On today's show, we'll get into the Big, Beautiful Bill passing the House, but what does it mean for our looming debt crisis? Plus, fallout from the terror attack against a couple of Israelis in Washington, D.C., and Patricia Heaton stops by.
00:00:00.000All right, folks, tons to get to on today's show.
00:00:02.000We'll get into the big, beautiful bill passing the House, but what does it mean for our looming debt crisis?
00:00:07.000Plus, fallout from the terror attack against a couple of Israelis in Washington, D.C., and Patricia Heaton stops by.
00:00:14.000But first, before you head into Memorial Day weekend, do not miss this.
00:00:17.000It's our Daily Wire Plus Memorial Day sale.
00:00:19.000Get 40% off an annual membership with code DW40.
00:00:22.000Watch all your favorite daily shows ad-free from the most trusted voices in conservative media.
00:00:26.000People like me, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and more.
00:00:29.000Plus, unlock our full entertainment library, including an all-new episode of Ben After Dark Tonight and the premiere of Parenting, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's powerful new series dropping this Sunday exclusively at Daily Wire+.
00:00:56.000We're back with more unsolicited takes, unqualified guests, and unfiltered nonsense, just the way no one asked for.
00:01:01.000Patty Heaton joins me as we find out just how far left Hollywood's brain has actually slid off the table.
00:01:06.000Adam 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.
00:01:17.000We'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.
00:01:24.000It is still unsupervised, still unfiltered, and still very, very bad.
00:01:28.000Been after dark tonight, only on Daily Wire Plus, only for members.
00:01:32.000Well, folks, President Trump has, in fact, moved the big, beautiful bill through the House of Representatives.
00:01:37.000President Trump took a victory lap yesterday over this particular move.
00:01:42.000He put out a statement on Truth Social, quote, The one big, beautiful bill has passed the House of Representatives.
00:01:46.000This is arguably the most significant piece of legislation that will ever be signed in the history of our country.
00:01:51.000The 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.
00:02:05.000Great job by Speaker Mike Johnson and the House leadership, and thank you to every Republican who voted yes on this historic bill.
00:02:10.000Now 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.
00:02:17.000The Democrats have lost control of themselves and are aimlessly wandering around, showing no confidence, grit, or determination.
00:02:22.000They'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.
00:02:33.000They don't realize that these things and so many more like them will never happen again.
00:02:37.000Okay, so President Trump obviously and correctly happy about the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill in the House of Representatives.
00:02:43.000Now, as to the content of the Big Beautiful Bill, Here is the reality.
00:02:47.000The American people are not in touch with reality when it comes to just fiscal reality.
00:02:53.000So yes, it is good that taxes did not massively increase.
00:02:56.000And yes, we do need funding for border security.
00:02:59.000But 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.
00:03:08.000Myths like the idea that there's no American middle class.
00:03:16.000Myths 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.
00:03:25.000According 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.
00:03:39.000Labor unions have a popularity rating of about 60% as opposed to big business, which is below 50%.
00:03:47.000The reason that's not good is because what that leads to is a populist economic policy.
00:03:51.000And 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.
00:04:01.000Those are the two options for the parties.
00:04:03.000And that's why you got a bill that looks like this.
00:04:05.000And let's be clear, this bill, it's a mess.
00:04:08.000There's some good stuff in it, the tax cuts, the border security stuff.
00:04:13.000I 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.
00:04:22.000There's still some economic problems out there.
00:04:24.000With 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.
00:04:34.000So, for example, President Trump made sure that there were no significant restructurings of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.
00:04:43.000Those will not cut in until December of 2026.
00:04:47.000No changes in Medicare, no changes in Social Security, the systemic drivers of America's debt.
00:04:52.000And the reason for that is because President Trump realizes a political reality.
00:04:56.000Again, President Trump is good at reality.
00:04:57.000The political reality is that there is no desire from the American people to restructure entitlements.
00:05:02.000And so in order to avoid the sort of blowback from the Democrats, President Trump decided not to touch any of that stuff.
00:05:08.000This is why, for example, Claire McCaskill, when she says, That millions of people are going to lose health care coverage.
00:05:15.000They'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.
00:05:25.000A lot of folks don't know what the bond market means.
00:06:22.000So 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.
00:06:30.000But 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.
00:06:41.000It doesn't actually get to the core of the matter.
