The Ben Shapiro Show - Texas Democrats RUN AWAY…Plus, The REAL Gaza Starvation

00:00:00.000 All right, folks, tons coming up on the show today, ranging from Texas Democrats running away from Texas very, very bravely in order to stop gerrymandering to the latest from Gaza, Zor Mamdani leading in the polls in New York, above and far away beyond all the other candidates combined.

00:00:16.000 And President Trump, of course, firing the head of the Bureau of Labor statistics.

00:00:19.000 So tons coming up first.

00:00:20.000 You've asked for years and thousands of comments.

00:00:22.000 Yes, we actually read them.

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00:00:49.000 All righty, folks.

00:00:49.000 So Democrats are having a very tough time with continued Republican victory.

00:00:53.000 Obviously, their poll numbers continue to be in the dumps, but all of this is now manifesting in the latest routine in Texas.

00:01:01.000 So Texas Republicans are looking right now at redistricting the state congressionally.

00:01:06.000 This is called gerrymandering, and it's quite typical around the United States.

00:01:10.000 In fact, every state has some form of gerrymandering.

00:01:13.000 Some of the worst gerrymandered states are states that include Democratic states.

00:01:17.000 So just to take one example, Illinois, which we'll come back to later.

00:01:21.000 Here, for example, is a map of Illinois with its congressional districts.

00:01:27.000 As you will see, it's insane.

00:01:29.000 These congressional districts make no sense.

00:01:31.000 They are all over the place.

00:01:33.000 There's one congressional district, particularly, District 13, that looks like kind of a snake that just kind of goes halfway up through the state.

00:01:42.000 And then that is juxtaposed with another congressional district, District 17, that was created just to get to a Democratic majority that looks sort of like a stair stepper.

00:01:54.000 You know, all these congressional districts are a total mess, like a complete and utter total mess.

00:01:58.000 That is the Illinois congressional redistricting plan.

00:02:01.000 And how do I know that?

00:02:02.000 Because there is a website called gerrymander.princeton.edu that actually ranks states by how much they are gerrymandered.

00:02:09.000 And many of those states are Democrat.

00:02:10.000 Some of those states are Republican.

00:02:12.000 Illinois is particularly bad.

00:02:14.000 Nevada is particularly bad.

00:02:16.000 That is a half Democrat, half Republican state, sort of.

00:02:20.000 Oregon actually happens to be particularly badly gerrymandered.

00:02:24.000 So there are a bunch of, this is a way that politics is done.

00:02:28.000 The sort of attempt to treat gerrymandering as though it is unnatural and politics are only pursued by one side.

00:02:32.000 That, of course, is absolute nonsense.

00:02:35.000 So the Texas state Republicans are now attempting to re-gerrymander the state.

00:02:40.000 And now Texas Democrats are threatening that they are going to run away from the state.

00:02:45.000 Now, in order for them to do that, what they actually have to do is claim that this is an authoritarian threat to democracy as opposed to a way that congressional districts have been created since legitimately the beginning of the republic.

00:02:58.000 Elbridge Jerry, who is the person who actually the term is named after former vice president of the United States, who served under President James Madison from 1813 until his death in 1814, obviously the founder of so-called gerrymandering lived at the very beginning of the Republic.

00:03:15.000 So this is a very long-standing congressional practice.

00:03:18.000 There is nothing new here.

00:03:19.000 But according to former Barack Obama, A.G. Eric Holder, this is all authoritarian and a threat to democracy.

00:03:24.000 Here's Eric Holder, who once called himself Barack Obama's wingman, actually suggesting that this is a threat to democracy if the Texas legislature redraws congressional districts.

00:03:36.000 What we're seeing now is an attempt by the White House to insulate itself from any kind of congressional scrutiny, any kind of congressional oversight to make sure that Donald Trump remains the authoritarian figure that he has become.

00:03:49.000 We have a compliant Congress, and he wants to ensure that given the fact that they passed this bill that is unpopular, that takes health care away from people, that gives tax breaks to billionaires, and it puts at risk the Republican majority.

00:04:02.000 He wants to ensure that he continues to have that compliant Republican House of Representatives.

00:04:10.000 Now, again, this idea that somehow the president is responsible for gerrymandering as opposed to, you know, the party that happens to be in control of a particular state legislature is ridiculous.

00:04:20.000 So what are Democrats doing?

00:04:22.000 They're doing what they've done before.

00:04:23.000 They're running away.

00:04:24.000 So according to Politico, when the Texas legislature reconvenes today at 4 p.m. Eastern Time, it will be 57 Democrats short of a quorum.

00:04:32.000 While a small number of Democratic legislators remain in Austin, many more have fled.

00:04:36.000 Some will be in New York meeting with Governor Kathy Hochul, and they'll be hanging out 10 a.m. in Albany talking about how wrong they are and why they have to flee.

00:04:46.000 Others will be hunkered down at an undisclosed hotel in Chicago.

00:04:49.000 Now, I mentioned that I would be talking about Illinois.

00:04:52.000 Again, there's great irony to legislators from Texas fleeing to Chicago in Illinois, one of the most gerrymandered states in America.

00:05:01.000 Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker is providing them with logistical support.

00:05:06.000 Now, again, it's not a shock that Pritzker is doing this.

00:05:08.000 He wants to run for president in 2028.

00:05:11.000 One of the leaders of this new movement is Texas State Representative James Tellerico, who spoke to Playbook Politico while he was aboard a bus hurtling toward his Chicagoland Hotel late last night, hurtling toward the hotel.

00:05:24.000 He says, I'm hoping what we've heard from blue state lawmakers talking about retaliation may give Texas Republicans pause.

00:05:29.000 It may give Speaker Mike Johnson pause because he's got members in blue states that may lose their seats if this escalates further.

00:05:35.000 And apparently aboard the bus, he and other members talked about how Abraham Lincoln once broke quorum in the Illinois state legislature by jumping out of a window.

00:05:42.000 And he said, everyone is hungry and tired, but in good spirits.

00:05:46.000 Wow.

00:05:46.000 Oh, the heroism.

00:05:48.000 Oh, the heroism.

00:05:49.000 Now, this is not the first time that Texas Democrats have run away to break quorum.

00:05:55.000 They did this back in 2021.

00:05:57.000 And in doing so, they released some of the worst social media ever.

00:06:02.000 They went to Washington, D.C. and started releasing photos of themselves eating salads and talking about what absolute heroes they were.

00:06:09.000 Well, James Tallarico has made himself a little bit of a face now because he wants to run presumably for higher office.

00:06:15.000 He was on Joe Rogan recently where he promoted a bunch of very left-wing ideas that Joe, of course, started buying into.

00:06:21.000 Joe is not a right-winger.

00:06:23.000 Joe may be a heterodox person who voted for Donald Trump, but he is certainly not in any way sort of traditionally conservative.

00:06:29.000 Well, here is James Tallarico explaining why he is running away.

00:06:34.000 My Democratic colleagues and I have just left our beloved state to break quorum and stop Trump's redistricting power grab.

00:06:42.000 Trump told our Republican colleagues to redraw the political maps here in Texas in the middle of the decade to get him five more seats and protect his majority in Congress.

00:06:53.000 They're turning our districts into crazy shapes to guarantee the outcome they want in the 2026 elections. 0.65

00:06:59.000 If this power grab succeeds, they will hang on to power without any accountability from the voters.

00:07:05.000 The Texas Democrats are fighting back.

00:07:07.000 We're leaving the state, breaking quorum, and preventing Republicans from silencing our voices and rigging the next election.

00:07:15.000 We are not fighting for the Democratic Party.

00:07:17.000 We are fighting for the Democratic process, and the stakes could not be higher.

00:07:22.000 We have to take a stand.

00:07:24.000 We are taking a stand by running away.

00:07:28.000 That is the only way to take a stand.

00:07:29.000 Brave Sir Robin ran away, bravely ran away away.

00:07:32.000 Yes, they are so brave, loving every element of this tremendous bravery.

