The Ben Shapiro Show - The Democrat-Media Scandal That Won’t Go Away

00:00:00.000 All righty, folks, tons to get to today, including all the fallout from the Joe Biden senility and now cancer scandal.

00:00:06.000 We'll examine the latest with the big, beautiful bill and President Trump trying to get those Ukraine negotiations going.

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00:00:37.000 Plus, we filmed it, we edited it, and somehow no one stopped us from releasing it.

00:00:41.000 Ben After Dark is what happens when I start saying the things that probably should have stayed in the group chat.

00:00:45.000 We've got unfiltered takes, deeply questionable decisions, and clips like this.

00:00:51.000 That is a former member of Congress right there.

00:00:54.000 Sure is, Ben.

00:00:55.000 Yep.

00:00:55.000 You know who, though?

00:00:56.000 Well, I mean, I don't know what his name was when he was doing this, but that is former Representative George Santos, is it not?

00:01:02.000 It is.

00:01:02.000 He was sentenced to seven years in prison this past week for wire fraud.

00:01:05.000 We all have passed.

00:01:08.000 And that is George Santos.

00:01:09.000 Now, will he be going to a men's or a women's prison?

00:01:13.000 Also this, for reasons I'm still not clear on.

00:01:16.000 They renamed their Chubby Hubby flavor to Hubby Hubby in celebration of Vermont's legalization of same-sex marriage.

00:01:21.000 Which is just terrible branding because Ferry Garcia is just right there in front of you for the taking.

00:01:26.000 It's the show no one asked for, but we made it anyway.

00:01:29.000 Ben After Dark, Episode 1 with Ambassador Mike Huckabee, Riley Gaines, and more is out right now only on DW +, only for members.

00:01:36.000 You're welcome.

00:01:37.000 Well, folks, the Joe Biden senility and cancer scandal is not going anywhere anytime soon.

00:01:42.000 And the reason for that is because it's not just a scandal about the Joe Biden family and the people immediately surrounding Joe Biden.

00:01:48.000 It is a scandal about the Democratic Party writ large, as well as the media.

00:01:51.000 And that Democrat media complex has been the thing that has kept Democrats relevant and victorious for decades at this point in the public narrative.

00:01:59.000 But time after time after time, particularly over the course of the last five years.

00:02:03.000 The Democrat media narrative has fallen completely apart.

00:02:07.000 Everything that they have labeled a conspiracy theory has turned out not only not to be a conspiracy theory, it's turned out to be largely true.

00:02:14.000 So, just to go back briefly in history, it was the Democrats and the media who claimed that Donald Trump was an actual cat's paw of the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

00:02:22.000 That he had been elected in 2016 on the basis of Russian gaming of the election.

00:02:27.000 And this turned into a four years long investigation.

00:02:30.000 It's Donald Trump and everyone surrounding him about how he was almost certainly on the Russian payroll.

00:02:35.000 And allegations were made about everything from money-changing hands to urinating on President Trump.

00:02:40.000 All this sort of stuff was trotted out by the media for four years as breaking news.

00:02:44.000 I remember being in the gym for literally years, and every day there'd be some sort of new breaking news on Wolf Blitzer about how Russiagate was going to break wide open.

00:02:53.000 It turned out that was a conspiracy theory on their part.

00:02:56.000 But they suggested, of course, that to say That there was, in fact, a deep state that was promulgating this lie, that that was a conspiracy theory.

00:03:03.000 Then we moved into the COVID era.

00:03:05.000 And when we got to COVID, again, it was labeled by the left a conspiracy theory to suggest that the virus had originated at a Wuhan lab, that that was some sort of wild conspiracy theory that was rooted in conjecture.

00:03:18.000 It was not rooted at all in relevant suspicion.

00:03:21.000 Probably it was just some Chinese guy ate a bat. 1.00

00:03:23.000 That was probably where this came from, a live market.

00:03:26.000 And it turns out that that was not a conspiracy theory.

00:03:28.000 It was actually probably true.

00:03:30.000 And then there was the suggestion by people on the right that it was conspiratorial at the top levels of government, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, to shut down dissent with regard to everything from masking to lockdowns.

00:03:42.000 And it turns out that wasn't a conspiracy theory either.

00:03:44.000 Anthony Fauci was, in fact, doing those things.

00:03:46.000 He was literally attempting to use his power to quash narratives ranging from the Wuhan lab leak to the so-called Great Barrington Declaration.

00:03:54.000 Would have been put out by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya over at Stanford, among others.

00:03:58.000 Bhattacharya is now the head of the NIH under Donald Trump.

00:04:01.000 Again, if you called out Fauci at the time, you were considered a conspiracy theorist, and it turned out that many of the allegations were true.

00:04:09.000 If you suggested that the BLM narrative around George Floyd and Derek Chauvin, that that actually was false, that actually George Floyd, in all likelihood, died of some sort of pre-existing health condition that was triggered by the fact that he was arrested.

00:04:24.000 That he didn't die because Derek Chauvin quote-unquote choked him out or anything like that.

00:04:27.000 And that the overarching BLM narrative was a lie.

00:04:30.000 That was a conspiracy theory as well.

00:04:32.000 And the Democrats in the media labeled it as such.

00:04:34.000 If you said, hey, wait a second, the statistics do not show that black people are being disproportionately targeted for death by the cops.

00:04:41.000 And that actually, if you remove cops from these particular areas, the crime rates are going to go up.

00:04:45.000 That was considered a conspiracy theory too.

00:04:47.000 And then that entire narrative fell apart.

00:04:49.000 And then, as if that weren't enough.

00:04:51.000 Everybody could see Joe Biden degrading in real time in front of all of us.

00:04:55.000 And we were told that that was a conspiracy theory as well.

00:04:58.000 That if you pointed out that Joe Biden was obviously going senile, then that too was a conspiracy theory.

00:05:03.000 And then all at once it blew up.

00:05:05.000 And it blew up on one day specifically.

00:05:07.000 And that was the day that Joe Biden did a debate with Donald Trump.

00:05:10.000 And it didn't just wreck Joe Biden's presidency.

00:05:12.000 It didn't just wreck Joe Biden's legacy.

00:05:14.000 It didn't just wreck Joe Biden's run for office and Kamala Harris's run for office.

00:05:19.000 It wrecked the Democratic Party and the media wholesale.

00:05:21.000 Because finally, all at once, you could see the myth-making apparatus exposed once and for all.

00:05:28.000 And that is why the Biden senility scandal, and now likely the Biden cancer scandal, is actually a real scandal that is deeply damaging the Democrats right now.

00:05:37.000 Democrats are once again now attempting to suggest that you are a conspiracy theorist if you are suspicious of the narrative that Joe Biden just found out five minutes ago that he has stage four cancer.

00:05:47.000 Stage four prostate cancer that is now metastasized to his bones.

00:05:51.000 And again, the science suggests that this was a long time coming.

00:05:55.000 Prostate cancer is a very slow-developing cancer.

00:05:57.000 It beggars the imagination that the President of the United States, a man who was the Vice President of the United States not all that long ago, never got a PSA test any time during this period.

00:06:07.000 It just beggars the imagination.

00:06:08.000 It makes no sense at all.

00:06:10.000 The President is the most important person on planet Earth, politically speaking, and in terms of just pure power.

00:06:15.000 The notion that you wouldn't do one of the most basic tests that is done during a physical For people above the age of 50 is ridiculous.

00:06:22.000 And so suspicion about that is not, in fact, a conspiracy theory.

00:06:25.000 But Democrats are still trying to trot out the idea that this is, in fact, a conspiracy theory.

00:06:31.000 So Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader in the House, he says that it's a conspiracy theory to suspect that perhaps people knew more than they were talking about last year with regard to Joe Biden's condition.

00:06:42.000 Or even worse, by the way, they avoided giving a PSA test to Joe Biden because they were suspicious that he might actually be sick.

00:06:50.000 Seems to me entirely inappropriate that at this moment in time, when President Biden is dealing with a serious and aggressive form of cancer, there are Republicans who are peddling conspiracy theories and want us to look backward.

00:07:09.000 They want us to look backward.

00:07:11.000 Okay, let me just point this out.

00:07:12.000 It's not a conspiracy theory if there is some evidence to support it.

00:07:16.000 There's good evidence to suggest that his very late-stage cancer did not develop overnight and was not diagnosed one moment ago.

00:07:23.000 And you have not earned the trust of the American people that you get to say things like, it's a conspiracy theory to wonder about that.

00:07:29.000 That is not just asking questions.

00:07:31.000 The medical evidence would suggest that it would be almost impossible for there to be no evidence of his cancer, medically speaking, unless you were actively not taking the tests.

00:07:42.000 Donald Trump, when he has his physicals, takes a PSA test.

00:07:46.000 That is in his presidential records.

00:07:48.000 Barack Obama had PSA tests.

00:07:50.000 Why did Joe Biden not have PSA tests?

00:07:52.000 These are real questions.

00:07:53.000 But the goal, as always for the Democrats, is not to actually stop conspiracy theories.

00:07:58.000 It's to stop actual, real, relevant questions that point out actual conspiracies.

00:08:03.000 The difference between a conspiracy theory and just a conspiracy is that a conspiracy theory has plausible evidence to suggest its truth, like actual plausible evidence and a mechanism.

00:08:13.000 By which the conspiracy theory is actually effectuated.

00:08:16.000 That turns it into an actual allegation of a conspiracy, or at least a plausible allegation of a conspiracy.

00:08:20.000 A conspiracy theory is something where you can't connect points A and point B. You just jump immediately to a conclusion without any intervening logic.

00:08:28.000 You say, for example, the globalists are responsible for the death of black men in the inner city.

00:08:35.000 I need to see the chain of how that works.

00:08:38.000 You need to show me the evidence of the people who are controlling the policy and why that policy is responsible For X, Y, or Z. But raising a question about whether or not people knew about Joe Biden's health situation when we know for a fact they covered up his senility, they actively covered up his senility.

00:08:54.000 This is not speculation.

00:08:55.000 That is real.

00:08:56.000 That is being reported by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson of Axios in the book Original Sin.

00:09:01.000 It is being reported publicly now that everything people were asking about is true.

00:09:05.000 You have not earned the trust of the American people that you get to now suggest that it's conspiracy theory.

00:09:09.000 What is this really about?

00:09:10.000 It's about shutting down.

00:09:11.000 Any questioning of any of it, on his senility, on his cancer, go for the sympathy play.

00:09:17.000 It is just another form of what Joe Biden himself used to do as president.