00:06:43.000That, 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.
00:06:59.000Well, 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.
00:07:07.000But I can't do that because I'm here to deliver a dose of reality.
00:07:11.000This bill dramatically increases deficits in the near term, but promises our government will be fiscally responsible five years from now.
00:07:29.000Okay, this bill is not a debt bomb ticking.
00:07:33.000Actually, just our government is a debt bomb ticking.
00:07:35.000Folks, when we talk about America's debt bomb, let's talk about the American debt-to-GDP ratio.
00:07:40.000Right now, we're already at around 100%.
00:07:42.000So I asked our friends and sponsors at Perplexity, what will our debt-to-GDP ratio be in 2035?
00:07:48.000And then compare that to some other countries.
00:07:50.000So, 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.
00:08:00.000This would actually be higher than our post-World War II record of 106%, which, by the way, Is psychotic.
00:08:07.000Because World War II was really, really expensive.
00:08:10.000If the current legislation were to pass, then debt theoretically could climb even higher, maybe reaching almost 130% of GDP by 2034, according to Perplexity.
00:08:21.000Well, how does that compare to other countries?
00:08:25.000Japan has a debt to GDP ratio of somewhere in the 250 to 270 percent range.
00:08:31.000And that is because of serious deflation and aging population.
00:08:34.000France will be about where we are, somewhere in the 120 percent range.
00:08:39.000Italy 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.
00:09:40.000You want to be able to grow your way out of some of this.
00:09:43.000You are going to need lower taxes and lower regulation.
00:09:46.000And those two things, lower taxes, lower regulation, that is stuff that the Senate is in fact doing.
00:09:52.000Yesterday, the Senate voted to end California's electric vehicle mandate, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:09:58.000The 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.
00:10:09.000Again, 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.
00:10:17.000So deregulation is actually a good thing.
00:10:21.000And, of course, keeping taxes lower is a good thing.
00:10:23.000However, to pretend that we do not have a debt bomb coming, that is silly.
00:10:42.000The 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.
00:10:51.000The yield on the 30-year bond drifted about 5% for the second time this week.
00:10:54.000The 10-year note was near 4.6% and inching higher.
00:10:58.000As 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.
00:11:07.000Where will growth come from to buoy consumer sentiment or to generate enough revenue to help Uncle Sam pay the bills?
00:11:13.000Keep 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.
00:11:20.000The rap is that the budget bill will blow out the deficit by another $3.3 trillion over 10 years.
00:11:25.000That profligacy According to the story, leaves bond investors at the end of their tether.
00:11:32.000It features more spending restraint than the Biden Democrats ever offered.
00:11:36.000And you do, in fact, need lower taxes.
00:11:38.000But 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.
00:11:47.000And 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.
00:11:55.000That it basically sinks the ship that we are all riding on together.
00:12:00.000Meanwhile, there are some other headwinds the economy is facing.
00:12:17.000Home sales in April fell for the second straight month, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:12:21.000U.S. existing home sales fell slightly by 0.5% in April from the prior month.
00:12:25.000To 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.
00:12:38.000The spring months have been lackluster this year.
00:12:41.000Home prices and mortgage rates remain too high for many buyers, and concerns about the economy are making buyers nervous about making a big purchase.
00:12:46.000Plus, by the way, sellers are not actually selling because they don't want to have to then buy.
00:12:54.000Meanwhile, It should be noted here that we still have a bunch of tariffs on the products coming into the country.
00:12:59.000There'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.
00:14:00.000Because 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.
00:14:54.000Somebody responsible is going to have to make the case that actually we need to curb our government debt.
00:14:59.000And that can't be done just by raising taxes on the rich.
00:15:02.000That is a lie the Democrats like to tell and the numbers just don't add up.
00:15:05.000There'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.
00:15:18.000The bottom line is, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and eventually America is going to find that out.
00:15:24.000Meanwhile, 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.
00:15:38.000Now, as you may have noted, on yesterday's show, I never actually used.
00:15:41.000The term antisemitism in discussing these sort of lies that have created a permission structure for violence.
00:15:58.000She says, don't worry, we're not going to tolerate antisemitism.
00:16:01.000What I do know is that the horrific incident is going to frighten a lot of people in our city and in our country.
00:16:10.000And I want to be clear that we will not tolerate this violence or hate in our city.