00:07:38.000 And again, it just demonstrates the extent to which Democrats are in real national trouble.

00:07:43.000 They're in trouble in states like Texas.

00:07:46.000 But the reality is that California has already been basically gerrymandered to death.

00:07:50.000 So this is nothing new.

00:07:52.000 The Democrats are like, well, you know, if you go after Texas, we might redistrict in California.

00:07:57.000 You already did it.

00:07:58.000 How many more seats are you going to take away from Orange County?

00:08:00.000 There's not that much more you can do to gerrymander Republicans out of existence in places like California.

00:08:06.000 But this, again, goes to the desperation of Democrats who do not have a national brand and what national brand they do have is quite negative.

00:08:14.000 Already coming up, Zoran Mamdani is still the frontrunner in New York, maybe by a bigger margin than before.

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00:10:37.000 I happen to be in New York right now.

00:10:39.000 Zorin Mamdani is likely to be the next mayor of this city.

00:10:42.000 That's what the polling is showing right now.

00:10:44.000 And Democrats have decided that they are fine with the momdanification of their party.

00:10:48.000 Bill Maher on HBO over the weekend.

00:10:50.000 He pointed out quite obviously that Zorin Mamdani represents the commies and he is likely going to be the mayor of New York.

00:10:56.000 This is Mondami.

00:10:57.000 If you've been not following the news, he is, he won the Democratic primary in New York, so he is certainly likely to be the next mayor.

00:11:05.000 We don't know.

00:11:06.000 I mean, there's a lot of opposition because we've never had someone this radical.

00:11:10.000 Some of the things he says, you know, he quotes Marxist, each according to their need.

00:11:15.000 I mean, that's straight up communism.

00:11:17.000 Whether you call it the abolition of private property, you call it housing guarantees.

00:11:22.000 It's preferable to what is going on right now.

00:11:24.000 I mean, just the phrase abolition of private property, not something we usually hear in America.

00:11:32.000 I mean, he is right about all of that.

00:11:35.000 It is, again, an amazing thing that Democrats have decided to mobilize behind him.

00:11:39.000 And they are, by the way, there is a new poll out showing that, you know, a couple of weeks ago, if you'd combined all the rest of the Democrats running against Mamdani, they would have essentially overcome his levels of support if you'd combined them with Curtis Sliwa, the only Republican in the race.

00:11:54.000 But now there's a new poll out by Zenith Research and Public Progress Solutions, and it finds him in the lead with over 50% of the vote, regardless of who else runs, which of course is a disaster area for the city of New York, which will clear out.

00:12:09.000 I mean, it's hard to think of a worse idea for the financial center of the human planet than Zorin Mamdani, a communist being in charge of it.

00:12:18.000 That is totally insane.

00:12:19.000 How radical is Zorin Mamdani?

00:12:21.000 Well, a clip is now merged of New York City Democrat Socialists of America steering committee head Daniel Golden, who talks about how they coordinate openly with Zorin Mamdani.

00:12:32.000 And actually, his plans are even more radical than the stuff he's talking about.

00:12:35.000 He actually would love it if other states and cities would send people who want to be trans to New York so they can pay for them. 1.00

00:12:43.000 Here is the New York City DSA steering committee head, Daniel Golden, describing the joys of Zorin Mamdani.

00:12:52.000 But most importantly, we collaborated with the Zoran Mamdani campaign on his trans rights platform.

00:12:58.000 And what we explicitly wanted to do was use the power of New York City to provide free gender-affirming care.

00:13:05.000 And I say free in case insurance companies decide to foot us off.

00:13:09.000 Free gender-affirming care, not just to people in New York City, but across the country.

00:13:13.000 There's no reason at all that we can't use telehealth and mailing prescriptions to people across the country to undermine state bands.

00:13:22.000 The Zoran campaign was always eager to work with us.

00:13:26.000 You know, we're like that.

00:13:28.000 We wrote the platform with him.

00:13:31.000 The team was so happy to work with us on this.

00:13:36.000 And now he's going to be mayor.

00:13:40.000 And all of a sudden, my work shifts from being on the outside to thinking about how to utilize the fairly significant municipal power of New York City.

00:13:54.000 I mean, amazing, amazing stuff.

00:13:56.000 And this is the direction Democrats are moving.

00:13:58.000 So keep doing it.

00:13:59.000 Seriously, keep doing it.

00:14:01.000 I hope that you do.

00:14:02.000 The Democrats are moving more and more to the left.

00:14:05.000 That is becoming clearer on a wide variety of issues, but it's not just economics, obviously.

00:14:09.000 It's also foreign policy.

00:14:10.000 I said when Mom Dani was running in the New York mayoral primary, a lot of people were saying politically, why is he not dissociating himself from globalize the Intifada?

00:14:19.000 Why is he not moving away from the quasi-support of Hamas?

00:14:24.000 Why is he doing all that stuff?

00:14:25.000 And I said the answer is because for the Democratic voting populace, that is popular.

00:14:30.000 I was there in 2012 at the Democratic National Convention when Antonio Villagosa, who was then the head of the DNC, got up and in the Democratic National Committee platform, they wanted to have a plank that said that Jerusalem was the eternal and unbreakable capital of Israel.

00:14:46.000 And it was booed down.

00:14:48.000 He overruled them in the room, but it was booed down.

00:14:50.000 So was God in the platform.

00:14:52.000 This is the direction of the Democratic Party for most of my adult lifetime.

00:14:56.000 And now it's reaching apex state.

00:14:58.000 You can see it in Its most virulent and ugly form with regard to what Israel is doing currently in Gaza.

00:15:06.000 Just to make clear right now, Israel is shipping in extraordinary amounts of aid to Gaza, extraordinary amounts of aid.

00:15:13.000 Ambassador Mike Huckabee put out a tweet this morning explaining exactly what is happening in Gaza.

00:15:19.000 Quote, there is no policy of starvation in Gaza except Hamas's deliberate starvation of the hostages.

00:15:23.000 Israel does not limit the amount of aid entering Gaza and has in the past facilitated the entry of up to 700 aid trucks per day, depending on UN and NGO supply.

00:15:31.000 In addition, Israel is now facilitating daily humanitarian pauses, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and aid airdrops.

00:15:38.000 UN-led aid distribution has stagnated after an initial increase, and the vast majority of it is diverted by Hamas.

00:15:43.000 We talked last week about how the UN is openly saying they will not allow the IDF to help them get the aid into the Gaza Strip because they want it stolen by Hamas. 0.85

00:15:51.000 It is a thing they desire.

00:15:54.000 A growing number of aid partners are trying alternative methods of aid distribution to civilians instead of relying solely on the UN mechanism.

00:16:00.000 The main obstacle is not aid entry, says Huckabee, but distribution within Gaza.

00:16:04.000 The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is the only mechanism successfully ensuring aid is not diverted by Hamas.

00:16:09.000 So how much aid went into Gaza over the last week?

00:16:12.000 23,000 tons of aid, 23,000 tons of aid.

00:16:17.000 Now, a rough estimate for how much aid it would require to feed 2 million people in Gaza every day is about 1,200 tons of aid, 1,300 tons of aid.

00:16:27.000 So what that means is that they shipped in the last week more than double, almost triple the amounts of aid that would be necessary to support the entirety of the Gaza Strip every day.

00:16:38.000 Where did it all go?

00:16:39.000 Hamas was stealing an enormous amount of it. 0.72

00:16:41.000 1,200 trucks entered Gaza over the past week, and Israel has been holding off on military action day to day in order to facilitate the entry of that aid.

00:16:52.000 It is pretty clear what is happening here, which is that Gaza is not in a state of overt famine, except that Hamas keeps stealing the aid.

00:17:02.000 Whatever famine is being caused in Gaza is being caused by Hamas. 0.99

00:17:06.000 Hamas is not trying to bring aid into the people.

00:17:08.000 Hamas is desperately attempting to avoid that.

00:17:10.000 They're shooting people who show up in lines for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

00:17:14.000 They shoot rockets at the aid stations that Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has set up.

