The Ben Shapiro Show - April 22, 2025


Pope Francis Dead, What Comes Next?


Episode Stats


Length

50 minutes

Words per minute

207.55244

Word count

10,388

Sentence count

661

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

19

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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?

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Well, folks, tons of news to get to, and we'll explain sort of why we are abroad in the very near future first.
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00:00:20.000 So we were off yesterday, as I say, for travel.
00:00:23.000 We'll know why in very short order.
00:00:25.000 However, while we were off...
00:00:27.000 The Pope passed away.
00:00:28.000 That, of course, was long expected.
00:00:29.000 He'd been sick for a while.
00:00:31.000 We 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.
00:00:37.000 Pope Francis's legacy, according to the left media, is that he was leftist.
00:00:42.000 That is how the left media are playing it.
00:00:44.000 They played it all the way this weekend.
00:00:46.000 The entire left media was basically united in the idea that Pope Francis was important because he isn't President Trump.
00:00:51.000 Here is a compendium of various members of the media basically suggesting...
00:00:56.000 That his sole importance lies in the fact that he opposed many of the Trump administration agenda items.
00:01:03.000 Pope Francis has been vocal speaking out against ways that the Trump administration has handled migrant issues to also issues across Europe.
00:01:10.000 Even before he was elected in 2016, the Pope...
00:01:14.000 Talked 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.
00:01:25.000 Many on the hard right inside the church were shocked that this folk would actually borrow from Jesus Christ and living that simple life.
00:01:38.000 Again, 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.
00:01:46.000 It's because he was a liberation theologist.
00:01:49.000 He is somebody who believed in a sort of Marxism mix-up with Roman Catholicism.
00:01:54.000 And 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.
00:02:05.000 Now, 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.
00:02:13.000 He said many of the same things that Pope Benedict had said before Pope Benedict resigned back in 2013.
00:02:19.000 That is when Pope Francis took over.
00:02:21.000 But 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.
00:02:31.000 According 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.
00:02:39.000 This is, of course, the way that the left-leaning media treats Pope Francis is that he opened up the church.
00:02:47.000 It made it broader and more appealing to people.
00:02:50.000 Now, 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.
00:02:57.000 Not in these sort of left-leaning forms that Catholicism seems to be taking these days, but going back to things like Latin Mass.
00:03:04.000 And my friends who are Catholic, many of our staffers who are Catholic, Daily Wire is disproportionately Catholic, actually.
00:03:10.000 Many of the people who work for us are people who go to traditional Latin Mass and go to more traditional Roman Catholic churches.
00:03:17.000 However, according to the media, the importance of Pope Francis is that
00:03:20.000 He was essentially moving the entire church to the left.
00:03:23.000 According to the New York Times, many rank-and-file Catholics approved, believing the church had become inward-looking and distant from ordinary people.
00:03:29.000 Now 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?
00:03:37.000 They do not.
00:03:37.000 It's just many people believe.
00:03:38.000 Francis reached out to migrants, the poor, the destitute, the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy members, and to alienated gay Catholics.
00:03:44.000 He 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.
00:03:53.000 And 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.
00:04:05.000 This is why they were puzzled when the day before the pope passed away, Vice President J.D. Vance visited.
00:04:11.000 Now, 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.
00:04:22.000 They 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.
00:04:36.000 According 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.
00:04:47.000 In 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.
00:04:55.000 Now, again, it's very nice for the Pope to condemn war.
00:04:59.000 Also, 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.
00:05:04.000 It turns out that the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, these are not just conflicts that randomly break out across the planet.
00:05:11.000 They actually have moral underpinnings.
00:05:12.000 And 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.
00:05:29.000 And 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.
00:05:39.000 And in Ukraine, it would have been great if the Pope...
00:05:41.000 had actually said, Russian aggression in Ukraine is evil and wrong.
00:05:44.000 That would have been great.
00:05:45.000 I would have liked more of that sort of thing.
00:05:47.000 The same thing holds true with regard to economics.
00:05:50.000 I 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.
00:05:58.000 The 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.
00:06:08.000 The Wall Street Journal editorial board says his papacy was marked by anti-Americanism and not merely against Donald Trump.
00:06:13.000 He seems to believe Latin America is poor because the United States is rich.
00:06:16.000 That, 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.
00:06:27.000 As the Wall Street Journal said, some attribute his hostility to free markets to his Latin American background.
00:06:31.000 Born 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.
00:06:37.000 There's a hard line to walk.
