Pete Hegseth is a military colonel who went to Princeton and served as a Fox News host. He s a devout Christian and has all the right principles to be the next Secretary of Defense, but Democrats are determined to block his confirmation.
00:01:05.000They were all wearing idiotic uniforms and carrying signs that said things like, no Hegseth, no Crusade, and no Hegseth, no Christian Jihad.
00:03:02.000Getting carried out like the babies they are.
00:03:04.000I haven't seen a person carried like that since I had to schlep my four-year-old into her room last night for screaming during dinner a lot.
00:03:11.000In any case, Pete Hegseth's opening statement was exactly what you'd expect from Pete Hegseth, which is to say it was excellent, it was articulate, and it had all the right principles.
00:03:18.000Here was Hegseth praising the Lord for his nomination.
00:03:21.000As Jenny and I pray together every morning, all glory, regardless of the outcome, belongs to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
00:03:56.000I'm not a perfect person, as has been acknowledged.
00:03:59.000Saved by the grace of God, by Jesus and Jenny.
00:04:04.000I'm not a perfect person, but redemption is real.
00:04:08.000And God forged me in ways that I know I'm prepared for.
00:04:12.000And I'm honored by the people standing and sitting behind me.
00:04:16.000I look forward to leading this Pentagon on behalf of the warfighters.
00:04:19.000And then Hegseth proceeded to talk about some of his policy prescriptions.
00:04:22.000Here was Pete Hegseth, President Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, blasting the Afghanistan withdrawal and saying, hey, listen, if you're involved, you need to lose your job.
00:04:31.000There's been no accountability for the disaster of the withdrawal in Afghanistan.
00:04:35.000And that's precisely why we're here today, is that leadership...
00:04:40.000It's been unwilling to take accountability.
00:04:42.000It's the time to restore that to our most senior ranks.
00:04:45.000You can hear some of the senators on the Democrat.
00:04:48.000No, you didn't do a great job and all those people should be fired.
00:04:51.000Hegseth also talked about getting rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion as a priority at the DOD. It needs to be a lethal warfighting machine, not an initiative for making people feel better about their woke HR choices.
00:05:14.000We need to make sure every warrior is fully qualified on their assigned weapons system, every pilot's fully qualified and current on the aircraft they are flying, and every general or flag officer is selected for leadership or promotion purely based on performance, readiness, and merit.
00:05:34.000Leaders at all levels will be held accountable.
00:05:38.000And warfighting and lethality and the readiness of the troops and their families will be our only focus.
00:05:46.000Again, all this should be non-controversial, but the left has made it somehow controversial.
00:05:50.000Other things that Hegseth suggested, he said, our top priority is avoiding nuclear war.
00:06:57.000We need people who are actually in front line warfighting positions at DOD. Not these career political bureaucrats who somehow made their way up the ranks by pleasing all of the right politically correct folks.
00:07:31.000Of standing up to the Iranian terror-fighting nexus and to Turkish predations.
00:07:37.000This is a moment of opportunity for the United States military, if we can seize it, if we can change our procurement processes, if we can change how we actually recruit, if we can change how the American war machine works, which I think Pete Hexth, I think he's going to go in there with a chainsaw, Javier Mille style.
00:07:52.000I think he's going to cut a lot of the dead wood, and I think that he is going to change how things are done at DOD. I think that's why he's a threat to the system, which is precisely...
00:08:02.000And Pete Hegseth, if you think you're going to get the best of him in this hearing, you are out of your damned mind.
00:08:08.000And meanwhile, again, those nomination hearings have begun.
00:08:12.000It is absolutely necessary that we get the precise reverse of what Joe Biden did.
00:08:17.000So Joe Biden gave a press conference yesterday that was sort of bizarre retrospective, an attempt to rewrite his own history yesterday at the White House.
00:08:24.000And it was just lie after lie after lie after lie.
00:08:28.000If people wonder how Donald Trump became president again, the answer is Joseph R. Biden.
