The Ben Shapiro Show - The Democrats’ Circular Firing Squad CONTINUES

00:00:00.000 Democrats engage in their circular firing squad, the radicals versus the traditionalists versus the moderates, and it's getting ugly out there.

00:00:07.000 Plus, more economic news from the Trump administration.

00:00:10.000 What actually would provide affordability?

00:00:12.000 Republicans fighting over H-1B visas.

00:00:14.000 And why are some supposed traditionalists now embracing polygyne, like men marrying more than one woman?

00:00:20.000 We'll get to all of that.

00:00:21.000 But first, join Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Andrew Claven, and me next Wednesday night, 7 p.m. Eastern on Daily Wire Plus, as we do what we do best.

00:00:28.000 Debate, discuss, disagree on the biggest stories in politics and culture.

00:00:31.000 Plus, we're world premiering the first official trailer for the Pendragon cycle, Rise of the Merlin.

00:00:35.000 Friendly Fire Wednesday at 7 p.m. Eastern only on Daily Wire Plus.

00:00:35.000 Don't miss it.

00:00:39.000 Well, the Democrats' circular firing squad continues.

00:00:42.000 There is a vast battle happening inside the Democratic Party, ranging from the radicals led by people like Zaran Mamdani and AOC and Bernie Sanders to the more traditional liberals who don't seem to have any sort of systemic immunity to that, to the moderate Democrats who are increasingly feeling out of step with their own party.

00:01:00.000 Meanwhile, President Trump just keeps trucking along.

00:01:03.000 Yesterday was Veterans Day, and the president of the United States spent Veterans Day speaking about the value of our veterans.

00:01:10.000 Here he was yesterday.

00:01:13.000 This morning on these hallowed grounds where generations of American heroes rest in eternal glory, we gather to fulfill the sacred duty of every free man and woman.

00:01:27.000 On Veterans Day, we honor those who have worn the uniform, who have borne the battle, who have stood to watch and whose ranks have formed the mighty wall of flesh and blood, bravery, and devotion that has defended our freedom for 250 years.

00:01:47.000 Today, to every veteran, we love our veterans.

00:01:52.000 We say the words too often left unsaid.

00:01:57.000 Thank you for your service.

00:01:59.000 Thank you very much.

00:02:02.000 And again, President Trump has a baseline level of patriotism that comes through in everything that he does, truly.

00:02:08.000 I mean, the man loves the country.

00:02:09.000 Obviously, he loves the American flag.

00:02:11.000 He loves the American military.

00:02:12.000 That was the president at Arlington National Cemetery yesterday.

00:02:16.000 And here he was, again, saying everything that we have, we owe to the military, which is something, again, the Radical Democrats do not believe this.

00:02:24.000 Yet every captain of industry, every pioneer of science, and every star whose brilliance has lit up the lights of Broadway all share one thing in common.

00:02:35.000 They only had the chance to soar because the veterans had the courage to serve.

00:02:41.000 They took care of those people.

00:02:42.000 They took care of all the stars.

00:02:45.000 The stars that you read about wouldn't be here without our veterans.

00:02:49.000 Everything we have, everything our country has achieved has been purchased by the muscle, spine, and steel of the United States military.

00:02:58.000 We owe it all to the fierce and noble men and women of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, Space Force, Coast Guard, and the United States Marines.

00:03:10.000 Well, contrast that with how Hassan Piker has been spending the last few days.

00:03:15.000 Apparently, he went to China, and while he was in China, he decided that he was going to blather about how America is terrible in a country that legitimately censors everything you do, kills its opposition, runs them over with tanks.

00:03:30.000 This was Hassan Piker literally in Tiananmen Square, where protesters against the Chinese government were murdered, talking about American patriotism.

00:03:41.000 I don't have any sort of patriotism in my heart for any.

00:03:48.000 I'm not like a very Well, I mean, if that is the choice that Americans are put to, and if Democrats continue to embrace this sort of radicalism, then, you know, I think the Democrats are in some real trouble here.

00:04:01.000 And the fact is, Hassan Piker is, of course, fairly close with Zarmamdandi, the new mayor-elect of New York.

00:04:07.000 He was at his party, his victory party in New York, where he was going around literally telling camera people that it was a tragedy that the Soviet Union had collapsed.

00:04:16.000 And so radicals are, in fact, taking over the Democratic Party.

00:04:19.000 There's no question that they are the ones with the momentum at this point if the Democratic Party refuses to stand up and say no.

00:04:27.000 So again, it's sort of fascinating the dynamic here.

00:04:30.000 Ryan Ennos is a political scientist at Harvard, and he argues in his substack quoted in the New York Times today, that Mamdani's significance lies more in the fact that there was enough enthusiasm for change rooted in dissatisfaction with the status quo and anger at those who perpetuated that voters in a major election were willing to elect a true outsider candidate and to work hard enough to do so in the face of enormous establishment resistance.

00:04:51.000 And this, I think, is the common thread you're seeing it on the right also, is that anger at the status quo leads people to embrace radicalism.

00:04:58.000 And when there are no leaders who are willing to stand up and either say the truth or at least to tell people who are lying that they are lying, then what you end up with is the radicals taking over the party.

00:05:10.000 And the radicals in the Democratic Party and the people on the fringes of the Democratic Party, they are an increasing number of people inside the Democratic Party.

00:05:17.000 This is presumably how you end up with continued violence from the left at, for example, TPSA events.

00:05:23.000 In a second, we'll get to whether the left can actually stop its radicals, plus the economy, affordability, what's the Fed going to do at the next rate meeting.

00:05:30.000 We'll get to all of it.

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00:07:42.000 On Monday, there was a protest that turned into a quasi-small riot outside a TPUSA event at University of California, Berkeley.

00:07:50.000 A demonstrator whose name is Jihad, Jihad DeFrepalez, 25, who apparently snatched a chain necklace from one of the attendees, and that left him in a vicious fight that left the victim covered in blood.

00:08:03.000 Here's what that looked like.

00:08:08.000 Police!

00:08:08.000 Break it off!

00:08:10.000 Break it off! 1.00

00:08:10.000 Police! 1.00

00:08:11.000 Hey, Whiteboard! 0.60

00:08:12.000 Break it off! 1.00

00:08:13.000 You're bleeding!

00:08:15.000 Hey, Whiteboard! 0.60

00:08:16.000 You're bleeding!

00:08:17.000 White boy! 1.00

00:08:18.000 Hey, Whiteboard! 0.60

00:08:19.000 You're in the lead!

00:08:19.000 White boy!

00:08:20.000 Break it off! 1.00

00:08:21.000 You're out of it!

00:08:22.000 What I'm doing!

00:08:23.000 That's a fair bit of blood on the face.

00:08:25.000 And of course, you know, this sort of thing has unfortunately become not particularly rare when Antifa radicals and their allies show up at events like the TPUSA event.

00:08:37.000 So, are there enough normie Democrats to stop this from taking over the party?

00:08:40.000 Well, the problem for them is that the sort of normie Democrats, the liberals, the not even the moderates, I'm just talking about like the mainstream liberal Democratic Party has no systemic immunity to this sort of stuff.

00:08:51.000 They are perfectly willing to go along with this sort of thing, which is why presumably they're so angry about the end of the government shutdown.

00:09:00.000 What Chuck Schumer did here in allowing a vote, essentially, and eight Democrats in moderate states joining with the Republicans to end the government shutdown.

00:09:08.000 That is a normie policy.

00:09:09.000 The shutdown was a radical policy that was embraced for electoral purposes.

00:09:13.000 And then the election was over, and then Democrats let it go.

00:09:16.000 But this is prompting extraordinary anks from the liberal mainstream Democratic Party because they want to capture these zeitgeists. 0.90

00:09:24.000 They want to capture what they think is the jet fuel of the radicals.

00:09:27.000 So, for example, Gavin Newsom, who wants to run for president, governor of California, he raged against the end of the shutdown on X.

00:09:34.000 He said, tonight's Senate vote on the federal government shutdown should have been a time for strength.

00:09:37.000 Instead, we saw capitulation and a betrayal of working Americans.

00:09:40.000 The American people need more from their leaders.

00:09:42.000 What more would it be?

00:09:43.000 Like a continuation of people not getting their SNAP benefits?

00:09:46.000 A continuation of the FAA not being actually functional? 0.98

00:09:51.000 His press office then put out a statement, pathetic. 0.96

00:09:54.000 This isn't a deal. 0.99

00:09:55.000 Don't bend the knee.