00:06:38.000 Some in his order accused him of unfairly being too friendly with the regime.
00:06:43.000 And Argentina, of course, during Pope Francis's tenure, when he was in Argentina, was run by Juan and Evita Perón.
00:06:51.000 And Perónism was a Marxist brand of centralized politics.
00:06:56.000 And of course, it's also true that the Pope reached out, Pope Francis reached out to the Chinese Communist Party in unique ways.
00:07:03.000 He attempted to make common cause with the Chinese.
00:07:06.000 Communist Party.
00:07:06.000 He 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.
00:07:14.000 And 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.
00:07:25.000 If 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.
00:07:34.000 Now, 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.
00:07:42.000 You can also make the case that what made the Pope who he was was his empathy.
00:07:46.000 And 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.
00:07:52.000 They spent an awful lot of time with the poor, ministering to the poor.
00:07:56.000 And that, of course, is a wonderful thing in a world in which, however, the big issues of the day are so much in turmoil.
00:08:04.000 And 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.
00:08:15.000 I'm hoping that the next pope provides more moral clarity with regard to the things that matter.
00:08:22.000 Because 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.
00:08:32.000 It's not right a lot about the Catholic Church.
00:08:33.000 In my book, The Right Side of History, because the Catholic Church, for a thousand years, was the preserver of Christendom.
00:08:40.000 I mean, that's what it was, until the rise of Protestantism.
00:08:43.000 And even after the rise of Protestantism, it was the sort of battle between Catholicism and Protestantism that made Europe what it was.
00:08:51.000 The 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.
00:09:00.000 All of this makes a huge difference in the history of the West.
00:09:04.000 And so a robust and useful Catholic church would be a good thing.
00:09:08.000 The 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.
00:09:20.000 And that is not going to have long-term good impact on faith, on those eternal values themselves.
00:09:27.000 We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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00:11:36.000 Now, what comes next?
00:11:37.000 Well, the Conclave comes next.
00:11:39.000 The Conclave, of course, has been made famous in literature and film.
00:11:43.000 Essentially, the College of Cardinals gets together, and then they vote on who ought to be the next pope.
00:11:50.000 The idea being, it's kind of a beautiful idea.
00:11:52.000 That God sits in the midst of the quorum.
00:11:55.000 Again, not an idea that is unique to Catholicism.
00:11:57.000 We have that sort of analog of that in Judaism.
00:11:59.000 The idea is that if you have ten men who are praying together, then God kind of sits on that quorum.
00:12:04.000 The same thing, I suppose, happens with regard to the College of Cardinals, the idea that God acts through man in history.
00:12:10.000 According 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.
00:12:18.000 It centers around the conclave, a gathering whose name stems...
00:12:21.000 From 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.
00:12:35.000 Cardinals in the conclave will be locked away within the Vatican.
00:12:37.000 They are cut off from the outside world, so it's kind of like sequestering the jury.
00:12:40.000 As 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.
00:12:50.000 In the conclave, there are a number of candidates who are up for the papacy.
00:12:56.000 Some are more conservative.
00:12:57.000 Many are not.
00:12:58.000 Pope Francis stacked the top levels of the College of Cardinals and the Vatican with people who are like-minded.
00:13:04.000 The 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.
00:13:21.000 Arborilius 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.
00:13:30.000 He advocates openness to refugees.
00:13:33.000 And again, he is more left-leaning.
00:13:36.000 There's Charles Mongbo from Myanmar.
00:13:39.000 He's 76. He has been outspoken against the violence inflicted by the country's military junta, according to the Washington Post.
00:13:47.000 And again, he was made a cardinal by Pope Francis.
00:13:50.000 You have candidates from France, from Congo.
00:13:55.000 You have candidates from Manila.
00:13:59.000 Perhaps the frontrunner right now, at least in the mind of the media, is a man named Luis Antonio Gokim Tegel, who is from Manila.
00:14:06.000 He is 67. He's considered closely aligned with Francis.
00:14:11.000 He has criticized the harsh and severe rhetoric Catholic clerics used to describe members of the LGBTQ plus community, divorced people, and unwed mothers.
00:14:19.000 He was born in Manila.
00:14:20.000 His mom is of Chinese heritage.
00:14:22.000 His father is Tagalog from Philippines.
00:14:24.000 So, 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.
00:14:32.000 And then you have some nominees who are more conservative.
00:14:37.000 So, for example, Peter Erdo from Budapest.
00:14:40.000 He is the Metropolitan Archbishop of Estergom, Budapest in Hungary.
