The Ben Shapiro Show - The Right Should DUMP Andrew Tate

00:00:00.000 Well, folks, it's going to be a very big week.

00:00:02.000 President Trump's nominees for his cabinet are going to get hearings this week, maybe votes this week.

00:00:07.000 All the fallout from the fires in California for one-time presidential contender Gavin Newsom.

00:00:13.000 Plus, we're going to get into all of the controversy surrounding Andrew Tate on the right.

00:00:17.000 First, your reminder, get ready.

00:00:19.000 In exactly one week, we will be live on the ground in Washington, D.C. for the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 47th president of the United States.

00:00:26.000 Watch live.

00:00:27.000 Join the fight at dailywire.com.

00:00:29.000 I want to start today with a controversy that erupted online, but is sort of indicative of a broader problem that the right currently has with, say, the influencer class.

00:00:39.000 This controversy erupted because Benny Johnson had on Andrew Tate.

00:00:44.000 Andrew Tate, for those who don't know, is an online provocateur.

00:00:48.000 He is mostly famous for one time being a kickboxer, and now he sort of runs around with his shirt off with fancy cars and good-looking women and smokes cigars.

00:00:56.000 And says some things that are sort of useful critiques of the left, but mostly says crazy stuff online.

00:01:03.000 And he has generated an enormous following, an enormous following.

00:01:06.000 So Benny Johnson had on Andrew Tate, and he also had on, at the same time, Alina Habbo, who is a counsel for the Trump team.

00:01:15.000 And Alina Habbo was really praising Tate, and so was Benny Johnson.

00:01:18.000 And this erupted into a controversy.

00:01:20.000 Here's what that sounded like.

00:01:22.000 Nice to meet you.

00:01:24.000 I'm a big fan.

00:01:25.000 Well, nice to meet you.

00:01:27.000 I'm a fan.

00:01:27.000 You're the one saving Trump.

00:01:28.000 You're doing more important work than me.

00:01:30.000 America.

00:01:31.000 America, not just Trump.

00:01:32.000 And I agree with everything you just said.

00:01:34.000 And I think that your anger is the same that President Trump has for our country.

00:01:41.000 And the time is now for us to stop being wimps.

00:01:45.000 I think that's exactly the right sentiment.

00:01:46.000 And I also have to say that I sympathize with you because I think you go through a lot of the same...

00:01:52.000 Show me the person, I'll find the crime that President Trump has gone through.

00:01:57.000 Okay, what Alina Haba is saying there is not actually true about Andrew Tate.

00:02:01.000 He is not of the same ilk as President Trump.

00:02:04.000 Find me the person, and I'll find you the crime.

00:02:06.000 That is true of President Trump.

00:02:07.000 That is not particularly true of Andrew Tate.

00:02:10.000 And Russell Brand, of course, rushed to the defense of all of this.

00:02:14.000 Russell Brand then suggested that anyone who objected to the treatment of Andrew Tate on the right, that they needed to sort of check their problems at the door.

00:02:22.000 Here was what Russell had to say.

00:02:24.000 Someone like Andrew Tate with the audience he has could make a significant difference if correctly backed.

00:02:30.000 He does say some stuff that's pretty out there.

00:02:32.000 But the fact is, in a democracy, if someone is able to glean popular support, they can have a mandate.

00:02:38.000 They should be represented.

00:02:40.000 I suppose what's more significant and interesting to me is the way that figures like Andrew Tate or Tommy Robinson have always been maligned, I think, to place an impassable threshold around systems of influence and power.

00:02:54.000 You can have your own views of Andrew Tate.

00:02:57.000 You might think he's misogynistic or vulgar, but the fact is he appeals to a lot of people and he represents some things that a lot of people are very interested in.

00:03:06.000 Okay, so I think that the way that some people are defending Andrew Tate today is a conflation of a couple of different ideas.

00:03:12.000 So, I think there's a big difference between having people on, have whoever you want on.

00:03:16.000 That's totally fine.

00:03:17.000 Free speech and all the rest.

00:03:19.000 That's totally fine.

00:03:20.000 And cheering on bad people who don't actually care about And Andrew Tate is the latter.

00:03:26.000 Now, again, let me say right at the outset, I am not upset at all with anyone actually just interviewing Andrew Tate.

00:03:32.000 Go for it.

00:03:32.000 Have at it.

