A new poll shows Zoran mamdani leading by leaps and bounds in New York City. What the hell is happening? Why are young people in NYC resonating to Zoran Mamdani? The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, stops by to explain why Democrats ran away. And President Trump is taking over the Smithsonian and the Kennedy Center honors.
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00:01:06.000There's a new Sienna College poll that shows Zoran Mamdani, the Democratic mayoral nominee in New York City, is now leading by an increased amount, 44%.
00:01:15.000Former Governor Andrew Cuomo is at 25%.
00:01:24.000According to pollster Stephen Greenberg, city voters under 35 are overwhelmingly supporting Mom Dani, as are a plurality of voters 35 to 54.
00:01:33.000Voters 55 and older back Cuomo over Mom Dani 38 to 32.
00:01:49.000So I asked our sponsors over at Comet, which is a project of perplexity, about the complete employment history for Zoran Momdani since his time in college, because obviously this must be a person with just unbelievably good resume.
00:02:01.000This person must have a CV that just blows you away.
00:02:04.000Or alternatively, he's never held a real job in his entire life.
00:02:11.0002014, graduated from Bowdoin with a BA in Africana Studies.
00:02:17.000As we all know, the most useful BA, the kind of BA that will earn you millions of dollars at a hedge fund somewhere, or alternatively, maybe allow you to TA at another low-ranking university in Africana Studies.
00:02:29.0002014 and 2015, he was an organizing trainee at Change Corps, but he left after six months while attempting to unionize within the program.
00:02:38.000So they were like, nah, you leave now.
00:02:39.0002014, he was also a short-term organizer with various advocacy groups, including moveon.org.
00:03:44.0002018, he was the campaign manager for Ross Barkins' New York State Senate campaign.
00:03:48.000I don't think that one went amazing either.
00:03:50.000Then in 2019, he's the field organizer for Tiffany Cabin's Queens District Attorney Campaign.
00:03:56.000From 2018 to 2020, he was a foreclosure prevention and housing counselor in Queens, which was basically trying to teach people how they could avoid being expelled from their homes, evicted from their homes for not paying their bills.
00:04:10.000And then from 2021 to present, he was the member of the New York State Assembly, where he missed about half of his votes.
00:04:27.000I've talked about Bernie Sanders being completely useless, a leech On the ass of society for legitimately his entire adult life from the time he was 20 to the time he is now, which he's like 172 years old.
00:04:37.000Well, Zoran Mamdani is that, but younger.
00:04:40.000So, you know, 15 years of uselessness or so.
00:04:45.000So you might say to yourself, how does a person with effectively no resume who worked for his mommy and was a rapper, how does that person end up as the Democratic nominee in New York City?
00:04:56.000And to misunderstand that is to misunderstand everything about Generation Z. Now, here's the thing.
00:05:01.000I'm not a politician, so I don't have to pretend that the concerns of Generation Z are legitimate.
00:05:06.000I understand that if you're a politician, then you have to placate people when they emotionally explain to you why their life is so difficult.
00:05:13.000Sometimes people do have difficult lives.
00:05:15.000People have real challenges in the world.
00:05:17.000But when I hear from Generation Z that the American dream is dead to them, all I can think of as a generation, not individually, as an entire generation, is, you have got to be kidding me.
00:05:28.000I've read more pieces over the course of the last couple of years about how Generation Z has it tougher than any generation in modern history and thought to myself, you, I'm just going to vomit.
00:05:37.000I mean, really, I'm just going to vomit.
00:05:39.000You have lived through zero serious wars that America has had to undergo.
00:06:18.000The generational complaint that somehow Generation Z has it worse than the Millennials or Gen X or the boomers or the greatest generation ignores literally all of American history, all of it.
00:06:30.000But if you're a politician, you can make bank by pretending that these people have concerns that are legitimate and they're not just being ungrateful and bratty.
00:06:38.000And again, Mamdani, for these folks, is a sort of avatar.
00:07:14.000See, so many folks in America look to their politicians as aspirational figures.
00:07:20.000I think a lot of people who love President Trump look to him as an aspirational figure, somebody who's very wealthy and very powerful, somebody who's made more of himself than otherwise he might have had at the beginning.
00:07:30.000Yes, he grew up rich, but he made himself into a brand name available all across the world for literally decades and then president of the United States twice.
00:07:40.000But what if the Gen Z aspiration is to be a career loser who lives off of his parents' income until he gets some sort of Kush government job living in a rent stabilized apartment?
00:07:49.000What if that is the actual aspiration?
00:07:51.000What if people look up to Zoran Mamdani, not because he is a loser, not in spite of the fact that he is a loser, but because he is kind of a loser?
00:08:00.000This is, I think, the theory of a piece in Tablet magazine called Zoran Mamdanti's Fantasy Island.
