The Washington Post fires 300+ people, and the journalistic world is up in arms. The latest on the immigration fiasco in Minnesota. Plus, Scott Besend goes to Congress and shellacks a bunch of Democrats first. That s what you need to be watching: The Pendragon Cycle, Rise of the Merlin.
00:00:00.000The Washington Post fires 300-plus people, and the journalistic world is up in arms.
00:00:05.000The latest on the immigration fiasco in Minnesota.
00:00:08.000Plus, Scott Besend goes to Congress and shellacks a bunch of Democrats first.
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00:01:17.000Well, tragedy occurred in the Bezos universe yesterday when 16,000 people were cut from Amazon.
00:01:23.000This is what the media were very, very concerned about.
00:01:26.000Amazon said that it was going to cut some 16,000 corporate employees.
00:01:30.000The first round of cuts in October led to about 14,000 white-collar employees receiving pink slips.
00:01:35.000And even at the time, Amazon was talking about 30,000 job cuts.
00:01:38.000So, of course, people in the world of journalism were deeply affected.
00:01:42.000They were really upset about the tens of thousands of people who are about to lose their jobs at Amazon, one of the most successful companies in America and in the world.
00:02:07.000So, the Washington Post is cutting 300-plus jobs.
00:02:11.000So, I'm just going to point out where the sympathies lie: 30,000 people lose their jobs at Amazon because Amazon is cost-cutting and reevaluating thanks to AI.
00:02:21.000And the journalists are like, well, you know, those are people who work at Amazon.
00:02:26.000Those might be factory workers, those might be middle management.
00:02:50.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post is cutting one-third of its staff, slashing hundreds of jobs across the newsroom and other departments in an effort to trim costs and reshape coverage.
00:03:00.000The layoffs will affect journalists in nearly all news departments, including the sports, foreign technology, and breaking news teams, as well as business and technology staff.
00:03:08.000The executive editor, Matt Murray, wrote in a note to newsroom staff on Wednesday: if we are to thrive, not just in Jew, we must reinvent our journalism and our business model with renewed ambition.
00:03:17.000Unclear how many of these cuts are coming from the newsroom.
00:03:20.000The Post is closing its sports department in its current form, but is going to retain some roles in that coverage area.
00:03:25.000It's also shrinking its international coverage, and it will focus on national news and features, investigations, and advice on health and wellness topics.
00:03:33.000The Post will continue to have some correspondence in about a dozen international locations, and they're going to focus on issues mostly related to national security because that's what readers actually want to hear.
00:03:42.000The Post lost $77 million in 2023, $100 million in 2024.
00:03:48.000It had significant traffic declines because digital media is a tough business.
00:03:55.000In recent weeks, post journalists made public pleas asking Jeff Bezos to maintain their jobs.
00:04:01.000Well, it turns out that the Washington Post, like the Daily Wire, like a lot of other for-profit institutions, is not a non-profit.
00:04:07.000If journalists wish to start their own nonprofit and get a bunch of left-wing funders to put millions of dollars behind their jobs, they are free to do that.
00:04:15.000And there are, in fact, organizations that operate as charitable organizations that do acts of journalism on occasion.
00:04:21.000But the idea that Jeff Bezos owes it to the employees of the Washington Post to maintain their jobs when they are losing money is crazy and it's stupid.
00:04:32.000Nonetheless, the response from the media ecosystem is absolute shock and horror.
00:04:39.000Emmanuel Felton, the race and ethnicity reporter at the Washington Post.
00:04:43.000I don't even know how are you the race and ethnicity?
00:04:46.000Is there breaking news in the race and ethnicity area?
00:04:59.000By the way, if on the right there was a race and ethnicity reporter, we would recognize just how kind of a little racist that is.
00:05:05.000If there was like a race and ethnicity reporter over at Breitbart or here at the Daily Wire, I think that the left would read that in a very different way than they read the race and ethnicity reporter over at the Washington Post.
00:05:16.000So Emmanuel Felton put out a statement: quote, I'm among the hundreds of people laid off by the Post.
00:05:21.000This comes six months after hearing in a national meeting that race coverage drives subscriptions.
00:05:26.000This wasn't a financial decision, it was an ideological one.
00:05:30.000He says the other reporter on my team covering race was also laid off, as well as the editor in charge of race coverage across national.
00:05:35.000The team covering America Beyond DC is now 90% white.
00:05:53.000Obviously, this was a decision driven by Jeff Bezos' inherent evil, white racism, says the guy who gets paid to talk about racism all day long.
00:06:06.000Robert McCartney, a retired Washington Post editor, correspondent, and columnist, quote, 39 years at paper before Bezos began gutting it.
00:06:14.000He says, Reader asks, Is democracy dies in darkness now the mission statement?
00:06:18.000Okay, do you remember when the Washington Post decided after Donald Trump was elected?
00:06:23.000This is before Bezos bought the paper that they were going to retitle, they were going to put it on their masthead, the statement, Democracy Dies in Darkness.
00:06:30.000The idea being that Donald Trump was an inherent threat to all things Democratic and the Washington Post would hold him responsible.
