MSNBC announces that Joy Reid is leaving the network, and her show The Reid Report will no longer air on weeknights, and she will be replaced by two other hosts, Simone Sanders Townsend and Alyssa Menendez.
00:00:00.000Well, folks, nature is healing, and nowhere is it healing more, apparently, than at MSNBC. Now, I have to say, I have mixed feelings about this news.
00:00:08.000Joy Reid is apparently losing her show at MSNBC, and that is a loss for, I think, all of us, considering that approximately 11% of the content of the show was simply provided by Joy Reid in her asinine commentary on politics.
00:00:20.000On Sunday, Variety and the New York Times reported that Reid's 7 p.m.
00:00:23.000weeknight show The Readout is being canceled and will air its final episode this week.
00:00:27.000Apparently, she is leaving the network completely as a result, which, of course, is not a shock.
00:00:31.000She's not going to want to stick around and play second fiddle.
00:00:34.000Perhaps she will join Jim Acosta at a brand new network.
00:00:38.000There's a lot of options out there for Joy Reid, who is the kind of psychotic leftist who helped run the Democratic Party directly into a ditch.
00:00:47.000MSNBC, by the way, insists that they are going to continue with their progressive move.
00:00:50.000They are not, in fact, going to move toward the center, which, again, genius-level stuff from the leadership over at MSNBC, apparently.
00:00:57.000They're going to move Jen Psaki, who is the former White House press secretary under Joe Biden, they're going to move her to anchor one of the primetime hours during the week.
00:01:07.000She could be named anchor of MSNBC's 9pm hour, where Rachel Maddow currently is.
00:01:41.000According to MSN.com, Sanders Townsend, formerly a spokesperson for Harris, was hired by MSNBC in 2022. Meanwhile, the leadership over at MSNBC. Suggest that they are going to add Politico's Eugene Daniels and NYU Law Professor Melissa Murray to the network's lineup as well.
00:01:59.000So they are continuing to move over to the left.
00:02:02.000And this reflects a serious problem for the Democratic Party.
00:02:07.000They are stuck because of identity politics and largely because of immigration.
00:02:11.000They are now stuck in a rut of their own making.
00:02:14.000And it is very difficult to break out of that rut.
00:02:16.000And so you're seeing Democrats struggle against the box, thrash against the box of reality.
00:02:22.000Former Bill Clinton pollster Mark Penn points out the Democratic Party is more popular than they've been any time in his lifetime.
00:02:28.000Here he is running down the polling data.
00:02:31.000Frankly, the Democratic Party is falling off a cliff.
00:02:34.000The ratings which were in the high 40s are going to be like 35 percent.
00:02:39.000And I think the basic question, who's doing a better job as president, Biden or Trump, Trump is winning that with 57 percent.
00:02:48.000I think you're seeing a retrospective assessment of Biden and the direction the Democratic Party was going, really a lot more negative than it was on Election Day.
00:02:58.000And they're looking at the contrast on immigration, on economic policy, on some of the social policies.
00:03:07.000And the Democratic Party, I have never seen anything like this.
00:03:10.000This is a record low for the Democratic Party in terms of favorability.
00:03:16.000So Democrats are trying to figure out exactly to whom they turn in the wake of Donald Trump's victory and the fact that he's now steamrolling through his agenda.
00:03:24.000So, do they turn back to the supposedly moderate types, the Joe Biden types?
00:03:28.000Biden advisor Tom Donilon says they should never have gotten rid of Joe Biden.
00:03:31.000They shouldn't have moved over to the identity politics brand of Kamala Harris.
00:04:16.000You didn't even remember she ran for president at one point, but she did and she lost.
00:04:18.000And here she is receiving an award from the NAACP. Some see the flames on our horizons, the rising waters in our cities, the shadows gathering over our democracy.
00:05:04.000Beat poetry that she used to do on the campaign trail.
00:05:06.000Well, if you want more of that, Democrats might do it.
00:05:08.000She might run for governor of California.
00:05:11.000Democrats themselves are sort of torn between how to approach the Trump administration.
00:05:15.000On the one hand, they want to go back to resistance-style anger.
00:05:17.000They really want to just scream at the wind a lot.
00:05:20.000The problem for them is that they can't find a point of consolidation because many of the things that Donald Trump is doing right now are actually quite popular.
00:05:28.000And so they're stuck in a weird in-between.
00:05:30.000On the one hand, they want to preach that Donald Trump is non-empathetic.
00:05:33.000That what you really need is more empathy.
00:05:35.000But people don't see the Democrats as particularly empathetic.
00:05:38.000Jane Fonda tried to make this case over the weekend.
00:05:41.000It is amazing that they are now having to trot out 70-odd-year-old people who once rallied for the Viet Cong as their sort of ideological thought leaders.
00:05:50.000This is a lady who literally went to North Vietnam and declared that the Viet Cong were the victims of the Vietnamese War and was posing next to an anti-aircraft battery.
00:06:30.000Are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way.
00:06:35.000And even if they're of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy and not judge, but listen from our hearts and welcome them into our tent.
00:06:50.000Because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what's coming at us.
00:06:56.000Jane Fonda is not a particularly smart person, but you are a smart person, and smart investors prepare ahead of time, just like keeping a life jacket handy before you set sail.