00:16:17.000We will not tolerate any acts of terrorism.
00:16:20.000And 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.
00:16:32.000Okay, so no toleration for anti-Semitism.
00:16:35.000And again, this is the kind of line that's being repeated left and right.
00:16:38.000For 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.
00:16:52.000She tweeted out, Absolutely nothing justifies the murder of innocents.
00:16:56.000I am devastated by the killing of two people outside.
00:16:58.000An American Jewish Committee global event here in Washington.
00:17:01.000Our prayers are with the victims, families, and loved ones of all impacted.
00:17:03.000As we await more details, we must be clear that hatred has no home here.
00:17:07.000Anti-Semitism is a threat to all we hold dear as a society.
00:17:10.000It must be confronted and rooted out everywhere.
00:17:13.000So she's going to root out anti-Semitism, says Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, she of the best friendship with Ilhan Omar.
00:17:21.000Bernie Sanders put out his own statement.
00:17:23.000I'm appalled by the killing of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington last night and grateful for the quick response from law enforcement.
00:17:30.000Violence must have no place in politics.
00:17:39.000There 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.
00:17:50.000They tweeted what the shooter did, and again, I don't do shooter names on the show, is the highest expression of anti-Zionism.
00:18:30.000The problem here is the definition of anti-Semitism clearly.
00:18:34.000When 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.
00:18:47.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
00:18:48.000First, Pure Talk, my wireless company, a veteran-led company, believes every man and woman And that's why Pure Talk is on a mission to give an allegiance flag, the highest quality American flag, to 1,000 U.S. veterans in time for the patriotic holidays.
00:19:04.000Flag Day and the U.S. Army Birthday are coming up June 14th.
00:19:07.000Independence Day, of course, comes up July 4th.
00:19:09.000Just switch your cell phone service to Pure Talk this month and a portion of every sale will go to provide these high quality flags to deserving veterans.
00:19:16.000With plans from just $25 a month for unlimited talk, text, and plenty of data, you can enjoy America's most dependable 5G network while cutting your cell phone bill in half.
00:19:23.000The average family saves over $1,000 a year.
00:19:26.000I'm constantly using my PureTalk coverage, business calls, family calls, everything phone-related.
00:19:31.000Just head on over to puretalk.com slash Shapiro to switch hassle-free in as little as 10 minutes.
00:19:35.000Again, that's puretalk.com slash Shapiro to support veterans and to switch to America's wireless company, PureTalk.
00:19:41.000You're going to save money, get better coverage.
00:19:42.000Go check them out right now, puretalk.com.
00:19:45.000Also, less-than-seller credit can close a lot of doors.
00:19:48.000From buying a car to securing a new apartment or house, Kickoff changes that narrative with credit-building plans designed to safely jumpstart your score in the simplest, fastest way possible, making financial possibilities more accessible again.
00:19:59.000Kickoff is the number one credit-building app out there.
00:20:02.000They make it really simple to sign up and start credit-building.
00:20:04.000You can sign up in minutes right from your phone.
00:20:06.000No credit check required, cancel any time, no hidden fees, no interest.
00:20:53.000Average first year credit score impact of plus 84 points.
00:20:55.000Advantage score 3.0 between January 2023 and January 2024 for kickoff credit account users who started with the score below 600, who paid on time, and who had no delinquencies or collections added to their credit profile during the period.
00:21:06.000Late payments may negatively impact your credit score.
00:21:29.000Anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory about a group.
00:21:32.000And it takes a bunch of different forms, many of which oppose one another.
00:21:35.000So 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.
00:21:43.000And the same people will then claim the Jews are actually infiltrating interlopers and they are diluting the body politic.
00:21:50.000You'll hear from people that Jews are aggressively nationalistic and therefore separatists, and also the Jews are actually globalists and actually deracinating.
00:21:59.000You hear the Jews are communists and therefore they are anti-capitalism and anti-markets.
00:22:04.000And also the Jews are capitalists and therefore they are selfish and anti-religious.
00:22:08.000You hear the Jews are weaklings and thereby weaken everybody or the Jews are too powerful and thereby exploit everybody, right?
00:22:25.000Against Jews, specifically for being ethnically Jewish.
00:22:28.000But as we've seen, that's actually incomplete.