00:06:39.000Breonna Tucker, the National Politics Breaking News reporter and the National Association of Black Journalists Political Task Force Chair, put out a statement: quote, I'm affected by layoffs at the Washington Post today.
00:06:50.000There aren't enough words to describe the immense privilege and profound responsibility I've felt since hired at 25 as an editor.
00:06:56.000As a black woman covering politics, a dwindling cohort today, that feeling is magnified.
00:07:04.000Again, if your first take about being fired by a paper that is bleeding money is that you were fired because of your race, perhaps that betrays the style of coverage that you were doing, which might be one of the reasons the paper was suffering.
00:07:19.000I don't know, I'm just going to put it out there that if you see everything through a racial lens and your paper, for whom you are reporting, keeps losing money, and then you get fired and in your firing statement, you talk about your specific race.
00:07:31.000Maybe you were part of the problem, not part of the solution.
00:07:35.000Peter Baker over at the New York Times, the chief White House correspondent, put out a tweet: quote, Jeff Bezos' wealth in 2024, $194 billion.
00:07:43.000Jeff Bezos' wealth in 2025, $215 billion.
00:08:53.000Maybe that's why he is extraordinarily wealthy and most of the reporters working for him are not, because maybe they think they're in the charity business.
00:09:04.000Again, as someone who's the co-founder of a major media organization in the same business as the Washington Post, let me just say that when you lose money and you can see where you're losing money, you have to lay people off.
00:09:19.000And Jeff Bezos is not doing anything wrong by doing all of that.
00:09:24.000The view of journalists that somehow they are owed their position because the person who hires them is rich is extraordinary, especially when many of these same journalists are asking that the federal government step in and make the owners of their own businesses not rich anymore.
00:09:39.000They are living off the charitable giving they think of the rich people while ripping into the rich people and declaring that they are the ones who are very, very important.
00:09:47.000And the people who hire them, they're just supposed to absorb the losses.
00:09:55.000Bernie Sanders, complete leech on the ass of American society for the last eight decades, a useless human being in the extreme, put out a statement, quote, if Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie and $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don't tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff.
00:10:49.000It is about what they want to do and what they have the freedom to do.
00:10:52.000And if Bernie Sanders wants to get together a bunch of his left-wing friends to put together a 501c3 and rehire all the race reporters at the Washington Post, he is free to do that.
00:11:01.000In fact, if Bernie wants it, he could sell his lake house and he could hire several of these journalists and they could work for him and they could gallivant into the utopian socialist sunset together and enjoy their time.
00:11:40.000And it is driven again by this bizarre ideology that you are somehow owed a job if your boss is rich, even if the company that you work for is losing money and you are unproductive in helping to drive the business's turnaround.
00:11:53.000Go start a business yourself if you want to absorb that risk.
00:11:56.000The beauty of being a salaried employee is that the check comes in the mail every week.
00:11:59.000The beauty of being an investor is that you receive the benefit of the decisions that you make at the top level.
00:12:05.000But it also means you absorb the losses.
00:12:08.000And so that means if you don't wish to absorb losses, you cut costs.
00:12:15.000And these sort of yelling that Jeff Bezos is really, really rich, therefore he should just subsidize all of these journalists or pseudo-journalists.
00:12:22.000I think many of them are pseudo-journalists in what they do, is ridiculous.
00:12:26.000In a second, we'll get to why the Washington Post is actually in trouble, why they've been failing.
00:12:30.000First, there's a lot of young people trying to navigate the dating scene these days.
00:12:33.000And as you're trying to find the right person for yourself, you should probably ask whoever you're seeing, you know, important questions like, do you want kids in the future?
00:12:40.000Or what are your thoughts on religion?
00:12:41.000That's how you get a better idea of whether or not that person is the right person for you.
00:12:45.000The same goes if you're hiring for your company.
00:13:41.000Now, I know there's some on the right today who are suggesting the reason that the Washington Post is failing is because it went so left-wing.
00:14:25.000The reason the New York Times is successful is because it made a series of purchases of nearly unrelated businesses and then drove all of those businesses toward a subscriber-based model that is almost like bundling.
00:14:39.000In the same way, you are now seeing major media corporations in the entertainment space buy one another and then drive all of the subscription revenue toward one hub.
00:14:48.000That is what the New York Times did to become successful.
00:14:50.000It's not because they hired a bunch of stellar White House reporters.
00:14:54.000It ain't Peter Baker who's driving the subscription model of the New York Times.
00:14:58.000He's certainly a reporter who is doing his job.
00:15:02.000And it's a very profitable enterprise, the New York Times.
00:15:05.000But the idea that the New York Times chiefly is making bank right now because of their stellar Middle East reporting or because they hired a stringer in Ukraine is nonsense.
00:15:15.000And all these journalists who are proclaiming that it is so are foolish.
00:15:19.000They don't understand how business works and they are self-glorifying, patting themselves on the back.
00:15:22.000The reason the New York Times grew is because they shelled out a bunch of money in 2022 to buy, for example, The Athletic, which is a sports outlet.
00:15:31.000And then subscriptions are driven back toward the New York Times company.
