Zoran Mamdani is leading the race to become New York City s next mayor, but is there something wrong with young people in this country? Plus, Bill Hagerty stops by to talk about the FBI targeting him, we get to President Trump in Asia, and all the rest of the news.
00:00:00.000Today, I want to talk about Zarin Mamdani and why he's leading the answer is there is something deeply wrong with young people in this country.
00:00:08.000Plus, Senator Bill Hagerty from Tennessee stops by to talk about the FBI targeting him.
00:00:13.000We get to President Trump in Asia and all the rest of the news.
00:00:16.000First, tonight, Friendly Fire returns for episode two.
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00:00:49.000Well, there's something bizarre going on in this New York City election, this mayoral election.
00:00:55.000The thing that's bizarre is that people don't actually love Zorin Mamdani's policies, but he's very likely to win anyway.
00:01:01.000According to the New York Post, Zorin Mamdani could become mayor without a majority of support, thanks to Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa splitting the vote.
00:01:08.000And despite New Yorkers opposing his socialist policies, a poll released on Tuesday found Momdani had a 15-point lead over runner-up independent candidates Cuomo in the New Manhattan Institute survey, a wider margin than other polls showing a bit of a tightening of the race.
00:01:28.000As all these polls are showing, if Sliwa dropped out, there'd be a decent shot for Andrew Cuomo to win the race.
00:01:32.000But what's most important about this particular poll shows that when it comes to the actual policies that Momdani is pushing, people don't actually like those policies very much.
00:01:43.000So, for example, 58% of respondents feared that making buses free could make them into rooming homeless shelters, while 33% believed all fares should be eliminated.
00:01:53.000So, in other words, by a 25% margin, people actually believed that this free buses idea is incredibly stupid.
00:02:01.000His proposal to get rid of the city's gifted and talented program is wildly unpopular.
00:02:08.00064% of the same voters who are giving a plurality of their vote to Mamdani believe that gifted and talented should be expanded.
00:02:15.000Only 21% believe that it should be scaled back in early grades.
00:02:21.000When it comes to repealing bail reform laws and returning to the bail system before 2019, 55% want to go back before no cash bail.
00:02:30.000Only 29% back the current program, which is what Momdani backs.
00:02:34.000So, in other words, his policies are not all that popular among voters, but Momdani himself is significantly more popular with voters.
00:02:42.000Now, there are a few explanations for this.
00:02:44.000One explanation is that he's running against some pretty bad competition.
00:02:47.000Andrew Cuomo is a particularly bad candidate.
00:02:49.000Mayor Eric Adams is deeply unpopular, but there is something else going on here.
00:02:53.000And the thing that's going on is Generation Z. Now, I know there are a lot of people on the right who have been talking up Generation Z. It's going to be the most conservative generation.
00:03:16.000They are far to the left of the general population on every single issue.
00:03:19.000And this sort of bizarre idea that Generation Z is going to carry us forward into a conservative future.
00:03:24.000I'm not seeing the evidence for that as a general matter.
00:03:27.000Mom Dani being a perfect encapsulation of this.
00:03:30.000So, in the latest Suffolk poll on the New York City mayoral race, which has Momdani leading Cuomo 44 to 34, Momdani actually trails among all voters age 45 plus.
00:03:41.000Among voters age 35 to 44, he runs ahead by about 23 points against Cuomo.
00:03:47.000But among voters who are 18 to 34, so that would be like Gen Z voters and maybe like tail end millennials, Mom Dani runs ahead by 61 points, by 61 points.
00:04:11.000Polls of young people show that they are wildly to the left of their forebears on pretty much every single issue.
00:04:18.000Right now, according to YouGov, President Trump's current approval rating among those under the age of 30 is 29%.
00:04:25.000According to a recent poll from Cato Institute and YouGov, some 62% of Americans aged 18 to 29 say they are favorable towards socialism.
00:04:34.000So almost two-thirds say they are favorable towards socialism.
00:04:38.000There was a spring 2025 Yale youth poll and it found that younger voters were consistently far to the left of the general population on everything from trans agenda issues to abortion to immigration.
00:04:52.000So the real question is, what is going wrong?
00:04:57.000Now, again, there's always this sort of explanation that young people, when they're young, they're naive, they don't pay taxes, they're not ushered into an actual real life where they are participating in the normal institutions of daily activity.
00:05:10.000And so they can kind of live in airy fairy land where everything is handed to them on a silver platter.
00:05:15.000We have delayed adulthood for young people all the way into their 30s.
00:05:21.000But there's something else going on too.
00:05:22.000And that is that young people have been told that they never have to enter adulthood.
00:05:27.000That in fact, everything ought to be handed to them.
00:05:29.000And that when things are not handed to them, either it's because they themselves have some sort of deep abiding illness or society itself is victimizing them in some way.
00:05:38.000According to Harmony Healthcare IT, they did a poll of young people.
00:05:41.00046% of Gen Z has been diagnosed with a mental health condition.
00:05:47.000So either we have hit a radical genetic bottleneck here or you have wild overdiagnosis of a population that is anxiety prone and believes there is a sort of virtue in it.
00:05:59.00037% suspect they have an undiagnosed mental condition.
