The Ben Shapiro Show - Is Trump WINNING The Tariff Wars?

00:00:00.000 Alrighty, folks, a big show coming up for you here today.

00:00:02.000 Gina Carano just won a big victory with Disney.

00:00:06.000 We were part of that.

00:00:06.000 And so we're really excited for Gina in all of that.

00:00:09.000 Plus, all of the latest on tariffs, uncertainty about AI, about trade wars.

00:00:14.000 And we'll get to Democrats now claiming that in order to fight Republican tyranny, they have to break all the mechanisms of democracy.

00:00:21.000 You know, it's just how it goes.

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00:00:32.000 Take a look at what's happening this month on Daily Wire Plus.

00:00:35.000 I don't care what you did in your career the last five years.

00:00:38.000 What are you going to do tonight?

00:00:39.000 Yeah, that's a very good question.

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00:00:44.000 I'm ready.

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00:00:50.000 The moment you've waited for is here.

00:00:54.000 Coming up on the Pope and the Fury.

00:00:56.000 Here we are with yet another week.

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00:01:36.000 Well, folks, I want to get to all the economic news in a minute because there is a lot of hubbub around President Trump's tariff war, about AI, about inflation.

00:01:44.000 We'll get to all of that in a moment.

00:01:45.000 First, I just think that the right ought to take a victory lap because today, actress Gina Carano reached a settlement with Lucasfilm and Walt Disney.

00:01:53.000 And we here at Daily Wire are very, very close to this story.

00:01:56.000 So the settlement is undisclosed for an undisclosed amount, but apparently Gina Carano posted on X that she was pleased with the outcome.

00:02:04.000 Lucasfilm said in a statement, Ms. Carano was always well respected by her directors, co-stars, and staff, and she worked hard to perfect her craft while treating her colleagues with kindness and respect.

00:02:12.000 With this lawsuit concluded, we look forward to identifying opportunities to work together with Ms. Carano in the near future.

00:02:19.000 Now, you'll remember what happened with Gina Carano.

00:02:21.000 This is a few years back in 2021.

00:02:23.000 So in 2021, she put up a social media posting that was a picture of Nazis chasing a Jew from the Holocaust.

00:02:31.000 And basically, she said, when you other other people, this is what it can lead to, which is a pretty vaguely innocent statement.

00:02:39.000 And because there were a bunch of people who perceived Gina Carano as right-wing, Lucasfilm and Disney essentially fired her unjustifiably, despite the fact that while she was on The Mandalorian, Pedro Pascal, who's the star of The Mandalorian, was similarly posting Holocaust memes, but comparing Jews in Auschwitz to illegal immigrants being held in detention facilities.

00:02:59.000 And that was no problem at all.

00:03:00.000 So Gina was fired from Walt Disney Company and from Lucasfilm and from The Mandalorian. 1.00

00:03:05.000 She was totally taken off the show. 0.95

00:03:07.000 And I personally called Gina.

00:03:09.000 I got her number actually from Dana White.

00:03:11.000 And I called up Gina and I said, Gina, they're trying to cancel you. 0.95

00:03:15.000 So we would like to hire you to do a movie and we should announce it like right now.

00:03:20.000 And it would take actual stones for you to stand up to the industry and say, listen, I'm not going to be canceled.

00:03:26.000 I'm not going to back down.

00:03:27.000 And in fact, I'm going to go do a film with other people outside the system.

00:03:33.000 And Gina, to her credit, immediately agreed.

00:03:35.000 And so within 48 hours of her firing from Walt Disney, she had been quote unquote uncanceled by Daily Wire.

00:03:40.000 That turned into Terror on the Prairie, which is a movie available, of course, over at Daily Wire Plus.

00:03:45.000 And it took several years, obviously.

00:03:47.000 That was 2021.

00:03:48.000 It took several years for Gina to get her due from Walt Disney and from Lucasfilm.

00:03:54.000 And good for her.

00:03:57.000 Again, I think what this means is that she will probably end up in the Mandalorian movie.

00:04:01.000 She'll probably have some sort of cameo or small part in the Mandalorian movie. 0.98

00:04:05.000 Her lawsuit against Disney was funded by Elon Musk.

00:04:10.000 Part of the intention included a promise when he bought X that he was going to fund lawsuits for people unfairly treated by their employers over poster activity on the platform.

00:04:18.000 On Thursday, Gina thanked Musk for backing my case and asking for nothing in return.

00:04:23.000 I had a chance to text a little bit with Gina last night.

00:04:25.000 It's very exciting for her.

00:04:26.000 And by the way, I do think that it is a move toward moderation from Disney.

00:04:30.000 I think that Disney, they realize that they went too far.

00:04:34.000 And you've seen this over the course of the past few years.

00:04:36.000 So you'll recall that originally when they launched the trailer for Disney's Snow White, there were no dwarves in it.

00:04:42.000 All the dwarves were fully grown, diverse peoples.

00:04:46.000 And then we threatened them that we were going to make a Snow White movie and they went back to the drawing board so much that they completely recut the movie.

00:04:51.000 Now, I don't think the movie is very good, but it is certainly more in line than it would have been otherwise with the actual original tale of Snow White because it actually has dwarves in it, for example.

00:05:01.000 Disney also, apparently, in the recent past, has taken movies that were going to be designed to push really hard social leftism on kids and basically redo those movies.

00:05:12.000 Okay, so I asked, for example, my sponsors at Comet, a new web browser by Perplexity, to list Disney movies since 2021 and to show their box office performance versus expectations.

00:05:23.000 And the answer is that the ones that were largely perceived as sort of left-leaning in their politics, or at least containing social messaging or social signaling, significantly underperformed.

00:05:32.000 Jungle Cruise, you'll remember in 2021, it had some LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign references in Jungle Cruise. 0.64

00:05:40.000 It's significantly underperformed.

00:05:43.000 Encanto performed well because it actually doesn't have any of that sort of stuff.

00:05:47.000 So it performed not particularly well at the beginning, but then it's become sort of a Disney classic because it doesn't have any of that stuff in it.

00:05:54.000 Cruella, which is sort of feminist rethinking of 101 Dalmatians, it didn't meet blockbuster expectations.

00:06:01.000 It did $86 million domestically.

00:06:03.000 The Eternals, which again had some of this left-wing social messaging, Giant Fail.

00:06:09.000 Strange World, which was an animated film again with references to boys who like boys and such, it earned less than $75 million worldwide and resulted in, according to Comet, a notable financial loss.

00:06:21.000 Meanwhile, Moana 2, which was, you know, basically just a sequel to Moana, that did fine, is on track for a billion-dollar global run, Inside Out 2, which again is not woke in any particular way.

00:06:33.000 It costs $1.7 billion globally.

00:06:38.000 The message here is clear.

00:06:40.000 When Disney does not try to pander to left-wing artists inside its shop, it does better.

00:06:46.000 So, Disney, it seems, is seeing the light.

00:06:48.000 So, good for them.

00:06:49.000 Gina's full statement on X. She says, I've come to an agreement with Disney Lucas Film, which I believe is the best outcome for all parties involved.

00:06:56.000 I hope this brings some healing to the force.

00:06:58.000 And then she thanks Elon Musk and her lawyers.

00:07:00.000 And she says, I'm humbled and grateful to God for his love and grace in this outcome.

00:07:04.000 I'd like to thank you all for your unrelenting support throughout my life and career.

00:07:07.000 You've been the heartbeat that has kept my story alive.

00:07:09.000 I hope to make you proud.

00:07:10.000 I'm excited to flip the page and move on to the next chapter.

00:07:12.000 My desires remain in the arts, which is where I hope you will join me.

00:07:15.000 Yes, I'm smiling.

00:07:16.000 From my heart to yours, Gina.

00:07:17.000 Gina's a very sweet person.

00:07:20.000 Knowing Gina, it was really devastating for her, what they did to her, because here she was, a mixed martial artist who'd been in a couple of movies, and then she became a very big star on Disney Plus via The Mandalorian.

00:07:31.000 And it really kind of wrecked her to be thrown off the show for nothing other than they disagreed with her politics.

00:07:39.000 I consider Gina a friend.

00:07:40.000 She's been over at her house, met my wife, the kids, and everything.

00:07:43.000 She's wonderful.

00:07:44.000 Good for her.

00:07:45.000 And again, good for Disney for finally starting to see the light.

00:07:47.000 That is a good thing.

00:07:48.000 And by the way, good for Daily Wire.

00:07:49.000 Okay, not to pat ourselves on the back, but no one else will.

00:07:52.000 We've been in existence.

00:07:53.000 It's our 10th year anniversary here at Daily Wire.

00:07:57.000 And this is one of the big things that we do: we push back when the left pushes too far, which is very frequently.

00:08:02.000 We are the ones who push back.

00:08:04.000 We are the ones who uncanceled Gina Carano.

00:08:06.000 We are the ones who sue the federal government when Joe Biden attempts to push a vax mandate.

00:08:10.000 We are the ones who push against the trans insanity up to and including in the legislative arena. 1.00

00:08:17.000 That is what this company does.

00:08:18.000 And so I'm very proud of that.

00:08:19.000 Okay, on to the economy.