00:09:20.000 Every time he would get in a bad political situation, he would mention the tragic death of his son Beau from cancer.

00:09:25.000 Anytime there's a bad situation, he would mention this, like a get-out-of-jail-free card.

00:09:29.000 It was really quite gross.

00:09:31.000 Not that he would mention his son's death, but in the context in which he would mention his son's death.

00:09:36.000 So after the Abbey Gate bombing, for example, he would bring up his son Beau's death as though that justified.

00:09:41.000 The activities that led to the Abbey Gate bombing in Afghanistan.

00:09:44.000 Now Democrats are doing the same exact thing.

00:09:46.000 They say, well, you have to have sympathy for the...

00:09:48.000 You can have plenty of sympathy for Joe Biden as a human being who's ridden with likely terminal cancer.

00:09:54.000 You can have all sorts of sympathy for him.

00:09:57.000 But that does not change the underlying question that must be asked.

00:10:00.000 Who knew what when?

00:10:01.000 Who was president of the United States for the last couple of years of his administration?

00:10:05.000 But you can see how Democrats are attempting to spin this into stop asking questions at all.

00:10:10.000 Here's David Axelrod doing that routine yesterday, the former Obama advisor.

00:10:15.000 Yeah, well, I mean, I think those conversations are going to happen, but they should be more muted and set aside for now as he's struggling through this.

00:10:30.000 Why should they be more muted and set aside?

00:10:32.000 Actually, it exacerbates the questions because if he is this far gone, if he is in this bad of a health condition, who knew what when?

00:10:39.000 And none of those people should ever be trusted again in any political context.

00:10:43.000 That is the issue.

00:10:44.000 As the Wall Street Journal points out, latest revelation about Biden's acuity put Democrats in a tough spot.

00:10:49.000 Yeah, no bleep.

00:10:51.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, continued revelations about Biden's mental capacity in office have led to awkward questions for prospective 2028 Democratic presidential candidates.

00:11:00.000 For Kamala Harris and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, both part of the administration, the topic is especially fraught.

00:11:07.000 Everybody who's in a top position of power in the Democratic Party, everybody who's dealing with Joe Biden, that includes Bernie Sanders, it includes Gretchen Whitmer, it includes Gavin Newsom, anyone who had dealings with Joe Biden on a personal level is now suspect as part of a broader cover-up of his senility.

00:11:21.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

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00:13:35.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, the days since Trump's election have been some of the most challenging Democrats have faced in decades as the party has struggled to land on a clear message or a leading messenger.

00:13:43.000 The most recent Wall Street Journal poll showed just 37% of voters viewed the Democratic Party favorably compared to 45% Not just that, by the way, Donald Trump's approval ratings, which had been kind of down in the dumps since Liberation Day, have actually increased over the course of the last several weeks, partially due to his very productive trip to the Middle East and partially due to the fact that there is a lot of focus right now on the fact that Democrats covered up the senility of the President of the United States.

00:14:11.000 The latest Harvard-Caps Harris poll shows that for the first time since July 2021, a majority of voters now believe the U.S. economy It's strong.

00:14:19.000 Split about 50-50.

00:14:20.000 51% of voters say it's strong.

00:14:21.000 49% say it's weak.

00:14:23.000 That is a major difference from just a few weeks ago when he declared that massive tariff war.

00:14:27.000 Not only that, his overall approval rating has been jumping, like really spiking.

00:14:32.000 According to one poll, the Insider Advantage poll, he is currently at plus 11, like 55% approved, 44% disapproved.

00:14:40.000 These are unbelievable numbers for President Trump.

00:14:43.000 And that's partially about President Trump.

00:14:44.000 And that is partially about the fact that his opponents are quite terrible at this.

00:14:49.000 President Trump, for his part, as usual, is not going to be silenced about the speculation regarding Biden's senility or about his cancer.

00:14:57.000 Here's President Trump yesterday saying, you know, it seems to me that somebody probably knew about this stuff early.

00:15:01.000 Bye.

00:15:03.000 Thank you.

00:15:03.000 The other thing is you have to say, why did it take so long?

00:15:07.000 I mean, when you, this takes a long time, can take years to get to this level of danger.

00:15:14.000 So it's a look.

00:15:15.000 It's a very, very sad situation.

00:15:17.000 I feel very badly about it.

00:15:19.000 And I think people should try and find out what happened.

00:15:24.000 Because I'll tell you, I don't know if it had anything to do with the hospital.

00:15:27.000 Walter Reed is really good.

00:15:29.000 They're some of the best doctors I've ever seen.

00:15:31.000 I don't even know if they were involved.

00:15:33.000 But a doctor was involved in each case.

00:15:36.000 Maybe it was the same doctor.

00:15:38.000 And somebody is not telling the facts.

00:15:40.000 That's a big problem.

00:15:44.000 I mean, again, he is right about this.

00:15:47.000 J.D. Vance is saying something very similar when he's talking not just about the cancer, but about the senility.

00:15:51.000 Like, the president of the United States was not all there for years at a time.

00:15:55.000 And that is not J.D. Vance's fault.

00:15:57.000 That is the fault of the Democratic Party.

00:16:00.000 Look, I will say, whether the right time to have this conversation is now or at some point in the future, we really do need to be honest about whether the former president was capable of doing the job.

00:16:12.000 And that's no, you know, that you can separate the desire for him to have the right health outcome with a recognition that whether it was doctors or whether there were staffers around the former president, I don't think he was able to do a good job for the American people.

00:16:27.000 you I mean, that is just accurate.

00:16:31.000 That is just correct.

00:16:33.000 I mean, and Democrats can complain about that all they want.

00:16:36.000 They can call it a conspiracy theory all they want.

00:16:38.000 It doesn't matter.

00:16:39.000 In the end...

00:16:41.000 The American people understand that they were lied to for years while Joe Biden was president and that everyone was complicit in it.

00:16:46.000 The Democrats, the media, they're all complicit in this lie.

00:16:50.000 The media, the best you can say for them is maybe act of omission rather than commission, meaning that they never would have taken Donald Trump's word for it if he were clearly losing his mind on camera.

00:17:01.000 And everybody's like, he's totally fine.

00:17:02.000 Behind closed doors, he's doing back handsprings and reciting the Gettysburg Address.

00:17:06.000 In Swahili.

00:17:08.000 Like, nobody would have taken that for granted if they were the media.

00:17:10.000 They would have been asking serious questions.

00:17:12.000 Okay, so, with the Democrat media complex blown up, the Democrats are in real trouble here.

00:17:16.000 They're in real trouble.

00:17:18.000 They basically have two possibilities.

00:17:20.000 One is, wait for Donald Trump to fall down on the job.

00:17:23.000 Maybe that happens, maybe that doesn't.

00:17:24.000 The second would be, actually start saying things that are interesting and popular.

00:17:28.000 They cannot do the latter.

00:17:29.000 They're so wedded to their woke base that they are now stuck.

00:17:32.000 I mean, truly stuck.

00:17:34.000 Let's take a few of their leaders as examples.

00:17:36.000 So Tim Walz, who for the only reason Tim Walz was ever a vice presidential pick is because he wasn't the Jew from Pennsylvania. 0.62

00:17:42.000 Josh Shapiro was clearly the better vice presidential pick for Kamala Harris.

00:17:45.000 Instead, they picked this oddball weirdo from Minnesota who has the affect of the Kool-Aid man if he had taken too much ecstasy.

00:17:55.000 And they decided to trot this guy out as an example of American masculinity, bopping around, making weird hand motions, doing jazz hands.

00:18:03.000 Well, Tim Walz is still out there haunting the American political landscape and calling ICE, like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the modern day Gestapo.

00:18:14.000 Donald Trump's modern day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets.

00:18:19.000 They're in unmarked vans, wearing masks, being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons.

00:18:23.000 No chance to mount a fence.

00:18:25.000 Not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye.

00:18:28.000 Just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans, and disappeared.

00:18:32.000 To be clear, there's no way for us to know whether they were actually criminals or not, because they refused to give them a trial.

00:18:39.000 We're supposed to just take their word for it.

00:18:41.000 And when duly elected members of Congress tried to exercise their constitutional right of oversight at an ICE facility, they get shoved around and threatened with arrest.

00:18:49.000 And when courts told them repeatedly to knock it off, they brazenly defy them.

00:18:56.000 So, again, Tim Walz claiming that ICE are like the Gestapo?

00:19:00.000 Good luck with this argument.

00:19:01.000 Like, this is the best you guys have?

00:19:02.000 Really, this is the best you guys have?

00:19:05.000 How about Hillary Clinton? 0.95

00:19:06.000 She's still out there.

00:19:08.000 She's basically turned into a Charles Dickens character, wandering around in her 2016 wedding dress like a ghost.

00:19:16.000 She's the Miss Haversham of American politics, wandering around saying the same things over and over.

00:19:21.000 Now she's calling female Trump voters handmaidens of the patriarchy. 1.00

00:19:26.000 What advice do you have for the first female president of the United States? 1.00

00:19:30.000 Well...

00:19:35.000 Well, first of all, don't be a handmaiden to the patriarchy, which kind of eliminates every woman on the other side of the aisle, except for very few.

00:19:51.000 Lisa Murkowski.

00:19:53.000 Liz Cheney.

00:19:54.000 Yeah, there's a few.

00:19:57.000 Handmaiden of the patriarchy.

00:19:59.000 By God, this woman.

00:20:00.000 I can't imagine why she lost to Donald Trump.

00:20:03.000 Handmaiden of the... 0.98

00:20:03.000 Can you imagine, by the way, a woman in American history who's been more of a handmaiden to the patriarchy than Hillary Clinton? 0.98

00:20:11.000 Literally, she allegedly threatened accusers of her husband.

00:20:17.000 Right?

00:20:18.000 She had this marriage with her husband in which her husband was plausibly accused of...

00:20:22.000 and other crimes against women. 1.00

00:20:26.000 And she allegedly threatened them in order so that she could be eventually a senator from New York and then secretary of state and then run for president. 1.00

00:20:34.000 Hard to imagine a bigger handmaiden to the patriarchy than Hillary Rodham Clinton, who's only famous because her last name is Clinton in the first place. 1.00

00:20:41.000 But, like, this is the best the Democrats can try it out.

00:20:44.000 Well, then there's the actual resistance mode of the Democratic Party now.

00:20:48.000 The young resistors.

00:20:49.000 Well, the problem is they're getting themselves arrested.

00:20:51.000 So the Department of Justice charged Democratic Representative LaModica.