00:06:04.000More than two in five, more than 40% of Generation Z feels that, quote, their generation isn't set up for success.
00:06:12.000Fewer than half of all Americans under the age of 35 believe they will ever have children.
00:06:17.000So all the things that would normally usher you into a more mature view of life, getting married, having kids, holding a job, paying taxes, these are things Generation Z is apparently not interested in doing and doesn't believe that they will ever do.
00:06:29.000Now, again, this is not because Gen Z is some sort of truly victimized generation.
00:06:34.000In all the history of all the humans on all the planet, the idea that American Generation Z is somehow the greatest victimhood class we have ever had is insane and bizarre.
00:06:46.000In fact, more Generation Z people hold degrees than millennials and Gen Xers did at their age.
00:06:52.000According to The Economist, the typical 25-year-old Gen Zer has an annual household income of over $40,000, more than 50% above baby boomers at the same age.
00:07:02.000According to Bank of America, Generation Z will be the largest and richest generation in American history within just 10 years.
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00:12:18.000Usually, it is because the boomers and the millennials decided to inculcate a brand of vague anti-Americanism that then metastasized into a very virulent, cancerous form of anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism.
00:12:34.000This is why whenever I hear parents talk about their kids and they say, you know, I'm just giving them the tools to think.
00:12:38.000I'm not telling them what to think, what values to hold.
00:12:42.000You should be telling your kids what values to hold.
00:12:44.000That is actually the number one thing you should be doing as a parent.
00:12:46.000The most important thing you can do as a parent is to become part of that chain that Edmund Burke talks about between the past and the future, maintaining the wisdom of generations and passing that on to your kids.
00:12:57.000If you're not doing that, you're not doing your job as a parent.
00:12:59.000Instead, what we do is we've been farming out our kids to universities filled with radicals who then teach the kids all the same sort of radical politics.
00:13:09.000Fascinating piece from the New York Times about Momdani called how a small elite college in Maine influenced Momdani's worldview.
00:13:16.000Now, remember, Zor Mamdani is a member of the most privileged class of humans ever to walk the earth.
00:13:21.000In fact, he's uniquely privileged because he and his family escaped a third world hellhole called Uganda and they came to the United States and his mom became a famous film producer and his dad became a professor at Columbia University.
00:14:06.000It is typically a member of what would be called by the Marxists the bourgeois classes who act as a sort of revolutionary vanguard in order to remake the system.
00:14:15.000They tend to be frustrated intellectuals, people who didn't get what they deserve, or angry at their parents or angry at the world because they were on the cusp of success, but then success ran away from them.
00:14:25.000I talk about this at length in Lions and Scavengers, my book.
00:14:29.000Mamdani is like the apex predator of the scavengers.
00:14:34.000So the New York Times writes about this Jeremy Peters report and quote, it wasn't so much what Zor Mamdani said, it was how he said it.
00:14:40.000We're going to stand up for Haiti because you taught the world about freedom, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York exclaimed to an elated crowd at a Haitian music festival in June.
00:14:50.000Mamdani pronounced the island's name Ahiti, near perfect Creole elocution.
00:14:55.000When I heard him say that, I smiled, recalled Brian Purnell, one of Mr. Mamdani's former professors at Bodouin College.
00:15:00.000He also noted that Mr. Mamdani's reference to freedom was a nod to Haiti's status as the first republic founded by former slaves.
00:15:07.000That's straight out of the lessons from the Haitian revolution that we teach in Afrikana studies, said Dr. Purnell, who is now the chair of the Afrikana Studies Department at Mamdani's Lama Matter.
00:15:18.000So, what exactly is the background for Mamdani?
00:15:21.000Quote, he would become one of the most visible representations of a new generation of progressives whose formative years as young adults were shaped by elite colleges where over the last decade, theories of social and racial justice became even more deeply ingrained in liberal arts education.
00:15:36.000He graduated in 2014 from Bodouin College in Brunswick, Maine, with a bachelor's in Africana Studies.
00:15:41.000Now, again, this is the kind of study regimen that creates career useless people.
00:15:48.000You can't get a job as an Africana studies major outside of politics or social work or being an Africana studies professor.
00:15:57.000It doesn't actually create a usable degree in any way.
00:16:01.000His experience there, readings of critical race theorists in the classroom and activism for left-wing causes on campus is emblematic of the highly charged debate over what is taught in American universities.
00:16:12.000What did he actually learn at Bodouin?
00:16:14.000Mamdani's campaign did not respond to requests for comments about his college years, but professors there challenged the idea his education was politically circumscribed, and they described a serious student who was interested in history and sociology.
00:16:27.000He formed a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which is a radical anti-Semitic group.
00:16:33.000He tried to get Bodouin to join an academic boycott of Israel.
00:16:39.000He, again, joined a studies department that was deeply ensconced in the idea that America is racist, colonialist, and filled with state violence.
00:16:51.000That's where he first read Franz Fanon.
00:16:54.000Again, he's like directly from my book, Lions and Scavengers.
00:16:56.000Fanon is like, again, the kind of spokesperson for what I call the barbarian mindset, this idea that all ills all over the world are the fault of the West, and therefore the West must import these barbarians into our own countries in order to destroy us from within as a sort of spiritual penance for our victimization campaign.
