The Ben Shapiro Show - So About Trump's Speech Last Night...

00:00:00.000 President Trump delivers a prime-time address on affordability, but did it make a dent.

00:00:04.000 Plus, heritage Americans or Creedal Americans, it's a debate breaking out on the right.

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00:00:57.000 Well, President Trump last night attempted a reset of the first year of his presidency.

00:01:02.000 Not really a reset in the sense that he's not actually sort of redoing his policy, but a narrative reset, an attempt to seize the narrative away from a left, which keeps saying the word affordability after the victory of Zorhan Mamdani in that New York mayoral election.

00:01:16.000 He's trying to seize back the narrative.

00:01:18.000 And last night, he successfully did that in one sense and unsuccessfully in another sense.

00:01:24.000 Yes, Americans are now talking about affordability.

00:01:26.000 Yes, the president of the United States did address that head on in the speech.

00:01:31.000 No, it wasn't an amazing performance.

00:01:32.000 And all those things can be true at once.

00:01:34.000 So first, you sort of have to set the scene.

00:01:36.000 The president has been experiencing historically low approval ratings.

00:01:40.000 The president obviously is looking forward to the midterm elections.

00:01:43.000 And Republicans are not in amazing shape in the midterm elections.

00:01:45.000 They're down on the generic congressional ballot by a significant amount at this point.

00:01:50.000 If the elections were held today, high likelihood that Republicans would lose somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 seats.

00:01:55.000 With that said, the president is attempting to convince Americans that things are getting better.

00:01:59.000 And he happens to be right on that.

00:02:01.000 He happens to be correct that the economy is indeed improving in market and obvious ways.

00:02:07.000 And so last night he announced that he was going to be doing a nationwide address, a national address.

00:02:12.000 Now, that is a kind of throwback.

00:02:14.000 The reality is the president can now speak to the entire nation whenever he pleases.

00:02:18.000 He could go live on the White House page anytime he wants.

00:02:22.000 We no longer exist in the era of three networks in which the president declares a national address, all three networks go to him, and then everybody in America watches it.

00:02:31.000 So the ratings on these sorts of addresses just are not what they used to be.

00:02:35.000 If the president wishes to get attention, he's a master at it.

00:02:38.000 He doesn't have to do a national address.

00:02:39.000 And so when someone does a national address, people sort of expect that there will be something groundbreaking happening.

00:02:45.000 And there were some outlandish predictions by podcasters who are generally inaccurate in the information they provide their audiences.

00:02:53.000 Those predictions were taken quite seriously by many people in the online space, predictions that Trump was calling a national address in order to announce that we're invading Venezuela or something.

00:03:02.000 But that's not what happened.

00:03:03.000 The president instead did a national address about the state of the economy.

00:03:07.000 And there were some very good things that he did here.

00:03:10.000 I think it was great that he showed charts.

00:03:12.000 It was sort of a Reagan-esque move.

00:03:14.000 President Reagan used to do this back in the 80s.

00:03:16.000 He would do a national address and he would take out actual charts and try to educate the American people about what was happening.

00:03:22.000 And President Trump did that last night.

00:03:24.000 So, for example, he showed Joe Biden's price increases and Trump's price decreases in a wide variety of areas, ranging from hotel rates up 37.4% under Joe Biden, down 5.1% under Donald Trump, to propane rates, 24.9%, up under Biden, down 4.2% under Trump.

00:03:45.000 Gasoline, up nearly 31% under Joe Biden, down 7% under Trump.

00:03:49.000 Sporting events, up nearly 50% under Joe Biden, down almost 10% under Trump.

00:03:56.000 Those are all good things to show the American people.

00:03:58.000 Now, there is one problem with that, which is that when you look at a chart like that, you think that the baseline price, the baseline price has gone down from where it was before Joe Biden.

00:04:10.000 But that's not true.

00:04:11.000 If the price rises 40% under Joe Biden and then comes down 10% under Donald Trump, well, it's still way higher than it was before Joe Biden took office.

00:04:19.000 And that's the embedded part of the economy that President Trump is not really going to be able to wipe away.

00:04:26.000 Years of inflation cannot be wiped away absent some sort of economic downturn.

00:04:31.000 But the president is right to point out wage increases, real wage increases under his tenure, wage decreases under Joe Biden.

00:04:40.000 The private sector wage growth averaged $1,048 since he returned to the White House versus losses of almost $3,000 under Joe Biden.

00:04:49.000 The president showed the new yearly mortgage cost increase under Joe Biden up almost $15,000 versus Trump's new yearly mortgage cost decrease down almost $3,000.

00:05:01.000 And when he points out Obamacare, he says it's not the Republicans' fault.

00:05:04.000 It's the Democrats' fault.

00:05:05.000 It's the Unaffordable Care Act.

00:05:06.000 And that, of course, is true as well.

00:05:09.000 So one of the questions is why Americans aren't feeling it.

00:05:13.000 This has been the big question we've been asking it here on the program for a while.

00:05:16.000 Why do Americans not seem to be feeling it?

00:05:18.000 So I think there are a few reasons.

00:05:20.000 One, obviously, is that Americans' expectations of what's going to happen with the amounts they pay is that it's going to actively go markedly down, not just from where it was last year, but from where it was three or four years ago.

00:05:33.000 Because if you radically inflate prices and then you decrease them marginally, people are still going to feel pretty pressed.

00:05:40.000 So that's number one.

00:05:41.000 Number two, many of the items the president is citing as having dropped in price are not the items that Americans most commonly buy.

00:05:48.000 The number one complaint you will hear from Americans right now about pricing is in the grocery markets.

00:05:54.000 Supermarkets where people feel pressed.

00:05:56.000 If you're going and you are shopping for a family of four for a week of food, you're now paying in some cases 30, 40% more than you were just three or four years ago.

00:06:07.000 And if the places that you most often shop are the places where you feel the most inflation and the most unaffordability, that's what's going to stick in your mind.

00:06:16.000 So yes, mortgage rates might be down, but how many people are actually taking out a new mortgage this year in the United States?

00:06:23.000 The answer is not all that many.

00:06:25.000 So I asked our friends, our sponsors over at Comet, a project of perplexity, what are the items Americans shop for most frequently?

00:06:31.000 Because this is a great way of trying to determine how Americans are feeling.

00:06:35.000 If the thing you buy most frequently is up in price, you're going to feel pressed.

00:06:39.000 If the thing you buy once every 20 years is down in price, you're not going to feel that quite as much because your last comp wasn't last year.