00:20:54.000 McIver, with assaulting federal law enforcement during a chaotic melee that erupted outside of an ICE detention facility in New Jersey, according to acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba on Monday, according to CNN.

00:21:05.000 The scuffle outside the detention facility occurred as protesters, lawmakers, and homeland security officers pushed against each other.

00:21:12.000 And that all happened, of course, as Democrats were outside a detention facility for illegal immigrants, claiming that their rights were being violated.

00:21:20.000 And now she's going to be prosecuted.

00:21:22.000 So who's it going to be, guys?

00:21:24.000 It's going to be Mr. Potato Head Cory Booker in 2028 shouting at the windows?

00:21:29.000 Is it going to be AOC and her oddball approach to politics backed by Bernie Sanders? 0.99

00:21:34.000 Who you guys got?

00:21:36.000 Seriously.

00:21:37.000 And how do you presume to overcome the gigantic boiling scandal at the heart of the Democratic Party, the cover-up of the former president's senility and possibly cancer?

00:21:49.000 Now again, AOC actually is the best place for this, right?

00:21:51.000 She can always claim that she was an outsider.

00:21:53.000 She didn't have a lot of contact with Joe Biden.

00:21:54.000 She hates the Democratic Party anyway. 0.99

00:21:56.000 And there is something to that.

00:21:58.000 So again, advantage AOC if you're looking at the 2028 Democratic primaries.

00:22:02.000 But it is amazing how the Democrats are struggling for footing against President Trump.

00:22:07.000 And it is all their own fault.

00:22:09.000 Now President Trump has a magical ability to draw the worst out of his opponents.

00:22:14.000 Legitimately the worst.

00:22:15.000 And Democrats are...

00:22:17.000 Falling right into it.

00:22:18.000 Speaking of the worst out of his opponents, James Comey is still wandering the landscape in search of relevance.

00:22:23.000 He's only in the headlines because he decided to take a photo of a shell array on a beach that said 8647, generating outsized questions about whether he was calling for violence against the President of the United States.

00:22:34.000 Well, it did get him a slot on MSNBC, which is probably what he wanted in the first place.

00:22:38.000 But just again and again and again, I really thought that I was done.

00:22:42.000 I was in another life.

00:22:43.000 I was a grandfather and an author wearing sweaters and jeans.

00:22:47.000 And then I went for a walk on the beach and posted a silly picture of shells that I thought was a clever way to express a political viewpoint.

00:22:56.000 And actually, I still think it is.

00:22:58.000 I don't see it the way some people are still saying it is.

00:23:01.000 But again, I don't want any part of any violence.

00:23:04.000 I've never been associated with violence.

00:23:06.000 And so that's why I took it down.

00:23:07.000 So, yeah, it was very clever.

00:23:12.000 Very, very clever, says James Comey.

00:23:14.000 By the way, he's always a victim, according to James Comey, as always.

00:23:17.000 Remember, this is the former FBI director who basically laundered into public view the erroneous and disgusting steel dossier targeting President Trump.

00:23:24.000 Harry was suggesting the only reason he's under fire is for walking on the beach with his wife.

00:23:27.000 You made this happen, my dude.

00:23:29.000 This was you.

00:23:31.000 You are back in the middle of a political firestorm.

00:23:35.000 Yeah, for walking on the beach with my wife, so.

00:23:39.000 I don't know how we ended up here.

00:23:40.000 It never occurred to me that it was any kind of controversial thing, but that's the time we live in.

00:23:46.000 Well, I mean, it happened because you did it.

00:23:48.000 That's the reason why that happened.

00:23:51.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

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00:25:51.000 And meanwhile, in other more relevant news, you know, things that actually matter in the world.

00:25:55.000 President Trump had a two-hour call with Vladimir Putin yesterday.

00:26:00.000 He then came out and he announced that some progress had been made.

00:26:03.000 Now, again, it's kind of interesting to watch the shift in the tone, the vacillation in tone inside the Trump administration with regard to Putin and Ukraine.

00:26:13.000 Vladimir Zelensky has been playing this much smarter over the course of the past few weeks.

00:26:17.000 The leader of Ukraine has been basically doing whatever the White House wants him to do.

00:26:20.000 They say 30-day ceasefire.

00:26:22.000 He says, no problem, 30-day ceasefire.

00:26:24.000 They say, rare earth minerals deal.

00:26:25.000 He's like, no problem, rare earth minerals deal.

00:26:27.000 They say, why don't you go to Turkey and have direct conversations with Putin without a 30-day ceasefire?

00:26:31.000 He's like, fine.

00:26:32.000 I'm in there.

00:26:33.000 I'm at Ankara.

00:26:34.000 Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is sitting there doing none of these things.

00:26:36.000 Zero of these things.

00:26:38.000 And you can start to see the irritation from the Trump administration.

00:26:40.000 J.D. Vance, the other day, he said, listen, Vladimir Putin seems to be unable to end the war.

00:26:44.000 Here was the vice president of the United States, one of the bigger Ukraine-support skeptics in the administration.

00:26:51.000 I think, honestly, that President Putin, he doesn't quite know how to get out of the war.

00:26:56.000 If you think about this, he's got a million men under arms.

00:26:58.000 He's re-engineered his entire economy, what used to be manufacturing facilities, making products for people to use in their civilian life.

00:27:06.000 They're now making tank shells and artillery shells and drones.

00:27:09.000 And so this is a little bit of a guess, but I think the president would agree that part of this is I'm not sure that Vladimir Putin has a strategy himself for how to unwind the war, of course, that's been going on for a few years.

00:27:23.000 And again, that happens to be correct.

00:27:26.000 I mean, Putin does not know how to unwind this, nor does he really have an intention to unwind this.

00:27:30.000 He just hopes to outlast.

00:27:31.000 His goal is to outlast.

00:27:32.000 So President Trump, after this very long phone call with Vladimir Putin, did not come away with any commitment by Putin to do anything.

00:27:38.000 Which, of course, is not a surprise.

00:27:39.000 That's not Trump's fault.

00:27:40.000 Vladimir Putin doesn't have an interest in actually negotiating an end to the war because he believes that if he just lasts long enough, the West will walk away from the war and he'll walk through Ukraine.

00:27:49.000 That's what he's gambling on.

00:27:51.000 Here's President Trump in the Rose Garden trying to suggest that some progress had indeed been made during the phone call.

00:27:57.000 Well, I want to thank everybody.

00:27:58.000 We just spent two and a half hours talking to Vladimir Putin.

00:28:03.000 And I think some progress has been made.

00:28:05.000 It's a terrible situation going on over there.

00:28:07.000 5,000 young people every single week are being killed.

00:28:12.000 So hopefully we did something.

00:28:15.000 We also spoke to the heads of...

00:28:17.000 Most of the European nations were trying to get that whole thing wrapped up.

00:28:23.000 What a shame that it ever started in the first place.

00:28:27.000 Okay, it's not just a shame that it got started in the first place.

00:28:29.000 It is Vladimir Putin invading a sovereign country.

00:28:31.000 Trump said that he had spoken with Putin and he said, when are we going to end this, Vladimir?

00:28:38.000 I said, when are we going to end this, Vladimir?

00:28:40.000 I know him for a long time now.

00:28:42.000 I said, when are we going to end this bloodshed, this bloodbath?

00:28:46.000 It's a bloodbath.

00:28:48.000 And I do believe he wants to end it.

00:28:51.000 Okay, so that's the part where I have some problems.

00:28:54.000 What evidence do we have that Putin wants to end this?

00:28:56.000 Like one shred of evidence.

00:28:58.000 Seriously, one.

00:28:59.000 I would love one shred of evidence that Vladimir Putin has any intention of ending this war.

00:29:04.000 Right now, there is no evidence of that.

00:29:06.000 I understand President Trump is in deal-making mode and he wants deals.

00:29:09.000 But in order for a deal to happen, both sides have to come to the table.

00:29:13.000 President Trump is suggesting direct negotiations in Rome.

00:29:16.000 He wants Pope Leo XIV to actually host the talks.

00:29:18.000 uh You've mentioned that the Pope would like to take a role potentially in mediating these talks.

00:29:26.000 Does that mean that the U.S. is taking a step back from...

00:29:29.000 No, no, no.

00:29:30.000 I think it would be great to have it at the Vatican.

00:29:32.000 Maybe it would have some extra significance.

00:29:35.000 And I saw that it was discussed yesterday, so I thought...

00:29:38.000 And people told me that they'd be honored to do it.

00:29:41.000 I would imagine they would be.

00:29:43.000 So, no, I think it would be maybe helpful.

00:29:46.000 There's tremendous bitterness, anger, and I think maybe that could help some of that anger.

00:29:52.000 So having it at the Vatican would be, in Rome, would be a very, I think it would be a great idea.

00:29:59.000 Okay, again, all that may be well and good.

00:30:02.000 The question is, what does Vladimir Putin want?

00:30:05.000 I did an episode a couple of weeks ago where we went through the writings of Vladimir Putin's so-called brain, Alexander Dugan.

00:30:11.000 And what he makes very clear, and what Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, has made clear, and what Putin himself has made clear, is that the Russians see the existence of a sovereign Ukraine that could even possibly align with the West as an existential threat to their imperial domination of the region, which is their end goal.

00:30:27.000 The Russian end goal for Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov and Alexander Dugan is Russia as imperial state, not Russia as regional power.

00:30:33.000 They explicitly reject that.

00:30:35.000 They do not want to be hemmed in.

00:30:36.000 They want domination of Eastern Europe. 0.95

00:30:38.000 They want domination of Ukraine. 0.87

00:30:40.000 They believe that NATO is a sort of thorn in their side, that it is a threat to their imperial aspirations for a Eurasian-dominated continent.

00:30:49.000 That is the problem.

00:30:51.000 And what that means, the only way to get Russia to the table is to make very, very clear that the West is going nowhere.

00:30:58.000 And that remains the open question here, because a lot of the verbiage from the Trump administration can be interpreted both ways.

00:31:03.000 So, for example, President Trump...

00:31:06.000 Told reporters at the White House, quote, I think something's going to happen.

00:31:08.000 And if it doesn't, I just back away and they're going to have to keep going.

00:31:12.000 Well, I mean, don't threaten Vladimir Putin with a good time.

00:31:15.000 There are two ways to interpret that.

00:31:17.000 One is he backs away from the negotiations and we up our support for Ukraine.

00:31:21.000 The Europeans up their support for Ukraine.

00:31:22.000 And it just continues until Vladimir Putin gets the message.