00:14:45.000 He's one of the more conservative members of the College of Cardinals.
00:14:48.000 So 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.
00:14:57.000 He has opposed allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion as well, so he's sort of more traditionalist.
00:15:03.000 So, 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.
00:15:13.000 Our 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.
00:15:25.000 And may his memory and his work be a blessing to them.
00:15:28.000 Meanwhile, when it comes to the United States, the economy continues to roil and tumble.
00:15:34.000 Yesterday, the stock market had a pretty terrible day.
00:15:36.000 It was down about 1,000 points in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
00:15:39.000 Gold was up.
00:15:40.000 Bond yields.
00:15:42.000 We're up, meaning people are moving away from bonds.
00:15:44.000 They're moving toward gold.
00:15:45.000 They're moving away from stocks.
00:15:46.000 All of this demonstrating lack of faith in the underlying health of the American economy.
00:15:50.000 De-dollarization is happening.
00:15:52.000 People are moving away from the dollar in international trade.
00:15:55.000 A huge amount of this is due to the tariff war, of course, that President Trump declared.
00:15:59.000 Since that tariff war was declared, the stock market is down markedly.
00:16:02.000 Over the course of President Trump's presidency, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is off somewhere between 13 and 15 points.
00:16:07.000 In 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.
00:16:16.000 Now, as I've said many times, when it comes to tariffs, there are some things that tariffs are good for.
00:16:23.000 So if you want to actually punish a country, say, like China, then a tariff is a useful thing, if well-calibrated. 0.99
00:16:28.000 If you want to protect an industry that is crucial to national security, then tariffs are useful.
00:16:34.000 And you might use it to protect, say, your shipbuilding.
00:16:37.000 Or your steel industry, if you feel that's crucial.
00:16:40.000 And we can have arguments about each of those industries, but that would be the purpose of a tariff.
00:16:43.000 Or 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.
00:16:49.000 However, launching a trade war on the entire world all at once turns out not to be something that helps the American economy.
00:16:57.000 It is not a well-thought-out policy, and you are seeing that in the markets nearly every day.
00:17:01.000 According 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.
00:17:08.000 By the way, for no reason.
00:17:10.000 Again, not for good reason.
00:17:12.000 The underlying health of the Trump economy was good.
00:17:15.000 The 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. 1.00
00:17:21.000 You have to first do the preconditional work in order to do a successful tariff war on China.
00:17:27.000 You can't just launch the tariffs up to 245%.
00:17:30.000 And hope everything's going to work out okay.
00:17:31.000 Because 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.
00:17:40.000 If 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.
00:17:47.000 First, 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. 0.94
00:17:54.000 Two, 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.
00:18:05.000 3. 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.
00:18:15.000 Four, you actually have to have rare earth minerals, right?
00:18:18.000 All 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. 0.67
00:18:24.000 And 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.
00:18:31.000 You can do all that work before you actually launch a well-calibrated trade war with China.
00:18:35.000 Virtually none of that work was done.
00:18:37.000 It was just sort of dumped out on the table that we were going to do a giant trade war, and then everything else was backfilled.
00:18:43.000 The markets are reacting to that.
00:18:45.000 If 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.
00:18:54.000 The volatility is the indicator.
00:18:56.000 I mean, overall, you're seeing a decline, but you're also seeing volatility.
00:18:59.000 On a day-to-day level, people don't know what's going on.
00:19:01.000 One 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.
00:19:08.000 He put out a series of truths in which he Slammed Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve.
00:19:17.000 Slammed him again.
00:19:19.000 And then he went on a sort of truth spree talking about how people don't understand tariffs.
00:19:25.000 Quote, the businessmen who criticize tariffs are bad at business, but really bad at politics.
00:19:29.000 They don't understand or realize that I am the greatest friend that American capitalism has ever had.
00:19:33.000 Well, listen, I think that he's a friend to American capitalism, but you know what the markets react to.
00:19:38.000 The policy.
00:19:39.000 They don't react to just the perception of who they believe the president is.
00:19:42.000 They react to the policy.
00:19:44.000 And 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.
00:19:57.000 And 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.
00:20:09.000 That is the best way out of this situation.
00:20:12.000 President Trump openly went after Jerome Powell again, suggesting that Jerome Powell needed to lower the interest rates.
00:20:21.000 Jerome Powell is not going to preemptively lower the interest rates in the middle of a tariff war that is likely to increase prices.
00:20:28.000 President Trump calling on Powell to do this is like his get-out-of-jail-free card.