00:08:08.000According to Armin Rosen, writing for Tablet, Zoran Mamdani first reached elected office in 2021.
00:08:12.000He defeated four-term Democratic incumbent state assemblywoman Arabella Somotas, a 46-year-old former lawyer, city health staffer, and community planning board member who belongs to the century-old Greek immigrant community of Northwestern Queens.
00:08:23.000Mamdani, then 29, had been rejected from the nation's internship program after graduating from college.
00:08:30.000He worked as a music coordinator on a Disney-produced film directed by his mommy.
00:08:34.000His sole qualification for public office was his relatively brief time as a housing counselor for Chaya Community Development Corporation, an organization that works with low and middle income South Asian communities in Jackson Heights in central Queens.
00:08:45.000To dismiss this resume, says Armin Rosen, as a multinational trust fund kid's laughable excuse for a career is also to misunderstand how power is now organized within Democratic Party verticals in major cities.
00:08:55.000Groups like Chaya have become one of the primary instruments of public policy in New York, where social programs are often carried out through the public subsidy of nonprofit private sector partners, groups with the freedom to be less accountable, more sectarian, and more ideological than government tends to be.
00:09:10.000In New York City, nonprofits received $20 billion in public money in 2021 in 2019 chia which is the organization he worked for got 600 grand in government grants accounting for one-third of the organization's revenue this public large just didn't mean momdani was drawing a large salary apparently he wasn't drawing much of a salary at all but The point is that he had all of these people available to fund him.
00:09:33.000In New York City, a taxpayer-funded matching program pays candidates $8 for every $1 they raise from city residents whose donations are $250 or lower.
00:09:43.000A lot of New Yorkers now have jobs and backgrounds very similar to Mom Dani's.
00:09:47.000New York is thought of as the sink or swim epicenter of American capitalism, but that's not true anymore.
00:09:51.000The city is home to more than 600,000 jobs in the nonprofit sector and a roughly equal number of jobs in government.
00:09:57.000Nonprofits now employ nearly 17% of the city's total private sector workforce compared to 10% nationally.
00:10:04.000And wage growth there is healthy because it's all done off of government grants.
00:10:08.000So all of those nonprofits are not independently raising their money.
00:10:11.000They're getting money from the government.
00:10:12.000So they're effectively second order government employees.
00:10:16.000And when you look at the stats in New York, you understand just why Zorin Mamdani is so successful.
00:10:21.000The top industries in New York City in terms of employment, about 17% of people living in New York City are government employees.
00:10:31.000Another 10% are in financial activities.
00:10:35.000Those are the people who are actually supporting the tax base of New York City.
00:10:39.00012.5% are leisure and hospitality, meaning that those are business people who are coming in from out of town and staying at a hotel.
00:10:45.000And then there's 34% in education and health services, right?
00:10:49.000Those are all on government subsidies.
00:10:51.000So you have well over 50% of the population that is working for some sort of government orchestrated, government-organized, or government-funded segment of the economy.
00:11:03.000And when it comes to tax revenue, the people who are paying the taxes are largely the people who are in that small portion of the business community, the people who are in financial activities.
00:11:13.000Business income taxes represent about 14% of all tax revenue in the city of New York.
00:11:19.000The finance and securities industry represents 6% to 7% alone.
00:11:22.000And then when it comes to office space and other real estate taxes, that represents half of all tax revenue that's being paid by all the financial and securities industries guys and the leisure and hotel activities that are in New York City.
00:11:34.000So in other words, the people who are getting money from the government are not the people who are paying for the government.
00:11:41.000They're living off the largesse of government.
00:11:44.000And meanwhile, all of the rent across New York City has been rent stabilized.
00:11:49.00050% of all of the units across New York City have been rent stabilized.
00:11:54.0001 million units have been rent stabilized, which means that there's an artificially low supply of actual new construction in New York City.
00:12:03.000So the average rent across New York City stands at approximately $4,000 a month.
00:12:09.000In Q1 of 2025, the median asking rent was $3,400 a month with zero to two bedrooms at $3,400 a month, three bedrooms at almost $4,800 per month.
00:12:24.000Manhattan, the average rent is over $5,400 per month in Manhattan.
00:12:31.000So when Zora Mamdani is complaining about affordability, number one, what we should point out, it's all left-wing policies that made things unaffordable.
00:12:38.000And number two, the people who are in New York City trying to afford those rent-controlled rent-stabilized apartments, a huge number of them are on the government dole.
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00:15:42.000There are people on the right who believe this, there are people on the left who believe this.
00:15:45.000This is not actually a traditionally American idea.
00:15:47.000The traditional American idea, if you go back to the very beginning, is cross an ocean with nothing to guarantee what is going to happen to you on the other end.
