The Ben Shapiro Show - Is There A Debt Bomb About To Drop?!

00:00:00.000 All right, folks, tons to get to on today's show.

00:00:02.000 We'll get into the big, beautiful bill passing the House, but what does it mean for our looming debt crisis?

00:00:07.000 Plus, fallout from the terror attack against a couple of Israelis in Washington, D.C., and Patricia Heaton stops by.

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00:00:47.000 Tonight, 7.30 p.m.

00:00:49.000 Eastern, only at Daily Wire.

00:00:50.000 It's an all-new terrible episode of Ben After Dark.

00:00:53.000 You had your chance to stop this.

00:00:55.000 You didn't.

00:00:56.000 We're back with more unsolicited takes, unqualified guests, and unfiltered nonsense, just the way no one asked for.

00:01:01.000 Patty Heaton joins me as we find out just how far left Hollywood's brain has actually slid off the table. 0.97

00:01:06.000 Adam Carolla recommends something that may or may not have been a personal attack, and I end up one jellybean away from existential collapse thanks to a game Savvy cooked up during what I can only assume was a psychotic break.

00:01:17.000 We've got Weird Mail, a segment that might accidentally summon Homeland Security, and Ben Destroys that goes full scorched earth on the worst cultural headline of the week.

00:01:24.000 It is still unsupervised, still unfiltered, and still very, very bad.

00:01:28.000 Been after dark tonight, only on Daily Wire Plus, only for members.

00:01:32.000 Well, folks, President Trump has, in fact, moved the big, beautiful bill through the House of Representatives.

00:01:37.000 President Trump took a victory lap yesterday over this particular move.

00:01:42.000 He put out a statement on Truth Social, quote, The one big, beautiful bill has passed the House of Representatives.

00:01:46.000 This is arguably the most significant piece of legislation that will ever be signed in the history of our country.

00:01:51.000 The bill includes massive tax cuts, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, tax deductions when you purchase an American-made vehicle, along with strong border security measures, pay raises for our ICE and Border Patrol agents, funding for the Golden Dome, Trump's savings account for newborn babies, and much more.

00:02:05.000 Great job by Speaker Mike Johnson and the House leadership, and thank you to every Republican who voted yes on this historic bill.

00:02:10.000 Now it's time for our friends in the U.S. Senate to get to work and send this bill to my desk as soon as possible, writes President Trump.

00:02:15.000 There is no time to waste.

00:02:17.000 The Democrats have lost control of themselves and are aimlessly wandering around, showing no confidence, grit, or determination.

00:02:22.000 They've forgotten their landslide loss in the presidential election and are warped in the past, hoping someday to revive open borders for the world's criminals to be able to pour into our country, men to be able to play in women's sports, and transgender for everybody. 0.87

00:02:33.000 They don't realize that these things and so many more like them will never happen again.

00:02:37.000 Okay, so President Trump obviously and correctly happy about the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill in the House of Representatives.

00:02:43.000 Now, as to the content of the Big Beautiful Bill, Here is the reality.

00:02:47.000 The American people are not in touch with reality when it comes to just fiscal reality.

00:02:53.000 So yes, it is good that taxes did not massively increase.

00:02:56.000 And yes, we do need funding for border security.

00:02:59.000 But if you are worried about the fiscal health of America, and if you're worried about the economic health of America, we need to explode many of the myths that currently surround the American economy.

00:03:08.000 Myths like the idea that there's no American middle class.

00:03:11.000 Not true.

00:03:12.000 Myths like the idea that manufacturing productivity has gone down in the United States.

00:03:15.000 It has not.

00:03:16.000 Myths like the idea promoted by both parties that labor unions in the United States are the good guys as opposed to businesses that hire people who are sort of the bad guys.

00:03:25.000 According to a brand new poll, Axios reporting, the Liberal Economic Policy Institute shows that the labor unions are now significantly more popular than so-called big business.

00:03:39.000 Labor unions have a popularity rating of about 60% as opposed to big business, which is below 50%.

00:03:47.000 The reason that's not good is because what that leads to is a populist economic policy.

00:03:51.000 And now you get to argue between whether you want a government that spends a lot of money and has lower taxes or a government that spends even more money and has higher taxes.

00:04:01.000 Those are the two options for the parties.

00:04:03.000 And that's why you got a bill that looks like this.

00:04:05.000 And let's be clear, this bill, it's a mess.

00:04:08.000 There's some good stuff in it, the tax cuts, the border security stuff.

00:04:11.000 And were I in Congress? 0.95

00:04:13.000 I would have voted for it because the crap sandwich is still better than a massive tax increase in the middle of what is right now a pretty rocky economy. 0.97

00:04:22.000 There's still some economic problems out there. 0.85

00:04:24.000 With that said, the reason we can't have nice things in this country is because the American people are fundamentally opposed to the things it would take for us to have actual nice things like good government policy.

00:04:34.000 So, for example, President Trump made sure that there were no significant restructurings of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.

00:04:43.000 Those will not cut in until December of 2026.

00:04:47.000 No changes in Medicare, no changes in Social Security, the systemic drivers of America's debt.

00:04:52.000 And the reason for that is because President Trump realizes a political reality.

00:04:56.000 Again, President Trump is good at reality.

00:04:57.000 The political reality is that there is no desire from the American people to restructure entitlements.

00:05:02.000 And so in order to avoid the sort of blowback from the Democrats, President Trump decided not to touch any of that stuff.

00:05:08.000 This is why, for example, Claire McCaskill, when she says, That millions of people are going to lose health care coverage.

00:05:13.000 They actually will not.

00:05:15.000 They're not going to lose health care coverage specifically because President Trump went out of his way to push what is by all measures a very high spending and lower tax bill.

00:05:25.000 A lot of folks don't know what the bond market means.

00:05:28.000 The bond market is pretty simple.

00:05:30.000 It means people don't want to loan us money anymore.

00:05:34.000 When you buy a U.S. Treasury, you're loaning the United States government money.

00:05:38.000 When we have to pay higher interest to get people to do that, that means they no longer see it as a safe bet.

00:05:44.000 And that's the problem with this deficit-inducing, hurting poor people bill, is that it doesn't help the deficit.

00:05:54.000 And causes a lot of pain to folks.

00:05:56.000 There will be millions and millions of people that will lose their healthcare coverage in this bill. 0.87

00:06:02.000 Okay, the thing about this that she's saying that is hilarious is she's saying two mutually exclusive things.

00:06:07.000 She's saying, I want to lower the deficit, and also, this bill is going to cut healthcare coverage.

00:06:12.000 Let's be clear.

00:06:13.000 More and bigger social services mean a higher deficit.

00:06:16.000 And the American people, Democrats and Republicans alike, do not want to come to grips with this.

00:06:20.000 They simply do not.

00:06:22.000 So when it comes to my sympathies, my political sympathies, there are a lot of reasons I'm not a huge Thomas Massey fan, the representative from Kentucky.

00:06:30.000 But Thomas Massey is right that there are a gigantic series of problems with the American debt, and this bill does not radically change the trajectory of that debt.

00:06:40.000 It changes around the margins.

00:06:41.000 It doesn't actually get to the core of the matter.

00:06:43.000 That, by the way, is something that even proponents of the bill, including the OMB director, Russ Vogt, recognize that the best you can say about the bill is that It's better than it otherwise could have been, but nobody is making the case that this bill actually fundamentally restructures our debt in any serious way.

00:06:59.000 Well, I'd love to stand here and tell the American people, we can cut your taxes and we can increase spending and everything's going to be just fine.

00:07:07.000 But I can't do that because I'm here to deliver a dose of reality.

00:07:11.000 This bill dramatically increases deficits in the near term, but promises our government will be fiscally responsible five years from now.

00:07:20.000 Where have we heard that before?

00:07:21.000 How do you bind a future Congress to these promises?

00:07:25.000 This bill is a debt bomb ticking.

00:07:29.000 Okay, this bill is not a debt bomb ticking.

00:07:33.000 Actually, just our government is a debt bomb ticking.

00:07:35.000 Folks, when we talk about America's debt bomb, let's talk about the American debt-to-GDP ratio.

00:07:40.000 Right now, we're already at around 100%.

00:07:42.000 So I asked our friends and sponsors at Perplexity, what will our debt-to-GDP ratio be in 2035?

00:07:48.000 And then compare that to some other countries.

00:07:50.000 So, according to Perplexity, U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is projected to reach 118.5% by 2035 under current policies based on the CBO projections.

00:08:00.000 This would actually be higher than our post-World War II record of 106%, which, by the way, Is psychotic.