00:20:32.000 I'm not going to change my policy.
00:20:33.000 Maybe Jerome Powell will do it.
00:20:34.000 Jerome Powell isn't going to do that.
00:20:35.000 Because Jerome Powell is not going to lower the interest rates in the middle of an inflationary cycle.
00:20:40.000 So President Trump put out a big statement on truth, quote, preemptive cuts in interest rates are being called for by many.
00:20:46.000 With energy costs way down, food prices, including Biden's egg disaster, substantially lower, and most other things trending down, there is virtually no inflation.
00:20:53.000 Now again, that's true, but those are back-looking numbers.
00:20:56.000 The question is, looking forward, will there be inflation if you break the supply chains?
00:21:00.000 He 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.
00:21:11.000 Europe has already lowered seven times.
00:21:13.000 Powell 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.
00:21:19.000 How did that work out?
00:21:19.000 Now, I agree with him on that last part.
00:21:21.000 I criticized Jerome Powell for lowering the interest rates just before the election, which I saw as at least partially political.
00:21:27.000 The reason, by the way, that Europe is lowering its interest rates right now.
00:21:30.000 It's because it wants to dump a bunch of spending money into its own flailing economy. 0.86
00:21:34.000 The European economy is falling into stagnation, and so they want to try to inflate their own economy.
00:21:39.000 Plus, 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.
00:21:47.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.
00:21:49.000 First, a lot of things in life that are inevitable.
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00:22:55.000 Also, Tax day may have passed, but for millions of Americans, the real trouble is unfortunately just beginning.
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00:24:00.000 Meanwhile, 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.
00:24:13.000 This is the thing.
00:24:14.000 If you're going to try and box in China, you actually have to work on the box.
00:24:16.000 You 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?
00:24:25.000 How about both?
00:24:26.000 OK, 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.
00:24:35.000 The 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.
00:24:43.000 The ministry said in a statement, quote, appeasement will not bring peace.
00:24:46.000 Compromise will not earn respect.
00:24:48.000 Seeking so-called exemptions by harming the interests of others from unselfish gain is like negotiating with a tiger for its skin.
00:24:54.000 In the end, it will only lead to a lose-lose situation.
00:24:57.000 China said that it would resolutely take countermeasures.
00:25:00.000 Now, the United States is significantly more powerful economically than China.
00:25:04.000 It is.
00:25:04.000 Just as a global power, we are significantly more powerful.
00:25:07.000 Investment dollars flow into the United States and from the United States.
00:25:10.000 There's a reason why the GDP per capita of the United States is a high multiple larger than that of China.
00:25:15.000 China, in aggregate, is a strong country.
00:25:18.000 But, of course, 1.4 billion people live in China, whereas only 330 million people live in the United States.
00:25:24.000 However, 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.
00:25:33.000 When I say they're a centralized government, I mean they are not subject to elections.
00:25:36.000 So China can fight a trade war, impoverish its own citizens.
00:25:40.000 Hell, if its own citizens die, China's done that before. 0.99
00:25:42.000 The Great Leap Forward killed 40 million people.
00:25:45.000 China is no stranger to human rights violations against its own people.
00:25:48.000 So 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.
00:26:00.000 I mean, this is why you better have your ducks in a row before you do something like that.
00:26:07.000 According 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.
00:26:15.000 Markets settled down in recent days as Trump pulled back from a maximalist stance on tariffs.
00:26:19.000 Volatility soared after the president unspooled his fluid and unpredictable trade policy on April 2nd.
00:26:24.000 A brutal bond market sell-off unfolded with 30-year yields.
00:26:28.000 Notching, 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.
00:26:37.000 People invest in what they think is going to bring at least a solid return in bonds.
00:26:40.000 That's not happening.
00:26:41.000 People 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.
00:26:51.000 The president can still course-correct here.
00:26:53.000 Make deals.
00:26:54.000 We were promised deals.
00:26:55.000 Make the deals.
00:26:56.000 Seriously. We need, like, deals now.
00:26:59.000 Okay, well, that's what we need in the markets.
00:27:01.000 What we need are those excellent trade deals President Trump was talking about.
00:27:05.000 And 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.
00:27:11.000 You know why they weren't so bad already?
00:27:12.000 They weren't so bad already because President Trump already negotiated the USMCA with Mexico and Canada.
00:27:19.000 There'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.
00:27:27.000 After the last election cycle, most analysts basically declared the Democratic Party in cardiac arrest situation.
00:27:35.000 The EKG looked pretty terrible for the Democratic Party.
00:27:37.000 If 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.