00:06:48.000 Your last comp was probably 10 years ago or 15 or 20 years ago.

00:06:51.000 If your last mortgage was taken out at 2.5% under the George W. Bush administration and your new mortgage is being taken out at 5.75% under the Trump administration, you're going to feel like things are more expensive, even though the mortgage rates are down from where they were a year or two ago.

00:07:08.000 So ask in Comet, what are the items Americans shop for most frequently?

00:07:12.000 Americans most frequently shop for everyday staples like groceries, basic household supplies, personal care items, and clothing, both in-store and online.

00:07:22.000 Not coincidentally, those are the areas where you have seen an elevation in prices with groceries and particularly with clothing.

00:07:30.000 When you take a look at mortgages, the question is, because the president cited mortgage rates coming down, which is true, what percentage of Americans take out a mortgage every year?

00:07:40.000 There's no official statistic for what percentage of Americans take out a mortgage each year, according to our friends over at Comet, but available data imply that only a small single-digit share of adults do so in a typical year.

00:07:52.000 Using recent mortgage origination counts and population figures, a reasonable ballpark is roughly two to three percent of the U.S. population every year.

00:08:02.000 So if you're citing as an example of costs going down, mortgage rates going down, only a small percentage of Americans are actually going to feel that in the moment.

00:08:10.000 And even the ones who are feeling it are not comparing the mortgage rates they could have gotten last year to this year.

00:08:15.000 They're comparing many of them.

00:08:16.000 The mortgage rate that they took out 10 years ago to the one they're getting this year, and it's higher this year than it was 10 years ago.

00:08:22.000 That's why Americans are feeling pressed.

00:08:24.000 With that said, it is good for the president to get specific.

00:08:27.000 I've been urging the president to get specific.

00:08:28.000 I think it's very good that he did.

00:08:30.000 Truly.

00:08:31.000 And again, the delivery is another question.

00:08:33.000 I don't think it was his best delivery last night, but I've been saying for a while that affordability is a weasel word.

00:08:38.000 Affordability is vague.

00:08:40.000 Affordability is a feeling.

00:08:42.000 You can't go around to people and ask them, are things affordable and expect them to say yes.

00:08:47.000 Virtually no one who is not quite wealthy and doesn't think about costs thinks of things as affordable.

00:08:53.000 For most of my life, everything felt unaffordable.

00:08:57.000 And then at a certain point, we achieved a certain level of income where everything felt affordable.

00:09:02.000 But you kind of have to move way up in the income ladder in order for things to feel affordable, generally speaking, where you're not really thinking about it.

00:09:11.000 Because when you think about whether things are affordable or not, what you mean is, am I thinking about the price of the thing that I am buying?

00:09:17.000 There are certain areas of your life where you're not thinking about the price of the thing that you're buying.

00:09:21.000 Affordability is a feeling.

00:09:23.000 It is not a statistical fact.

00:09:24.000 So the president trying to drill down and get into the stats, which is sort of counterintuitive.

00:09:29.000 He doesn't like to do this too much.

00:09:30.000 I think it's actually quite good.

00:09:32.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

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00:11:42.000 So the president last night let off by saying that he inherited a mess and he's fixing it.

00:11:45.000 This is true.

00:11:47.000 11 months ago, I inherited a mess, and I'm fixing it.

00:11:52.000 When I took office, inflation was the worst in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country, which caused prices to be higher than ever before, making life unaffordable for millions and millions of Americans.

00:12:07.000 This happened during a Democrat administration, and it's when we first began hearing the word affordability.

00:12:16.000 Our border was open, and because of this, our country was being invaded by an army of 25 million people. 0.99

00:12:24.000 And President Trump then went on to go after the left.

00:12:28.000 Here he was.

00:12:30.000 For the last four years, the United States was ruled by politicians who fought only for insiders, illegal aliens, career criminals, corporate lobbyists, prisoners, terrorists, and above all, foreign nations, which took advantage of us at levels never seen before. 0.58

00:12:49.000 They flooded your cities and towns with illegal aliens. 0.97

00:12:53.000 They decimated your hard-earned savings.

00:12:55.000 They indoctrinated your children with hate for America.

00:13:00.000 Really, I mean, they just released a level of violent felons that we had never seen to prey on innocent.

00:13:07.000 They caused war. 0.99

00:13:09.000 They caused mayhem.

00:13:11.000 They caused a horrible situation all over the globe.

00:13:14.000 But now you have a president who fights for the law-abiding, hardworking people of our country, the ones who make this nation run.

00:13:23.000 Now, again, the president is right about all this.

00:13:25.000 I know there was a lot of criticism of the president last night.

00:13:27.000 This was pointless.

00:13:28.000 Why are we doing this?

00:13:29.000 What are we watching?

00:13:30.000 Okay, that's true.

00:13:31.000 But the question is, are you talking about the thing that he said?

00:13:34.000 So maybe you're talking about the way in which he said it.

00:13:36.000 Fine.

00:13:37.000 But are you talking about the things that he actually said?

00:13:39.000 If so, then it actually is a political victory.

00:13:42.000 And this is something that I've had to learn as a political observer over the course of Trump's two terms now.

00:13:49.000 Because I also tend to look at the framework of how did he say it?

00:13:53.000 Was it beautifully performed?

00:13:55.000 And one of the things you realize in watching President Trump is that President Trump is fine with giving a mediocre performance as long as the spotlight is on him.

00:14:03.000 And so bringing the spotlight back to him to talk about things he wants to talk about, even if you don't like the performance, is a way of redirecting the attention to a topic that he wants to talk about, which is what he did successfully last night.

00:14:14.000 So President Trump started talking about his tax cuts, which of course are an economic victory.

00:14:19.000 Next year, you will also see the results of the largest tax cuts in American history that were really accomplished through our great, big, beautiful bill, perhaps the most sweeping legislation ever passed in Congress.

00:14:34.000 We wrapped 12 different bills up into one beautiful bill.

00:14:38.000 That includes no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors.

00:14:47.000 Under these cuts, many families will be saving between $11,000 and $20,000 a year.

00:14:55.000 And next spring is projected to be the largest tax refund season of all time.

00:15:01.000 Okay.

00:15:01.000 He also went on to discuss bringing the economy back by bringing prices down, which is the thing most people are concerned about right now.

00:15:09.000 Here at home, we're bringing our economy back from the brink of ruin.

00:15:13.000 The last administration and their allies in Congress looted our treasury for trillions of dollars, driving up prices and everything at levels never seen before.

00:15:23.000 I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast.

00:15:30.000 So again, this was an attempt to shift the conversation.