00:08:06.000 That's crazy.

00:08:07.000 Because World War II was really, really expensive.

00:08:10.000 If the current legislation were to pass, then debt theoretically could climb even higher, maybe reaching almost 130% of GDP by 2034, according to Perplexity.

00:08:21.000 Well, how does that compare to other countries?

00:08:23.000 Well, Japan is in serious trouble.

00:08:25.000 Japan has a debt to GDP ratio of somewhere in the 250 to 270 percent range.

00:08:31.000 And that is because of serious deflation and aging population.

00:08:34.000 France will be about where we are, somewhere in the 120 percent range.

00:08:39.000 Italy will be a little bit higher, Canada a little bit lower, Germany much lower because Germany is much more fiscally responsible than the United States.

00:08:51.000 That's lower than the United States.

00:08:52.000 It is currently rising.

00:08:53.000 It could theoretically rise to 105 to 110%.

00:08:57.000 However, let's be real about this.

00:09:02.000 Chinese debt to GDP ratio is skewed by the fact that they don't actually take on government debt directly.

00:09:07.000 Very often what they do is they sell their government debt to private citizens or they have localities that are selling bonds or whatever.

00:09:15.000 The good news about China is because it's a dictatorship, if they ever get in trouble, they just screw their citizens. 0.98

00:09:20.000 That's the good news for China. 1.00

00:09:21.000 That's not something democracies can afford to do, obviously.

00:09:24.000 Social Security and Medicare, if there were no changes here, would still be bringing our debt to GDP ratio to about 120%.

00:09:31.000 Over the course of the next 10 years or so.

00:09:34.000 So let's just be real about this.

00:09:35.000 The bill makes sure that your taxes didn't radically increase, which, again, I think it's a good thing.

00:09:40.000 You want economic growth.

00:09:40.000 You want to be able to grow your way out of some of this.

00:09:43.000 You are going to need lower taxes and lower regulation.

00:09:46.000 And those two things, lower taxes, lower regulation, that is stuff that the Senate is in fact doing.

00:09:52.000 Yesterday, the Senate voted to end California's electric vehicle mandate, according to the Wall Street Journal.

00:09:58.000 The GOP-led Senate voted to take away California's ability to set its own tailpipe emission standards, effectively killing the country's biggest driver of EV investment.

00:10:06.000 It was 51 to 44 vote.

00:10:09.000 Again, that's a good thing because, again, the goal here is to actually unleash America's car industry, not to regulate it out of existence.

00:10:17.000 So deregulation is actually a good thing.

00:10:21.000 And, of course, keeping taxes lower is a good thing.

00:10:23.000 However, to pretend that we do not have a debt bomb coming, that is silly.

00:10:28.000 Obviously we do.

00:10:28.000 And this bill doesn't solve that.

00:10:30.000 This is something that the Wall Street Journal editorial board makes clear.

00:10:34.000 What should have been a routine auction for 20-year debt with a face value of $16 billion turned into a mini fiasco amid soft demand.

00:10:41.000 This is from a couple of days ago.

00:10:42.000 The auction produced a yield of 5.014%, slightly higher than expected and well above the roughly 4.6% benchmark set in a string of recent auctions.

00:10:51.000 The yield on the 30-year bond drifted about 5% for the second time this week.

00:10:54.000 The 10-year note was near 4.6% and inching higher.

00:10:58.000 As the Wall Street Journal points out, it's trendy to blame Washington for this market fracas and with cause, but first recognize the biggest problem that appears to be bothering markets, economic growth.

00:11:07.000 Where will growth come from to buoy consumer sentiment or to generate enough revenue to help Uncle Sam pay the bills?

00:11:13.000 Keep that question in mind as commentators and some politicians try to lay the blame for a bond self entirely at the feet of the Republican Congress.

00:11:20.000 The rap is that the budget bill will blow out the deficit by another $3.3 trillion over 10 years.

00:11:25.000 That profligacy According to the story, leaves bond investors at the end of their tether.

00:11:30.000 But that argument is a trap.

00:11:32.000 It features more spending restraint than the Biden Democrats ever offered.

00:11:36.000 And you do, in fact, need lower taxes.

00:11:38.000 But again, the reality is the American people are not willing to face up to what it would actually take to fix the economy for the long term.

00:11:47.000 And so what that means is you are likely to get a bunch of bad bills from here to eternity, or at least until the point at which the debt burden becomes so strong.

00:11:55.000 That it basically sinks the ship that we are all riding on together.

00:12:00.000 Meanwhile, there are some other headwinds the economy is facing.

00:12:04.000 I mean, let's be real about this.

00:12:05.000 If the tax bill went down to flaming defeat, the economy would crash almost immediately.

00:12:08.000 That's just the reality because the vast tax increase would mean investors see economic slowing and pull their money out.

00:12:15.000 But there are some bad signs anyway.

00:12:17.000 Home sales in April fell for the second straight month, according to the Wall Street Journal.

00:12:21.000 U.S. existing home sales fell slightly by 0.5% in April from the prior month.

00:12:25.000 To a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $4 million, the slowest sales pace for any April since 2009, which of course was right at the tail end of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the recession.

00:12:38.000 The spring months have been lackluster this year.

00:12:41.000 Home prices and mortgage rates remain too high for many buyers, and concerns about the economy are making buyers nervous about making a big purchase.

00:12:46.000 Plus, by the way, sellers are not actually selling because they don't want to have to then buy.

00:12:51.000 So, that's not a great sign.

00:12:54.000 Meanwhile, It should be noted here that we still have a bunch of tariffs on the products coming into the country.

00:12:59.000 There's sort of a funny situation yesterday when Howard Lutnick was at a consortium and he was talking to a reporter and they were talking about the tariffs.

00:13:10.000 This is the Axios Forum.

00:13:12.000 And he turned to the audience and asked them if they were feeling the pain of tariffs.

00:13:15.000 And he said there is no pain.

00:13:17.000 So he turned to the audience to ask them and he did not get the answer that he wanted.

00:13:22.000 Everything in the world's got 10%.

00:13:24.000 You go to the store now, are you feeling the pain?

00:13:26.000 No.

00:13:27.000 Why not?

00:13:28.000 Because there is no pain.

00:13:30.000 Because what happens is the sellers, the producers, the sellers, and the currencies change and the price effectively mostly goes away.

00:13:39.000 I'm not, you know, what's the inflation rate in America?

00:13:42.000 Two odd percent?

00:13:43.000 Okay.

00:13:44.000 Two odd percent.

00:13:45.000 But seriously, for the month of May, every product in the world has got 10% on it right now.

00:13:50.000 With no exceptions, no exclusions.

00:13:52.000 This, that we have 25% on cars and that are coming in from out.

00:13:57.000 Do any of you feel anything?

00:14:00.000 Because I want you to understand, in the month of May, the United States of America is going to take in $35 billion towards our deficit of tariff revenue in the month of May.

00:14:14.000 And consumers will feel that.

00:14:16.000 I said, it's already on.

00:14:18.000 This is on since April.

00:14:21.000 It's not that the TAF is coming.

00:14:23.000 It's on.

00:14:24.000 Have any of you felt any of it?

00:14:27.000 Seriously.

00:14:30.000 And the audience actually said yes.

00:14:33.000 Well, of course, because it turns out the policy has consequences.

00:14:36.000 So, here's what the Trump administration actually needs to do.

00:14:39.000 Yes, the bill needs to pass.

00:14:40.000 And yes, you need to radically deregulate.

00:14:42.000 And yes, you need to pass a crypto bill.

00:14:44.000 And you need to pass a bill.

00:14:45.000 That unleashes AI.

00:14:47.000 You need to do all of those things.

00:14:48.000 All of the above.

00:14:49.000 And then at some point, somebody is going to have to make the case.

00:14:53.000 Somebody.

00:14:54.000 Somebody responsible is going to have to make the case that actually we need to curb our government debt.

00:14:59.000 And that can't be done just by raising taxes on the rich.

00:15:02.000 That is a lie the Democrats like to tell and the numbers just don't add up.

00:15:05.000 There's a reason why, if you're looking at European countries that have a lower debt-to-GDP ratio, that is because they cut in their top tax brackets.

00:15:13.000 At like $60,000 a year.

00:15:16.000 $50,000 a year.

00:15:18.000 The bottom line is, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and eventually America is going to find that out.

00:15:24.000 Meanwhile, more fallout from the awful terror attack a couple of days ago at this party that was being put up, an event that was being put up by the American Jewish Committee, and everybody and their mother is coming out condemning anti-Semitism.