00:31:25.000 That would be the glass half full version of this.

00:31:27.000 The glass half empty version of this is when he says, I just back away and they're going to have to keep going.

00:31:33.000 He doesn't just mean with regard to negotiations.

00:31:34.000 He means with regard to any form of support for Ukraine at all, which basically damns Ukraine to a slow loss to the Russians because the Russians do have more manpower.

00:31:44.000 The Russians do not care about casualties. 0.99

00:31:47.000 One of the amazing things about the way that Russia does war, this has been true for several hundred years at this point, is that while the West cares very much about casualties among their own troops, the Russians just don't.

00:31:57.000 This has been true since the Napoleonic era, and it was certainly true during the Stalin era. 0.95

00:32:01.000 Vladimir Putin is perfectly willing to throw hundreds of thousands of men into the maw of death for the imperial ambitions of his country.

00:32:08.000 He's perfectly willing to do that.

00:32:10.000 And one of the giant mistakes the West constantly makes, and it's over and over and over again with regard to all of our geopolitical opponents, is projection.

00:32:19.000 We assume that their interests are the same as ours.

00:32:22.000 The West does this all the time.

00:32:24.000 And because we are projecting our own sort of moral viewpoint on the world, our worldview, On other people, we then can't understand why they don't do the things we want them to do.

00:32:33.000 And the answer is they are working from an entirely different framework.

00:32:37.000 This is why, for example, in the Middle East, the idea of a two-state solution was always ridiculous.

00:32:41.000 It was always nonsense because it turns out that the people who are not the Israelis in that equation do not want a two-state solution. 0.64

00:32:47.000 They want a one-state solution that involves the destruction of Israel and the death of the Jews.

00:32:51.000 And it turns out that in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is not looking for some sort of territorial off-ramp where everybody...

00:32:57.000 Kind of goes weapons down and Ukraine becomes more pro-European and the eastern parts of Ukraine become more pro-Russian.

00:33:05.000 That's not what they're looking for.

00:33:06.000 They're looking for a Ukraine that is turned into a sort of Belarusian proxy state for the Russian regime.

00:33:13.000 That is the goal of the Russians. 0.99

00:33:15.000 In the same way, the goal of the Chinese was misinterpreted for literally decades by the United States.

00:33:20.000 We assumed, okay, we will help open up their economy.

00:33:22.000 We will make them richer.

00:33:23.000 And then in sort of gratitude at them being richer.

00:33:26.000 They will reorient toward the West.

00:33:28.000 They'll liberalize their regime.

00:33:29.000 And China will eventually become our global friend.

00:33:32.000 And it turns out that's not what the Chinese are about at all. 0.96

00:33:34.000 It turns out the Chinese leadership is about hegemonic domination of an entire region of the world and a completely different vision opposed to that of the West. 0.58

00:33:44.000 It turns out that Contra, many of the so-called foreign policy experts on both left and right, people in the world have their own independent interests that are not, in fact, aligned with those of the United States.

00:33:56.000 Not everybody wants peace, security, and material prosperity in the way that we in the West interpret that.

00:34:02.000 Many have other aspirations that are different, just completely different.

00:34:06.000 And those aspirations range from the spiritual, to the religious, to the geopolitical, to the imperial.

00:34:14.000 And those ambitions exist, whether or not the United States exists.

00:34:17.000 It's just that we are the gigantic roadblock in the way of those ambitions extending to people who don't want to be part of a regime that does that sort of thing.

00:34:25.000 Well, meanwhile, again, we're talking about geopolitical regimes that are opposed to the United States.

00:34:30.000 China, of course, is the big one.

00:34:32.000 President Trump has been right on this, totally right on this.

00:34:34.000 You're talking about areas where President Trump really has shifted, the sort of global consensus.

00:34:38.000 China is one of those places.

00:34:40.000 So before Donald Trump, there was sort of a bipartisan consensus that China was a strategic competitor, possible future friend.

00:34:47.000 President Trump came along, he said, hold up.

00:34:49.000 They steal our IP.

00:34:51.000 They engage in some of the grossest human rights violations.

00:34:54.000 They are seeking to box us out of particular markets.

00:34:57.000 They have basically artificially boosted areas of their economy so as to hollow out our manufacturing base.

00:35:03.000 They're not our friends.

00:35:04.000 They're actually our geopolitical opponents.

00:35:06.000 And members of both parties actually now agree on this.

00:35:09.000 This is one of the rare areas of bipartisan consensus between Republicans and Democrats.

00:35:13.000 In the same way that Republicans and Democrats for a long time actually both believed, at least the mainstream of the parties, that the Soviet Union was an enemy, Republicans and Democrats now understand that China is in fact a rising threat.

00:35:23.000 The problem, of course, China is moving very quickly to consolidate its power and they are dumping resources into key areas so as to outcompete the United States. 0.58

00:35:34.000 He's by Kyle Chan, researcher at Princeton University who focuses on Chinese industrial policy over at the New York Times.

00:35:40.000 And he points out that China may in fact be winning, for example, the AI race.

00:35:46.000 He says China's trajectory is very different from that of the United States.

00:35:51.000 He says that President Trump's Sort of autarkic ambitions with regard to his tariff war, his attempt to reshore manufacturing through tariffs not on China, but on all sorts of other countries as well, is not going to run down to our benefit.

00:36:03.000 China is doing something different, he says.

00:36:05.000 China already leads global production in multiple industries.

00:36:08.000 Steel, aluminum, shipbuilding, batteries, solar power, electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, 5G equipment, consumer electronics, active pharmaceutical ingredients, and bullet trains.

00:36:15.000 It is projected to account for 45%, nearly half, of all global manufacturing by 2030.

00:36:20.000 Beijing is laser-focused on winning the future.

00:36:23.000 In March, it announced a $138 billion national venture capital fund that will make long-term investments in cutting-edge technologies like quantum computing and robotics and increase its own budget for public research and development.

00:36:35.000 And he points out that China is fast catching up on the technological front.

00:36:40.000 When the Chinese startup DeepSeek, he writes, launched its artificial intelligence chatbot in January, many Americans suddenly realized China could compete in AI.

00:36:48.000 The Chinese electric carmaker BYD.

00:36:50.000 Which Mr. Trump's political ally, Elon Musk, once laughed off as a joke, overtook Tesla last year in global sales.

00:36:57.000 And they're building new factories around the world.

00:36:59.000 In March, they reached a market value greater than that of Ford, GM, and Volkswagen combined.

00:37:04.000 China is charging ahead in drug discoveries, especially cancer treatment.

00:37:07.000 And they've installed more industrial robots in 2023 than the rest of the world combined.

00:37:12.000 Meanwhile, in semiconductors, where China's weak because, of course, Taiwan is the chief producer of semiconductors and they don't own China.

00:37:18.000 They're building a self-reliant supply chain led by recent breakthroughs by Huawei.

00:37:23.000 So the question is, what does the United States do to fight all of this?

00:37:28.000 I mean, the big problem right now is that the way that you actually fight China is by isolating China and creating massive network effects with everybody else. 0.65

00:37:35.000 The entire theory of Hayekian capitalism, the theories of F.A. Hayek, the famous Vienna School Economist, and the basic capitalist theory is that diffuse knowledge among a thousand sources in the aggregate is significantly higher.

00:37:50.000 This is why, for example, the centralized economy of the Soviet Union, which was directed from above, setting prices, setting goals, was never going to be able to outcompete the rest of the world combined through its trade systems, its diffuse knowledge systems.

00:38:04.000 The movement of goods, services, people, and knowledge meant much higher competitiveness.

00:38:10.000 And this is why, in virtually any situation, you are going to choose the field versus, say, one company.

00:38:18.000 In terms of how will things go over the next 10 years?

00:38:20.000 In any field, you know, you can say, okay, you know, I'm going to take Facebook.

00:38:25.000 I'm not going to take the rest of the field.

00:38:26.000 But the reality is that it is actually quite rare for any company in the United States to maintain market dominance for longer than 10 years, certainly for longer than 20 years.

00:38:35.000 The constituency of the so-called Magnificent Seven, for example, like the Magnificent Seven, which are these high-tech stocks, those stocks, would you have imagined for even half a heartbeat?

00:38:47.000 That, for example, NVIDIA would be among the Magnificent Seven 15 years ago?

00:38:53.000 Highly unlikely.

00:38:54.000 Tesla, would that be among the Magnificent Seven 10 years ago?

00:38:57.000 These are all newer companies that have developed.

00:39:00.000 And why is that?

00:39:02.000 Why is there such churn in, for example, Fortune 500 companies?

00:39:05.000 The answer is because the sort of competitive, roiling, chaotic nature of capitalism means that new insights can come from anywhere and can network with other insights.

00:39:15.000 The biggest problem.

00:39:16.000 That you have with regard to the new approach by the United States pursuing a sort of autarkic view of the economy is that if you cut America off, what you end up doing is actually giving the advantage to other autarkic states that are larger and more command and control.

00:39:31.000 You get the worst of both worlds.

00:39:33.000 The magic of the American economy, historically speaking, was free movement in terms of goods, services, and knowledge.

00:39:40.000 And we sought the best immigrants.

00:39:42.000 They're the people who actually knew the most.

00:39:45.000 Elon Musk, immigrant.

00:39:46.000 Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, immigrant.

00:39:48.000 These are all people who come to the United States or their parents come to the United States and then they build amazing things.

00:39:54.000 If you want to out-compete China, you actually do need those people here. 0.99

00:39:57.000 Or at the very least, you need to trade with those people if they're not located in the United States.

00:40:01.000 You need to actually lower your trade barriers with other countries that are competing with China.

00:40:06.000 Because otherwise, China is simply going to take its gigantic share of the world economy, suck it dry, and channel it. 0.99

00:40:14.000 Toward one purpose.

00:40:15.000 Now, maybe China makes a mistake, right?

00:40:18.000 Maybe China has some sort of path dependency mistake where, for example, they go down the wrong path in AI and they end up in a box canyon.

00:40:24.000 And we, because we are more diffuse, we're able to kind of move around that.

00:40:29.000 Maybe that's what happened with the Soviet Union.

00:40:31.000 The Soviet Union, because it went down so many bad pathways in the economic maze, ended up cut off at every front.

00:40:39.000 And eventually, they just couldn't compete anymore.

00:40:42.000 They were relegated to stealing American technology. 0.54

00:40:44.000 But China is not working like that right now.

00:40:47.000 China is a deep competitor.

00:40:49.000 And again, China has systemic problems.