00:27:44.000 Terry Enten at CNN talked about the possible collapse of the Republican brand if the economy continues to go the way it's going.
00:27:50.000 You look forward now.
00:27:53.000 Of course, it's completely on the table that the Republican brand could collapse.
00:27:58.000 It has not yet, but it absolutely could.
00:28:02.000 A hundred percent, if the economy goes south, it will take Republican House members with them.
00:28:08.000 And some senators, too.
00:28:09.000 Okay, now, this right here is the question.
00:28:12.000 If 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.
00:28:21.000 If the markets drop, There's less liquidity available for businesses.
00:28:25.000 Credit dries up.
00:28:26.000 Small businesses, which operate on margin, are going to go under.
00:28:30.000 There is a lag effect between the stock market going down and the economy cratering.
00:28:35.000 But to pretend the two are utterly disconnected is ignorant of economic history.
00:28:39.000 Let's put it this way.
00:28:40.000 There's never been a time when the economy was booming where the stock market was radically declining.
00:28:44.000 There have been times where the stock market declined and then went back up, declined and went back up.
00:28:48.000 But 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.
00:28:59.000 And meanwhile, the President of the United States, his signal policy, the one that actually is working the best for him, is immigration.
00:29:06.000 On the polling, President Trump's immigration policy is highly popular.
00:29:08.000 It's not just because Americans are sick and tired of the open borders policy of the Biden administration.
00:29:15.000 It's also because Democrats continue to take the worst possible tack when it comes to this sort of stuff.
00:29:20.000 The 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.
00:29:32.000 That would be the actual smart approach to this particular issue.
00:29:35.000 But Democrats have decided that the smart approach is to shove their heads directly up their own, you know.
00:29:39.000 And 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.
00:29:48.000 And this leads to the awkward situation.
00:29:50.000 Of 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.
00:30:06.000 Not a good guy.
00:30:07.000 And he was deported to El Salvador.
00:30:09.000 Again, that was done mistakenly according to the Trump DOJ.
00:30:13.000 And that was a process issue.
00:30:15.000 So the way that the Democrats should have protested that is they should have said, listen.
00:30:19.000 Everybody deserves due process.
00:30:20.000 If you are here on a green card, you deserve whatever the due process is for a green card holder. 0.98
00:30:24.000 If you are here as an illegal immigrant, you deserve whatever due process is due to you under the law. 1.00
00:30:28.000 And due process shouldn't be violated.
00:30:30.000 It's sacrosanct in the United States.
00:30:31.000 That's the argument they should have made.
00:30:33.000 Instead, 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.
00:30:43.000 Which 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.
00:31:01.000 Is that he and his administration are defying a court order to give Abrego Garcia his due process rights.
00:31:10.000 They are trying to litigate on social media what they should be doing in the courts.
00:31:15.000 They need to put up or shut up in the courts. 0.99
00:31:17.000 But 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?
00:31:30.000 I didn't ask him that because I know what his answer is.
00:31:33.000 What he told me was he was sad and traumatized that he was being in prison because he has committed no crimes.
00:31:42.000 Okay. Sad and traumatized, the likely MS-13 member.
00:31:47.000 Great job there, Chris Van Hollen.
00:31:49.000 You can see he's trying to backtrack now.
00:31:50.000 Now he's trying to turn it into a due process argument.
00:31:52.000 Again, the due process argument is a better argument for Democrats.
00:31:54.000 It just is.
00:31:55.000 The Supreme Court, over the course of the last 72 hours, hands it out and orders.
00:32:00.000 Early Saturday morning, 7 to 2, they handed down just an order.
00:32:03.000 There was no actual text to the order.
00:32:06.000 It 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.
00:32:16.000 That 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.
00:32:30.000 There was a dissent by Justices Alito and Justice Thomas in this particular case.
00:32:36.000 Same quote.
00:32:36.000 Shortly after midnight yesterday, the court hastily and prematurely granted unprecedented emergency relief, although the order is not to find the putative class.
00:32:43.000 It 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.
00:32:50.000 Who 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.
00:33:00.000 And then they criticized the court for doing all this, even though it's not clear the court had jurisdiction.
00:33:04.000 It's questionable whether the applicants complied with their obligation to seek emergency injunctive relief in the district court.
00:33:10.000 The Court of Appeals was already considering the issue of emergency relief.
00:33:14.000 The papers alleged that the applicants were in imminent danger of removal, but there was no concrete support.
00:33:19.000 For that suggestion.
00:33:21.000 So, 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.