00:15:38.000 Now, as you may have noted, on yesterday's show, I never actually used.

00:15:41.000 The term antisemitism in discussing these sort of lies that have created a permission structure for violence.

00:15:47.000 And there's a reason for that.

00:15:49.000 I'll get to that in a moment.

00:15:51.000 Why I didn't put it in those terms.

00:15:53.000 Muriel Bowser in Washington, D.C. is an example of somebody who's using this sort of language.

00:15:56.000 She, of course, is the mayor.

00:15:58.000 She says, don't worry, we're not going to tolerate antisemitism.

00:16:01.000 What I do know is that the horrific incident is going to frighten a lot of people in our city and in our country.

00:16:10.000 And I want to be clear that we will not tolerate this violence or hate in our city.

00:16:17.000 We will not tolerate any acts of terrorism.

00:16:20.000 And we're going to stand together as a community in the coming days and weeks to send the clear message that we will not tolerate anti-Semitism.

00:16:32.000 Okay, so no toleration for anti-Semitism.

00:16:35.000 And again, this is the kind of line that's being repeated left and right.

00:16:37.000 No toleration.

00:16:38.000 For anti-Semitism, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who has been a massive backer of the pro-Hamas movement in the United States, up to and including weeping on the floor of the House over the House funding Iron Dome, which shoots down terrorist rockets.

00:16:52.000 She tweeted out, Absolutely nothing justifies the murder of innocents.

00:16:56.000 I am devastated by the killing of two people outside.

00:16:58.000 An American Jewish Committee global event here in Washington.

00:17:01.000 Our prayers are with the victims, families, and loved ones of all impacted.

00:17:03.000 As we await more details, we must be clear that hatred has no home here.

00:17:07.000 Anti-Semitism is a threat to all we hold dear as a society.

00:17:10.000 It must be confronted and rooted out everywhere.

00:17:13.000 So she's going to root out anti-Semitism, says Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, she of the best friendship with Ilhan Omar.

00:17:21.000 Bernie Sanders put out his own statement.

00:17:23.000 I'm appalled by the killing of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington last night and grateful for the quick response from law enforcement.

00:17:29.000 We must all condemn this heinous act.

00:17:30.000 Violence must have no place in politics.

00:17:39.000 There was a sort of fascinating tweet from the Bronx Anti-War Coalition, which called the terrorist attack on these two innocent people in D.C., at least one of whom was a Christian.

00:17:50.000 They tweeted what the shooter did, and again, I don't do shooter names on the show, is the highest expression of anti-Zionism.

00:17:58.000 So why do I point that out?

00:18:00.000 The reason that I'm not using the term anti-Semitism is because it seems to have lost any impact or definition.

00:18:06.000 Truly.

00:18:08.000 It has been deliberately obfuscated, obscured, turned into an empty vessel.

00:18:16.000 And that's had a couple of pretty dire effects.

00:18:19.000 One, actual Jew hatred goes by the wayside.

00:18:22.000 And number two, a bunch of stuff that is cover for actual violence is then ignored.

00:18:28.000 Permission structures are ignored.

00:18:30.000 The problem here is the definition of anti-Semitism clearly.

00:18:34.000 When you can have people who clearly, clearly have created permission structures for the free, free Palestine, globalize the Intifada crowd, claiming that they're fighting anti-Semitism, definitions become a problem.

00:18:47.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

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00:21:09.000 So, what exactly is antisemitism?

00:21:11.000 Well, as I've said before, antisemitism is essentially a conspiracy theory about the threat and power of Jews.

00:21:17.000 That is why antisemitism, unlike most other isms that are targeted at a group, takes an enormous number of different forms.

00:21:24.000 Usually, racism suggests the innate inferiority of a particular group.

00:21:28.000 That's not antisemitism.

00:21:29.000 Anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory about a group.

00:21:32.000 And it takes a bunch of different forms, many of which oppose one another.

00:21:35.000 So you will hear from a variety of people that Jews are cliquish and keep to themselves, and therefore they're a threat to the generalized body politic. 0.64

00:21:43.000 And the same people will then claim the Jews are actually infiltrating interlopers and they are diluting the body politic. 0.74

00:21:50.000 You'll hear from people that Jews are aggressively nationalistic and therefore separatists, and also the Jews are actually globalists and actually deracinating. 0.93

00:21:59.000 You hear the Jews are communists and therefore they are anti-capitalism and anti-markets. 0.94

00:22:04.000 And also the Jews are capitalists and therefore they are selfish and anti-religious. 1.00

00:22:08.000 You hear the Jews are weaklings and thereby weaken everybody or the Jews are too powerful and thereby exploit everybody, right? 1.00

00:22:14.000 It takes all sorts of forms. 0.99

00:22:15.000 It's a shapeshifter. 1.00

00:22:17.000 But when people hear the term anti-Semitism, they think that anti-Semitism is just another type of racism.

00:22:23.000 It's just racism against Jews.

00:22:24.000 So basically it's hatred. 0.92

00:22:25.000 Against Jews, specifically for being ethnically Jewish.

00:22:28.000 But as we've seen, that's actually incomplete.

00:22:30.000 Because you can claim all of the things anti-Semites actually claim. 0.85

00:22:34.000 Jews are cliquish or globalists or at the same time both or whatever, without technically hating Jews. 0.87

00:22:40.000 And that's the game that is being played right now.

00:22:42.000 This is why you see people who fall under an actual real definition of anti-Semitism, as I've laid it out, who get away with saying that they're fighting anti-Semitism.

00:22:53.000 You're hearing Ilhan Omar will say this sort of thing.

00:22:57.000 So these overbroad terms used by politicians actually become counterproductive. 0.66

00:23:01.000 So, for example, you can say that Israel is the fond head of all evil without technically hating Jews.

00:23:06.000 You could say that, right? 0.95

00:23:08.000 You can even say you have a Jewish friend.

00:23:10.000 That might not really be true, but you can say it.

00:23:13.000 Or you can find some Jewish person who actually has no connection with Judaism and that person can be your standard. 0.91

00:23:19.000 And this is the excuse that you'll hear from many of the people who say just this kind of stuff.

00:23:22.000 And here's the problem with what Muriel Bowser and AOC and all these people are saying.

00:23:26.000 It leaves open the possibility that so long as you talk about hatred of Israel and that results in people getting killed, it's totally fine. 1.00

00:23:34.000 And that's the cover that many people who actually do hate Jews use because it is in fact an easy cover. 0.96

00:23:39.000 Say, oh, it's not about hatred of Jews.

00:23:42.000 It's not about anti-Semitism.

00:23:43.000 It's just about hatred of Israel. 0.56

00:23:45.000 That's the game.

00:23:47.000 So instead of focusing on whether people are doing and saying things because They hate Jews, what they feel inside.

00:23:52.000 Here's what we should do.

00:23:54.000 We should instead have this conversation in the context of lies.

00:23:58.000 We should be condemning lies.

00:24:00.000 Now, it is quite possible that many of the lies that you're hearing, Israel's committing a genocide, are rooted in actual hatred of Jews.

00:24:07.000 Or, maybe it's rooted in some other philosophy.

00:24:10.000 In some cases, we can probably read what people feel on their insides, but sometimes that's not the case, and often it's not even useful.

00:24:17.000 Because people who actually hate Jews, Often just aren't going to come out and say it.

00:24:23.000 And there are some who will.

00:24:24.000 I point to Nick Fuentes for honesty, but most people don't actually say it.

00:24:27.000 Or Kanye West.

00:24:28.000 At least they're honest. 0.99

00:24:30.000 Most people may tweet pretty obvious Jew-hating garbage and then delete it. 0.99

00:24:34.000 But they can always claim their perspective isn't rooted in hatred of Jews, per se. 0.99

00:24:38.000 And all of that offers an easy offer for those who actually build a permission structure for actual evil and murder.

00:24:45.000 Instead of talking about antisemitism then, what we actually should do Like, for example, it is a lie, as we discussed yesterday on the show, that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.

00:24:59.000 It is just a lie.

00:25:00.000 There's not only no data to back it, there's significant data to disprove it. 0.79

00:25:03.000 Now, maybe some people are too ignorant to know that it's a lie, and they're just repeating what they hear.

00:25:08.000 Maybe they're just using the word genocide as a stand-in for bad thing. 1.00

00:25:12.000 Or maybe they're just dumb. 0.99

00:25:14.000 But for those who do know, it's a lie. 0.99

00:25:18.000 It was a lie that the Palestinian cause is about a two-state solution.