00:40:51.000 I did a YouTube video maybe a year and a half ago talking about the problems with China.

00:40:54.000 They range from the demographic to the debt-driven.

00:40:56.000 But in order for the United States to continue to out-compete China, we have to do the thing that made America an economic powerhouse in the first place.

00:41:03.000 One of the key aspects of making America into the world's hegemon was the fact that we were an empire of economic liberty.

00:41:10.000 Meaning that we built an entire world system.

00:41:13.000 Involving free trade, freedom of navigation in the seas, freedom of movement and knowledge.

00:41:18.000 If we cut ourselves off from that, we're not doing ourselves any real favors.

00:41:22.000 That also means we have to keep our own economy less regulated.

00:41:24.000 One of the things China can do that the United States can't, China does not care whatsoever at all about any sort of regulations that are designed as a hamper on business or development.

00:41:36.000 They don't care.

00:41:36.000 This is why they're developing energy way outstripping that of the United States.

00:41:40.000 China right now has something like triple or quadruple.

00:41:43.000 The energy capacity of the United States, because they've built all of it in the last 10 years, and they don't care if it gets a little dirty out there.

00:41:49.000 They don't care.

00:41:50.000 The United States, meanwhile, is dealing with regulatory overreach.

00:41:54.000 Also, our tax system is screwy-luy.

00:41:57.000 It has been for a long time.

00:41:59.000 Now, China, they don't really have a tax system in the same way that we do, in the sense that the party just controls everything.

00:42:04.000 So they suck money out of the private sector, they put it in the public sector, and then they ram it back into certain areas of the private sector.

00:42:10.000 And it's pure economic fascism over in China.

00:42:13.000 It's a sort of mercantilistic approach to the economy.

00:42:16.000 In the United States, the complexity of things like our tax code, the fact that we've run up massive debt, that makes it very difficult in the future for us to sell our debt, raise new capital in the bonds market, for example.

00:42:31.000 That is a real problem.

00:42:32.000 And this is why the United States, if we wish to outcompete China, we need lower taxes, lower regulation, higher productivity. 0.91

00:42:40.000 That is the way out of this mess.

00:42:41.000 And yes, eventually a restructuring, a serious restructuring of entitlements.

00:42:46.000 Joining us on the line is Congressman Seth Moulton, Democrat from Massachusetts.

00:42:49.000 He currently serves on the Armed Services Committee, Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and the Select Committee on China.

00:42:55.000 Seth, thanks so much for joining the show.

00:42:56.000 I really appreciate it.

00:42:57.000 Yeah, great to be here, Ben.

00:42:58.000 Thanks for having me.

00:42:59.000 So obviously a lot going on in the news.

00:43:01.000 We're going to start with some domestic politics and then move on to the sort of foreign arena.

00:43:04.000 So obviously the big question for Democrats right now, President Trump's approval ratings remain...

00:43:09.000 Pretty high at this point.

00:43:10.000 Democrats in Congress have a pretty low approval rating.

00:43:13.000 One of the issues, obviously, that seems to be hovering over the Democratic Party at this point is all the questions surrounding what people knew when they knew it regarding Joe Biden's mental health, now questions about his physical health.

00:43:24.000 What do you make of that?

00:43:24.000 How should Democrats deal with Americans' lingering questions about what everybody knew and when they knew it about Joe Biden's declining mental health during the last couple of years of his presidency?

00:43:34.000 Well, I think the lesson for Democrats is that we've clearly lost trust.

00:43:38.000 And there are a lot of Americans who felt that Trump was a bit crazy.

00:43:41.000 I don't want to vote for this guy.

00:43:42.000 But I can't trust the Democratic Party.

00:43:44.000 They're so out of touch.

00:43:46.000 And so I think we need to make some corrections there.

00:43:48.000 Now, let's be honest.

00:43:49.000 At 100 days, Trump had the lowest approval ratings of any president in modern history.

00:43:55.000 Democrats in Congress, Congress across the board is looking pretty bad.

00:43:59.000 The opportunity for Democrats is to show that we're willing to change and that we can do things better, we can do things differently.

00:44:05.000 But ultimately, we have to prove to the American people that we're not just going to preach to you about, you know, what we think our liberal beliefs are.

00:44:12.000 We want to listen to you and gain your trust.

00:44:14.000 We have a lot of work to do there.

00:44:17.000 So let's talk about that.

00:44:18.000 Where are the issues you think the Democrats can actually change?

00:44:21.000 Because obviously a lot of what's happened over the past several years has been culture war driven.

00:44:25.000 A lot of talk about intersectionality and race and sex and various sort of hot button cultural issues that Democrats pushed into the public view and then Republicans responded to.

00:44:34.000 And those culture war issues obviously have been sort of front and center.

00:44:38.000 But, you know, as we move into a new era as President Trump is president, as Democrats look forward.

00:44:43.000 It seems there's a bit of a split inside the Democratic Party along a wide variety of lines.

00:44:47.000 Where do you hope the Democratic Party puts its focus?

00:44:50.000 I hope we focus on the issues that really matter to American voters, like the economy, right?

00:44:55.000 People are pretty frustrated with the tariffs.

00:44:57.000 They don't want a trade war.

00:44:58.000 They don't want prices to go up.

00:45:00.000 Democrats have a generational opportunity to win back leadership on the economy.

00:45:04.000 Republicans this week are going to try to push through, and they'll probably succeed because they'll all cave at the end of the day, this massive bill.

00:45:11.000 That will cut taxes for the rich, slash Medicare, and ultimately dramatically raise our deficit.

00:45:17.000 So we shouldn't trust Republicans, at least under Trump, on the economy, and yet if you look at American voters, going back to Reagan, they really trust the Republican Party overall.

00:45:27.000 So I think Democrats have a chance to actually win back leadership on the economy.

00:45:32.000 I think we have a chance to win back leadership on national security.

00:45:35.000 Trump is crushing our allies.

00:45:37.000 He's kissing up to dictators.

00:45:39.000 You saw what he did in the Oval Office with Zelensky.

00:45:41.000 He basically echoes the Kremlin talking points.

00:45:44.000 This is a generational opportunity for Democrats to be the party of the flag, Democrats to be the party that supports the troops, Democrats to be the party that stands with our allies and stands up to dictators.

00:45:54.000 But these are things that we have to show the American people, hey, we're going to change.

00:45:58.000 We're not just going to be obsessed over cultural issues.

00:46:01.000 Whether Republicans bring up the issues and make us talk about them, or whether we just think that you can't even be a part of our party if you don't check all these boxes on these litmus test social issues, we want to be a majority.

00:46:13.000 And we've got to be a majority by welcoming more people into the party and showing that we can lead on issues that really matter to American voters.

00:46:22.000 So, Congressman, I want to talk about the economy, and then I want to talk about the foreign policy things that you've just mentioned.

00:46:26.000 So when it comes to the economy and the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, it seems to me that the big gap between the parties seems to be the tax rates, not the spending.

00:46:33.000 I mean, just realistically speaking, the Republicans are spending a boatload of money in this bill.

00:46:38.000 They're not radically bending the cost curve.

00:46:39.000 If they do bend the cost curve, it is kind of at the margins, with things like work requirements for Medicaid, which may phase in in three years or may phase in in four years.

00:46:48.000 Democrats, I've yet to see a serious cut to anything that Democrats have ever proposed in my entire lifetime.

00:46:53.000 It's always an expansion of government benefits and government spending.

00:46:56.000 And then the only difference is that Democrats suggest higher taxes and Republicans suggest lower taxes.

00:47:01.000 So what is the Democratic plan for solving what appears to be a looming debt crisis that both parties seem to be running toward a cliff with regard to?

00:47:09.000 Well, first of all, Ben, I mean, I agree with you.

00:47:12.000 In large part, I mean, the big thing about this bill that people aren't talking about is what it does to the deficit.

00:47:17.000 You know, this reconciliation plan will add over five trillion dollars to the deficit.

00:47:24.000 Trump added eight trillion dollars to the national debt in his first term.

00:47:29.000 We're not just kicking a can down the road for our kids.

00:47:32.000 We're throwing a bomb down the road for our kids.

00:47:35.000 And this is really bad for our country.

00:47:37.000 And I, by the way, will admit that Democrats need to do a better job of talking about the deficit, admitting that it's important.

00:47:44.000 But don't tell me that Democrats have never made cuts.

00:47:48.000 I mean, under Clinton, you were alive for Clinton.

00:47:50.000 Clinton and Gore cut government by $250 billion, about twice as much as what Elon Musk has achieved.

00:47:55.000 And they cut a lot of government red tape.

00:47:58.000 They made welfare reforms.

00:48:00.000 By the way, some of those work requirements didn't work out all that well, but they did this before.

00:48:05.000 Democrats have made cuts before.

00:48:07.000 But we've also done things like expand health care.

00:48:09.000 We've gotten health care to a lot of Americans, including a lot of red state Republicans, who are very grateful for Obamacare, who supported Medicaid expansion, which Republicans want to cut back right now.

00:48:19.000 The bottom line is, can we afford these tax cuts for the 1%?

00:48:23.000 Can we afford tax cuts for corporations like Amazon that are barely paying any taxes at all?

00:48:29.000 And I think the harsh reality that we have to come to terms with as Americans, if we do care about the debt and the deficit, is that we can't afford them.

00:48:38.000 Well, I mean, I think that the big debate is going to be in the future and it's going to have to be between either raising taxes, inflating the currency or cutting a lot of these services.

00:48:47.000 I mean, that is really the only way to do this.

00:48:49.000 And the truth is that you can't just tax the people at the top end of the spectrum and hope to actually fix this.

00:48:53.000 The United States has perhaps the most progressive income tax system in the world.

00:48:57.000 Ben, our tax system isn't nearly as progressive as it was in the 1950s.

00:49:05.000 You know, Trump wants to take us back to this mythical time in the 1950s.

00:49:08.000 Well, we actually paid for things back then.

00:49:11.000 You know, I fought four tours in a war in Iraq, and Bush told everyone to go shopping.

00:49:15.000 It was the first war in American history where we didn't raise taxes to actually pay for the war and pay for all the veterans' benefits that those of us who, you know, came back from that war need today.

00:49:25.000 So we do have to have this honest conversation.

00:49:27.000 And, you know, I'm standing in my office here on Capitol Hill right now.

00:49:30.000 I've had hundreds of people come in, sit on this couch, and tell me about things they want government to spend more on.

00:49:36.000 Sometimes they bring in their kids who are suffering from horrific diseases and they want more money for research.