00:08:21.000 So, President Trump's tariff wars continue apace.

00:08:24.000 Now, there's a lot of talk on the right about how everybody was wrong about tariffs.

00:08:28.000 Everybody was wrong about tariffs.

00:08:30.000 President Trump has declared tariff wars across the world.

00:08:32.000 The current tariff rates, on average, are higher than they were during the Smoot Hawley tariff era, which is essentially in the lead up to the Great Depression.

00:08:39.000 And one of the lines that is being retailed right now is that everything is hunky-dory.

00:08:44.000 Now, as I've said before, it's possible that it is.

00:08:47.000 Maybe conventional economic wisdom is wrong.

00:08:49.000 Maybe the United States, by using our leverage, is going to be able to bring manufacturing back home.

00:08:55.000 Maybe there will be no real downside ramifications because the economy can simply absorb higher Cost and lower supply.

00:09:01.000 Maybe other countries will not retaliate.

00:09:03.000 Maybe all of that is true.

00:09:04.000 That's possible.

00:09:05.000 Or maybe it's too early to tell.

00:09:07.000 And we don't really know at this point.

00:09:09.000 And when I talk with friends in the investor community, of which I have many, or friends in the manufacturing community, of whom I have many, when I talk with them, the number one mood that I hear expressed is uncertainty, a feeling of disquiet.

00:09:25.000 Everybody is very eager to go out and invest.

00:09:28.000 Everybody is eager to go out and utilize the opportunities provided by the Trump administration in terms of, for example, taxes and regulation, because the Trump administration is really, really deregulatory, very friendly to business, much more tax-friendly.

00:09:43.000 At the same time, it does make a very large difference if, in fact, you cannot get the inputs that you once did from where you once did.

00:09:50.000 It does make a very large difference if you have to increase prices on your consumers.

00:09:54.000 And one of the reasons that you haven't seen inflation kick in is because very often, if you increase trade barriers, the price spikes a little bit and then demand declines.

00:10:04.000 And when demand declines, so do prices.

00:10:07.000 Again, to explain, inflation is, as Milton Friedman said, everywhere and anywhere, a monetary phenomenon.

00:10:14.000 What does that mean?

00:10:15.000 Inflation is when too many dollars are chasing too few goods.

00:10:19.000 Well, when you artificially spike the price, but you don't have more dollars that are in the system as a general matter, then what you end up with is a temporary price spike.

00:10:27.000 People don't have the money to pay for it.

00:10:29.000 And so the demand goes down and then the prices go down.

00:10:32.000 So it tends to self-correct in terms of pricing.

00:10:35.000 Long-lasting inflation, real inflation comes from monetary policy.

00:10:38.000 It comes from central banking policy.

00:10:40.000 It comes from, for example, lower interest rates and injections and infusions of cash into the economy, which is what Joe Biden did, what Jerome Powell did for years on end.

00:10:50.000 So what is the outcome of all of this going to be?

00:10:52.000 I think at this point, it's too early to say.

00:10:55.000 And so I think some of the triumphalism is a little bit overstated.

00:10:58.000 I think some of the catastrophism is overstated as well.

00:11:00.000 But let's just be clear.

00:11:02.000 When Donald Trump took office this year on January 21st, the Dow Jones industrial average on January 21st was 44,000.

00:11:13.000 Today, the Dow Jones industrial average is about 44,000.

00:11:17.000 So it's basically even.

00:11:20.000 So does that mean things are disastrous?

00:11:22.000 No.

00:11:23.000 It just means that things have not exploded the way they would if we removed a lot of these trade barriers.

00:11:27.000 Again, I'm still against the trade barriers.

00:11:29.000 I still think that the erection of these trade barriers will end up being a negative policy prescription.

00:11:35.000 And again, I'm happy, I'd be more than happy to be proved wrong here because I want the Trump administration to succeed.

00:11:40.000 I want the American economy to succeed.

00:11:42.000 If they don't, the left is going to end up taking over the government in 2028, which will be a full-scale disaster area.

00:11:48.000 All righty, guys, coming up more on the current state of the economy, AI, redistricting, and we'll have a couple of guests stop by.

00:11:55.000 So a lot coming up first.

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00:14:32.000 Welcome to the table.

00:14:33.000 So what is the current state of affairs?

00:14:36.000 Well, President Trump has now announced a wide variety of new tariffs.

00:14:41.000 Those tariffs range from somewhere between 20 and 25% on India to some 39% on Switzerland.

00:14:49.000 There's a 35% tariff on goods from Canada.

00:14:51.000 Those took effect on August 1st.

00:14:55.000 Duties on Chinese goods remain at 30%.

00:14:57.000 So believe it or not, we are now tariffing Canada more harshly than we are China. 0.55

00:15:04.000 Some important U.S. trading partners have brokered deals to set their tariffs at 15 to 20%.

00:15:08.000 That'd be like the EU, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam.

00:15:13.000 But let us be clear: the average tariff rate on all of these countries before the Trump era was far closer to 0%.

00:15:22.000 For a lot of these countries, it actually was like Vietnam was 0%, for example.

00:15:25.000 We had a free trade agreement with Vietnam.

00:15:29.000 So the question is: what is the purpose of the tariffs?

00:15:31.000 And there are really three purposes to tariffs.

00:15:33.000 One purpose of tariffs is to receive revenue.

00:15:37.000 So, for example, there are countries, like, for example, the Bahamas that have very high tariffs.

00:15:43.000 Those tariffs are designed to increase tax revenue because they don't actually have an income tax in some of these places.

00:15:49.000 And so, the idea is like early America.

00:15:51.000 Early America also didn't really have a federal income tax.

00:15:54.000 It wasn't constitutional.

00:15:55.000 And so, instead, federal revenue was raised via tariffs.

00:15:58.000 That's one way to do it.

00:15:59.000 And that is, in fact, being successful.

00:16:00.000 Now, to be fair, it is consumers who are paying for that.

00:16:04.000 It is indeed consumers who are paying for the price of the tariffs, but it is revenue that goes to the government.

00:16:10.000 It could be up to $300 billion this year from the tariffs that we weren't going to get last year.

00:16:16.000 So, that's number one purpose, and that purpose is being achieved.

00:16:19.000 Number two purpose is leverage to get countries to do other things, that you are ratcheting up the tariffs to ratchet down the tariffs.

00:16:25.000 You're ratcheting up the tariffs in order to get collateral wind from those other countries on, say, security matters.

00:16:31.000 And there's been some of that as well.

00:16:32.000 The president of the United States has used tariff policies, for example, in order to get countries in the EU to up their defense spending for NATO.

00:16:41.000 He's trying to use tariff policy right now to get Brazil's Lula de Silva to stop being such a tyrant with regards to his political opposition.

00:16:49.000 And again, I think you're seeing some of that from the president, and I think that's good.

00:16:53.000 And then there is the third idea, which is that tariffs are in and of themselves good, that they strengthen American industry.

00:16:57.000 And the president believes this.

00:16:58.000 I do not believe this.

00:16:59.000 I do not think this is true.

00:17:00.000 I think that the idea that tariffs themselves are a way of developing domestic American industries in a stronger way is disproved by the entire failure of what was called dependency theory in Latin America.

00:17:11.000 So, dependency theory is a sort of offshoot of Marxist economic theory, which suggests that trade with other countries amounts to exploitation of those other countries.

00:17:20.000 And so, the best way to develop your economy is to be non-dependent, to be autarkic, to essentially develop everything in-house.

00:17:27.000 So, what you do is you erect these gigantic trade barriers in order so that you can redirect monies into developing significantly less efficient businesses at home, infant industries, which can then theoretically grow and compete globally.

00:17:40.000 The problem is it rarely happens that way.

00:17:42.000 Because if these businesses are not exposed to an international market, what you end up developing are extremely bloated, heavily subsidized businesses that die on first contact with the international markets.

00:17:54.000 And that's what happened to all the countries in Latin America that tried to operate on the basis of dependency theory.

00:18:01.000 So, again, I'm laying all this out so we understand the stakes of what's happening with regard to this tariff war.

00:18:09.000 So, where are we right now?

00:18:10.000 The answer is nobody knows.

00:18:11.000 Maybe I'm wrong.

00:18:12.000 Maybe I'm right.

00:18:13.000 No one really knows.

00:18:14.000 Larry Kudlow over on Fox, he says the doom and gloom recession catastrophe, they haven't happened.

00:18:20.000 That's true, obviously.

00:18:22.000 Does that mean that the policy is the best policy?

00:18:26.000 Too early to say, I think, would be the best case scenario.

00:18:30.000 All the gloom and doom, tariff inflation, tariff recession, tariff catastrophe.

00:18:36.000 None of that has happened.

00:18:38.000 Okay.

00:18:38.000 And in fact, as you noted earlier, the tariff revenues are pouring in.

00:18:44.000 Okay, he could do as much as $400 billion this year alone in tariff revenues.

00:18:53.000 Okay, so again, when it comes to tariff revenues, as I say, yes, that is happening.

00:18:57.000 Those tariff revenues will decline over time because, again, what a tariff revenue is, is other countries shipping their goods here, us buying those goods.