00:15:41.000There's a free game played by a lot of people, and it means a lot of people are on the New York Times app, and a certain percentage of those people will be upsold into the subscription.
00:15:49.000They bought Wirecutter, which is a product recommendation site.
00:15:54.000You want to know where the expansion occurred in the New York Times staff?
00:15:56.000It did not occur in their Middle East reporting.
00:15:58.000It occurred in their cooking section because they realized that high engagement in their cooking section would get people to subscribe for the cooking section and then stick around for everything else.
00:16:09.000It is fair to say that the growing components of the New York Times business subsidized the newsroom.
00:16:14.000It's why New York Times expanded its games section.
00:16:18.000It's why they expanded their audio and podcast section.
00:16:21.000They changed their strategy with regard to their registration wall.
00:16:24.000In other words, they made a bunch of business decisions at the New York Times that have not been imitated by the Washington Post in any real way.
00:16:30.000And that is why the Washington Post was in trouble, not because the New York Times is more committed to journalism than Jeff Bezos over at the Washington Post.
00:16:40.000Kara Swisher, who again is a left-wing journalist in the tech space, who is very warm toward the Bernie Sanders view of the world, Kara apparently led Washington Post alumni by donating a staggering $10,000.
00:16:53.000I don't know why that's called staggering by media, but okay.
00:16:56.000A staggering $10,000 to a rapidly growing fundraiser for journalists laid off from the newspaper on Wednesday.
00:17:03.000She made the donation to a GoFundMe organized by the newsroom union and reporter Rachel Siegel.
00:17:08.000Apparently, they have about $322,000 raised.
00:17:11.000So Swisher had floated a bid to buy the paper from Bezos in 2024.
00:17:18.000She wrote, quote, The Washington Post, where I started in the mailroom, is the place that made me everything I am now.
00:17:22.000Skin Flint, billionaire, and failed fashion model, Jeff Bezos, has decimated it.
00:17:27.000But I have the means now because of what this legendary institution gave me to donate a decent chunk of dough to these hardworking employees.
00:17:54.000It is how the world has always worked.
00:17:55.000Unless you have somebody subsidizing your pet interest and being angry at Jeff Bezos that he's decided not to subsidize your favorite reporters on race and ethnicity.
00:18:04.000That is your problem, not Jeff Bezos'.
00:18:23.000So Jim Vandehey, he says, quote, still baffled, why would a disinterested, disengaged, distracted Washington Post owner hire a seemingly disinterested, disengaged, distracted CEO, suffer perpetual criticism and money loss?
00:18:38.000Show me a single entity at anywhere doing anything that worked without a strong engaged leadership kind of matters.
00:18:43.000I bet Don Graham or Kara Swisher would pull together a group to take it over.
00:18:47.000Bloomberg could easily swoop it up himself, just sell it.
00:18:50.000So if Jeff Bezos wants to sell it and somebody makes him an offer, I'm sure he would consider it.
00:18:56.000But Jake Sherman over at Punch Bowl News, who again has a very successful newsletter, sort of a DC Beltway insider newsletter that's that's really well done.
00:19:05.000So Jake tweeted back at Vandahey, quote, okay, hot shot, what would you do to turn the post around?
00:19:10.000And Vanda Hey then tweeted out a list of things that he would do.
00:19:14.000Two reporters on every federal agency.
00:19:41.000Two reporters on each of the top local biz sectors, defense tech, lobbying influence, buy punchbowl, bonus thought, buy the information, poach Peter Baker, work with philanthropists or ProPublica to fund investigative public trust with stories made available to other Alex upon public.
00:19:59.000Yes, go to ProPublica, the left-wing organization that is dedicated to half-misinformation.
00:20:07.000Ask Marty Barron and Bob Woodward to train a new generation of diggers and like this is such old-style thinking.
00:20:13.000This is not the thing that is going to turn around the Washington Post.
00:20:19.000But again, it's not about that for so many of these journalists.
00:20:21.000The reason they are so upset today is because what the Washington Post just said is that journalists are subject to the rules of the market, just like everybody else.
00:20:28.000They have, in the journalistic world, thought that they were immune from this stuff for legitimately decades.
00:20:35.000All right, meanwhile, on the immigration front, Tom Homan says that some immigration agents are going to leave Minnesota.
00:20:42.000According to the Wall Street Journal, in a press conference Wednesday morning, Homan said he would be pulling 700 officers and agents out of Minnesota.
00:20:49.000There are still 2,000 were going to continue to operate.
00:20:53.000Homan is, of course, trying to reset the table.
00:20:56.000He is trying to make clear that this is just the efficient and effective use of law enforcement, that ICE is not there to quote unquote cause trouble.
00:21:04.000And he is trying to negotiate deals with the locals in Minnesota, Mayor Jacob Fry, who's terrible, and the Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who's trying to make bank off of this political crisis in order to continue effectuating the law.
00:21:17.000Homan has repeatedly indicated that he hoped to move the officers under his command away from large roving street sweeps toward more targeted arrests of known criminals.