00:03:33.000 There are tons of excellent questions to ask Andrew Tate.

00:03:36.000 But none of these people are asking Andrew Tate any of those questions.

00:03:40.000 Instead, a lot of people are sort of glomming on to his very online popularity in order to get clicks.

00:03:46.000 And some people are dishonestly conflating interviewing Andrew Tate with cheering for Andrew Tate or applauding him or talking about how brave and wonderful he is.

00:03:56.000 And Andrew Tate is not brave and wonderful.

00:03:58.000 He rips off thousands of people with his scam hustlers university.

00:04:01.000 He preaches the virtue of treating women in a way you would never, ever allow anyone to treat your wife or your daughter. 0.86

00:04:06.000 No one is saying you can't have Andrew Tate on your show.

00:04:10.000 It's a free country.

00:04:11.000 You should do what you want.

00:04:13.000 What I'm saying is that if you say you're conservative, and then you have someone who truly is disgusting on, and you proceed to tout them, praise them, Not along to everything they say.

00:04:23.000 Cheer them.

00:04:23.000 You're doing more than platforming, which, again, is fine.

00:04:26.000 Platforming, the idea that you can never have a conversation.

00:04:28.000 You can have a conversation with whomever you want.

00:04:30.000 But there's a difference between having a conversation with a person and becoming a propagandist for that person.

00:04:36.000 If you're a person, for example, who purports to stand for biblical values or American values or traditional values, you probably have a moral obligation.

00:04:43.000 I probably certainly have a moral obligation to ask Andrew Tate, who is a self-stated bad man.

00:04:49.000 Hard questions about his actions and his beliefs and his past.

00:04:52.000 Not to, as so many on the right have, help him falsely rewrite his legal record or ignore all of the things he's actually said while nodding enthusiastically.

00:05:01.000 See, here's the thing.

00:05:02.000 Andrew Tate, now he's trying to play himself off as a politician.

00:05:04.000 He's not.

00:05:04.000 He's an influencer.

00:05:05.000 He's an online troll. 0.96

00:05:07.000 That's really what he is. 0.94

00:05:08.000 Now he's trying to start some sort of party in the UK. But he's not a conservative politician, for example, trying to push conservative policies where part of the job of the interviewer is separating out his agenda.

00:05:17.000 From his personal behavior.

00:05:19.000 Like, what does the public get out of this person versus what they do in their private life?

00:05:22.000 That is a question typically reserved for politicians.

00:05:25.000 That's not what he is. 0.98

00:05:26.000 He's an online troll. 0.96

00:05:27.000 And he revels in precisely the evils conservatives hate. 0.97

00:05:31.000 That is his entire, like, not some of it, his entire self-stated persona.

00:05:36.000 If you don't ask about that, you're not doing your job as a conservative, as a traditional person, a person with actual values.

00:05:43.000 Now, listen, I understand the appeal of Andrew Tate.

00:05:45.000 I get it.

00:05:46.000 I've seen his stuff.

00:05:47.000 He's really charismatic.

00:05:49.000 And for decades, the hatred of traditional masculinity in our society has been so strong, so thoroughgoing throughout the media, throughout politics, from our institutions, from our colleges, everywhere, that people, including people on the right, have run away from traditional masculinity altogether.

00:06:05.000 And they've sort of feminized what masculinity is supposed to be. 1.00

00:06:09.000 Young men for at least a generation, maybe two, have basically been told they were useless at best and toxic at worst. 0.76

00:06:16.000 And that leaves a giant vacuum. 0.63

00:06:17.000 A vacuum for somebody who can sort of cosplay masculinity.

00:06:21.000 And Tate fills that vacuum with his form of masculinity.

00:06:24.000 But masculinity has good iterations and it also has really, really ugly iterations.

00:06:29.000 And the iteration that Andrew Tate pushes is not a responsible masculinity.

00:06:33.000 A traditional masculinity that is all about channeling the sort of testosterone-fueled side of man into protecting women and children and civilization and building good things.

00:06:43.000 But the kind of masculinity that tears everything good down, sort of barbarian masculinity that is interested in destroying rather than building. 1.00

00:06:50.000 Now, Andrew Tate plays a WWE heel.

00:06:53.000 He knows it.

00:06:54.000 I mean, he's not making any bones about this.

