On the heels of Pope John Paul III s sudden death, the left-leaning media are celebrating the pontiff s life and legacy. They argue that Pope Francis was a leftist, and that he was a bulwark against President Trump's agenda. But is there any truth to this?
00:00:31.000We talked about it on the show just a few weeks ago with my friend Michael Knowles, who explained how the conclave will work and what the Pope's legacy is.
00:00:37.000Pope Francis's legacy, according to the left media, is that he was leftist.
00:00:42.000That is how the left media are playing it.
00:00:44.000They played it all the way this weekend.
00:00:46.000The entire left media was basically united in the idea that Pope Francis was important because he isn't President Trump.
00:00:51.000Here is a compendium of various members of the media basically suggesting...
00:00:56.000That his sole importance lies in the fact that he opposed many of the Trump administration agenda items.
00:01:03.000Pope Francis has been vocal speaking out against ways that the Trump administration has handled migrant issues to also issues across Europe.
00:01:10.000Even before he was elected in 2016, the Pope...
00:01:14.000Talked about this idea of building walls to keep out migrants is something that he said was unchristian and this sort of continued over the course of his presidencies.
00:01:25.000Many on the hard right inside the church were shocked that this folk would actually borrow from Jesus Christ and living that simple life.
00:01:38.000Again, the reason that the left-leaning media liked Pope Francis is because Again, I speak as somebody who really does not have a dog in this particular fight.
00:01:46.000It's because he was a liberation theologist.
00:01:49.000He is somebody who believed in a sort of Marxism mix-up with Roman Catholicism.
00:01:54.000And what that meant is that on economic issues, on issues ranging from migration to distribution of resources to the environment, he put heavy focus on a very left-wing perspective.
00:02:05.000Now, what people in the media like to ignore was the fact that Pope Francis actually was still traditional on issues ranging from same-sex marriage.
00:02:13.000He said many of the same things that Pope Benedict had said before Pope Benedict resigned back in 2013.
00:02:21.000But the media, of course, very celebratory of Pope Francis in a way they never were of Pope Benedict, specifically because he said things that sounded different than the papacy had in the past.
00:02:31.000According to the New York Times, which, of course, was celebrating Pope Francis, Francis steadily steered the church in another direction, restocking its leadership with a diverse array of bishops who shared his life.
00:02:39.000This is, of course, the way that the left-leaning media treats Pope Francis is that he opened up the church.
00:02:47.000It made it broader and more appealing to people.
00:02:50.000Now, what we are seeing in the United States, actually, in terms of the numbers, is that more young Americans are turning toward Catholicism, but it's more traditional forms.
00:02:57.000Not in these sort of left-leaning forms that Catholicism seems to be taking these days, but going back to things like Latin Mass.
00:03:04.000And my friends who are Catholic, many of our staffers who are Catholic, Daily Wire is disproportionately Catholic, actually.
00:03:10.000Many of the people who work for us are people who go to traditional Latin Mass and go to more traditional Roman Catholic churches.
00:03:17.000However, according to the media, the importance of Pope Francis is that
00:03:20.000He was essentially moving the entire church to the left.
00:03:23.000According to the New York Times, many rank-and-file Catholics approved, believing the church had become inward-looking and distant from ordinary people.
00:03:29.000Now again, did they have any polling data to support the idea that the leftward-leaning moves of the church have somehow been a salutary good for the church?
00:03:38.000Francis reached out to migrants, the poor, the destitute, the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy members, and to alienated gay Catholics.
00:03:44.000He traveled to often forgotten and far-flung countries and sought to improve relations with an antagonistic Chinese government, Muslim clerics, and leaders from across the fragmented Christian world.
00:03:53.000And again, the sort of extraordinarily positive view that the media hold of any pope is dependent on that pope doing what they believe to be the bidding of the political left.
00:04:05.000This is why they were puzzled when the day before the pope passed away, Vice President J.D. Vance visited.
00:04:11.000Now, they were very happy that the pope seemed to give him a bit of a lecture on migration, but the fact that J.D. Vance, who's a fairly recent convert, To Catholicism was meeting with the Pope was somewhat puzzling to them in the first place.
00:04:22.000They don't have any trouble understanding why Nancy Pelosi, an extraordinarily pro-abortion, pro-transgenderism, pro-same-sex marriage person, is a Catholic, or Joe Biden, even though they violate Catholic doctrine at every turn, but they had some sort of hang-up when it came to J.D. Vance.
00:04:36.000According to the Wall Street Journal, in his final hours, Pope Francis met Vice President J.D. Vance and delivered an Easter message on a theme that was central to his papacy and appealed for better treatment of migrants and other vulnerable and marginalized people.
00:04:47.000In his final Easter message, read out by an aide, Francis called for an end to the conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan and condemned hardline immigration policies again.
00:04:55.000Now, again, it's very nice for the Pope to condemn war.
00:04:59.000Also, it would be good if, you know, maybe he took a moral stance on some of those wars, which actually do have a moral component.
00:05:04.000It turns out that the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, these are not just conflicts that randomly break out across the planet.
00:05:11.000They actually have moral underpinnings.