00:15:33.000 And I think that it will be the beginning of a sustained campaign to do precisely that.

00:15:38.000 Now, of course, all of that relies on the economy continuing to hold up, the economy continuing to be good.

00:15:43.000 It relies on economic growth.

00:15:44.000 It relies on wage increases.

00:15:46.000 It relies on a continued flattening of the cost curve when it comes to inflation.

00:15:52.000 Right now, a lot of Republicans in Purple Districts, quite worried because they're looking at the polls and they can see themselves losing their seats.

00:15:58.000 And this resulted yesterday in four vulnerable House Republicans rebelling against Speaker Mike Johnson and backing a Democratic effort to force a vote on extending ACA subsidies.

00:16:08.000 That'd be Obamacare, exposing GOP fractures over surging health care costs headed into next year's midterm elections. 0.89

00:16:13.000 This is according to the Wall Street Journal.

00:16:15.000 And of course, when we talk about surging costs, what we mean is that Joe Biden put into place subsidies that expired.

00:16:22.000 Those subsidies, in expiring, jack up costs, but the subsidies never should have been in place in the first place.

00:16:28.000 The subsidies were actually part of the jacking up of the cost.

00:16:31.000 Because when you subsidize a thing, what you get typically is a higher price.

00:16:36.000 This is true anywhere and everywhere that the government pours money on a fire.

00:16:42.000 Representative Mike Lawler of New York joined three Republicans from Pennsylvania swing districts in signing a petition led by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries that would force a vote on a three-year extension of enhanced Obamacare subsidies.

00:16:54.000 The lawmakers acted after GOP leaders blocked votes on compromise measures aimed at extending and trimming the subsidies, saying the needs of their voters were urgent.

00:17:01.000 And again, the reason for that presumably is these Purple District Republicans need to go back home and say, listen, I worked in bipartisan fashion to try to avoid that spike in your Obamacare premiums. 0.88

00:17:12.000 And if we didn't get it done, that's not my fault.

00:17:15.000 So you can see why they did it.

00:17:16.000 Now, it's not going to matter because it'll go to the Senate and it will presumably die in the Senate.

00:17:20.000 There are not 60 votes to push forward the Obamacare subsidies, but it will be added impetus for some sort of compromise deal, which is the most likely outcome of what happens here, is some sort of compromise deal with an extension of the Obamacare subsidies for not three years, but maybe a year or two years, while other measures pushed by Republicans start to eat away at the costs.

00:17:43.000 That, I think, is where this ends up.

00:17:45.000 There's been an attempt to say that this is a blow to Mike Johnson's leadership, but again, I'm not sure exactly what you expect from the speaker.

00:17:52.000 Speaker Johnson, I think, has done an extraordinary job in navigating an incredibly fractious and tough caucus.

00:17:58.000 He has a majority essentially of one vote.

00:18:01.000 And so it's not a shock that a few people are going to defect and move over to the Democrats in order to preserve their own districts.

00:18:07.000 Johnson had said he would not hold any vote on subsidies this week, citing widespread objections from Republicans who call Obamacare a failed program that has done nothing to rein in health care costs.

00:18:16.000 In a TV appearance early on Wednesday, Speaker Johnson warned colleagues against trying to bypass leadership, and he said the party would tackle broader health care policy changes in the new year.

00:18:26.000 But if you're one of these four Republicans, again, the goal presumably is to be able to go back to your district and say, listen, I did my best.

00:18:34.000 Now, Democrats, you have to admire the gall.

00:18:38.000 Their basic move here was do nothing, obstruct, don't come to a compromise.

00:18:43.000 Don't come to an agreement.

00:18:44.000 Don't try to fix things.

00:18:45.000 According to Axios, that was the strategy.

00:18:48.000 Don't give an inch to Republican moderates looking for an escape hatch.

00:18:51.000 And it worked.

00:18:51.000 By following that simple strategy, Jeffries got everything he wanted, a House vote on a three-year extension of the subsidies without income caps or cost offsets.

00:19:02.000 Now, Jeffries was pressed by several of his centrist members to throw his support behind one or two-year extensions, as we were talking about.

00:19:10.000 But instead, he held firm and Republicans came to him.

00:19:12.000 In the end, it's not going to help.

00:19:13.000 In the end, there will be some sort of compromise deal that gets cut, which is, again, not a shock.

00:19:19.000 The Wall Street Journal editorial page is very critical of these four Republicans.

00:19:24.000 They say, quote, they did so even though Mr. Johnson suggested they could have a vote on an amendment to his bill if they could find spending cuts to offset the cost of the extension.

00:19:32.000 This would have required proposing other reforms, and the Republican renegades said no.

00:19:36.000 Their sole aim is to protect themselves from Democratic attacks, but signing the petition is unlikely to provide much insulation.

00:19:41.000 It will instead give Democrats more confidence.

00:19:43.000 They have Republicans on the run and Chuck Schumer more leverage to scare GOP senators to revolt as well.

00:19:49.000 Now, one of the problems here is that in Congress, there's always a temptation to push things off until the crisis moment.

00:19:56.000 Republicans should have been figuring this out six months ago.

00:19:59.000 Republicans should have been attempting to push some sort of compromise solution six months ago so that they could say Democrats are the ones who are allowing the subsidies to expire. 0.60

00:20:09.000 That would have been the thing to do.

00:20:10.000 And presumably, the Republicans will spend the next month doing that, coming up with some sort of compromise solution that they propose and the Democrats keep voting down over and over and over.

00:20:21.000 But for the moment, again, all this goes to is the reality for a lot of Republicans in purple states, in purple districts, that if they continue to kind of double down as opposed to making moves to win their districts, they are likely to lose to lose their seats.

00:20:36.000 President Trump's coattails are not endless and President Trump's approval ratings are not that high.

00:20:40.000 And so a lot of these people are thinking, how do I preserve my job?

00:20:43.000 And that is absolutely normal in the world of electoral politics.

00:20:47.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

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00:21:49.000 Also, as an advocate for truth, you know that women shouldn't have to share locker rooms with men.

00:21:54.000 Women shouldn't have to compete against male athletes and they shouldn't be punished for speaking the truth. 0.68

00:21:59.000 But across America, that is exactly what has been happening.

00:22:01.000 Men are being allowed to compete in women's sports, robbing girls of scholarships, medals, titles, and safety. 0.89

00:22:06.000 Now, for the first time in history, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases, West Virginia versus BPJ and Little versus Heacocks on January 13th, that could decide the future of women's sports nationwide.