00:21:25.000He said the changes he was implementing would, quote, help ensure accountability and that targeted enforcement operations have a focus on national security threats and public safety threats, and they are conducted effectively, safely, and appropriately.
00:21:36.000He calls this smarter enforcement, not less, enforcement.
00:21:39.000President Trump, for his part, again, President Trump has very good political instincts, which is why he has been president twice.
00:21:44.000He says, you know, that he learned, he said this to NBC News, that we could use a softer touch.
00:21:50.000Speaking of Minneapolis, what did you learn?
00:21:54.000I learned that maybe we can use a little bit of a softer touch, but you still have to be tough.
00:22:21.000He says, listen, we got to enforce the law, and we're trying to do it.
00:22:24.000It's Democrats who are standing in the way.
00:22:25.000This is why I say I think the Democrats maybe are winning the battle on immigration, but they're going to lose the war because as we'll talk about in a moment, they are also going completely radical.
00:22:34.000Now that they believe they have an advantage, again, political parties tend to do this.
00:22:38.000They think they have an advantage on an issue, and then they go pedal to the metal and proceed to ram right through all the guardrails.
00:22:44.000A journalist also spent the day trying to get JD Vance, the vice president, to apologize to Alex Predty's family.
00:22:49.000That did not go particularly well for him.
00:22:52.000Did you plan to apologize to the family of Alex Predty?
00:22:56.000For, you know, labeling him an assassin with ill intent.
00:23:00.000Well, again, I just described to you what I said about Alex Predty, which is that he's a guy who showed up with ill intent to an ICE protest.
00:23:06.000But if it is a guy, it's determined that his civil rights were violated by this FBI investigation.
00:23:21.000Okay, and the vice president, you know, basically saying, when the evidence, you know, shows what you're saying that it shows, then maybe.
00:23:27.000The reality is that the full investigation has not yet been done.
00:23:33.000If, as the evidence appears to show, Alex Predty did not show up to massacre law enforcement, who's there to obstruct law enforcement, but not massacre them.
00:23:39.000Does that mean that Greg Bovino used some overwrought language and so did Christy Noam?
00:23:53.000And while the left tries to tell us many times that it's somehow compassionate to allow that kind of chaos, it isn't.
00:24:00.000It was dangerous, not just on this side of the border, but on the Mexican side of the border as well.
00:24:06.000We saw many of those illegal migrants not be able to survive the brutal terrain.
00:24:10.000They didn't survive the river crossing.
00:24:13.000Those causes of death, of heat, and water were dangerous.
00:24:18.000And the left behind so many bodies that in some counties along the border, they had to install migrant morgues just to pick up the dead bodies that were passing away on their way to try to get into the United States.
00:24:30.000In fact, during the Biden administration and those open border policies, we saw even the UN declare that the United States and Mexico border was the deadliest land route in the world.
00:24:42.000Countless people were sexually abused and trafficked over and over again and exploited.
00:24:50.000Of course, she is right about all of this.
00:24:52.000Now, again, I think the Trump administration is course correcting.
00:24:54.000I will tell you what is not helpful is when Steve Bannon, I will say once again, a person all over the Epstein files and who did 15 hours of sit-down interviews with Jeffrey Epstein acting as a quasi-PR flak for the child molester.
00:25:09.000Steve Bannon, who desperately wants to run for president, apparently in 2028, right now, he's playing this game where he says he wants Trump to run in 2028.
00:25:16.000Then he will reluctantly step into the fray.
00:25:18.000Steve has no chance of becoming president, of course, but he would like to maximize his profile by doing so and saying obnoxious things on stage because that is what Steve Bannon does.
00:25:27.000He came out yesterday and suggested, quote, we're going to have ICE surround the polls come November.
00:25:31.000We're not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again.
00:25:34.000And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.
00:25:40.000He says President Trump has to nationalize the election.
00:25:42.000You've got to put not just, I think, ICE, you've got to call it the 82nd and 101st airborne on the Insurrection Act.
00:25:47.000You've got to get around every poll and make sure only people with IDs, people actually register to vote and people in the United States as citizens vote in this election.
00:26:02.000Steve's a clever character, but again, what he's doing here is fairly obvious.
00:26:06.000What he would like to do is say the most outrageous thing to get the bays to cheer and rally around him and then have the left attack him in order to maximize his own profile.
00:26:14.000The Trump administration is moderating its rhetoric for a smart reason because they would like to see their mission actually effectuated.
00:26:21.000Democrats are looking for precisely that sort of rhetoric in order to jump on it.
00:26:26.000Meanwhile, the Democrats, again, continue to go too far on their side of the aisle.
00:26:30.000Representative Ayanna Presley, the Ringo star of the squad, she says that this is fascism and now is the time to fight fascism.
00:26:38.000Each of you have shown immense courage, and it is time for Democrats to show that same courage and fight against fascism.
00:26:47.000As we negotiate funding for DHS, we have a real opportunity to do more than express concern.
00:26:53.000We have the chance to reject this campaign of terror, and we have a responsibility to do so.
00:27:00.000So, again, this is going to be the take by Democrats.
00:27:03.000Minnesota, it does result in some fairly funny things, how crazy the left is being on this issue.