00:15:55.000Go into a wilderness, build a crappy house, and try to start a business.
00:16:00.000And if that doesn't work, then what you do is you abandon that place and then you move further to the west across mountain ranges, across rivers.
00:16:08.000I mean, that was the original American idea.
00:16:48.000One would be get rid of all the rent stabilization, the rent control, get rid of all of the regulations that prevent the building of new apartments, for example.
00:16:56.000And that's something that both the left and the right should be able to agree on.
00:16:59.000That is what Ezra Klein writes about in abundance.
00:17:03.000But the other thing that traditionally Americans did is when it was too expensive to live in a place, they left.
00:17:09.000But Americans are not doing that anymore.
00:17:11.000Instead, the reason that so many New Yorkers seem warm on socialism is because many New Yorkers are already living a form of socialism.
00:17:18.000They're living the Zoran Mamdani lifestyle where they are being supported by the government in a wide variety of ways, ranging from the regulatory to the actual subsidy.
00:17:28.000And so, when they say things are so hard in New York City, and the answer is more redistribution from the people who are earning all of the income and paying all of the taxes, the answer to that from saying people should be no.
00:17:40.000Now, maybe New York wants to do it, but I think at some point there's going to have to be a call for some level of responsibility on the part of yes, young people.
00:17:50.000Now, whenever I say stuff like this, I always get a bunch of flack because, oh, you grew up rich.
00:18:04.000I had the ultimate privilege, which was a solid two-parent household.
00:18:07.000My parents are wonderful people, but I did grow up in an 1,100-square-foot house in Burbank, California, sharing a bedroom with three sisters until I was 11 years old, one bathroom for six people.
00:18:32.000So she would drop us off at the restaurant and we would sit in the back of the restaurant and watch my dad play the piano.
00:18:38.000And if he got a 20 in the tip drive, that was a massive night.
00:18:42.000Okay, I'm not telling this story because I'm looking for some sort of blue collar sympathy or something.
00:18:47.000I'm telling this story because there is this dumb assumption that if you talk about mobility in America and the capacity of people to make smart decisions and to make the kinds of moves that would be necessary to achieve success, the immediate accusation is that it was only true for you.
00:19:04.000It is true for a huge majority of Americans.
00:19:06.000If you make smart decisions in America and if you stop whining for five seconds and if you go out and make better decisions for yourself, you can make a better life for yourself.
00:19:15.000And I think that this has really infused all of our politics.
00:19:39.000This is how you end up with Zorn Mamdani or Bernie Sanders.
00:19:42.000And you're seeing a sort of populist economics on the right that says sort of the same thing, which is, if the economy hasn't worked the way that you want it to work, give me power and I can fix.
00:19:53.000That mentality is not going to fix your life.
00:19:56.000For the vast majority of people, the vast vast, again, this is not true for everybody.
00:20:00.000There are people with real challenges for the fourth time.
00:20:02.000There are people with real challenges in the world, health challenges, life challenges.
00:20:07.000Not everybody was as lucky as I was to have two wonderful parents.
00:20:11.000I happen to know a great number of people who are very wealthy who also did not have two wonderful parents.
00:20:15.000You know, obstacles can turn into stepping stones for your success if you make the right decisions.
00:20:21.000But our entire politics is designed around the idea that people who tell you to make the right decisions are somehow selfish.
00:20:27.000And people who tell you to give them your money and your power so they can do what they want with it, those are the people who are really trying to help you.
00:20:39.000And there have been a lot of conspiracy theories floating around right and left over the course of the last few years.
00:20:43.000And as I've said before, sometimes there are conspiracies.
00:20:46.000Sometimes the conspiracies are very real.
00:20:48.000But the sort of generalized conspiracy theory of life, which is that your failure is the result of some grand conspiracy run by a shadowy group in the back room that is trying to somehow screw you, that has not made anyone's life better.
00:21:03.000If you can identify a conspiracy with actual conspirators, with actual bad policies, let's all fight it together.
00:21:09.000And now I'm saying the same thing that I said about the accusation that America was systemically racist, which was an accusation that there's essentially ghost hunting.
00:21:17.000Because how do you fight systemic racism?
00:21:32.000There's an entire group of commentators who are there to massage the feelings of people who complain that they are being screwed by life, screwed by society, screwed by the system.
00:21:41.000And you know who gets rich off of that?
00:21:44.000The person who gets powerful off of that is the commentator or the politician.
00:21:48.000And nobody makes money telling people that they ought to make their bed.
00:21:52.000That is generally not a great way to win friends and influence people, but it also happens to be the only thing that makes people's lives better in a free country.
00:23:00.000Alrighty, coming up, we'll get to President Trump, his intervention in Washington, D.C., fighting the Smithsonian, and Governor Greg Abbott of Texas is going to stop by in a bit.