00:22:30.000Because you can claim all of the things anti-Semites actually claim.
00:22:34.000Jews are cliquish or globalists or at the same time both or whatever, without technically hating Jews.
00:22:40.000And that's the game that is being played right now.
00:22:42.000This 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.
00:22:53.000You're hearing Ilhan Omar will say this sort of thing.
00:22:57.000So these overbroad terms used by politicians actually become counterproductive.
00:23:01.000So, for example, you can say that Israel is the fond head of all evil without technically hating Jews.
00:23:08.000You can even say you have a Jewish friend.
00:23:10.000That might not really be true, but you can say it.
00:23:13.000Or you can find some Jewish person who actually has no connection with Judaism and that person can be your standard.
00:23:19.000And this is the excuse that you'll hear from many of the people who say just this kind of stuff.
00:23:22.000And here's the problem with what Muriel Bowser and AOC and all these people are saying.
00:23:26.000It 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.
00:23:34.000And that's the cover that many people who actually do hate Jews use because it is in fact an easy cover.
00:23:39.000Say, oh, it's not about hatred of Jews.
00:24:30.000Most people may tweet pretty obvious Jew-hating garbage and then delete it.
00:24:34.000But they can always claim their perspective isn't rooted in hatred of Jews, per se.
00:24:38.000And all of that offers an easy offer for those who actually build a permission structure for actual evil and murder.
00:24:45.000Instead 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.
00:25:32.000And the more they are told, the more dangerous they become.
00:25:36.000And 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.
00:25:44.000Because 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.
00:25:57.000And perhaps AOC wouldn't just be able to invoke anti-Semitism and get off scot-free while simultaneously making room for Ilhan Omar.
00:26:04.000She might actually have to call out the lies of her own side.
00:26:07.000And that's the thing they will never do.
00:26:09.000At a certain point, invocation of terms like anti-Semitism.
00:26:15.000Because, again, if that doesn't do the job of stopping people from lying about Jews, then what exactly is the point of the thing?
00:26:26.000Instead, 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.
00:26:39.000That's the thing that actually allows us clarity.
00:26:42.000That allows us to see who is pushing what and why.
00:26:46.000And again, that's not me saying that none of the people who are pushing the lies hate Jews.
00:26:51.000Many of them, I'm sure, are not particularly fond of Jews or Judaism or anything like it.
00:26:55.000But 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.
00:27:12.000So, 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.
00:27:21.000He was literally shouting, free, free Palestine, right after murdering two people.
00:27:27.000He was also, in January of 2024, tweeting out, death to America, America KKKA.
00:27:34.000So we know exactly why this person did, what this person did.
00:27:37.000We know exactly what the worldview was.
00:27:40.000Now, if you just say that's anti-Semitism, it doesn't actually go to the heart of the matter.
00:27:45.000It's not just about irrational Jew hatred, in the same way that racism is about irrational hatred of blacks or Asians or whomever else.
00:27:53.000There is a broader worldview that is deeply damaging to Western society that lies at the root of all this.
00:27:59.000There's one on the right, there's one on the left.
00:28:00.000Listen to yesterday's show, I talk about it at length.
00:28:03.000This, by the way, is how the New York Times can make light of Mahmoud Khalil, pretending that Mahmoud Khalil is totally fine.
00:28:09.000And this, of course, would be the student who was detained from Columbia University as a graduate, and he was detained for deportation.
00:28:21.000And he had an immigration court hearing to try and determine whether he would be deported or not.
00:28:27.000And 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.
00:28:42.000That group cheered the October 7th pogrom.
00:28:47.000They also lavished praise on Ismail Chania of Hamas, Hassan Azrala of Hezbollah.
00:28:54.000The 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.
00:29:08.000So, that's what Mahmoud Khalil believes.
00:29:11.000Is that a permission structure for the kind of thing we saw?
00:29:27.000If 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.
00:29:47.000Then 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.
00:29:54.000And my thoughts and prayers, violence should have no place in our country.
00:29:57.000OK, if you let people off the hook just for saying violence is bad or anti-Semitism is bad.
00:30:01.000But you never ask specific questions about the belief systems that drive people to do evil things.
00:30:07.000And 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.
00:30:20.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
00:30:21.000First, when we started Daily Wire, it felt like we had to figure everything out with minimal help.