00:08:32.000The worst president of the modern era.
00:08:35.000The only possible challenger to his terrible presidency would be Jimmy Carter.
00:08:43.000Here was, for example, Joe Biden suggesting that illegal crossings went way down under his presidency, which is a lie.
00:08:51.000We let in somewhere between 8 and 10 million illegal immigrants while he was president of the United States.
00:08:55.000Let's get something in mind about the border.
00:08:58.000When I became president, the numbers came way down, number one.
00:09:02.000Number two, we had a circumstance where I pushed very hard for a bipartisan agreement to put more people on the border, more secret services.
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00:12:05.000Meanwhile, Joe Biden was actually taunting Putin about saying that he would visit Kiev in a matter of days.
00:12:09.000We should note at this point that Joe Biden's initial response to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was to offer a plane ride out of Ukraine to Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine.
00:13:46.000But the rewriting of history continued to pace.
00:13:48.000Here was Joe Biden yesterday talking about what an amazing job we did in Afghanistan, which is incredible because there are 13 dead American service people thanks to his botched pullout from Afghanistan.
00:14:35.000Okay, and it went amazing, as it turns out.
00:14:39.000That went absolutely, incredibly well.
00:14:42.000The fact is, the pullout from Afghanistan was the single worst botched American moment in military foreign policy history, perhaps.
00:14:50.000Turning over that country back to the Taliban, the full-scale collapse of our allies in Afghanistan due to Joe Biden deliberately pulling back air support for any of our allies in Afghanistan.
00:15:01.000By the way, no one, no American troops were dying in Afghanistan at the time.
00:16:07.000Not to the Israelis, not to the Saudis, and not to the Ukrainians, not to the Kurds.
00:16:11.000Please, name an American ally that feels stronger because of Joe Biden today.
00:16:17.000And we have strengthened partnerships all across the Americas, defending democracy, targeting corruption, addressing migration, increasing prosperity, and protecting Amazon rainforest, which captures billions of tons, billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year.
00:16:37.000Overall, we've reinvigorated people's faith in the United States as a true, true partner.
00:16:43.000By the way, the allies that he supposedly supported in South America are people like Lula da Silva in Brazil, who's basically a left-wing authoritarian.
00:17:06.000I mean, this is a guy who thinks that some of the main concerns for the United States would be like AI misidentifying people of color as a national security concern.
00:17:57.000And there have been a lot of studies to show that bias is a genuine challenge when it comes to artificial intelligence and the ways in which that could undermine social cohesion in the United States and globally has national security implications.
00:18:13.000And terrorism has national security implications.
00:18:16.000You know what actually has some pretty significant national security implications?
00:18:21.000You guys surrendering to terrorists and handing them billions of dollars in American military equipment.
00:18:29.000He says, you know, when it comes to that Afghanistan pullout, which, by the way, was the turning point of the Biden presidency, he says that, yeah, we had some challenges, a few difficulties.
00:18:37.000You mean how you abjectly surrendered to some of the worst people on planet Earth and got American troops killed?
00:18:43.000Would those be the challenges and difficulties, Jake?
00:18:48.000America's better off today that we are not entering now our 25th year of war of Americans fighting and dying of billions and billions of dollars spent in Afghanistan.
00:18:57.000And what we have been able to do instead is refocus that effort and energy and attention on the challenges of the future.
00:19:05.000Now, when you end a war after 20 years, with all of the decisions that have piled up over that time.
00:19:11.000There are going to be challenges and difficulties, and there were challenges and difficulties in the period of the drawdown.
00:19:17.000But people predicted once we left Afghanistan, it would harm our alliances.
00:19:25.000They predicted that we would have a safe haven in Afghanistan for plotting terrorist attacks against the American homeland.
00:19:34.000Terrorism remains a very real concern, but President Biden pointed out before he pulled out that it's a more diffuse and metastasized threat, including the kind of homegrown violent extremism that we saw on display in New Orleans in January.