00:33:37.000 I 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.
00:33:43.000 Now, 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.
00:33:58.000 That's the argument that is being made on the other side of the aisle.
00:34:02.000 One 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.
00:34:15.000 Because on the morality, the Trump administration is not only correct, they are unbelievably correct.
00:34:20.000 Tom 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?
00:34:31.000 What shocks me is he's remained silent on the travesty that happened on our southern border.
00:34:36.000 Many people died.
00:34:37.000 Thousands of people died.
00:34:39.000 I've met with hundreds of angel moms and dads who buried their children that were murdered by an illegal alien. 0.98
00:34:44.000 How many angel moms and dads has he met in the state of Maryland?
00:34:49.000 That's what concerns me.
00:34:50.000 And on the politics, Republicans are right.
00:34:52.000 But 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.
00:35:03.000 Again, I'm rooting for the Trump administration to do all of this right, so its policies actually work.
00:35:07.000 The same thing holds true with regard to Harvard.
00:35:10.000 So the Trump administration is admirably going after the endowment of Harvard University, which is great.
00:35:15.000 They should.
00:35:15.000 Harvard University is a travesty.
00:35:17.000 Again, that is my alma mater.
00:35:18.000 I went there for law school.
00:35:19.000 They are very rich.
00:35:21.000 There is no reason why Harvard University should be treated with kid gloves.
00:35:25.000 Their endowment is $53 billion.
00:35:29.000 Massive endowment.
00:35:30.000 These major universities have the GDPs of small countries.
00:35:33.000 It's unbelievable.
00:35:34.000 The 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.
00:35:41.000 It is planning to pull an additional billion dollars of the school's funding for health research, according to people familiar with the matter.
00:35:46.000 Trump administration officials thought the long list of demands they sent Harvard last Friday was a confidential starting point for negotiations.
00:35:52.000 Instead, Harvard released the letter to the public.
00:35:54.000 Before Monday, the administration was planning to treat Harvard more leniently than it had Columbia University.
00:35:59.000 Now officials want to apply even more pressure to the nation's most prominent university, Harvard.
00:36:03.000 There's a lot of talk about the attempt to remove non-profit status from Harvard University.
00:36:09.000 The task force thought Harvard would concede.
00:36:12.000 Instead, Harvard decided to make itself the centerpiece of this issue.
00:36:17.000 Now, the Trump administration could have won a very easy victory here, and they still may win a victory here.
00:36:22.000 It'll be harder thought.
00:36:24.000 They 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.
00:36:34.000 Its aid would go away, for example.
00:36:36.000 And then been very meticulous about the list they put forward.
00:36:39.000 And so they put forward a very broad list of things they wanted Harvard University to do, including reconstitute its board, reconstitute its professoriate.
00:36:45.000 And listen, those are all things that are good and should happen to Harvard University.
00:36:49.000 Absolutely. Will they be uphold in a court of law?
00:36:51.000 That is a little unclear.
00:36:53.000 Again, Harvard, for all the problems with Harvard, there's some good lawyers who work there and very expensive lawyers who work there.
00:36:59.000 I want to see the Trump administration's measures against Harvard University maintained, which is, again, why meticulousness should be the order.
00:37:06.000 We'll get to more of that in a moment.
00:37:07.000 First, if you're not able to watch those old family videos anymore because, you know, they're on a VHS tape in your garage, moldering away, well, and you don't have a VCR, you really should get all that transferred over and digitized, and that is what Legacy Box is for.
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00:38:19.000 Okay, meanwhile, the Defense Department continues to roil with its own level of chaos.
00:38:25.000 Now, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth appears to be under assault.
00:38:29.000 From people who are very much opposed to Pete Hegseth's view on the universe.
00:38:33.000 And here I'm talking about isolationists within the Defense Department.
00:38:37.000 There'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.
00:38:48.000 It's precisely the opposite.
00:38:49.000 You can tell this from social media.
00:38:50.000 The 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.
00:38:58.000 So 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.
00:39:08.000 And then many of them have been going around and mouthing off about it in public.
00:39:12.000 That includes Dan Caldwell.
00:39:14.000 Dan Caldwell was a member of the Defense Department, a top member of the Defense Department.
00:39:21.000 He was appointed by people inside the Office of Personnel Management, the Office of Personnel Management.
00:39:26.000 is staffed by people who are very sympathetic to this point of view, apparently.
00:39:30.000 Caldwell 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.
00:39:40.000 And that is the kind of generalized suspicion.
00:39:42.000 I don't know if that's true or not.