00:17:19.000 Here, for example, is a Gazan telling MSNBC the dirty part, which is that Hamas actually would like a famine.

00:17:26.000 Hamas wanted to see the deterioration of the humanitarian conditions in Gaza, knowing full well that this may be the only hope for drawing in the international community, for producing horrendous imagery that showcase the war as being a humanitarian catastrophe and therefore hoping to bring about a rapid end to the war that it started and it has an ultimate responsibility to end.

00:17:56.000 I think for sure Hamas has had a role in siphoning off plenty of the aid going in.

00:18:04.000 Look, obviously, as a father, as a human being, when I look at pictures of anybody suffering, particularly children, you have to be very concerned and upset about that.

00:18:13.000 It is very upsetting.

00:18:14.000 I don't know how a human being can look at pictures in Gaza and not be upset by those pictures.

00:18:17.000 The question is, who is to blame for that suffering and how does that suffering stop?

00:18:22.000 And the answer to the former question is Hamas.

00:18:24.000 And the answer to the latter is that Hamas is no longer in control of either aid distribution or of the Gaza Strip in part or in whole.

00:18:31.000 Obviously, also, if the Europeans continue to support Hamas and do Hamas's work in terms of propaganda to ensure that Hamas never gives up, the suffering only continues, which is Hamas's game. 0.75

00:18:43.000 That is the entire game here.

00:18:45.000 By the way, we know for a fact why Hamas is doing this, because Hamas is winning what it believes to be political victories precisely by starving the people of Gaza.

00:18:55.000 It is a thing that they want to do.

00:18:56.000 They literally came out yesterday and said they will not disarm until a Palestinian state is established with Jerusalem as its capital.

00:19:03.000 Now, they, as a fighting force, have been decimated by Israel.

00:19:06.000 They've been wrecked by Israel, clearly, and yet they believe they have the upper hand in negotiations. 0.96

00:19:11.000 Why?

00:19:12.000 Because they have pushed this propagandistic effort to label Israel as a genocidal nation.

00:19:19.000 And somehow, post-October 7th, after the deadliest attack on Jews since World War II, they are now on the verge of having a bunch of countries declare a Palestinian state with no government, no territory, no borders, and no freedom. 0.99

00:19:32.000 I mean, that's an amazing PR victory by them, reliant on the stupidity and gullibility of a bunch of people who are willing to do Hamas's propaganda work for them. 0.99

00:19:41.000 You know who's saying this? 1.00

00:19:42.000 Hamas. 0.73

00:19:43.000 Here, for the example, is Hamas official Ghazi Hamad saying October 7th actually achieved, achieved what they wanted.

00:19:49.000 Now, we should know, by the way, that there was a ceasefire that had been brokered by the end of July.

00:19:55.000 Steve Witkoff was due to fly to Doha for the signing on July 23rd, according to the Jewish Chronicle.

00:20:01.000 And you know what happened?

00:20:03.000 Hamas ran an op.

00:20:05.000 They ran an op saying that Israel is engaged in mass starvation.

00:20:08.000 A bunch of European countries came out and said they were going to give the Palestinians a state on the basis of that.

00:20:12.000 And then Hamas pulled out of the talks.

00:20:14.000 And so the end of the war was actually prevented by Hamas along with its European allies, which is what they are. 0.98

00:20:22.000 And it's, at best, delightful stooges in the media.

00:20:26.000 Here's Hamas official Ghazi. 0.99

00:20:27.000 Hamad saying, we played them like a fish.

00:20:28.000 7 October, this strong attack was directed to Israel.

00:20:34.000 He's saying the powerful blow that was delivered to Israel on October 7th has yielded three very important historic achievements. 0.99

00:20:41.000 First of all, it brought the Palestinian cause back to censor stage.

00:20:43.000 Why are all these countries recognizing Palestine now?

00:20:48.000 Had any country dared to recognize the state of Palestine prior to October 7th?

00:20:53.000 The overall outcome of October 7th forced the world to open its eyes to the Palestinian cause and to act forcefully in this respect.

00:21:02.000 So they killed their own citizens, 1,200 Israelis, took 250 prisoners.

00:21:07.000 20 are still alive, probably in tunnels under Gaza, being starved, as we'll talk about in a moment.

00:21:13.000 They did this and they achieved what they wanted to achieve because they knew that the left would go for it.

00:21:17.000 They knew the media would fall for it and they'd be able to dredge up extraordinary amounts of ire against Israel online.

00:21:24.000 They knew this.

00:21:25.000 It's why they've strengthened their bargaining position.

00:21:28.000 If they cared about the people of Gaza, they would not be strengthening their bargaining position. 0.72

00:21:31.000 They'd be looking to end the war.

00:21:32.000 And you know who's helping them out?

00:21:34.000 All of their friends in the media, all their friends in the media.

00:21:37.000 Look at the difference in coverage between a photo of a young child in Gaza with cerebral palsy who was blasted out all over the world.

00:21:47.000 We talked about this last week.

00:21:48.000 It's a picture on the front page of the New York Times of a kid named Yusuf Matar, a kid with cerebral palsy.

00:21:57.000 And the New York Times put it on the front page because the kid looked like in horrible physical condition because of the cerebral palsy.

00:22:03.000 He has a younger brother who's standing just off camera who looks totally fine.

00:22:06.000 The New York Times did not run the picture with the younger brother.

00:22:10.000 They ran the picture with the kid with cerebral palsy.

00:22:12.000 Why did they run it?

00:22:13.000 Well, now we know the details.

00:22:14.000 According to Semaphore, last Thursday at 3 p.m., the Times was preparing to run images of Yusuf Matar, a young child in Gaza with cerebral palsy, who is suffering from lack of nourishment, alongside its July 24th story that cited doctors in Gaza finding, quote, an increasing number of their patients are suffering and dying from starvation.

00:22:31.000 And by the way, if you think that there is a chance in hell that if Hamas, for example, and all of the Palestinian propaganda outlets had pictures of hundreds of starving Palestinians, like in skeletal condition and they weren't running on the front pages, you'd be out of your mind.

00:22:49.000 Of course they would be.

00:22:50.000 And you know they would be because the Palestinian propaganda effort is overwhelming and the media have bought into it because it matches all of their priors. 0.93

00:22:57.000 So what happened with this kid?

00:22:59.000 The Times' topmost editors wanted to err on the side of caution.

00:23:02.000 After viewing the photo, according to communications viewed by Semaphore, they worried it might inadvertently call into question the paper's reporting, which said many of the children suffering from hunger did not have pre-existing health issues.

00:23:13.000 Managing editor Mark Lacey said, quote, do we want to use a photo that will be the subject of debate when there's presumably no shortage of images of children who were not malnourished before the war and currently are?

00:23:22.000 Executive editor Joe Khan agreed.

00:23:24.000 The story isn't framed around people with special needs and the lead art really should not do that either.

00:23:28.000 They landed instead on a photo of Mohamed Zakaria Al-Mutawak, an 18-month-old child in Gaza suffering from malnutrition.

00:23:34.000 And they thought that that photo was going to actually do it better.

00:23:38.000 The problem is that actually Amu Tawak also had genetic and other disorders.

00:23:43.000 So they ran that as well.

00:23:45.000 They ran another photo of a kid who had significant health disorders prior to the situation in Gaza.

00:23:53.000 They were desperate to run a photo demonstrating that Israel was starving children.

00:23:58.000 And so they went ahead with photos of kids who had serious other health conditions other than lack of nutrition.

00:24:06.000 I mean, Hamas could always count on its friends in the media.

00:24:09.000 They could always count on their friends in the media.

00:24:11.000 In fact, Hamas can count on its friends in the media so much that last week, very end of last week, Hamas released a video of a hostage that it took during October 7th.

00:24:19.000 His name is Evyatavid.

00:24:21.000 Okay, they released this video, photos of him looking like a prisoner at Auschwitz.

00:24:26.000 That's what he looks like.

00:24:27.000 For those who can't see, he's skeletal, totally starved.