00:05:12.000And speaking as a critic of Pope Francis, because I believe that the Pope was not morally clear on a wide variety of conflicts and on a wide variety of issues, ranging from economics to international politics, I wish he had said more about the actual underlying morality of, say, the conflict in Gaza.
00:05:29.000And by that I mean it would have been nice if he had not done a nativity scene at the Vatican that posed baby Jesus as a Palestinian, for example, or if he had suggested that maybe Hamas needed to go.
00:05:39.000And in Ukraine, it would have been great if the Pope...
00:05:41.000had actually said, Russian aggression in Ukraine is evil and wrong.
00:05:45.000I would have liked more of that sort of thing.
00:05:47.000The same thing holds true with regard to economics.
00:05:50.000I wish that Pope Francis had not been so enthralled to, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board says, ideologies that keep the poor in poverty.
00:05:58.000The Pope was a radical environmentalist, and so he was constantly criticizing capitalism when the reality is that poor people across the world need more capitalism and better property rights, not the opposite.
00:06:08.000The Wall Street Journal editorial board says his papacy was marked by anti-Americanism and not merely against Donald Trump.
00:06:13.000He seems to believe Latin America is poor because the United States is rich.
00:06:16.000That, of course, is a hallmark of liberation theology, which is a left-leaning mashup, as I said, of sort of Marxist economics with Catholic social teaching.
00:06:27.000As the Wall Street Journal said, some attribute his hostility to free markets to his Latin American background.
00:06:31.000Born in Buenos Aires, Pope Francis at a young age was made the provincial superior for a Jesuit order in Argentina during the time of the military junta.
00:07:06.000He actually gave the Communist Party in China influence on who exactly would be the bishops in China, which is not a great way to do your religion.
00:07:14.000And one of the kind of great things about the history of Catholicism is that when Catholics were sending priests all over the world to minister to people, they weren't actually changing the underlying logic of the Catholic Church.
00:07:25.000If you're making your pick for bishops subject to the Chinese Communist Party, which hates God and hates Catholicism and hates religion, that is not a great way to do it.
00:07:34.000Now, again, I'm being very critical of the Pope here because the media decided that the Pope's politics were the thing that made him who he was.
00:07:42.000You can also make the case that what made the Pope who he was was his empathy.
00:07:46.000And this was sort of the other strain of coverage of the Pope's death was the fact that Pope Francis was very clearly empathetic to the poor.
00:07:52.000They spent an awful lot of time with the poor, ministering to the poor.
00:07:56.000And that, of course, is a wonderful thing in a world in which, however, the big issues of the day are so much in turmoil.
00:08:04.000And when moral leadership has never been more wanting, I'm hoping that the next pope, and again, I'm speaking as an outsider because I'm not a Catholic, but the pope is a large moral voice to a billion people.
00:08:15.000I'm hoping that the next pope provides more moral clarity with regard to the things that matter.
00:08:22.000Because if the church is going to stand for anything, if it's going to gain adherence, then it has to maintain the sort of moral center of eternal values upon which it has been based.
00:08:32.000It's not right a lot about the Catholic Church.
00:08:33.000In my book, The Right Side of History, because the Catholic Church, for a thousand years, was the preserver of Christendom.
00:08:40.000I mean, that's what it was, until the rise of Protestantism.
00:08:43.000And even after the rise of Protestantism, it was the sort of battle between Catholicism and Protestantism that made Europe what it was.
00:08:51.000The Peace of Westphalia was based on the idea, religious toleration was based on the idea that no one was going to win the war between Catholics and Protestants, and so religious diversity should bloom within a certain framework.
00:09:00.000All of this makes a huge difference in the history of the West.
00:09:04.000And so a robust and useful Catholic church would be a good thing.
00:09:08.000The Catholic church has been fading in recent decades, not just because of the assault of secularism, but because, like, pretty much every mainline religion, it has been imbibing from the well of modernity and casting out its own spiritual values.
00:09:20.000And that is not going to have long-term good impact on faith, on those eternal values themselves.
00:09:27.000We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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00:11:39.000The Conclave, of course, has been made famous in literature and film.
00:11:43.000Essentially, the College of Cardinals gets together, and then they vote on who ought to be the next pope.
00:11:50.000The idea being, it's kind of a beautiful idea.
00:11:52.000That God sits in the midst of the quorum.
00:11:55.000Again, not an idea that is unique to Catholicism.
00:11:57.000We have that sort of analog of that in Judaism.
00:11:59.000The idea is that if you have ten men who are praying together, then God kind of sits on that quorum.
00:12:04.000The same thing, I suppose, happens with regard to the College of Cardinals, the idea that God acts through man in history.
00:12:10.000According to NPR, with the death of Pope Francis, the elaborate mechanism will now begin to decide who sits in power at the Vatican, the seat of the last absolute monarchy in Europe.
00:12:18.000It centers around the conclave, a gathering whose name stems...
00:12:21.000From the Latin for with key, which comes from the 13th century, because back in 1268, the church went nearly three years without a pope, so they actually locked the cardinals in, and they put them on water and bread until they could come up with the new pope.
00:12:35.000Cardinals in the conclave will be locked away within the Vatican.
00:12:37.000They are cut off from the outside world, so it's kind of like sequestering the jury.