00:39:43.000 Dan 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.
00:39:56.000 And it is not quite a wonder as to who actually is calling for his resignation on the right.
00:40:00.000 It'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.
00:40:11.000 Caldwell said, quote, I was out there advancing things a lot of people in the foreign policy establishment didn't want.
00:40:15.000 It 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.
00:40:25.000 Who did the ousting, precisely.
00:40:28.000 He thinks his views contributed to his ouster.
00:40:31.000 What'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.
00:40:38.000 Now, 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.
00:40:49.000 The 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. 0.69
00:40:54.000 That's just wrong on its face.
00:40:57.000 The 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. 0.50
00:41:12.000 The press attacks on Pete Hegseth, though, because, again, they agree with the Obama-level foreign policy is a horseshoe theory here.
00:41:16.000 The New York Times and Dan Caldwell largely agree.
00:41:21.000 According 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.
00:41:35.000 And so now this is being used as another excuse to go after Pete Hegseth.
00:41:39.000 Rumors started flying around yesterday that the Trump administration was going to look to alternatives for Hegseth.
00:41:46.000 For the White House's part, they're denying that Caroline Levitt at the White House yesterday said this is not true.
00:41:51.000 The 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.
00:42:03.000 The president stands strongly behind Secretary Hegseth, who is doing a phenomenal job leading the Pentagon.
00:42:08.000 And this is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and working against the monumental change that you are trying to implement.
00:42:16.000 Secretary 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.
00:42:28.000 And unfortunately, there have been people at that building.
00:42:32.000 Who don't like the change the secretary is trying to bring.
00:42:35.000 So they are leaking and they are lying to the mainstream media.
00:42:38.000 The fact the White House is standing by Hegseth, that is, of course, the right move. 1.00
00:42:41.000 Pete Hegseth yesterday was talking about his relationship with the White House.
00:42:45.000 He says, listen, we're trying to fire leakers. 1.00
00:42:47.000 That's what we are doing here.
00:42:49.000 You 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.
00:42:59.000 Won't give back their Pulitzers. 1.00
00:43:00.000 They got Pulitzers for a bunch of lies.
00:43:03.000 Pulitzers for a bunch of lies.
00:43:05.000 And on hoaxes.
00:43:06.000 Time and time and time again.
00:43:09.000 And as they peddle those lies, no one ever calls them on.
00:43:12.000 See, this is what the media does.
00:43:14.000 They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations.
00:43:23.000 Not going to work with me.
00:43:24.000 So, the White House should stand by Hegseth.
00:43:26.000 He was their pick.
00:43:27.000 He was an out-of-the-box pick, and he remains the right pick for Secretary of Defense.
00:43:31.000 Meanwhile, speaking of wrong picks, Steve Witkoff, again, he's been trotted out there as some sort of negotiating genius.
00:43:36.000 I would love to see the actual negotiating genius at some point of Steve Witkoff.
00:43:40.000 So, right now, he's leading negotiations over Ukraine, and he continues to make proposals that are geared, presumably, at granting carrots to the Russians.
00:43:49.000 That is the only way to sort of read how Steve Witkoff is approaching.
00:43:53.000 These particular negotiations.
00:43:54.000 The Ukrainians, I mean, Zelensky already came to the table.
00:43:57.000 If the idea was get Zelensky to the table, the Trump administration has already accomplished this.
00:44:02.000 And 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. 0.54
00:44:10.000 I mean, if you're going to have a deal, you need the Russians at the table too.
00:44:12.000 And right now, all the focus of the Witkoff wing of the administration is get the Ukrainians.
00:44:17.000 The Ukrainians already came. 1.00
00:44:19.000 Zelensky already said he wants a 30-day ceasefire.
00:44:22.000 Zelensky already is granting this rare earth minerals deal, which is extremely, extremely favorable to the United States.
00:44:28.000 He's already doing all of those things.
00:44:29.000 The question is, what exactly is going to get Russia to the table?
00:44:32.000 Witkoff'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.
00:44:42.000 So he wants the Ukrainians to basically declare.
00:44:47.000 That 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.
00:44:57.000 He wants the Ukrainians to also agree that they will effectively never join NATO and give up their sovereignty because that's what that means.
00:45:08.000 It'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.
00:45:15.000 Now, the question is, does Putin even want an off-ramp?
00:45:17.000 Because right now, the other side of the table is, let's say you're Vladimir Putin.
00:45:20.000 Just switch the sides on the chess table for a second and play the other side of the chess table.