00:49:41.000 I mean, really, really good things.

00:49:43.000 But how many people do you think have come in here and said, hey, I've got an idea for how to increase revenues so that we can actually pay for all this stuff?

00:49:52.000 Ben, you could still be the first, right?

00:49:54.000 So the point is that we do have to have a fine discussion about it.

00:49:59.000 What's that?

00:49:59.000 I mean, we can have an honest discussion, but I think the real honest discussion is not about the top marginal tax rate of the 1950s.

00:50:04.000 The true honest discussion is if you want European-style social services, you need European-style taxes.

00:50:08.000 And that means that the top tax brackets kick in at $60,000 a year in Denmark.

00:50:12.000 They kick in at around that in France, in England.

00:50:16.000 So the reality is that increasing taxes at the top specter...

00:50:20.000 Look, I don't think we have to make...

00:50:21.000 The bottom line is that the real honest conversation about taxes would involve vast increases on the middle class, not just on the top.

00:50:28.000 Look, we do not need to pursue this tax plan that's before us this week.

00:50:33.000 I mean, this is what's on the table, right?

00:50:35.000 That will disproportionately benefit the 1%.

00:50:38.000 I think Americans get the idea that we should have fairness in our tax system.

00:50:43.000 And when Warren Buffett says that, you know, his assistant, his secretary, pays a higher tax rate than he does...

00:50:48.000 And that doesn't seem very fair to Americans.

00:50:50.000 So I'm not saying that we get all our revenue from the top 1%.

00:50:53.000 I'm not saying we should just crush people who are billionaires and millionaires.

00:50:56.000 You know, I'd love to be a billionaire someday.

00:50:58.000 Wouldn't we all, right?

00:51:00.000 But I do think that everyone should pay their fair share.

00:51:03.000 And it doesn't really seem like that's the case when the Republicans have a bill that disproportionately benefits the top 1%.

00:51:09.000 You know, successful companies in America went from a tax rate of about 22% to 12%.

00:51:18.000 Under these first tax cuts that they want to repeat now, that doesn't seem fair.

00:51:23.000 I mean, you and I pay a higher tax rate than 12%.

00:51:27.000 So why is it that a trillion-dollar corporation, almost like Amazon, has a lower tax rate than you and I?

00:51:37.000 I don't know.

00:51:37.000 As an advocate of a 0% corporate tax rate, because the reality is that all that money ends up being paid to somebody who then has to pay an income tax on it, we can agree to disagree on this approach.

00:51:46.000 But the reality is that bottom line is both parties are really throwing that deficit and debt bomb down the road without any real solutions being offered.

00:51:55.000 And I think we can agree that there need to be some serious conversations in which people actually acknowledge that there are trade-offs to these policies and in which actually some pain is going to have to be suffered by somebody.

00:52:04.000 That's right.

00:52:05.000 I agree with that.

00:52:06.000 We should have a serious conversation.

00:52:08.000 That's why we should actually have a bipartisan discussion and debate about this legislation instead of just passing it in a completely partisan way through reconciliation.

00:52:17.000 Let's have that discussion.

00:52:19.000 Let's make Democrats come to the table and say, here are some cuts that we reasonably can agree to.

00:52:24.000 Let's make Republicans come to the table and say, here are some taxes that we could actually raise to pay for this stuff.

00:52:29.000 But instead, like you said, we are throwing a bomb down the road.

00:52:34.000 And it actually is not the same between the two parties because the deficit has consistently gone down.

00:52:43.000 Under most Democratic presidents of the last 50 years.

00:52:47.000 And it's consistently gone up under most Republican presidents because Republicans always cut taxes by saying that, oh, the economy will pay for them.

00:52:56.000 But it hasn't.

00:52:57.000 The economy did not pay for the Bush tax cuts.

00:53:00.000 The economy did not pay for the Trump tax cuts.

00:53:02.000 And the economy is not going to pay for these tax cuts either.

00:53:05.000 That's just the math.

00:53:08.000 Well, I mean, and one of the reasons for that is because every time we cut the taxes and then grow the economy, we then also increase our social spending.

00:53:15.000 So the social spending always goes in one direction faster than the tax revenues taken into the government continue to increase overall, except for, again, the Clinton era, which is when you actually had a Republican Congress and a Democrat president who are talking about all this stuff together.

00:53:28.000 Exactly.

00:53:28.000 When we're talking about areas that bipartisanship is actually necessary, the challenge of China is a very real one.

00:53:34.000 And, you know, you and I have talked off air about this before.

00:53:36.000 Obviously, this is one area where President Trump actually did shift a lot of the debate.

00:53:39.000 I think during the Obama era, even during the Bush era, there was sort of a bipartisan idea that China was a strategic competitor, maybe even a possible friend in the future.

00:53:49.000 But that has pretty radically changed.

00:53:51.000 China, obviously, has taken an incredibly oppositional viewpoint with regard to America.

00:53:55.000 They've been spreading their tentacles outward, and they are racing toward AI supremacy.

00:53:59.000 They are racing toward manufacturing supremacy.

00:54:02.000 What do you think would be the best way to work toward containing China and defeating China in the battle for the future? 0.84

00:54:08.000 Because, again, if you look right now at China's energy production, if you look at their shipbuilding, if you look at their AI production, if you look at their microchip production, and if you look at the possibility of a serious threat to Taiwan, all of those are very much on the table. 0.75

00:54:19.000 I totally agree.

00:54:22.000 I mean, we're playing catch-up.

00:54:23.000 We're behind them in technology.

00:54:24.000 We haven't been making the investments that we need to really focus on this threat.

00:54:29.000 And of all the things you listed, Ben, the fact that Xi Jinping has promised to invade Taiwan, staked his reputation on it, I mean, that's the most serious because it could literally start World War III.

00:54:41.000 And I'm amazed by the number of Americans, including very, very well-educated Americans that, you know, you and I see places where we go, like, they don't understand this threat.

00:54:51.000 And if China invades Taiwan, it will ruin the economy. 0.60

00:54:55.000 We're talking about Great Depression again.

00:54:57.000 If we get into that war, I'm confident the US will win, but we're talking about Vietnam-level casualties. 0.98

00:55:04.000 So the point is, with all of this stuff, we have to be focused on deterrence.

00:55:08.000 We have to convince Xi Jinping that it is a very bad idea to think about starting a war in the Pacific.

00:55:15.000 And Obama was actually the first president to say, we're going to strategically shift to the Pacific, get out of wars in the Middle East, focus on the Pacific.

00:55:23.000 Trump has doubled down on that strategy.

00:55:25.000 I agree with a lot of what Matt Pottinger did when he was on the NSC, leading the China policy in the first Trump administration.

00:55:32.000 But we've got to be serious about this threat.

00:55:35.000 And that's why I'm proud to serve on the Bipartisan China Committee.

00:55:38.000 It's a very bipartisan committee.

00:55:40.000 We do a lot of good stuff together.

00:55:42.000 Mike Gallagher was a chairman before.

00:55:44.000 We've passed some important pieces of legislation, like the TikTok bit.

00:55:48.000 We might love TikTok, but the fact that the Chinese Communist Party can influence the minds of our kids because they run the algorithms that run TikTok, which 100 million Americans have on their phones, that's a real problem. 0.99

00:56:04.000 And by the way, it's a real problem that this bipartisan piece of legislation passed into law is not being implemented by the president.

00:56:13.000 I mean, he is violating the law by not...

00:56:17.000 Well, that is Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat from Massachusetts.

00:56:27.000 Perhaps one of the last vestiges of a Democratic Party that might regain its sanity.

00:56:31.000 Congressman Moulton, really appreciate your time.

00:56:34.000 Good to see you, Ben.

00:56:35.000 Well, the Republicans are still trying to figure out how to get this House bill passed.

00:56:39.000 There are a lot of factions in the Republican Party.

00:56:41.000 Some are on the more tax cut side, but also big spending side.

00:56:45.000 Some are deficit hawks.

00:56:46.000 Trying to cobble all of that together is the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.

00:56:51.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, House Republicans set course Monday for a midweek vote on passing President Trump's agenda of tax cuts and spending reductions, giving them just days to work out deep disagreements among members of their fractious conference.

00:57:02.000 They're banking on President Trump to help them.

00:57:04.000 Trump, on Monday, met with GOP lawmakers one-on-one.

00:57:07.000 He is planning to speak to the broader House Republican conference today on Capitol Hill, according to people familiar with the matter.

00:57:13.000 The House Rules Committee is planning to meet shortly after midnight on Wednesday morning to try to then send the package later that day to the House floor.

00:57:20.000 Speaker Johnson says of the Wednesday target, that is the plan.

00:57:23.000 But fiscal conservatives like Chip Roy of Texas are very concerned.

00:57:26.000 They are pointing out, of course, that we have basically a debt time bomb here in the United States.

00:57:31.000 That is something that Moody's has been pointing out as well.

00:57:35.000 The House Republican leadership have said that there are still major disagreements.

00:57:40.000 Over cutting clean energy tax breaks, there are a bunch of sort of green tax breaks that need to be phased out sooner.

00:57:48.000 Lifting the salt cap, again, a bunch of Republicans in purple districts want a salt cap deduction increased, basically.

00:57:55.000 Again, the amount of your state taxes that you pay should be taken off your income before you pay federal taxes.

00:58:00.000 That's what they want.

00:58:02.000 And also, there's a big debate over how quickly to start new work requirements for people receiving Medicaid.

00:58:08.000 One House GOP leadership aide told reporters Monday, everything is on the table right now.

00:58:13.000 And this is extraordinarily difficult.

00:58:17.000 Andy Harris, chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said on Steve Bannon's show, a passage of the bill is not 100% guaranteed.

00:58:23.000 It is far from it.

00:58:25.000 He said the bottom line is if we don't get significant spending reduction, this bill is not going anywhere this week.

00:58:31.000 And again, even if you're talking about significant spending reduction, the reality is until you completely restructure the entitlements, everything is trimming around the edges.

00:58:38.000 Everything.

00:58:39.000 But these debt concerns are quite real.

00:58:43.000 The possibility of serious downgrades in the future of American debt, that is quite real.

00:58:51.000 Ralph Norman, Republican from South Carolina, he said, if we don't have a wake-up call now, all of us, Democrats, Republicans, I don't know what it's going to take.

00:59:00.000 Trump's National Economic Council director, Kevin Hassett, said the downgrade by Moody's in our bond rating reflected former President Joe Biden's fiscal policies.