00:17:18.000Apparently, Mamdani stood out to his professors.
00:17:24.000His professor said, quote, it's rare for someone to come to college and say, I want to major in Afrikana studies.
00:17:36.000So, again, this is where it comes from.
00:17:38.000We inculcate this sort of stuff in our kids at the university level.
00:17:42.000We tell an entire generation of people that they are, in fact, victims of a system that has made them the most wealthy, prosperous, and free people in the history of planet Earth.
00:17:52.000And then we sell them the soap that if you grant power to one of these people, one of these revolutionaries, that they will fix all of your problems.
00:17:59.000There are a lot of politicians willing to sell that soap, whether it is Mamdani on the left or a wide variety of politicians on the populist right who also say the same thing to the right-wing version of this.
00:18:08.000The left-wing version of the grievance campaign is that America is an awful, terribly racist place that has aggrieved third world minorities and crackdown on gays and lesbians and therefore must be brought low by the revolutionaries.
00:18:20.000Capitalism has brought us all to this horrible fate.
00:18:24.000On the right, there is an equal and opposite movement.
00:18:28.000It has not taken over the Republican Party yet, but it's attempting to.
00:18:31.000And that right-wing movement is saying the same thing, except it sort of reverses the victimhood class.
00:18:36.000The victimhood class here would be white Christian males, and the idea would be that white Christian males have been brought low by the system, and that therefore the only corrective to that is a complete revolution against capitalism, meritocracy, and all the rest.
00:18:49.000Now, at the seed of both of these movements, there is a grain of truth.
00:18:55.000There is truth to the idea that America, historically speaking, was not good to black people.
00:19:00.000That America, historically speaking, was not good to certain classes of immigrants.
00:19:05.000But the idea that that's because the American system is bad, that's not a flaw with the system, that that's the feature of the system, that's wrong.
00:19:13.000When people say white Christian males have been put under boot by the system, there's certainly truth to the idea that there is discriminatory policy, both socially and in governmental policy, that has discriminated against white Christian males over the course of the last 30, 40, 50 years.
00:19:30.000But the idea that that is emblematic of the constitutional system or meritocracy or capitalism, and the only solution is some sort of dictatorship of the white Christian male proletariat, overthrowing constitutional norms and boundaries, going after minorities, that this somehow is the solution.
00:19:49.000That is just as revolutionary from the opposite point of view.
00:19:52.000And in both cases, that sort of crap is being fostered and fomented by boomers who wink and nod at this sort of stuff as jet fuel for their own ambitions or who see these people as sort of the more passionate offspring of their own ideological predilections.
00:20:07.000All right, coming up, Jon Stewart performs unspeakable acts on Zoran Mamdani.
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00:22:33.000So Jon Stewart, who is now well into his 60s, he's no longer the cool kid in school who is making the funny smug faces at the very, very short clips taken out of context.
00:22:44.000Now he is passing the baton to Zoran Momdani.
00:22:49.000Jon Stewart has always been horrible for our body politic.
00:22:53.000I've been critical of Jon Stewart since the very first moment because Jon Stewart turned news into comedy, but then pretended that he was a news person.
00:23:00.000So you do the clown nose on, clown nose off routine, which has allowed him to hide behind his sanctified status as a pseudo-comedian in order to be incredibly scurrilous about how he pursues politics.
00:23:14.000Well, now Stewart has anointed Mom Dani, Jackie Robinson, because he has to fit Mom Dani somehow into his boomer framework, right?
00:23:24.000The boomer framework that basically says that as long as you are brown and you are going to be elected to a position, that means that you're being elected to the position in a historic way, fighting back against white supremacy.
00:23:38.000This is how, again, Zoran Mamdani would remain a fringe figure in the DSA, except for the fact that he does have older generations fostering him, funding him, paying for him.
00:23:48.000And Momdani is emblematic of his generation, just as Stewart is emblematic of his generation on the left.
00:23:57.000Honestly, you know, I think any New Yorker who looks at someone getting an opportunity who's representing communities that have not been as representative, a Muslim, a young person, a progressive, a Democratic socialist, you know, there are so many different communities that are looking to you.
00:24:15.000And this, I hate to put it on you, as a bit of a Jackie Robinson moment.
00:24:19.000And I know that that probably will be a lot of fun.
00:24:22.000He also waits for me to put that on him.
00:24:24.000But man, oh man, what an exciting opportunity.
00:25:02.000Jackie Robinson was a black man who faced death threats and slurs every day of his playing career.
00:25:08.000And long after for the great crime of being a black man playing baseball, Zoran Momdani has been rewarded and feted and handed everything this country has to offer specifically because of his ethnic diversity and immigrant background.
00:25:21.000And somehow he's akin to Jackie Robinson.
00:25:27.000And what I love hearing about this is one of the things that's been so frustrating in our politics is so much of it has been defined over these last 10 years as the negative case against someone.
00:25:37.000And finally, and I think this is not blown smoke.
00:25:40.000I think you've made an affirmative case for people.
00:25:43.000I think the enthusiasm that they have for you is because you've made an affirmative case that's not about protecting something that's going to be lost or a bad man that's over there.