00:12:40.000As they deliberate, news outlets point cameras at the papal chimney, and then you find out who was the pope, who's the new pope, when the white smoke emerges from the chimney.
00:12:50.000In the conclave, there are a number of candidates who are up for the papacy.
00:12:58.000Pope Francis stacked the top levels of the College of Cardinals and the Vatican with people who are like-minded.
00:13:04.000The Washington Post has a rundown on some of the top contenders, including a man from Stockholm named Anders Arborilius, who is 75. My guess is they're going to go with somebody younger, because after having two very elderly popes, I think that it would probably behoove them to go with somebody who is younger.
00:13:21.000Arborilius is 75. He's actually born a Lutheran and then converted to Catholicism when he was 20. He has suggested the creation of a special advisory body of women.
00:13:59.000Perhaps the frontrunner right now, at least in the mind of the media, is a man named Luis Antonio Gokim Tegel, who is from Manila.
00:14:06.000He is 67. He's considered closely aligned with Francis.
00:14:11.000He has criticized the harsh and severe rhetoric Catholic clerics used to describe members of the LGBTQ plus community, divorced people, and unwed mothers.
00:14:22.000His father is Tagalog from Philippines.
00:14:24.000So, again, he was proclaimed a cardinal by Benedict, but the idea here is that he would continue the sort of left-leaning march of the Vatican.
00:14:32.000And then you have some nominees who are more conservative.
00:14:37.000So, for example, Peter Erdo from Budapest.
00:14:40.000He is the Metropolitan Archbishop of Estergom, Budapest in Hungary.
00:14:45.000He's one of the more conservative members of the College of Cardinals.
00:14:48.000So when Pope Francis declared in December 2023 that Catholic priests could bless but not marry same-sex couples, Erdo appeared to oppose the decision in his Christmas Eve sermon.
00:14:57.000He has opposed allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion as well, so he's sort of more traditionalist.
00:15:03.000So, it'll be fascinating to see who emerges as the next Pope, and of course the whole world does have a stake in that because the Pope is the spiritual leader for a billion people.
00:15:13.000Our condolences go out, obviously, to all Catholics today, because whether you agree with Pope Francis or not, when the Pope passes away, that means an enormous amount to our Catholic friends and neighbors.
00:15:25.000And may his memory and his work be a blessing to them.
00:15:28.000Meanwhile, when it comes to the United States, the economy continues to roil and tumble.
00:15:34.000Yesterday, the stock market had a pretty terrible day.
00:15:36.000It was down about 1,000 points in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
00:15:52.000People are moving away from the dollar in international trade.
00:15:55.000A huge amount of this is due to the tariff war, of course, that President Trump declared.
00:15:59.000Since that tariff war was declared, the stock market is down markedly.
00:16:02.000Over the course of President Trump's presidency, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is off somewhere between 13 and 15 points.
00:16:07.000In something like 11 days in modern history in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dumped 1,000 points, four of those have come since President Trump declared his tariff war.
00:16:16.000Now, as I've said many times, when it comes to tariffs, there are some things that tariffs are good for.
00:16:23.000So if you want to actually punish a country, say, like China, then a tariff is a useful thing, if well-calibrated.
00:16:28.000If you want to protect an industry that is crucial to national security, then tariffs are useful.
00:16:34.000And you might use it to protect, say, your shipbuilding.
00:16:37.000Or your steel industry, if you feel that's crucial.
00:16:40.000And we can have arguments about each of those industries, but that would be the purpose of a tariff.
00:16:43.000Or you could put a tariff on a country because you're attempting to get that country to lower its own tariffs, to escalate, to de-escalate.
00:16:49.000However, launching a trade war on the entire world all at once turns out not to be something that helps the American economy.
00:16:57.000It is not a well-thought-out policy, and you are seeing that in the markets nearly every day.
00:17:01.000According to the Wall Street Journal, stocks fell with the Dow Industrials dropping almost 1,000 points and on pace for the worst April since 1932.
00:17:12.000The underlying health of the Trump economy was good.
00:17:15.000The attempt to declare a trade war, if you're going to do so and you're going to orient against China, as I've laid out, there are smart ways to do it.
00:17:21.000You have to first do the preconditional work in order to do a successful tariff war on China.
00:17:27.000You can't just launch the tariffs up to 245%.
00:17:30.000And hope everything's going to work out okay.
00:17:31.000Because it turns out you then have to blow holes through the middle of your tariff on things like auto parts or pharmaceuticals or for Apple, which is what President Trump has already done.
00:17:40.000If you actually want to fight a successful tariff war with China, a few things have to be done before you even start the tariff war with China.
00:17:47.000First, you need to sign terrific free trade deals with everybody else in the world in order to orient them toward you and away from China.
00:17:54.000Two, you actually have to gradually raise the tariffs so as to allow people time to reshore their key industries away from China to Vietnam or to Indonesia or to Malaysia or wherever else they're going to reshore.
00:18:05.0003. If you have really crucial industries, you have to take the time and cut the regulations such that those crucial industries have already reshored in the United States before the supply gets cut off from China.
00:18:15.000Four, you actually have to have rare earth minerals, right?