00:19:06.000 If we stop buying those goods from abroad, then people stop shipping them here and you don't get tariff revenue.

00:19:11.000 So if tariffs work, many of the purposes that I just talked about are at cross-purposes with one another.

00:19:15.000 If tariffs work and you develop infant industries in the United States or stronger industries in the United States and you're buying from Ford, not Toyota, then Toyota just stopped shipping its cars over here.

00:19:25.000 And then you don't actually make the money from the tariffs.

00:19:28.000 So some of these purposes of tariffs are actually at cross-purposes.

00:19:32.000 But Stephen Moore was at the White House yesterday and he was praising the Trump economic performance thus far, which again, it's not that the economic performance has been bad.

00:19:39.000 It hasn't.

00:19:40.000 The economic performance has been fine.

00:19:43.000 It's just not booming in the way that it probably would if we had the great Trump tax policy, the great Trump regulatory policy, and we didn't have the tariff wars.

00:19:52.000 Here is Stephen Moore.

00:19:55.000 I was telling the president in his first five months in office, starting in January through the end of June, the average median household income adjusted for inflation for the average family in America is already up $1,174.

00:20:10.000 That's an incredible number.

00:20:12.000 Just came out just came out.

00:20:14.000 So that's a giant gain.

00:20:16.000 And if I would have said this, nobody would have believed it.

00:20:18.000 Here's your number.

00:20:21.000 We're doing well.

00:20:25.000 Now, again, he's right.

00:20:26.000 Median household income is, in fact, up significantly.

00:20:29.000 And the reason the median household income is up significantly is largely because the inflation came down, right?

00:20:34.000 It's real median household income, meaning what you can purchase in the market for your income.

00:20:39.000 And because the inflation of Joe Biden has been wiped out of the economy under President Trump, that does mean a real median household income.

00:20:48.000 That's a good thing.

00:20:50.000 This is a very good thing.

00:20:52.000 Stephen Moore also pointed out the real household income increase under Donald Trump versus Joe Biden in his first term.

00:20:58.000 And this is the one I think that actually matters, because you know what we didn't have in the first term?

00:21:02.000 Liberation Day.

00:21:03.000 We had the tax cuts in the first term.

00:21:04.000 We had some of the deregulation in the first term.

00:21:07.000 We did not have a gigantic tariff war in the first term.

00:21:10.000 We finally have the 2024 data on what happened with real family income in the United States.

00:21:16.000 And so what I did was I compared the record and Donald Trump's first term with the Joe Biden first term.

00:21:22.000 And you can see that, by the way, these dotted lines here, Mr. President, that's COVID.

00:21:28.000 So if it had not been for COVID, these numbers would have been substantially better.

00:21:32.000 But even taking account President Trump's last year in 2020, we saw a $6,400 real after-inflation gain in income for the average family.

00:21:44.000 And that compares with Joe Biden, which was a measly $551.

00:21:50.000 So, Mr. President, you gain 10 times more income for the average family than Joe Biden is because of your policies.

00:21:58.000 Right.

00:21:58.000 You know, those policies did not include in term number one, a gigantic tariff war with the rest of the world.

00:22:03.000 President Trump is very critical of the Wall Street Journal, which has also been critical of the tariffs.

00:22:06.000 He put out a statement on Truth Social, quote, the reason the Wall Street Journal editorial board is always negative on Trump and the hundreds of billions of dollars we're bringing into our country through tariffs, numbers that the USA has never seen before, is because they are China-centric or at a minimum globalist.

00:22:19.000 And they would rather see China and the world, for unknown reasons, win-baby-win. 0.77

00:22:22.000 If the United States were not able to charge tariffs to other countries, it would be economically defenseless and have no further force and effect.

00:22:30.000 The only thing that can destroy our country are crooked radical left judges, of which there are many.

00:22:33.000 Now, I don't think that's correct.

00:22:36.000 I just don't think that's right.

00:22:38.000 Actually, if you wish to defeat China, what you should do, I'm a big fan of tariffing China. 0.96

00:22:42.000 I think we ought to be punishing China economically. 1.00

00:22:44.000 In order to do that, you have to actually create a vast network of trade with all of the countries surrounding China.

00:22:51.000 You need to offer all of those countries the carrot of access in the American markets and the stick that they will lose that access if they continue to do business with the Chinese. 0.95

00:23:01.000 Then you need to secure your supply of all of the things China currently produces and that we actually use as our inputs.

00:23:08.000 In order to do that, you need more free trade, not less free trade.

00:23:12.000 If you are worried about pharmaceuticals and you want to reshore those, you can try to reshore them to the United States.

00:23:16.000 That's very, very expensive.

00:23:18.000 Or you could reshore those to Vietnam or Indonesia or India.

00:23:22.000 But if you tariff all those places, it makes it very difficult for businesses to actually reshore to those places, especially knowing that three years from now, God forbid, a Democrat takes over and the policy reverses.

00:23:33.000 When it comes to rare earth minerals, China right now is using its leverage over rare earth minerals to ensure that its tariff rate is lower than that of Canada.

00:23:42.000 Again, I simply do not understand. 0.99

00:23:44.000 Listen, I think Mark Carney's a schmuck. 1.00

00:23:46.000 Canada is America's top hat. 0.99

00:23:48.000 And also, the tariff war against Canada makes zero sense to me.

00:23:52.000 Zero.

00:23:53.000 If you take out the oil that we import from Canada, we have a trade surplus with the Canadians.

00:23:57.000 I think trade deficit or surplus, by the way, is a terrible measure of whether we have a healthy economic relationship with the country.

00:24:03.000 I do not think that we are being screwed by Ethiopia because we buy a lot of coffee from Ethiopia.

00:24:09.000 But with that said, even if you do believe that sort of thing, Canada is not on the list.

00:24:14.000 Doesn't matter.

00:24:15.000 President Trump is now tariffing Canada harsher than he is tariffing China.

00:24:20.000 That to me is a policy that is not designed to lock in China.

00:24:24.000 And as we'll talk about in a moment, there are open questions about the approach on China because it seems like we are sort of giving with one hand and taking away with the other when it comes to our relationship with China.

00:24:35.000 As far as the tariffs themselves, and the reality of the situation is that it's the American taxpayer who pays for the tariffs.

00:24:42.000 Yes, importers pay the check at the dock.

00:24:45.000 But if people don't buy their product in the United States, they stop sending product to the United States.

00:24:49.000 They're not going to send product here to not sell it and pay tariffs to the United States.

00:24:53.000 The Treasury Secretary Scott Besson, who, again, I think is the man who's been keeping this thing on the rails.

00:24:58.000 Here he was trying to explain who's paying the tariffs.

00:25:02.000 And in the end, he does have to come to the conclusion that the American people end up paying those tariffs.

00:25:07.000 Assuming it does come from Brazil, say, or it comes from any country with a tariff, who writes the check to the Treasury?

00:25:16.000 Well, the check is written to the person who receives it at the dock in the U.S. The check is, quote, written by the person who receives it.

00:25:27.000 So tariff is paid in this country by the importer.

00:25:31.000 Is that right?

00:25:32.000 But the Brazilian exporter could decide that they want to keep market share.

00:25:37.000 They could lower their price so that the full 50% of the tariffs, say, you know, and you're going to eat part of the cost.

00:25:44.000 They can eat part of the waiting.

00:25:45.000 Which is what we've seen.

00:25:47.000 Okay.

00:25:48.000 But the check is written by the importer, right, at the dock.

00:25:52.000 Yeah.

00:25:52.000 And then the importer can pass it on or not.

00:25:59.000 Well, this goes to what happens now with inflation, right?

00:26:02.000 Inflation killed the Biden presidency, among other things.

00:26:04.000 I mean, Joe Biden killed the Biden presidency, obviously, by not being alive.

00:26:08.000 But aside from that, inflation was the biggest issue of the Joe Biden presidency.

00:26:12.000 There's been a lot of worry about inflation.

00:26:13.000 Now, as I've said, the generalized kind of econ 101 idea is that when you increase regulatory burden or tariffs, you will get a one-off price spike, and then demand will lower, and then the price will go down.

00:26:26.000 So you won't get vast inflation.

00:26:28.000 The problem becomes if, for example, you artificially lower the interest rate.

00:26:32.000 So the interest rates right now, you can make the case they're too high, fine.

00:26:35.000 If you lower the interest rates, injecting liquidity into the economy, which is the goal, if you do that, you are going to get more dollars chasing fewer goods in the economy, which actually could lead to an inflation spike.

00:26:47.000 Now, it'll be interesting to see what happens.

00:26:49.000 I think Jerome Powell at the next Federal Reserve meeting is probably going to lower the interest rates by 25 basis points, maybe even 50 basis points, depending on how far demand has fallen.

00:26:59.000 Is that going to lead to an Inflationary spiral?

00:27:00.000 I don't think so.

00:27:01.000 But in the end, if American productivity does not go up, if we are not getting better goods, products, and services, then you will get inflation or stagflation in the long run.

00:27:12.000 Forget about like the short run or the medium run.

00:27:14.000 If the American economy does not develop, if it does not become more productive, if it does not generate the things that people want to buy, new cool things, if that does not happen, then what you will end up with is a stagnating economy that the government attempts to continually stimulate by injecting cash into the system.