00:25:21.000 That's always been a lie.

00:25:23.000 The Palestinians will tell you it's a lie. 1.00

00:25:25.000 Now again, maybe some people who are pushing it are too ignorant or hopeful to know that it's a lie, but it is a lie. 0.97

00:25:30.000 And lies are bad.

00:25:32.000 And the more they are told, the more dangerous they become.

00:25:36.000 And that's why I think it's actually kind of useless at this point for politicians to talk about anti-Semitism and never the actual lies that matter.

00:25:44.000 Because if we actually had an honest conversation about what actually drove the feelings of shootings like this, lies and lies and more lies than Muriel Bowser might have to call out the lies of her own side.

00:25:57.000 And perhaps AOC wouldn't just be able to invoke anti-Semitism and get off scot-free while simultaneously making room for Ilhan Omar.

00:26:04.000 She might actually have to call out the lies of her own side.

00:26:07.000 And that's the thing they will never do.

00:26:09.000 At a certain point, invocation of terms like anti-Semitism.

00:26:13.000 It actually becomes counterproductive.

00:26:15.000 Because, again, if that doesn't do the job of stopping people from lying about Jews, then what exactly is the point of the thing?

00:26:26.000 Instead, if we are going to talk about the permission structure that led to the murder of these two young people in Washington, D.C., we have to talk about the actual lies and the people who tell those lies and what their worldview is.

00:26:39.000 That's the thing that actually allows us clarity.

00:26:42.000 That allows us to see who is pushing what and why.

00:26:46.000 And again, that's not me saying that none of the people who are pushing the lies hate Jews.

00:26:51.000 Many of them, I'm sure, are not particularly fond of Jews or Judaism or anything like it.

00:26:55.000 But it's a lot easier and more specific and more clarifying and more useful to talk about the lies themselves as opposed to a term like anti-Semitism, which again, at this point in time, has now become so semantically overloaded that people are able to escape the implications of their own lies.

00:27:12.000 So, for example, the New York Times will go out there and they will say they don't know the motivation of the person who committed the shooting.

00:27:20.000 That's a lie.

00:27:20.000 It's a lie.

00:27:21.000 He was literally shouting, free, free Palestine, right after murdering two people.

00:27:27.000 He was also, in January of 2024, tweeting out, death to America, America KKKA.

00:27:34.000 So we know exactly why this person did, what this person did.

00:27:37.000 We know exactly what the worldview was.

00:27:40.000 Now, if you just say that's anti-Semitism, it doesn't actually go to the heart of the matter.

00:27:45.000 It's not just about irrational Jew hatred, in the same way that racism is about irrational hatred of blacks or Asians or whomever else.

00:27:53.000 There is a broader worldview that is deeply damaging to Western society that lies at the root of all this.

00:27:59.000 There's one on the right, there's one on the left.

00:28:00.000 Listen to yesterday's show, I talk about it at length.

00:28:03.000 This, by the way, is how the New York Times can make light of Mahmoud Khalil, pretending that Mahmoud Khalil is totally fine.

00:28:09.000 And this, of course, would be the student who was detained from Columbia University as a graduate, and he was detained for deportation.

00:28:21.000 And he had an immigration court hearing to try and determine whether he would be deported or not.

00:28:27.000 And the New York Times has a very sympathetic piece talking about what a wonderful person he is with a picture of his wife and his kid, completely ignoring the fact that Mahmoud Khalil Was a chief member of a group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

00:28:42.000 That group cheered the October 7th pogrom.

00:28:47.000 They also lavished praise on Ismail Chania of Hamas, Hassan Azrala of Hezbollah.

00:28:54.000 The leadership of that group originally condemned a student who suggests Zionists don't deserve to live, but then thought better of it and issued an apology to the person they had condemned.

00:29:08.000 So, that's what Mahmoud Khalil believes.

00:29:11.000 Is that a permission structure for the kind of thing we saw?

00:29:14.000 Of course it is.

00:29:16.000 Of course it is.

00:29:19.000 Specificity is the friend of truth.

00:29:21.000 Specificity is the friend of truth and clarity.

00:29:25.000 And vagary is the friend of lies.

00:29:27.000 If there is a rubric under which Ilhan Omar can somehow portray herself as an opponent of anti-Semitism, which is what she tried to do after suggesting the other issue.

00:29:38.000 It's amazing.

00:29:38.000 She was literally asked about the shooting on the street.

00:29:43.000 And she walked away. 0.93

00:29:45.000 She said nothing to say about it.

00:29:47.000 Then she finally tweeted later in the day, I'm appalled by the deadly shooting at the Capitol Jewish Museum last night, holding the victims, their families and loved ones.

00:29:54.000 And my thoughts and prayers, violence should have no place in our country.

00:29:57.000 OK, if you let people off the hook just for saying violence is bad or anti-Semitism is bad.

00:30:01.000 But you never ask specific questions about the belief systems that drive people to do evil things.

00:30:06.000 Then you're not doing your job.

00:30:07.000 And that is why it is incumbent on, yes, Jewish organizations to actually get specific about the philosophies that result in things like we saw in Washington, D.C. That's the thing I'm calling for.

00:30:20.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

00:30:21.000 First, when we started Daily Wire, it felt like we had to figure everything out with minimal help.

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00:32:00.000 Call 1-877-CARS4KIDS or go to cars4kids.org slash Ben.

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00:32:31.000 Cars with a K. Well, meanwhile, the Trump administration is taking yet another measure against Harvard University.

00:32:36.000 On Thursday, they announced that they were halting Harvard's ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a critical funding source for Harvard.

00:32:45.000 Now, Harvard doesn't just bring students in because they're quote-unquote the best and the brightest from abroad.

00:32:49.000 They also bring people in who are likely to pay full tuition, like 60 grand a year.

00:32:54.000 There are about 6,800 international students attending Harvard this year.

00:32:58.000 That's more than a quarter of the student body.

00:33:01.000 The Trump administration is using this as leverage to get Harvard to actually obey the Civil Rights Act.

00:33:08.000 According to the letter sent by Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary to Harvard, quote, I'm writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University's student and exchange visitor program certification is revoked.

00:33:22.000 A spokesperson for Harvard called the administration's action unlawful.

00:33:27.000 In a news release, the Department of Homeland Security said, quote, this means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.

00:33:37.000 Hey, now, as a method of getting Harvard to actually obey civil rights law, Fine with me.

00:33:44.000 However, this is actually not a Harvard-specific problem.

00:33:48.000 This is an immigration problem. 1.00

00:33:49.000 This is something the Secretary of State Rubio has been very clear on.

00:33:52.000 The problem here is we should not be giving student visas to people who hate America, hate American values, sympathize with terror groups and all the like.

00:33:59.000 You don't have free speech rights just because you want to come here.

00:34:02.000 That is not the way that it works.

00:34:04.000 Rights do not attach to you.

00:34:06.000 You don't have a right to enter the United States believing That has never been the way any self-respecting country treats itself.

00:34:14.000 And so what I would recommend is that it not just be targeted at students at Harvard, but that actually the immigration system that President Trump is taking control of take a much more solid and long-lasting look at how we give out student visas in the first place in general.

00:34:28.000 It's not enough to shift some of these terrible people from Harvard University to Columbia or whatever.

00:34:32.000 Many of them just shouldn't be in the country at all.

00:34:36.000 And meanwhile, if you are worried, I don't know how many times the Iranians can say it. 0.78

00:34:55.000 They've said it over and over and over and over.

00:34:56.000 They are not going to give up their ability to enrich uranium, which is to say to build a nuclear weapon.

00:35:00.000 Nonetheless, the negotiations continue apace.

00:35:03.000 The Trump administration is apparently going to deploy Steve Whitcoff once again, our special envoy.

00:35:09.000 To negotiate with the Iranians, this time in Rome. 1.00

00:35:14.000 Now, again, the Iranians keep saying it over and over, like the quiet part out loud.

00:35:17.000 They're basically just calling the Trump administration's bluff.

00:35:20.000 They're saying, we're not going to give you anything you want.

00:35:21.000 Are you still going to try and sign a deal?

00:35:23.000 Abbas Iraqi, Iran's foreign minister, said, quote, we are witnessing completely unreasonable and illogical positions from the Americans.

00:35:30.000 Ayatollah Khomeini said the United States should not try to talk nonsense and called it a big mistake for President Trump to demand an end to Iran's enrichment of uranium.

00:35:38.000 Khomeini himself said, I don't think nuclear talks with the United States will bring results.