00:26:11.000Stewart is the Democratic establishment.
00:26:13.000I mean, it's hard to say that Kathy Hochl isn't the Democratic establishment.
00:26:16.000Kathy Hochul literally appeared on stage with Mom Donnie two nights ago, even while she says that she's not going to do any of the things that he wants her to do.
00:26:24.000Because again, for the boomers, it's all about that revolutionary energy.
00:26:27.000Now, here's the thing about revolutionary energy: everyone who hopes to harness the revolutionary energy and channel it toward more moderate goals fails.
00:26:36.000The revolutionary energy always eats everything around it.
00:27:22.000I process what everybody says, but I also have to balance governing this state and making sure that those people who are actually the reason we have a generous, supportive budget that helps lift people up, it's their revenues that we tax.
00:27:45.000New Yorkers don't like Mom Donnie's ideas, but they want to be part of the revolution.
00:27:49.000They want to feel part of the thing because too many New Yorkers, particularly young New Yorkers, whose elders have massaged them and have treated them with kid gloves and have never told them no, have told them that all of their own failures, all of their own sicknesses, all of their own shortcomings are not their fault and are not correctable by them.
00:28:09.000They're only correctable by a shift in the system.
00:28:13.000Those people have made their bet and now they're going to have to lie in it.
00:28:18.000And once this energy is loosed, it cannot be contained.
00:28:22.000The Democrats have loosed the whirlwind and it is going to eat them now.
00:28:25.000There's some new polls, for example, up in Maine showing that Graham Plattner, the Nazi tattooed candidate who's supposedly an oyster farmer, but actually is the scion of apparently relative wealth.
00:28:37.000Well, after that news came out that he has a Nazi tattoo, which he then had covered up, there was a poll showing that the current Maine governor jumped in front of him in the race by a couple of points.
00:29:17.000The revolutionaries will always have people who justify them, who softpeddle them, who allow them to lie about their own positions in order to achieve power.
00:29:25.000I mean, you saw in that Canary Mission video, the basic idea put forward by DSA members that they're going to say the things they need to do in order to obtain power.
00:29:34.000They're going to lie in order to obtain power, and then they're going to do the revolutionary stuff.
00:29:56.000We were asked if I had a tattoo that had Nazi overtones.
00:30:02.000I have had this thing for ages and it had never once come up.
00:30:09.000At that point, we looked at it, we saw what they sent.
00:30:12.000And it's a stylized skull and crossbones.
00:30:15.000Stylized skull and crossbones are very popular with military units for obvious reasons, but it looked quite similar.
00:30:21.000And at that point, I don't want something like that on my body that is going to make people think I have any kind of ideological similarity to something that I'm that is essentially so antithetical to my politics.
00:30:37.000So I was more than happy to get it covered up.
00:30:40.000As soon as so you learned in October and as soon as you learned, you got it covered up immediately within days, within a day.
00:30:57.000Well, you know, again, this attempt to cover for platforms, it's not because the left is somehow really upset about the Nazi tattoo and they're happy that he got rid of it.
00:31:07.000It's because the whole goal is to cover for the radicals, to allow the radicals free reign.
00:31:13.000And this is how you end up with Zorin Mamdani as a radical leader in New York.
00:31:16.000And it's why the future of the Democratic Party is with radicalism, because there is no systemic immune system rejection of this radicalism.
00:31:26.000Now, the same thing seems to be happening on the right, and it is a real problem because it turns out that the vast majority of Americans are normies.
00:31:33.000The vast majority of Americans like meritocracy.
00:31:36.000The vast majority of Americans believe in the traditional American dream, meaning economic progress for them and for their children, meaning capacity to build community and church and live in freedom.
00:31:50.000The vast majority of Americans like the Constitution and the Declaration.
00:31:53.000In other words, the vast majority of Americans like the country.
00:31:57.000But if you let the radical revolutionary vanguard take over your party out of some sort of benighted idea that you must unite with the radicals in order to achieve victory, you're not going to achieve victory, number one, because Democrats are in rough waters because of what they've done here.
00:32:12.000But number two, the victory that you achieve will be pyrrhic because you will have sacrificed the thing that you actually care about to the people who hate that thing, all in the name of garnering enthusiasm from the young.
00:32:25.000And by the way, if this were really working out great for the young, why are they so depressed?
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00:33:34.000Well, now it's time for some fast facts.
00:33:40.000Speaking of radicalism and the impacts on policy that radicalism can have, Breitbart has a good report out today based on a New York Times report about the kiddie stroll sex market on LA's Figueroa Street.
00:33:54.000According to the New York Times, for the 77th Street Division, which covers the northern half of the Figueroa Corridor, prostitution had always been a problem.
00:34:01.000But in recent years, the officers had seen the magnitude of child sex trafficking explode.
00:34:06.000Now, you should know that Figueroa is just in the middle of downtown.
00:34:10.000Gangs that had long sold drugs began to take advantage of Figueroa's lucrative opportunity.
00:34:14.000With a dozen girls, one trafficker could easily make $12,000 a night.
00:34:18.000Drugs are sold once and gone forever, but girls can be resold indefinitely, said Police Sergeant Alvaro Navarro, who had been in the division for two decades.