00:24:32.000 If you look at a before and after picture of this guy, he looks totally different.

00:24:35.000 And they forced him to dig his own grave in a tunnel.

00:24:38.000 And then they released the pictures as a way to try and create pressure inside Israel for Israel to essentially end the war without victory.

00:24:45.000 They released those pictures publicly.

00:24:48.000 And in fact, in the video, they actually have a person from Hamas handing him food.

00:24:54.000 And they make the claim that Hamas is living in the same conditions as Evyat Tardavid.

00:24:57.000 There's only one problem.

00:24:58.000 You can see the arm of the person from Hamas, and it is a totally normal, not malnourished arm.

00:25:05.000 Here's the video.

00:25:11.000 He says what I'm doing now is digging in my own grave.

00:25:13.000 The key is from my perspective.

00:25:16.000 Because every day that I'm moving, every time I'm moving, my body is moving.

00:25:23.000 It's more and more and more.

00:25:25.000 From my perspective, it looks like I'm in the way of my blood.

00:25:30.000 I'm walking directly into my grave.

00:25:35.000 This is the grave where I think I'm going to be buried.

00:25:46.000 Time is running out.

00:25:53.000 You're the only ones who can end this.

00:25:55.000 To be released and to be able to sleep in my bed with my family.

00:26:00.000 Okay, they released this.

00:26:02.000 Hamas released this. 0.61

00:26:03.000 Why did they release this?

00:26:04.000 Because they knew that the media would not pick up on it and run with it.

00:26:08.000 The New York Times did not dedicate a front page to that picture of Evyatavid, who, by the way, is, as far as I have seen, maybe the only picture of an adult victim of starvation in the Gaza Strip.

00:26:23.000 Again, you would imagine lots of pictures of adult victims of starvation in the Gaza Strip if Hamas had those to bubble his eyes, except that Israel and the GHF have been handing out thousands of meals, millions of meals over the course of the last couple of months in the Gaza Strip.

00:26:39.000 Okay, so did this run on the front page of the New York Times?

00:26:41.000 Of course not.

00:26:42.000 They ran instead the picture of the Palestinian mom holding the kid with cerebral palsy.

00:26:46.000 That is what they did.

00:26:47.000 And again, they know that their friends in the media will do whatever they can to foster the idea that this is once again a cycle of violence and Israel basically should surrender.

00:26:57.000 Now, I do find it amusing that all of these people keep saying, well, Hamas should just give up the hostages and end the war.

00:27:02.000 Okay, how do you propose to do this?

00:27:05.000 How do you propose to accomplish this?

00:27:07.000 Do you really think that Hamas is going to stop now?

00:27:10.000 They believe they have the upper hand in terms of the politics of the situation.

00:27:14.000 The minute they give up all the hostages, they're dead and they know it.

00:27:18.000 I mean, what do you think is going to happen here?

00:27:21.000 And I think in order to truly understand what Evyatar David, how starved Evyatard is, here is a picture of Evyatar David before.

00:27:30.000 Here's a picture of Evyatar David after.

00:27:32.000 That is a victim of starvation because Hamas is deliberately starving its own hostages.

00:27:38.000 But then you have tweets like this one from Piers Morgan, who has truly turned into the Jerry Springer of low-rent politics.

00:27:44.000 Quote, it's interesting that all the prominent pro-Israeli voices on here who refuse to believe any Gazan casualty numbers published by the Hamas-run Palestinian Health Ministry accept the veracity of hostage pics or videos posted by Hamas without hesitation.

00:27:56.000 I don't know what the hell Piers is trying to say here.

00:27:57.000 Honestly, is he claiming that the pictures put out by Hamas are fake there?

00:28:03.000 Hamas put them out.

00:28:05.000 And if he's saying, why do you only believe the Hamas propaganda videos in which they accidentally expose themselves as opposed to the numbers that they put out that are totally unverified and unverifiable?

00:28:17.000 The answer is very simple.

00:28:19.000 It's an obvious admission against interest.

00:28:22.000 There's a principle in criminal law.

00:28:25.000 That principle is that if somebody makes what's called an admission against interest, it is admissible in court in a way that admissions against interest are not.

00:28:35.000 In other words, people don't tend to tell on themselves.

00:28:38.000 So if Hamas is putting out one line of attack saying that Israel is killing hundreds of people at aid stations every day, that serves their purposes. 1.00

00:28:45.000 And if they put out a video that is designed to stoke hatred in Israel by people against their government, which is what this was, and it accidentally instead shows that they are starving hostages, that is an accidental admission against interest.

00:28:57.000 So yes, I believe them when they put out a video of the hostage whose name we know of them starving this person to death.

00:29:06.000 Yes, I believe them when they do that.

00:29:07.000 And no, I don't believe them when they put out statistics that there's no way of verifying five minutes after an event occurs when we know they lie repeatedly.

00:29:16.000 But again, all this is part of a broader propagandistic idea and it is bought into by the left across the globe.

00:29:23.000 I mean, truly across the globe, which is an amazing thing and speaks to sort of the underlying dynamic on the left, which is always and forever to declare that unsuccessful third world regimes like Hamas are somehow victimized by their colonial overlords or some such nonsense.

00:29:40.000 Now, how's this actually going to come to an end?

00:29:43.000 According to the New York Times, there's now a discussion between the Israeli government and the American government.

00:29:48.000 They're going to try and push for a comprehensive deal.

00:29:51.000 Hamas does not want to make a deal, obviously.

00:29:53.000 So basically, Israel and the United States may say that there will be no more piecemeal deals.

00:29:59.000 Everybody comes out alive, Hamas goes into exile, or Israel goes to the end.

00:30:04.000 Okay, which, by the way, should have been the situation in the first place.

00:30:07.000 They should set up humanitarian enclaves in Rafah and a couple other places around the Gaza Strip.

00:30:11.000 They should make sure that the aid to those places is plentiful.

00:30:14.000 They should use face recognition technology to try and prevent people associated with Hamas from getting into those enclaves.

00:30:19.000 This would be basic counterinsurgency strategy.

00:30:22.000 And then they should, and then they should essentially clean up the rest of the Gaza Strip. 1.00

00:30:25.000 They should give people a particular period of time to get to those humanitarian aid areas that are protected by the IDF and other people on the ground, in which aid is controlled, not by the United Nations, which is, again, an awful, evil organization, but instead is controlled by an organization that does not wish to hand the aid to Hamas. 0.80

00:30:44.000 And then after giving people enough time to get to the enclaves, Israel should essentially start annexing one mile per day, one square mile per day for every day that Hamas does not surrender in the rest of the Gaza Strip because there's nothing else that Hamas understands at this point. 0.56

00:30:57.000 If Israel would like to get back its hostages, that is the only way of doing this. 0.93

00:31:01.000 All righty, coming up, we'll get into the latest on the economy.

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00:33:18.000 Okay, meanwhile, the other big news over the course of the weekend was that President Trump made the unique move of firing his Bureau of Labor Statistics chief after a weak jobs report.

00:33:29.000 So we talked about this jobs report that came out last week that showed not only weak job growth, that 73,000 jobs estimated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but also showed a revision downward of a couple hundred thousand jobs, demonstrating that actually over the last three months, there's basically been almost no job growth in the United States.

00:33:47.000 In a social media post, President Trump said that Erica McIntarfer, the BLS commissioner, would be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified, asserting that the government's jobs numbers have been manipulated for political purposes.

00:34:00.000 So first of all, to understand why jobs number change, you actually have to understand exactly what job numbers do and how they are calculated in the first place.

00:34:10.000 So according to News Nation, how are those jobs numbers calculated?

00:34:13.000 Well, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases an estimate of the change in payroll employment for the previous month.

00:34:18.000 That estimate is based on a monthly survey of about 560,000 businesses selected to represent millions of employers nationwide.

00:34:26.000 So businesses report the total number of people who worked or received paid during that pay period, including the 12th of the month.

00:34:32.000 So they produce an initial estimate for the overall economy based on job gains or losses at the businesses that submitted their data.