00:09:55.000 It's a surrender.

00:09:57.000 Don't bend the knee.

00:09:58.000 And that is Gavin Newsom linking arms with the radicals in his own party.

00:10:02.000 Roe Konick, he says the Democratic leadership is out of touch.

00:10:07.000 It's mind-boggling.

00:10:08.000 It's just people who are out of touch, who don't understand the political moment that we're in.

00:10:15.000 Look, the good news is there's a new generation of leaders.

00:10:18.000 Zorhan Mamdani, one, Abigail Spanberger, one, Mikey Sherrill, one.

00:10:22.000 There are people who get it.

00:10:24.000 You know, someone jokingly, or maybe it was serious, described me as a backbencher calling for Schumer's ouster.

00:10:31.000 Some people who liked me came to my defense saying, no, he's not a backbencher.

00:10:34.000 I said, no, the problem is those of us in the back need to get to the front.

00:10:37.000 This party needs a change in the leadership.

00:10:43.000 Okay, so again, what you now have inside the Democratic Party, you know, to look for a historical analogy, go back to the Russian Revolution, where you basically had some soft socialists, the so-called Russian whites, led by a guy named Alexander Kerensky, who are trying to hold off the Reds. 0.50

00:10:59.000 And the Reds actually started off in an unenviable position militarily, and they ended up winning because eventually there wasn't enough systemic immunity to stop them.

00:11:08.000 And that's basically where it seems we are right now.

00:11:10.000 The systemic immunity is gone.

00:11:11.000 J.B. Pritzker, who also wants to run for president, the governor of Illinois, who must be lowered into the state capitol by Crane, he says that the government should have remained closed.

00:11:20.000 Look, I have enormous respect and always have for Senator Durbin.

00:11:24.000 I disagree with his vote.

00:11:26.000 I do not think that the eight members of the Senate that voted the way that they did should have done that.

00:11:34.000 I think that we had an opportunity to make sure that we were protecting people's health care across the nation.

00:11:42.000 But for whatever reason, those members decided to vote the way that they did.

00:11:49.000 Again, I'm disappointed.

00:11:50.000 I think that more could have been done here.

00:11:54.000 Okay, so, you know, again, this is where the Democratic Party is going.

00:11:57.000 They're following their radicals down the rabbit hole.

00:11:59.000 And the Democrats who refuse to do so increasingly do seem out of touch, as Rocana says.

00:12:04.000 Hakeem Jeffries, the would-be Speaker of the House, the House minority leader, is still out there praising Schumer, despite the fact that he actually disagreed with ending the government shutdown.

00:12:13.000 What do you think, Leader Jeffries?

00:12:15.000 Do you agree with RoCanna?

00:12:16.000 Do you think Schumer should be replaced?

00:12:20.000 Leader Schumer did not bless this agreement.

00:12:23.000 He voted against it.

00:12:25.000 And of course, Senate Democrats who voted no have made that clear.

00:12:30.000 And what we've seen from Senate Democrats over the last seven weeks has been part of a valiant fight that we have waged together to stand up in defense of the health, the safety, and the economic well-being of the American people.

00:12:46.000 So, again, does he seem as though he is in touch right now?

00:12:50.000 He's trying to bridge the gap.

00:12:52.000 I'm not sure that gap is particularly bridgeable.

00:12:54.000 Maybe the last honest Democrat in the Congress is Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who points out that a basically normie position in America, just to be generally pro-Israel, which by the polls is a fully normie position, that is the mainstream moderate position in the United States.

00:13:11.000 Doesn't mean you have to back everything Israel does, doesn't mean you have to love the prime minister of the state, but to just be generally supportive of Israel.

00:13:17.000 That has now become incompatible with being a proud Democrat, according to Fetterman.

00:13:21.000 I've met with widows, their husbands were lost in the Gaza War, and they have eight children raising eight children by their own.

00:13:30.000 That's a hero for all of it.

00:13:33.000 So for me, it's heartbreaking.

00:13:36.000 And that's been what's so difficult for me is like being devotion to Israel becoming increasingly incompatible with being a proud Democrat now, too.

00:13:45.000 And that's put me at odds.

00:13:48.000 And so we'll see how long this current Democratic Party can last without splitting into pieces.

00:13:52.000 Now, meanwhile, the biggest threat to the Republicans at this point is indeed the economy.

00:13:56.000 This has been true for a very long time.

00:13:58.000 The reality is, I've been saying for legitimately months, that an economy that is on the precipice, that feels uncertain, that is not a growth-oriented economy, is going to have some problems.

00:14:11.000 And so there's been a lot of angst properly over affordability in the United States.

00:14:16.000 It is true, as the president says, that there is some hangover here from the Biden years, obviously.

00:14:21.000 Massive inflation during the Biden years.

00:14:23.000 And over the course of the last year, moderate inflation would be the best way to describe it.

00:14:27.000 Inflation clocking in on an annualized basis, like 3%, which is too high by about 50%, but it's not like the 9% or 10% or 11% we had during some months during the Biden administration.

00:14:38.000 Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, he's blaming Joe Biden for the affordability crisis.

00:14:42.000 And again, he's not wrong.

00:14:45.000 I think that we inherited an affordability crisis.

00:14:52.000 We have slowed the price increases down, and they are going to continue to slow down, and that real working class wages will go up, and that that will address the affordability issue.

00:15:04.000 Okay, so again, that is the theory, and hopefully that is correct.

00:15:09.000 Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the National Economic Council, he says that the inflation that we're seeing is actually coming down.

00:15:16.000 It's moving in the right direction.

00:15:17.000 Wages are going to increase.

00:15:18.000 Here he was explaining on CNBC.

00:15:20.000 He was asked why inflation has increased for five straight months.

00:15:24.000 Well, I guess if you look at it from January, there's ups and downs and seasonals.

00:15:29.000 But yeah, we have surprised on the downside.

00:15:32.000 People were expecting it to accelerate, and it didn't.

00:15:35.000 And I think that that is because this growth that we're getting is not from printing a massive amount of government debt and sending checks to people like Joe Biden did.

00:15:46.000 I mean, think about it.

00:15:47.000 If you look at the macroeconomic picture, the way you get inflation down is you don't have the government spend like crazy.

00:15:54.000 And we've actually got a deficit reduction so far this year that's really on track by December to be down $600 billion for the year alone.

00:16:02.000 And so that $600 billion reduction in the deficit takes the macroeconomic pressure off.

00:16:09.000 Okay, so again, perhaps that's true, but Americans have to see the results.

00:16:14.000 This is one of the reasons why I have been against the Federal Reserve cutting the interest rates.

00:16:18.000 I was against the rate cuts.

00:16:20.000 I do not think that the current rate cuts are designed to actually do what the Federal Reserve is supposed to do, bring down inflation.

00:16:26.000 Again, I've always been critical of the idea that you can have an agency with two mandates.

00:16:31.000 For example, when you look at the Homeland Security Department, that department has been tasked with both facilitating legal immigration and ending illegal immigration. 0.99

00:16:40.000 That's stupid. 0.98

00:16:41.000 If you have two separate purposes, they should have two separate agencies. 1.00

00:16:44.000 The Federal Reserve should not be charged with both keeping unemployment low and keeping inflation low.

00:16:49.000 They should be charged with keeping inflation low.

00:16:51.000 Keeping unemployment low is a function of innovation.

00:16:55.000 It is a function of deregulation.

00:16:58.000 It should not be a function of inflationary government policy.

00:17:02.000 Using the central bank as your policymaker of first resort is a mistake, and it leads to mistakes that tend to be inflationary in nature.

00:17:11.000 Pretty rare that you get a Federal Reserve since the Great Depression that is deflationary in nature.

00:17:16.000 They tend to favor inflation over deflation for obvious reasons.

00:17:20.000 Well, now, apparently, the Federal Reserve is torn over an interest rate cut.

00:17:24.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, officials are fractured over which poses the greater threat, persistent inflation or a sluggish labor market, and even a resumption of official economic data may not bridge the differences.

00:17:33.000 The rupture has complicated what looked like a workable plan less than two months ago, though investors think a rate cut at the Fed's next meeting is still more likely than not.

00:17:41.000 When policymakers agreed to cut rates by a quarter percent in September, 10 of 19 officials, a slim majority, penciled in cuts for October and December.

00:17:49.000 Cutting rates at three consecutive meetings would echo the downward adjustments that Powell last made in 2019.