00:07:04.000That's why so many people are adding gold to their portfolios, leading to record gold prices in early 2025. They're still a great opportunity for you to diversify and strengthen your financial future.
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00:08:52.000That's balanceofnature.com, promo code SHAPIRO. And meanwhile, Democrats are touting an anti-Trump rant.
00:09:07.000They got a standing ovation in a rather blue area of a red state.
00:09:11.000This happened over the course of the last weekend or so.
00:09:17.000But the people who are attending this particular town hall event in Roswell, Georgia are largely Democrats.
00:09:22.000Here is a town hall rant that was getting a lot of attention from the left over the weekend.
00:09:27.000It's clear from all the writings of our founding fathers that our great republic was never...
00:09:36.000So you can imagine my shock and pure horror when I woke up to find that our president had given himself unprecedented executive powers and then within a few days named himself king to his followers.
00:09:53.000Tyranny is rising in the White House and a man has declared himself our king.
00:10:00.000Rather, the people would like to know what you, congressman, and your fellow congressman are going to do to rein in the megalomaniac in the White House.
00:10:54.000The only point of consolidation is if Donald Trump and his administration What I've said very publicly is that Democrats need to play possum.
00:11:37.000I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days, in the midst of a massive collapse, and particularly a collapse in public opinion.
00:11:51.000Okay, so, again, Democrats are betting that it's all going to fall apart for President Trump.
00:11:57.000And Carville's suggestion is rooted in the fact that President Trump's approval ratings have slid from the mid-50s in some of the polls down to the mid-40s in some of the polls.
00:12:04.000That was always likely to happen because, again, the country is indeed quite polarized.
00:12:08.000But massive collapse doesn't appear to be on the horizon unless, unless there is some sort of serious economic problem.
00:12:14.000And that is why the central focus of the Trump administration right now must be on bringing down inflation.
00:12:21.000That's what the central focus has to be on.
00:12:22.000Yes, we want to see President Trump keep all of his promises, and he will, with regard to immigration.
00:12:27.000Sure, we would like to see President Trump bring an end to the war in Ukraine in a reasonable fashion.
00:12:31.000But the thing that Americans care most about, this is true of the election, it's true of nearly every election, is their economic well-being.
00:12:39.000And there are some blinking red lights that are on the horizon here.
00:12:42.000One of those blinking red lights comes courtesy of Warren Buffett.
00:12:46.000So Warren Buffett is now holding an extraordinary amount of cash.
00:12:50.000Warren Buffett, his Berkshire Hathaway, is holding $320 billion in cash and treasury bills.
00:12:58.000And the reason for that is he's looking at all the various areas of possible investment, and he's saying they're already overvalued.
00:13:05.000Essentially, what he's saying is that we are in a bubble right now.
00:13:07.000And it is hard to look at, for example, the stock market, where the price-earnings ratio is way out of whack.
00:13:12.000The price-earnings ratio just means the price of the stock as opposed to the earnings of companies.
00:13:18.000Right now, the average in the Dow Jones Industrial Average is 26 times.
00:13:21.000The price of stocks are 26 times the annual earnings of those companies.
00:13:27.000A normal distribution would be like 16, 18. 26 is way out of whack.
00:13:32.000And at the very top end of the spectrum, those top seven companies that everybody talks about, those companies are at a P-E ratio of something like 46. So those are overvalued.
00:13:42.000So Berkshire Hathaway is saying, we're not going to sink more money into that.
00:13:45.000At the same time, the real estate market is also inflated because the interest rates have been high for a while and there are a bunch of people who are holding on to their houses because they don't want to sell them and then get into a higher interest rate mortgage.
00:13:57.000And so what that means is a sort of artificially limited supply while demand remains at sort of even keel.
00:14:03.000And when that happens, you end up with a real estate bubble because fewer people are selling their homes and the demand has remained the same.
00:14:10.000So you have a bit of a real estate bubble, which is likely to break at some point.
00:14:14.000Which is likely to break at some point.
00:14:16.000These are the worries the Trump administration has on its mind.
00:14:19.000And beyond all that, inflation is driving both of those things.
00:14:22.000Because the currency was inflated so much over the course of Joe Biden's tenure.
00:14:27.000Because of the velocity of the money that was injected into the economy under Joe Biden.
00:14:31.000And in the latter days of the Trump administration, because of that, there's so much money chasing goods.
00:14:37.000And inflation remains at 3% right now, which is 50% higher than the Federal Reserve generally seeks.
00:14:43.000And that means that the interest rates are unlikely to come down, which means that it's tougher to get a loan.
00:14:48.000At the same time, even if you got a loan, you wouldn't actually want to spend your money on inflated assets.
00:14:53.000And so you have a bit of a sticky patch here for the American economy.
00:14:56.000And the only way to truly unstick it is with productivity gains.
00:15:00.000That is the only way to truly unstick this.
00:15:02.000Is more competition, less regulation, more investment in newer things.
00:15:09.000The productivity gains of AI. Have not actually made themselves manifest in the generalized market as of yet.
00:15:15.000There are tens of billions of dollars chasing AI. The problem, of course, is that aside from using AI for kind of everyday searches on the internet, most people aren't using AI yet to make their businesses more efficient and more effective.