00:19:49.000In fact, over the course of these four years, we have seen President Biden, that was the first terrorist attack that has happened on American soil.
00:19:58.000It was not connected to Afghanistan as far as we know.
00:20:00.000It was connected to inspiration from ISIS.
00:20:03.000And so President Biden believes that the decision he took has left America in a profoundly stronger position.
00:20:12.000By the way, the withdrawal from Afghanistan led to two obviously predictable responses.
00:20:16.000One, Russia thinking that America was weak and thus invading Ukraine.
00:20:19.000And two, Iran thinking that America and its allies were weak and thus prompting Hamas to invade Israel on October 7th, 2023. These people cannot go soon enough and they need to be replaced by people who are going to clean house.
00:20:32.000In 60 Minutes over the weekend, did an awful interview with a former State Department staffer who quit the Biden administration because the Biden administration, according to this crazed pro-terrorist former State Department staffer for like 20 years, was too pro-Israel, which is a wild misapprehension of exactly what Joe Biden had been doing with the Israel situation since like late 2023. That department needs to be cleansed.
00:21:11.000I think Tulsi Gabbard will be confirmed.
00:21:13.000I think all these people will be confirmed and should be.
00:21:15.000They need to go into their various departments with a chainsaw like Javier Mille and start cutting staff immediately and replacing them with people who are not...
00:21:25.000Actual globalists, people who believe that American priorities come first.
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00:24:13.000All three of you viewers over at MSNBC? Apparently, according to Mediaite, MSNBC will bring Rachel Maddow back five nights a week to cover the first 100 days of Donald Trump's second term.
00:24:23.000She's literally the only host on that network who really has any draw at all.
00:24:28.000In 2024, Maddow raked in 2.5 million average viewers, which quadrupled her CNN competition at 9 p.m.
00:24:35.000Sean Hannity led the time slot, as always, at Fox News with 2.8 million average viewers.
00:24:41.000Alex Wagner, who hosts Maddow's hour the other four nights a week right now, will be hitting the road for the network.
00:24:45.000Maddow's taking the helm starting on January 20th.
00:24:48.000Maddow is making $30 million a year over at MSNBC, which may in fact be their entire gross receipts at MSNBC at this point, given their low viewership.
00:24:59.000But I think the big media move of the moment, the one that matters most to me because it's the most hilarious.
00:25:05.000So Jennifer Rubin is a former pseudo-conservative columnist for The Washington Post.
00:25:08.000She's not been a conservative for, I don't know, 15 years at this point, but they kept calling her the conservative columnist for The Washington Post.
00:25:14.000She could be reliably counted upon to write the dumbest tripe available.
00:25:18.000She quit The Washington Post yesterday and slammed Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post.
00:25:24.000She is now launching a brand new subscription outlet called The Contrarian.
00:25:33.000I am sure that all two of her readers will be absolutely energized by this new announcement.
00:25:40.000She'll be joined in this prospect by a person named Norm Eisen, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and CNN legal analyst.
00:25:49.000Wow, a constellation of stars happening right here.
00:25:52.000So both of them looked into a camera and then talked and it was terrible for everyone.
00:26:39.000You'll bring your vast audience of anti-authoritarian subscribers over to Substack, and we wish you nothing but the best.
00:26:47.000Speaking of people who have some regerts, Jack Smith, who quit his job after it turns out that the person he was attempting to prosecute was elected president of the United States and was sentenced to four years in the White House.
00:26:57.000Special Counsel Jack Smith, according to the Wall Street Journal, has defended his decision to bring charges against Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election laws.
00:27:05.000He wrote in a report made public early Tuesday, prosecutors believe they had enough evidence to convict Trump had they not been forced to drop the case after his re-election in November.
00:27:13.000Well, I'm sure he did believe that, considering that he could have gotten a Washington, D.C. jury to convict Donald Trump on pretty much anything.
00:27:18.000I think it's important for Americans to note what a bullet we all dodged by Donald Trump actually being re-elected.