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00:25:12.000Meanwhile, speaking of Washington, D.C., where all this power has been aggregated, by the way, I should mention here that we just hit $37 trillion on the national debt.
00:25:19.000The reason for this is this sort of conspiratorial thinking.
00:25:22.000It is this idea that the American system is inherently corrupt.
00:25:24.000And if we just spend our way out of it, then that will magically fix all of our problems.
00:25:34.000In any case, President Trump has now said that he wants to unleash the federal law enforcement auspices on Washington, D.C. And the Democrats are predictably very upset about this.
00:25:47.000Senator Chris Van Holland, who is absolutely one of the dumbest people in Congress.
00:25:52.000I mean, I know it's a long list, but Chris Van Holland really is near the top of the list.
00:25:55.000Here he goes ripping into President Trump over this.
00:26:00.000The president is showing all of his authoritarian tendencies.
00:26:04.000We have this decision by the president to essentially federalize the D.C. police at a time when actually crime in the District of Columbia is at a 30-year low last year and has been continuing to decrease in the first six months of this year.
00:26:24.000Okay, so apparently President Trump is some sort of fascist for wanting to decrease crime further from where it is.
00:26:31.000Again, if you give Democrats more power in Washington, D.C., probably they'll solve the same problem they've been failing to solve for literally decades.
00:26:37.000Meanwhile, a Democratic Philadelphia DA, Larry Krasner, who's responsible in large part for destroying the city of Philadelphia.
00:26:45.000Larry Krasner is, again, one of these George Soros elected prosecutors, a man who was focused laser-like on ensuring criminals were out of prison so they could do more crime.
00:26:56.000Here he was complaining to CNN about President Trump being a fascist.
00:27:00.000He's doing it for the same reason he did that stupid birthday parade.
00:27:03.000He's doing it because he really likes the idea of being a dictator.
00:27:07.000He likes the idea of destroying our legal system.
00:27:10.000He likes the idea of eliminating the courts and taking away individual rights.
00:27:14.000I mean, look what he's doing talking about people who are unhoused as if they're criminals.
00:27:32.000This is a profoundly un-American attempt to exercise power in ways that are illegal to scare big cities and to go after democratic cities that are diverse to serve his racist, fascist agenda.
00:28:02.000And the actual solution to that is, as President Trump has suggested, arrest the criminals, make people who have serious drug problems dry out.
00:28:09.000And also, you actually do need involuntary commitment of people with serious mental illness so they can get their medication.
00:28:14.000What's fascinating about all of this is that, of course, if President Trump were a Democrat, they would be praising him for his perspicacity in trying to shut down crime in these major cities.
00:28:24.000Here's Kathy Hochl, the New York governor, bragging about deploying the National Guard to the subway system in New York in order to shut down crime.
00:29:26.000you know but the stats are very bad but um Points for honesty and truth there for the president of the United States.
00:29:37.000Now, back to the topic of this sort of generalized running down of America.
00:29:42.000In order for politicians to truly demagogue, you have to suggest that America is a terrible place, that the only thing that can fix America is if you give me more power.
00:29:51.000Your life will be better if you give me more power or you give me more money.
00:29:54.000Well, to President Trump's credit, he understands that in order to rectify that, in order to fight against that, what you actually have to do is change the cultural conversation around what America is.
00:30:06.000So there are a lot of people today who are very, very angry at President Trump for intervening with the Smithsonian.
00:30:10.000So the Smithsonian Institute is, of course, a series of museums.
00:30:16.000It's everything from the National Museum of American History to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
00:30:23.000And the Smithsonian has had some problems being infiltrated by woke.
00:30:26.000See, the left has known this for a long time.
00:30:28.000If you want to build up a narrative that America is truly a terrible place that requires massive earth-shaking change, that has to be done culturally.
00:30:35.000And this is why, for example, back in 2020, during the Black Lives Matter moment, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of African American History, literally put out an exhibit called Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States.
00:30:50.000I remember this one almost verbatim because it was so insane.
00:30:54.000Because it was basically that, that horseshoe theory where the alt-right Nazis and the woke Black Lives Matter folks, like they shook hands.
00:31:04.000So according to the National Museum of African American History, again, this was back in 2020, aspects and assumption of whiteness and white culture, like things that are uniquely white, include things like rugged individualism.
00:31:39.000Other white things include time, quote, follow rigid time schedules.
00:31:44.000Also, aesthetics based on European culture.
00:31:48.000Also, things like, you know, justice based on the English common law, competition, and religion.
00:31:56.000All those things were just white people things, according to the Smithsonian.
00:31:59.000Well, the president has come in and he says, listen, we're not doing this anymore.
00:32:02.000We want to go through everything that the left woked up, and we're going to try and fix that now.