00:17:54.000 You'll remember that what came after that was a gigantic inflationary spiral tapped off by COVID, but then radically accelerating under Joe Biden.

00:18:02.000 A contingent of Hawks has questioned the need for further reductions.

00:18:05.000 The resistance hardened after officials reduced rates again in late October to the current range between 3.75 and 4%.

00:18:13.000 Hawks are challenging the presumption of another rate cut.

00:18:17.000 And that is why presumably Jerome Powell has been sort of downplaying the expectations that there will be another rate cut in December.

00:18:23.000 Again, it's hard to see why there should be a rate cut given the fact that liquidity conditions in the United States are not actually all that difficult.

00:18:29.000 They're worse than they were a few years ago in terms of mortgages, in terms of car loans, but in terms of business loans, in terms of the ability to access capital for startups.

00:18:40.000 That's not a liquidity problem.

00:18:43.000 That's an innovation problem.

00:18:44.000 That's an uncertainty problem.

00:18:45.000 It generally is not a liquidity problem.

00:18:47.000 There are a lot of investors sitting on the sidelines right now because they just don't know what is coming next.

00:18:52.000 The last official data released before the government shutdown showed a key measure of inflation at 2.9%, and that is up from 2.6%.

00:18:59.000 That is below some of the forecast because of the tariffs.

00:19:01.000 But is that due to a drop off in demand?

00:19:03.000 We don't really know.

00:19:05.000 Again, inflation in prices is a function not only of the amount of money in the economy, but also it is the effect of demand.

00:19:11.000 If demand increases, then you tend to get higher prices.

00:19:13.000 If demand decreases, then you tend to get lower prices.

00:19:17.000 Well, again, the big question in all of this is how do you bring down prices?

00:19:21.000 How do you bring down prices?

00:19:22.000 Historically speaking, the way to make things affordable, the way to bring down prices is fairly simple.

00:19:28.000 You increase supply.

00:19:30.000 That is how prices go down.

00:19:32.000 Any product, anytime, increase supply, keep demand steady, the prices go down.

00:19:39.000 That is just how markets work.

00:19:41.000 That is how realities work.

00:19:43.000 Any attempt to do anything else is going to be at best a band-aid and at worst radically counterproductive to the cause of bringing down the prices.

00:19:51.000 And so intervening with government-backed programs is more likely to lead to inflationary policy than the opposite.

00:19:58.000 One of my favorite charts is a chart showing the differences in prices between government-subsidized products and non-government subsidized products over the course of the last 40 years in American life.

00:20:09.000 Every single government subsidized product from education to healthcare has skyrocketed in terms of cost.

00:20:15.000 Because when you increase demand and subsidize it, you end up with higher prices.

00:20:20.000 Everything the government does not subsidize, the prices have gone down because that's how markets work.

00:20:24.000 And so my advice for the Trump administration is to move less toward government solutions and more toward government getting out of the way.

00:20:34.000 Deregulation, yes, lower taxes, less subsidies, fewer interventions in the market economy, more growth innovative policies.

00:20:46.000 This is one of the reasons why I'm not a huge fan of this idea of now like a government-backed 50-year mortgage.

00:20:51.000 All righty, coming up, we'll get to affordability.

00:20:53.000 We'll get to President Trump with Laura Ingram talking about H1BVs. 0.56

00:20:56.000 There's a lot to talk about.

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00:22:46.000 Again, that's oracle.com/slash Shapiro, oracle.com slash Shapiro.

00:22:51.000 There's been talk about trying to make housing more affordable by bringing down essentially what you pay on your monthly payment by extending your mortgage out from a 30-year mortgage to a 50-year mortgage.

00:23:03.000 Now, one of the questions is why there aren't sort of natural 50-year mortgages.

00:23:07.000 Why don't private lenders just offer a 50-year mortgage?

00:23:09.000 And the answer is that private lenders don't offer 50-year mortgages because, in many cases, they are illegal, because the amount of money that you end up paying over the course of 50 years is so much more than the actual sticker price of a house that it's insane.

00:23:23.000 If you're paying a fairly low interest rate on an $800,000 loan over the course of 50 years, you'll end up paying many times the original price of the house just in the interest because the loan is so long.

00:23:39.000 So you're actually losing money every month.

00:23:42.000 Beyond that, the gamble that is being made by the lender at that point is that if you default, your house will be worth more than it was.

00:23:49.000 Okay, well, maybe that's true, but the problem is you are setting yourself up basically for a second subprime housing crisis.

00:23:55.000 If ever the housing market drops off in terms of prices and all those banks then foreclose on the houses and have valueless assets in exchange for money that they lent out, then you have a major banking crisis that actually ends up eating the system.

00:24:10.000 That's a point being made by the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

00:24:13.000 High home prices are a problem, having soared 56% since January 2020.

00:24:17.000 Two reasons are excessive government spending that fueled inflation and historically low pandemic era interest rates, which, of course, is right.

00:24:24.000 Again, when you lower the interest rates, that is a subsidy to demand.

00:24:28.000 Because maybe I wasn't thinking about taking out a mortgage at 7%, but I am thinking about taking out a second mortgage at 2%.

00:24:34.000 The Federal Reserve then had to raise rates to bring inflation under control.

00:24:37.000 The result, average monthly payments on a new home have climbed some 80% over the last five years.

00:24:42.000 This means fewer young people can afford a home.

00:24:44.000 The median age of first-time buyers this year reached an all-time high of 40 compared to the late 20s in the 1980s.

00:24:50.000 Public surveys show the cost of housing is an acute worry for young Americans.

00:24:53.000 So President Trump has now been sold, apparently, on the idea of a 50-year mortgage by Bill Pulte, who runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

00:25:01.000 The aim is to reduce monthly payments by amortizing the loan over a longer period.

00:25:04.000 So instead of paying down the principal over 30 years, which is already a super long loan, by the way, most countries do not offer 30-year mortgages.

00:25:10.000 Borrowers would now have 50 years to do it. 1.00

00:25:14.000 So again, a 50-year mortgage, as I've said, it would cut monthly payments, but it would also radically increase the amount of interest that borrowers pay over the life of the loan.

00:25:23.000 Also, borrowers may have to pay higher interest rates to compensate for the enormous risk that sometime over the next half century, you're going to default.

00:25:32.000 And as the Wall Street Journal points out, this has happened before.

00:25:35.000 As the housing bubble inflated, Fannie Mae began buying more four-year mortgages, which let borrowers take out bigger loans than they could otherwise afford.

00:25:41.000 Borrowers were slower to build equity. 0.62

00:25:43.000 Many walked away from their mortgages when the home prices collapsed.

00:25:46.000 Or look at the subprime auto market.

00:25:48.000 As car prices rose with inflation, auto dealers extended the duration of loans for less creditworthy borrowers.

00:25:54.000 Some struggling borrowers are now turning in their keys and leaving lenders with big losses.

00:25:59.000 So again, the only way to truly do a 50-year mortgage is to have some sort of government backstop.

00:26:05.000 And a government backstop, you're looking at too big to fail.

00:26:07.000 Repeat of 2008.

00:26:09.000 It turns out that government invention, intervention into the economy tends to create inflationary policy, not affordability.

00:26:17.000 Okay, the president is, in fact, however, pursuing some policies that are supply-side policies intended to bring down the prices.

00:26:27.000 One of those, for example, is the president's push for more oil drilling off the California coast.

00:26:33.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is poised to unveil a plan that would allow oil drilling off the California coast, according to people familiar with the matter.

00:26:41.000 And of course, Gavin Newsom is eager for this.

00:26:42.000 He loves fights.

00:26:43.000 The announcement is expected to include a proposal for drilling around Alaska in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

00:26:48.000 That's part of the drill, baby, drill campaign that President Trump was pushing.

00:26:51.000 And that, of course, is good policy.

00:26:53.000 Increasing supply is a good policy.

00:26:55.000 It brings down the price.

00:26:57.000 If you're worried about the price of oil, then actually increasing the supply of domestically produced oil is a very, very good thing.

00:27:04.000 President Trump has said he can rapidly cut Americans' energy costs by 50% or more by expanding oil and gas production.

00:27:12.000 Now, again, it'll be interesting to see who takes him up on it because there is, in fact, a supply-demand equilibrium where at a certain point, it costs more to actually drill the well than you will get by selling the oil.

00:27:23.000 With that said, are we anywhere near that at this point?

00:27:25.000 We are not.