00:15:29.000There's a sort of gap between the quality of the technology and the adaptivity of that technology to your normal everyday business working.
00:15:37.000Most people aren't using it in their businesses as of yet in a major way.
00:15:40.000So productivity gains have not matched the investment.
00:15:43.000It's one of the reasons, for example, why companies like NVIDIA have a massive valuation right now because people are pouring tons of money into the semiconductors produced by NVIDIA in order to build up AI. But again, the productivity gains from AI in the general workplace are not apparent as of yet.
00:15:57.000If they make themselves apparent, then we can outgrow all of this, or at least a large part of this.
00:16:02.000But in the meantime, what can the Trump administration do?
00:16:05.000They need to take a hammer to the regulations.
00:16:06.000And this is where we need to talk a little bit.
00:16:09.000So what Doge is doing right now is wonderful in a large number of ways.
00:16:12.000You all know I'm a big fan of the Department of Governmental Efficiency, as well as what Elon Musk is attempting to do.
00:16:18.000And one of the things Elon Musk is attempting to do is he's really targeting personnel in a very serious way inside the executive branch.
00:16:24.000So over the weekend, Elon Musk's Doge sent out an email to 2.3 million government workers asking that they justify their work.
00:16:32.000He basically said, give us five things you did over the course of the last week, and if you can't, then we may fire you.
00:16:39.000A bunch of the various agencies, again, run by Trump appointees, are saying, you know, you really don't have to do that.
00:16:45.000Some of these departments probably have to do it, but other departments not.
00:16:48.000So, for example, in HHS, RFK Jr. has instructed his people that they probably should, in fact, respond to Elon's email.
00:16:55.000They put out an email suggesting, quote, this is a legitimate email.
00:16:58.000Please read and respond per the instructions by Monday.
00:17:00.000And again, HHS is the largest single department inside the federal government.
00:17:04.000But there are other parts of the federal government.
00:17:06.000Particularly in the intelligence community or the defense community, where it's not clear they're going to answer those emails.
00:17:11.000Because it turns out that if you have a bunch of sort of long-term projects in the intelligence community, you can't just write that in an email and send it to Elon's team.
00:17:18.000This is why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has instructed personnel in U.S. spy agencies not to respond, according to the text of an email she sent to the workforce on Sunday, citing the agency's sensitive and classified work.
00:17:30.000Defense Department employees were given similar instructions not to respond.
00:17:36.000And again, what Elon is focusing on is breaking the pipeline of money that moves between the federal government and a bunch of sort of blue areas of the economy.
00:17:47.000But it is very important at this point to recognize that when it comes to Doge, Doge alone is not going to solve the fiscal problems.
00:17:59.000Doge is going in and finding waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:18:01.000But as I've been saying for literally months, waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:18:05.000Amount to a negligible, a very small percentage of actual federal spending.
00:18:10.000Unless you're talking about the giant wasteful programs that are, for example, means-tested welfare programs, and you're talking about absolutely restructuring those programs in a more beneficial way, you are just cutting around the edges.
00:18:20.000And even the sorts of things that we like to see, even those sorts of things are not, in fact, going to materialize into gigantic cuts.
00:18:30.000The Wall Street Journal did an investigation.
00:18:46.000First of all, $55 billion as a percentage of the American national budget every year is a very, very small percentage of America's budget every year.
00:18:59.000Like in the last year of the Biden administration, we spent approximately $7 trillion.
00:19:03.000$55 billion would represent one 127th of that.
00:19:08.000It's a very, very small percentage of the federal budget.
00:19:11.000But beyond that, it hasn't actually cut all of that.
00:19:15.000So the Wall Street Journal looked at what the contracts actually are cutting.
00:19:20.000And what they found is that the savings from contracts amounted to about $7 billion.
00:19:26.000Projects the actual savings could be closer to $2.6 billion over the next year if the spending levels remain consistent.
00:19:32.000Only about 2% of those funds would have gone to contracts related to DEI. So you're talking, again, about very small amounts in the end.
00:19:38.000Now, it's very good to talk about waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:19:40.000It's good to change in sort of public perception the meaning of what government spending is.
00:19:45.000But the really big things that need to happen if you actually want to unshackle the economy, if you actually want to see productivity gains, if you want to see business growth, if you want to see the economy.
00:20:21.000And if you want the data, you need USAFacts.org.
00:20:24.000USAFacts isn't about narratives, it's about data.
00:20:26.000Real, nonpartisan, verifiable data straight from government sources.
00:20:29.000Whether it's taxes, healthcare, or the economy, USAFacts gives you the numbers you need to cut through the nonsense and make informed decisions.
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00:22:02.000The single most important op-ed of the last five years was penned By House Budget Committee Chairman Jody Arrington and former U.S. Senator Phil Graham back in September of last year.
00:22:13.000And it talked about what is actually driving America's systemic national debt.
00:22:19.000And the answer, believe it or not, is not even Social Security and Medicare alone because the vast majority of Social Security and Medicare are actually paid for by payroll taxes.
00:22:27.000Doesn't mean that they're not a huge drain on our economy.
00:22:30.000They are because taxes are a giant drain on our economy and Social Security and Medicare in and of themselves.