00:30:25.000Editorial guidelines, studio setup, production schedule, branding.
00:30:29.000New decisions were necessary literally daily.
00:30:31.000Finding the one tool that simplifies everything when starting a business becomes a game changer and a lifesaver for millions of businesses.
00:30:56.000Shopify's got you covered from the start with beautiful, ready-to-go templates that match your brand's style and help you find your customers through easy-to-run email and social media campaigns.
00:31:04.000And if you need a hand with Ever8Hasks, their AI tools, created specifically for commerce, can help enhance product images, write descriptions, and more.
00:31:12.000Plus, their award-winning customer support is available 24-7 to share advice if you ever get stuck.
00:31:41.000Cars for Kids is not just an awesome and catchy jingle.
00:31:44.000This amazing organization will come to you free of charge at your convenience and tow away any old vehicle you've got sitting around and turn it into charity funds for kids.
00:31:51.000They take care of all the paperwork and logistics, and you walk away with a tax-deductible receipt for the sale price of the car, a vacation voucher, and space in your driveway for your new car.
00:32:00.000Call 1-877-CARS4KIDS or go to cars4kids.org slash Ben.
00:32:31.000Cars with a K. Well, meanwhile, the Trump administration is taking yet another measure against Harvard University.
00:32:36.000On Thursday, they announced that they were halting Harvard's ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a critical funding source for Harvard.
00:32:45.000Now, Harvard doesn't just bring students in because they're quote-unquote the best and the brightest from abroad.
00:32:49.000They also bring people in who are likely to pay full tuition, like 60 grand a year.
00:32:54.000There are about 6,800 international students attending Harvard this year.
00:32:58.000That's more than a quarter of the student body.
00:33:01.000The Trump administration is using this as leverage to get Harvard to actually obey the Civil Rights Act.
00:33:08.000According 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.
00:33:22.000A spokesperson for Harvard called the administration's action unlawful.
00:33:27.000In 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.
00:33:37.000Hey, now, as a method of getting Harvard to actually obey civil rights law, Fine with me.
00:33:44.000However, this is actually not a Harvard-specific problem.
00:33:49.000This is something the Secretary of State Rubio has been very clear on.
00:33:52.000The 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.
00:33:59.000You don't have free speech rights just because you want to come here.
00:34:06.000You don't have a right to enter the United States believing That has never been the way any self-respecting country treats itself.
00:34:14.000And 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.
00:34:28.000It's not enough to shift some of these terrible people from Harvard University to Columbia or whatever.
00:34:32.000Many of them just shouldn't be in the country at all.
00:34:36.000And meanwhile, if you are worried, I don't know how many times the Iranians can say it.
00:34:55.000They've said it over and over and over and over.
00:34:56.000They are not going to give up their ability to enrich uranium, which is to say to build a nuclear weapon.
00:35:00.000Nonetheless, the negotiations continue apace.
00:35:03.000The Trump administration is apparently going to deploy Steve Whitcoff once again, our special envoy.
00:35:09.000To negotiate with the Iranians, this time in Rome.
00:35:14.000Now, again, the Iranians keep saying it over and over, like the quiet part out loud.
00:35:17.000They're basically just calling the Trump administration's bluff.
00:35:20.000They're saying, we're not going to give you anything you want.
00:35:21.000Are you still going to try and sign a deal?
00:35:23.000Abbas Iraqi, Iran's foreign minister, said, quote, we are witnessing completely unreasonable and illogical positions from the Americans.
00:35:30.000Ayatollah 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.
00:35:38.000Khomeini himself said, I don't think nuclear talks with the United States will bring results.
00:35:54.000Because 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.
00:36:07.000And meanwhile, speaking of the Trump administration Department of Justice, they're doing an amazing thing.
00:36:13.000Our 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.
00:36:47.000And 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.
00:36:56.000And 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.
00:37:11.000On 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.
00:37:21.000The city has to pay for the compliance costs of this, which often amount to over $10 million a year over a decade.
00:37:28.000And 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.
00:37:37.000And crime goes up, public safety goes down.
00:37:43.000And overall, these consent decrees have been found to be relatively ineffective.
00:37:47.000And so what we're doing at the Civil Rights Division is we're withdrawing.
00:37:52.000We 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.
00:38:06.000She was shot and killed as a result of.