00:27:27.000 In April, Interior Secretary Doug Bergham directed his agency to begin to plan to develop a schedule for offshore oil and gas lease sales.

00:27:34.000 The plan was part of the administration's focus on responsible offshore energy development.

00:27:39.000 Again, this is good supply-side policy, and I hope that the president continues to pursue it.

00:27:43.000 Meanwhile, one of the fascinating things that's happening on the right is that there are a lot of people on the right who seem to simultaneously complain about affordability, but also want to restrict the factors that lead to affordability.

00:27:57.000 This is incoherent.

00:27:59.000 It's incoherent.

00:28:00.000 You can say there are things more important than affordability.

00:28:03.000 That's fine.

00:28:04.000 There are many things in life that are more important than affordability.

00:28:04.000 I agree.

00:28:07.000 Living close to family might be one of those things.

00:28:10.000 A beautiful sunset might be more important to you than affordability, right?

00:28:14.000 There are lots of things in life that are more important than affordability.

00:28:16.000 However, if you are simultaneously complaining about affordability and also seeking to restrict the supply of an item, then what you are saying is logically and economically incoherent.

00:28:29.000 If you want the president to create more affordability in the United States, you need the prices of things to go down.

00:28:34.000 The way the prices of things go down is with more supply, right?

00:28:37.000 This is very simple.

00:28:39.000 This is why I find it fascinating that there is so much talk these days about H-1B visas.

00:28:44.000 Okay, now, there are many problems with the H-1B visa program.

00:28:46.000 You can make the claim, I think somewhat accurate, that the H-1B visa program is too broad.

00:28:51.000 The H-1B visa program, about 65,000 are offered every year.

00:28:57.000 Enormous number of renewals of people who have been in under H-1B visas before.

00:29:02.000 I asked our sponsors over at Comet to explain this.

00:29:04.000 It's a project of perplexity.

00:29:06.000 H-1B visas are a U.S. immigration program that allows employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations that require at least a bachelor's degree or equivalent expertise.

00:29:15.000 Around 85,000 new H-1B visas are issued annually.

00:29:18.000 The total number, including renewals, exceeds 400,000 per year.

00:29:21.000 That means somebody got an H-1B last year and now they got it renewed for this year as well.

00:29:26.000 So you're bringing in foreign workers mainly in tech.

00:29:30.000 Something like 50% of all H-1B visas are coming in the tech industry.

00:29:34.000 They're people who are coming over to work in computer engineering or computer science or something.

00:29:38.000 They're working for Intel or they're working for Microsoft or they're working for Google.

00:29:43.000 This has become a point of contention on the right, not because of the usual reasons that the right is concerned about immigration, but for economic reasons.

00:29:50.000 So there are lots of reasons to be concerned about legal immigration in the United States, not just illegal immigration, legal immigration.

00:29:56.000 So for example, if you are bringing in people who are low skilled, don't have jobs, are going to be dependent on welfare and be more of a net draw on the treasury than they are a benefit economically.

00:30:06.000 That would be a reason not to let somebody into the country. 1.00

00:30:08.000 Cultural differentiation, a massive reason not to let in certain people from certain countries.

00:30:13.000 They might be qualified in computer science, but if they're coming here and they don't like American values and they like terrorist groups, for example, we shouldn't let them in.

00:30:21.000 It's like basic common sense.

00:30:23.000 You can make the case that there are a lot of people who are being let in who are actively Chinese agents, infiltrators at our tech companies who are stealing IP.

00:30:32.000 That would be an amazing reason not to let somebody in.

00:30:35.000 However, the case that's being made right now against H-1B visas is that H-1B visas are bad economically speaking in general for the American population.

00:30:44.000 Now, in order to make that case, you have to make the case that they are artificially driving down the price of labor, which we can argue about in a second, and that there are no externalities that are beneficial to bringing them in, that the country is better off banning them and using quote-unquote domestically supplied labor than bringing in people on H-1B visas. 0.98

00:31:05.000 Now, if we're talking about pricing of labor, there's no question, obviously, that you bring in more people who are applicants for a job and the price of the labor goes down.

00:31:13.000 That is a deflationary policy.

00:31:15.000 Just in terms of affordability, it makes products more affordable.

00:31:18.000 If labor is cheaper, products are more affordable.

00:31:20.000 For the people who don't get those jobs, life is worse.

00:31:23.000 For the broad American public, life is better because the affordability went up.

00:31:27.000 Again, all economic policies have beneficiaries and have people who are harmed by those economic policies.

00:31:36.000 The question is, how widespread are the beneficiaries and how discreet are the people who are being hurt and vice versa?

00:31:43.000 Let's be adults about how we discuss economics when we're going to talk about these big issues.

00:31:47.000 Okay, so here is the case for importing certain types of labor.

00:31:52.000 One, there are, in fact, certain positions in the United States that require a level of expertise that may not be reachable in the numbers that are currently being turned out by American universities.

00:32:01.000 That is a shortcoming of our educational system, and it is a problem.

00:32:05.000 And so you can say we should up our game, education.

00:32:07.000 I agree.

00:32:08.000 We should absolutely up our game educationally.

00:32:10.000 But in the meantime, if you do not bring in the labor supply, particularly to tech, tech will go find the labor supply.

00:32:17.000 And so what you will end up with is an office that was employing 30 Americans and three H-1B visa people.

00:32:23.000 If the costs grow too high, simply moving to another country where they hire 30 Indians and zero Americans. 0.92

00:32:32.000 This is the problem with all the reason companies offshore is not because it's easy or fun to simply move your company somewhere else.

00:32:37.000 It's because the labor cost becomes so prohibitive in the United States that companies move away.

00:32:43.000 And you can try to tariff them back, but all that does is artificially raise the price on Americans. 0.63

00:32:46.000 Again, we're talking about affordability.

00:32:48.000 There are trade-offs in economics.

00:32:50.000 Autarky comes with the fun feeling that everybody in America is making American product.

00:32:54.000 It comes with the very large downside that your products are economically inefficient.

00:32:58.000 They don't work as well and you're not globally competitive.

00:33:03.000 All policies have trade-offs.

00:33:06.000 It is also better for the American people, broadly speaking, to bring in the best from other countries.

00:33:10.000 Now, how do you determine the best?

00:33:12.000 You can make, again, the case.

00:33:13.000 The H-1B visa program is fatally flawed.

00:33:15.000 It's not bringing in enough of the best.

00:33:17.000 I will point out that many of our best founders in the United States are either immigrants or the children of immigrants who came in on H-1B visas or who came in just generally without an H-1B visa through other forms of legal immigration as students.

00:33:32.000 And the reality is that maybe our screening procedures should be different, but we need to see specifics on what the screening procedures you're applying are that would allow for there to be, for example, an Elon Musk American citizen creating tens of thousands of jobs.

00:33:47.000 Or the head of Google, Sinder Pinchai, creating tens of thousands of jobs.

00:33:53.000 Or the head of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, creating tens of thousands of jobs.

00:33:57.000 Now, you can say that maybe if those people didn't exist, there would be an American who just did that job, but that is now living in the realm of theory.

00:34:05.000 It's not living in the realm of reality.

00:34:07.000 Brain draining other countries is also a good thing for America in terms of our own global competitiveness. 0.99

00:34:12.000 I'd rather bring all the smartest people from around the globe if they are going to, again, this is assuming the precondition that they are going to assimilate to American values, that they like America, that they are American patriots.

00:34:21.000 If they're not, they shouldn't come in, period, no matter what industry they're in.

00:34:24.000 But if they're going to be good American patriots, creating tens of thousands of jobs is a good thing while depriving those jobs from China, from other countries. 0.79

00:34:33.000 Brain draining is good. 0.98

00:34:34.000 We brain drained Germany in the 1930s, and that was quite good for the American economy. 0.98

00:34:39.000 We have brain drained a number of other countries around the globe, which is why America is the global economic powerhouse.

00:34:47.000 So again, when we are talking about affordability, we have to talk about things like supply.

00:34:53.000 And conflating all of these issues and pretending they don't exist doesn't solve the affordability crisis.

00:34:58.000 It just means that we have an affordability crisis and we rip each other to shreds over sort of ancillary issues.

00:35:04.000 Because I think, again, everyone on the right agrees that people who shouldn't be in America shouldn't be in America.

00:35:10.000 The question is, should we bring the best and brightest here if they are going to be great Americans?

00:35:14.000 And my answer is absolutely.

00:35:17.000 Should we be having more people come here to found companies who are going to be good Americans?