00:45:23.000 You're not the United States anymore trying to get to an arrangement.
00:45:26.000 You're Vladimir Putin.
00:45:27.000 And what you've seen so far is that the United States is putting extraordinarily heavy pressure on the Ukrainians.
00:45:32.000 And so far, no actual pressure on the Russians.
00:45:36.000 In fact, the United States has cut off intelligence sharing with the Ukrainians.
00:45:39.000 The United States is threatening to cut off aid to the Ukrainians, threatening to leave the negotiating table entirely.
00:45:44.000 If you're Vladimir Putin, why don't you just wait out the United States?
00:45:48.000 Why don't you just wait them out?
00:45:49.000 Seriously, just wait them out.
00:45:51.000 The Europeans probably can't fill the gap. 0.99
00:45:53.000 Wait for the United States to get frustrated and leave, and then redouble your efforts and go harder.
00:45:58.000 Now, I don't think that's in the interest of the United States.
00:46:00.000 I don't think that's in the interest of President Trump.
00:46:03.000 President Trump correctly believes that one of the most humiliating moments in American foreign policy history was the Taliban strolling through Kabul. 1.00
00:46:09.000 That 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.
00:46:17.000 Well, the United States allowing Vladimir Putin to stroll through Kiev would have a significantly worse impact on America's foreign policy.
00:46:24.000 I don't think President Trump wants that.
00:46:26.000 And 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.
00:46:33.000 Now, President Trump himself has said that.
00:46:35.000 President Trump himself has said that there will be consequences to Russia if they don't come to the table.
00:46:39.000 But those consequences need to be spelled out.
00:46:42.000 In the meantime, other countries around the region are feeling very uneasy about this.
00:46:46.000 This ranges from the Baltic states all the way up to Finland and Sweden, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:46:52.000 For a long time, the Nordic countries were better known for their peace efforts and cozy living than militarism.
00:46:56.000 Now they're shedding that persona.
00:46:57.000 The Norics have emerged as a model for Europe's defense. 0.96
00:47:00.000 They are leading efforts to reverse decades of military drawdowns to counter both Russian aggression and uncertain security guarantees from the Trump White House.
00:47:06.000 The foreign main Nordic countries are among Europe's top donors of military aid to Ukraine by population.
00:47:11.000 They're taking steps to usher in a new regional security architecture that's less reliant on the United States.
00:47:16.000 Listen, that's great for the United States.
00:47:18.000 If the Europeans can shoulder more of the burden, that's wonderful. 0.98
00:47:21.000 That'd be good.
00:47:22.000 The question is, how much of the burden are the Europeans actually willing to shoulder?
00:47:26.000 Because the United States, in fact, has security interests in Ukraine that are not just European security interests.
00:47:32.000 The question is, what are Russia's actual ambitions?
00:47:35.000 A 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.
00:47:45.000 And so, I think I have a pretty good insight into what exactly Russia is looking for here.
00:47:51.000 And it is not an off-ramp.
00:47:53.000 Meanwhile, 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...
00:48:03.000 Sending missiles, but sending tons and tons of drones into Ukraine, and sending off air raid sirens every five minutes over the course of Easter.
00:48:12.000 According 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.
00:48:20.000 The talks will take place in the shadow of the apparently futile 30-hour truce.
00:48:24.000 Now again, Zelensky said, let's turn that into, you know, like a 30-day truce.
00:48:27.000 And maybe that turns into an armistice, which, by the way, is the most likely outcome here.
00:48:30.000 There will be no peace agreement.
00:48:32.000 There 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.
00:48:41.000 So 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.
00:48:48.000 There'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.
00:48:57.000 It's just there's a hardened battle line right there, and then it's basically been set up as a demilitarized zone.
00:49:01.000 That is the most likely scenario and outcome in what's going on in Ukraine.
00:49:05.000 But 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.
00:49:16.000 Again, 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.
00:49:29.000 You 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.
00:49:36.000 And within a few years, Afghanistan was totally overtaken by the Taliban.
00:49:40.000 So again, I'm waiting to see the negotiating genius of Steve Witkoff.
00:49:43.000 Like, bring it, dude.
00:49:44.000 Let's see it.
00:49:45.000 Already coming up, we'll get to Coachella, which unleashed a rather shocking message over the weekend.
00:49:51.000 Plus, Klaus Schwab has now resigned as head of the WEF, so something could at least happen over the course of the last 72 hours.
00:49:57.000 But in order to watch, you actually have to be a member.
00:49:59.000 If you are not a member, become a member, use Coach Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.