00:32:06.000So the White House sent a letter to the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, a person named Lonnie Bunch, talking about all of this.
00:32:13.000Quote, as we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation's founding, it is more important than ever that our national museums reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story.
00:32:24.000In this spirit, and in accordance with Executive Order 14253, we will be leading a comprehensive internal review of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions.
00:32:32.000This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the president's directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.
00:32:42.000And so they're going to go through the public-facing content and how content is curated and how exhibitions are planned and all of the rest.
00:32:49.000And so they asked for all the material on educational materials, external partnerships, grants, and everything else.
00:32:56.000And everybody on the left went insane.
00:33:19.000So here is Peter Baker of the New York Times claiming this is just like Vladimir Putin.
00:33:23.000But when it's the president of the United States dictating what the history should be, that, of course, brings to mind a different kind of history, a history of the kinds of countries where politicians are deciding what people should know rather than historians and experts.
00:33:39.000And if you put this together with a president who's now planning to personally host the Kennedy Center honors, who's determining what kind of culture should be showcased himself personally, who is now sending American troops into the streets of Washington, all of these things together hearken to a lot of people to the kind of countries that Vladimir Putin would feel very comfortable in.
00:34:04.000So in other words, if the White House looks at an executive branch issue like the Smithsonian Institution and tries to go through the history and write it in accordance with American history as opposed to listening to the left complain about the rewriting of history after they spent years tearing down statues and defacing them is kind of an amazing thing.
00:34:29.000And then if you attempt a counterrevolution, then of course you are the great offender.
00:34:33.000President Trump is not standing for that.
00:34:34.000Other things that he is doing on the cultural level, you heard Peter Baker mention that President Trump is going to host the Kennedy Center honors this year.
00:35:03.000Here he was explaining that he's going to host the Kennedy Center honors.
00:35:07.000Let's talk about right now the Kennedy Center, and I'm delighted to be here as we officially announce the incredibly talented artists who will be celebrated later this year at the 2025 Kennedy Center honors.
00:35:49.000I really don't think it took that much to talk President Trump into this.
00:35:52.000I think President Trump was pretty, this is probably the thing he's been most enthused about as president in a while.
00:35:57.000He also acknowledged that the people who are Being honored by the Kennedy Center, that that went through him, that he wiped out all of the wokeies.
00:36:25.000This is very different than it used to be.
00:36:27.000Now, the people, by the way, who are being honored are George Strait, who is the king of country, Michael Crawford, who you'll recognize from Phantom of the Opera.
00:36:35.000I myself am not a huge Michael Crawford fan.
00:36:37.000His baritone lacks something, but that's, you know, an aesthetic judgment.
00:36:40.000Sylvester Stallone, Gloria Gaynor, and Kiss.
00:36:44.000So obviously he's featuring a bunch of people who are fairly friendly to him.
00:38:04.000Average first year credit score impact and plus 84 points vantage score of 3.0 between January 2023 and January 2024 for kickoff credit account users who started with a score below 600 who paid on time and who had no delinquencies or collections added to their credit profile during the period.
00:38:16.000Late payments may negatively impact your credit score.
00:38:21.000Meanwhile, the New York Post yesterday reported a kind of shocking story.
00:38:24.000I mean, not that shocking if you've been following Russia Gate, but a little shocking.
00:38:27.000Apparently, according to the New York Post, Senator Adam Schiff, then the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, authorized leaks of classified information to tarnish President Trump's image during the RussiaGate probe, having assumed he would lead the CIA in the Hillary Clinton administration, according to newly released whistleblower statements.
00:38:43.000It's an unidentified source who worked as a Democratic staffer on the House Intelligence Committee for 12 years after spending a couple of decades in the Intel community.
00:38:51.000He told FBI agents in December 2017 the mood among the panel became indescribable after Trump's upset win the year before.
00:38:58.000Apparently, he said, quote, ranking member, that's Schiff, was particularly upset as he had believed he would have been appointed as the director of the CIA had candidate Hillary Clinton won the election.
00:39:07.000In September 2017, the same whistleblower told investigators he had heard from congressional staff colleagues around October 2016 that Schiff would be offered the CIA job if Clinton had won.
00:39:18.000So this whistleblower says basically that Schiff and apparently they were also worried about one congressman, Eric Swalwell, that they might be leaking bad information about Trump in order to hurt him.
00:39:29.000During an FBI interview in June 2023, the whistleblower recalled being part of an all-staff meeting called by then Congressman Schiff, at which the Democrats stated that the group would leak classified information derogatory to the president.
00:39:41.000Schiff said the information would be used to indict President Trump.
00:39:44.000The whistleblower said he objected only to be told by other participants they would not be caught if they did leak classified information.