00:27:24.000Because the prospect of Donald Trump facing down actual prison time thanks to an out-of-control DOJ presided over by Democrats would have broken so many more institutions in the country than have already been broken.
00:27:38.000These prosecutions that Smith brought went so far beyond the statutory requirements that they were not just bending the law, they were effectively breaking the law.
00:27:48.000So, of course, Smith is now going to claim that if it hadn't been for those darn kids, then he definitely would have gotten away with it.
00:27:54.000If it hadn't been for those darn American people electing Donald Trump to a second term, then he definitely would have gotten Donald Trump.
00:27:59.000It's like the end of every Scooby-Doo episode.
00:28:02.000But you can expect that from Jack Smith, who went after Donald Trump with a blowtorch and ended up coming away with, what, a contract at MSNBC or CNN? And meanwhile, the wildfires in California are still raging.
00:28:15.000Joe Biden has now pledged a massive, a massive federal subsidy to each resident affected by the LA wildfires.
00:28:24.000$770 to every resident affected by LA wildfires.
00:28:28.000Now, far be it for me, a small government conservative, to think that the federal government ought to pass out checks in large numbers to people.
00:28:35.000I actually don't think that they should.
00:28:37.000I don't understand why taxpayers in Kentucky should be subsidizing people in California when California is a very large state with an incredibly large tax base.
00:28:45.000That taxes its residents at exorbitantly high rates and then proceeds to mismanage fire management.
00:28:50.000With that said, if Joe Biden is going to toss $7 trillion out the window every year, it seems to me he can do better than $770 to each resident affected by the LA wildfires, which is going to last under his inflation-ridden economy precisely two grocery cycles.
00:29:05.000According to NewsNation, Biden announced Monday federal aid is flowing to LA as California battles its worst wildfires in state history.
00:29:13.000Biden said, quote, we are not waiting until the fires are over to help victims.
00:29:45.000Worst episode of The Price is Right literally ever.
00:29:48.000As it turns out, the state of California really should be footing the bill considering how they botched this on behalf of all of their residents.
00:29:54.000Good piece in the Wall Street Journal today by Alicia Finley talking about California's policy.
00:30:00.000The L.A. Department of Water and Power in 2019 sought to widen a fire access road and replace old wooden utility poles in the Topanga Canyon, abutting the Palisades with steel ones to make power lines fire and wind resistant.
00:30:11.000In the process, crews removed an estimated 182 Broughton milk vetch plants, an endangered species.
00:30:17.000The utility then halted the project as state officials investigating the plant's destruction.
00:30:22.000More than a year later, the California Coastal Commission issued a cease and desist order, fined the utility $2 million, and required mitigation for the project's impact on the species.
00:30:31.000This involved replacing non-native vegetation with plants native to the state.
00:30:37.000So, basically, to protect the milk vetch they let, all of the power lines remain vulnerable to fire.
00:30:45.000Since the milk vetch requires wildfires to propagate, the only way to boost its numbers is to let the land burn.
00:30:51.000Meanwhile, LA Fire Department Chief Kristen Crowley complains the city cut her budget by $17 million last spring, which she says reduced overtime comp and interfered with wildfire preparation.
00:31:00.000But in truth, the fire budget didn't actually shrink because city leaders last autumn approved a new union contract that boosted pay and benefits by $76 million.
00:31:10.000Before that raise, firefighters in LA, on average, earned $200,000 plus $90,000 in benefits.
00:31:17.000Many retire at 55 with pensions equaling 90% of their final salaries.
00:31:22.000So it turns out that maybe the spending wasn't the problem with the firefighters, except for the fact that these public sector unions are able to pry gigantic contracts out of these cities, and then they're wildly understaffed.
00:31:34.000LA spent $350 million this year on firefighter pensions and benefits alone.
00:31:38.000It feels like that money could have been better used on fire prevention, which made up 5% of the fire department's budget.
00:31:45.000Bloated union contracts and DEI may not have directly hampered the fire response.
00:31:49.000They illustrate the government's wrong-headed priorities.