00:35:44.000 Thank you.

00:35:46.000 So, again, totally unclear at this point whether the Trump administration stands tall.

00:35:52.000 Obviously, they should.

00:35:54.000 Because the Iranians absolutely agree with the shooter of these two Israelis in Washington, D.C. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they would treat it the same way. 0.93

00:36:07.000 And meanwhile, speaking of the Trump administration Department of Justice, they're doing an amazing thing.

00:36:13.000 Our friend Harmeet Dillon, who actually served as a lawyer for the Daily Wire when we were suing the Biden administration, she's over at the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ now, and she is walking back a Biden-era DOJ policy targeting police departments.

00:36:27.000 She joined us on the line yesterday.

00:36:29.000 Harmeet, thanks so much for taking the time.

00:36:31.000 Really appreciate it.

00:36:32.000 Happy to be here, Ben.

00:36:35.000 So let's talk about the DOJ and what you guys are now doing in the Civil Rights Division to actually allow the police to do their job.

00:36:42.000 You're taking a very different position than the last administration, obviously.

00:36:46.000 Well, absolutely.

00:36:47.000 And so for the last 30 years or so, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has been pursuing consent decrees on police departments throughout the United States.

00:36:56.000 And what happens is, with any organization, there's one or two rogue officers or cops or people with just bad intention or malign motives who do something bad, and then the DOJ and a court imposes a consent decree.

00:37:11.000 On the entire city, that typically keeps on average the city and the police department or the sheriff's department under a federal court's control for over a decade.

00:37:21.000 The city has to pay for the compliance costs of this, which often amount to over $10 million a year over a decade.

00:37:28.000 And then on top of that, they have to pay a law firm or a police monitor, who is a solo, another million dollars a year on average.

00:37:37.000 And crime goes up, public safety goes down.

00:37:41.000 Police satisfaction goes down.

00:37:43.000 And overall, these consent decrees have been found to be relatively ineffective.

00:37:47.000 And so what we're doing at the Civil Rights Division is we're withdrawing.

00:37:52.000 We dismissed yesterday two consent decree filings that the Biden administration had done in the waning days of their administration in Louisville, Kentucky, where the Breonna Taylor situation happened in the prior Trump administration.

00:38:06.000 She was shot and killed as a result of.

00:38:19.000 So we're prosecuting those detectives and the officers involved in these incidents that I'm mentioning.

00:38:25.000 We're prosecuting them for their individual offenses, and I think that's important, individual accountability.

00:38:30.000 In the other one that we dismissed in Minneapolis, this stems from the George Floyd incident.

00:38:42.000 And what we have found in these types of consent decree situations is that public safety goes down, and so we don't want that to happen in these cities.

00:38:52.000 In each of these cities, Louisville has already agreed to hire its own police monitor to help improve its practices overall, and Minneapolis has negotiated a settlement with their state.

00:39:04.000 Human Rights Commission, putting them under a consent decree already.

00:39:08.000 And so Louisville didn't oppose our attempts to kick this out while we looked at it.

00:39:13.000 And Minneapolis did oppose our attempts and has publicly criticized our decision.

00:39:18.000 But in addition to the ones that I mentioned, Ben, we also dismissed six factual findings in different cities.

00:39:26.000 And what the Biden administration attempted to do, and as you probably are aware, my predecessor was an avid defund the police activist.

00:39:34.000 And that is also the view of several of the prior lawyers in our special litigation section who've now moved on to other pastures.

00:39:43.000 But we had...

00:39:58.000 We don't have confidence that those findings are based in facts.

00:40:03.000 Appropriate, full consideration of all the facts and appropriate statistics.

00:40:08.000 And so we're dismissing those factual findings in Memphis and Oklahoma City and Mississippi State Police and Trenton, New Jersey and, sorry, Louisiana and Trenton, New Jersey and Mount Vernon, New York and Phoenix, Arizona.

00:40:26.000 So pretty broad range of different types of issues, but we did not have confidence in those outcomes.

00:40:31.000 And so that's why we took those actions yesterday.

00:40:35.000 So, Harmi, when people kind of colloquially hear about a consent decree, they tend to think, well, you know, that's a police department getting together with the federal government and figuring out a better way to do policing.

00:40:44.000 What are the sorts of things that are in these consent decrees that really hamstring the police and prevent them from doing their jobs?

00:40:50.000 And why do police departments accept that it's consent decrees in the first place if they're so bad for policing?

00:40:55.000 Well, great question.

00:40:57.000 So the police departments themselves are usually not the decision makers.

00:41:00.000 It's usually the city council or a mayor.

00:41:03.000 And as we've seen a trend in the United States over the last two decades, those are often anti-police themselves and very progressive, if you will.

00:41:13.000 These consent decrees can run to hundreds of pages long, and they basically minutely control the extent to which hiring, training, reporting, practices like the types of holds that can be used on suspects,

00:41:33.000 where police will be punished effectively for, call them DEI statistics, the extent to which arrest or stop and question or stop and frisk encounters with the public are in any way different statistically from the population of that community without considering the extent to which it is.

00:42:02.000 So first of all, as we know, Memphis is a fairly crime-ridden city.

00:42:06.000 It's also majority African American.

00:42:09.000 The police force is majority African American.

00:42:11.000 the homeless population is 75% African-American.

00:42:15.000 And yet the African-American police I mean, this is ludicrous on its face, and only privileged lawyers sitting in D.C. or sitting on their sofas throughout the United States working from home would come up with this. 0.96

00:42:34.000 It defies common sense and it's unfair.

00:42:38.000 And so, you know, I had the privilege of calling some governors and attorneys general and United States attorneys yesterday and informing them that, Policing and these types of policy decisions are always best made at the local level, Ben, and that's where the local accountability is and where the local demand and resources are for spending appropriately training.

00:43:03.000 That said, United States Department of Justice does have training resources for police departments.

00:43:08.000 And one thing we offer is if a We offer an audit process for them and we'll go through and provide some consultation.

00:43:21.000 And there's even funds available for police departments that have a need.

00:43:25.000 And so overall, I think we've made a step today to make Americans safer in those cities.

00:43:30.000 And I want to assure other cities that are under consent decrees currently, either monitored by a judge or by a voluntary agreement with the Department of Justice, that we're reviewing all of them.

00:43:40.000 Because consent decrees that go on for 12, 14, 15, even over 20 years, something is broken in that system.

00:43:46.000 The taxpayers are paying a tax effectively for a broken system, and that is wrong, and we're going to fix that.

00:43:53.000 You know, Harmeet, I think one of the things that is so astonishing to members of the left about what the Trump administration is doing is that they look at things like the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. DOJ, which for as long as I've been alive has been used as a tool to foster anti-police sentiment.

00:44:08.000 To go after institutions that are actually charged with keeping the peace.

00:44:13.000 I mean, that was true in the Obama administration.

00:44:14.000 It was certainly true in the Biden administration as well.

00:44:17.000 And the Trump administration, very differently than other Republican administrations of the past, is not pandering to that sort of history.

00:44:24.000 Instead, you're using the tools at your disposal to actually protect the actual civil rights of citizens, namely the civil right to be free of crime.

00:44:30.000 Well, that's the job.

00:44:32.000 And it was my vision.

00:44:33.000 And I discussed this with the attorney general and the president before I was nominated.

00:44:39.000 I believe in civil rights.

00:44:42.000 I think you believe in civil rights too, but these civil rights are much more broadly defined than the progressive version of civil rights.

00:44:48.000 We all have rights as parents and families to determine how children are educated and their exposure to sexualized content in the schools.

00:44:58.000 That's a civil right.

00:44:59.000 Civil right to pray and be free of violence on the basis of your religious identification and beliefs.

00:45:07.000 The right of a citizen to be free from crime, I think, is a promise that every basic society, dating back to ancient times, even before we had the Internet and the Civil Rights Division, promises people.

00:45:20.000 And so these are all civil rights that we're standing up for at the Department of Justice.

00:45:23.000 And I do believe they're consistent with our statutory framework and certainly the vision of our founders.

00:45:28.000 But I think it's our job to affirmatively use these tools for the benefit of the American people.

00:45:33.000 That's what President Trump promised, and that's what we're delivering.

00:45:37.000 Well, that is Harmeet Dillon.

00:45:39.000 She, of course, is the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. DOJ.

00:45:42.000 Harmeet, thanks so much for your hard work, and thanks so much for taking the time.

00:45:45.000 Thank you, Ben.

00:45:47.000 I'm going to get to more on this in a moment.

00:45:48.000 First, we've got to change gears for a minute and talk about Israel.