00:39:55.000Apparently, that was one prominent oversharer, according to the whistleblower.
00:39:59.000Because apparently over drinks that evening, the whistleblower claimed Democrats on the Intel Committee had established a system for leaking in which sensitive information would be given to Schiff, after which a decision was made as to who would leak the information.
00:40:12.000In that December 2017 FBI interview, a whistleblower recounted how a particularly sensitive document was seen by a small group of lawmakers and staff, including Schiff and Swalwell, but leaked out almost verbatim within a day.
00:40:22.000The whistleblower allegedly claimed to have been warned to be careful because Swalwell had a reputation for leaking classified information.
00:41:14.000And he's still butthurt over this somehow.
00:41:17.000If you don't remember, this is July 2024.
00:41:20.000I just wanted to know, from your perspective, I think it would help us understand on just like a scale of zero to 100%, how much do you support Project 2025?
00:41:32.000I think like President Trump, I haven't looked all that deeply at Project 2025, but it seems that Democrats on this committee, sort of like Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, if they say Project 2025 enough, their presidential candidate becomes alive again.
00:41:46.000And so well, let's just talk about pieces of it.
00:41:50.000And I guess you can tell me if you support it.
00:41:52.000You probably want less bureaucracy, right?
00:42:12.000There's a genetic component of orientation, but the view of all religious people I know has always been that sexual behavior is something that is up to you.
00:42:19.000And you said, I may have a desire to sleep with many women, but I do not.
00:42:52.000According to Breitbart, you remember those Texas House Democrats who ran away?
00:42:56.000Brave Sir Robin ran away because they were attempting to avoid providing a quorum for redistricting.
00:43:02.000Well, apparently, they're now going to return home after Governor Greg Abbott took emergency action to begin removing the absent legislators as they refused to show up for work.
00:43:11.000Multiple sources revealed the news to ABC 13 on Tuesday.
00:43:14.000The exact date that they will return to the state capitol in Austin has not been confirmed.
00:43:17.000The state house had only 95 members present for the second day in a row on Tuesday, with Speaker Dustin Burroughs predicting the session will end and a new one will start, assuming there is no quorum on Friday.
00:43:27.000The Senate Democrats did not break a quorum, but they did storm out of the chamber in protest as the Republicans passed the new redistricting map.
00:43:35.000So they got really mad and then they walked out and then they walked back in.
00:44:20.000But apparently, that's a legal problem.
00:44:22.000Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the state court to clear the way for law enforcement officials to arrest him because there was a court order barring him from fundraising for those statehouse Democrats who were in violation of the law.
00:44:34.000Paxton filed a motion for contempt in court against O'Rourke.
00:44:36.000But of course, this makes Beto O'Rourke happier than anything else on earth.
00:44:39.000Like Eric Swabwell, that dude just wants attention, desperately, desperately wants attention.
00:44:44.000And since he can't get it from skateboarding, kick flip, bong, rip, beta, he says, F the rules, man.
00:44:52.000If you're a Democrat these days and you need to be the leader of the resistance, the best way to do that is to just show how much you are so mad at Trump.
00:45:07.000Like, they're just going to get whatever is the worst form of cursing that they can use.
00:45:12.000That is what that shows that they care, you see.
00:45:16.000It doesn't mean they're effective, but it shows they care really like a lot.
00:45:19.000The more they curse, if they can curse like a Martin Scorsese mafioso and talk about Trump, man, that road to the White House is paved with gold for them.
00:45:31.000Here's Beto standing in front of a giant American.
00:45:38.000We want California and New Jersey and Illinois and Maryland and every other state where the Democrats hold the governor's mansion, the Assembly, and the state Senate to redraw their congressional districts now, not wait for Texas to move first to maximize Democratic Party advantage.
00:45:56.000Listen, you may say to yourself, well, those aren't the rules.
00:46:32.000He's showing a lot of spice, but he's not the only one.
00:46:35.000J.B. Pritzker, the rotund governor of Illinois, who must be lowered into the state capitol by Crane, he also has words about this, also showing fire and passion and rotundity.
00:46:48.000So it's time to stop apologizing when we're not wrong.
00:46:57.000And it's time to stop surrendering when we need to fight.
00:47:38.000Donald Trump, if you do not stand down, we will be forced to lead an effort to redraw the maps in California to offset the rigging of maps in red states.
00:47:45.000But if the other states call off their redistricting efforts, we will do the same.
00:47:48.000Thank you for your attention to this matter.
00:47:50.000See, it's funny because he said thank you for your attention to this man.
00:48:19.000How do I decide between the skateboarder who failed running for president and also failed running for the Senate in Texas, J.B. Pritzker, who no one cares about but is super wealthy because his family made a bunch of money.