00:27:10.000My favorite clip yesterday was a clip of a woman who identifies as a member of Minnesota Ice Watch setting up a checkpoint.
00:27:18.000I believe it was Melissa Chen who pointed out that this lady is actually rationalizing her way to borders from first principles, which is pretty hysterical.
00:27:28.000We are literally creating a place that we know who's coming and going in and out of our neighborhoods.
00:27:34.000In the middle of the road at 32nd and Cedar Avenue, a makeshift roadblock turned this intersection into a roundabout.
00:27:58.000And the media, of course, are fostering all of this.
00:28:00.000This is the thing they want, all of which is leading to a new Democratic push for yet another possible shutdown.
00:28:06.000They want to curb ICE's power by apparently pressing for judicial warrants to be used in arrest of illegal immigrants as opposed to administrative warrants.
00:28:15.000Some of the things that they are looking to do.
00:28:17.000Joining us on the line to discuss the legality of what Democrats are now pushing in the House and the Senate is Gene Hamilton.
00:28:23.000He's president of America First Legal and former Deputy White House Counsel.
00:28:31.000So one of the things that we've been hearing is the Democrats are pushing for the possibility of yet another partial government shutdown with regard to the Department of Homeland Security.
00:28:39.000And we've heard rumors that they are pushing the idea that every arrest must be accompanied by a judicial warrant for ICE to effectuate it.
00:28:47.000What is the legal basis for administrative warrants, which is typically what ICE uses when they're effectuating an arrest for illegal immigration?
00:28:58.000Civil immigration enforcement is the standard routine immigration enforcement that ICE has engaged in for decades.
00:29:05.000Immigration to the United States and immigration out of the United States tends to be a civil matter.
00:29:11.000Now, there are criminal penalties associated with violating those civil matters.
00:29:16.000So if you come into the United States illegally, you've committed a crime.
00:29:20.000If you come into the United States after being deported again, you have committed a crime.
00:29:25.000There are lots of other crimes that are associated with it.
00:29:27.000But generally speaking, immigration is a civil function of the federal government.
00:29:33.000And so what happens is that you have a system that's built in the executive branch to handle this, where you have ICE within the Department of Homeland Security.
00:29:44.000They detain aliens in the United States and they handle deportations.
00:29:49.000Their cases, if they have a case that's being heard in immigration court, people have heard about the immigration court backlog, all kinds of different things.
00:29:58.000Those are actually Department of Justice lawyers who are functioning as judges who are adjudicating the cases.
00:30:06.000There's no involvement of Article III of the federal court system.
00:30:10.000There's no involvement, and it's never been that way.
00:30:14.000It's because these are cut and dry civil offenses.
00:30:17.000This goes to the ultimate authority of any national government anywhere across the world.
00:30:23.000We're not talking about really complicated legal trials that are at issue that need to be heard before an Article III judge, and it's going to go to the Court of Appeals and then the Supreme Court.
00:30:34.000And there's going to be some massive precedent-setting case that's going to arise that had to arise in an Article III district court context.
00:30:44.000Everybody knows anytime you get involved in litigation in federal court, it's going to take time.
00:30:50.000It's going to take years to adjudicate a civil claim.
00:30:55.000It can take, depending on the complexity, a long time to adjudicate criminal cases.
00:31:00.000So with that background and that table setting, imagine if ICE, every time that they wanted to go arrest an alien, instead of being able to do it on their own, like Congress directed in the immigration laws, ICE has authority to conduct warrantless arrests in many different circumstances.
00:31:20.000And the warrants that they do use are administrative civil warrants.
00:31:24.000But now imagine if they had to go to a federal judge every single time that they wanted to go arrest an illegal alien, they wanted to engage in some kind of action, it would crush the federal court system.
00:31:36.000The volume would be absolutely crushing.
00:31:39.000There's already 1 point something million cases pending in the immigration courts today.
00:31:45.000There are millions of illegal aliens who are here today.
00:31:49.000It would suck up every resource that's present in the federal government now to be able to adjudicate these matters.
00:31:56.000And so it's for good reason that they're not currently done that way.
00:32:00.000The Democrats in Congress, they know this and they want this to come to a crushing halt.
00:32:06.000I mean, they just don't want anybody to be deported.
00:32:09.000And so they know that if they toss this thing on, that if you're an average American and you're just kind of sitting there thinking, oh, well, that doesn't sound so bad.
00:32:16.000Why couldn't they go get a judicial warrant?
00:32:18.000They know that the end game is the complete slowdown and stoppage of the immigration enforcement in the United States, which means that they would achieve their objectives while Donald Trump's in office that they were trying to do while Joe Biden was here, which is, of course, bring in as many people as they can.
00:32:36.000Don't deport anybody and see what happens to the electorate.
00:32:41.000I think one of the things Democrats are relying upon is that when people hear warrant, the first thing they think of is law and order.
00:32:46.000They think of a judge granting a warrant.
00:32:48.000They don't know that there are these things called administrative warrants.
00:32:51.000And I think people really don't sort of engage with the law enforcement system this way frequently.