00:35:22.000 Sure.

00:35:22.000 Is the H-1B visa program totally geared toward that?

00:35:25.000 No.

00:35:25.000 Maybe there need to be changes there.

00:35:28.000 But again, pretending that we can just go autaric, that is a mistake.

00:35:33.000 The reason this comes up is because yesterday the president of the United States was on with Laura Ingram and he was asked about H-1B visas.

00:35:40.000 And he's being ripped up by a certain portion of the right for his answer here, which, frankly, I think is mostly reasonable.

00:35:46.000 There's never going to be a country like what we have right now.

00:35:49.000 The Republicans have to talk about it later.

00:35:51.000 And does that mean the H-1B visa thing will not be a big priority for your administration?

00:35:55.000 Because if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can't flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. 0.93

00:36:01.000 Thousands of foreign workers.

00:36:03.000 Also, do have to bring in talent when you have talented people.

00:36:06.000 No, you don't.

00:36:07.000 We don't have talented people in there.

00:36:07.000 No, you don't.

00:36:09.000 No, you don't have certain talents and people have to learn.

00:36:13.000 You can't take people off an unemployment, like an unemployment line and say, I'm going to put you into a factory where we're going to make missiles or I'm going to put you in the middle of the money.

00:36:20.000 How did we ever do it before?

00:36:21.000 Well, let me tell you.

00:36:22.000 When you and I were.

00:36:23.000 In Georgia, they raided because they wanted illegal immigrants out.

00:36:23.000 I'll give you an example.

00:36:29.000 They had people from South Korea that made batteries all their lives.

00:36:34.000 You know, making batteries are very complicated.

00:36:36.000 It's not an easy thing.

00:36:37.000 It's very dangerous, a lot of explosions, a lot of problems.

00:36:40.000 They had like 500 or 600 people, early stages to make batteries and to teach people how to do it.

00:36:47.000 Well, they wanted them to get out of the country.

00:36:49.000 You're going to need that, Laura.

00:36:50.000 I mean, I know you and I disagree on this.

00:36:52.000 You can't just say a country's coming in, going to invest $10 billion to build a plant and going to take people off an unemployment line who haven't worked in five years, and they're going to start making missiles.

00:37:04.000 It doesn't work that way.

00:37:06.000 Okay.

00:37:07.000 The president happens to be right about this.

00:37:09.000 When he says there isn't talent, again, people are reading that, I think, wrongly.

00:37:13.000 He's saying there's not enough talent in particular industries at this time.

00:37:16.000 You need a transitional skill set force to come in and sometimes teach Americans to do something.

00:37:20.000 I'm not sure what's totally unreasonable about that.

00:37:23.000 I think, frankly, there's a lot of demagoguery of these issues going on because people don't want to acknowledge the realities of how economics actually works.

00:37:29.000 It's more fun to rail against the idea that there are any shortcomings at all anywhere in the American labor force, or that it's actually good to brain drain other countries, or that we should have the best and brightest from other places come here and engage in our economy.

00:37:43.000 And again, I love Laura Ingram.

00:37:45.000 I think she's wonderful.

00:37:46.000 When Laura says, if you go back to the 1950s and 60s, how did we do it then?

00:37:49.000 The answer is there were a lot of foreign-born people who actually were founding some of these companies and were involved in the production of some of our most sophisticated technologies.

00:37:58.000 I mean, she's talking about missile technologies, for example.

00:38:01.000 I mean, it was an ex-Nazi Werner von Braun who was heading up a rocket program in the United States.

00:38:07.000 And that's on a defense of Werner von Braun's Nazi associations.

00:38:10.000 That is a recognition that importation of talent actually matters when you are crafting a dynamic economy, of course, of course.

00:38:18.000 But it seems that when it comes to affordability, people are more interested, again, in demagoguing the issues than actually talking about solutions to the issues.

00:38:25.000 And if you do that, what you'll end up with is a lot of people who are angry about affordability, but get no actual answers that provide affordability.

00:38:32.000 When Laura says she's interested in raising American wages, everyone's interested in raising American wages.

00:38:36.000 But the problem is this.

00:38:37.000 If you raise the American wages and you raise the American prices faster than the wages, then the wages get eaten up by the price increases.

00:38:44.000 This is what happened during the Biden administration.

00:38:46.000 You need two things, increased wages and lowering prices.

00:38:50.000 And the way that you do that is with innovation and with increased supply.

00:38:54.000 That is how that works.

00:38:56.000 You need both of those things.

00:38:58.000 I can artificially raise the wages in the city of Detroit in 1950 by unionizing the entire workforce and negotiating extraordinarily lucrative contracts.

00:39:06.000 And by 1965, the American auto industry will be getting its lunch eaten by the Japanese. 1.00

00:39:12.000 You can do this.

00:39:14.000 Again, there are ways to artificially increase the price of labor.

00:39:18.000 What you end up doing is increasing the price of the product that the labor produces.

00:39:22.000 And that ends up making that product non-competitive.

00:39:24.000 And then eventually the industry dies.

00:39:28.000 Short-term thinking here is the enemy of actual economic health, robust economic health in the long term, which requires innovation and malleability of labor supply and movability of labor is a big thing here.

00:39:40.000 And again, none of this is to argue that we should have free, unfettered immigration or the United States is just in economic form.

00:39:46.000 I started this conversation by acknowledging full scale.

00:39:49.000 The H-1B visa program may be letting in too many people.

00:39:51.000 It may be letting in the wrong people.

00:39:53.000 But the argument that is being made against the H-1B visa is an argument that proves too much, as we used to say in law school.

00:39:58.000 It is too broad an argument.

00:40:00.000 And it basically says we should simply shut our borders.

00:40:02.000 And again, if what we are worried about is quote unquote the price of labor in the United States, and we are saying that we need higher wages, then we probably should go all the way and just ban tech.

00:40:13.000 I mean, these arguments, these are not good arguments.

00:40:16.000 The argument that economic health comes, for example, from artificially increasing the price of labor by restricting supply, that applies just as much to tech developments themselves, to robotics, for example, as it does to importation of labor.

00:40:31.000 If you want to maintain manufacturing jobs in Ohio, and that's like the only thing you care about is increasing the actual wage paid for a manufacturing job in Ohio, you probably should ban all robotics.

00:40:41.000 Because if you take a look at where all those manufacturing jobs went in the United States, manufacturing productivity did not go down in the United States.

00:40:47.000 It has increased since NAFTA in the United States.

00:40:50.000 The number of jobs went down, not because they were shipped to Mexico, but because robots are doing a lot of those jobs.

00:40:55.000 Now, you can ban the robots.

00:40:56.000 You can.

00:40:57.000 It'll just make you globally and domestically non-competitive and make everybody broad spectrum poor.

00:41:02.000 Because again, it's not just about the amount of money in your pocket.

00:41:05.000 It's about what you can buy with that money.

00:41:07.000 If the price of all the goods goes up and your wage goes up, but the price is going up faster and you have worse products, you don't have a better life.

00:41:14.000 And that's the thing that everybody is seeking when it comes to affordability.

00:41:17.000 Well, speaking of affordability, I did an interview last week that aired early this week with Trigonometry.

00:41:21.000 That's Constantine Kissen and Francis Foster talking about the affordability debate in New York.

00:41:26.000 And one of the things that apparently went viral is somebody taking, like clearly taking something I said out of context and then pretending that what I'm saying is that the solution, economically speaking, to affordability is people just leaving their houses, which is not what I'm saying.

00:41:40.000 So I want to play the full clip so people can understand what I said.

00:41:42.000 And then I'm happy to explain what I meant about general affordability and about the decisions that we make in our individual lives.

00:41:50.000 And so the fact that everyone's flattering Mamzani by saying, well, you know, he did talk a lot about affordability.

00:41:55.000 And what I keep saying to people is, well, affordability is not like Beetlejuice, where if you just say it over and over, it suddenly arrives.

00:42:01.000 You actually have to pursue policies that are likely to alleviate an affordability problem.

00:42:06.000 But if your solution is always give me more power, and it does seem like that is the solution of the day from both sides, actually, then you're likely to just continue penduluming one side to the other because people don't want to learn the actual lesson, which is if you actually want affordability, then either you have to change policies or change locations.

00:42:24.000 Those are really the only two things.

00:42:26.000 And also, I think more broadly, it's not about affordability.

00:42:30.000 We have trained an entire generation of people to believe that if their lives are not what they want them to be, it's the fault of systems as opposed to decisions that are in their own control.