00:48:32.000And Gavin Newsom, mostly famous for eating in the middle of COVID at the French laundry and also being the ex-husband of Kimberly Guilfoyle, our ambassador to Greece.
00:48:40.000I mean, wow, what a stellar lineup they have.
00:49:37.000And so what these Democrats have done, they fled a fight and they went to all places, Chicago, Illinois, which is the quintessential example of gerrymandering.
00:50:11.000We are going to pass those new maps, whether it be this week, next week, next month, the month after that, we're going to stay in special session until we get those maps passed.
00:50:23.000So Governor, let's talk about what is prompting the redrawing of the maps.
00:50:27.000Obviously, Democrats are claiming it's illegal or that it's being driven by political pressure from the White House.
00:50:31.000What is causing Texas to want to redraw those congressional maps right now?
00:50:54.000All that's required is a majority of the Texas House and Texas Senate.
00:50:58.000A catalyst for this was a court decision from the Fifth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals last year that said that coalition districts were no longer required.
00:51:08.000When you couple that with the facts from the last presidential election, it showed that counties that are predominantly Hispanic that historically had in the past voted for Democrats, this time voted Republican for Donald Trump as well as other Republicans.
00:51:23.000So we have new facts and new law that allow us to redraw these lines in ways that these voters and these districts, they're not trapped in a Democrat congressional district.
00:51:33.000Instead, they can vote for a Republican candidate of their choice.
00:51:36.000So Democrats have been absconding in order to presumably break quorum.
00:51:40.000What are the sort of methodologies that can be used to compel them to come back?
00:51:46.000So the punishments are outlined in the Constitution, and they are punishments that the House comes up themselves with the consequences for not showing up for a quorum.
00:52:00.000Another that the House leadership is seeking to impose on the runaway Democrats is to pay for all of the expenses, which is in the millions of dollars, as well as other potential consequences such as losing privileges on committees and different things like that.
00:52:15.000Those are what I would consider to be the minimum consequences.
00:52:19.000And I'll tell you what, if they don't show up, they're going to see some more consequences.
00:52:23.000So meanwhile, Beto O'Rourke, who, while you've served in pretty much every position in Texas government, he was a congressperson, then he ran for Senate and failed.
00:52:30.000That was after he ran for president and failed.
00:52:32.000So he continues to run for things and fails at them, but he's also raising money for a bunch of Texas Democrats.
00:52:50.000And he lost by double digits in Texas.
00:52:53.000So he's a three-time loser when it concerns politics.
00:52:57.000But let's get to the law because these are very serious allegations.
00:53:01.000And what we did, we found a quote from Betro O'Rourke himself where he was suggesting that he was going to pay money to any of these Democrats who refused to stay in a quorum, who fled the quorum and refused to vote for these maps.
00:53:17.000Under Texas law, if you offer somebody money to either vote a certain way or to not vote, that would be considered to be bribery.
00:53:26.000This is a second-degree felony in Texas.
00:53:39.000Texas was experiencing mass migration surges to the southern border thanks to President Biden.
00:53:45.000From your position as Texas governor, can you describe the difference between President Trump's administration and what you were facing just a year ago?
00:53:51.000Night and day, complete opposites, however much you can contrast it.
00:53:55.000Interestingly, I was visiting today with the head under Trump of the Border Patrol.
00:54:01.000And we were commiserating over that very difference.
00:54:04.000This time last year, there were thousands of people coming across the border every single day.
00:54:08.000Today, there is zero people that the Trump administration allows to cross the border illegally.
00:54:14.000Also, what the Border Patrol is doing, that they are putting into place measures that I actually put into place, such as those big orange buoys that we put into the river.
00:54:22.000They're doing that on a much more massive scale.
00:54:24.000They're working to build more border wall.
00:54:27.000With the one big beautiful bill, they got billions of dollars of new funding, so they're going to be able to redouble their efforts to secure the border.
00:54:34.000Governor Abbott, back to the redistricting for just a moment.
00:54:36.000So Governor Gavin Newsom over in California, who apparently spends pretty much 23 out of every 24 hours a day trolling President Trump in a desperate attempt to become the Democratic nominee in 2028.
00:54:47.000He is suggesting that if Texas goes ahead with redistricting, he is then going to redistrict California and wipe out some Republican districts in places like Orange County.
00:54:57.000And is that going to determine in any way, shape, or form what the state of Texas does here?
00:55:01.000So what Gavin Newsom says is meaningless to me and to the state of Texas.
00:55:06.000I'll be honest with you, I think he really is doing nothing more than trying to posture himself as the Democrat nominee for the presidency.
00:55:13.000But also his threats, if you would, ring very hollow because unlike in Texas and California, it requires a constitutional amendment for them to even be able to draw new lines.
00:55:25.000And he's seeking that constitutional amendment, but I don't think he's going to get it.