00:34:39.000 But many businesses haven't finalized their payroll data in time for the initial release, meaning the early numbers often represent an incomplete snapshot.

00:34:46.000 So then they give a revision.

00:34:49.000 So it is pretty consistent that there is either upward or downward revisions in the BLS numbers.

00:34:56.000 Not a giant shock.

00:34:57.000 Here, for example, is a chart showing jobs revisions since 1980.

00:35:02.000 And you can see jobs revisions happen all the time.

00:35:04.000 You have some outliers.

00:35:05.000 There was big outlier in 2006.

00:35:08.000 There was a gigantic outlier in 2009 or so.

00:35:12.000 Big outlier last year.

00:35:14.000 Those are those red dots, gigantic outliers.

00:35:18.000 But in reality, the revisions are pretty regular.

00:35:21.000 And it doesn't look like, you just look at a rural level at this chart.

00:35:24.000 It doesn't look like they've gotten significantly worse over time.

00:35:27.000 The revisions.

00:35:28.000 And so this raises the question of, was this jobs report rigged?

00:35:31.000 Why is President Trump going off on the jobs report?

00:35:35.000 According to Alicia Finley reporting for the Wall Street Journal, the BLS commissioner has traditionally been a nonpartisan post.

00:35:42.000 The Senate confirmed Ms. McIntarfer 36 to 8 last year.

00:35:48.000 But Trump asserted without evidence that McIntarfer faked the jobs numbers before the election to try to boost Kamala's chances of victory and revise the job numbers after the election by 818,000.

00:35:58.000 Well, the truth, says Finley, is the jobs numbers have become more volatile in recent years because of declining business survey response rates.

00:36:05.000 It's why polls have been not particularly great because response rates are down.

00:36:09.000 The Bureau surveys 631,000 workplaces by a variety of media, including phone, web, even fax.

00:36:14.000 Many businesses don't respond every month.

00:36:16.000 The BLS tries to collect the data and then revises its findings over the next two months.

00:36:20.000 The survey's overall response rate has declined to 43% from 60% before the pandemic.

00:36:25.000 Small businesses are less likely than bigger ones to respond, especially in the first month.

00:36:29.000 And the survey doesn't fully account for business births and deaths either.

00:36:34.000 So is it true that there was some sort of gigantic screw-up here?

00:36:40.000 That actually the person who's responsible is the person who's the head of BLS.

00:36:44.000 Probably not.

00:36:46.000 It doesn't seem like there's a lot of evidence to the idea that this lady in particular is responsible for the bad job numbers here. 0.74

00:36:54.000 The White House points out that there have been a lot of job revisions over the course of the last couple of years.

00:37:00.000 Quote, a lengthy history of inaccuracies and incompetence by Erica McIntarfer, the former Biden-appointed commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has completely eroded public trust and government agency charged with disseminating key data used by policymakers and businesses to make consequential decisions.

00:37:15.000 This is what the White House has to say about all of this.

00:37:19.000 Now, is that true?

00:37:22.000 Is that, well, here's the reality of the situation.

00:37:26.000 Either the economy is healthy and in good shape, or it is slowing down.

00:37:30.000 One of those two things are true. 0.51

00:37:32.000 And one of the big mistakes that politicians very often make is trying to talk past how people are feeling about the economy.

00:37:37.000 It's a mistake Joe Biden made.

00:37:39.000 As inflation was mounting, you saw his public officials out there saying the American people just didn't understand inflation was transitory.

00:37:45.000 And it turns out that was wrong.

00:37:47.000 Hiring the head of BLS isn't actually going to fix this problem.

00:37:50.000 In fact, in many ways, it undermines President Trump because let's say that the job numbers go up next month after he replaces the head of the BLS.

00:37:59.000 Is that going to be a more trustworthy number?

00:38:01.000 How many people are going to say that that person now has a political incentive to please President Trump by creating a number that he likes?

00:38:09.000 This is the catch-22.

00:38:11.000 If President Trump thought that Erica McIntarford did a bad job last year, he should have fired her when he came in. 0.99

00:38:16.000 Firing her after a bad jobs report makes it look as though he's just shooting the messenger at this point.

00:38:21.000 And that, of course, is what Democrats are now claiming.

00:38:24.000 And I don't see a reason for this sort of political liability.

00:38:27.000 It doesn't make a lot of, doesn't make a lot of sense.

00:38:29.000 Here's Governor Jared Polis of Colorado trying to claim that President Trump is shooting the messenger here.

00:38:35.000 This is an example of shooting the messenger.

00:38:38.000 Look, there's been times, and we have a state labor statistics department.

00:38:41.000 Yes, there's been times when there's been big revisions in that space and information that's submitted by the private sector, by others.

00:38:47.000 It's compilated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

00:38:50.000 The president didn't like what he saw.

00:38:52.000 And rather than look in the mirror and say, guess what?

00:38:55.000 My tariffs and tax increases are causing this.

00:38:58.000 And we're already seeing the devastating impact across the country.

00:39:02.000 Rather than doing that, he just said, I don't like the person who tabulated the information and it's not going to change the reality.

00:39:10.000 William W. Beach is the former commissioner of labor statistics and former head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

00:39:16.000 And he says, listen, these revisions, they happen pretty much every year.

00:39:19.000 There's nothing new here.

00:39:20.000 We always revise the number.

00:39:22.000 Every year, we revise the numbers.

00:39:24.000 When I was commissioner, we had a 500,000 job revision during President Trump's first term.

00:39:30.000 And why do we do that?

00:39:31.000 Because firms are created or firms go out of business, and we don't really know that during the course of the year until we reconcile against a real full count of all the businesses.

00:39:46.000 We do that once a year.

00:39:47.000 Once we do the reconciliation, like reconciling your checkbook, you find out whether you've got as much money or you have less.

00:39:56.000 Okay, so again, is this likely to make President Trump's economy stronger or weaker?

00:40:01.000 Uncertainty leads to weaker economies.

00:40:04.000 A belief that you're not getting straight data is also a problem.

00:40:07.000 The National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett, who may in fact be the next chair of the Federal Reserve, he's definitely up for it.

00:40:13.000 He was trying to defend presidents' actions over on Fox.

00:40:16.000 Here's what he had to say.

00:40:17.000 Look, the fact is that when the data are unreliable, when they keep being revised all over the place, then there are going to be people that wonder if there's a partisan pattern in the data.

00:40:28.000 Okay, well, I mean, that may well be the truth, but you know what else is going to make people believe there's a partisan bent to the data is when you fire the head of BLS and try to replace that person after a bad jobs report.

00:40:39.000 You'll notice that President Trump didn't fire this person after a good jobs report or a revision up, right?

00:40:45.000 If the idea here is that you're trying to ensure the veracity of the statistics, then an error in the other direction would be just as bad in terms of just ensuring that people believe the stats.

00:40:56.000 So do I think this is a smart political move?

00:40:58.000 I do not.

00:40:58.000 I do not think that it's a smart political move by the president because again, it is undermining people's belief in the fairness of the stats.

00:41:06.000 Now, again, you can say that the stats are flawed and you can point out that every stat should be taken with a grain of salt, which of course is, I think, a totally fair point.

00:41:13.000 I think President Trump could say, listen, they got it wrong one direction.

00:41:16.000 Maybe they got it wrong the other direction next month.

00:41:18.000 Maybe it's not 73,000.

00:41:19.000 Maybe we actually picked up a couple hundred thousand jobs.

00:41:22.000 Instead, firing this person, it just doesn't seem like particularly beneficial politics for the president of the United States.

00:41:29.000 Meanwhile, speaking of economic uncertainty, the White House released a bunch of new tariff rates for dozens of countries on Friday.

00:41:36.000 Those tariff rates range from 15% for Iceland and Israel to 30% for South Africa to 39% for Switzerland and 20% for Taiwan and Vietnam.

00:41:45.000 These are major changes, okay?

00:41:46.000 Trying to pretend that this is not a massive increase in tariff rates.

00:41:51.000 Obviously, it is a massive increase in tariff rates.