00:32:56.000So they don't think about the idea that if you're arrested, for example, for going 100 miles an hour in a school zone, it's not as though the cop is pulling you over, calling up a judge and asking for a warrant to arrest you.
00:33:05.000And this sort of attempt to jerry rig a rationale for not arresting people is pretty astonishing, which goes to the sort of Democrats' new attempt.
00:33:16.000And it really is, it's not new, but it's certainly ramped up to obstruct federal law enforcement in general.
00:33:21.000So Tom Holman, I believe, the Borders Art, he's done a much better job of laying out exactly what the Trump administration is trying to do than the DHS Secretary, Christy Noam.
00:33:30.000But the things that the DHS has been doing, that ICE and Border Patrol have been doing in Minneapolis, these are well within the purview of ICE and Border Patrol.
00:33:38.000And they always have been going back through the Clinton or Obama administrations, the Biden administration.
00:33:44.000Yeah, look, we are talking about immigration enforcement that used to be routine, bipartisan matter that people agreed upon.
00:33:52.000Hey, if you're an illegal alien, you need to go home.
00:33:56.000Now, especially if they say you're an illegal alien who's committed additional crimes in the United States, it used to be universal consensus that even that population needed to go.
00:34:07.000You can look at old quotes and clips from Hillary Clinton, from Barack Obama, from Joe Biden, from every Democrat that has been on the national scene over the last several decades.
00:34:18.000But of course, now where the rubber is actually meeting the road in Minneapolis, where ICE and CBP have been engaging in targeted operations going after these convicted criminals who either have removal orders or who, because of the Sanctuary City policies in Minnesota, don't, ICE doesn't have the ability to detain after they've been encountered by law enforcement.
00:34:39.000And so these guys, these guys and gals are engaging in things that everybody used to agree was good and it was good for society and it was necessary.
00:34:48.000It's a necessary function of any sovereign government.
00:34:52.000But yet what we see now through the agitators present in Minneapolis, present across other cities across the United States, well-funded, well-organized, being pushed from all kinds of different folks behind the scenes, all kinds of different Marxist networks behind the scenes that are trying to create this image of resistance, of overreach by the Trump administration.
00:35:16.000And they're trying to do this because they want to convince the average American that they have more in common with the struggles of some illegal alien who came here and committed multiple DUIs and that somehow it's the modern civil rights fight of the day.
00:35:35.000This is just like Rosa Parks in, you know, during the civil rights movement.
00:35:40.000And so if you're not aligned with Rosa Parks, then my God, you must be a fascist.
00:35:46.000You must be all these kinds of different things.
00:35:48.000And it's because this is, I mean, this is just the Marxist worldview time and time again coming out in different ways in different manners where they have to create this constant clash, right, between classes.
00:36:00.000They have to create this illusion of this constant fight so they can maintain their fundamental ideology, which at the at the root of which leads to the destruction of our society.
00:36:12.000So when we of our of our constitutional republic, and so when we see what they're doing on the streets of Minneapolis, when these are things that were routine, these are things that happened under administrations of both parties years in the past, maybe not to the number that we're seeing today because they didn't have the same types of personnel.
00:36:31.000They didn't have the same types of resources, but things that were done.
00:36:35.000And now they're trying to turn it into the modern civil rights fight of the day.
00:36:40.000I think you can kind of understand what's happening here and what their ultimate objective is.
00:36:47.000Yeah, Gene, I think that the point that you're making here also underscores why the Trump administration really needs to retail the best version of its PR, because this obviously is a chaos operation with a massive PR angle.
00:36:58.000It is not an attempt to prevent law enforcement from committing some sort of crime.
00:37:03.000It's an attempt to obstruct law enforcement through the mechanism of bad press, essentially.
00:37:07.000And so that's why, you know, I'm critical of Christine Noam in the way that, for example, she characterizes situations like Renee Good or Alex Preddy in the immediate aftermath.
00:37:15.000And that creates a backlash that is unnecessary.
00:37:18.000The sort of low-key, let's go enforce the law approach of a Tom Holman seems significantly better calibrated to achieve the goals of the administration than the sort of colorful chaos that sometimes seems to attend some of the people who have now been actually put out of camera view in the Trump administration, people like Greg Bavino.
00:37:38.000Yeah, I mean, look, there are lots of folks with lots of different views on the PR angle here.
00:37:45.000And look, again, this is immigration enforcement is not anything new per se.
00:37:51.000Now, we might have forgotten about it for the last four years as a society because Joe Biden didn't engage in any of it.
00:37:58.000But immigration enforcement arrests of illegal aliens or of aliens who have committed offenses in the United States is a very routine thing.
00:38:10.000It's something that every nation with the means across the world does every single day.
00:38:18.000Try to go violate the immigration laws in China.
00:38:20.000Try to go violate the immigration laws in anywhere else in the world as an American, and you will face The enforcement of those immigration laws against you.
00:39:00.000What's most upsetting to me is that when you look at a lot of the ties and connections that are being laid out, kind of in public discourse about what these groups were involved in, especially in Minneapolis, you look at their signal chats, you look at who was in those groups, people who aren't just agitators, but people allegedly who appear to be members of government, members of other non-governmental organizations,
00:39:26.000members of all kinds of aspects of society who are conspiring, appear to be conspiring together to impede the enforcement of our laws.