00:27:33.000 That, by the way, is exactly what Joe Biden was predicting.

00:27:35.000 Joe Biden was predicting that through the end of the decade, there would be less than 2% GDP growth.

00:27:40.000 Well, the big hope against that, and I think this is what the Trump administration is also banking on, is AI.

00:27:45.000 All righty, coming up, we'll get to AI.

00:27:47.000 We'll save the American economy. 0.95

00:27:48.000 Plus, we'll get to Democrats being absolutely insane.

00:27:51.000 And Rob Henderson, the coiner of the term luxury beliefs, stops by to explain.

00:27:55.000 First, you track your sleep, you track your steps.

00:27:57.000 Heck, you even track your dog's steps.

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00:28:14.000 I'd overcook it.

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00:29:54.000 If you talk to investors today, pretty much all focus is on AI.

00:29:59.000 And if you look at whatever gains there are in the stock market over the course of the last several years, they're basically accruing to the biggest tech companies and to not a lot of other companies.

00:30:08.000 You're saying I'm a slow rate of growth for the rest of the stock market, but the top companies in the stock market, the Googles and the Teslas and the big tech companies, Facebook's, Meta, all those ones are skyrocketing.

00:30:26.000 Everybody else is basically on even keel.

00:30:29.000 A lot of money is going to AI right now.

00:30:31.000 And so if you're looking for places in the economy that could theoretically be a bubble, AI is definitely one of those places.

00:30:36.000 Tens of billions of dollars are pouring into AI investment right now.

00:30:39.000 Someone is going to win.

00:30:41.000 Somebody is going to lose.

00:30:42.000 And so the question is, is all of that going to automatically convert over to additional productivity?

00:30:48.000 Again, better goods, products, and services the American people wish to consume?

00:30:51.000 Or is there going to be a bit of a wipeout?

00:30:54.000 In other words, are we living in like 2007 of the internet, where all of these new companies, at that time, Meta was a new company?

00:31:00.000 It was Facebook then, Google.

00:31:02.000 Are all these new companies going to spring up and then they're going to usher in an era of internet prosperity?

00:31:08.000 Or are we living right now in 1999, 2000, when the internet was first starting?

00:31:12.000 Everybody knew it was going to be a big thing.

00:31:14.000 But because everybody knew it was going to be a big thing, they basically took a fire hose of cash and aimed it at the internet and just sprayed it everywhere.

00:31:20.000 And what you ended up with was pets.com with an extraordinary stock market valuation that turned out to be effectively worthless.

00:31:29.000 I think it's probably the latter.

00:31:30.000 I think that you're probably in an AI bubble right now, that the spending is not going to end up all being justified in the immediate term.

00:31:36.000 That doesn't mean AI isn't going to transform the economy.

00:31:38.000 It absolutely will, but things tend to move slower through the economy than I think people think they do.

00:31:46.000 It takes a while for new products, especially new product lines like that blow your mind like AI, to really filter through every aspect of the economy.

00:31:54.000 I think most people who engage with AI do so in sort of a fun and marginal way.

00:31:59.000 I think most businesses in the United States, for example, don't even know what to do with AI to make their business more productive.

00:32:04.000 It's going to take a while for that tech to filter through the economy.

00:32:07.000 And so that means there's likely to be a bubble in the AI sector.

00:32:10.000 With that said, obviously AI is sort of the great hope of the Western economic future.

00:32:16.000 And so the administration has really been focused like a laser beam on ensuring that America wins the so-called AI race against China.

00:32:23.000 Here is the Treasury Secretary Scott Besson talking about making the U.S. an AI superpower.

00:32:29.000 What we want to do is make sure that there's not a timing difference here so that as the old jobs disappear, the new jobs aren't created in time.

00:32:42.000 And there has to be some kind of a bridge.

00:32:45.000 But we're very aware of this.

00:32:47.000 We have David Sachs at the White House, who is the AI czar.

00:32:52.000 So the administration has embraced this and is aware of it.

00:32:58.000 We want to make the U.S. the AI superpower.

00:33:03.000 But there could be downsides too.

00:33:06.000 So we're looking at all the economic potential consequences.

00:33:12.000 So in an attempt to actually push forward AI, the federal government is not only pushing forward vast energy exploration, which is a very good thing.

00:33:20.000 AI requires extraordinary energy consumption.

00:33:23.000 China right now is vastly outproducing us on an energy level.

00:33:26.000 They have no regulations environmentally.

00:33:29.000 So they're basically just ramming through huge energy projects that are designed in order to foster their AI system.

00:33:36.000 The United States, under President Trump, is opening up the energy sector, which is absolutely necessary, really, really necessary.

00:33:43.000 The United States is also deregulating a lot of the tech economy, which is excellent.

00:33:48.000 It means that there will be more capital that flows into the AI race.

00:33:53.000 And that matters for both reasons, military and technological generally.

00:33:58.000 American companies are still leading this race.

00:34:00.000 Yesterday, ChatGPT released GPT-5, which is their new flagship AI model.

00:34:06.000 OpenAI executives called GPT-5 a major upgrade over the systems that previously powered ChatGPT, saying the new technology was faster, more accurate, and less likely to hallucinate or make stuff up.

00:34:18.000 OpenAI has consistently improved the technology that underpins its chatbot.

00:34:22.000 OpenAI has many rivals, including Google, Meta, Anthropic, China's DeepSeek, Comet, which is perplexity, they've released similar technologies.

00:34:31.000 This is the first time OpenAI has used a so-called reasoning model to power the free version of chat GPT.

00:34:37.000 Unlike the previous tech, a reasoning model spends time thinking through complex problems before settling on an answer.

00:34:42.000 So instead of it being a predictive text mechanism, it basically checks its own work to prevent error.

00:34:46.000 So all of this is indeed transformative.

00:34:49.000 And the U.S. federal workforce is apparently going to be provided access to chat GPT at essentially no cost.

00:34:57.000 So it's going to filter through the federal workforce, which is good.

00:34:59.000 But this does raise the question of what do we do with China because it is a race between the United States and China.

00:35:05.000 And as I mentioned yesterday on the show, there is some conflict in thinking among people on the right about what to do with China.

00:35:11.000 There are some people, for example, who believe that China should be provided access to everything except the H-100 from NVIDIA, because get China dependent on American silicon, and then they will have to build on our platforms.

00:35:25.000 And that's better than them developing domestically their own industry in microchips.

00:35:30.000 And then there is the side, which I tend toward, which is, no, no, no, no, no.

00:35:34.000 You don't give China anything. 0.98

00:35:36.000 Make them steal it.

00:35:37.000 Like really make them steal it.

00:35:38.000 And the Trump administration seems kind of split on this, frankly, because on the one hand, you'll see the Trump administration say China is cheating.

00:35:45.000 And President Trump will go after the Intel CEO for having too many close ties to China.

00:35:51.000 This happened yesterday.

00:35:52.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, Intel shares fell over 3% Thursday after President Trump called on the company's chief executive to resign because of past ties to China.

00:36:00.000 He wrote in a post on Truth Social on Thursday, quote: The CEO of Intel is highly conflicted and must resign immediately.

00:36:06.000 There's no other solution to this problem.

00:36:08.000 Thank you for your attention to this matter.

00:36:11.000 Here he was referencing Intel CEO Lip Bhutan's past business dealings in China.

00:36:16.000 Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas had called them out, pointing out that that deep relationship meant that Intel chips were probably getting into China illegally.

00:36:27.000 Cotton wrote an open letter to Intel's board questioning Tan's ties to the Chinese government, including apparent connections to the country's military and investments in other semiconductor companies.

00:36:37.000 Okay, well, I agree with that.

00:36:38.000 But on the other hand, the administration is also opening up the possibility of NVIDIA shipping H-20s to the Chinese government effectively.

00:36:50.000 So a policy must be settled on with regard to how to view China and developments in AI.

00:36:55.000 Are we going to be in open competition with China?

00:36:57.000 Is it going to be sort of a friend-emy situation with China?

00:37:01.000 That remains utterly unclear.

00:37:04.000 So amidst all of this turmoil, all I can say is what the markets are really looking for in the end is stable policy.

00:37:10.000 This is the thing every investor will tell you: stability, stability, stability.

00:37:13.000 There's been a lot of flip-flopping.

00:37:15.000 There's been a lot of movement with regard to, for example, tariff policy.

00:37:18.000 There's been a lot of movement with regard to China policy.

00:37:20.000 There's been a lot of movement with regard to: can you ship chips in?

00:37:23.000 Should you take chips out?

00:37:24.000 Should we buy from TSMC in Taiwan?

00:37:26.000 Should we fund TSMC in Arizona?

00:37:29.000 Stability is the name of the game.

00:37:31.000 And no one should be more invested in the success of the American economy than President Trump.

00:37:35.000 One of the things that I've said about Trump is that Trump tends to respond to incentive structures.

00:37:39.000 And one of those incentive structures is the reality of the stock market.

00:37:43.000 And so we will see.

00:37:44.000 I think the wrong way of looking at the stock market since the beginning of his term is to say, well, it hasn't really dropped dramatically despite all of this variability.