00:41:54.000 Now, is that going to kick into inflation?

00:41:56.000 We'll get into Federal Reserve policy here in a second, because if, as Milton Friedman has said, and as I've quoted many times, inflation is anywhere and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, what you would expect is a temporary increase in prices followed by a drop in demand, followed by a decrease in prices.

00:42:11.000 That is normally what happens when there is a bad piece of policy.

00:42:15.000 The prices go up because of restriction in supply.

00:42:17.000 And then people are like, well, I don't want to buy it at that price.

00:42:20.000 And then the demand goes down.

00:42:21.000 And then the prices go down to adjust to lack of demand.

00:42:24.000 That is actually what happened during the Great Depression.

00:42:26.000 There's a price spiral that was partially brought on by tariffs.

00:42:30.000 It wasn't like there was a massive amount of inflation.

00:42:32.000 There was actually a price decrease and a massive amount of deflation happened in the early years of the Great Depression, partially due to tariff policy, actually.

00:42:41.000 Okay, so what actually is happening here?

00:42:43.000 Well, the problem here is not just the tariffs.

00:42:45.000 It is also the uncertainty associated with the tariffs.

00:42:48.000 Here is Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan.

00:42:50.000 He says, listen, a lot of this slowdown is just nobody knows what the hell is going on.

00:42:56.000 They don't think they're going to move.

00:42:58.000 Now, the market says they're going to move in September, maybe twice this year.

00:43:01.000 The market was at seven times one point this year.

00:43:03.000 Now they're down to two.

00:43:04.000 Then they're down to one.

00:43:05.000 Now they're up to two.

00:43:06.000 This is going to move around.

00:43:07.000 But the reality is two things people should really keep in focus.

00:43:09.000 One is until the inflation is out of the system, the Fed's going to be a little very careful.

00:43:14.000 And that's what they said.

00:43:15.000 And then secondly, the rate we're going to go to is a rate that is more normal than pre-global financial crisis, more of a 3%, 3.5% rate, which actually means the American economy is probably functioning better, frankly.

00:43:28.000 Okay, so we are going to see exactly whether that is true or not.

00:43:31.000 Jameson Greer is our U.S. trade representative, and he says there may be more coming.

00:43:36.000 He says that August 12th, there's the possibility of a tariff snap back.

00:43:40.000 Here he was on CBS with Margaret Brennan.

00:43:44.000 There's an August 12th deadline.

00:43:46.000 And if that deadline is not met, you have said tariff levels could snap back to above 80%.

00:43:52.000 Is that deadline going to slide?

00:43:54.000 So that's what's under discussion right now.

00:43:56.000 I would say that our conversations with the Chinese have been very positive.

00:44:00.000 We have discussions at the staff level, at my level.

00:44:04.000 President Xi and President Trump have had conversations.

00:44:07.000 They said that it's sliding.

00:44:09.000 The Chinese said it's sliding.

00:44:11.000 That's something we're working toward.

00:44:12.000 That's what we talked about.

00:44:13.000 They're not there yet.

00:44:14.000 And so they want to do that.

00:44:15.000 We're working on some technical issues, and we're talking to the president about it.

00:44:20.000 I think it's going in a positive direction.

00:44:22.000 I'm not going to get ahead of the president, but I don't think anyone wants to see those tariffs snap back to 84%.

00:44:30.000 Okay, so I think he's right about that.

00:44:33.000 I think that he is looking, presumably, for an off-ramp President Trump here.

00:44:38.000 With that said, this amount of volatility in the tariff economy, unpredictability is going to lead to investors slowing down.

00:44:47.000 There's certain areas where it's not going to slow down, like AI.

00:44:50.000 We know that AI, the money is just going to keep dumping into AI.

00:44:52.000 That is going to keep happening until presumably the bubble bursts.

00:44:56.000 Because right now, the amount being poured into AI is not being met by productivity gains on the other end concomitant with the investment.

00:45:02.000 And somebody's going to win the AI race.

00:45:04.000 Open AI will beat Anthropic or Meta will beat both of them.

00:45:08.000 And then there will be losers and those losers will fall out of step.

00:45:12.000 All of that could happen.

00:45:13.000 One thing is very, very clear.

00:45:15.000 If President Trump wants a booming economy at this point, he already has deregulation.

00:45:20.000 He already has the one big beautiful bill.

00:45:22.000 He needs some sense of predictability and solidity in the American economy.

00:45:26.000 And that jobs report that came out last week is a warning sign.

00:45:30.000 It is a red warning sign saying that you might want to slow up on the tariff war if it is going to undermine demand.

00:45:38.000 And maybe the Federal Reserve does what President Trump wants, and maybe it's the right thing to do to lower those interest rates finally and increase the ability of people to borrow at lower rates.

00:45:49.000 But the big problem is going to be where do people put that money?

00:45:52.000 Because right now we have a bunch of speculative bubbles all over the place.

00:45:54.000 You can kind of sense these bubbles everywhere, from the real estate market to the crypto markets to things like AI.

00:46:01.000 And while I don't think that we are on the verge of those bubbles bursting, I don't think that a recession is going to just pop upon us.

00:46:08.000 Bubbles burst suddenly.

00:46:09.000 It's not as though they are gradual.

00:46:11.000 They just sort of happen.

00:46:13.000 We are in still a very risky economic time and treating it as though we are not, I think, is a mistake and shooting the head of the BLS in order to blame her for the fact that these factors are cross-cutting and existing.

00:46:27.000 That, I think, is a mistake.

00:46:29.000 Meanwhile, an executive branch ethics watchdog has now opened an investigation into Jack Smith.

00:46:33.000 You'll remember Jack Smith.

00:46:34.000 He became, for just a moment in time, a person for whom the left lit vote of candles is after Dr. Anthony Fauci and Anthony and Robert Mueller.

00:46:43.000 There are a bunch of figures that the left has really worshipped for a very long time.

00:46:47.000 Jack Smith was a brief object of worship for the left because he was going after President Trump with a wide variety of lawsuits.

00:46:54.000 Well, now the Office of Special Counsel has confirmed that it is opening a probe into Smith for possible violations of the Hatch Act, which is a federal law that bans partisan political activity by certain government employees.

00:47:05.000 That inquiry comes at the request of Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who on Wednesday asked the agency to scrutinize whether Smith's actions were designed to skew the 2024 election in favor of then President Joe Biden and his then vice president Kamala Harris.

00:47:16.000 Cotton accuses Smith of trying to influence the election by rushing criminal proceedings.

00:47:20.000 Now, you'll remember that Smith did, in fact, attempt to accelerate his criminal cases against President Trump prior to the election.

00:47:28.000 He wanted to ensure that something got adjudicated before the election actually happened.

00:47:34.000 Smith's team brought two federal cases against Trump in the lead up to the November election, one alleging Trump unlawfully retained classified documents, another over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election laws.

00:47:44.000 Both were charged in 2023 ahead of the 2024 election.

00:47:47.000 Neither case went to trial.

00:47:49.000 Smith dropped them after Trump was reelected.

00:47:53.000 Smith and then Attorney General Merrick Garland have repeatedly said politics played no role in the investigations.

00:47:58.000 The probe is unusual because the steepest punishment for violation of the Hatch Act typically is dismissal from the federal government.

00:48:03.000 Now, the Hatch Act is very rarely invoked.

00:48:06.000 People online like the Hatch Act a lot.

00:48:08.000 Our sort of online lawyering club loves the Hatch Acts.

00:48:11.000 The Hatch Act's like, you're not allowed to do political activity if you are in politics, if you're in a nonpartisan position, no politics.

00:48:18.000 And it turns out that people do that all the time.

00:48:21.000 It's possible the Hatch Act is actually a violation of the First Amendment.

00:48:23.000 There's all sorts of questions about the utility of the Hatch Act.

00:48:27.000 However, it does signal that the President of the United States is unwilling to allow Democrats and Democrat appointees to be let off the hook for the politicization of everything from the DOJ to the Intel divisions.