00:18:18.000All the things you need from China need to be sourced elsewhere, so when you cut off China, you're not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
00:18:24.000And five, you actually have to build up your military sufficient that if China feels boxed in and they go for Taiwan, you can deter them.
00:18:31.000You can do all that work before you actually launch a well-calibrated trade war with China.
00:18:45.000If they thought that this was well thought out, the markets, if people in the investment game thought that all of this was well calibrated and well thought out, you wouldn't see the markets moving up and down wildly.
00:18:56.000I mean, overall, you're seeing a decline, but you're also seeing volatility.
00:18:59.000On a day-to-day level, people don't know what's going on.
00:19:01.000One of the reasons that the market dumped yesterday is because President Trump decided that it would be a wonderful idea to attack Jerome Powell again.
00:19:08.000He put out a series of truths in which he Slammed Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve.
00:19:44.000And right now, again, it is unclear whether President Trump is ratcheting up tariffs to ratchet them down, whether he's just attempting to protect key industries, or whether he thinks trade is bad, like his advisor, Peter Navarro, who is, in fact, not good at this.
00:19:57.000And if you want the markets to rise again, what you actually need to do, Mr. President, is fire Peter Navarro, who is quite bad at this, and let your Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant, Negotiate a bunch of great trade deals.
00:20:09.000That is the best way out of this situation.
00:20:12.000President Trump openly went after Jerome Powell again, suggesting that Jerome Powell needed to lower the interest rates.
00:20:21.000Jerome Powell is not going to preemptively lower the interest rates in the middle of a tariff war that is likely to increase prices.
00:20:28.000President Trump calling on Powell to do this is like his get-out-of-jail-free card.
00:20:35.000Because Jerome Powell is not going to lower the interest rates in the middle of an inflationary cycle.
00:20:40.000So President Trump put out a big statement on truth, quote, preemptive cuts in interest rates are being called for by many.
00:20:46.000With energy costs way down, food prices, including Biden's egg disaster, substantially lower, and most other things trending down, there is virtually no inflation.
00:20:53.000Now again, that's true, but those are back-looking numbers.
00:20:56.000The question is, looking forward, will there be inflation if you break the supply chains?
00:21:00.000He says, with these costs trending down so nicely, just what I predicted they would do, there can be almost no inflation, but there can be a slowing of the economy unless Mr. Too Late Powell, a major loser, lowers interest rates now.
00:21:11.000Europe has already lowered seven times.
00:21:13.000Powell has always been too late, except when it came to the election period when he lowered in order to help sleepy Joe Biden later calmly get elected.
00:21:19.000Now, I agree with him on that last part.
00:21:21.000I criticized Jerome Powell for lowering the interest rates just before the election, which I saw as at least partially political.
00:21:27.000The reason, by the way, that Europe is lowering its interest rates right now.
00:21:30.000It's because it wants to dump a bunch of spending money into its own flailing economy.
00:21:34.000The European economy is falling into stagnation, and so they want to try to inflate their own economy.
00:21:39.000Plus, they're about to spend a lot more money, you would think, on the war in Ukraine because the United States is withdrawing its support gradually and not so gradually from Ukraine.
00:21:47.000We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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00:24:00.000Meanwhile, in a sign that, again, the United States did not do the kind of necessary work before launching the trade war that it should have done, China is cutting trade deals with everybody.
00:24:14.000If you're going to try and box in China, you actually have to work on the box.
00:24:16.000You have to work on everybody who's around China and cut excellent trade deals with all of those people so that if you say to them, choose between us and choose between China, they don't just say, hey, how about both?
00:24:26.000OK, well, according to The New York Times, the Chinese government on Monday warned other countries against curbing trade with China in order to win a reprieve from American tariffs, promising to retaliate against countries that do so.
00:24:35.000The Chinese Ministry of Commerce said it was responding to foreign media reports that President Trump's administration was trying to pressure other countries on their trade with China as a negotiating tactic.
00:24:43.000The ministry said in a statement, quote, appeasement will not bring peace.
00:25:04.000Just as a global power, we are significantly more powerful.
00:25:07.000Investment dollars flow into the United States and from the United States.
00:25:10.000There's a reason why the GDP per capita of the United States is a high multiple larger than that of China.
00:25:15.000China, in aggregate, is a strong country.
00:25:18.000But, of course, 1.4 billion people live in China, whereas only 330 million people live in the United States.
00:25:24.000However, where China does have an advantage when it comes to fighting a trade war, for example, which is a centralized government policy, is that China is a centralized government.
00:25:33.000When I say they're a centralized government, I mean they are not subject to elections.
00:25:36.000So China can fight a trade war, impoverish its own citizens.
00:25:40.000Hell, if its own citizens die, China's done that before.
00:25:42.000The Great Leap Forward killed 40 million people.
00:25:45.000China is no stranger to human rights violations against its own people.
00:25:48.000So if the question is, who's going to break first in a game of chicken between the Chinese Communist Party and the Trump administration, which again is subject to the outside will of the American people who are going to have midterm elections in a year and a half here.
00:26:00.000I mean, this is why you better have your ducks in a row before you do something like that.
00:26:07.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the idea that you can break trade and not break the capital flow side is a fantasy, said Stephen Blitz, chief U.S. economist at Global Data TS Lombard.