00:06:55.000 He released a video yesterday, a very long 21-minute video, rambling video, sitting in a jacuzzi in cold weather, smoking a hookah, and basically saying that he wants to be the most hated man on Earth and that he makes money off of that.

00:07:06.000 And he's telling the truth about that.

00:07:07.000 That part is true.

00:07:08.000 But here is the thing. 1.00

00:07:10.000 Andrew Tate is, at best, a crap sandwich. 0.99

00:07:12.000 He presents totally differently to different audiences. 0.99

00:07:15.000 So, for people, sort of traditional people on the right, when he's in interviews with them, he will present as a sort of low-rent, anti-feminist talking head.

00:07:23.000 Doesn't know much, but he's saying the things that need to be said, bashing left-wing wokeism.

00:07:27.000 And then, to the crazier side of the internet, he'll present as an anti-Semitic radical who's willing to violate any taboo for the fringes.

00:07:36.000 And then when he's sitting down with someone actually conservative, he'll pretend he's an upstanding person who cares about family values and that he's been out of the sort of scam business for a while. 0.81

00:07:45.000 In the end, what he really is is a con artist. 0.78

00:07:48.000 And he's actually kind of an evil con artist. 0.91

00:07:50.000 Not kind of, if you believe the allegations against him, and there are lots of them, an actually evil con artist. 0.75

00:07:56.000 Even if you just believe the stuff he said about himself, what he says is evil. 0.79

00:08:01.000 He made his money off of cam girls, which is to say, He is a self-professed pimp.

00:08:13.000 He made his money grooming women for the industry.

00:08:17.000 Now, all the people on the right who are very upset, correctly, about the grooming gangs in Britain are going to have to explain why they're okay with his grooming gang.

00:08:25.000 Here is Andrew Tate explicitly explaining his method.

00:08:27.000 Now he claims it's all a joke, but it's not a joke.

00:08:29.000 He literally made millions of dollars doing this thing.

00:08:33.000 So yeah, on corporateate.com I have my PhD program and that is a PhD is a pimp and hoes degree. 1.00

00:08:40.000 Clever.

00:08:41.000 Clever.

00:08:42.000 That teaches basically how I got girls, how I met girls, how I got girls to like me, how I got girls to fall in love with me to work on webcam for me.

00:08:51.000 Because that's what I did.

00:08:52.000 That was my MO was find girls, make them love me and make them work for me. 1.00

00:08:55.000 And that's how I got rich.

00:08:57.000 Okay, now if you know anything about the grooming gang scandal in Britain, that's exactly what the grooming gang scandal is.

00:09:01.000 That's exactly what it is.

00:09:02.000 They took underage girls, they would convince these young girls that the girls were in love with them, and then they would pass them around their group of friends for money.

00:09:09.000 That's exactly what happened in the grooming gang's trials in the UK, which is a massive scandal internationally as it should be.

00:09:16.000 But I guess for Andrew Tate, then if you confess to doing things like this on tape, like he just said.

00:09:24.000 Then morally, it's somehow okay because you're anti-woke or something?

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00:11:35.000 Hey, the latest in terms of his legal situation is according to the BBC. He's been placed under house arrest by a Romanian judge as prosecutors investigate new and serious allegations, including with a minor and underage persons.

00:11:47.000 The allegation, by the way, is that he did exactly the same thing that the grooming gangs did.

00:11:51.000 With a 15-year-old girl, prosecutors had asked the judge to remand the brothers in custody for 30 days.

00:11:56.000 That would be him and his brother Tristan.

00:11:58.000 While they continued a new investigation involving a total of 35 alleged victims, including a woman who was 15 at the time.

00:12:04.000 In a statement, Romania's Agency Against Organized Crime, Dicot, said six people had been detained in total, both Romanians and foreigners.

00:12:12.000 He, of course, says that 30 of these girls say we've done nothing wrong, which, again, that's not actually super rare in sort of grooming cases.

00:12:18.000 That's actually the original perspective of many of the girls who actually were groomed in Great Britain by the grooming gangs.

00:12:23.000 Two are the mothers of our children. 0.57

00:12:25.000 Two have never even been here to Romania.

00:12:27.000 Asked repeatedly by the BBC about the allegations of the 15-year-old girl and underage persons, he walked away and refused to reply.

00:12:36.000 Now, these are new and separate allegations from the old allegations.