00:42:39.000 And politicians absolutely have a stake in selling that.

00:42:42.000 A lot of people in our industry have a stake in selling that.

00:42:44.000 It makes people feel good about themselves and bad about the world.

00:42:47.000 And the reality is, if you want a better life, you should feel better about the world and worse about yourself until you actually go do the right things.

00:42:53.000 I broadly, generally speaking, as a matter of principle, agree with you.

00:42:56.000 But I mean, I was looking around at property prices, real estate prices in New York.

00:43:02.000 I'm doing pretty well for myself.

00:43:04.000 I feel kind of poor looking at those.

00:43:06.000 Oh, no.

00:43:06.000 And I'm not saying it's not affordable, but it absolutely is unaffordable.

00:43:09.000 And if you wanted to make a political difference, what you would do is you would relieve the building regulations.

00:43:14.000 You would make it easier for people to build, not harder.

00:43:16.000 You wouldn't rent control because if you stop rent controlling, then that creates incentive for people to build.

00:43:20.000 You would allow people to build up further.

00:43:22.000 You would get rid of many of the code regulations that are kind of antiquated.

00:43:25.000 Like there are things you actually could do.

00:43:27.000 And then if you're a young person and you can't afford to live here, then maybe you should not live here.

00:43:32.000 I mean, that is a real thing.

00:43:34.000 I know that we've now grown up in a society that says that you deserve to live where you grew up.

00:43:38.000 But the reality is that the history of America is almost literally the opposite of that.

00:43:42.000 The history of America is you go to a place where there is opportunity.

00:43:46.000 And if the opportunities are limited here and they're not changing, then you really should try to think about other places where you have better opportunities.

00:43:54.000 Again, that's not saying that public policy can't change.

00:43:56.000 I think it can, but I think that the solutions being offered are untenable.

00:44:00.000 Okay, so I agree with me, as a famous man once said.

00:44:03.000 So as you will note there, I'm offering two specific things for people to do.

00:44:08.000 One is change the public policy where you're at.

00:44:10.000 If you're in New York, change the public policies that the public policy is better, alleviate some of the problems that you have with affordability by doing all the things that I'm talking about right there.

00:44:19.000 And then I say that as an individual, as an individual human being, if you are upset with the public policy and you feel like it's not going to change anytime in the near future and that your life is being ruined by that public policy, you're left with two choices.

00:44:32.000 One is to sit there and be miserable and fulminate against a system that is not changing.

00:44:36.000 Again, if you can change the system, great, do it.

00:44:39.000 Vote out Mom Donnie, vote out the bad city council, vote in somebody who understands basic economics and isn't a third worldist socialist. 1.00

00:44:45.000 Do all those things.

00:44:46.000 Stay and fight.

00:44:46.000 Great.

00:44:47.000 I did this in California for years.

00:44:48.000 And then there came a point where I realized California was never going to provide me the public policy backdrop for a successful life, the kind of life that I wanted to live.

00:44:57.000 And so I moved.

00:44:59.000 And again, that comes with costs.

00:45:02.000 I'm not pretending that moving doesn't have costs.

00:45:05.000 And when I moved, I made sure that, you know, I'm lucky.

00:45:08.000 I was able to, my parents were able to move with me.

00:45:10.000 Our in-laws were able to move.

00:45:11.000 A couple of sisters were able to move.

00:45:13.000 We were able to take our entire family, which at that point was actually geographically disparate and move into the same area.

00:45:18.000 No one has talked more publicly about the importance of having a supportive family structure near you than I have.

00:45:25.000 It is also true that if you're a young person, a 20, 21-year-old, 22-year-old, and you're not finding successful conditions in the city, and those conditions are not likely to change.

00:45:35.000 If you want to seek happiness, you can either get angry at the system that's not going to change, which will not make your life better, or you can do the things that are in your control, like maybe looking outside of New York City.

00:45:46.000 This seems fairly inarguable to me.

00:45:49.000 That is not an argument for, quote unquote, abandoning the city or abandoning your principles or anything like that.

00:45:55.000 Every individual has to make their own decision about what level of bad policy they are willing to undergo in order to maintain their status in the city.

00:46:05.000 But simply shouting at the moon doesn't solve problems.

00:46:07.000 It doesn't.

00:46:09.000 David Harsanyi has an excellent piece over at the Washington Examiner talking about this.

00:46:16.000 And he quotes one of the very online people saying, quote, if we want Democrats to have a supermajority, this is the message for the GOP to adopt.

00:46:24.000 Tell people they need to move.

00:46:25.000 Don't form family bonds.

00:46:26.000 Worship the banks and big corporations.

00:46:27.000 My goodness.

00:46:28.000 Okay, first of all, that's absurd.

00:46:30.000 There is no one in America who's talked more about forming family bonds than I have.

00:46:33.000 And let me explain something about forming family bonds.

00:46:36.000 The reason that people in New York City are not forming family bonds is not because the price of rent is too high.

00:46:42.000 That is not the reason.

00:46:44.000 If you get married, there are two of you in New York City, likely both of you have jobs now sharing one space.

00:46:51.000 So it is cheaper for you to get married and live with your working spouse in that same apartment complex than it would have been for you to do it by yourself.

00:47:00.000 Okay, the reason we have a marriage crisis in America is not because of economics.

00:47:04.000 This is a lie.

00:47:05.000 There are places all over the world that are poorer than the United States that have much higher marriage rates.

00:47:10.000 In fact, one of the bizarre things about the way that the developed countries work is the more developed the country, the fewer people tend to get married and the fewer children they have. 0.95

00:47:19.000 So, this notion that broad speaking, Americans are not having kids because they're too poor is silly. 0.85

00:47:25.000 You know what?

00:47:26.000 Americans were having tons of kids in the 1930s, like lots and lots and lots of kids.

00:47:30.000 And then they had lots of kids again in the 40s and lots of kids again in the 50s.

00:47:34.000 And then they stopped having kids when birth control became available because we're a rich country.

00:47:38.000 And this is true for every developed country.

00:47:41.000 This attempt to link a sort of Marxist redistributionist economics, heavy regulation, and government subsidized.

00:47:46.000 That's what's going to make the kids happen.

00:47:48.000 I have zero, zero evidence supports this.

00:47:51.000 Zero, literally none.

00:47:53.000 Okay, but as Harsanyi says, if there's a better way to worship a bank than borrowing 800 grand on a 30-year mortgage at 6.5% for a 900-square-foot home in Park Slope, I've yet to hear of it.

00:48:03.000 Though no one, as far as I can tell, is arguing that the GOP should adopt moving as a central message.

00:48:07.000 That's correct.

00:48:08.000 I'm not saying that that's the central message.

00:48:10.000 I'm saying that you, in your personal life, when you're talking about what makes your life better, be accurate about what are the things that you can do to make your life better.

00:48:19.000 As Harsanyi points out, it should be noted it's a myth that all or perhaps even most people grows about housing costs in expensive metros are native to those cities.

00:48:29.000 Most of these people would not surrender familial and communal bonds if they relocated to less expensive cities.

00:48:34.000 So, again, the idea that like you're living in New York because that's where your family is.

00:48:37.000 For the most part, that's not true of a lot of these people.

00:48:39.000 70% of the population in Washington is not native to DC.

00:48:45.000 A huge percentage of New York is not native to DC.

00:48:50.000 The average home price in New York is $735,000.

00:48:53.000 It's not much better in the outlying suburbs or even exurbs.

00:48:55.000 None of that is considering the sky-high cost of living in the area, says Harsanye.

00:48:59.000 Years ago, a couple starting out could comfortably live in many towns on Long Island.

00:49:02.000 Not today.

00:49:03.000 You're paying three quarters of a million dollars for a new house, not to mention outlandish property taxes in any neighborhood with a decent school district.

00:49:09.000 For that kind of money, a young couple could get a veritable mansion with a pool, parks, low taxes, more opportunity, and a thriving school district in a Dallas or Indianapolis suburb.

00:49:17.000 There is nothing wrong with pointing that out.

00:49:20.000 That is correct, obviously.

00:49:23.000 And it is also true, as I said in that tape, that the history of America is a history of people moving.

00:49:29.000 As Harsanye points out, in 1950, Detroit was a booming industrial city with 1.8 million residents, and Phoenix had 106,000 residents.

00:49:36.000 Today, 640,000 people live in Detroit, and 1.6 million people live in Phoenix.