00:26:15.000Markets settled down in recent days as Trump pulled back from a maximalist stance on tariffs.
00:26:19.000Volatility soared after the president unspooled his fluid and unpredictable trade policy on April 2nd.
00:26:24.000A brutal bond market sell-off unfolded with 30-year yields.
00:26:28.000Notching, their largest weekly increase since 1987, despite decent bond auctions, the sell-off occurred against the backdrop of a weakening dollar, which normally strengthens during bouts of stress.
00:26:37.000People invest in what they think is going to bring at least a solid return in bonds.
00:26:41.000People are moving away from bonds, they're moving away from the dollar, and they're moving away from stocks, which demonstrates lack of faith in the current economic policy or in the economy of the United States.
00:26:51.000The president can still course-correct here.
00:26:59.000Okay, well, that's what we need in the markets.
00:27:01.000What we need are those excellent trade deals President Trump was talking about.
00:27:05.000And by the way, we need the headlines on the trade deals because the reality is that our trade relationships, let's say Mexico or Canada, they weren't so bad.
00:27:11.000You know why they weren't so bad already?
00:27:12.000They weren't so bad already because President Trump already negotiated the USMCA with Mexico and Canada.
00:27:19.000There's a lot of danger here for the Trump administration, not just in a sinking economy, but in the impact that could have on the Republican brand in the midterms and in the future.
00:27:27.000After the last election cycle, most analysts basically declared the Democratic Party in cardiac arrest situation.
00:27:35.000The EKG looked pretty terrible for the Democratic Party.
00:27:37.000If you want to inject electricity into the Democratic Party, you want to paddle the Democratic Party back to life, a bad economy will do it.
00:27:44.000Terry Enten at CNN talked about the possible collapse of the Republican brand if the economy continues to go the way it's going.
00:28:09.000Okay, now, this right here is the question.
00:28:12.000If you want President Trump to succeed, then you want his policy to be geared at reality, and that means a trade policy that makes sense to the markets that they can intuit, because the markets do have real-world impact.
00:28:21.000If the markets drop, There's less liquidity available for businesses.
00:28:40.000There's never been a time when the economy was booming where the stock market was radically declining.
00:28:44.000There have been times where the stock market declined and then went back up, declined and went back up.
00:28:48.000But when the stock market continues to go down and to the right, Name me a time in American history where the economy was doing amazing work while the stock market continued to go down and to the right for a prolonged period of time.
00:28:59.000And meanwhile, the President of the United States, his signal policy, the one that actually is working the best for him, is immigration.
00:29:06.000On the polling, President Trump's immigration policy is highly popular.
00:29:08.000It's not just because Americans are sick and tired of the open borders policy of the Biden administration.
00:29:15.000It's also because Democrats continue to take the worst possible tack when it comes to this sort of stuff.
00:29:20.000The attack they should be taking on immigration right now is that President Trump is right to close the border, that President Trump is correct to unleash ICE to go find criminal illegal immigrants and deport them, but we need to obey the law.
00:29:32.000That would be the actual smart approach to this particular issue.
00:29:35.000But Democrats have decided that the smart approach is to shove their heads directly up their own, you know.
00:29:39.000And so what that means is that they are instead basically going out of their way to praise MS-13 members and suggest that President Trump is wrong to try and deport all of those people.
00:29:48.000And this leads to the awkward situation.
00:29:50.000Of absolute dolt Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who has the IQ of a turnip, going down to El Salvador to meet with a man named Kilmer Abrego Garcia, who is a likely MS-13 member and an alleged wife-beater by his wife.
00:30:31.000That's the argument they should have made.
00:30:33.000Instead, because they have an internal emotional necessity to valorize people who are quote-unquote victims of the Trump administration, they've decided to treat people who are actually quite bad with sympathy.
00:30:43.000Which leads to the awkward spectacle of Chris Van Hollen being asked, Well, Dan, what Donald Trump is trying to do here is change the subject, the subject at hand.
00:31:01.000Is that he and his administration are defying a court order to give Abrego Garcia his due process rights.
00:31:10.000They are trying to litigate on social media what they should be doing in the courts.
00:31:15.000They need to put up or shut up in the courts.
00:31:17.000But since you were the one person to have met with him, and since this is a thing, you say on social media, it's what we hear from Donald Trump and Republicans every day, all day long, you didn't ask him?
00:31:30.000I didn't ask him that because I know what his answer is.
00:31:33.000What he told me was he was sad and traumatized that he was being in prison because he has committed no crimes.
00:31:42.000Okay. Sad and traumatized, the likely MS-13 member.
00:31:55.000The Supreme Court, over the course of the last 72 hours, hands it out and orders.
00:32:00.000Early Saturday morning, 7 to 2, they handed down just an order.
00:32:03.000There was no actual text to the order.
00:32:06.000It didn't explain its reasoning, but it ordered the Trump administration to respond to an emergency appeal and said the government is directed not to remove any members of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court.
00:32:16.000That would be the people who are being detained under the so-called Alien Enemies Act, which is an 18th century act designed at allowing the expeditious removal of people who are declared wartime enemies by the executive branch.
00:32:30.000There was a dissent by Justices Alito and Justice Thomas in this particular case.