00:45:51.000 Obviously, the attack in Washington, D.C., a couple of days ago, killing a couple of Israelis.

00:45:59.000 The fight continues against people who hate the state of Israel, who hate Jews.

00:46:03.000 It is May now, exactly 80 years ago this month.

00:46:05.000 The horrors of the Holocaust, the final solution, finally came to an end. 0.88

00:46:08.000 But did you know that half of all Holocaust survivors actually live in Israel?

00:46:11.000 Think about that for a moment.

00:46:12.000 These elderly survivors, who already endured unimaginable trauma decades ago, are now facing renewed pain from the October 7th attacks and the troubling rise of anti-Semitism we've been seeing worldwide.

00:46:21.000 What makes this even more heartbreaking is that thousands of elderly Jewish survivors in Israel are living below the poverty line.

00:46:26.000 There's simply not enough a safety net for them, and that's why I'm so passionate about supporting the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.

00:46:32.000 The fellowship provides a real lifeline to these precious individuals Meanwhile,

00:47:00.000 members of the media are very perturbed with President Trump for calling out the South African president.

00:47:05.000 Cyril Ramaphosa, a couple of days ago in the Oval Office, there's a piece in the New York Times by a journalist and filmmaker named Richard Poplack complaining about President Trump's treatment of Ramaphosa.

00:47:17.000 Why?

00:47:18.000 Well, because according to this journalist, it is totally fine to racially discriminate with regard to land ownership in response to the apartheid past of the country of South Africa.

00:47:29.000 Quote, to this day, the bulk of South Africa's private wealth remains in white hands. 0.68

00:47:33.000 And while life is demonstrably better for the black majority, South Africa is by many measures the most unequal society on earth.

00:47:39.000 The white minority is the major beneficiary of this arrangement, but there is a caveat.

00:47:43.000 Even within this cohort, wealth distribution is lumpy.

00:47:47.000 The decline of the middle class is a global phenomenon, but in South Africa, it takes on unambiguously racial characteristics.

00:47:53.000 There is no question that many rural South Africans, like many urban South Africans, have experienced almost wartime levels of violence.

00:47:59.000 South Africa's gruesome rates of inequality almost ensure this.

00:48:02.000 The police are often useless or worse.

00:48:04.000 Organized gangsterism and industrial-scale stock theft reduce rural areas to occasional battlefields.

00:48:10.000 But to allege government complicity in the murder of white farmers, let alone genocide, is a falsehood that verges on full-scale rewrite of South Africa's history.

00:48:16.000 history.

00:48:18.000 So, what is the point of this column?

00:48:20.000 The point is that you should ignore all the problems in South Africa, because after all, the whites kind of deserve whatever they get. 1.00

00:48:28.000 Quote, South Africa helped define and perfect white supremacy, so take it from an expert. 0.99

00:48:33.000 This is an effort to flip the narrative of apartheid and cast former oppressors as victims.

00:48:37.000 You see the idea here?

00:48:38.000 The idea here is that if white farmers are about to have their land expropriated, that's okay because they're actually former oppressors.

00:48:46.000 It's an attempt to invalidate the end of legislated white minority rule in South Africa and render white Afrikaners as victims of reverse racism to say nothing of targeted mass murder.

00:48:55.000 It's about spreading the global white replacement conspiracy theory. 0.87

00:48:58.000 Okay, well, hold up a second.

00:49:00.000 If there are 141 laws in South Africa that target white people, apparently, and if the Land Appropriation Act in South Africa is designed to actually expropriate land from white people, which it appears to be, then I'm confused as to how the people victimized by that law are not, in fact, the victims.

00:49:17.000 This columnist says, make no mistake, democratic South Africa is, in many respects, a failed, violent, and corrupt state.

00:49:22.000 But the forgiveness extended to the white minority at the end of apartheid is one of the most exceptionally human and humane moments of our species'bloody history. 0.81

00:49:29.000 By turning their backs on this, by accepting refugee status and claiming the mantle of exceptional victimhood, right-wing Afrikaners have become bit players in MAGA's noisy but empatheticism. 0.90

00:49:37.000 Well, so you admit that the state is a complete fail.

00:49:44.000 But as long as apartheid was bad, that means that everything that's happening now is justified. 0.92

00:49:50.000 Seems to be the logic here.

00:49:52.000 Which is absurd on its face and the essence of a sort of DEI-driven Immorality.

00:49:59.000 A turnabout is somehow fair play.

00:50:02.000 Meanwhile, in other news, the Supreme Court yesterday deadlocked on the question of whether public religious charter schools violate the separation of church and state.

00:50:14.000 So in the state of Oklahoma, there was a Catholic virtual school that filed for charter status, public charter status.

00:50:23.000 And the Supreme Court was supposed to decide on this.

00:50:26.000 A ruling in favor of St. Isidore would have allowed for the first time, according to the Washington Post, direct and complete taxpayer funding to establish a faith-based charter school, legalizing government sponsorship of a curriculum that calls for students to adhere to Catholic beliefs and the church's religious mission.

00:50:41.000 Instead, the current landscape of government funding for religious schools remains intact.

00:50:45.000 Now, a lot of people are all over Amy Coney Barrett because she recused herself in this case. 0.59

00:50:50.000 That's not her fault.

00:50:52.000 Okay, Amy Coney Barrett recused herself in this particular case.

00:50:55.000 Because of her ties to Notre Dame Law School and its Religious Liberties Legal Clinic, which represented the school in this particular case.

00:51:02.000 So she accused herself.

00:51:04.000 She, again, did not vote against the religious charter school.

00:51:09.000 Obviously, the religious charter school should be funded.

00:51:11.000 The idea of separation of church and state was never meant to say that no dollar can flow to a religious institution from the state, especially if the state is basically taking the view.

00:51:21.000 That it can flow to both secular and religious institutions and religious institutions of every form and fashion.

00:51:26.000 It says that the state cannot prefer one religion above all the other religions.

00:51:31.000 That is what the separation of church and state suggests.

00:51:35.000 But if you are making the funding available to all of these various public charter schools, what exactly is the problem?

00:51:42.000 Now, it's unclear exactly how people voted.

00:51:45.000 The court split four to four, and because Coney Barrett recused herself, there's no actual outcome in the case.

00:51:53.000 However, I think it is probably fair to say that you would imagine that it was Chief Justice Roberts who voted the wrong way on this.

00:51:58.000 Hard to imagine that it was Kavanaugh or even Gorsuch who voted this way on this particular decision.

00:52:04.000 It's not the end of the story.

00:52:06.000 There will be another case, I'm sure, that's brought by an institution unaffiliated with Amy Coney Barrett, at which point she will indeed rule. 0.99

00:52:14.000 And meanwhile, President Trump had a dinner at his golf club in Virginia.

00:52:21.000 For investors in his meme coin, and again, this sort of stuff is not going to run down to his benefit.

00:52:25.000 It's just not.

00:52:26.000 It isn't.

00:52:27.000 It's hard to see the political upside to this.

00:52:30.000 According to the New York Times, a group of 220 cryptocurrency enthusiasts who wanted dinner with President Trump gathered at his golf course in Virginia.

00:52:39.000 Mr. Trump and his business partners in the venture announced the event last month, calling it the most exclusive invitation in the world.

00:52:44.000 They framed it as a contest in which the top 220 buyers of the coin would dine with the president.

00:52:49.000 at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, while the top 25 would join him at a more intimate cocktail reception and go on a tour of the White House the very next day.

00:52:57.000 There was a leaderboard that was put up on the website.

00:53:00.000 This, of course, would be the dollar sign Trump crypto.

00:53:03.000 It allowed investors to see how much they needed to purchase to move up the rankings and win a spot.

00:53:09.000 And again, the claim has been made that this is effectively an emolument.

00:53:12.000 It can have foreign powers.

00:53:14.000 That invest in the crypto coin in order to curry favor with the Trump administration, with President Trump.

00:53:21.000 Apparently, the final list includes investors from Singapore, Australia, and the United States.

00:53:26.000 Some of those investors have even said they hope to use the dinner as an opportunity to press Mr. Trump on crypto policy.

00:53:33.000 So, again, not a good look.

00:53:35.000 Not a good look.

00:53:36.000 Forget about the morality or even allegations of corruption, whatever there is there.

00:53:42.000 It is not a smart look for the President of the United States to appear to be involved in influence brokering like this.

00:53:49.000 And all of this stuff is fun and games, so long as the economy continues to function, so long as things are sailing along.