00:22:17.000 It could be a watershed moment in the fight to protect biological reality and fairness.

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00:22:35.000 What starts in women's sports spreads to schools, medicine, and parental rights. 0.99

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00:22:49.000 That's Alliance Defending Freedom.

00:22:51.000 Meanwhile, a shock poll is out showing Alexander Ocasio-Cortez defeating JD Vance in a presidential race, 2028 presidential race, 51 to 49.

00:23:03.000 Now, that is inside the margin of error, but that in and of itself should scare the hell out of Republicans if the poll is in any way accurate.

00:23:09.000 Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, of course, I've said, is being underrated as a candidate.

00:23:14.000 She also happens to be the most radical Democrat in the possible field.

00:23:19.000 The fact that she is even in spinning distance of the Vice President of the United States suggests either that Republicans are in for a rough ride generally in 2028 or that there needs to be some course correction politically for Vice President Vance's incipient campaign.

00:23:35.000 AOC was asked directly about this, and she said, of course, I would stomp him, which, of course, you would expect her to say.

00:23:40.000 Do you think that you'll beat that you could beat JD Vance in a head-to-head race for president as polling suggests in 2028?

00:23:46.000 Listen, these polls like three years out are, you know, they are what they are, but let the record show I will stomp him.

00:23:56.000 I will stomp him. 0.99

00:23:57.000 Okay, now, of course, she's sort of half joking.

00:24:00.000 With that said, she is not the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination right now by the polling data.

00:24:04.000 She is clocking in in the real clear politics polling average.

00:24:07.000 And of course, it is very early right now.

00:24:09.000 She is clocking in in the real clear politics polling average and in most of the polls in fourth place in the Democratic primary general vote.

00:24:17.000 Gavin Newsom right now is the heavy favorite.

00:24:20.000 Kamala Harris is still polling high, but that's for a hot moment because she was the last nominee. 0.96

00:24:24.000 She is not going to end up as the Democratic nominee.

00:24:26.000 The California governor has been running very obviously for president for at least a couple of years now.

00:24:32.000 Pete Buttigieg is holding down that third place slot, but he has a ceiling.

00:24:37.000 He's probably not going any higher than where he currently is.

00:24:39.000 Ocasio-Cortez could theoretically pick up more of the Bernie Sanders vote, which is kind of sitting outside and waiting to see who runs at this point.

00:24:48.000 With that said, if the Democrats are that competitive with the Republicans already, that, of course, is a very bad sign and it shows the necessity for a sort of political change.

00:25:00.000 And this does mean, this does mean that on the right side of the aisle, there needs to be some reckoning with the idea that the era of Donald Trump running at the top of the ticket is now over.

00:25:10.000 He is not going to be on the ballot in 2026 and he will not be on the ballot in 2028, despite the most fond wishes of some people who I generally like, like Alan Dershowitz.

00:25:19.000 It ain't happening.

00:25:19.000 The president of the United States is constitutionally forbidden from running for a third term.

00:25:24.000 And so that means that the next candidate will not be Donald Trump.

00:25:27.000 And whoever that candidate is, is going to have to craft his own coalition.

00:25:32.000 I'm going to say this over and over and over again.

00:25:34.000 No one inherits someone else's coalition.

00:25:37.000 If they do, it is usually a smaller coalition.

00:25:40.000 George H.W. Bush in 1988 inherited the Reagan coalition, and he performed less well than Reagan did in 1984.

00:25:49.000 In 2016, Hillary Clinton tried to inherit the Obama coalition, and she significantly underperformed Barack Obama.

00:25:56.000 If you take somebody else's coalition and you shrink it, you are likely to lose, or at least not to perform as well, obviously.

00:26:03.000 And that's particularly true in our very tight elections.

00:26:07.000 We've been having tight elections in this country for basically the last 24 years, going all the way back to 2000.

00:26:13.000 It's been a long time since we've had a true blowout election.

00:26:16.000 You can say that 2008 was kind of a blowout election for Barack Obama.

00:26:19.000 That's an exception to the rule.

00:26:20.000 2012, while it was a solid victory for Obama in the Electoral College, was a fairly tight race the entire way.

00:26:26.000 And obviously, 2000 was an extraordinarily tight race.

00:26:29.000 2004 was a very tight race.

00:26:31.000 2016 was an incredibly tight race.

00:26:33.000 2020 was a tight race.

00:26:34.000 2024 was a tight race.

00:26:36.000 None of these races could be considered blowouts.

00:26:38.000 Republicans can't afford to drop even two percentage points and win national elections.

00:26:45.000 And so that means that Vice President Vance is going to have to look at his own coalition building skills and figure out what coalition he believes he will be able to bring to the ballot box.

00:26:55.000 And that is why I think a lot of the very online chatter that's been happening right now on the right, the sort of triumphalist attempt to transform the nature of how Americans think about Americanism, it is politically inept.

00:27:08.000 What I mean by this is there's a big conversation that's currently happening on the right about what is an American?

00:27:12.000 What is an American?

00:27:13.000 Now, traditionally, when I was growing up, and I think for most modern conservative history, the answer to what is an American is a person who lives in America, was born here traditionally, or immigrates to the United States, imbibes from the well of and assimilates to the values of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

00:27:34.000 That would be sort of the very short synopsis of what is an American.

00:27:38.000 There's been an attempt because people are rebelling now against the sort of creedal notion of Americanism that ideas have anything to do with being an American.

00:27:47.000 And I think that is a response to the fact that the left basically said that what is an American?

00:27:51.000 Anyone who's here.

00:27:53.000 And so what members of the right are now saying is it's, no, it's not anyone who's here.

00:27:57.000 It's people who historically are from here.

00:28:00.000 But neither of those answers is correct.

00:28:02.000 The actual answer is people who wish to join the American experiment and then assimilate to Anglo-American traditions and Judeo-Christian values.

00:28:13.000 Those are traditionally the people who become Americans.

00:28:15.000 And the history of America is which people can come here and do that.

00:28:20.000 And that is why the genetic heritage of the United States is quite diverse.

00:28:24.000 It's why only a very small percentage of Americans can trace their ancestry all the way back to the Mayflower.

00:28:30.000 Well, this is all coming to a head because there are a lot of Republicans, again, who are starting to push the idea that that creedal idea, Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States, Anglo-American values in terms of legality, property rights, general religious tenor, that all of that ought to be pushed to the side in favor of some sort of quote-unquote heritage Americanism.

00:28:53.000 And again, that's pretty ill-defined because it's difficult to explain why, because your great, grandfather got here.