00:34:25.000Motel owners who noticed the parades of customers but feared the gang's retribution kept quiet.
00:34:32.000According to the New York Times, California repealed the law allowing the police to arrest women who loitered with the intent to engage in prostitution.
00:34:39.000That repeal was known as SB 357, and it was intended to prevent profiling of black, brown, and trans women based on how they, of course, of course it was, of course, because radicalism always comes, guys, with a smile.
00:34:53.000How dare you arrest women who are loitering or men dressed as women who are loitering, clearly with intent to prostitute themselves?
00:35:08.000When it was implemented in January 2023, according to the New York Times, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them.
00:35:19.000Now officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage.
00:35:23.000But sometimes with the fake eyelashes and the wigs, it was impossible to tell.
00:35:28.000One girl told voice officers her trafficker had explained things succinctly.
00:35:34.000Apparently, by the end of 2023, the city attorney was calling Figueroa the kiddie stroll because many of the girls weren't even 13 years old.
00:35:41.000Now, again, that bill was pushed by a state rep named state senator named Scott Weiner, who is currently running for Congress.
00:35:50.000Weiner, you'll recall, is the person who's also been pretty famously featured in photos dressed in SNM gear in the middle of gay parades and all the rest.
00:36:00.000The ACLU had backed this pro-prostitution bill.
00:36:06.000The New York Times basically ignored the fact that Weiner is running for Congress and was also one of the driving forces behind all this, as well as Newsom's involvement.
00:36:17.000Those consequences can actually be counted in lives lost, in lives wrecked, and all the rest.
00:36:23.000Meanwhile, again, radicalism has a permission structure.
00:36:27.000Our Quasi friend Michael Moles was on the Hill speaking with the Senate Judiciary Committee about this yesterday, where he promptly pointed out that all the talk about right-wing violence, even if that's true, there is right-wing violence, left-wing extremist violence is rewarded by the structure in a way that right-wing violence is not.
00:36:46.000You know, there is appropriate concern, the kind of concern that one would never have on the left because they don't face any threats on college campuses.
00:36:53.000College campuses are key, though, here, Senator, because when some fringe right-winger does something awful, he's castigated, thrown into prison, as he should be.
00:37:01.000When a fringe left-winger commits terrorist attacks, sometimes he's given university positions, as happened with the Weather Underground, an organization which blew up part of this very building, and they were rewarded with sine cures at universities.
00:37:16.000And here was Michael pointing out that, you know, when you try to claim that it's disproportionately on the right, well, I mean, that's true if you just ignore left-wing violence totally.
00:37:26.000The Covenant School massacre in Nashville, in which a trans-identifying shooter murdered Christian school children after outlining her ideological motivations.
00:37:35.000According to authorities, there was no ideological motive there.
00:37:40.000The Black Lives Matter riots, overtly leftist demonstrations that left dozens of people dead and over a billion dollars worth of property damage.
00:37:48.000Likewise, those failed to show up on registers of left-wing political violence.
00:37:53.000Even an attack by Antifa that targeted me personally, as well as conservative college students for our political views, appeared in official records and data sets as nothing more than obstructing law enforcement.
00:38:06.000It turns out the left commits relatively little political violence when you don't count the political violence that the left commits.
00:38:17.000The permission structures created by the radical left mean that violence is significantly more likely to take place.
00:38:24.000And people who refuse to acknowledge that these permission structures exist, well, they're actually fomenting the permission structures in doing so.
00:38:31.000Meanwhile, one of the most astonishing stories of the day, Bill Gates has now decided to reverse himself on his climate doomerism.
00:38:38.000So you'll remember that Bill Gates has spent decades talking about how the global warming catastrophe is going to swamp us all.
00:38:44.000We'll all be aboard Noah's Ark attempting to escape the tides.
00:38:48.000Well, now he actually says that climate change will not lead to humanity's demise.
00:38:52.000It's almost as though all of these sort of expert class, world-changing pseudo-experts, they didn't know what they were talking about in the first place.
00:39:02.000And we're not being honest because the truth is they always knew that the kinds of measures they were proposing to quote unquote stop global warming were not going to be sufficient to what they were suggesting.
00:39:24.000And shouldn't we, in our awareness of how little generosity there is to help measure, you know, should we get them a measles vaccine or should we do some climate-related activity?
00:39:40.000And if we could take, if we stopped funding all vaccines and that, you know, saved you 0.1 degree, would that be a smart trade-off?
00:39:49.000That's the kind of question we have to ask.
00:39:53.000So I'm a climate activist, but I'm also a child survival activist.
00:39:59.000So what he's saying there is that actually, when it comes to the kind of causes you pursue, there are trade-offs as to human energy.
00:40:05.000But the most important thing he said is, quote, although climate change will have serious consequences.
00:40:10.000This is what he wrote in a blog post, particularly for people in the poorest countries.
00:40:13.000It will not lead to humanity's demise.
00:40:15.000People will be able to live and thrive in most places on earth for the foreseeable future.
00:40:23.000I mean, my goodness, you mean the things that we have been saying on this program for legitimately a decade are true?
00:40:28.000That actually global warming, while it could be a problem in certain areas, is something that human beings can adapt to.