00:48:41.000 Speaking of which, CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed over the weekend on Fox and Maria Bardaromo that John Brennan, James Comey, and Hillary Clinton might actually face indictment.

00:48:51.000 So what I think I hear you saying is there is still an opportunity for indictments, potential prosecutions, accountability from those people who may have lied under oath, like John Brennan, James Comey, and perhaps Hillary Clinton.

00:49:07.000 Well, that's why I've made the referrals that I have.

00:49:10.000 DNI Gabbard has made referrals and why we're going to continue to share the intelligence that would support the ability of our Department of Justice to make fair and just bring fair and just claims against those who have perpetrated this hoax against the American people and this stain on our country.

00:49:29.000 Okay, so we'll find out whether that happens or not.

00:49:32.000 Certainly, if the evidence is there, prosecutions should be in order.

00:49:35.000 Meanwhile, director of the FBAC Cash Patel put out a tweet over the weekend, quote, in 2017, 2018, I proved the Steele dossier was fictitious intelligence weaponized by corrupt FBI officials to deceive a federal judge, an unlawfully spy on then presidential candidate Trump's campaign, all paid for by his opponent.

00:49:50.000 The media called me a liar.

00:49:52.000 Now, says Cash Patel, I'm the FBI director, we just uncovered burn bags filled with hidden Russia gate files, including the Durham manners and declassified them.

00:49:59.000 Once again, I released the prior FBI's own documents and exposed the truth.

00:50:03.000 The same media is calling me a liar again.

00:50:04.000 Maybe this FBI will release more docs directly from FBI headquarters so we can see who is lying.

00:50:09.000 Wouldn't want to deprive the fake news of more bogus Pulitzers. 0.98

00:50:13.000 So we'll find out what else he has to release.

00:50:15.000 It sounds like there is more that is going to drop in the very near future.

00:50:19.000 Okay, meanwhile, Chuck Schumer and his Democrats are still holding up a bunch of President Trump's nominees.

00:50:25.000 According to Politico, GOP's internal frustration in the Senate has been building over the past month.

00:50:30.000 Many Republicans are annoyed about the lack of voice votes for President Trump's nominees.

00:50:33.000 Senate Majority Leader John Thune noted in a floor address last Monday that at the same point in his tenure, President Biden had gotten dozens of nominees approved without having to call individual roll call votes.

00:50:43.000 Democrats have basically been utilizing a wide variety of methodologies in order to hold up President Trump's even intermediate or low-level nominees.

00:50:52.000 Thun added in an interview on Tuesday, quote, pressure is going to grow to take steps to expedite this process if Dems don't start playing ball soon.

00:50:59.000 It's going to start coming from every direction.

00:51:01.000 There are roughly 150 nominees currently awaiting action on the Senate floor.

00:51:05.000 Democrats are forcing Republicans to eat up floor time to overcome procedural hurdle nominees on even mid-level picks.

00:51:11.000 Senator Dick Durbin, of course, says, quote, Republicans would like to return to those golden years when there were groups of nominees considered, but we weren't given that courtesy by them.

00:51:19.000 We're kind of stuck where we are.

00:51:21.000 Okay, so the question, of course, is if that's the case, then why were so many more nominees approved by Republicans while Joe Biden was president of the United States?

00:51:33.000 Chuck Schumer is trying to claim that it's because President Trump's nominees are historically bad.

00:51:38.000 Let me say, historically bad nominees deserve historic levels of scrutiny.

00:51:45.000 I saw the majority leader bring out a chart again today comparing the situation right now to past nominees from past administrations.

00:51:52.000 What he fails to mention is that we have never seen nominees as flawed, as compromised, as unqualified as we have right now.

00:52:02.000 And the Republican senators know that.

00:52:04.000 So once again, historically bad nominees deserve a historical level of scrutiny.

00:52:12.000 Well, I mean, that's not true at all.

00:52:14.000 I mean, Joe Biden tried to, as you will recall, appoint Nira Tandon to the head of the Director of Office of Management and Budget.

00:52:22.000 And she had attacked Republicans.

00:52:23.000 She had attacked even some Democratic senators. 1.00

00:52:25.000 Even Senator Joe Manchin had to step in when he was a Democrat and kill that Particular nomination. 0.99

00:52:32.000 Nancy Abudu was nominated to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. 0.62

00:52:35.000 She was director at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

00:52:39.000 Her nomination was obviously quite controversial.

00:52:42.000 She was nominated to the 11th circuit.

00:52:45.000 There are a bunch of other nominees that Joe Biden put forward who were quite controversial.

00:52:48.000 So that's just nonsense.

00:52:50.000 This is Chuck Schumer again playing this game where if he holds up Republican nominees, then that is just him being principled.

00:52:56.000 But if Republicans hold up nominees, then it's a threat to democracy or some such.

00:52:59.000 Senator Tom Cotton commented on this.

00:53:01.000 He says, listen, we can also do this the hard way.

00:53:05.000 It's a Democrat's choice. 0.73

00:53:06.000 They have a third choice.

00:53:08.000 They could return to historical precedent.

00:53:12.000 They could agree to voice vote today in the next few minutes.

00:53:19.000 More than 150 nominees at this point, most of whom came out of our committee on a bipartisan basis.

00:53:27.000 Many of whom are nominated to offices that have literally never had a recorded vote on the floor of the United States Senate.

00:53:42.000 The question is up to the Democrats.

00:53:43.000 Do you want to do this the easy way or do you want to do it the hard way?

00:53:47.000 So what are Democrats actually doing?

00:53:49.000 It's not about the nominees.

00:53:50.000 What Democrats are actually doing is, according to Fox News, they are attempting to leverage Republicans into stopping future recision packages.

00:53:57.000 Those, of course, are the things done where the White House says we don't want to spend a certain amount of money.

00:54:01.000 And then Congress essentially passes a bill by a pure majority vote saying we are not going to force you to spend a given amount of money.

00:54:09.000 President Trump doesn't want any of that.

00:54:12.000 He put out a post on Saturday on Truth Social, quote, praising Republicans for fighting over the weekend and far beyond, if necessary, in order to get my appointments approved and on their way to helping us make America great again.

00:54:24.000 He said, Senator Cry and Chuck Schumer is demanding over $1 billion in order to approve a small number of our highly qualified nominees who should right now be helping us to run our country.

00:54:32.000 The demand is egregious and unprecedented and would be embarrassing to the Republican Party if it were accepted.

00:54:37.000 It's political extortion by any other name. 1.00

00:54:39.000 Tell Schumer, who's under tremendous political pressure from within his own party, the radical left lunatics, to go to hell. 1.00

00:54:44.000 Do not accept the offer. 0.99

00:54:45.000 Go home and explain to your constituents what bad people the Democrats are and what great jobs the Republicans are doing and have done for our country.

00:54:52.000 Have a great recess and make America great.

00:54:54.000 Again, not one of Trump's nominees has gotten a voice vote or gone through unanimous consent.

00:54:59.000 At this point, four years ago, 49 of President Biden's picks had already been confirmed by voice votes.

00:55:06.000 So according to Senator Mark Wynn Mullen of Oklahoma, he says the Republicans have a few options.

00:55:11.000 One, they could reach a deal with the Democrats.

00:55:12.000 Two, they could adjourn the Senate and give the president runway for recess appointments, which appears to be what they're going to do.

00:55:17.000 And finally, a rules change package in which Republicans consider the nuclear option.

00:55:21.000 Basically, they go to the Senate parliamentarian and they ask for a ruling that by pure majority vote, they can just push through these nominees without any sort of obstruction by Democrats.

00:55:31.000 So that's still on the table as well.

00:55:33.000 Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, he says, listen, we are getting some of Trump's nominees through.

00:55:38.000 We've got a great start, but Democrats are holding up the process for sure.

00:55:43.000 But I want to emphasize, despite Chuck Schumer's trying to slow things down, we've had an incredible first seven months under President Trump.

00:55:50.000 We've had 11 pieces of major legislation that the president signed.