00:31:54.000According to Alicia Finley, President Trump blamed dry fire hydrants in LA on protections for the Delta smelt.
00:31:58.000The real culprit was an overwhelmed water system, but both reflect government mismanagement.
00:32:03.000Those smelt protections don't allow water to flow from north to south, which means billions of gallons of water being flushed out to the Pacific Ocean every year.
00:32:13.000Meanwhile, the state has decided that basically crime and homelessness are now legal.
00:32:17.000And so we still don't know how these fires started.
00:32:20.000Because many of the wildfires in California have started this way.
00:32:23.000That you basically had homeless people living in the woods and burning things, and that starts wildfires.
00:32:28.000Good Samaritans on Thursday actually detained a homeless man, an illegal immigrant, as it turns out, who they said used a flamethrower to incinerate Christmas trees and garbage cans around the same time as a major fire erupted.
00:32:39.000Meanwhile, when it comes to insurance...
00:32:41.000The insurance commissioners keep attempting to quash the fire insurance business in the state of California.
00:32:46.000They say, we want the prices low and won't allow you to raise the prices.
00:32:49.000So insurance companies are like, well, then we can't make money, so we're not going to do it, which means everybody just falls back on the state insurance plan, which means that now all the taxpayers get to pay for all of this.
00:32:58.000It is no wonder that you have Speaker Johnson saying, listen, if we're going to give aid on a federal level to California, they're going to need to restructure some of their fire policies because otherwise you're just flushing money down the toilet.
00:33:36.000If the federal taxpayer is going to be subsidizing California, perhaps California should actually, you know, pursue the measures that might mitigate wildfires like this one.
00:33:44.000The good news is that, as always, Governor Gavin Newsom right on top of it.
00:33:48.000He says one of his top priorities, he doesn't want land speculators buying a property in the Palisades or Malibu.
00:34:43.000I think the big issue here, however, is the obvious racism against Karen Bass, the mayor of L.A., who has botched this thing beyond recognition.
00:34:50.000The good news is actresses Yvette Nicole Brown and Kim Whitley are on the case, and they say they will hear no racism against the elected mayor of Los Angeles.
00:35:54.000I mean, the thing that's different this time is that you have a Palisades fire that has burned 23,000 acres, has been burning for seven days, and is 17% contained, and your mayor was out of town in Ghana.
00:36:07.000I mean, I feel like there are a few distinctions.
00:36:09.000By the way, the fire warnings are now extending pretty much all the way up the coast, through Malibu, all the way towards Santa Barbara at this point, because the winds are still picking up.
00:36:19.000They're going to pick up again today, and there's a lot of dry tinder in those particular areas.
00:36:23.000Mayor Bass, for her part, she issued an executive order Monday that seeks to expedite rebuilding efforts.
00:36:28.000Executive Order 1 requires city departments to complete project reviews within 30 days from when a complete application is submitted.
00:36:34.000It's hilarious how they all become Republicans when they actually want to build something.
00:36:37.000Until then, however, they will continue to quash actual livability in the state of California on behalf of trees and the homeless.
00:36:44.000All right, in just one second, we'll get to Israel and Hamas supposedly on the verge of a quote-unquote ceasefire deal.
00:36:51.000The Daily Wire will be live from Washington, D.C. to bring you every moment as Donald Trump is sworn in as 47th President of the United States.
00:36:58.000It's not just an event, it's a movement.
00:36:59.000We're making sure you're front and center for all of it.
00:37:01.000To celebrate, we're giving you 25% off new Daily Wire Plus annual memberships.
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00:37:20.000Meanwhile, with President Trump entering the White House, it appears that Israel and Hamas, the terrorist group that is currently holding 100 hostages, about 70 of those are supposedly alive and they're holding the bodies of 30 others.
00:37:31.000There is a deal that is going to release hostages.
00:37:33.000It's being characterized by some as a ceasefire deal.
00:37:35.000It's being characterized by others as a hostage release deal.