00:40:36.000What's amazing is that after spending decades promoting an agenda that basically amounted to the end of capitalism, something that was pushed by the World Economic Forum and its fellow travelers, that after spending decades claiming that we needed a wild revision of how human beings live in order to marginally lower the curve on the climate increase, now Bill Gates is reversing himself because it turns out that's stupid.
00:41:01.000I mean, here's Bill Gates saying that the Paris climate goals were unrealistic to begin, which of course is true.
00:41:05.000But those of us who said this were castigated and pilloried by people like Bill Gates.
00:41:11.000That was a key milestone because the countries of the world said, hey, this is a mutual problem.
00:41:18.000The temperature rise, the entire world will experience a temperature rise from the emissions from all these countries.
00:41:26.000So getting countries to commit was very, very important.
00:41:31.000The one thing about that accord that turned out not to be realistic was the ambitious goal of staying to 1.5 degrees.
00:41:52.000If you set unrealistic goals and suggest that they are in fact realistic and then you fall short, all you end up doing is number one, discrediting your own cause, and number two, expending vast amounts of resources in pursuit of a dumbass goal to begin.
00:42:05.000I mean, Gates is now saying all the things that those of us who are climate realists were saying for a very, very long time.
00:42:11.000Quote, a few years ago, the government of one low-income country set out to cut emissions by banning synthetic fertilizers.
00:43:40.000We want to solve the ACA premium crisis now.
00:43:46.000Okay, well, I mean, you could also try to negotiate that after the end of the government shutdown when you fund the continuing function of the government.
00:43:54.000I don't, I honestly don't understand what Democrats' strategy here is.
00:43:57.000They've really put themselves in a position where they have no leverage.
00:44:02.000And not only do they have no leverage, the SNAP benefits are about to cut off in a couple of days here.
00:44:07.000And when that happens, Democrats will be blamed.
00:44:10.000They can try to pretend they won't be by going on MSNBC and saying that.
00:44:13.000I mean, here's Representative Angie Craig trying to blame Speaker Johnson for all of this.
00:44:20.000I say if his mouth is moving these days, he's lying.
00:44:24.000There has never been a lapse in appropriations for SNAP in any other government shutdown.
00:44:30.000This isn't new territory for this administration.
00:44:34.000Secretary Brooke Rollins, her own website up until Friday night spelled this out clearly, that that contingency fund can be used to fund SNAP benefits in November.
00:44:50.000Again, like this is good luck with this.
00:45:47.000According to CNN, former President Joe Biden experienced such cognitive decline while in office that it remains a serious question as to whether he was aware of the substance of the various pardons and commutations signed in his name via AutoPen, according to the GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee.
00:46:03.000The committee deems void President Biden's executive actions that were signed using the AutoPen, and the committee determines that action by the Department of Justice is warranted to address the legal consequences of that determination.
00:46:13.000Now, that was made public alongside a 93-page report outlining their conclusions.
00:46:18.000They said they had a cover-up of the president's cognitive decline evidenced, and quote, no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all the executive decisions that were attributed to him.
00:46:30.000Now, the Democrats, of course, are very upset about all of this.
00:46:36.000He says every executive action with the AutoPen should be voided, considering that Joe Biden was no longer with us.
00:46:42.000Oversight Chairman James Comer released a blockbuster report now on the Biden Autopen presidency.
00:46:50.000And this report includes 47 hours worth of transcripts and testimony revealing that every executive action signed by the Autopen without written authorization from President Biden should be voided.
00:47:03.000This is an unprecedented situation in American politics and government.
00:47:09.000The actions of President Biden simply were not all his own actions.
00:47:14.000And there are major implications to that.
00:47:20.000Democrats are still trying to misdirect away from this.
00:47:22.000Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, he is angry at the Representative James Comer, who is pushing this forward through the House Judiciary Committee.
00:47:31.000Well, no, actually, the clown activity was you guys for like several years maintaining that your president was totally fine only to take him and dump him overboard the minute that it became clear that he was actually holding down your chances of a 2024 victory.
00:47:47.000The so-called chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comar, continues to behave like a malignant clown.
00:47:54.000He can't point to a single thing that he's actually done to make life better for the American people.
00:48:02.000Well, I mean, that's, I mean, I have a question.
00:48:06.000You are currently holding up the government.
00:48:08.000You're the one who's promoting the shutdown.
00:48:30.000So why don't we begin with this kind of insane story about the FBI attempting to access your phone records during the Jack Smith probe?
00:48:37.000What's the story there for those who haven't been following?
00:48:40.000Well, Ben, I think it's beyond attempting to access.
00:48:42.000I think they actually did, which is an outright disgrace.
00:48:45.000This is the extraordinarily partisan Jack Smith case in 2023, just after he committed the Mar-a-Lago break-in, if you recall that, the photo op that they leaked out across the media with President Trump's in President Trump's home, where they had all these documents with confidential covers on them that they immediately leaked into the media.
00:49:08.000He decided it's a good idea to come after eight sitting senators and a congressman.
00:49:13.000What he did was he requested our phone records, evidently requested more phone records than what was revealed.