00:29:00.000 That is somehow better than someone else's great, grandfather getting here.

00:29:06.000 As though the more greats you have in the grandfather, the more American you are.

00:29:10.000 To a certain extent, that's kind of stolen valor because you're not the one who got here.

00:29:14.000 It was one of your ancestors who got here.

00:29:16.000 But the reality is that that is a losing political proposition.

00:29:20.000 Forget about the morality of it or even the ideology of it.

00:29:23.000 That is a losing political proposition that radically shrinks your base.

00:29:27.000 It does.

00:29:28.000 President Trump won a historic number of Hispanic votes for a Republican in the last election cycle.

00:29:33.000 Many of the Hispanic voters that he's winning are first generation or second generation Americans.

00:29:38.000 If you say that the longer you're in the country, the more American you are, you are alienating your potential voters.

00:29:45.000 Because it turns out a lot of people in the United States got here in the course of the last 150 years.

00:29:54.000 Again, it is a mistake to do the routine that you are now seeing on a political level.

00:29:58.000 And the more you talk about it, the more you're alienating people.

00:30:01.000 And if JD Vance loses Latino votes from President Trump, if he loses black votes from President Trump, if he loses female votes from President Trump, if he loses blue-collar votes from President Trump, he needs to make all this up somewhere.

00:30:14.000 Vivek Ramaswamy, who's running for governor of Ohio, has what I think is a truly good piece at the New York Times titled, What is an American?

00:30:21.000 And he says there are two competing visions now emerging on the American right, and they're incompatible.

00:30:25.000 One vision of American identity is based on lineage, blood, and soil.

00:30:29.000 Inherited attributes matter most.

00:30:31.000 The purest form of an American is a so-called heritage American, one whose ancestry traces back to the founding of the United States or earlier.

00:30:38.000 This view is now popularized by the Groyper Reich, a rapidly ascendant online movement that argues for the creation of a white-centric identity.

00:30:45.000 This is a predictable response, one that I anticipated in my 2022 book, Nation of Victims, to anti-white discrimination over the last half decade.

00:30:52.000 And it is no longer just a fringe viewpoint.

00:30:54.000 The alternative, and says Vivek Ramaswamy, in my view, correct vision of American identity is based on ideals.

00:31:00.000 Americanness isn't a scalar quality that varies based on your ancestry.

00:31:04.000 It's binary.

00:31:05.000 Either you're an American or you're not.

00:31:07.000 You're an American if you believe in the rule of law in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression and colorblind meritocracy in the U.S. Constitution, in the American dream, and if you are a citizen who swears exclusive allegiance to our nation.

00:31:18.000 As Ronald Reagan quipped, you can go live in France, but you can't become a Frenchman.

00:31:22.000 But anyone from any corner of the world can come to live in the United States and become an American.

00:31:26.000 Now, what Vivek is saying here is correct.

00:31:28.000 The attack on so-called creedal Americanism has been the idea that you can't shut the door based on creed.

00:31:33.000 That's not true.

00:31:34.000 Of course you can.

00:31:36.000 That's why it matters where immigrants are coming from. 0.77

00:31:38.000 It's why I am very much a fan of creedal Americanism because America is exceptional and different.

00:31:44.000 When I say American exceptionalism, I don't mean like Barack Obama, that Americans believe in American exceptionalism like Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism or Japanese believe in Japanese exceptionalism.

00:31:53.000 America is in fact different.

00:31:56.000 It is a nation based on an idea, not an idea based on a nation.

00:32:02.000 It is the only state that was literally formed based on a set of ideas.

00:32:08.000 Now, of course, many of the people who formed those ideas had a common ancestry.

00:32:12.000 Many didn't, by the way.

00:32:13.000 We now tend to obliterate all those differences because they seem minor in comparison to the sort of ethnic diversity of the United States, but there's some pretty significant conflict between, say, Scotch-Irish immigrants to the United States at the founding and English immigrants to the United States at the founding or Dutch immigrants to the United States at the founding for that matter.

00:32:31.000 New York was originally New Amsterdam, of course.

00:32:35.000 But of course, creedal Americanism can serve as a litmus test as to whether someone ought to become an American.

00:32:41.000 And we can measure that and we can bar people who are unlikely to assimilate.

00:32:46.000 Vivek says, no matter your ancestry, if you wait your turn and obtain citizenship, you're every bit as American as a Mayflower descendant, as long as you subscribe to the creed of the American founding and the culture that was born of it.

00:32:56.000 This is what makes American exceptionalism possible.

00:32:58.000 And this is right.

00:32:59.000 This is correct.

00:33:00.000 One of the reasons that America is, in fact, so powerful is specifically because we can brain drain everywhere else.

00:33:07.000 We can values drain everywhere else.

00:33:09.000 We can become the world center of commerce and the world center of small art republicanism.

00:33:15.000 We can do all those things because we can be a magnet for those things.

00:33:21.000 The divide between these two views, says Ramaswamy, is more foundational than policy divides between Republicans and Democrats.

00:33:27.000 Older Republicans who may doubt the rising prevalence of the blood and soil view should think again.

00:33:30.000 My social media feeds are littered with hundreds of slurs, most from accounts that I don't recognize about the Pajites and street bleepers and calls to deport me back to India.

00:33:39.000 I was born and raised in Cincinnati and have never resided outside the United States.

00:33:44.000 This new online right movement doesn't represent the views of most real world Republican voters, take it from the son of Indian immigrants who's dominating polling in Ohio's GOP primary for governor.

00:33:53.000 But as one of the most vocal opponents of left-wing identity politics, I now feel real reluctance from my former anti-woke peers to criticize the new identity politics on the right.

00:34:02.000 And good for Vivek for writing this because this is exactly right.

00:34:05.000 He says this pattern eerily mirrors the hesitance of prominent Democrats to criticize woke excess in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.

00:34:12.000 This, of course, is exactly right.

00:34:14.000 So what's the solution? says Ramaswamy.

00:34:18.000 We need to imagine a new American dream that delivers economic empowerment while also filling the next generation's hunger for purpose and belonging.

00:34:24.000 To achieve that vision, four conditions must be met.

00:34:26.000 First, conservative leaders should condemn without hedging Groitberg transgressions.

00:34:30.000 That doesn't mean censorship.

00:34:32.000 It means moral clarity instead of indulgence.

00:34:34.000 Yes.

00:34:34.000 Second, reduce cost of living.

00:34:36.000 States can deliver quick wins, drive down home prices by eliminating local land use restrictions to increase housing supply, reduce property tax burdens, et cetera, et cetera.