00:32:36.000Shortly after midnight yesterday, the court hastily and prematurely granted unprecedented emergency relief, although the order is not to find the putative class.
00:32:43.000It appears the court means all members of the class the habeas petitioner sought to have certified, namely all non-citizens in custody of the Northern District of Texas.
00:32:50.000Who were, are, or will be subject to the March 2025 presidential proclamation entitled Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act regarding the invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua.
00:33:00.000And then they criticized the court for doing all this, even though it's not clear the court had jurisdiction.
00:33:04.000It's questionable whether the applicants complied with their obligation to seek emergency injunctive relief in the district court.
00:33:10.000The Court of Appeals was already considering the issue of emergency relief.
00:33:14.000The papers alleged that the applicants were in imminent danger of removal, but there was no concrete support.
00:33:21.000So, Alito and Thomas both complained, in sum, literally in the middle of the night, the court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order.
00:33:37.000I refuse to join the court's order because we had no good reason to think that under the circumstances, issuing an order at midnight was necessary or appropriate.
00:33:43.000Now, again, I think what the rest of the court would say is we wouldn't think that was necessary or appropriate either, except for the fact that we've now had situations in which the Trump administration has allegedly ignored the orders of lower courts not to do a deportation and then just did the deportation.
00:33:58.000That's the argument that is being made on the other side of the aisle.
00:34:02.000One of the things that should become clear to Republicans at this point is that Doing things in meticulous fashion is likely to lead to longer-lasting victories than doing them as sort of one-offs and in quick fashion.
00:34:15.000Because on the morality, the Trump administration is not only correct, they are unbelievably correct.
00:34:20.000Tom Homan, who is our Bulldog Bordersar, criticized, for example, Chris Van Hollen for his sympathy for MS-13 members, saying how many angel moms and dads has he met with?
00:34:31.000What shocks me is he's remained silent on the travesty that happened on our southern border.
00:34:50.000And on the politics, Republicans are right.
00:34:52.000But do the law right also, and you'll have longer-lasting victories, because otherwise, many of the things the Trump administration is trying to do are going to get reversed on appeal, and that would be really bad for the Trump administration as well.
00:35:03.000Again, I'm rooting for the Trump administration to do all of this right, so its policies actually work.
00:35:07.000The same thing holds true with regard to Harvard.
00:35:10.000So the Trump administration is admirably going after the endowment of Harvard University, which is great.
00:35:34.000The Trump administration, according to the Wall Street Journal, has now grown so furious with Harvard University after a week of an escalating dispute between the two sides.
00:35:41.000It is planning to pull an additional billion dollars of the school's funding for health research, according to people familiar with the matter.
00:35:46.000Trump administration officials thought the long list of demands they sent Harvard last Friday was a confidential starting point for negotiations.
00:35:52.000Instead, Harvard released the letter to the public.
00:35:54.000Before Monday, the administration was planning to treat Harvard more leniently than it had Columbia University.
00:35:59.000Now officials want to apply even more pressure to the nation's most prominent university, Harvard.
00:36:03.000There's a lot of talk about the attempt to remove non-profit status from Harvard University.
00:36:09.000The task force thought Harvard would concede.
00:36:12.000Instead, Harvard decided to make itself the centerpiece of this issue.
00:36:17.000Now, the Trump administration could have won a very easy victory here, and they still may win a victory here.
00:36:24.000They could easily have simply said to Harvard University that unless it complied with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the necessary consequences would follow.
00:36:36.000And then been very meticulous about the list they put forward.
00:36:39.000And so they put forward a very broad list of things they wanted Harvard University to do, including reconstitute its board, reconstitute its professoriate.
00:36:45.000And listen, those are all things that are good and should happen to Harvard University.
00:36:49.000Absolutely. Will they be uphold in a court of law?
00:36:53.000Again, Harvard, for all the problems with Harvard, there's some good lawyers who work there and very expensive lawyers who work there.
00:36:59.000I want to see the Trump administration's measures against Harvard University maintained, which is, again, why meticulousness should be the order.
00:37:06.000We'll get to more of that in a moment.
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00:38:00.000My dad was so happy with it, he actually made copies of all the material and made sure the kids could get it.
00:38:19.000Okay, meanwhile, the Defense Department continues to roil with its own level of chaos.
00:38:25.000Now, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth appears to be under assault.
00:38:29.000From people who are very much opposed to Pete Hegseth's view on the universe.
00:38:33.000And here I'm talking about isolationists within the Defense Department.
00:38:37.000There's this sort of bizarre narrative that's now being retailed that Hegseth is under assault from people who are quote-unquote more interventionist in sort of their directionality.
00:38:50.000The people who are currently assaulting Pete Hegseth are people opposed to Pete Hegseth because Pete Hegseth is too much in favor of peace through strength.
00:38:58.000So some of the people who are fired over the course of the last couple of weeks, allegedly for leaking to the press, are people who are very much allied with the isolationist wing of the Republican Party.
00:39:08.000And then many of them have been going around and mouthing off about it in public.
00:39:14.000Dan Caldwell was a member of the Defense Department, a top member of the Defense Department.
00:39:21.000He was appointed by people inside the Office of Personnel Management, the Office of Personnel Management.
