 06, 2025

FEAR AND LOATHING: Reds Take New York

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