00:38:19.000So we're prosecuting those detectives and the officers involved in these incidents that I'm mentioning.
00:38:25.000We're prosecuting them for their individual offenses, and I think that's important, individual accountability.
00:38:30.000In the other one that we dismissed in Minneapolis, this stems from the George Floyd incident.
00:38:42.000And 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.
00:38:52.000In 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.
00:39:04.000Human Rights Commission, putting them under a consent decree already.
00:39:08.000And so Louisville didn't oppose our attempts to kick this out while we looked at it.
00:39:13.000And Minneapolis did oppose our attempts and has publicly criticized our decision.
00:39:18.000But in addition to the ones that I mentioned, Ben, we also dismissed six factual findings in different cities.
00:39:26.000And what the Biden administration attempted to do, and as you probably are aware, my predecessor was an avid defund the police activist.
00:39:34.000And that is also the view of several of the prior lawyers in our special litigation section who've now moved on to other pastures.
00:39:58.000We don't have confidence that those findings are based in facts.
00:40:03.000Appropriate, full consideration of all the facts and appropriate statistics.
00:40:08.000And 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.
00:40:26.000So pretty broad range of different types of issues, but we did not have confidence in those outcomes.
00:40:31.000And so that's why we took those actions yesterday.
00:40:35.000So, 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.
00:40:44.000What are the sorts of things that are in these consent decrees that really hamstring the police and prevent them from doing their jobs?
00:40:50.000And why do police departments accept that it's consent decrees in the first place if they're so bad for policing?
00:40:57.000So the police departments themselves are usually not the decision makers.
00:41:00.000It's usually the city council or a mayor.
00:41:03.000And 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.
00:41:13.000These 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,
00:41:33.000where 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.
00:42:02.000So first of all, as we know, Memphis is a fairly crime-ridden city.
00:42:09.000The police force is majority African American.
00:42:11.000the homeless population is 75% African-American.
00:42:15.000And 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.
00:42:34.000It defies common sense and it's unfair.
00:42:38.000And 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.
00:43:03.000That said, United States Department of Justice does have training resources for police departments.
00:43:08.000And one thing we offer is if a We offer an audit process for them and we'll go through and provide some consultation.
00:43:21.000And there's even funds available for police departments that have a need.
00:43:25.000And so overall, I think we've made a step today to make Americans safer in those cities.
00:43:30.000And 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.
00:43:40.000Because consent decrees that go on for 12, 14, 15, even over 20 years, something is broken in that system.
00:43:46.000The taxpayers are paying a tax effectively for a broken system, and that is wrong, and we're going to fix that.
00:43:53.000You 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.
00:44:08.000To go after institutions that are actually charged with keeping the peace.
00:44:13.000I mean, that was true in the Obama administration.
00:44:14.000It was certainly true in the Biden administration as well.
00:44:17.000And the Trump administration, very differently than other Republican administrations of the past, is not pandering to that sort of history.
00:44:24.000Instead, 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.
00:44:42.000I think you believe in civil rights too, but these civil rights are much more broadly defined than the progressive version of civil rights.
00:44:48.000We all have rights as parents and families to determine how children are educated and their exposure to sexualized content in the schools.
00:44:59.000Civil right to pray and be free of violence on the basis of your religious identification and beliefs.
00:45:07.000The 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.
00:45:20.000And so these are all civil rights that we're standing up for at the Department of Justice.
00:45:23.000And I do believe they're consistent with our statutory framework and certainly the vision of our founders.
00:45:28.000But I think it's our job to affirmatively use these tools for the benefit of the American people.
00:45:33.000That's what President Trump promised, and that's what we're delivering.
00:46:12.000These 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.
00:46:21.000What makes this even more heartbreaking is that thousands of elderly Jewish survivors in Israel are living below the poverty line.
00:46:26.000There'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.
00:46:32.000The fellowship provides a real lifeline to these precious individuals Meanwhile,
00:47:00.000members of the media are very perturbed with President Trump for calling out the South African president.
00:47:05.000Cyril 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.
00:47:18.000Well, 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.
00:47:29.000Quote, to this day, the bulk of South Africa's private wealth remains in white hands.
00:47:33.000And while life is demonstrably better for the black majority, South Africa is by many measures the most unequal society on earth.
00:47:39.000The white minority is the major beneficiary of this arrangement, but there is a caveat.