00:59:09.000 He argued tax cuts in the megabill would position the United States for further growth.

00:59:12.000 And he also cited increased tax revenue from tariffs.

00:59:16.000 And the problem with that, of course, is that the tariffs are, in fact, going to slow the economy somewhat.

00:59:20.000 This is a point that Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was making just yesterday.

00:59:27.000 Things being up, including trade, trade in general, because not just tariffs, has created a lot of risk out there.

00:59:34.000 And we should be prepared for it.

00:59:36.000 My own view is where people feel pretty good because you haven't seen an effect of tariffs.

00:59:43.000 The market came down 10%.

00:59:44.000 It's back up 10%.

00:59:45.000 I think that's an extraordinary amount of complacency.

00:59:49.000 That's my own view.

00:59:51.000 That when I've seen all these things adding up, That are on the fringes of extreme kind of thing.

00:59:57.000 I don't think we could predict the outcome, and I think the chance of inflation going up and stagflation is a little bit higher than other people think.

01:00:06.000 There are too many things out there.

01:00:08.000 And I think you're going to see the effect.

01:00:10.000 Even if these low levels, you know, they stay where they are today, that's pretty extreme tariffs.

01:00:18.000 Now, again, these are all real problems.

01:00:20.000 The answer for President Trump, if he wants to keep those approval ratings up, which obviously he does, deregulation of the economy, movement toward a more free trade system than those 10% tariffs, the network effect of free market capitalism across the globe directed, oriented against China and oriented toward defeating China.

01:00:36.000 And yes, that tax bill does, in fact, have to pass.

01:00:40.000 And meanwhile, the Supreme Court has now declared that President Trump can, in fact, This, of course, is the proper answer.

01:01:03.000 The only person who would have denied the application is the terrible Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson.

01:01:09.000 Who's utterly incompetent, the worst justice on the bench at this point.

01:01:12.000 And that's saying a lot because Sonia Sotomayor is still on the Supreme Court.

01:01:15.000 And the reality, of course, is that if you sign an executive order granting TPS, temporary protected status, to Venezuelan migrants en masse, the next president can undo that.

01:01:24.000 That is the nature of executive power.

01:01:26.000 This also gives the lie to the idea, by the way, that the Supreme Court is deeply oriented against President Trump in some way.

01:01:32.000 I've heard this from people on the right.

01:01:33.000 No, it's not.

01:01:34.000 It's not.

01:01:35.000 I'm sorry.

01:01:36.000 Again, you may disagree.

01:01:37.000 I may disagree with some of the decisions coming out of the Supreme Court of the United States.

01:01:40.000 But this idea that overall the Supreme Court is basically like a David Souter Supreme Court or Sandra Day O 'Connor Supreme, that is just not true.

01:01:49.000 The Supreme Court is a more originalist, conservative Supreme Court than any Supreme Court of my lifetime.

01:01:55.000 And what that means is that President Trump and his team should, in fact, be very meticulous and careful about how they go about doing policy.

01:02:02.000 Because if they go about doing policy correctly, They will likely get what they want out of the Supreme Court.

01:02:07.000 If, however, they rush headlong into a wall, the Supreme Court will probably tell them no.

01:02:11.000 That seems to be the way all of this is operating.

01:02:15.000 And meanwhile, in sort of fraught legal questions, there's a pretty horrifying story out of Georgia.

01:02:24.000 The story that's horrifying is not what the state is actually doing there.

01:02:28.000 It's just a horrifying story because of the human tragedy involved, according to the Washington Post.

01:02:32.000 A pregnant woman declared brain dead months ago is being kept on life support in Georgia until her baby can be delivered, a decision doctors made to obey the strict state abortion ban, according to her family.

01:02:43.000 Now, again, this makes some sense, honestly, like just on a pure pro-life level.

01:02:50.000 Adriana Smith, 30-year-old Atlanta nurse, was about nine weeks pregnant when she was declared brain dead in February, according to her family.

01:02:55.000 Doctors said that maintaining life support was the only legal option because Georgia outlaws abortion after cardiac activity can be detected in a fetus at around six weeks of pregnancy.

01:03:05.000 And the state's law says that a fetus is a person with legal rights.

01:03:08.000 The hospital has plans to keep Smith alive until the fetus is at least 32 weeks old.

01:03:14.000 The family says the decision should have been left to us, but really, it's unlikely that the decision should have been left to them.

01:03:23.000 Now, it's unclear at this point.

01:03:25.000 Whether the baby's status is going to, whether the baby survives, whether the baby does not survive, according to the Washington Post, medical experts said they know of no cases in which maintaining life support for a fetus, whose mother was declared brain dead so early in pregnancy, has led to a healthy, successful delivery.

01:03:40.000 Usually, this happens in the second trimester or early during the third trimester.

01:03:46.000 But, obviously, this is a tragic situation, but just on a pure moral level.

01:03:51.000 I'm not sure why, on a pure moral level, it would be better for two people to die instead of one.

01:03:56.000 The pro-life position, of course, is that rights attach at conception.

01:03:59.000 And so, if you do wish to protect the baby with all sympathy for the family, obviously, it's horrifying on an emotional level for everybody involved.

01:04:08.000 But, I'm not sure why the death of the baby somehow improves the situation, certainly not for the baby, but for the family in general as well.

01:04:20.000 So, again, a very fraught situation.

01:04:23.000 These sorts of edge cases are very often used to argue against pro-life laws.

01:04:27.000 But I think that the case in this particular case on a moral level is quite strong.

01:04:31.000 If the baby has a chance at survival, why you would kill mother, pull the plug on the mom, knowing that it will also kill the baby. 0.84

01:04:41.000 I'd like to hear the sort of moral justification for that, assuming that there is a chance that the baby actually lives.

01:04:47.000 And goes on to lead a life.

01:04:51.000 That's, I think, the question at issue here.

01:04:54.000 Okay, meanwhile, in media news, CBS News' president has now been forced out amid tensions with President Trump.

01:05:01.000 So CBS News has been having a very difficult time lately.

01:05:05.000 The reason being that CBS News is, of course, owned by Viacom.

01:05:12.000 They merged back in 2019.

01:05:14.000 Viacom has sort of been on the sales block for a while.

01:05:17.000 Sherry Redstone is the controlling shareholder, wants to sell Viacom.

01:05:22.000 And she also would like for the company not to be in sort of open wars with the Trump administration while that is happening.

01:05:30.000 The president of CBS News, Wendy McMahon, has now been forced out of her post on Monday, according to the New York Times.

01:05:36.000 Ms. McMahon told her staff in a memo, it's become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward.

01:05:40.000 Executives at Paramount informed McMahon on Saturday they wanted her to step down.

01:05:45.000 Paramount is currently in talks to settle a $20 billion lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump that accused 60 Minutes of deceptively editing an interview with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.

01:05:55.000 Sherry Redstone has been saying that she wants to settle the case.

01:05:57.000 Now, again, settlements do not mean, for example, that you are admitting guilt.

01:06:01.000 It is quite possible that what Sherry Redstone here is saying is, hey, guys, if this goes to trial, we might lose the case, and then we might have to owe billions of dollars.

01:06:11.000 Let's just settle this thing out of court and basically be done.

01:06:14.000 But the situation prompted the executive producer of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, to resign last month.

01:06:18.000 And so what you're seeing now is sort of a media resistance to Sherry Redstone.

01:06:21.000 Here's the thing.

01:06:22.000 She owns the company.

01:06:22.000 If you don't like it, you can go work someplace else.

01:06:26.000 60 Minutes has been targeting the Trump team and administration for years on end, and 60 Minutes happens to be a particularly biased program for a very, very long time.

01:06:34.000 It is not Sherry Redstone's obligation to keep hiring people who she feels are going to report falsely or in radically biased ways against the Trump.

01:06:44.000 It's always amusing to me to see people who believe that they are owed jobs.

01:06:48.000 You are not owed a job.

01:06:49.000 It is not, in fact, censorship for somebody to say, you do not agree with my vision at this company.

01:06:54.000 You don't work here anymore.

01:06:55.000 That's not censorship.

01:06:56.000 That's just called real life.

01:06:57.000 And it happens in companies literally all the time.

01:07:01.000 So, should Wendy McMahon have been fired? 0.99

01:07:04.000 I mean, listen, if Sherry Redstone believes she should have been fired, then I suppose that she should have been fired. 0.94

01:07:11.000 Apparently, McMahon is going to remain at the network for a few weeks to support the transition.

01:07:15.000 She's going to be succeeded for now by a pair of veteran network executives. 0.76

01:07:20.000 But of course, the media are playing this as a deep wrong.

01:07:23.000 It is not, in fact, a deep wrong.

01:07:25.000 It is just the normal way that business is done.

01:07:27.000 If the boss doesn't like the job you're doing, you're likely to find yourself out on your butt.

01:07:32.000 Meanwhile, it's kind of fun to watch people who are on the left suddenly discover conservatism as reality sets in.

01:07:37.000 So, the peace of the day.

01:07:38.000 That is sort of dedicated to this proposition is a piece by Christina Emba.

01:07:42.000 To be fair, Christina Emba, who writes over at the New York Times, has made a habit of this. 0.98

01:07:46.000 She'll say conservative things that she sort of discovered.

01:07:49.000 She'll be like, oh, hey, you know what's great?

01:07:50.000 Marriage.

01:07:51.000 Marriage is kind of great.

01:07:52.000 Well, she has a piece today at the New York Times titled The Delusion of Harmlessness.

01:07:59.000 Glad to see people on the left finally actually realizing that it's bad for you.

01:08:04.000 Some of us have been saying this literally our entire careers.

01:08:06.000 I read a book when I was 20. It's also crippled women who have fallen into 0.98

01:08:36.000 the trap of believing That they need to subject themselves to awful treatment by men in the name of quote-unquote consent, in the name of being sexy.

01:08:45.000 So Christine Emba has this fascinating piece in which she struggles with the fact that the left's only value is consent.

01:08:52.000 And it turns out that actually human beings need more than consent to feel good about their own actions.

01:08:59.000 They actually need a sense of spirituality and fulfillment.

01:09:02.000 So she has this entire piece pointing out, floods the internet.

01:09:07.000 A 2023 report from Brigham Young University estimated could be found on 12% of websites.

01:09:13.000 Bots regularly surface on X, on Instagram, in comment sections, and in unsolicited direct messages.

01:09:19.000 Defenders tend to cite the existence of so-called ethical, but that is not what the majority of users are watching.