00:34:44.000 Third, create broad-based participation in wealth generation from stock market gains, meaning we should have what are now being called the Trump accounts.

00:34:54.000 And fourth, provide America the shared national project we badly need.

00:34:58.000 America has a greater purpose in the world than what we have embodied thus far in the 21st century.

00:35:03.000 Americans of all stripes long to be reminded of it through a modern day equivalent of the Apollo mission.

00:35:08.000 Now, again, I think that there's truth to this, that building big things tends to inspire the imagination.

00:35:15.000 Now, I don't think that that is a pre-rec.

00:35:17.000 I think that an inspired vision for Americans is the dream, the dream.

00:35:22.000 The American dream is the inspiring thing.

00:35:25.000 If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

00:35:27.000 And let's be real about young Americans.

00:35:29.000 The opportunity is, in fact, in your hands.

00:35:32.000 There are people out there who are going to lie to you.

00:35:33.000 They're going to tell you you can't succeed in the United States.

00:35:35.000 They're going to tell you that because it makes them stronger and then more powerful and then richer.

00:35:40.000 But it's going to make your life worse and poorer.

00:35:43.000 You can, in fact, succeed.

00:35:44.000 You've been handed the opportunity, an opportunity that hundreds of millions, billions of people worldwide would kill to get.

00:35:51.000 That is an opportunity that you were born into in the United States or immigrated to.

00:35:56.000 And to pretend that this system is what is holding you down, absent a specific policy that you would like to change, and then we can all get on board.

00:36:04.000 But a generalized grievance is not going to make your life better.

00:36:07.000 And people who pander to you by telling you that failure is a result of generalized grievance without a solution.

00:36:14.000 They are making your life actively worse.

00:36:17.000 They're destroying your opportunity and they're destroying the American spirit.

00:36:20.000 We'll get to more on this in just a moment.

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00:38:48.000 Last night, the president of the United States, there were people online again, who were predicting that he was going to declare war with Venezuela or something that, of course, turned out to be untrue, as are many of their predictions.

00:38:58.000 It is true, however, that the president is creating more of a blockade on Venezuela.

00:39:04.000 The president is basically trying to stop the shipping of so-called ghost ships out of Venezuela that are loaded with oil for illegal climbs in violation of international law.

00:39:19.000 President Trump is very much focused on the oil in Venezuela, which, by the way, is correct. 0.99

00:39:23.000 I know there are people who are uptight about this.

00:39:25.000 Why?

00:39:26.000 Venezuela was reliant largely on American companies to build their oil industry, and then they nationalized their oil industry and ran their country directly into the ground.

00:39:36.000 And President Trump says, you know, we built it and you took it and you've destroyed your country in the process.

00:39:42.000 The president is not wrong here.

00:39:44.000 It's a blockade.

00:39:46.000 Not going to let anybody going through this shit be going through.

00:39:49.000 You remember they took all of our energy rights.

00:39:52.000 They took all of our oil from not that long ago.

00:39:57.000 And we want it back.

00:39:58.000 But they took it.

00:39:59.000 They illegally took it.

00:40:02.000 The president then put out a statement on truth social quote.

00:40:04.000 Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America.

00:40:09.000 It will only get bigger and the shock to them will be like nothing they've ever seen before.

00:40:12.000 He added he is ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela.

00:40:18.000 And he argued that Maduro's government is using oil revenue to finance illicit operations, including drug terrorism.

00:40:24.000 The United States has already sanctioned three of Maduro's nephews, according to NBC News, and repeatedly conducted deadly military strikes against boats from the Caribbean that it alleges are carrying drugs.

00:40:34.000 Venezuela responded by accusing Trump of violating international law, free trade, and the principle of free navigation.

00:40:39.000 Okay, Venezuela, you commies. 0.99

00:40:42.000 You commie Iranian dictatorship-loving horror show. 1.00

00:40:48.000 It added on his social media, he assumes that Venezuela's oil, land, and mineral wealth are his property.

00:40:52.000 No, actually, he assumes that if we drilled for the oil and helped your industry and then you nationalized it and stole it on behalf of your communist dictatorship, that that's a bad thing.

00:41:03.000 Maduro's government plans to denounce the situation before the United Nations.

00:41:06.000 Well, slow clap for you guys.

00:41:07.000 Congrats.

00:41:08.000 Now, there are a lot of people who are claiming that President Trump is going to launch a full-scale military invasion of Venezuela.

00:41:15.000 No, he's not.

00:41:16.000 Stop it.

00:41:17.000 Stop being stupid.

00:41:18.000 Representative Jason Crowe, Democrat of Colorado, is saying that.

00:41:21.000 As the president has talked about U.S. involvement in land, is it clear to you what that would look like to you, U.S. involvement in a land war in Venezuela, how that would play out?

00:41:33.000 That would be complete insanity.

00:41:35.000 We've spent the last 25 years, trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, tens of thousands of Americans wounded with stress and invisible and visible scars of these battles.

00:41:47.000 Hundreds of thousands of people died around the world in these conflicts.

00:41:51.000 And most of these conflicts ended poorly, right?

00:41:54.000 Terrorism is still alive and well.

00:41:56.000 We pulled out of Afghanistan.

00:41:57.000 We saw how poorly that went.

00:41:59.000 Iraq did not go well.

00:42:01.000 The United States needs to get out of the regime change business.

00:42:07.000 Actually, I don't think the United States needs to get out of the regime change business. 0.73

00:42:10.000 If by that he means that we should not root for certain regimes to change.

00:42:15.000 We certainly should not invade Venezuela with hundreds of thousands of troops, if that's what he's talking about.

00:42:19.000 But I really don't think that President Trump is going for that.

00:42:22.000 Why are you guys standing for the Venezuelan regime?

00:42:25.000 And what President Trump is pretty obviously doing is cutting off the lifeblood of the Venezuelan economy and creating internal pressures inside the country for some sort of military coup or for a popular uprising to depose the dictator.

00:42:38.000 Why is that bad?

00:42:40.000 Like, let's be real about what he's doing.

00:42:41.000 He is not talking about using F-16s to take out Maduro.

00:42:46.000 He's not talking about unleashing the 101st airborne.

00:42:51.000 That's not what he's talking about.

00:42:53.000 Ilhan Omar, of course, another big defender of the Marxist regime in Venezuela.

00:42:57.000 The answer is that this is not about drugs.

00:43:00.000 This is about regime change.

00:43:03.000 And we also have the White House chief of staff on record saying that this is about regime change.

00:43:11.000 It has nothing to do with drugs.