00:39:26.000is staffed by people who are very sympathetic to this point of view, apparently.
00:39:30.000Caldwell was fired after allegations that he was leaking to the press, presumably people with whom he has friends, like Tucker Carlson, on whose podcast he appeared recently.
00:39:40.000And that is the kind of generalized suspicion.
00:39:43.000Dan Caldwell went on Tucker's podcast on Monday and said he was not responsible for leaks that were used as, quote, justification for a purge that has caused turmoil at the Pentagon and prompted calls for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to resign.
00:39:56.000And it is not quite a wonder as to who actually is calling for his resignation on the right.
00:40:00.000It's people who don't like the sort of Trumpian peace through strength argument and are much more friendly to the sort of paleo-conservative isolationist wing of the Republican Party.
00:40:11.000Caldwell said, quote, I was out there advancing things a lot of people in the foreign policy establishment didn't want.
00:40:15.000It doesn't justify what's happening to me, but let's just be honest, that's the nature of the games played in D.C. So he's claiming to Tucker Carlson that he's basically ousted by, quote-unquote, the neocons, which is weird because he isn't naming.
00:40:28.000He thinks his views contributed to his ouster.
00:40:31.000What's weird about that is, of course, there were a couple of other people who were fired from the Pentagon who actually don't hold those exact same views.
00:40:38.000Now, Caldwell himself is making very strong isolationist arguments, and he accuses there of being people who are just desperate for another war in the Middle East, which, again, is simplistic thinking.
00:40:49.000The idea that, for example, if you wish for Israel to take out Iran's nuclear facilities, this means you want another war in the Middle East.
00:40:57.000The idea that you want another war in the Middle East if you want to stop the Houthis from, you know, stopping all traffic in the Red Sea, which is something that Pete Hegseth has expressed support for, that that means that you're a warmonger, that is an Obama-level foreign policy.
00:41:12.000The press attacks on Pete Hegseth, though, because, again, they agree with the Obama-level foreign policy is a horseshoe theory here.
00:41:16.000The New York Times and Dan Caldwell largely agree.
00:41:21.000According to the New York Times, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared details about information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15th in a private signal group chat that included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat.
00:41:35.000And so now this is being used as another excuse to go after Pete Hegseth.
00:41:39.000Rumors started flying around yesterday that the Trump administration was going to look to alternatives for Hegseth.
00:41:46.000For the White House's part, they're denying that Caroline Levitt at the White House yesterday said this is not true.
00:41:51.000The Pentagon is working against Pete Hegseth specifically because, by the way, recruitment numbers are up because Pete Hegseth is cutting the waste and the fraud and the abuse over at the Pentagon because Pete Hegseth is a different kind of sec def.
00:42:03.000The president stands strongly behind Secretary Hegseth, who is doing a phenomenal job leading the Pentagon.
00:42:08.000And this is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and working against the monumental change that you are trying to implement.
00:42:16.000Secretary Hegseth was nominated for this position because he is standing up for the warfighter, the men and women in uniform who are putting their lives on the line to protect our country and our homeland.
00:42:28.000And unfortunately, there have been people at that building.
00:42:32.000Who don't like the change the secretary is trying to bring.
00:42:35.000So they are leaking and they are lying to the mainstream media.
00:42:38.000The fact the White House is standing by Hegseth, that is, of course, the right move.
00:42:41.000Pete Hegseth yesterday was talking about his relationship with the White House.
00:42:45.000He says, listen, we're trying to fire leakers.
00:42:49.000You know, what a big surprise that a bunch of a few leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax.
00:43:27.000He was an out-of-the-box pick, and he remains the right pick for Secretary of Defense.
00:43:31.000Meanwhile, speaking of wrong picks, Steve Witkoff, again, he's been trotted out there as some sort of negotiating genius.
00:43:36.000I would love to see the actual negotiating genius at some point of Steve Witkoff.
00:43:40.000So, right now, he's leading negotiations over Ukraine, and he continues to make proposals that are geared, presumably, at granting carrots to the Russians.
00:43:49.000That is the only way to sort of read how Steve Witkoff is approaching.
00:43:54.000The Ukrainians, I mean, Zelensky already came to the table.
00:43:57.000If the idea was get Zelensky to the table, the Trump administration has already accomplished this.
00:44:02.000And I took the Henry Kissinger position back in 2022, which is the Ukrainians needed to be brought to the table, but then so did the Russians.
00:44:10.000I mean, if you're going to have a deal, you need the Russians at the table too.
00:44:12.000And right now, all the focus of the Witkoff wing of the administration is get the Ukrainians.
00:44:19.000Zelensky already said he wants a 30-day ceasefire.
00:44:22.000Zelensky already is granting this rare earth minerals deal, which is extremely, extremely favorable to the United States.
00:44:28.000He's already doing all of those things.
00:44:29.000The question is, what exactly is going to get Russia to the table?
00:44:32.000Witkoff's view seems to be that if he makes more overtures to the Russians, then magically Vladimir Putin is going to come to the table.
00:44:42.000So he wants the Ukrainians to basically declare.
00:44:47.000That all the areas that Putin has occupied, even some areas that Putin has not occupied actually yet in the east of the country, that all those areas ought to be taken off the table and declared Russian annexed territory.