00:39:36.000And what they want is they want to draw out this kind of backlash.
00:39:40.000They want to draw out this kind of conflict for the reasons we've discussed earlier, because then they can say, oh, look, these fascists are overreaching.
00:40:16.000Meanwhile, Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, was on the Hill yesterday speaking with the House Financial Services Committee, and it got pretty feisty.
00:40:23.000Democrats tried to go up against the Treasury Secretary.
00:40:26.000It seems there was a pretty significant IQ gap between many of the Democrats and the Treasury Secretary, who is one of the more intelligent people in American politics.
00:40:33.000Whatever you say about Scott Besson's actual perspectives on things like tariffs, and I have some quibbles.
00:40:40.000There's no question that Scott Bessant is a brilliant human.
00:40:42.000Anyway, Scott Besant was appearing before the House Financial Services Committee, and he was asked about inflation in housing.
00:40:49.000And he started talking about the fact that you need to deport people.
00:40:52.000And if you deport people, then that is going to reduce the demand for housing because you're reducing the demand for housing by deporting, I mean, just definitionally.
00:40:59.000Maxine Waters had a problem with this.
00:41:00.000Again, one of the great hilarities of the U.S. Congress is that Maxine Waters, who is as corrupt as the day is long, has been sitting on the Financial Services Committee for decades.
00:41:11.000I believe the ranking member does not understand the definition of generalized inflation versus one-time price increases.
00:41:18.000I would also note that housing, especially for working Americans, a Wharton study has shown that the mass unfettered immigration, adding 10 to 20 million new people demanding housing, Congresswoman, is what caused a great deal of housing inflation for working Americans.
00:41:38.000So you and the Biden administration should be ashamed.
00:41:42.000Which is also why we are seeing rents.
00:41:44.000There was just a recent media story on this.
00:41:46.000Rents are going down partially because of that enforcement.
00:41:54.00010 and 20 million immigrants shut the housing stock of working Americans.
00:42:03.000So that was Maxine Waters telling Besson to shut up because she wanted to seize back her time.
00:42:07.000Having participated in some of these hearings, I truly believe that not televising hearings would be better for the country because all it is mainly are Congresspeople who are posing for the cameras.
00:42:17.000Maxine Waters being a key representative of that particular view on how hearings ought to be used.
00:42:23.000Scott Bessant was also quizzed by Representative Gregory Meeks on committing to investigate alleged corruption in the Trump administration.
00:44:07.000Now, on a more substantive level, Scott Besson cited 4.1% growth under the Trump administration as a big highlight for the Trump administration.
00:44:14.000Obviously, the perception of the economy is going to have a massive impact on the 2026 elections.
00:44:18.000And looking forward on the 2028 presidential election, here is Besson citing solid growth under President Trump, particularly in the last half of last year.
00:44:27.000The U.S. will have reported, likely, despite the government shutdown, despite the longest government shutdown in history, 4.1% growth for the past three quarters.
00:44:39.000And so we have been successful at that.
00:44:43.000Europe last week celebrated 0.3% growth.
00:44:51.000And I think we are beginning to accelerate.
00:44:53.000And importantly, everything we are doing is to fix this terrible Biden inflation from the past four years, 21.5%, much more for working families.
00:45:10.000And there's no question that the economy has been chugging forward at a very rapid rate at this point.
00:45:16.000That is particularly, again, because of the tech industry that is now being decried by the entire left and populists on the right.
00:45:23.000It is the supposedly terrible big companies that are driving economic growth in the country right now.
00:45:28.000Even though, for example, software companies have been taking it on the chin because AI is now substituting itself for some of the big software companies.
00:45:35.000Google, for example, is now doubling its spend.
00:45:38.000Alphabet reported an 18% jump in fourth quarter revenue and revealed plans to roughly double its spend on data centers and other capital projects.
00:45:45.000Sales exceeded analysts' expectations and nearly $114 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, driven by growth in the company's digital advertising and cloud computing units.
00:45:57.000That is a 30% increase compared with the same period a year earlier.
00:46:01.000Google is using all of that money to develop AI models and build the data centers needed to train and run them.
00:46:07.000Again, Google is an extraordinarily well-run business, obviously, which is why they have such a high valuation.
00:46:15.000Now, there are some problems that the Trump administration needs to move on if it does wish to shore up the growth numbers that it is currently pursuing.
00:46:25.000In my opinion, the tariff uneasiness is leading to an unnecessary dampening of economic growth.
00:46:31.000Now, Scott Besson did go up against Maxime Waters on tariffs and inflation, and here's what he had to say: quote, tariffs are inflationary.
00:47:02.000Well, last November, as the Trump administration finally began to realize that affordability issues in America are not a hoax.
00:47:12.000Now, again, Scott Besson is suggesting there that tariffs do not cause inflation.
00:47:16.000Well, when it comes to inflation as a generalized phenomenon, as he has pointed out, as opposed to one-time price increases or temporary price increases, it's not tariffs generally that cause inflation.