00:49:18.000But what we found out initially was that myself and seven of my Senate colleagues, plus a congressman, all had our phone records handed over to Jack Smith and his extraordinary witch hunt.
00:49:28.000And I think at any point during that period, Ben, any sentient being who read the news media would know that there was a witch hunt underway, that Jack Smith's effort was wholly partisan.
00:49:40.000And for my carrier, Verizon in this case, to just turn around and hand over my phone records that not only told, you know, whom I'd called, the duration of the call, but where I was when I made the phone calls, Verizon, more than happy to hand it over.
00:49:54.000AT ⁇ T would not hand over Ted Cruz's records.
00:50:06.000Well, I came to find out that the general counsel of Verizon used to be a staffer for one Democrat congressman named Henry Waxman, one of the most partisan players in the House of Representatives.
00:50:17.000So what you have now is a general counsel who's a Democrat operative, more than happy to conspire and to collaborate with Jack Smith on this witch hunt.
00:50:27.000There is a speech and debate clause in the United States Constitution, absence of treason or felony.
00:50:33.000Any of my conversations like this are privileged.
00:50:36.000And the pretext here is just beyond comprehension that they believe that they could come in and begin to snoop and spy on United States senators.
00:50:48.000And my phone company, again, I'm just shocked that they would have handed my records over, not let me know.
00:50:54.000I talked with people that are very familiar with how this works here in Washington in the legal community.
00:50:58.000They said, had I been a drug dealer, Ben, I would have probably been notified by Verizon.
00:51:03.000But as a sitting U.S. Senator, no notification.
00:51:06.000Again, an operative working in the general counsel's office, you know, we'll let the air clear here and find out what really went on.
00:51:13.000But you've got this former Democrat staffer's team that is more than happy to collaborate with Jack Smith against sitting United States senators handing over this sort of sensitive information.
00:51:22.000The legislative privilege does apply here.
00:51:26.000That is, again, a constitutional red line that they've crossed, and there's a lot to be answered for right now.
00:51:34.000So, Senator, what do you think the corrective ought to be?
00:51:36.000Assuming that everything that you're saying bears out, that the Verizon made a political decision to turn over the records, that Jack Smith's investigation was indeed predicated on political attempts to target members of the Republican Party, high-ranking members, including yourself.
00:51:49.000What should the corrective activity be here?
00:51:51.000Well, I think this should never be allowed to happen again.
00:51:54.000So I think the punishment needs to be swift and it needs to be severe.
00:51:57.000We only just found out about this a couple of weeks ago.
00:51:59.000Verizon has been wholly uncooperative to this point.
00:52:02.000I've inquired about the information that they received.
00:52:05.000What sort of documentation did they get from Jack Smith that they relied upon to hand over my records?
00:52:32.000You'd think I'd at least get an apology.
00:52:35.000But again, it's talk to the hand at this point, and that is not going to work well.
00:52:39.000So making an example out of this situation, I think, is absolutely important, Ben.
00:52:43.000We cannot have this to happen in the United States of America.
00:52:46.000If I put it into your realm, you're a great journalist.
00:52:50.000Could you imagine if the Department of Justice could have an FBI person down the hall every time you talk to a source?
00:52:59.000Think about what the chilling effect would be.
00:53:01.000Every time I talk to one of my colleagues about the legislative process, do I need to worry about the FBI investigating me to seek those records?
00:53:09.000You think about what would happen to you.
00:53:11.000The Department of Justice has actually put in place explicit rules prohibiting the snooping on news gathering type of activities that I just described for you.
00:53:21.000I would think that a United States senator in the legislative process would at least be accorded that level of deference.
00:53:26.000Instead, Jack Smith and his wholly partisan team comes after United States senators and our carriers are more than happy to hand over the information.
00:53:36.000So obviously the Trump administration is now in charge of the FBI and the DOJ.
00:53:40.000What's been the response from the FBI under Cash Patel and the DOJ under Pam Bondi on this topic?
00:53:45.000Well, thankfully, we do have Cash Patel and Dan Bongino there as soon as they found out, and they only found out by accident, Ben, that this had happened, that these records had been revealed.
00:53:55.000As soon as they found out, they convened the eight senators, brought us together and explained what they knew.
00:54:02.000But this is something that they are digging into to get to the bottom of.
00:54:05.000This is misbehavior beyond comprehension when you think about the executive branch spying on the legislative branch and the constitutional implications of that.
00:54:13.000So they have immediately stepped up and said they're going to get to the bottom of it.
00:54:16.000Pam Bondi could not be more cooperative as well.
00:54:18.000And a number of my colleagues have reached out to Pam demanding an investigation here to get to the bottom of what Jack Smith did, what his team did.
00:54:26.000Again, I want to understand from the perspective of the carrier who should have been protecting my interest as a customer, who should have at least had sufficient diligence, undertaken sufficient diligence to check the United States Constitution before handing my records over.
00:54:38.000ATT at least was willing to ask what the legal predicate was.
00:54:42.000Verizon evidently more than happy to collaborate with Jack Smith.
00:54:52.000The DOJ and FBI, I'm sure, are digging into this as quickly as they can.
00:54:56.000But with this type of investigation, they won't be able to disclose perhaps the details that we'd like to know right now.