00:37:52.000 The right way would be to think, how much would it have grown if it had not been for this sort of vicissitudes of economic policy?

00:38:00.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

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00:38:42.000 Meanwhile, an enormous amount of hubbub over Texas's plan to redistrict.

00:38:47.000 So again, redistricting, gerrymandering, this is a part of the process. 0.89

00:38:51.000 The notion that Texas is doing anything wrong here is silly.

00:38:54.000 Actually, when Gavin Newsom threatens to redistrict, he may be in violation of the California Constitution because you're really only supposed to redistrict under the California Constitution once every 10 years.

00:39:03.000 Texas has no such constitutional provision.

00:39:06.000 All of the complaints about, oh my God, I can't believe they're doing this.

00:39:09.000 It's so terrible.

00:39:10.000 There have been some great ironies here.

00:39:11.000 So, for example, the governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healy, she came out, Democrat, and said, well, if they do that, then we'll also redistrict.

00:39:18.000 There's one problem, Moira.

00:39:20.000 The problem is that there are nine congressional districts in Massachusetts.

00:39:23.000 All of them are Democratic.

00:39:25.000 There is no way for you to redistrict further.

00:39:27.000 It's absurd.

00:39:29.000 The other issue is that the redistricting being proposed in Texas is not insane.

00:39:34.000 Here's Karl Rove explaining that Texas redistricting actually creates two black majority districts.

00:39:41.000 What does the Texas effort do?

00:39:43.000 It creates two black majority congressional districts, first time in the history of Texas.

00:39:48.000 Isn't that a goal of the Voting Rights Act?

00:39:51.000 It creates an eighth Hispanic majority district, albeit one that's Republican.

00:39:56.000 And it does so without involving themselves in these goofy lines like that we see in Illinois that, you know, in which there's a deliberate attempt to go hundreds of miles across the state in order to link together pockets of one party supporters in order to get a congressional seat.

00:40:17.000 So again, he's right about that.

00:40:18.000 Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, he says, hey, did you know that four out of the five new districts will be Hispanic districts?

00:40:24.000 What Texas is doing, actually, we are drawing districts to provide every voter in the state the opportunity to cast a vote for the party in Canada of their choice.

00:40:35.000 For the five districts we are drawing, they're going to be Hispanic districts.

00:40:39.000 They happen to be Hispanic Republican districts.

00:40:42.000 One is going to restore the Barbara Jordan district in Harris County, Texas.

00:40:48.000 Okay, I just want to show you a couple of maps.

00:40:50.000 Here are the current legislative districts that are being looked at and juxtaposed with the proposed legislative districts that are currently being looked at.

00:41:00.000 Do you see like major differences here?

00:41:01.000 Like really, really big differences?

00:41:04.000 No.

00:41:05.000 The answer is no.

00:41:05.000 In fact, the new legislative districts look significantly less crazy than the old ones.

00:41:09.000 Look at that district in Texas, the current one that stretches from Austin to San Antonio with like a small, tiny little land bridge that goes all the way across.

00:41:17.000 That disappears in the new one because it turns out Austin and San Antonio are not actually right next to each other.

00:41:23.000 Actually, Austin and San Antonio are like 80 miles apart.

00:41:26.000 So having them in the same congressional district is definitely a little bit weird.

00:41:30.000 You may note.

00:41:31.000 So is that like a big deal?

00:41:32.000 According to the left, it is a massive, massive deal.

00:41:34.000 Also, a massive deal is President Trump's suggestion that he wishes to perform the United States Census again because it was counted wrong last time.

00:41:40.000 And this time, he doesn't want to count illegal immigrants.

00:41:43.000 I have to say, it is astonishing to me that there are so many people, including judges, who have made the case that the census is supposed to count illegal immigrants.

00:41:50.000 They're saying that by reading the 14th Amendment, Section 2, with regard to the census, quote, representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.

00:42:05.000 So that is the important provision there.

00:42:08.000 So they say, well, it doesn't say citizens, right?

00:42:10.000 It says the whole number of persons in each state, right?

00:42:12.000 Meaning it's counting women and children because children can't vote and women at the time could not vote when the 14th Amendment was put into law.

00:42:21.000 There's only one problem.

00:42:22.000 You will notice a provision there that says excluding Indians not taxed.

00:42:26.000 What does that mean?

00:42:27.000 Well, that means that there were Native Americans living in various states who are under the domain of a separate jurisdiction.

00:42:36.000 They were governed by their tribal jurisdiction.

00:42:38.000 And so they weren't taxed by the federal government.

00:42:41.000 Question: Do illegal immigrants who are not taxed because they are not citizens and are under the jurisdiction of a foreign government?

00:42:48.000 If you're a Mexican who comes across the border illegally and you live in LA and you don't pay taxes, does that sound more like an Indian not taxed under the 14th Amendment? 0.93

00:42:55.000 Or does that sound more like just a person who is living in a household that is taxed and is part of American society?

00:43:03.000 And the fact that judges have suggested that persons means everyone, but are ignoring the excluding Indians non-tax provision is kind of shocking to me, just on a raw textual level.

00:43:16.000 So what President Trump is doing here makes perfect sense.

00:43:18.000 Why in the world would you count people in the census who not only cannot vote, have no possibility of ever voting absent a change in the law?

00:43:27.000 That's a bizarre thing to do.

00:43:30.000 And yet the left is declaring this is a violation of democracy.

00:43:34.000 And so Texas state representatives have been running headlong from the state.

00:43:37.000 Here, for example, is Texas state Democratic Representative Gene Wu, who has absconded from the state of Texas.

00:43:43.000 He won't answer when he will return.

00:43:46.000 How long are you willing to stay out of Texas to block this redistricting plan ahead of tomorrow's deadline to return?

00:43:53.000 Yeah, so again, when we're out here, it's not just because of redistricting.

00:43:59.000 The main reason that we're here is simply because the state of Texas, under Republican leadership, under Governor Abbott's leadership, simply does not listen to the people anymore.

00:44:10.000 The state of Texas, the citizens of Texas, have said loudly to everyone, we want you to focus on disaster readiness.

00:44:17.000 We'll focus on disaster recovery and focus on the Kerrville disaster first and only.

00:44:23.000 So then, how long are you willing to stay out of Texas to make your point here?

00:44:28.000 Our group is committed to ending this corrupt special session.

00:44:33.000 Whether that's a week, whether that's two weeks, I don't know.

00:44:37.000 That's not up to us.

00:44:40.000 Governor Abbott and the Republican leadership of Texas hold all the cards.

00:44:47.000 So again, this kind of insanity, I'm not sure how you put it on the psychotic scale, but it's pretty high.

00:44:53.000 The same guy is saying it's the end of our republic.

00:44:55.000 Like a normal gerrymandering or gerrymandering you don't like is the end of our republic.

00:45:01.000 What everyone needs to tell tell their legislators, tell their leaders is everyone needs to stop.

00:45:06.000 If you believe in a country that still values hard work and fair play and following the rules, like you have to stand up and speak up for it now, not whoever wins this one time, you get to rewrite all the rules whenever you want.

00:45:21.000 That's not the American way. 0.96

00:45:23.000 That's not the way we should work.

00:45:25.000 And if we don't fight against that now, once this happens, that's the end of our democracy.

00:45:31.000 That's the end of our republic.

00:45:34.000 It's the end of democracy.

00:45:36.000 Well, good news is Democrats have figured out how to save democracy.

00:45:39.000 According to James Carville, the way to save democracy is wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, add states, add judges to the Supreme Court, completely skew every institution of American life.

00:45:50.000 If the Democrats win the presidency, the Senate and the House in 2028, which is not impossible.

00:45:56.000 I don't know if you say likely or possible.

00:45:59.000 I don't know.

00:45:59.000 It would work, you know, but it's certainly not impossible.

00:46:02.000 They are just going to have to unilaterally add Puerto Rican to District of Columbia state.

00:46:07.000 They're going to have to, the Congress does give the Constitution gives Congress power over federal elections.

00:46:13.000 I don't think they can redistrict, but they're things that have to do it.

00:46:20.000 Okay, so I'm just going to point out that some of us predicted this during the last election cycle.

00:46:24.000 In fact, here I was speaking last year on exactly what Democrats would do at Miami University if they won the election.

00:46:32.000 If Kamala Harris were, God forbid, able to become president of the United States and able to have, say, a Senate majority and a House majority, should promptly rewrite all the rules of government. 1.00

00:46:41.000 They've already pledged to do this.

00:46:42.000 They pledged to kill the filibuster in the Senate.

00:46:44.000 They would rewrite the voting rules to essentially make ballot harvesting almost mandatory across the country.

00:46:49.000 They've talked about packing the Supreme Court.

00:46:50.000 They've talked about adding two states to the Senate of the United States, presumably Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, in the hopes that this would then set up a permanent Democratic majority.

00:46:58.000 The kinds of change that Kamala Harris would love to wreak upon the country are, broadly speaking, transformative.

00:47:07.000 Okay, so not that I was right, but I was right.

00:47:10.000 And this is what Democrats are doing.

00:47:12.000 As always, if they call Trump a dictator, that means that they can do dictatorial things, which is why they cannot be allowed to regain power.