00:44:57.000He wants the Ukrainians to also agree that they will effectively never join NATO and give up their sovereignty because that's what that means.
00:45:08.000It's not that NATO has to accept Ukraine, but if Ukraine can never try to orient itself toward the West in order to appease Vladimir Putin, that's one of the things that Putin is looking for.
00:45:15.000Now, the question is, does Putin even want an off-ramp?
00:45:17.000Because right now, the other side of the table is, let's say you're Vladimir Putin.
00:45:20.000Just switch the sides on the chess table for a second and play the other side of the chess table.
00:45:23.000You're not the United States anymore trying to get to an arrangement.
00:45:51.000The Europeans probably can't fill the gap.
00:45:53.000Wait for the United States to get frustrated and leave, and then redouble your efforts and go harder.
00:45:58.000Now, I don't think that's in the interest of the United States.
00:46:00.000I don't think that's in the interest of President Trump.
00:46:03.000President Trump correctly believes that one of the most humiliating moments in American foreign policy history was the Taliban strolling through Kabul.
00:46:09.000That the Taliban, taking over a country that the United States had abandoned, Where we abandon our allies under Joe Biden was shameful and ugly and wrong.
00:46:17.000Well, the United States allowing Vladimir Putin to stroll through Kiev would have a significantly worse impact on America's foreign policy.
00:46:24.000I don't think President Trump wants that.
00:46:26.000And so what that means is that Steve Wyckoff should start conveying messages to the other side of the negotiation as well that they need to come to the table and spell out some actual consequences.
00:46:33.000Now, President Trump himself has said that.
00:46:35.000President Trump himself has said that there will be consequences to Russia if they don't come to the table.
00:46:39.000But those consequences need to be spelled out.
00:46:42.000In the meantime, other countries around the region are feeling very uneasy about this.
00:46:46.000This ranges from the Baltic states all the way up to Finland and Sweden, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:46:52.000For a long time, the Nordic countries were better known for their peace efforts and cozy living than militarism.
00:46:57.000The Norics have emerged as a model for Europe's defense.
00:47:00.000They are leading efforts to reverse decades of military drawdowns to counter both Russian aggression and uncertain security guarantees from the Trump White House.
00:47:06.000The foreign main Nordic countries are among Europe's top donors of military aid to Ukraine by population.
00:47:11.000They're taking steps to usher in a new regional security architecture that's less reliant on the United States.
00:47:16.000Listen, that's great for the United States.
00:47:18.000If the Europeans can shoulder more of the burden, that's wonderful.
00:47:22.000The question is, how much of the burden are the Europeans actually willing to shoulder?
00:47:26.000Because the United States, in fact, has security interests in Ukraine that are not just European security interests.
00:47:32.000The question is, what are Russia's actual ambitions?
00:47:35.000A little bit later this week, I'm going to go into extreme detail about what I believe Russia's ambitions are, because I've been spending the last week or so delving into the writings of the man known as Putin's brain, Alexander Dugin.
00:47:45.000And so, I think I have a pretty good insight into what exactly Russia is looking for here.
00:47:53.000Meanwhile, with regard to Ukraine and Russia, Vladimir Putin made the cynical move of declaring a 24-hour ceasefire around Easter, which apparently he then violated by not...
00:48:03.000Sending missiles, but sending tons and tons of drones into Ukraine, and sending off air raid sirens every five minutes over the course of Easter.
00:48:12.000According to the Washington Post, Kiev is expected to respond to a new U.S. proposal and talks in London starting Wednesday, and including representatives from the United States, Britain, and France.
00:48:20.000The talks will take place in the shadow of the apparently futile 30-hour truce.
00:48:24.000Now again, Zelensky said, let's turn that into, you know, like a 30-day truce.
00:48:27.000And maybe that turns into an armistice, which, by the way, is the most likely outcome here.
00:48:32.000There will be no peace agreement because Ukraine is not going to simply cede the territory in the east of the country and the Crimea to Russia, and Russia is not going to settle for that.
00:48:41.000So the most likely outcome here, if you were to get to any outcome at all, looks sort of like the Korean War, which, by the way, is still technically ongoing.
00:48:48.000There's an armistice agreement signed in 1953, but there's no actual technical agreement by South Korea that North Korea is not its territory, and there's no agreement by North Korea that South Korea is not its territory.
00:48:57.000It's just there's a hardened battle line right there, and then it's basically been set up as a demilitarized zone.
00:49:01.000That is the most likely scenario and outcome in what's going on in Ukraine.
00:49:05.000But in order to even get there, you have to have a perception by the Russians they're not going to get much more, that everyone needs to go weapons down because the costs of not going weapons down are too high.
00:49:16.000Again, there's been a lot of focus placed on, for example, the rare earth minerals deal that the United States is now going to sign with the Ukrainians, that this is going to essentially provide for an informal security arrangement with the Ukrainians.
00:49:29.000You can see why the Ukrainians are a little bit skeptical of that, considering that in 2017, the United States actually did sign a rare earth minerals deal with Afghanistan.
00:49:36.000And within a few years, Afghanistan was totally overtaken by the Taliban.
00:49:40.000So again, I'm waiting to see the negotiating genius of Steve Witkoff.