00:53:55.000 The minute that they are not, or the minute the Democrats take the Congress in 2026, all this stuff comes to a crashing halt, and it is used as a club to wield against the Republican Party writ large.

00:54:07.000 Meanwhile, the questions continue to mount over Joe Biden and the insane conspiracy to try to ensure that he remained president despite the fact that he did not have a function.

00:54:16.000 Well, I felt sorry for Joe Biden because I didn't think she was protecting him.

00:54:39.000 She wasn't protecting him from himself.

00:54:41.000 And after that hideous debate, right after the debate, they're in the spin room, and she's got his hand up, and they're victory, victory, we won, we won, it was great, great.

00:54:52.000 And the next day, he's off in North Carolina and making a victory speech.

00:54:55.000 I thought, what were they watching?

00:54:59.000 I thought it was just elder abuse, really, what they were doing.

00:55:05.000 Sally Quinn is sort of an ultimate D.C. insider.

00:55:08.000 She spent years kind of hanging out with the hoi polloi inside the Washington, D.C. beltway.

00:55:14.000 She said everybody thought he shouldn't run.

00:55:16.000 People were just distraught that he was running and thought it was terrible for the party.

00:55:20.000 I think everybody was horrified.

00:55:22.000 He was put in a position where he was allowed to run by both his staff and his wife.

00:55:25.000 People felt sorry for him.

00:55:28.000 Quinn said, listen, look like dementia to everybody.

00:55:31.000 Well, it looks like the beginning of dementia to me.

00:55:35.000 My husband had dementia.

00:55:36.000 He was diagnosed eight years before he died.

00:55:38.000 And it didn't really get severe until the last two years of his life.

00:55:43.000 But it was clear that, you know, I would see him.

00:55:49.000 He'd be making a speech and he'd forget where he was.

00:55:52.000 and he would stumble, and I finally just said...

00:55:59.000 I told everybody in his office, no more speeches, no more public appearances.

00:56:05.000 Now, again, she ain't wrong.

00:56:07.000 Meanwhile, the GOP is starting to look into the possibility of investigating how the White House actually handled Joe Biden's health.

00:56:14.000 Senator Ron Johnson is now launching an investigation, according to Axios, into former President Biden's health.

00:56:21.000 Apparently, he's going to try to find out who knew what when, which, of course, is fully warranted given the.

00:56:30.000 That's also a point made by Senator John Cornyn of Texas.

00:56:32.000 Here he was.

00:56:35.000 We're talking about the leader of the free world, the commander in chief.

00:56:38.000 This is a national security issue.

00:56:41.000 And to have a completely dysfunctional president, as apparently President Biden appeared to be, and now with those latest revelations of his other health issues.

00:56:51.000 kept from the American people, this is something that needs to be investigated.

00:56:57.000 That's the reason for the letter.

00:56:58.000 Well, he ain't wrong.

00:57:06.000 He ain't wrong.

00:57:06.000 Joining us on the line to discuss this and more is the executive editor of The Daily Wire and host of The Morning Wire, my friend John Bickley.

00:57:13.000 So, John, a lot going on in the news, obviously.

00:57:17.000 Continued cover-up of the Biden medical decline.

00:57:20.000 It's a pretty amazing thing.

00:57:21.000 Obviously, this week we saw new details emerge, not just from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's book regarding President Biden's senility, but also the Biden family announcing that the president has probably fatal cancer.

00:57:33.000 What did you guys make of it?

00:57:37.000 I step back every now and then this week.

00:57:40.000 I've stopped and just said, look, we're witnessing the biggest presidential scandal in American history.

00:57:46.000 This is massive.

00:57:48.000 And the breadth of it, the depth of it, the significance of it, it can't be overstated.

00:57:54.000 And yet the media is trying to cover this up.

00:57:57.000 They want us to move on from it.

00:57:59.000 They obviously were part of the cover-up from the beginning, now have downplayed it significantly, and want us to move on now to the rest of the news cycle.

00:58:07.000 And, you know, on our show, we've been trying to really emphasize this and not let this go.

00:58:11.000 I know your show, part of your vision for your show is to bring some balance here to the national conversation.

00:58:16.000 We're trying to do that on Morning Wire.

00:58:17.000 And so we're hammering this pretty hard.

00:58:20.000 But the Media Research Center just released a study that is really stunning.

00:58:26.000 So we have, again, the biggest scandal we've ever seen.

00:58:31.000 And yet the major, the big three spent a total of, from May 13th through the 19th, a total of seven minutes covering the We had a Politburo running the country.

00:58:52.000 The media is not interested in this.

00:58:54.000 Six minutes of that seven total minutes, seven total minutes, was from NBC.

00:59:00.000 ABC, 37 seconds.

00:59:03.000 37 seconds from May 13th through the 19th on this story.

00:59:07.000 CBS, 22 seconds.

00:59:10.000 On it, PBS NewsHour, MRC found no seconds on this story.

00:59:16.000 And again, what we've seen here is the media's complicity in this cover-up.

00:59:22.000 It's more a media scandal than anything else, I would argue.

00:59:27.000 And they want us now to move on.

00:59:29.000 We're not going to do that.

00:59:30.000 So one of the things that's come out in the last couple of days that's just stunning, the Biden campaign put on a fake It was a 90-minute town hall.

00:59:42.000 They spent millions on this.

00:59:44.000 And the point of this was to astroturf it, put chosen people in the audience, paying a lot of folks here, and it was going to make Biden look good. 0.99

00:59:54.000 He was so inept. 0.52

00:59:56.000 He was so incoherent that they didn't release a single second of this multi-million dollar project. 0.98

01:00:03.000 90 minutes, not a single second of it came out.

01:00:07.000 This is how incapacitated, And we know that this now, the revelations from the book, again, that the media is not covering, this goes back from day one of his presidency.

01:00:21.000 Laura Trump called this out in 2020, was shamed by Jake Tapper for doing so. 0.78

01:00:26.000 We all saw it.

01:00:27.000 The American people witnessed this.

01:00:29.000 It was very obvious.

01:00:30.000 Way back in 2020, by 2021, who was running the country?

01:00:35.000 We don't know.

01:00:36.000 We've learned a little bit.

01:00:37.000 It's a Politburo, again, of close advisors to the president, a group of four men, and then Jill Biden's enforcer increasingly took over. 0.99

01:00:49.000 Hunter Biden increasingly took over.

01:00:52.000 Extremely alarming.

01:00:53.000 Even Jake Tapper, to his credit, he's releasing his stuff and doing some apologizing.

01:01:00.000 But he understated, I think, the fact that we learned that Hunter Biden played such a role.

01:01:06.000 He said, you know, this is problematic, you know, because he's not the best guy.

01:01:10.000 This is shocking stuff.

01:01:12.000 Everyone should be outraged.

01:01:15.000 Thank you.

01:01:16.000 I mean, one of the things that I think is fascinating about the way that this story is now being covered is there are really a few different strains.

01:01:23.000 There are people who continue to maintain that everything was fine above board and hunky-dory.

01:01:27.000 That includes people.

01:01:28.000 Like Joe Scarborough, who's maintained that over at MSNBC.

01:01:31.000 Whoopi Goldberg, of course, is doing that over at The View.

01:01:33.000 Then you have members of the media, like Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, who actually are doing some very good reporting now.

01:01:39.000 And so the big question for the right is, why were they not doing this sort of reporting when it was happening, since we did have a president whose brain was not functional for the last year and a half of his presidency at minimum, maybe more than that.

01:01:50.000 And so that sort of question, I think, is going to hang over the media for a very, very long time to come.

01:01:56.000 And then you have, again, the members of the media who sort of claim that they didn't have anything to do with this, that they were completely bamboozled.

01:02:01.000 And it's that last group that I have some trouble believing.

01:02:05.000 The sort of group where it's like, well, I wasn't suspicious at all.

01:02:07.000 I was just completely taken in.

01:02:08.000 I mean, all of us could see in real time that the president was degrading.

01:02:13.000 And it's absolutely unbelievable to be told by, again, a lot of those same folks that there was no way for them to see it other than.

01:02:26.000 And if that means covering up the infirmity of the president of the United States so that his drug-addled son can run the country, then sure, I guess that's what it means. 0.53

01:02:34.000 You know, it's interesting.

01:02:35.000 We did an interview with Bhatia Ungar-Sargon.

01:02:37.000 She's a real force on this.

01:02:38.000 And she has the sort of class perspective that I think is fascinating.

01:02:42.000 And we asked her that, you know, why is the media so willfully ignorant and then actively covering up?