00:43:14.000 Well, I mean, I assume that it has to do with both regime change and drugs.

00:43:19.000 Again, this notion that the United States is about to launch some sort of massive ground-scale invasion into Venezuela is not correct.

00:43:26.000 That, of course, is not correct.

00:43:28.000 But economic pressure on Venezuela, I really don't see the problem, to be quite honest with you.

00:43:33.000 Meanwhile, Democrats continue to focus like a laser beam on the fact that Pete Hegseth's Department of Defense launched a second strike at a drug boat in international waters.

00:43:43.000 Representative Benny Thompson, who was last seen claiming that the shooting of a couple of National Guard members was a sort of bizarre accident.

00:43:53.000 Well, now he's back and he's claiming that Trump's boat bombings are illegal.

00:43:57.000 We are a nation of laws.

00:44:00.000 The Trump administration's boat bombings are illegal under U.S. and international laws.

00:44:07.000 Simply put, these are war crimes. 0.71

00:44:10.000 Further, the administration has failed to provide Congress with basic information, even as Trump directs a massive buildup of U.S. forces and threatens war.

00:44:24.000 And I might add, Mr. Speaker, those of us who've been in so-called classified briefings still have not received any additional information beyond what's already in the eyes of the public and on TV.

00:44:41.000 It's our duty as a Congress to reign in the lawless administration and prevent an illegal war.

00:44:50.000 Also, meanwhile, Chuck Schumer is claiming that the video of the boat strike turned his stomach.

00:44:55.000 It turned his.

00:44:58.000 OK, I mean, you want to go with blowing up drug boats is bad.

00:45:01.000 I guess that's a take.

00:45:04.000 The unedited video of what happened on September 2nd, I've seen it.

00:45:10.000 It turns your stomach.

00:45:12.000 It is awful.

00:45:15.000 And people should see it.

00:45:17.000 What the hell is Hegseth hiding?

00:45:19.000 His excuse about classification, it's false.

00:45:29.000 Okay.

00:45:30.000 All right.

00:45:30.000 Well, I mean, I guess if they want to run with this, they can.

00:45:33.000 The Senate did pass a Pentagon bill pressing Pete Hegseth to disclose vote strike evidence on Wednesday, according to the Washington Post.

00:45:40.000 It was an addendum to the $900 billion defense policy bill.

00:45:43.000 It advanced 77 to 20.

00:45:46.000 So I assume that at some point the footage will come out, and then we'll find out whether, in fact, the people on the boat were signaling others to be picked up.

00:45:55.000 That's sort of the question at issue, legally speaking, is somebody considered ordered to combat when their boat gets wrecked, or could they get back in the fight by getting on another boat, calling somebody, is the boat still salvageable, and whatnot.

00:46:06.000 By the way, the original accusation, which was that Pete Hegseth said, kill everyone and then stood there while they nuked these people, is false.

00:46:14.000 And that was already reported by the New York Times.

00:46:16.000 So the original report from the Washington Post made a claim that has already been specifically debunked by the New York Times.

00:46:22.000 Okay, meanwhile, in other Trump administration news, Dan Bongino says he will step down from the FBI in January, according to the New York Times.

00:46:29.000 He said on Wednesday he would step down next month, bringing an end to his brief but tumultuous stint at the Bureau.

00:46:35.000 He wrote on social media, I will be leaving my position with the FBI in January.

00:46:40.000 He announced this.

00:46:41.000 He said, I want to thank President Trump, A.G. Bondi, and Director Patel for the opportunity to serve with purpose.

00:46:46.000 Most importantly, I want to thank you, my fellow Americans, for the privilege to serve you.

00:46:49.000 God bless America and all those who defend her.

00:46:52.000 Now, again, I think that Dan deserves extraordinary praise for what he's done over the course of the last year.

00:47:00.000 He gave up legitimately tens of millions of dollars to go into public service for no reason other than his own patriotism.

00:47:06.000 You can't name a reason why he would do it other than he wanted to help the country.

00:47:10.000 He certainly didn't do it for the money.

00:47:11.000 He certainly didn't do it for the love.

00:47:15.000 And Dan has taken some real hits from dishonest people claiming that he abandoned his position as a person who wants to get to the truth.

00:47:23.000 And by the way, full credit to Dan for telling the truth, even when it was not in his political interest to do so.

00:47:29.000 I mean, Dan had been one of the lead purveyors of much of the questioning surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, but it was Dan who had to do that investigation and look into all the evidence and then tell the truth to the American people.

00:47:39.000 That's a hard job.

00:47:40.000 Telling the truth to the American people is a much more difficult job, as it turns out, than lying to them and telling them what they want to hear, particularly if they're in your base.

00:47:47.000 Dan deserves enormous credit for that.

00:47:49.000 Dan deserves huge credit for being instrumental in the arrest of the January 6th pipette bomber.

00:47:57.000 Again, the ire that you see for Dan online, I think a lot of it is sort of competitive hatred for Dan.

00:48:02.000 It's coming from other people who are afraid he's going to come back to his podcast and do really well.

00:48:06.000 I hope he comes back to his podcast, and I hope he does do really well because Dan is a very talented guy.

00:48:12.000 But again, what Dan deserves most of all is thanks for having put aside his own personal interests on behalf of the country, even if it was for a year.

00:48:21.000 Most people don't do that, and that is not an easy decision to make.

00:48:26.000 Well, in other news, Zorhan Mamdani's tenure is going exactly how you thought it would.

00:48:31.000 According to the New York Post, Mamdani has now tapped a controversial lawyer who defended an al-Qaeda terrorist and a radical anti-Israel campus leader at Columbia for a high-ranking position at City Hall.

00:48:42.000 How exciting.

00:48:43.000 Ramzi Qasem, who is also a law professor at City University of New York and a member of Mamdani's transition team for legal affairs, is the top candidate for chief counsel, the most important advisory role in the mayor's office.

00:48:54.000 Can't see how this would go wrong.

00:48:58.000 In addition to defending Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University protest leader who was also engaged in trespass and violation of law, Qasem helped to defend terrorist Ahmed Al-Darby, an al-Qaeda member who was convicted in 2017 of bombing a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen in 2002.

00:49:16.000 All this, of course, follows a pattern for Zorhan Mamdani. 0.64

00:49:18.000 He was supposed to be a moderate.

00:49:20.000 Yeah, that's not happening so much.

00:49:22.000 Not really seeing it.

00:49:22.000 Meanwhile, he appeared with Trevor Noah, who apparently is still in the media.