00:37:38.000There's no question that President Trump's threats of all hell breaking loose on Hamas are leading Hamas to try to make a deal before Trump enters office with the Biden administration acting as broker.
00:37:48.000That President Trump and his team would like a headline that says that hostages walk out of Gaza because of President Trump during the first week of his brand new administration.
00:37:56.000And so pressure has been brought on Israel, without a doubt, to come to the table and make some sort of deal.
00:38:01.000The way that this deal stacks up is not something that I particularly like.
00:38:06.000But that is because my belief is that if Israel does not, in fact, make the Strip quiescent, if Israel does not retain control over the Gaza Strip...
00:38:15.000Then they are setting themselves up for further failure.
00:38:18.000I also think that the generalized math in which Israel has participated, and this is Israel's own fault, for decades, which basically says that they will trade terrorists, like living, actual, murderous terrorists, for innocent people who are taken hostage, leads Israel's enemies to take hostages.
00:38:32.000That is just the logic of hostage deals.
00:38:34.000So, with all of that said, the following premises lead to a deal.
00:38:37.000One, Israel was always going to make some sort of deal to try and get its hostages out, because Israel sees it as paramount to get those hostages out alive.
00:38:44.000Two, Hamas was never going to allow all the hostages out because if they do, they lose their leverage and they know it.
00:38:50.000So essentially, by taking hostages, Hamas always, to a certain extent, had Israel over the barrel.
00:38:54.000And the only question was going to be, how many terrorists did Israel have to give up to get some of its hostages back?
00:38:59.000Right now, the calculus seems to be 33 live hostages coming out over the course of the next six weeks, led by women and children.
00:39:06.000Again, Hamas is perhaps the most evil terrorist group on the planet.
00:39:09.000They're literally holding a one-year-old hostage.
00:39:12.000And then the goal would be, if you're Hamas, to get to phase two, which would be a further negotiation that would allow for, quote unquote, the end of the war, which would mean Israel would withdraw most of its troops, if not all of its troops, from the Gaza Strip.
00:39:25.000And Hamas would like to then reconstitute inside Gaza.
00:39:59.000There are a bunch of things that Israel is called upon to do that are very negative militarily.
00:40:03.000that include withdrawal from the so-called netzarim corridor which is a corridor a land corridor that goes basically bisects the gaza strip in an east-west direction and allows for israel to break up movement from terrorists from the south to the north where there are more weapons stockpiles this deal would also limit israel and their ability to police the so-called philadelphia corridor which is the smuggling corridor between egypt and the gaza strip which is how hamass got Terrorists would be released.
00:40:29.000Those terrorists are supposedly going to be released to Qatar and Turkey, both of which hate Israel and are perfectly willing to allow those terrorists to Move back into the Gaza Strip at first available opportunity.
00:40:40.000So there's a serious security danger to Israel.
00:40:42.000If it weren't, Hamas wouldn't be doing the deal.
00:40:44.000That is why Hamas is going to the table.
00:40:46.000And yes, they're also going to the table because they fear that if they don't, they'll get a much worse deal under President Trump who will come in and then, quote unquote, unleash all hell, which would presumably mean allowing Israel to participate in much more severe fashion and mop up operations in the Gaza Strip.
00:41:00.000According to Reuters, negotiators are meeting in Qatar, hoping to finalize details of a plan to end the war in Gaza.
00:41:05.000Steve Witkoff is the Middle East envoy.
00:41:07.000He seems to be working very closely with the Qataris.
00:41:10.000That's not something I'm perfectly comfortable with, since Qatar has very often acted as a sort of cutout for Iran.
00:41:16.000With that said, some sort of deal was probably going to get cut here.
00:41:18.000The only question was just how bad for Israel.
00:41:21.000There's been some talk about the possibility that the Netanyahu government is going to fall.
00:41:36.000If his own coalition drops off the hostage deal and decides to walk out of the government, then his government falls and new elections are called in Israel.
00:41:42.000Netanyahu is betting that won't happen.