00:55:03.000I'm going to keep digging at it from the other side.
00:55:06.000Well, Senator Haggerty, down another topic.
00:55:08.000You were the former ambassador to Japan under President Trump during his last term.
00:55:12.000You've been watching President Trump in Japan meeting the new prime minister of Japan, forming a strategy that looks like it's about forming alliances to help counter the rise of China.
00:55:22.000What do you make of the president's trip?
00:55:24.000What do you make of his strategy right now vis-a-vis Japan?
00:55:27.000His trip is going extremely well, Ben.
00:55:29.000I talked with our U.S. ambassador to Japan, George Glass, yesterday.
00:55:32.000I talked with Kevin Kim, who was on the way to the airport to pick the president up in South Korea as well.
00:55:37.000He's our chargé d'affaires, the acting ambassador in South Korea.
00:55:40.000They are working their hearts out to make certain that this is the most productive trip the president could possibly have.
00:55:46.000His time in Japan was absolutely outstanding.
00:55:49.000If you think about the business deals that were announced, the capital investment that's coming into America, this is something we started under his first term with great success.
00:55:56.000Japan became, when I was ambassador, the number one investor in America.
00:56:02.000They're right back in the swing of it again.
00:56:04.000And again, our ambassador Glass is doing a terrific job of making all of this work.
00:56:08.000The Japanese want to be our strongest possible ally.
00:56:12.000The new prime minister, Takeichi, she is very focused on strengthening U.S.-Japan alliances.
00:56:18.000I spoke with her just last week about this.
00:56:20.000She's determined to make the strongest possible relationship.
00:56:24.000You may recall that President Trump had a very strong relationship with Prime Minister Abe when I was serving as ambassador.
00:56:30.000Prime Minister Abe was a good friend of President Trump, a very good friend of mine.
00:56:34.000And Prime Minister Takeichi is a protégé of Prime Minister Abe.
00:56:38.000In fact, she gave President Trump, Prime Minister Abe's favorite putter, a great remembrance for someone that President Trump deeply misses.
00:56:46.000Prime Minister Abe, as you know, was sadly assassinated in Japan.
00:56:50.000But she's going to carry the mantle forward.
00:56:52.000What I see happening in Japan is much deeper cooperation on the economic front.
00:56:58.000And that forms a foundation, Ben, from an economic standpoint, from an energy cooperation and collaboration standpoint, and from a technology collaboration standpoint.
00:57:06.000That solid foundation supports then our military cooperation.
00:57:10.000And we have more United States military stationed in Japan than any other nation in the world.
00:57:16.000People ask, why do we have such a large presence there?
00:57:18.000Well, it's pretty simple when you think about it.
00:57:20.000Japan is situated in a very tough neighborhood, meaning you have North Korea, Russia, and China right at your doorstep.
00:57:26.000If you think about what's happening in the region, whether it's in the Philippines, it's in the Taiwan Strait, China's aggression has been extraordinary.
00:57:33.000After we fell, after the fall of Afghanistan under Joe Biden, what we saw was this sort of behavior manifest itself all over the world, but particularly in the Taiwan Strait.
00:57:43.000We saw China's aggression step up dramatically after they realized the United States under Joe Biden would not step up and protect its allies.
00:57:50.000What we've seen happening in the Philippines, even more aggressive.
00:57:53.000Now we've had both South Korea and Japan working with the Philippines, working with us, creating a calmer environment there and better military-to-military cooperation.
00:58:03.000My goal is to see more of that take place.
00:58:06.000We just had a trilateral dialogue between South Korean, Japanese, and United States business people in Tokyo.
00:58:12.000That happened about 10 days ago with about 40 CEOs, over 100 attendees, again, looking to deepen our economic cooperation, our technological cooperation.
00:58:21.000And I think everyone understood at that meeting that our economic security runs parallel to our national security.
00:58:27.000And the stronger our economic ties, the deeper those ties happen to be, then the stronger we will be as allies together.
00:58:32.000And I see nothing but a bright future ahead, both for U.S.-Japan relations, but also for U.S. relations with the Republic of Korea.
00:58:40.000And more and more cooperation, Ben, will begin to take place between the Republic of Korea and Japan.
00:58:45.000And as you may know, there's a long history dating back to 1910 when Japan occupied the Korean Peninsula.
00:58:51.000That took place until 1945 when we liberated the Korean Peninsula.
00:58:54.000Now you've got North Korea and that tension there.
00:58:58.000Kim Jong-un actually started launching again ahead of the president's trip to Asia.
00:59:03.000President Trump is focused on that relationship as well.
00:59:06.000But I'm very optimistic that we're going to see new cooperation from an economic standpoint, a military standpoint, and again, an opportunity to see things settle down.
00:59:15.000President Trump's going to meet with President Xi here in South Korea.
00:59:19.000That's a new breakthrough opportunity.
00:59:37.000Coming up, we are going to jump into the question of President Trump trying to get a settlement out of the DOJ for all of their malfeasance during the last several years going after him.
00:59:49.000We'll talk about that, the Republican response to it.
00:59:51.000Plus, the Senate actually bucking President Trump on trade.
00:59:53.000Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.
00:59:55.000If you're not a member, become a member.