00:55:28.000He does not have the ease that Texas has in passing these new lines.
00:55:32.000And that for one, but for another, you know, one thing that was really exposed in the aftermath of America learning that Texas is redrawing our congressional lines, what's been exposed is the gerrymandering that exists in California, Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts.
00:55:47.000I don't think California can gerrymander any more than what they've already done.
00:55:51.000They've already removed all Republicans they can remove.
00:55:55.000And so I think it's nothing more than a hollow threat.
00:55:57.000He's trying to get some attention, trying to get some support for his presidential campaign and nothing more than that.
00:56:10.000Meanwhile, the president of the United States is on Friday supposed to be holding a big confab with Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
00:56:18.000There are a lot of worries, I know, among people who do not want Vladimir Putin to walk away with some sort of sweetheart deal, that President Trump is somehow going to give away the store or something.
00:56:28.000Apparently, he's already told the Europeans that he has a bunch of red lines.
00:56:31.000The Wall Street Journal reports that he agreed with European leaders, including President Vladimir Zelensky, to red lines for the coming talks with Putin in Alaska and said he hoped to follow up quickly with a trilateral summit with the two warring leaders.
00:56:42.000He also threatened Vladimir Putin with very severe consequences if the Russian president refused to ceasefire in their coming meeting, which of course would be a great start, right?
00:56:50.000Start with the ceasefire and then move on to the negotiations.
00:56:58.000And that's been the status quo for the last multiple months, like many, many months.
00:57:03.000When I visited Kiev and I talked to Zelensky personally, that was already something that Zelensky had accepted.
00:57:09.000Vladimir Putin, by contrast, has been shoving hundreds of thousands of troops toward the front lines in an attempt to break the Ukrainian lines.
00:57:18.000Trump told his European peers he would not directly negotiate territorial issues, saying Ukraine has to have that discussion directly with Russia.
00:57:24.000That's according to German chancellor Friedrich Murz, who initiated the meeting.
00:57:28.000The president also made it clear any security guarantees offered to Ukraine as part of a potential peace deal with Russia would not involve NATO.
00:57:35.000But he accepted that there would be other alternative security guarantees.
00:57:41.000Putin is not going to accept any deal in which Ukraine formally joins NATO because obviously he still wants to influence Ukraine's future policy.
00:57:48.000But Ukraine is not going to accept any deal in which they don't have some sort of external security guarantee.
00:57:54.000Emmanuel Macron, the French president, he said President Trump was very clear the American desire was to obtain a ceasefire at this meeting in Alaska.
00:58:02.000Mara said, we Europeans are doing everything in our power to set the right foundations for this meeting.
00:58:06.000We want President Trump to have success in Anchorage on Friday.
00:58:09.000Fundamental interests of Ukraine and Europe must be secured in Alaska.
00:58:12.000This was the message we passed on to the president of the United States.
00:58:16.000Putin, for his part, is attempting to presumably massage the president of the United States, give him some sort of goodies in an attempt to wheedle him into abandoning his current positions.
00:58:28.000President Trump Had a meeting via phone with all those leaders this morning.
00:58:34.000He rated it a 10 out of 10, which, as we know, is the best.
00:58:38.000Also, he said, as we've talked about, that Putin could face very serious consequences.
00:58:42.000Presumably, that would mean many more additional sanctions as well.
00:58:46.000Meanwhile, Zelensky says Putin is bluffing.
00:58:48.000He's trying to apply pressure before the meeting in Alaska on all directions of the Ukrainian front.
00:58:53.000And he said that Putin is acting as if sanctions are not important to him and that they're not working.
00:58:57.000In fact, sanctions are very helpful and are hitting the Russian military economy.
00:59:02.000Meanwhile, the Kremlin is basically trying to seize a bunch of territory that it hasn't won.
00:59:06.000Here's a map of the current status of the war.
00:59:09.000What you can see is that the military control of Ukraine has changed pretty significantly over time.
00:59:16.000But that eastern region of Ukraine, which is the area that is most at issue, that's been basically frozen for quite a while.
00:59:23.000Apparently, what Putin wants is the entire Donbass.
00:59:27.000And that Donbass region is, again, much, much more territory than they currently have won.
00:59:33.000They have not picked up all that territory yet.
00:59:36.000They're making slow moves by like tens of yards, hundreds of yards a day, maybe.
00:59:42.000And they've basically been stuck since, I don't know, a year ago.
00:59:48.000Hasn't been major movement in the actual territorial line.
00:59:53.000So the idea that Ukraine is somehow going to just give up the ghost and hand over control of all of these areas, that is a thing that is not going to happen.
01:00:01.000Alrighty, folks, coming up as we continue the show, we have an update from a friend, Jussi Smoulier.