00:22:37.000If we took the money that people are putting into payroll taxes and instead put it into the Dow Jones back in 2006 when George W. Bush was suggesting, the stock market has risen times four since then.
00:22:48.000But the actual systemic drivers of the debt, as Arrington and Phil Graham pointed out back in September, are actually the means-tested social welfare spending programs.
00:22:59.000Precisely the things that neither party actually wants to touch.
00:23:03.000Food stamps, refundable tax credits, supplemental security income, temporary assistance for needy families, federal housing subsidies, and almost 100 other programs whose eligibility is limited to those below an income threshold.
00:23:14.000And one of the points that Graham and Arrington make in this op-ed is that since 1967, defense spending has fallen from 68% of unobligated general revenue to 37.2% in 2023. So we're spending way more on these means-tested welfare programs.
00:23:31.000As defense spending plummeted, they write, swords were not beaten into plowshares, which would increase economic growth and wages, but instead were used to fund welfare payments.
00:23:39.000Today, the United States redistributes a larger share of its GDP, 29.4%, through transfers and taxes than any other developed country on planet Earth except France, at 30.1%.
00:23:50.000And in fact, this is an unbelievable statistic.
00:23:54.000After counting all transfer payments as income to the recipients, and taxes as income lost by taxpayers and adjusting for household size, The average households in the bottom, second, and middle quintiles all have the same income.
00:24:05.000And so we are such a redistributionist country that if you're in the bottom 60% of income earners, you're all basically making the same income because so much money has been redistributed from the top 40% to the bottom 60%.
00:24:19.000And if you're in the bottom 20%, you're actually making the same amount of money as a guy who's in like the middle quintile of income because of all the transfer payments.
00:24:32.000It's ensuring that the massive national debt gets larger.
00:24:37.000We are now paying more interest on our national debt than we are paying for our actual defense budget every single year, something that Neil Ferguson has pointed out is a mark of a declining empire.
00:24:48.000These things cost things, but these are the hard things.
00:24:52.000What's actually going to bring long-lasting success is not going to be cutting around the edges.
00:24:57.000What's actually going to bring long-lasting success Is the politically difficult thing.
00:25:01.000And if nobody's willing to do it, then basically we're just going to end up in this sort of progressive, this progressive populist horseshoe.
00:25:08.000Where despite all the talk about innovation, government just continues to grow and eat up an increasing portion of Americans' earnings and savings.
00:25:15.000Where a smaller and smaller percentage of the population is actually working while the government continues to spiral out of control in terms of growth.
00:25:22.000And where productivity does not actually outpace all of the spending of government and the taxation of government.
00:25:29.000That is the problem that is faced by President Trump.
00:25:31.000Now, the easy thing for Democrats is that when things fall down because of all these giant programs that they themselves have enshrined, they just claim capitalism failed.
00:25:38.000This is the magic of being a Democrat.
00:25:40.000The magic of being on the side of the blue is that when government screws up the economy to the point where there's a collapse, they immediately turn around and blame capitalism.
00:25:47.000This is exactly what happened in 2007-2008 during the real estate crisis.
00:25:52.000Bill Clinton and the Democrats rammed through particular government mortgage programs that were designed.
00:25:58.000To allow people with bad credit or no credit to get into homes at subprime rates in order to make home ownership more equitable.
00:26:09.000And in the end, all of that went bust and then capitalism got blamed.
00:26:13.000Well, the same thing could easily happen right here and it could take free markets right along with it.
00:26:19.000And so at some point, Congress particularly is going to have to pick up the bag here.
00:26:23.000And President Trump is going to have to start pushing.
00:26:26.000For some real systemic change on the regulatory side, he's going to have to push for some real systemic change when it comes to these means-tested welfare programs.
00:26:34.000Again, the kind of stuff that populists like, but that actually is eating up a giant chunk of the American budget every single year.
00:26:42.000If the premise of the current American political moment is that we are in a moment of scarcity, which is true, that we have scarce resources, that we are in danger of being outproduced by countries like China, That the American budget is too large.
00:27:24.000That fear of the quote-unquote far-right is leading center-right parties to join with center-left parties and then undermine their own credibility, which leads concomitantly to the rise of that supposed far-right.
00:27:35.000So right now in Germany, the results are pretty fascinating.
00:27:39.000Friedrich Merz is the clear winner of the German election, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:27:42.000The question for the conservative leader is how fast and with whom he can cobble together a government and whether the United States will seek to influence the process.
00:27:49.000Despite a historically strong showing by anti-establishment nationalists in a ballot that extended Europe's recent lurch to the right, MERS's Christian Democratic Union scored a comfortable victory once all ballots had been counted.
00:27:59.000This means that MERS this week will start talks on forming a government, at the end of which he's likely to become Germany's next chancellor, but the way there could be really, really rocky, because basically the breakdown was this.
00:28:08.000The CDU and its CSU sister party in Bavaria obtained 28.5% of the vote.
00:28:14.000Coming in second was the alternative for Germany.
00:28:44.000That's the worst score since the late 19th century.
00:28:46.000The question for MERS, It's how he's going to put together a coalition.
00:28:50.000Because MERS originally said he didn't want to side with the AFD. The AFD has been slandered, in my opinion, as a quote-unquote neo-Nazi party.
00:28:56.000I see no evidence that the party itself is a neo-Nazi party.