00:47:19.000 They just cannot.

00:47:20.000 They really cannot, especially because they continue to move hard to the left, like very, very hard to the left.

00:47:26.000 The Mondonification of the Democratic Party continues apace. 0.51

00:47:29.000 It is kind of interesting to watch as some of the old guard Democrats, who, again, when I was growing up, Nancy Pelosi was the furthest left member of Congress.

00:47:36.000 Now she is somehow the most moderate member of the Democratic caucus.

00:47:39.000 She's still sort of dodging an endorsement of Zorin Mamdani, the pro-terrorism communist who is going to probably be the next mayor of New York.

00:47:48.000 Are you ready to give your whole-throated endorsement to his candidacy, like Elizabeth Bourne, and a few others?

00:47:55.000 I have not, I have not participated in married races throughout the country.

00:48:00.000 That's for the people there.

00:48:02.000 That's not for me.

00:48:04.000 So let them make their own decision about who they want to be their mayor. 0.89

00:48:12.000 By the way, Pelosi, however, despite her sort of hesitation about Zorin Mamdani, she still believes that there ought to be gender-affirming care for trans kids, meaning it's time to trans the children.

00:48:22.000 These are like the moderates in the Democratic Party.

00:48:26.000 Well, that is something that I'm working for at the national level.

00:48:29.000 And we have hoping that we can have gender affirming here for our trans kids.

00:48:43.000 And that it's a sad thing for us.

00:48:48.000 Meanwhile, ex-Republicans, now Democrats like Tim Miller, are out there calling ICE agents cops and robbers with masks.

00:48:56.000 Joe Rogan's been talking about this himself.

00:48:58.000 None of those people signed up for this, right?

00:49:01.000 Like this kind of cops and robbers co-splay, mask men jump out of a car and they give themselves a cute name and then they take ladies that are just sitting there trying to sell food to workers.

00:49:14.000 I understood when they carried mass deportation signs now that that was going to be part of the agenda, but I think a lot of people that supported Trump did not.

00:49:24.000 Well, meanwhile, it's been a busy week, as always, over at the White House.

00:49:27.000 And Daily Wire, White House correspondent Mary Margaret Olihan was there to cover all of it.

00:49:31.000 Mary Margaret, good to see you.

00:49:32.000 How are you doing?

00:49:34.000 Hey, Ben, great to be here.

00:49:38.000 So let's talk about the White House events this week.

00:49:41.000 First of all, do we have any idea what President Trump was doing up on that roof?

00:49:43.000 There was a very funny tete-a-tete where he was walking around part of the White House roof a little bit earlier this week, and he was shouting at reporters.

00:49:50.000 They were shouting back at him.

00:49:51.000 Do you have any insight into what was going on up there?

00:49:55.000 Yes, so the president obviously is a builder.

00:49:57.000 He's been really excited about a lot of different projects around here.

00:50:00.000 One main one is this announcement that he's building a ballroom that's supposed to fit up to, I think, 600 people.

00:50:08.000 He's building this on the White House grounds with an architect that I know, actually.

00:50:11.000 He's a Catholic architect that's built a lot of really beautiful churches all over the United States and perhaps outside of it as well.

00:50:18.000 And this architect's name is James McCurry, and he was up on the roof with the president the other day.

00:50:24.000 And they were both up there looking down at the reporters.

00:50:27.000 And obviously, all the reporters around here get very excited to speak to the president whenever we can.

00:50:32.000 So everyone kind of gathered actually sort of near where I'm standing right now to try and talk to the president.

00:50:38.000 And he called down to them, lightly chatted with them.

00:50:41.000 Of course, everyone's yelling up to him, Mr. President, what are you doing up there?

00:50:44.000 And I think he said something along the lines of he was surveying the property and seeing what else needed changes.

00:50:49.000 And he even made a quip about how he's going to use his own money to spruce up the grounds, which he's actually doing.

00:50:55.000 He is paying for this ballroom project.

00:50:58.000 I think he considers it kind of a historic contribution to the White House.

00:51:02.000 And I actually had a source tell me that they're thinking about making it even bigger than they had previously said.

00:51:08.000 So seating maybe even more than the 600 people who were supposed to fit in it already.

00:51:13.000 So I think this is just kind of a classic Trump move.

00:51:15.000 It's not something that we've seen before where the President of the United States just strolls across the roof and is conversing with reporters.

00:51:23.000 He even yelled down to Peter Ducey, hey Peter, how are you doing?

00:51:26.000 And I think he said something along the lines of, you're looking good, Peter.

00:51:29.000 So classic Trump.

00:51:30.000 This is another day at the White House.

00:51:32.000 And he's making a lot of different changes to the property.

00:51:36.000 I think you probably noticed, Ben, the Rose Garden, there's been a little bit of hubbub about that because he paved over the Rose Garden.

00:51:44.000 He had joked with some people about how the ladies can't really walk across it because their heels get stuck in the mud and the grass.

00:51:51.000 Well, now it's completely paved over and he put out a bunch of kind of mar-a-lago style tables and umbrellas.

00:51:57.000 So that's another big change to the White House as well.

00:52:00.000 I haven't gotten to see them myself, but I'm told it looks a lot like Mar-a-Lago, and he has, I think, the same exact umbrellas he has down there.

00:52:08.000 So another Trump move here at the White House.

00:52:12.000 So meanwhile, on a policy level, the president has been pushing forward with the idea of doing a new census.

00:52:16.000 He also talked the other day about mobilizing federal law enforcement to protect Washington, D.C. Obviously, you're living out there.

00:52:22.000 What do you make of all of it?

00:52:26.000 Yeah, Ben, I've lived here since I went to college here.

00:52:28.000 D.C. has never been a super safe place, but in recent weeks, we've seen a lot of complaints about some of these attacks on staffers, most noticeably this attack on, I believe his name is Edward Korstein, more colloquially known around here as Big Balls.

00:52:42.000 He is an employee of Elon Musk, or was an employee of Elon Musk's Doge, where he's been working for some time.

00:52:49.000 And he's been the subject of some controversy around here.

00:52:52.000 But this week, I believe, or maybe it was last week, this young man was involved in an attack where he pushed his girlfriend into the car to save her from about 10 young attackers, which is what we're told by the police, who started beating him up.

00:53:06.000 And we had pictures of this young man really bloody and bruised and sitting in the street.

00:53:11.000 And so this, of course, came to the attention of the administration since he's worked and continues to work for them.

00:53:17.000 And President Trump put out a big statement saying that we need to focus on this crime in D.C., that no one should be being hurt in this manner.

00:53:25.000 And he's mobilizing federal law enforcement to protect the people of D.C. So we're going to see some units patrolling.

00:53:31.000 Obviously, they'll be marked clearly so people know who they are.

00:53:34.000 But this is a big move by the president.

00:53:36.000 We've talked about this kind of thing for a long time.

00:53:39.000 The mayor is not a huge fan of it, I'm told, and that this is something that she has resisted for quite some time.

00:53:44.000 But just anecdotally, Ben, I was talking about this attack on Edward Korstein the other day with some of these reporters.

00:53:51.000 Two different reporters I was chatting with said, oh yeah, I got mugged on the metro here.

00:53:55.000 It's something that's happened to pretty much everyone.

00:53:57.000 In fact, you're kind of lucky if you haven't been in that type of situation.

00:54:00.000 So crime around here is absolutely something that needs to get under control, whether, you know, this is going on down by Union Station or down by the Kennedy Center.

00:54:10.000 It's something that we're seeing everywhere.

00:54:12.000 And so the president is mobilizing this law enforcement to take care of that.

00:54:16.000 And hopefully we'll see a reduction in crime.

00:54:17.000 That is Mary Margaret Olihan.

00:54:19.000 She, of course, our Daily Wire White House correspondent Mary Margaret, thanks so much for the time.

00:54:24.000 Thank you, man.

00:54:26.000 So again, this is the new left.

00:54:28.000 The new left are virtue signaling nutjobs.

00:54:31.000 And their goal, presumably, is to use the threat of Trump to be able to enshrine their viewpoint into law for the future.

00:54:38.000 Join us online to discuss the sort of virtue signaling of the left.

00:54:42.000 What has been called the luxury belief system is the coiner of that term, Rob Henderson.

00:54:46.000 I sat down with him yesterday to talk about the luxury belief left.

00:54:50.000 Joining me on the line to discuss all this is Rob Henderson, best-selling author of Troubled, a memoir of foster care family and social class.

00:54:57.000 He's currently a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

00:54:59.000 You can check out his Substack newsletter as well.

00:55:02.000 Rob, thanks so much for taking the time.

00:55:03.000 I really appreciate it.

00:55:04.000 Thanks, Ben.

00:55:05.000 Great to be here.

00:55:06.000 So why don't we start with the thing that made you pretty famous back in 2019, which was the idea of luxury beliefs.

00:55:11.000 We're seeing all this play out in real time.

00:55:13.000 I don't think it's relegated to just the left at this point, although I think that it is largely located on the left.

00:55:19.000 But the idea, if I am not misdefining, of a belief system where you don't actually feel the consequences of it, but it acts as a sort of moral virtue signal to all of your friends and family is the idea of luxury beliefs.