00:47:43.000Even within this cohort, wealth distribution is lumpy.
00:47:47.000The decline of the middle class is a global phenomenon, but in South Africa, it takes on unambiguously racial characteristics.
00:47:53.000There is no question that many rural South Africans, like many urban South Africans, have experienced almost wartime levels of violence.
00:47:59.000South Africa's gruesome rates of inequality almost ensure this.
00:48:02.000The police are often useless or worse.
00:48:04.000Organized gangsterism and industrial-scale stock theft reduce rural areas to occasional battlefields.
00:48:10.000But 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.
00:48:38.000The idea here is that if white farmers are about to have their land expropriated, that's okay because they're actually former oppressors.
00:48:46.000It'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.
00:48:55.000It's about spreading the global white replacement conspiracy theory.
00:49:00.000If 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.
00:49:17.000This columnist says, make no mistake, democratic South Africa is, in many respects, a failed, violent, and corrupt state.
00:49:22.000But 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.
00:49:29.000By 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.
00:49:37.000Well, so you admit that the state is a complete fail.
00:49:44.000But as long as apartheid was bad, that means that everything that's happening now is justified.
00:50:02.000Meanwhile, in other news, the Supreme Court yesterday deadlocked on the question of whether public religious charter schools violate the separation of church and state.
00:50:14.000So in the state of Oklahoma, there was a Catholic virtual school that filed for charter status, public charter status.
00:50:23.000And the Supreme Court was supposed to decide on this.
00:50:26.000A 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.
00:50:41.000Instead, the current landscape of government funding for religious schools remains intact.
00:50:45.000Now, a lot of people are all over Amy Coney Barrett because she recused herself in this case.
00:50:52.000Okay, Amy Coney Barrett recused herself in this particular case.
00:50:55.000Because of her ties to Notre Dame Law School and its Religious Liberties Legal Clinic, which represented the school in this particular case.
00:51:04.000She, again, did not vote against the religious charter school.
00:51:09.000Obviously, the religious charter school should be funded.
00:51:11.000The 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.
00:51:21.000That it can flow to both secular and religious institutions and religious institutions of every form and fashion.
00:51:26.000It says that the state cannot prefer one religion above all the other religions.
00:51:31.000That is what the separation of church and state suggests.
00:51:35.000But if you are making the funding available to all of these various public charter schools, what exactly is the problem?
00:51:42.000Now, it's unclear exactly how people voted.
00:51:45.000The court split four to four, and because Coney Barrett recused herself, there's no actual outcome in the case.
00:51:53.000However, 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.
00:51:58.000Hard to imagine that it was Kavanaugh or even Gorsuch who voted this way on this particular decision.
00:52:06.000There 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.
00:52:14.000And meanwhile, President Trump had a dinner at his golf club in Virginia.
00:52:21.000For investors in his meme coin, and again, this sort of stuff is not going to run down to his benefit.
00:52:27.000It's hard to see the political upside to this.
00:52:30.000According to the New York Times, a group of 220 cryptocurrency enthusiasts who wanted dinner with President Trump gathered at his golf course in Virginia.
00:52:39.000Mr. Trump and his business partners in the venture announced the event last month, calling it the most exclusive invitation in the world.
00:52:44.000They framed it as a contest in which the top 220 buyers of the coin would dine with the president.
00:52:49.000at 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.
00:52:57.000There was a leaderboard that was put up on the website.
00:53:00.000This, of course, would be the dollar sign Trump crypto.
00:53:03.000It allowed investors to see how much they needed to purchase to move up the rankings and win a spot.
00:53:09.000And again, the claim has been made that this is effectively an emolument.
00:53:36.000Forget about the morality or even allegations of corruption, whatever there is there.
00:53:42.000It is not a smart look for the President of the United States to appear to be involved in influence brokering like this.
00:53:49.000And all of this stuff is fun and games, so long as the economy continues to function, so long as things are sailing along.
00:53:55.000The 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.
00:54:07.000Meanwhile, 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.
00:54:16.000Well, I felt sorry for Joe Biden because I didn't think she was protecting him.
00:54:39.000She wasn't protecting him from himself.
00:54:41.000And 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.
00:54:52.000And the next day, he's off in North Carolina and making a victory speech.
00:56:41.000And to have a completely dysfunctional president, as apparently President Biden appeared to be, and now with those latest revelations of his other health issues.