00:42:02.000Batal Smotrich has a smaller party than Ben Gavir.
00:42:06.000Smotrich represents a lot of the so-called settlers, people who are living in Judea and Samaria, who really don't like the deal.
00:42:12.000A disproportionate share of Israeli soldiers who've been killed in this war come from Judea and Samaria, are coming from the areas...
00:42:17.000That have elected Patel Smotrich, so they don't like the deal.
00:42:20.000Smotrich is hesitant to topple the government because he recognizes that if that happens, he's probably not likely to sit in the next coalition government in Israel.
00:42:27.000Ben Gavir could single-handedly topple the government, but instead he seems to be demagoguing the issue.
00:42:31.000He's basically saying, I'll only walk out if Smotrich walks out, which is a great way for him to avoid walking out of the government.
00:42:36.000So it appears right now as though some sort of deal is going to go through before President Trump becomes president.
00:42:41.000Trump will get the headline correctly that says that his presidency brought about the release.
00:42:46.000And then the question is to whether this is a livable deal for Israel or whether it threatens Israel and other American allies because reconstitution of Hamas in the Gaza Strip would be quite bad.
00:42:55.000That question is going to come down to further implementation of the deal.
00:42:59.000Apparently, according to Reuters, Hamas is accepting verbal agreements to possibly talk to agree about a ceasefire nearing the end of the war.
00:43:09.000And what that seems to me is Hamas operating from a position of absolute weakness.
00:43:14.000According to the Wall Street Journal, both sides seem galvanized by the prospect of Trump's return to office.
00:43:18.000The incoming president said a week ago a hell will break out in the Middle East if the hostages aren't released by the time he takes office on Monday, repeating a threat he had made earlier.
00:43:35.000They're getting it finished maybe by the end of the week.
00:43:38.000Asked what turned the tide in recent days, an Israeli official said, quote, the Trump effect.
00:43:42.000And that official said Trump's going to get credit no matter what, if the deal actually gets done.
00:43:47.000Now, again, the fact that the Biden administration is working well with Steve Whitcoff makes me think this is not a particularly amazing deal for the West or for Israel generally.
00:43:55.000But once again, it was Israel that made a priority to get back its hostages and was willing to trade terrorists for those hostages.
00:44:02.000If Israel had taken the position from the get-go that they were not going to sacrifice military priorities in favor of the hostages, that would have changed the math.
00:44:10.000But as long as they need to get the hostages back, terrorists are going to go free, and Israel is going to have to make moves that compromise its own national security.
00:44:16.000That's just sort of the reality of the situation.
00:44:19.000Again, this had all been forecast a little bit earlier this week.
00:44:22.000J.D. Vance on the Sunday shows had suggested that all hell means that basically Israel will be given a freer hand.
00:44:27.000Hamas knows that's coming, and that's one of the reasons they're being pushed to the table.
00:44:30.000They're getting a better deal under Biden than they would under Trump.
00:44:33.000I think the president, if you talk to world leaders, it's very clear that President Trump threatening Hamas and making it clear that there is going to be hell to pay is part of the reason why we've made progress on getting some hostages out.
00:44:46.000We're hopeful there's going to be a deal that's struck towards the very end of Biden's administration, maybe the last day or two.
00:44:52.000But regardless of when that deal is struck, it will be because people are terrified that there are going to be consequences for Hamas.
00:45:00.000I think, number one, it means enabling the Israelis to knock out the final couple of battalions of Hamas and their leadership.
00:45:07.000It means very aggressive sanctions and financial penalties on those who are supporting terrorist organizations in the Middle East.
00:45:14.000It means actually doing the job of American leadership.
00:45:17.000And again, I think that Hamas sees that and they know that's coming.
00:45:21.000Whether this deal ends up being catastrophically bad or just sort of as bad as it needs to be in order to get the hostages out, that's going to be up to the sort of next iteration of the deal.
00:45:31.000Meaning, after Hamas violates the deal, which they absolutely will, I mean, they're currently holding hostages.