00:55:30.000 How do you see that manifesting in today's politics?

00:55:33.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:55:34.000 Luxury beliefs I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent and educated while inflicting costs on the less fortunate members of society.

00:55:41.000 And, you know, I've written various essays going through examples at length.

00:55:45.000 So, you know, a recent one, an intuitive one for a lot of people, both on the right and on the center left, is the defund the police movement.

00:55:52.000 So I went through the survey data in 2020 and 2021 and found that the highest income Americans were always consistently the most in favor of defunding the police.

00:56:00.000 The lowest income Americans were always the least in favor of this.

00:56:03.000 And then even when you broke it down by political orientation, it was always white progressives who are the most in support of defunding the police and black and Hispanic Democrats were less in favor of it.

00:56:12.000 There are other examples as well, such as this denigration of the family, the downplaying of the family, which is a major theme throughout my book, Troubled.

00:56:20.000 So if you go back to 1960, you'll see that 95% of American children, regardless of social class, were raised by both of their birth parents, rich kids and poor kids alike.

00:56:30.000 And if you fast forward to 2005, for affluent kids from upper middle class families, so roughly the top 20% of the income scale, that dropped from 95% in 1960 to 85% by 2005.

00:56:44.000 Whereas for poor and working class kids, roughly in the bottom 30% of the income scale, 95% of those children are raised by both of their birth parents in 1960, and it dropped to 30% by 2005, which is roughly the period where I was a teenager and witnessing a lot of the breakdown in working class neighborhoods.

00:57:01.000 And look, there were poor people in 1960 as well.

00:57:04.000 So when people chalk this up to poverty, it doesn't make any sense because poor families were intact in 1960 and increasingly they're not today.

00:57:12.000 And so a lot of that has to do with the cultural values and the attitudes of the elites.

00:57:16.000 People have a difficulty understanding that the cultural messaging, the ideas, pop culture, everything that we're surrounded by and immersed in, that has an effect on behavior.

00:57:24.000 And so this denigration of every time you open up a glossy magazine or read elite media outlets who talk about throubles and swinging and polyamory and open relationships, all of that has an effect on how families decide to form.

00:57:36.000 And it has especially detrimental consequences for people who don't have access to education, to income, who are not necessarily inclined to committing long term unless they consistently have reinforcements and cultural guardrails.

00:57:49.000 You have a piece that just came out from City Journal about why men and women are diverging politically.

00:57:55.000 And it really is striking when you look at the numbers, how young women are becoming very much left and young men are swinging pretty significantly to the right.

00:58:03.000 To what do you attribute that sort of split happening?

00:58:06.000 Yeah, well, what's interesting is that it depends on what survey you look at.

00:58:09.000 So every single survey that I've seen, women are veering dramatically to the left. 1.00

00:58:12.000 Some surveys indicate that men are tilting to the right.

00:58:15.000 Some surveys actually show there's not much movement at all, at least in terms of self-identified political orientation.

00:58:20.000 Are you a liberal?

00:58:21.000 Are you a conservative?

00:58:22.000 But when you look at the voting data, a lot of men, even men who don't necessarily identify as conservative, turned out in support for Trump.

00:58:28.000 And I think you saw that pattern maybe with like the kind of people who listen to the podcast, bros, fans of that whole sort of independent media scene, they don't necessarily think of themselves as conservative, but they were very much against what they saw as sort of the progressive overreach.

00:58:42.000 So in that piece in City Journal, I talk about what's going on here because increasingly, women are converging with men in terms of education.

00:58:49.000 So, they're outperforming men in terms of earning bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, PhDs.

00:58:52.000 A lot of people are familiar with those statistics.

00:58:55.000 It's also the case that in a lot of major metropolitan areas in the United States, young women under 30 are either matching or exceeding the earnings of their male counterparts, also under 30.

00:59:05.000 So, under 30s, women are actually doing as well or better than men in a lot of cases.

00:59:09.000 So, you might expect that as their education and their income and their professional achievements converge with men's, that they might become more similar in terms of their cultural outlooks, in terms of their political values.

00:59:20.000 But you're actually seeing the opposite.

00:59:21.000 They're increasingly diverging.

00:59:23.000 And I suggest that this is something that I learned in grad school: this idea of what's called the gender equality paradox.

00:59:30.000 And this is a very interesting finding, which shows that if you look at societies across the world, you'll see that the most prosperous and socio-politically equal societies show the largest differences between men and women.

00:59:42.000 So, if you compare the gender gaps in, say, Denmark or Sweden, they're actually larger between men and women than if you look at more traditional societies like Vietnam or Botswana.

00:59:51.000 And one hypothesis for why this is the case is that in richer and more prosperous societies where people are treated fairly, they're treated equally, this actually allows our underlying differences to emerge to manifest.

01:00:01.000 If you live in a poor society with very rigid cultural values, there's a limit to how much you can express your underlying preferences and desires and personality and so on.

01:00:10.000 And so, I'm suggesting that this is the case.

01:00:12.000 This is what's happening in a lot of Western, modern, developed first world countries.

01:00:16.000 And you even see this on college campuses, which I find fascinating: that the higher up you go in university ranking, the larger the political gender gap is. 0.98

01:00:24.000 So, if you look at the Ivy Leagues and sort of Ivy Plus schools, you'll see that the gender gap between men and women is larger than if you look at sort of mid-tier and lower-tier universities.

01:00:32.000 So, even here, just within the university systems, you'll see that kind of the richer and more the universities that emphasize cultural equality, you'll see that even within the university system, you see this gender gap widening.

01:00:44.000 One of the things that's sort of fascinating about that is that obviously, when you're talking about places like Denmark, those studies typically, I believe, are done with regard to sort of job choice, where if you look at the Nordic countries, women are choosing to go into education.

01:00:55.000 If you go to a poorer country, women become engineers and doctors because that's how you need to actually make the money. 1.00

01:01:01.000 So, if you're in a richer country, you don't have to do that.

01:01:02.000 You get to select kind of what you want to do.

01:01:04.000 What's fascinating about the sort of political angle of it is that it's so personal that it's not just about what kind of job you're seeking, it's also about lifestyle choices.

01:01:12.000 Like, do you want to remain single?

01:01:13.000 Do you ever want to get married and have children?

01:01:15.000 Because one of the things that we're seeing among young women is not only delay of marriage and children, but many people just opting out of the system entirely and saying they never want to get married, never want to have children.

01:01:24.000 And meanwhile, men who seem to have been left behind sort of falling into a sort of bizarre gray area in American society, feeling alienated from their traditional roles.

01:01:35.000 Yeah, yeah, you're seeing a lot of that.

01:01:37.000 And I think that that too fuels this political divide, sort of lower rates of marriage formation, interest in meeting other people of the opposite sex, dating.

01:01:46.000 You know, there's the whole idea of the sex recession. 0.69

01:01:48.000 And I think that men and women have this tendency to depolarize one another.

01:01:52.000 So, if you're a man and you're only surrounded by other men, especially young men, and especially if you spend most of your time online, exposed to the most sort of extreme and provocative political views, those views tend to harden.

01:02:03.000 But if you meet a girl and she has different political views than you, and you can converse and you can communicate, and you tend to, you know, it takes the edge off of some of those more radical views that you might have.

01:02:13.000 And then, same for the woman as well.

01:02:14.000 If she's around other women and they're reinforcing one another's opinions repeatedly, then those views tend to harden and become more extreme. 1.00

01:02:20.000 But if she meets a guy who has more conservative views, then they kind of moderate one another.

01:02:24.000 But because we're living increasingly apart, people aren't dating one another, they're not meeting, they're not marrying, they're not forming families.

01:02:30.000 I think that this too is fueling this growing gender divide. 1.00

01:02:33.000 So, there's kind of the one angle of the gender equality paradox of societies becoming more equal and more prosperous, and that this actually ironically fuels the growing divide in terms of, like you mentioned, career choice preferences, those kinds of things, but also in terms of personality and political outlook.

01:02:47.000 But then, also, we also react to our social environment.

01:02:52.000 There are sort of socio-cultural factors as well.

01:02:55.000 And those can moderate or magnify those differences.

01:02:58.000 You know, when we're looking At both of these issues, the issue of luxury beliefs generally, and then things like gender divides in politics.

01:03:04.000 The thing that really comes to mind is the fact that we are a very luxurious country.

01:03:09.000 We're a country that is extremely rich, unprecedentedly rich, despite all the complaints about how difficult it is to be a young person in America today, literally drop a young person in America any other place on earth today or in all of human history.

01:03:20.000 And it would be very difficult to suggest that that person is somehow disadvantaged in America today.

01:03:25.000 And yet we've somehow convinced ourselves that the more that we signal that people are having it very, very difficult in the United States, the better it is.

01:03:32.000 If that were to change, if there were to be an economic recession, if things were to go the other way, if luxury beliefs end up being self-defeating in a certain way, because you end up pursuing policies that actually damage the society in which you live.

01:03:45.000 Do you believe that politics will depolarize, that we will stop with the virtue signaling and there will be sort of a movement back toward reality and moderation, ironically?