00:29:00.000Its platform looks very much like the platform of the Republican Party in the United States, although more populist on economics and probably less free market oriented.
00:29:08.000Which is weird, because when it was founded, it was founded as a libertarian party.
00:29:12.000The AFD, of course, has people who are hangers-on and associates and people who are involved with the party.
00:29:17.000Who have expressed neo-Nazi tendencies, but those people are both rare and not in positions of high leadership inside the AFD. The AFD's success is being driven in large part by opposition to immigration, which originally was led by the CDU. Originally, that was Angela Merkel's proposal to let in millions of Syrian refugees into the country, and it completely wrecked the entire body politic in Europe.
00:29:43.000Well, the CDU has now turned on immigration.
00:29:45.000Not in the same way as the AFD. The AFD has turned on immigration in a much more public way.
00:29:49.000So the question is going to be whether the CDU will sit with the AFD or whether they're going to turn back to Olaf Scholz and try to get together with Olaf Scholz.
00:29:58.000So if the CDU decides to try and side with the center-left, this will be very much reminiscent of what has been happening in France, where Emmanuel Macron's party refused to form a coalition with the Marine Le Pen National Rally.
00:30:30.000If, in a coalitional system in Europe, your party, your center-right party, sides with the left, it will not be perceived by the public as a move toward right-wing moderation.
00:31:07.000She said the CDU just needs to take it.
00:31:09.000Otherwise, a change in policy in Germany won't be possible.
00:31:13.000Merz has already said he would, under no circumstances, form a ruling union with the AFD. Suda David Wilp, the vice president of external affairs at the German Marshall Fund in the United States, said, quote, Friedrich Merz would be loath to work with the AFD. Pressure from the United States is unlikely to sway him.
00:31:29.000The problem, of course, is that the Olaf Scholz party is now saying they don't want to side with CDU. So it may be that if Olaf Scholz rejects it, then that will give Merz the possibility of opening up again.
00:31:42.000Back to AFD. It'll be fascinating to see, because here's the thing.
00:31:45.000If there is no immigration crackdown in Germany, AFD will continue to gain ground, and they should.
00:31:49.000Meanwhile, in other international news, obviously, tragic things happening with regard to Pope Francis.
00:31:55.000Pope Francis has been in the hospital for several days at this point.
00:31:57.000As you know, I'm not a fan of the Pope, but everybody should pray for his health nonetheless.
00:32:01.000Pope Francis remained in critical condition on Sunday.
00:32:03.000Blood tests showed early kidney failure.
00:32:04.000He remains alert, responsive, and attended Mass, according to the Vatican.
00:32:08.000The 88-year-old Ponce is battling pneumonia and a complex lung infection.
00:32:11.000Of course, he is quite ill and he is quite old.
00:32:15.000And everybody in the Catholic Church is aware that these are probably the last days of Pope Francis.
00:32:21.000Unclear exactly who is going to take over.
00:32:26.000I assume it will not be, spoiler alert, an intersex person like in the idiotic movie Conclave.
00:32:31.000But it will be fascinating to see which direction the Catholic Church swerves toward.
00:32:36.000Pope Francis has led the Catholic Church in a very left-wing liberation theology direction.
00:32:40.000I think it has been not beneficial for the Catholic Church.
00:32:43.000I think it has undermined its raise on debt.
00:32:45.000I think that he has sidelined many of the key causes of the Catholic Church in a modernizing left-wing world in favor of conciliatory positions on some of the most controversial issues in the international community.
00:32:58.000And that has been an idiotic move, I think.
00:33:00.000The Catholic Church, if it's going to represent anything, ought to represent the eternal values upon which it was based, and those are largely social values, and they have a lot less to do with, say, redistributionism and environmentalism and putting kathias on baby Jesus, all things that apparently Pope Francis was in favor of.
00:33:17.000So, obviously, prayers for his health, despite our disagreements, but we will see, in very short order, in which direction the Catholic Church wishes to move.
00:33:26.000Joining us now on the show to discuss is the host of The Michael Knowles Show, And, you know, a Catholic, I know, Michael Knowles.
00:33:31.000So let's start with, you know, what actually happens if Pope Francis should pass?
00:33:38.000And despite all of my disagreements with Pope Francis, obviously all our prayers are with him in a time of travail.
00:33:44.000If he should pass, then the conclave begins.
00:33:46.000I assume, according to the movies, we select an intersex pope, is my understanding.
00:33:50.000But what is the actual sort of process?
00:33:54.000Who's making up the College of Cardinals at this point?
00:33:57.000Who are sort of the likely frontrunners for the possible papacy?
00:34:00.000I think some people are a little mixed up on this because we're trying to map left and right in the American context perfectly onto the College of Cardinals.
00:34:10.000There are some cardinals who are hard leftists, who...
00:34:15.000Probably want to change doctrine, who want to do things that faithful Catholics would probably say it is not possible to do, actually.
00:34:23.000You know, doctrine can develop, but you can't change doctrine.
00:34:25.000The Pope is not permitted to just, like, make stuff up.
00:34:28.000You know, that's not how infallibility works.
00:34:31.000So there are some who are legitimately leftist.
00:34:34.000Likewise, there are cardinals who are traditionalists.