00:47:26.000It is bad monetary policy, loose monetary policy.
00:47:29.000As Milton Friedman famously suggested, inflation is anywhere and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
00:47:34.000With that said, the study that he is citing does not claim that tariffs aren't inflationary.
00:47:38.000The study that he is citing says, quote, our results suggest that immediately following an increase in tariff rates, the unemployment rate tends to increase and inflation tends to fall.
00:47:46.000This pattern suggests that at first, the effects of tariffs more closely resemble a negative demand shock.
00:47:50.000That is, consumers and businesses pull back their spending, which slows economic activity and also slows down inflation.
00:47:56.000Over time, however, economic activity picks back up and inflation then increases to a higher rate than it would have been without the tariff increase.
00:48:02.000In other words, there's an immediate pullback in spending.
00:48:06.000That creates deflation because people aren't spending as much, so the prices go down.
00:48:09.000Then people come back, they start spending again, but the prices, because supply is restricted, the prices are a little bit higher than they would have been.
00:48:16.000So have the tariffs been this gigantic boon to America's economy?
00:48:19.000The evidence has yet to show that they have been a gigantic boon to America's economy.
00:48:24.000The other area where the Trump administration, again, I think that they, like this is not unique to Trump.
00:48:30.000This is every single politician in America with very few exceptions.
00:48:33.000The willingness to simply ignore our massive debt crisis is going to cause a problem.
00:48:39.000It won't cause a problem in the moment.
00:48:41.000It is going to become a bigger and bigger drag on the economy.
00:48:45.000Yesterday, President Trump suggested that we shouldn't have to worry about the national debt because our growth will make the debt look small.
00:48:52.000We have now, with me, and with all the money, I've always been good at money.
00:48:57.000And with all the money coming into our country, we're a rich country again.
00:49:01.000We have debt, but we also have growth.
00:49:04.000And the growth will soon make the debt look very small.
00:49:09.000I wish that you could simply grow your way out of a $39 trillion debt.
00:49:13.000But no, that is not the case, actually.
00:49:16.000Our current debt growth, if you annualize it, is almost 7%.
00:49:20.000The current deficit is 5.9% of GDP, which means that if you wanted to make up the deficit alone, you would have to grow at a massive rate.
00:49:30.000To make up our annual deficit this year, for example, we would have to grow at a 12 to 15% rate, which, of course, is not going to happen.
00:49:37.000If you wanted to reach what's called a primary surplus, which means more is collected in taxes every year than is spent on everything except the interest, with the current tax rates and with the current economic growth rates, you require 3.2% GDP growth continuously for the next 30 years.
00:50:29.000George Will says, as the national debt is a few months from reaching $39 trillion and perhaps $40 trillion by the end of the year, it is puzzling how unperturbed the political class is.
00:50:40.000Writer and political agitator Upton Sinclair said it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it or pretending not to, says George Will.
00:50:48.000A bipartisan congressional consensus more alarming than partisan rancor is.
00:50:52.000There are no long-term fiscal gains without intense short-term political pain.
00:50:56.000So because today's congressional careers do not yet seem likely to coincide with coming dire consequences, let them come.
00:51:04.000He points out that according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, there are six possible crises scenarios.
00:51:12.000The sixth is less so, but most alarming and also most likely.
00:51:17.000First, you could have a financial crisis where investors look at how fast the debt is accruing and say, we're not going to invest in bonds anymore.
00:51:24.000Second, you could have an inflation crisis because if you have a financial crisis, then you have to inflate the currency in order to deal with that.
00:51:32.000Inflation would then become baked into the expectations of investors who would demand higher interest rates.
00:51:37.000And if that happens, then says George Will, when interest rates paid on debt exceed the rate of economic growth, a crisis intensifies because rising interest rates depress economic growth.
00:51:46.000Then you would have an austerity crisis where you have to have massive cutbacks.
00:51:50.000You could have a currency crisis where because of inflation, an appreciating dollar means that people diversify away from U.S. debt.
00:51:58.000The most unlikely is a default crisis, but the most probable and most ominous outcome is a gradual crisis where we kind of just descend into economic sluggishness.
00:52:08.000Now, maybe AI creates massive productivity gains.
00:52:13.000But even if AI creates massive productivity gains, which I believe is something that's going to happen, until and unless we have a political class and an American people, because we're the ones who elect them, who are willing to talk about the kinds of cuts necessary to make America fiscally responsible again, nothing is going to change.
00:52:29.000The trajectory will maintain for a while, and then it will suddenly get much, much worse.
00:52:34.000Right now, we're still the best bet on the block because other countries are acting in even more fiscally irresponsible ways than the United States.
00:52:40.000But if we continue along the pathway that we have created with our gigantic welfare state, particularly our means-tested welfare state, if we continue to do that sort of stuff, then we are going to run into a brick wall at some point.
00:52:57.000All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now.
00:52:59.000We'll get to scandal in New York as Zorhan Mamdani visited a dude who got shot charging a cop with a knife.
00:53:07.000Remember, in order to watch you have to be a member, if you're not a member, become member, use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.
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