00:45:36.000Once that happens, if Israel says, listen, we are not going to hand over the strip back to Hamas after the sacrifices in soldiers and materiel that we've made, if Israel says that and then goes back in, is the Trump administration going to object?
00:45:48.000My guess is probably not very much, considering that the hostages will be out at that point.
00:45:53.000Joining us online is Ilya Shapiro, Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies at Manhattan Institute.
00:45:58.000He has a brand new book out today titled Lawless, the Miseducation of America's Elites.
00:46:02.000Ilya, thanks so much for joining the show.
00:46:06.000So let's talk about the situation in sort of legal academia right now.
00:46:10.000First of all, why does this matter, given the fact that America probably has too many lawyers already?
00:46:16.000Well, as we've learned, there's a crisis in higher education more broadly, which has certainly come to the fore since October 7th and revealed the pathologies of various kinds.
00:46:28.000This is particularly dangerous for legal education because while it's sad for humanity if English and sociology departments go off the rails, law schools train the next generation of...
00:46:40.000The gatekeepers of our legal and political institutions, our judges, disproportionately our politicians, other leaders of various kinds.
00:46:48.000If the law is subverted, if the rules of the game, such basic values as due process, equality under the law, free speech, if these are thrown out the window, we're in big trouble.
00:47:00.000So you obviously have some personal experiences with regard to the law schools and how they have treated.
00:47:07.000People who differ in viewpoint, maybe you can talk a little bit about what it's like.
00:47:11.000I mean, you've taught at some of these law schools.
00:47:14.000Well, three years ago, I was about to start a job at Georgetown Law School, and I was commenting in the media about the Supreme Court.
00:47:22.000That was the subject of my last book, Supreme Disorder, Judicial Politics.
00:47:26.000And I tweeted, I inartfully phrased a criticism of Joe Biden for restricting his Supreme Court nominees by race and sex, a view I maintain to this day.
00:47:37.000Overwhelming majority of Americans agree as well.
00:47:40.000Anyway, this badly phrased tweet led to a four-month-long investigation by the DEI office at Georgetown as to whether I was discriminating against or harassing someone, at the end of which I was let off on the technicality that I wasn't employed when I tweeted, and so the rules didn't apply.
00:47:59.000From the HR and DEI office, saying any time I offended someone, I would be back in the Star Chamber, would create a hostile educational environment.
00:48:08.000I said I couldn't work under these conditions, and so I quit, and I've been using this platform to shine a light on the rot in academia, and especially in legal education.
00:48:18.000So, Ilya, obviously the Trump administration is set to take over next week.
00:48:21.000There are going to be some significant changes in places like the Department of Education.
00:48:24.000Federal policy does have some impact on how these operations actually run.
00:48:29.000Let's say that you were advising Linda McMahon over at the Department of Education.
00:48:31.000What kind of stuff would you be telling her with regard to legal academia?
00:48:38.000We're not going to have reforms internally.
00:48:41.000The leaders of these institutions have to be dragged, kicking and screaming to do the right thing, not because it's the right thing, but because it's in their interests.
00:48:49.000And that includes the shocks from federal and state governments.
00:48:52.000The Office of Civil Rights at Education should investigate and in conjunction with the Justice Department withhold funds from schools that violate students' civil rights, whether in the context of free speech, anti-Semitism or so many other things that these schools are doing that are improper.
00:49:08.000State attorneys general should investigate these places.
00:49:11.000Private employers, as they did after October 7th, writing law school deans saying, why are you having a culture where Hamas supporters are flourishing?
00:49:21.000All of these kinds of exogenous shocks, I think, are important.
00:49:27.000And as we're seeing now with Texas A&M, for example, with their People of Color Only Conference or whatever it is that they're having, just shining a bit of a light makes it obvious that to mix metaphors, in some cases, these are Potemkin villages guarded by paper tigers.
00:49:44.000Well, the book is Lawless, The Miseducation of America's Elites.