01:09:27.000 So, it turns out that an enormous number of people who are watching are now engaging in activities that are pretty vile in real life.

01:09:37.000 She points out, it's hard not to see a connection between trained behaviors like choking, slapping, and spitting that have become the norm even in early sexual encounters and young women's distrust in young men.

01:09:47.000 In the future, people will become only more addictive and effective as a teacher as virtual reality makes it more immersive and artificial intelligence allows it to be customizable.

01:09:56.000 And then she cites a book titled Girl on Girl, How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by a woman named Sophie Gilbert, who pointed out that the mass objectification of women, In the 1990s and 2000s, was bad.

01:10:11.000 And she points out that easy-to-access hardcore, quote, trained a good amount of our popular culture to see women as objects, as things to silence, restrain, fetishize, or brutalize, and it's helped train women, too.

01:10:21.000 But here's the part that Emba points out that's quite fascinating.

01:10:24.000 She says, while Ms. Gilbert is unsparing in her descriptions of women's warping effect on culture and its consumers, she's curiously reluctant to acknowledge what seems obvious.

01:10:33.000 It hasn't been good for us.

01:10:35.000 While her descriptions of the cultural landscape imply the mainstreaming of hardcore has been a bad thing, she pulls her punches.

01:10:41.000 So she writes, quote, I'm not interested in kink shaming and I'm not remotely opposed to.

01:10:44.000 Immediately after describing a 2019 study that found 38% of British women under 40 reported having experienced unwanted slapping, choking, gagging, or spitting during sex.

01:10:55.000 That data point came at the tail end of a chapter that draws a disturbing and convincing line from the emergence and popularization of violent extreme in the late 1990s.

01:11:03.000 To photos that emerged from Abu Ghraib in 2004 of prisoners being sexually humiliated.

01:11:08.000 And here is the central point that EMBA makes, and this is totally right.

01:11:12.000 Criticizing goes against the norm of non-judgmentalism for people who like to consider themselves forward-thinking, thoughtful, and open-minded.

01:11:19.000 There's a dread of seeming prudish, boring, and uncool.

01:11:23.000 More generously, there's a desire not to indict the choices of individuals who create sexual content out of need or personal desire or allow legislation to harm those who depend on it to survive.

01:11:32.000 But a lack of judgment sometimes comes at the expense of discernment.

01:11:36.000 Yes, we call this conservatism and traditional values.

01:11:39.000 Yes, it turns out that non-judgmentalism is in fact a value system all its own.

01:11:43.000 And it turns out quite rapidly and actually is identical with moral relativism, suggesting that we cannot judge people's quote-unquote kinks. 0.59

01:11:51.000 Well, it depends what the kink is.

01:11:53.000 Some kinks are bad, as it turns out. 1.00

01:11:55.000 Bad for them, bad for their partners.

01:11:57.000 Yes, you can judge other people's activities.

01:11:59.000 Doesn't mean there needs to be legislation directed against it.

01:12:02.000 But the popularization of such activities in the mainstream obviously is going to have an impact on how people live.

01:12:11.000 Emba points out, most recently, the only people who seem willing to openly criticize the widespread availability of people tend to be right-leaning or religious, and so are instantly discounted, often by being disparaged as such.

01:12:22.000 But cracks are beginning to appear in the wall, as shown by sources as varied as the recent of quiet revile of the anti- Well, yes, but I have a question.

01:12:42.000 Why is it?

01:12:43.000 Here's the problem.

01:12:43.000 This is actually a real problem.

01:12:45.000 She says, well, it's really bad because, you know, it's kind of awkward because the only people who have been consistently anti-political, like from the beginning to now, the only people who have been right on this stuff are people who are right-leaning or religious.

01:12:56.000 That's true.

01:12:58.000 That's true.

01:12:59.000 Literally my entire career I've been anti- All the new converts that I'm seeing on the right or on the kind of heterodox center or left are like, hey, you know what's bad?

01:13:09.000 I never had to go through a period of my life where I thought it was good or decent or amoral even.

01:13:17.000 I always thought it was wrong because I have a traditional worldview which suggests that the human soul is besmirched by this sort of activity.

01:13:26.000 That it makes people treat women worse and see women in a worse way.

01:13:30.000 And it is bad for men and it is bad for women to treat them as sexualized objects only. 0.74

01:13:35.000 That people have souls and ought to be treated as holistic human beings.

01:13:39.000 But a left that said, hey, but you believe in gods.

01:13:42.000 That's bad.

01:13:42.000 You can't say that anymore.

01:13:43.000 So now it's like, oh, well, we're rediscovering that it's bad.

01:13:46.000 First of all, thanks for that 20 years in the wilderness.

01:13:48.000 Really enjoyed that.

01:13:48.000 That worked out great.

01:13:50.000 But second of all, I noticed that when you strip.

01:13:53.000 The traditional values worldview from this argument?

01:13:57.000 It's like you have to reprove every element of the traditional values worldview.

01:14:00.000 This is a broader problem that's happening not just on the left but also on the right.

01:14:05.000 It turns out the traditional values worldview has a bunch of positions that are rooted in basic human nature.

01:14:12.000 That's why they developed over the course of 2,000 years.

01:14:15.000 This is why the biblical values that undergird Western civilization and were guarded by the religious are the basis for our civilization today. 0.99

01:14:26.000 And when you strip out the religious values and when you say, well, let's just explode all of that and we'll rediscover from the beginning.

01:14:31.000 Well, what you end up with is an awful lot of chaos and suffering before those values are rediscovered.

01:14:37.000 And also, no language with which to discuss why this stuff is bad.

01:14:42.000 Religious people can explain to you at length why is wrong, why it is bad, and why consent is not the only indicator of whether something is good or bad. 1.00

01:14:51.000 Religious people have the language to describe this.

01:14:54.000 People with traditional value systems have the language to describe why something might be bad outside of the sort of classically liberal consent context.

01:15:03.000 But the kind of nouveau right doesn't really have the ability to do that because they didn't grow up with any of this worldview.

01:15:10.000 Like, have them explain why is bad.

01:15:12.000 They'll say it's because it feels icky.

01:15:14.000 Okay, but for a lot of people, it doesn't feel icky until it does.

01:15:17.000 Or they'll say, you know, it made my life...

01:15:19.000 Materially worse, sort of a utilitarian approach.

01:15:21.000 But what if it was bad even if it didn't make your life worse in a utilitarian way?

01:15:25.000 What if some things are just morally wrong?

01:15:28.000 What if it doesn't have to be all about you?

01:15:31.000 It turns out that sin is sin.

01:15:34.000 What if that?

01:15:35.000 When you discard the entire religious, traditional, moral framework, you end up having to rebuild it, ersatz, and it doesn't have the same binding effect as a traditional view of God, sin, and human nature have.

01:15:47.000 Those are holistic.

01:15:49.000 Comprehensive worldviews that define how people live.

01:15:52.000 And kind of trying to parachute into these various issues that, hey, you know what?

01:15:57.000 We just found out that it's not all that great.

01:15:59.000 Okay, on what basis?

01:16:01.000 For you personally?

01:16:02.000 Or like on a utilitarian social level?

01:16:04.000 How do you define the good, right?

01:16:06.000 Why is it bad if people act in atomistic individual isolation sexually?

01:16:12.000 Why is that bad?

01:16:13.000 A religious person can explain why that's bad because that's not what you're meant to do. 0.99

01:16:16.000 God did not create you to do that thing.

01:16:18.000 God created you to leave your father and mother and cleave to your wife and form a new family unit. 0.98

01:16:24.000 And he says so in the book of Genesis.

01:16:26.000 And I understand, oh my God, you're citing that terrible book.

01:16:28.000 You're citing the Bible.

01:16:29.000 How could you possibly cite, you know, that book about the big sky, man?

01:16:32.000 Well, here's the deal.

01:16:33.000 If you don't have a premise that says that things are moral or immoral on the basis of some objective reality, and what you end up with is a utilitarian calculus about, well, maybe he's okay.

01:16:44.000 And maybe it's okay for some.

01:16:46.000 And maybe violent.

01:16:47.000 It's okay.

01:16:48.000 And now we have to prove all over again the things that human nature have already shown us to be true.

01:16:53.000 Let's take the perfectly secular view of what the Bible is for a second.

01:16:56.000 Okay, perfectly secular.

01:16:57.000 Let's take God out of the picture.

01:16:59.000 Just assume for a second that what the Bible actually is and the biblical corpus and doctrines that spring from the Bible, we won't talk about God.

01:17:05.000 Let's just assume that those are pieces of time-tested wisdom that have lasted the ages because they are true.

01:17:13.000 Forget about the miracles.

01:17:15.000 Forget about God on a mountain, or if you're a Christian, God taking human form. 0.99

01:17:20.000 Forget about any of that.

01:17:21.000 Just look at the moral principles that are spelled out by this religion and the biblical corpus that have lasted into today's world.

01:17:30.000 Why have they done so?

01:17:32.000 Thomas Sowell, who is, as far as I'm aware, an agnostic or an atheist, says that treating the only form of data as like sociology studies is idiocy.

01:17:41.000 Another form of data is the received wisdom of the past.

01:17:43.000 And if you have to keep remaking the wheel every generation, you know what you end up with?

01:17:46.000 An awful lot of lost young people.

01:17:48.000 I'm sorry, the people who are now discovering that is bad are not people you should have trusted in the first place.

01:17:54.000 I'm just telling you this.

01:17:55.000 I know that there is this attachment among young men particularly to this, well, you know, we're all on a journey now and we're all discovering together.

01:18:01.000 But you know what?

01:18:02.000 Maybe the person who is telling you, the people who are telling you it was wrong all along, maybe they were right.

01:18:09.000 Maybe you should turn to them, not the people who said, you know, let's experiment and we'll determine maybe later whether it was a good idea or a bad idea.

01:18:16.000 Maybe those people shouldn't be trusted because their worldview was deeply flawed.

01:18:20.000 And if you spend your entire life trying to remake the moral wheel just because you didn't trust your grandfather, maybe you're doing it wrong.

01:18:28.000 Maybe our civilization is doing it wrong.

01:18:30.000 Maybe grandpa had some interesting things to say.

01:18:32.000 And yeah, maybe him sitting over the fire reading the Bible won the worst thing in the world.

01:18:36.000 Already, folks, the show continues for our members right now.

01:18:38.000 We'll jump into the mailbag and answer your questions.

01:18:40.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

01:18:42.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

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The Ben Shapiro Show - May 20, 2025

The Democrat-Media Scandal That Won’t Go Away

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