00:49:27.000 I didn't even realize that Trevor was still active.

00:49:28.000 Good for you, Trevor.

00:49:30.000 And he declared that free buses are going to lower crime.

00:49:33.000 Okay, Charlie, we'll see how that works out for you.

00:49:36.000 When we made those bus routes free after a year, assaults on bus drivers dropped by 38.9% on the bus driver.

00:49:43.000 On the bus drivers, because unlike the train, the act of fare collection on the bus happens on the bus, it's there.

00:49:51.000 And bus drivers and unions have shared anecdotally that about 50% of assaults happen around the fare box.

00:50:01.000 So when you eliminate the fare box, you make for a safer experience for the bus driver, for everyone on the bus.

00:50:09.000 It's going to be so safe when nobody has to worry about the fares and when people are just riding around the buses and using them as homeless encampments.

00:50:16.000 If there's one thing that Zorn Mamdani is going to bring, it's going to be safety to New York City.

00:50:20.000 Man, you guys, you voted for this and now you're going to get it good and hard.

00:50:23.000 That's the theory of democracy in a nutshell.

00:50:25.000 He also described, to Trevor Noah, what socialism means.

00:50:27.000 You'll notice that he doesn't actually define what socialism means.

00:50:30.000 This is a favorite habit of socialists is to say things like, if socialism means that everybody lives a better life and is richer, then I'm a socialist.

00:50:37.000 It's like, well, no, that's not what socialism means.

00:50:39.000 It actually has a definition.

00:50:40.000 Here is Zorn Mamdani doing his best.

00:50:42.000 But I think, you know, many people have caricatures in their head as to what it means.

00:50:47.000 I often turn to Dr. King to describe socialism.

00:50:51.000 He said, call it democracy or call it democratic socialism.

00:50:54.000 There must be a better distribution of wealth for all of God's children in this country.

00:50:58.000 It comes back to dignity.

00:51:00.000 It comes back to ensuring that whatever you need to live a dignified life, that you have that.

00:51:06.000 You should not be priced out of a necessity.

00:51:08.000 We're not talking about want or like.

00:51:10.000 We're talking about need.

00:51:12.000 You should not be priced out of being able to have a home to call your own, of being able to send your kid to school, being able to ride the bus.

00:51:20.000 And I've found actually that when you're speaking to New Yorkers one-to-one, they've actually had far fewer questions of how I describe my politics and far more of does my politics include them?

00:51:32.000 Are their struggles part of my focus?

00:51:36.000 And I've found that there are many people who might describe themselves in a different way, but when I speak about what this would mean for New York City, they start to see themselves in that vision.

00:51:44.000 And that's, I think, the key of this is how is this a politics that actually reflects the struggles of working people?

00:51:52.000 The irritation of people like Mamdani.

00:51:53.000 This is crap.

00:51:54.000 I mean, Mamdani and Sanders, they all do this routine.

00:51:56.000 The routine is, here's something I wish everybody had.

00:51:58.000 And if I believe that everybody should have it, then they should have it.

00:52:01.000 Now, they never tell you how they're going to get from point A to point B, because what socialists actually believe is if everyone deserves a house, then what that means is we should seize the means of production and we should either tax the living hell out of people and then build houses and just give them to people, which was called the affordable housing projects of the 1960s and 70s, gigantic failure.

00:52:20.000 Or we should seize current housing stock and just put people in those houses.

00:52:26.000 And these programs invariably end with failure.

00:52:28.000 I want people to have houses too.

00:52:30.000 And the way that you get more people in more houses is with additional supply.

00:52:33.000 And you know what's a great way to create better houses, additional houses, houses with more amenities, houses that aren't the crap boxes that your grandparents owned in the middle of Peoria in 1952, which were just brick structures with no internal air conditioning and half the time no toilet.

00:52:47.000 You know what's the best way to do that?

00:52:48.000 Market economics.

00:52:49.000 Market economics.

00:52:50.000 So no, socialism isn't just a quote-unquote call for you to have things.

00:52:54.000 It's an actual program for how to achieve that.

00:52:57.000 And that program is always ugly and it's always a failure.

00:52:59.000 And we'll see how it works out for New Yorkers.

00:53:02.000 Honestly, Momdani's saving grace is that he's not going to be able to do all the things that he says he wants to do.

00:53:08.000 All righty, coming up, we're going to jump into the vaunted Ben Shapiro show mailbag.

00:53:12.000 Remember, you have to be a subscriber in order to access the mailbag and become part of the show.

00:53:16.000 Head on over to dailywire.com right now to subscribe.

00:53:22.000 Oh, this is an illusion.

00:53:24.000 An echo of a voice that has died.

00:53:29.000 And soon that echo will cease.

00:53:41.000 They say that Merlin is mad.

00:53:49.000 They say he was a king in Dovid.

00:53:52.000 The son of a princess of lost Atlantis.

00:53:56.000 They say the future and the past are known to him.

00:54:01.000 Let the fire and the wind tell him their secrets.

00:54:04.000 Let the magic of the hill folk and druids come forth at his easy command.

00:54:11.000 They say he slew hundreds.

00:54:14.000 Hundreds, do you hear?

00:54:16.000 That the world burned and trembled at his wrath.

00:54:23.000 The Merlin died long before you and I were born.

00:54:28.000 Merlin Emirus has returned to the land of the living.

00:54:34.000 Vortigern is gone.

00:54:36.000 Room is gone.

00:54:38.000 The Saxon is here. 0.76

00:54:40.000 Saxon Hengist has assembled the greatest war host ever seen in the island of the mighty. 0.84

00:54:45.000 And before the summer is through, he means to take the throne.

00:54:50.000 And he will have it.

00:54:51.000 If we are too busy squabbling amongst ourselves to take up arms against him, here is your hope.

00:54:58.000 A king will arise to hold all Britain in his hand.

00:55:01.000 A high king who will be the wonder of the world.

00:55:06.000 You To a future of peace.

00:55:13.000 There'll be no peace in these lands till we are all dust.

00:55:16.000 Men of the island of the mighty, you stand together.

00:55:22.000 You stand as Britons.

00:55:24.000 You stand as one.

00:55:29.000 Great darkness is falling upon this land.

00:55:33.000 These brothers are our only hope to stand against it.

00:55:37.000 Not our only hope.

00:55:40.000 Esay Merthyn slew 70 men with his own hands.

00:55:44.000 At Cathay, he slew 500.

00:55:48.000 No man is capable of such a thing.

The Ben Shapiro Show - December 18, 2025

So About Trump's Speech Last Night...

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