00:49:42.000 Moving is not a new thing.

00:49:44.000 We are moving significantly less than our parents.

00:49:45.000 We are less mobile.

00:49:47.000 And that is because politicians are lying to people.

00:49:49.000 They are lying to you when they say the politicians, stay in place, we will solve the affordability crisis.

00:49:54.000 And then they provide for policies that do nothing of the sort.

00:49:57.000 It just makes you frustrated.

00:49:58.000 And then you go to the other party who says the same thing.

00:50:00.000 And then they don't do it.

00:50:01.000 And it makes you frustrated.

00:50:03.000 And this is why you get more and more radical politics in these unaffordable cities.

00:50:07.000 But none of these politicians are going to solve that problem.

00:50:08.000 Number one, the solutions they are applying are not actual solutions.

00:50:12.000 And number two, they are lying to you because they don't even have solutions to these things.

00:50:17.000 There's an article in the Washington Post today talking about affordable cities.

00:50:22.000 And there's one in particular they point out: Pittsburgh.

00:50:25.000 As real estate prices and interest rates shot up in recent years, the prospect of homeownership moved further for many Americans, especially young adults in large metro areas, where the median home price can run well over half a million dollars, but not in Pittsburgh.

00:50:36.000 After dropping $10,000 to rehab a bathroom and decrepit kitchen cabinets, Isaac Ray and Liam Weaver bought their first home for $163,000.

00:50:47.000 Though the housing market has tempered since the frenetic days of 2020, prices remain relentlessly high.

00:50:52.000 The U.S. median topped $410,000 in the second quarter.

00:50:55.000 That's more than 50% climb in five years, which of course is due to government inflationary policy.

00:51:01.000 For people on the coasts, it's even higher.

00:51:03.000 In LA, it's $995,000.

00:51:06.000 How about Greater Pittsburgh?

00:51:07.000 $229,000 with a low unemployment rate, with new industries.

00:51:15.000 Private redevelopment is happening at rapid rates.

00:51:18.000 Deregulation, ability to build, fixer-uppers.

00:51:23.000 And when I made the case that personal mobility is something that people should consider, again, that's not for everybody.

00:51:30.000 But this is this kind of bizarre notion that has set in on the right that personal mobility is not part of the American story.

00:51:37.000 That is not true.

00:51:39.000 And I'm not talking about abandoning families.

00:51:42.000 I'm not talking, again, we are already in atomized society.

00:51:44.000 You think New York is a place that's filled with families who just don't want to move?

00:51:48.000 New York, truly.

00:51:50.000 That's what we're talking about here.

00:51:51.000 We're not talking about singles who are living in rent-controlled apartments with a couple of roommates.

00:51:56.000 New York is like the center of American familial life.

00:52:00.000 The reason I'm pointing this out is because if you want to have realistic expectations of how politics works and what it can achieve, your life will be better.

00:52:10.000 And if you want to have realistic expectations about how you can make your own life better, which is what we all want, our own lives to be better, we want the lives of our families to be better, then recognizing baseline realities is the key component to happiness.

00:52:25.000 Ignoring reality in favor of political utopianism is a recipe for personal unhappiness.

00:52:32.000 And it's not something that, honestly, people on the right should be promoting. 0.99

00:52:37.000 All righty, meanwhile, speaking of idiocy, Vogue has now decided in a piece by Shante Joseph that having a boyfriend is embarrassing. 0.98

00:52:45.000 Again, these are the people complaining about affordability in New York. 0.99

00:52:48.000 The people complaining about affordability are the people who write pieces for Vogue about having a boyfriend is embarrassing.

00:52:56.000 I'm amazed by conservatives telling me that ultra-liberal New York and saying, hey, maybe you might want to consider moving to Nashville or Florida if you can, that somehow this is an anti-conservative point.

00:53:07.000 Okay?

00:53:09.000 According to this columnist, there's been a pronounced shift in the way people showcase their relationships online.

00:53:15.000 Far from fully hard-launching romantic partners, straight women are opting for subtler signs, a hand on a steering wheel, clinking glasses at dinner, or the back of someone's head. 1.00

00:53:22.000 On the more confusing end, you have faces blurred out of wedding pictures or entirely professional edited photos with the fiancé conveniently cropped out of all the shots.

00:53:30.000 So, what gives?

00:53:31.000 Are people embarrassed by their boyfriends now, or is something more complicated going on?

00:53:34.000 To me, it feels like the result of women wanting to straddle two worlds: one where they can receive the social benefit of having a partner, but also appear not so boyfriend-obsessed, they come across as culturally loserish. 0.94

00:53:45.000 They want the prize in celebration of partnership, but understand the norminess of it, says Zoe Samudzi, the writer and activist.

00:53:51.000 Women don't want to be seen as being all about their man, but they also want the clout that comes with being partnered. 1.00

00:53:58.000 But it's not all about image.

00:53:59.000 Apparently, some people believe in the evil eye, which is that your happy relationship will make your near friends upset or something, or people being icked out.

00:54:10.000 Okay, a society that doesn't champion partnerships, that doesn't champion having a wife or a husband, is a society doomed to failure.

00:54:17.000 Turns out the post-religious society is pretty bad. 0.99

00:54:20.000 I also say that the post-traditional religious society is pretty bad. 0.87

00:54:26.000 There is a movement that is, shall we say, post-traditional biblical that is growing in size.

00:54:36.000 People who are sort of reinterpreting their religious tradition in order to, I would say, tickle their fancies.

00:54:45.000 There is a pastor of a small non-denominational church in Canton, Missouri, who's now making a big deal out of the fact that according to his website, he has now taken a second wife.

00:54:57.000 I don't mean he got divorced and then got married again.

00:54:58.000 I mean, he has two wives.

00:55:01.000 And so he looks at the biblical text and he says he has two beautiful wives.

00:55:05.000 My second wife is expecting my eighth child.

00:55:08.000 We're thrilled for what the Lord has done for our family.

00:55:12.000 And then he says, in 2019, I discovered the surprising fact that God not only never prohibited polygamy throughout the entire biblical narrative, he divinely ordained it in several cases, including David, Jacob, and Joash in the book of Chronicles.

00:55:27.000 God lawfully regulated the practice of plural marriage.

00:55:32.000 And so, first of all, if you just got familiar with the Bible like six years ago and you read it for the first time, you're like, hey, look, there's polygamy in, you know, 3,000 years ago, 3,500 years ago.

00:55:44.000 Congratulations on being able to read.

00:55:46.000 And also congratulations on knowing nothing literally about the subsequent biblical tradition in Catholicism, Judaism, and Protestantism.

00:55:53.000 Like really well done here.

00:55:54.000 But here he is explaining polygon.

00:55:56.000 Again, this is not a good thing.

00:56:00.000 Now, I want to share something with you.

00:56:03.000 I believe first and foremost that all lawful marriage is divinely ordained.

00:56:09.000 In other words, if the woman is lawfully available, the union is brought about by God.

00:56:17.000 Starting with Adam and Eve, when God brought her to the man.

00:56:20.000 Go to Genesis 2.22.

00:56:23.000 This is very important.

00:56:24.000 So that we don't accuse David or anyone of some kind of sin that they didn't commit.

00:56:28.000 You need to understand how marriage actually works.

00:56:30.000 It's not through dating websites.

00:56:32.000 That's number one.

00:56:34.000 Now, can God bring people together through a dating website?

00:56:37.000 But here's how this works.

00:56:37.000 Sure.

00:56:38.000 Genesis 2.22.

00:56:39.000 The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man. 0.94

00:56:46.000 Everybody say brought her to the man.

00:56:50.000 I'm submitting to you with lots of scriptural evidence that as long as the union is lawful, God brought her to the man.

00:56:59.000 And I can prove this over and over again.

00:57:01.000 It wasn't just Eve.

00:57:03.000 All lawful marriages, God brings the woman to the man. 0.99

00:57:09.000 This goes for a first wife. 1.00

00:57:11.000 This goes for a second wife, third wife, however many David ended up.

00:57:16.000 Okay, so it's true for all the wives. 1.00

00:57:19.000 Okay, so first of all, we should point out the multiple marriages in the Bible tend not to work out particularly well.

00:57:24.000 Sarah and Hagar, it doesn't work out particularly well.

00:57:27.000 Rachel and Leah, it doesn't work out particularly well.

00:57:31.000 Isaac only had one wife, Rebecca.

00:57:33.000 It turns out that actually plural marriage turns out historically pretty poorly.