00:34:39.000They're real conservative, and they love the traditional Latin Mass, and they enjoy pre-conciliar rites and liturgies and all that sort of stuff.
00:34:47.000I myself am an attendee of the traditional Latin Mass, and so these are really wonderful cardinals, but they don't have huge numbers.
00:34:55.000And then there are all the cardinals in the middle, who are kind of conservative.
00:35:00.000Even with some of the news reports out of this pontificate, the Catholic Church remains.
00:35:07.000For all that's been said about Pope Francis being a leftist and soft on LGBT issues and whatever, Pope Francis also said that gay marriage is no mere political issue, but rather a machination of the father of lies that seeks to deceive and confuse the children of God.
00:35:22.000When he was asked about gay marriage, he said, God can't bless sin.
00:35:26.000The most famous phrase he used last year was this phrase, I actually can't even say it probably on the air, but there's too much homosexuality.
00:35:39.000So, you know, don't believe everything you read in the newspapers.
00:35:43.000But that means that in the middle, you've got the people who are kind of a little bit conservative or kind of want to maintain the status quo of Francis, which is a bit more liberal, or even just cardinals who...
00:35:53.000Want to be left alone and want to be able to control their own areas and, you know, just not have to deal with interference from Rome so much.
00:36:02.000So the top candidates right now, and who knows, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, he is a progressive.
00:36:11.000So he would be in the Francis Lane or further than the Francis Lane.
00:36:19.000Erdo in Hungary, he's viewed as much more of a conservative.
00:36:23.000I was just with the Hungarians the other night at CPAC in D.C. Great, wonderful conservative country and could be a real good choice.
00:36:30.000Cardinal Pietro Perolin, he is the Vatican Secretary of State.
00:36:34.000He would probably be a continuation of Francis, so definitely a little bit more on the liberal side of things.
00:36:41.000Some that the conservatives are hoping for would be like Cardinal Burke, who is an amazing, wonderful...
00:36:47.000Faithful cardinal, very orthodox, has raised certain questions about Francis' pontificate from the more traditional side of things.
00:36:56.000Cardinal Sarah is a big favorite of conservatives.
00:36:59.000He would be the first black pope, and it's kind of funny because the progressives would all hate the first black pope, and the conservatives would all love the first black pope, which just goes to show you how the Catholic Church...
00:37:11.000Continues to mystify, you know, many people around the world.
00:37:14.000But probably Cardinal Serra is a little bit too old.
00:37:21.000And then one candidate who is really interesting, he's been talked about, and he comes from a really hot part of the world that's been important to the church from the very beginning and certainly today, is Cardinal.
00:37:32.000Pierre Battista Pizzabala, who has a delightful and whimsical last name, Pizzabala.
00:37:38.000Also, he is the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, and he is considered more conservative.
00:37:44.000He seems to be open to the traditional Latin mass, which is so important, especially to many young people in the West.
00:38:09.000So how does the process actually take place?
00:38:12.000Because, obviously, we all know about sort of the black smoke that's rising from the conclave and then the white smoke when they finally figure out who exactly is going to be the next pope.
00:38:19.000But how does it actually take place on sort of a day-to-day level?
00:38:22.000And actually, sometimes, Ben, as you saw after the conclave that followed the death of Pope Pius XII, sometimes you get the white smoke, but then the black smoke comes up again, and it's kind of unclear.
00:38:38.000If this is the end of Pope Francis' earthly sojourn, and we're getting reports, you know, he has bronchitis, he only has one full lung, he has reportedly received a blood transfusion, at least one, he's been on oxygen, seems to have mild kidney failure.
00:38:54.000You know, the man is 88 years old in ill health.
00:38:58.000We all shuffle off our mortal coil at some point.
00:39:01.000If that happens, the conclave will kick off.
00:39:27.000You know, the German cardinals at this point are so far left, it's hard to recognize them as Catholic.
00:39:32.000But in the new world, these are pretty hardcore, orthodox, traditional people in many ways.
00:39:38.000So the conclave will kick off, and all the people in the red hats will go into the room, and there's no politicking officially, no campaigning officially, but I've never been inside one of these rooms, so, you know, who knows?
00:39:56.000At that point, obviously, the funeral for Pope Francis, those rights have already been put into place.
00:40:05.000They've been planning this for some long time.
00:40:08.000I'm seeing mixed reports that the Pope has received last rights, so even that is a little bit unclear.
00:40:15.000But if I were a gambling man, if it be not now, it will come.
00:40:21.000It seems that Pope Francis has He's lived a good long life, and so whether this is tomorrow or weeks from now or even months from now, this is probably happening soon.
00:40:32.000Well, Michael, I really appreciate the insight into all of this.
00:40:35.000I now know more than I did at the beginning of this conversation, a rarity in our conversations.
00:40:42.000Coming up on the show, continued controversy over the Trump administration's approach in Ukraine.
00:40:46.000Plus, President Trump fires a bunch of top military brass.
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00:41:16.000Meanwhile, controversy continues over President Trump's approach.
00:41:19.000In Ukraine, it is unclear exactly what the vast gap is actually between what Trump wants and what is likely to be achieved at this point.
00:41:28.000President Trump has made very clear that what he would like is presumably for Russia to retain control of the Donbass and Crimea and for the Ukrainians to be given security guarantees but not NATO membership.