01:03:53.000 You know, Ben, that was my hope with, you know, if there were anything good to come out of what was happening during COVID, as soon as it struck, as you mentioned, you know, I started writing about luxury beliefs in 2019, and then February, March of 2020 happens, and suddenly there's this global pandemic.

01:04:06.000 And in my mind, I was thinking, oh, luxury beliefs are dead.

01:04:08.000 Like we have like a serious issue here.

01:04:10.000 We all have to concentrate on this deadly virus and so on.

01:04:13.000 And then by the summertime, you know, luxury beliefs were in full force and we reached like peak woke during that period.

01:04:19.000 So it's really disappointing for me.

01:04:20.000 I don't know.

01:04:21.000 I think that if we had some serious catastrophe, real sort of economic recession or depression, some kind of wartime scenario, then perhaps, and that is kind of part of the luxury beliefs idea.

01:04:32.000 You mentioned how prosperous we are as a society.

01:04:35.000 In the past, back when there were sort of more rigid material divides between the social classes, I was drawing on Thorsten Veblen and Pierbord and all of these sort of classic sociologists of class where the elites back in the day would exhibit their social status with delicate and restrictive clothing, tuxedos, evening gowns, top hats, monocles, pocket watches.

01:04:56.000 And today it's much more difficult if you just go out into the street and say, you know, that person is rich, that person's middle class, that person's poor, because generally everyone has become more wealthy and making those fine-tuned distinctions has become more difficult.

01:05:08.000 So how do you exhibit your class?

01:05:10.000 You do it through these bizarre, wild, counterintuitive and provocative opinions, which I call luxury beliefs.

01:05:17.000 And when you express a luxury belief, you're essentially signaling, I went to an expensive university.

01:05:21.000 I spend time with all the right people.

01:05:22.000 I consume the right kinds of media.

01:05:24.000 This is like an expression of what Pierre Bordeaux called cultural capital.

01:05:28.000 So to your question, I think that, yes, once people experience sort of real struggle in their lives, then those luxury beliefs will probably go underground.

01:05:37.000 But yeah, people will still find ways to express status, even in those cases.

01:05:41.000 I wonder if you think that luxury beliefs are also a sort of whole society thing, meaning that we're talking here about certain strata of American society having luxury beliefs.

01:05:50.000 But increasingly, I'm coming to believe that actually this applies to maybe nearly all of the West, that the West has taken upon itself gigantic luxury beliefs in relation to the rest of the world.

01:06:00.000 The luxury belief that comes to mind because it's top of the news is the war in Gaza, where suddenly the West is signaling that, you know, is Hamas all that bad?

01:06:08.000 Maybe terrorism is actually driven by Western imperialism and colonialism.

01:06:13.000 And that seems to be a sentiment that is spreading very widely, not just on the left, but also now increasingly on the right in the United States and in the West more generally.

01:06:23.000 And again, is that sort of a luxury belief?

01:06:25.000 Because we are a safe society that has not experienced significant war on our shores for legitimately 80 years.

01:06:31.000 And so the belief is: okay, well, you know, it's happening far away.

01:06:34.000 That's suffering.

01:06:35.000 That's terrible.

01:06:36.000 And so now I'm going to signal about all that without actually having to suffer with any of the consequences of it.

01:06:41.000 Yeah.

01:06:41.000 And that kind of moral signaling, you saw that initially on Ivy League campuses, the Hamas encampments, all of these students, upper and upper middle class students demonstrating against Israel or in support of Palestine or Hamas or what have you.

01:06:56.000 And yeah, it is interesting to see that it's spreading on the right as well that if you're removed from violence, you're removed from conflict, it becomes a game.

01:07:04.000 It becomes an abstraction.

01:07:06.000 Sort of the criticisms that academics get, you know, you're in your ivory tower, removed from the world.

01:07:10.000 Well, you could apply that same kind of logic, I think, to a lot of sort of comfortable, very online young Americans today.

01:07:17.000 Well, that's Rob Henderson.

01:07:18.000 You should go check out all of his work over on his sub stack, which is available at robkhenderson.com.

01:07:23.000 His work is also over at the Manhattan Institute.

01:07:25.000 And check out his book, which is fabulous, Troubled, a memoir of foster care, family, and social class.

01:07:29.000 Rob, thanks so much for the time.

01:07:30.000 really appreciate it.

01:07:31.000 Thank you, Ben.

01:07:32.000 Meanwhile, in other news, speaking of the sort of luxury beliefs of the left, they're very, very upset today that Israel has said that it is now going to finish off Hamas in Gaza City.

01:07:42.000 Now, you remember they did this routine maybe a year ago about Rafah.

01:07:45.000 All eyes on Rafah.

01:07:46.000 It was going to be just a catastrophe, a disaster.

01:07:48.000 How dare the IDF try to clear a terrorist hotbed and save hostages?

01:07:51.000 No, no, no.

01:07:52.000 Well, now they're doing the same exact thing.

01:07:55.000 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel says that the goal is to go in, clear out the Gaza Strip, ensure security, but not to actually annex the place.

01:08:04.000 Now, the reason he is saying that is because annexation under Israeli law then requires essentially a supermajority of the internet, Knesset II, to un-annex.

01:08:12.000 So he is saying he's not interested in owning the Gaza Strip or in taking control of the Gaza Strip, which would make him similar to every other world leader, all of them. 0.94

01:08:21.000 The funny thing to me is all of these morons out there who are saying things like, this was always a land play. 0.89

01:08:27.000 Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. 0.99

01:08:30.000 They handed the whole thing over to Hamas. 0.86

01:08:31.000 Hamas spent 20 years building terror tunnels and destroying every possibility of actual governance and economic success in the Gaza Strip and then launched the worst attack on Jews since World War II. 1.00

01:08:43.000 And so this is about an Israeli land grab, is your theory, is your idiot theory. 0.99

01:08:49.000 By the way, Israel has tried to get Egypt to take control of the Gaza Strip many, many times. 0.99

01:08:52.000 Egypt says no, because they don't want to deal with the Palestinian population, which is hugely radicalized, not just, by the way, against Israel, but against every regime in the region. 0.76

01:09:00.000 There's a reason that Jordan, which is 60% ethnically Palestinian, has expelled tens of thousands of Palestinians.

01:09:07.000 It's why Lebanon got wrecked. 1.00

01:09:09.000 It's why Egypt won't take in any Palestinian refugees today, even into the northern Sinai.

01:09:13.000 Anyway, here was Netanyahu explaining the plan.

01:09:16.000 We intend to, in order to assure our security, remove Hamas there, enable the population to be free of Gaza and to pass it to civilian governance. 0.96

01:09:28.000 That is not Hamas and not anyone advocating the destruction of Israel.

01:09:33.000 That's what we want to do.

01:09:35.000 We want to liberate ourselves and liberate the people of Gaza from the awful terror of Hamas.

01:09:42.000 Okay, again, if anybody's got an alternative plan, everybody's all ears here.

01:09:47.000 There was a ceasefire on the table two weeks ago, and the international community killed it in order to parrot the propaganda that was being put out by Hamas.

01:09:55.000 Here is Netanyahu explaining that the journalists who are being, who are covering this stuff in Gaza are largely manipulated by Hamas or are tools of Al Jazeera or of the Turkish government, which of course is true. 1.00

01:10:07.000 He says one of the goals here is to give honest journalists the ability to see the truth.

01:10:11.000 Those who are lying are going to continue lying, but give honest journalists the ability to see the truth.

01:10:17.000 A, the fact that we're trying to get civilian aid, humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, the efforts that we're making there.

01:10:25.000 B, to understand and explain why those buildings are destroyed because they're booby-trapped and we clear the population.

01:10:34.000 And I'm glad you were in.

01:10:35.000 I'm glad you did this thing.

01:10:36.000 I'm glad, in fact, you're, I would say, you're blazing the trail.

01:10:40.000 But there have been others, and we have the same result.

01:10:44.000 Every time people see it, they see it in a more realistic way, in a more honest way than the way that it's presented.

01:10:54.000 So he is right about that, obviously.

01:10:56.000 And it is Hamas that is intriciting the aid. 0.92

01:10:58.000 It is Hamas that is stealing the aid. 0.85

01:11:00.000 All of that is true.

01:11:01.000 And for all of Israel's critics, the question is, what is your proposed alternative?

01:11:06.000 Do you think that Israel wishes to send a bunch of 18-year-old draftees and 45-year-old reservists into the Gaza Strip interminably for literally at this point, years on end?

01:11:16.000 Israel wanted to avoid this so badly.

01:11:18.000 They literally handed the place over to Hamas 20 years ago, and it worked out really, really poorly.

01:11:22.000 So any other choices?

01:11:23.000 Anybody?

01:11:24.000 Bueller, Buehler?

01:11:28.000 Again, it remains ridiculous that the media continue to do the work of Hamas.

01:11:32.000 If it were not for the media, Hamas would have lost this war already.

01:11:34.000 Alrighty, as the show continues, we're going to jump into that vaunted Ben Shapiro show mailbag because, of course, it is a Friday.

01:11:39.000 Remember, in order to have your question answered, you do have to become a member.

The Ben Shapiro Show - August 08, 2025

Is Trump WINNING The Tariff Wars?

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