01:02:50.000 And she said, you know, in the end, it is the class of elites.

01:02:54.000 They come from a similar background.

01:02:56.000 Their goals are the same as the Democratic Party's goals.

01:03:00.000 And that's really what's operating here.

01:03:03.000 And, you know, it's funny, and it's like you're saying, the group in the media that say, oh, man, we had no idea.

01:03:11.000 Every American watching their television at any point when Biden was on it for a second saw this. 1.00

01:03:17.000 So you're asking us, What we're really saying here, this is damning, is that you're either an idiot, you have no common sense, or you're lying to us. 0.99

01:03:27.000 Either one of those prospects is really damning for legacy media outlets. 1.00

01:03:32.000 How can we trust you? 1.00

01:03:33.000 Your credibility, either you're deceptive and manipulative, or you're really that dumb. 1.00

01:03:39.000 Either way, I should turn you off and turn on shows like The Binge Bureau Show. 1.00

01:03:46.000 And like The Morning Wire, which is now available.

01:03:48.000 On video, wherever your video podcasts are available.

01:03:51.000 It is a beautiful-looking show, by the way, and really some fantastic information every single morning.

01:03:56.000 John Bickley, executive editor of The Daily Wire and host of The Morning Wire.

01:03:59.000 I really appreciate it, John.

01:04:02.000 Thanks a lot, Ben.

01:04:03.000 Well, meanwhile, this week's episode of Ben After Dark has a very special guest and a wonderful person, my friend Patricia Heaton.

01:04:10.000 She joined us online a few days ago to talk about everything going on in the world.

01:04:15.000 Patricia Heaton, thanks so much for taking the time.

01:04:17.000 Really appreciate it.

01:04:18.000 Thanks.

01:04:19.000 Thanks for having me, Ben.

01:04:20.000 So, obviously, you've done enormous amounts of amazing work in Hollywood, and you have this long and storied career, but you've also been doing tremendous work in the charitable world.

01:04:30.000 One of the things you've been working on is something called O7C.

01:04:34.000 Yeah, that's correct.

01:04:35.000 It's called October 7th Coalition, or as we call it, O7C.

01:04:39.000 And it was born out of my dismay at seeing a lack of response on the part of Christians.

01:04:46.000 To what happened on October 7th.

01:04:48.000 We saw a huge response from all the pro-amas people in major cities and on campuses across the country, which were incredibly well-financed, well-organized.

01:04:58.000 It's interesting that on October 8th, suddenly everyone had printed signs, everyone had a keffiyeh.

01:05:04.000 I mean, it clearly was planned prior to October 7th.

01:05:09.000 So that's something interesting to look into.

01:05:11.000 But at any rate...

01:05:19.000 I live in Nashville, and I know many, many people here have been to Israel a number of times.

01:05:24.000 I know they support Israel, so I was confused as to why there wasn't any more of an outpouring.

01:05:29.000 I think as far as churches go, I think pastors are afraid it's too political.

01:05:34.000 They don't want to be seen as anti-Muslim.

01:05:38.000 But I don't think that's a strong enough excuse.

01:05:41.000 There's something going on here that's not about Muslims, it's about radical Islam. 0.62

01:05:44.000 And I think you should be able to speak up against it, just like a few pastors did.

01:05:49.000 During World War II was who spoke up against the Nazis.

01:05:52.000 And again, there were only a few that also did that.

01:05:54.000 So I guess it's not a surprise.

01:05:56.000 But we put the October 7th coalition together to try to activate Christians to be visibly and vocally supportive of the Jewish people, of Israel's right to exist, and to fight anti-Semitism.

01:06:06.000 And we started right here in Nashville, reaching out to the Jewish Federation and to all the rabbis and Jewish leaders, sent a letter of support.

01:06:17.000 We did a unity dinner with 250 Christian pastors and leaders to just say we're here and to just get to know each other.

01:06:24.000 That's part of the thing.

01:06:25.000 A lot of people will go to Israel, say, I love Israel.

01:06:28.000 They'll come back.

01:06:29.000 They don't know any Jewish people in their hometown.

01:06:31.000 So I think it's really important now that we see that this radical Islamist plan for the world is unfolding, that we all need to be vigilant and get to know each other. 0.99

01:06:45.000 Work with each other.

01:06:47.000 And we also have to really get on social media.

01:06:51.000 I know you don't go on TikTok, but that's where a lot of this war is being waged for the minds of people.

01:06:57.000 So that's a big part of it.

01:07:00.000 Well, I mean, you've been doing amazing work on this, and I do appreciate the fact that you're reaching out to Christians on this because it is kind of astonishing that the feelings have changed with regard to Israel in some parts of the Christian community.

01:07:12.000 When I was growing up, obviously...

01:07:16.000 Obviously, a lot of Catholics are extremely pro-Israel also.

01:07:18.000 But there has been a larger split in the last couple of years among the Christians that I know on overt support for Israel in its war against Hamas, for example.

01:07:27.000 Yes, it's interesting.

01:07:29.000 And I think we're seeing that on the right now more in people that you and I know who are They've suddenly discovered the word Ashkenazi, and suddenly Ashkenazi means that you're not really Jewish or that you're actually in charge of everything.

01:07:53.000 It's this newfound way of being able to be anti-Semitic without saying you don't like Jewish people or you hate Jews.

01:08:02.000 So it's this really nefarious kind of thing that's creeping in.

01:08:08.000 You know, Ben, when you look at the history of the church, there are some early church fathers that are revered for their theology, St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, all these people.

01:08:20.000 There was elements of mild and then really extreme anti-Semitism in those early church fathers, but it was really theological.

01:08:30.000 It was all about the theology.

01:08:32.000 What we're seeing today is a whole different thing about race.

01:08:36.000 And it's such bigotry.

01:08:39.000 It's such uninformed bigotry. 1.00

01:08:41.000 It's such uneducated, ignorant bigotry. 1.00

01:08:44.000 And it's very, very frustrating when you see people that you thought were smart and you thought were intelligent and thought were educated spewing this just ignorant garbage. 1.00

01:08:55.000 Well, thanks for what you're doing with the O7C group that you've put together. 0.98

01:08:59.000 And then to shift topics to something wildly more entertaining.

01:09:03.000 Obviously, you're extremely successful in Hollywood.

01:09:07.000 You have been for decades at this point.

01:09:09.000 One of the things that's been fascinating to watch in Hollywood is sort of a newfound capacity for people to mention that they have heterodox politics.

01:09:16.000 And when you and I first met, that was certainly not the case.

01:09:18.000 I mean, both you and I were members of a group in Hollywood that was called Friends of Abe that was basically the underground Hollywood conservative organization where everybody sort of kept it secret in their place of work about what their politics were.

01:09:31.000 How much has President Trump, do you think, shifted the conversation in Hollywood and made it broader and easier to talk about this sort of stuff?

01:09:37.000 I don't know it was Trump as much as the instigator of this move was really about the extremism of the left.

01:09:48.000 The Democrats allowed very extremist people to take over the party.

01:09:54.000 And when you're forced to say things you don't believe, when you're forced to say things that are not true or you'll lose your job, like men can get pregnant, that's crazy.

01:10:04.000 And people started recognizing the crazy.

01:10:07.000 I think, and then you have, you know, Trump comes back in as the candidate, which I was so shocked by.

01:10:13.000 I never thought that would happen.

01:10:15.000 And seems to be just talking common sense.

01:10:20.000 It's like the scales are falling from people's eyes.

01:10:23.000 And when I see what's going on now, I know none of this is being done in an elegant way, but I think you had to bulldoze a lot of what was going on in our federal government because it was just sclerotic.

01:10:35.000 It was just frozen, calcified.

01:10:38.000 Nobody could make a dent in anything.

01:10:40.000 And as RFK Jr., who like, I don't know.

01:10:42.000 I'm still not sure, but I think what he's doing right now, he said, I got rid of those dyes in 100 days.

01:10:48.000 You had this department for 40 years.

01:10:51.000 You never got rid of those dyes.

01:10:52.000 Give me some credit.

01:10:53.000 I think that's what is, even if the tariffs make prices go up, I don't think people are going to care because stuff is being taken care of that should have been done 40, 50 years ago.

01:11:04.000 Well, that's Patricia Heaton.

01:11:05.000 Patricia, I really thank you so much for what you're doing.

01:11:07.000 Thanks so much for your time.

01:11:14.000 Thanks so much.

01:11:15.000 Great to see you.

The Ben Shapiro Show - May 23, 2025

Is There A Debt Bomb About To Drop?!

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