00:41:39.000He's been ripping on Vladimir Zelensky.
00:41:41.000It is very unclear at this point why he has been ripping on Vladimir Zelensky.
00:41:44.000I understand there are a lot of people who believe false things about Zelensky, such as that he is a dictator.
00:41:50.000He is the legally elected president of Ukraine during times of martial law, when like half your country is occupied by another country.
00:41:56.000Many of your people have actually run to other countries as refugees, and many of your people are actually, you know, on the front lines fighting.
00:42:06.000It turns out very difficult to hold an election.
00:42:11.000President Trump suggested there needs to be a new election before some sort of peace deal is held.
00:42:14.000That doesn't seem to make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
00:42:16.000For his part, Zelensky came out over the weekend and said, listen, if me resigning would create peace, I'd be happy to do it.
00:42:21.000Or give me security guarantees, NATO members, like do something, and then I'll resign.
00:42:25.000Happy to leave as soon as the war has basically come to some sort of conclusion that actually guarantees Ukraine safety and security for the foreseeable future.
00:42:34.000If you really need me to leave for the sake of peace, I'm ready to do so.
00:42:39.000I am focused on security for Ukraine today, not in 20 years' time, and I'm not going to hang around in power for decades.
00:42:48.000It's important, I think, to put some context around Zelensky's remarks about him resigning.
00:42:52.000He said that if it brought peace to Ukraine or gave Ukraine NATO membership, he'd be willing to step aside.
00:43:01.000Now, the truth is, if Zelensky himself stepped down today, presumably the person who picked up the baton, because there wouldn't be an election, would be somebody who very largely agrees with Vladimir Zelensky's approach.
00:43:10.000The Ukrainians have lost hundreds of thousands of people dead or wounded.
00:43:14.000They're not simply going to allow a situation in which Russia can walk through the front door and into Kiev in the very, very near future.
00:43:22.000I don't think the Trump administration wants that either.
00:43:24.000I think a lot of this is a distraction.
00:43:26.000I think a lot of the talk about the controversy between Trump and Zelensky has nothing to do with sort of the on-the-ground reality, and you keep seeing that from various members of the Trump administration.
00:43:34.000So, for example, Pete Hegseth, who is the defense secretary, he says, listen, President Trump, you know, he's made comments about this sort of stuff, but we know who invaded whom, and we're not interested in watching Ukraine just turn into effectively a Russian territory.
00:44:21.000By Mike Walz, the National Security Advisor, he said, listen, President Trump has said that Russia invaded Ukraine under Obama, Russia invaded Ukraine under Biden, Russia did not invade Ukraine under Trump.
00:44:32.000So, I mean, it's a tacit acknowledgement that Russia invaded Ukraine under Joe Biden, obviously.
00:45:58.000Trump provides an alternative plan for Gaza, the only realistic plan I've ever heard about Gaza that actually accords with, you know, actual factual on-the-ground reality, and they start screaming about it.
00:47:12.000All of that is perfectly rational and within the realm of reality.
00:47:15.000If Zelensky can negotiate a better deal with the Europeans or with the United States for those rare earth minerals, great for him, good for him.
00:47:22.000And that would be good for both the United States and Ukraine because, as the Trump administration has openly suggested, an economic relationship with Ukraine enshrines American security interests.
00:47:31.000In Ukraine, much the way the United States has security interests in Taiwan, for example.
00:47:39.000And listening to Democrats who blew up the world suddenly complain about Donald Trump coming in and trying to fix things is really bizarre.
00:47:45.000It's hard for me to think of anyone who is a worse advocate in favor of the United States than the former Obama-U.N. ambassador and then policy advisor to Joe Biden, Susan Rice.
00:47:56.000She says that Trump on Ukraine is going to embolden China to invade Taiwan.
00:48:00.000What was it exactly when Joe Biden withdrew from Afghanistan utterly and left it to the tender predations of the Taliban?
00:48:08.000What message does it send to Xi Jinping when Donald Trump says to Ukraine that they are the aggressor, they who are in fact the victims of an invasion, are somehow the ones who started the war and that the price for ending the war ought to be that Ukraine gives are somehow the ones who started the war and that the price for ending the war And oh, by the way, give over five hundred billion dollars to Donald Trump in the United States for nothing in return.
00:48:36.000If I'm Xi Jinping, I'm looking at that going great.
00:48:42.000Well, I mean, again, you guys set up the predicate for all this.
00:48:48.000Now, I don't want China to invade Taiwan.
00:48:50.000And one of the things that I hope the Trump administration is pursuing, and they've talked openly about this, I assume they are, is a pivot from places like Europe, where Europe should be able to take care of its own business.
00:49:00.000Again, Europe, the EU is much larger than Russia as a collective.
00:49:03.000We can pivot from there to China and help protect Taiwan.
00:49:07.000Because if Taiwan were to fall, that would have some grave consequences for Japan, for Australia, for the supply chain, for the future of pretty much all sophisticated manufactured goods.
00:49:18.000So the pivot, I think, is something that the Trump administration has openly talked about.
00:49:23.000It is amazing to watch Democrats and the left-wing media freak out about Trump's foreign policy.
00:49:28.000And they're so delusional about what foreign policy even is.