00:55:53.000 We've repealed 16 Biden rules as well, 125 nominees, but the Democrats are not following suit at all.

00:56:01.000 They're doing everything they can to obstruct us.

00:56:05.000 Well, it will be fascinating to see what Republicans do next.

00:56:08.000 They should hold Democrats' feet to the fire on all of this. 0.82

00:56:11.000 Meanwhile, we have updates on that horrifying video last week of a white man being pummeled by a group of black young men. 0.91

00:56:21.000 And then a white woman steps in and she gets absolutely clocked in the face by a young black man. 0.86

00:56:27.000 And this, of course, went viral online.

00:56:28.000 And it raised the question that we briefly discussed on the show: if the races were reversed, wouldn't that have been a national story?

00:56:33.000 The answer, of course, is 100%.

00:56:35.000 It definitely would have.

00:56:36.000 Well, now she's speaking out.

00:56:39.000 Here she was.

00:56:40.000 Her name is Holly, apparently. 0.99

00:56:42.000 She is a single mom, and she's thanking people for their support.

00:56:45.000 As you can see, I mean, her face is still deeply bruised.

00:56:48.000 I mean, there's a person who got pretty hurt.

00:56:50.000 I just want to say thank you so much to everyone for all of the love and support.

00:56:58.000 It is very humbling that you have set your prayers, your blessings.

00:57:05.000 It's definitely what's keeping me going.

00:57:08.000 And you have just brought back faith and humanity.

00:57:15.000 So God bless you all.

00:57:17.000 Thank you.

00:57:20.000 I appreciate everything that you're doing for me and my family.

00:57:27.000 It's been very, very hard.

00:57:29.000 And I'm still recovering.

00:57:31.000 I still have a very bad brain trauma.

00:57:38.000 Thank you.

00:57:39.000 Thank you, everyone.

00:57:42.000 So one of the alleged assailants is 34, claimed he was called racial spurs and spat on the lead up to the beatdown.

00:57:50.000 Well, of the woman, I mean, you can see that on tape.

00:57:53.000 But I mean, let's assume for the sake of argument that the N-word was used by the white guy or even by the woman who was punched in the face.

00:58:02.000 So when I say so, I don't mean they did something okay.

00:58:06.000 It's not okay to use the N-word. 0.99

00:58:07.000 But the punishment for using the N-word in the United States of America is not you get your ass kicked by an entire group of people. 0.98

00:58:12.000 That is not how this typically works while people stand around filming and dancing and cheering. 0.96

00:58:17.000 Words are not to be met with violence.

00:58:19.000 This is one of the typical rules of a civilized society.

00:58:22.000 The monopoly of violence is supposed to be held by the police or to be used in self-defense.

00:58:29.000 Apparently, according to the police, one of the women who was involved in this conflagration interjected herself into a brawl on the street.

00:58:40.000 Family members, according to the New York Post, of the alleged assailants have since attempted to make the street rampage into a racial issue, claiming the only reason it drew so much attention and outrage was because of the skin color of those involved.

00:58:50.000 Okay, like, I mean, yes.

00:58:52.000 I mean, that's obviously true in the sense that if this were a bunch of black people beating up a black person, it wouldn't receive a lot of attention. 0.93

00:58:58.000 But the point is, until social media, a bunch of black people beating up a white person would not have received a lot of attention and still has not nationally. 0.91

00:59:06.000 The real question here is about the legacy media coverage, because the question is not if a bunch of white people beat up a white person, would it make news? 0.70

00:59:11.000 The answer is no. 0.98

00:59:12.000 If a bunch of black people beat up a black person, is it news? 1.00

00:59:14.000 The answer is no. 1.00

00:59:15.000 If a bunch of white people beat up a black person, is it news? 0.98

00:59:18.000 Yes, for months on end in the legacy media. 0.99

00:59:23.000 And if a bunch of black people beat up a white person, it makes news on X, but pretty much nowhere else. 0.74

00:59:29.000 I have yet to see an enormous amount of media coverage of this particular incident from, say, the New York Times. 0.96

00:59:37.000 I'm waiting to see it.

00:59:40.000 I've yet, it's a mystery.

00:59:42.000 I don't know where it went.

00:59:43.000 Meanwhile, Ken Cober, the president of the Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police, spoke to the Daily Wire about this.

00:59:50.000 And he slammed elected city leaders over allegations many have made against the victims of the mob attack on July 26th.

00:59:56.000 He said, quote, I speak to our investigators probably every 12 hours.

00:59:59.000 There's been absolutely zero evidence so far that suggests these victims caused this.

01:00:03.000 I mean, they've looked at video evidence, they've done interviews, nothing suggests these victims were the ones that started this mob attack.

01:00:09.000 After videos of the mob attack began circulating online, Cincinnati City Council President Pro Tem Victoria Parks wrote a Facebook comment saying the victims, quote, begged for that beatdown.

01:00:18.000 I am grateful for the whole story, which is insane.

01:00:22.000 Vice Mayor Jan Michelle Kearney said, quote, let us be clear, we do not condone violence.

01:00:26.000 We condemn the violent actions of the instigators of the fight, as well as the violent actions of those who responded to the provocation.

01:00:32.000 Opportunists are trying to use this incident as a way to divide us racially and politically and cast our great city in a false and negative light.

01:00:38.000 Cobra said, quote, I think a lot of it is pandering to their constituents.

01:00:42.000 They do it in the face of what the investigation says.

01:00:44.000 These investigators have met with city officials, explained to them, here's the evidence we have.

01:00:48.000 And they just snub their nose at that.

01:00:49.000 Quite honestly, it's pretty disgusting.

01:00:52.000 Now, apparently, the city's police force, according to Daily Wire, has operated understaffed by roughly 20%.

01:00:59.000 Republican Senator Berry Moreno of Ohio ripped into Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Peraval last week after the mayor's response to the attack.

01:01:07.000 He said, nice words don't mean anything unless you have actual actions in order to improve policing in Cincinnati.

01:01:15.000 So, again, the fact that this is turned into a sort of apparent racial defense, racialist defense by some members of Cincinnati government is totally insane, but indicative of where we are politically.

01:01:27.000 Okay, meanwhile, in foreign policy news, Dmitry Medvedev, who is the deputy chair of the Security Council of the Russian Federation and was for just a brief moment a Potemkin president of Russia before Vladimir Putin decided to get rid of the facade and just do what he wanted.

01:01:46.000 He had been threatening nuclear action based on American support for Ukraine and NATO support for Ukraine.

01:01:52.000 And he had threatened the possibility of nuclear action.

01:01:55.000 He put out a tweet, quote, Trump's playing the ultimate game with Russia.

01:01:57.000 50 days or 10, he should remember two things.

01:01:59.000 Russia isn't Israel or even Iran.

01:02:01.000 Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step toward war, not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country.

01:02:06.000 Don't go down the sleepy Joe Road.

01:02:09.000 Well, President Trump responded to that by positioning two nuclear submarines closer to Russia in response to the recent comments.

01:02:18.000 He said, quote, based on the highly provocative statements of the former president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the deputy chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I've ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that.

01:02:34.000 The U.S. does have strategic submarines at sea that carry nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.

01:02:38.000 But the bottom line here is that this is obviously President Trump backing the Russians off, saying, listen, you guys really think you're going to go to nuclear war at the United States?

01:02:47.000 Really?

01:02:47.000 That is a thing that you're threatening?

01:02:49.000 Because President Trump said there's an ultimatum on sanctions based on your behavior in Ukraine.

01:02:54.000 Good luck with that. 1.00

01:02:54.000 Playing chicken with the president of the United States when it comes to foreign policy is typically a very stupid game to play. 1.00

01:03:01.000 All righty, folks, the show is continuing for members right now. 0.99

01:03:03.000 We're going to jump into the Vaunted Ben Shapiro show mailbag.

01:03:06.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

01:03:07.000 If you're not a member, become a member, use code Shapiro.

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The Ben Shapiro Show - August 04, 2025

Texas Democrats RUN AWAY…Plus, The REAL Gaza Starvation

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