00:57:38.000 Okay, so number one, there's that.

00:57:39.000 Number two, basic rule of sort of interpretation of scripture, at least in the Old Testament context, which is the one that I'm more familiar with, obviously.

00:57:49.000 Just because the Bible talks about people doing a thing does not mean that the Bible is happy with people doing the thing.

00:57:55.000 God orders you in the Bible to do particular things or bans you from doing particular things.

00:58:01.000 But if the Bible just gives quote unquote permission to do a thing, that doesn't mean that the Bible is celebrating the thing.

00:58:06.000 It's usually a transitional rule, which is why in the year 1000 in Judaism, famously, there was a rabbi named Rabbi Nutam who banned plural marriage, like man married to more than one woman.

00:58:17.000 In Christianity, as early as the sixth century, there are people who are already moving to ban plural marriage.

00:58:23.000 It took another thousand years for that to be made official, but the reality is it fell out of common practice long before that.

00:58:29.000 Why?

00:58:30.000 Because what is the ideal marriage?

00:58:32.000 The ideal marriage is described at the very beginning of the book of Genesis.

00:58:35.000 A man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, his wife, not his wives. 0.98

00:58:43.000 But why is this happening?

00:58:44.000 Because the guy wants attention and because he has a desire, presumably, to legitimize his own behavior.

00:58:51.000 This is why tradition is good.

00:58:53.000 It's why tradition is necessary.

00:58:55.000 And when you just free yourself of all tradition and start freewheeling it, you end up in some pretty bad areas, whether that's secular or whether it is pseudo-religious in this way.

00:59:02.000 Well, joining me on the line to discuss all of this is an actual expert on the other half of the Bible, the New Testament.

00:59:08.000 I'm an Old Testament guy.

00:59:09.000 He is the master of the New Testament.

00:59:11.000 That would be Matt Frad.

00:59:12.000 He's the host of Pines with Aquinas, one of our new Daily Wire shows.

00:59:15.000 Matt, thanks so much for taking the time.

00:59:17.000 I really appreciate it.

00:59:19.000 Yeah, I reject your affirmation of me, but it is true that I have joined the Daily Wire and I'm thrilled to be with you.

00:59:24.000 Thanks, Ben.

00:59:26.000 So let's talk about polygyne, because apparently this is now a topic that is emerging once again.

00:59:32.000 And one of the things that seems to happen fairly regularly is people going back, looking at the Bible, reading it without any sort of gloss, without any sort of interpretive background, and then simply saying things that have been basically obliterated by several thousand years of religious history.

00:59:48.000 There's a pastor who calls himself a pastor who's now quoting the Bible to the effect that a man should be able to marry more than one woman.

00:59:54.000 What do you make of this from a biblical perspective?

00:59:57.000 Yeah, well, I would agree with what you said earlier, that just because something is described in scripture, it doesn't mean that it is commended in scripture.

01:00:06.000 So I think it is the case, right, that we do see polygamy in the Old Testament, but that is far from saying it is somehow celebrated as a good.

01:00:16.000 I think we could realize in a similar way to how adultery, sorry, not adultery, divorce was permitted in scripture.

01:00:28.000 This was permitted, Christ says, because of the hardness of people's hearts.

01:00:33.000 So this is the problem, I think, when you take the scriptures and you interpret it without the magisterium of the church.

01:00:38.000 Forgive me, but I have to give you the Catholic answer.

01:00:40.000 Now, I think most Protestants, right, the majority of Protestants are going to condemn this as unbiblical, and they'd be right too. 1.00

01:00:47.000 I don't see polygamy popular among Christians ever, even today, and it won't be in the future.

01:00:54.000 But one thing I think that the Catholic has that the Protestant doesn't is a teaching office to help him interpret sacred scripture.

01:01:02.000 So just because we see polygamy, it doesn't follow that polygamy was God's idea.

01:01:07.000 And Christ points us back to the beginning where it was not so.

01:01:12.000 There was male and female.

01:01:15.000 You know, one of the points you make here, and obviously for Catholics, you're talking about the authority of the Catholic Church, that the sort of Jewish equivalent would be the oral tradition, which is the idea that there is an interpretive tradition that's carried down over the course of thousands of years that actually, you know, you can go look it up, right?

01:01:29.000 You can actually see what people have been saying about this sort of stuff for a very long time.

01:01:33.000 You know, that is why one of the answers, one of the questions that's asked very often by secular atheists is they do the same thing, right?

01:01:40.000 Richard Dawson will pick up the Bible and then he'll say, here's a verse I don't like.

01:01:43.000 It violates my morality and it's bad.

01:01:46.000 And you'll say, well, that's because you've never looked at any of the interpretive traditions surrounding that verse.

01:01:51.000 And they'll say, well, you know, but if God's eternal, then why would he definitely, why would he have given this scripture?

01:01:55.000 Why wouldn't you have just said the thing I want him to say?

01:01:57.000 And the answer, of course, is that God was giving orders to a group of people 3,000 years ago who had a different set of priors than you or I have.

01:02:05.000 And so this is actually made clear.

01:02:06.000 Again, I'm going to use a Jewish reference here because that's the one I know. 0.85

01:02:09.000 But for example, there is a section of the Bible where it talks about the war bride, right?

01:02:13.000 Where the idea that there is a, you go out to war, there's a woman in the war, you bring her home, you shave her head, and then she sits in mourning for her family, and then you can marry her.

01:02:23.000 And this is very ugly, right?

01:02:24.000 It's pretty terrible.

01:02:25.000 And you read it and you say, this is really bad.

01:02:27.000 And the rabbis, if you look into the tradition, thousands of years ago, they were talking about the idea that this was basically a temporary attempt by the Bible to stop people from engaging in mass rape.

01:02:39.000 That's what it was.

01:02:39.000 But now that we've moved beyond that, now that we've developed beyond that through a moral tradition, now we don't do that anymore.

01:02:44.000 And that's not something that we should say is okay or engage in.

01:02:47.000 The same thing would be true for indentured servitude, right?

01:02:49.000 There are lots of things in the Bible that are pointing toward a way forward as humanity interprets the tradition, because what biblical living is, and I pronounce, you know, I put the emphasis on living there, is the interaction between human beings who have an interpretive capacity and a God who is trying to provide them a text with which to work.

01:03:09.000 And ignoring either side of that equation is a mistake.

01:03:14.000 Yeah, I mean, in Catholicism, we talk a lot about natural law.

01:03:17.000 And one way to kind of describe natural law would just be to say when you use it in accord with its nature, it will flourish.

01:03:23.000 And if you use it against its nature or in a way that's contrary to its nature, it won't.

01:03:28.000 So if you take a tomato plant and put it in a closet and feed it only beer, it will die because you're treating it contrary to its nature.

01:03:36.000 And I think the same thing is shown in the Bible with polygamy.

01:03:41.000 You know, every narrative involving polygamy is marked with jealousy, like you mentioned earlier, heartbreak, rivalry, Sarah and Hagar, Leah and Rachel, etc.

01:03:50.000 And so, again, as a Catholic, I think there are many, this is, forgive me for harping on this, but I mean, there are many sexual acts in scripture that are condemned by the church that the scripture is silent on.

01:04:04.000 So the scripture doesn't directly and explicitly condemn self-abuse or masturbation, nor does it condemn masturbation, sorry, pornography or IVF, obviously.

01:04:16.000 Even the scriptures that do, I think, condemn homosexual acts are quibbled with those who would like to reject it.

01:04:25.000 In other words, if you're not going to submit yourself to the word of God as your master that knows more than you and is there to direct you so that you can flourish, I think what we all have a tendency to do is to be the master over the word of God and make it say what it wants us to say, but the results are disastrous.

01:04:46.000 Well, that is Matt Frad.

01:04:47.000 Check out his podcast, Pines with Aquinas, where you're going to get a lot of deep thinking and not the daily news.

01:04:52.000 You'll actually get the actual stuff that matters.

01:04:55.000 Matt, thanks so much for taking the time.

01:04:56.000 I really appreciate it.

01:04:58.000 You're welcome.

01:04:59.000 All righty, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.

01:05:02.000 I'll bring you some foreign policy updates from Venezuela.

01:05:05.000 And also, why is the UK government now denying the Trump administration intelligence sharing?

01:05:09.000 First, remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

01:05:11.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

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The Ben Shapiro Show - November 12, 2025

The Democrats’ Circular Firing Squad CONTINUES

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