00:49:30.000So Michael Birnbaum at the Washington Post has a piece called, quote, In first month, Trump upends century-old approach to the world.
00:49:38.000So what is the century-old approach to global affairs?
00:49:41.000Quote, Trump has gone further than he did in his first term to redefine whom the United States embraces and whom it combats, surprising fellow world leaders who thought they knew Trump's playbook and had been working to please him.
00:49:50.000Instead, the president is spurning a post-World War II international system built to block global aggressors, embracing far older ideas of allowing military powers to build regional spheres of influence and exert dominion over their neighbors.
00:50:03.000That was also the system after World War II. The Soviet Union had a very, very, very large sphere after World War II. And President Trump is not interested in not allowing any blocking of global aggressors.
00:50:14.000If that were the case, he would in fact just withdraw from Ukraine and not try to broker a peace deal at all.
00:50:19.000This is my favorite sentence in the piece from the Washington Post.
00:50:21.000Quote, Trump appears to be turning back the clock to a time in world history when countries with the biggest militaries constructed empires, demanded tribute from weaker nations, and expanded their territories through coercion.
00:50:33.000Do you mean like all of human history?
00:50:36.000That the bizarre interregnum in which liberals thought that they could magic China into being nice to us, for example, or they could wheedle Russia into being kind, that that was always a facade and always a nonsense?
00:50:48.000As Rosa Balfour, director of the Brussels office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says, quote, This is a classic geopolitics, actually.
00:50:54.000Influence on the areas that are closest to you geographically.
00:50:57.000Now, again, that doesn't mean the United States wants to abandon the Far East.
00:51:07.000But a reshifting and realignment of interests such that the people who are closest are spending the most on the thing makes an awful lot of sense.
00:51:15.000And Democrats whining about it should have thought about that before they decided, to sink billions of dollars into a quagmire in Ukraine of their own making.
00:51:24.000Meanwhile, President Trump is taking serious action inside the Pentagon.
00:51:27.000He abruptly fired Air Force General C.Q. Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Friday.
00:51:34.000This is all part of his campaign to feature merit instead of diversity.
00:51:38.000The ouster of Brown, only the second black general to serve as chairman, is sure to send shockwaves through the Pentagon.
00:51:43.000His 16 months in the job have been consumed with the war in Ukraine and the expanded conflict in the Middle East.
00:51:48.000By the way, terrible job on both, sir.
00:51:51.000If you wonder why exactly he's gone, the answer might be, you know, the quagmire in Ukraine and the fact that the Hooties now run the Red Sea.
00:52:00.000According to the AP, Brown's public support of Black Lives Matter after the police killing of George Floyd had made him fodder for the administration's war against wokeism in the military.
00:52:09.000Trump said he's nominating retired Air Force Lieutenant General Dan Raisin Cain to be the next chairman.
00:52:14.000Kane is a career F-16 pilot who served on active duty and in the National Guard.
00:52:18.000He was most recently the Associate Director for Military Affairs at the CIA. So, that seems like pretty well qualified, actually.
00:52:27.000Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also announced the firings of two additional senior officers, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti and Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force General Jim Slife.
00:52:37.000Franchetti is the second top female officer to be fired by the Trump administration.
00:52:40.000He also fired Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Fagan just a day after he was sworn in.
00:52:47.000Now again, this is not just a quote-unquote purge of the diverse.
00:52:50.000This is an attempt to reorient the Defense Department toward the priorities of the President of the United States.
00:52:56.000This is the point that Hegseth is making.
00:52:57.000Let's put in place people who actually listen to the President.
00:53:33.000President Trump has given another set of lawful orders, and they will be followed.
00:53:36.000If they're not followed, and all these orders are in keeping with the Constitution and norms inside the military, if they're not followed, then those officers will find the door.
00:53:46.000Okay, so again, this seems like a perfectly plausible explanation for what's happening at the Pentagon.
00:53:51.000One of the things that is hilarious about this is Democrats freaking out about this.
00:53:56.000Presidents have always fired generals, like top generals.
00:53:59.000Barack Obama famously fired Stanley McChrystal for the great sin of making comments in a magazine profile about Barack Obama and his handling of Afghanistan.
00:54:06.000By the way, McChrystal was totally right about all of that.
00:54:09.000Most famously, Harry Truman fired General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to move more harshly during the Korean War.
00:54:17.000None of this is the end of the world, but...
00:54:20.000Democrats keep claiming that everything is the end of the world.
00:54:22.000So you have Susan Rice again saying that Donald Trump is putting politics in our military.
00:55:05.000And it does not bode well for our integrity as a democracy.
00:55:13.000I was just hearing Democrats about the integrity of democracy after they centralize all power in the executive branch and then complain about it.
00:55:20.000Again, all of this is within the realm of the perfectly normal, and everybody pretending that this is a threat to democracy is, you know, over their skis at the very least.
00:55:28.000Coming up, we'll get to the trans story of the day.
00:55:32.000A famous actress, meaning, you know, an actor, like a dude who thinks he's a lady, complaining about passports.
00:55:38.000If you want to be a member and actually access that content along with all of our other great content, including Matt Walsh's great movies, What is a Woman, and Am I Racist, and all access with me, and whatever you want from Michael Knowles and Jordan Peterson.
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