00:56:51.000kept from the American people, this is something that needs to be investigated.
00:57:06.000Joining 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.
00:57:13.000So, John, a lot going on in the news, obviously.
00:57:17.000Continued cover-up of the Biden medical decline.
00:57:21.000Obviously, 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.
00:57:59.000They 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.
00:58:07.000And, you know, on our show, we've been trying to really emphasize this and not let this go.
00:58:11.000I know your show, part of your vision for your show is to bring some balance here to the national conversation.
00:58:16.000We're trying to do that on Morning Wire.
00:58:17.000And so we're hammering this pretty hard.
00:58:20.000But the Media Research Center just released a study that is really stunning.
00:58:26.000So we have, again, the biggest scandal we've ever seen.
00:58:31.000And 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.
00:59:30.000So 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.
00:59:44.000And 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.
00:59:56.000He was so incoherent that they didn't release a single second of this multi-million dollar project.
01:00:03.00090 minutes, not a single second of it came out.
01:00:07.000This 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.
01:00:21.000Laura Trump called this out in 2020, was shamed by Jake Tapper for doing so.
01:01:16.000I 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.
01:01:23.000There are people who continue to maintain that everything was fine above board and hunky-dory.
01:01:28.000Like Joe Scarborough, who's maintained that over at MSNBC.
01:01:31.000Whoopi Goldberg, of course, is doing that over at The View.
01:01:33.000Then you have members of the media, like Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, who actually are doing some very good reporting now.
01:01:39.000And 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.
01:01:50.000And so that sort of question, I think, is going to hang over the media for a very, very long time to come.
01:01:56.000And 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.
01:02:01.000And it's that last group that I have some trouble believing.
01:02:05.000The sort of group where it's like, well, I wasn't suspicious at all.
01:02:08.000I mean, all of us could see in real time that the president was degrading.
01:02:13.000And 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.
01:02:26.000And 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.
01:03:03.000And, 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.
01:03:11.000Every American watching their television at any point when Biden was on it for a second saw this.
01:03:17.000So 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.
01:03:27.000Either one of those prospects is really damning for legacy media outlets.
01:04:20.000So, 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.
01:04:30.000One of the things you've been working on is something called O7C.
01:04:48.000We 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.
01:04:58.000It's interesting that on October 8th, suddenly everyone had printed signs, everyone had a keffiyeh.
01:05:04.000I mean, it clearly was planned prior to October 7th.
01:05:09.000So that's something interesting to look into.
01:05:56.000But 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.
01:06:06.000And 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.
01:06:17.000We did a unity dinner with 250 Christian pastors and leaders to just say we're here and to just get to know each other.
01:06:29.000They don't know any Jewish people in their hometown.
01:06:31.000So 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.
01:07:00.000Well, 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.
01:07:16.000Obviously, a lot of Catholics are extremely pro-Israel also.
01:07:18.000But 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.
01:07:29.000And 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.
01:07:53.000It's this newfound way of being able to be anti-Semitic without saying you don't like Jewish people or you hate Jews.
01:08:02.000So it's this really nefarious kind of thing that's creeping in.
01:08:08.000You 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.
01:08:20.000There was elements of mild and then really extreme anti-Semitism in those early church fathers, but it was really theological.
01:08:41.000It's such uneducated, ignorant bigotry.
01:08:44.000And 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.
01:08:55.000Well, thanks for what you're doing with the O7C group that you've put together.
01:08:59.000And then to shift topics to something wildly more entertaining.
01:09:03.000Obviously, you're extremely successful in Hollywood.
01:09:07.000You have been for decades at this point.
01:09:09.000One 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.
01:09:16.000And when you and I first met, that was certainly not the case.
01:09:18.000I 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.
01:09:31.000How 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?
01:09:37.000I don't know it was Trump as much as the instigator of this move was really about the extremism of the left.
01:09:48.000The Democrats allowed very extremist people to take over the party.
01:09:54.000And 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.
01:10:04.000And people started recognizing the crazy.
01:10:07.000I think, and then you have, you know, Trump comes back in as the candidate, which I was so shocked by.
01:10:15.000And seems to be just talking common sense.
01:10:20.000It's like the scales are falling from people's eyes.
01:10:23.000And 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.
01:10:53.000I 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.