00:12:40.000 The anti-organized crime agency in Romania says the accused were grooming vulnerable people who were then housed in different locations and forced to produce material for online broadcast.

00:12:48.000 One of the foreign men is accused of forcing a 17-year-old foreign citizen to perform acts in order to make online video content.

00:12:54.000 He's said to have kept all the $1.5 million in profit.

00:12:57.000 The statement does not name him.

00:12:59.000 That same man is accused of repeatedly having relations with a girl who was 15 years old when they met.

00:13:04.000 And actually, there's a fair bit of tape of the girl talking about when she met Andrew Tate allegedly.

00:13:10.000 And if that tape is in any way correct, and if his own statements on tape are in any way correct, she was underage at the time.

00:13:17.000 Some of the other allegations from the new allegations that are being brought include, according to the actual case that's being brought, quote, he was hitting the victim on the head with one of his hands, right on the temple, not on the face, and with the other at the same time he was choking the victim.

00:13:33.000 Thus, an eye injury was not caused by blows to the head inflicted by the defendant, Andrew Tate, but was the result of immense pressure felt by the victim as a result of the strangulation.

00:13:42.000 According to the victim, during the allegedly violent intercourse, she felt she was on the verge of death.

00:13:47.000 This person provided the judicial authorities with photographs and messages relating to these injuries.

00:13:53.000 These are pretty significant accusations.

00:13:57.000 Now, maybe it's all lies.

00:13:59.000 Maybe all of it is lies.

00:14:00.000 But the problem is that he said a lot of things like this on tape.

00:14:05.000 So we'll have to see how that goes.

00:14:06.000 And again, it's not just trials in Romania that are happening.

00:14:08.000 There is also legal considerations in the UK. In March.

00:14:13.000 Both of the Tates were taken into custody in Romania on a new European arrest warrant issued by the British authorities.

00:14:18.000 Those charges related to the arrest were made between 2012 and 2015 and include allegations of aggression.

00:14:25.000 The Bedford Child Police in England said at the time they were working with the authorities in Romania on investigation into allegations of violence and human violence as well.

00:14:34.000 So they're in a legal snafu.

00:14:36.000 At the very least, the stuff that he has said himself on these matters is pretty terrible.

00:14:43.000 He is currently going on trial in Romania for both...

00:14:46.000 All while supposedly running for Prime Minister of Great Britain in order to stop radical Muslim grooming gangs. 0.93

00:14:51.000 He is a Muslim.

00:14:53.000 He's a self-stated Muslim.

00:14:54.000 And according to his own statements, he was involved in grooming girls for... 0.99

00:15:00.000 This again, according...

00:15:02.000 If his own statements about himself are...

00:15:03.000 I'm not saying it.

00:15:04.000 He's saying it.

00:15:04.000 Here's Andrew Tate talking about exploiting women.

00:15:07.000 I was all about trying to get paid.

00:15:09.000 Like my whole...

00:15:11.000 I used...

00:15:12.000 As a tool to make women love me so they'd obey me and live in my house to make me money. 1.00

00:15:15.000 That's what I wanted.

00:15:17.000 So I was a pimp in that sense.

00:15:19.000 I'm happy with those labels so far.

00:15:24.000 But the majority of my money wasn't made in fighting.

00:15:27.000 My money was actually made in the pimp game.

00:15:29.000 I want you to understand some basic concepts to the pimp game.

00:15:32.000 Basic concepts to the realities between men and women.

00:15:35.000 Women need a man to do only... 1.00

00:15:37.000 It's the same reason a woman need a man to do anything, because they're incompetent and they're very, very lazy. 1.00

00:15:42.000 And they're stupid. 1.00

00:15:43.000 When you're pimping people like me, it's a full-time job. 1.00

00:15:47.000 And Nathan Livingstone, who's kept tabs on this, has put together a lot of these videos that we're using right here.

00:15:53.000 Now, Tate has then claimed in interviews with conservatives that he stopped his webcam business long ago, like super long.

00:15:58.000 He stopped his webcam business technically in about 2022. And it's not that long ago, as you may know.

00:16:04.000 And apparently he stopped his webcam business when he found a new grift, the thing he calls Tate University or Hustlers University, which is effectively a multi-level marketing scheme that is designed to spread social media awareness of Andrew Tate.

00:16:21.000 That's basically what it is.

00:16:22.000 So Coffeezilla, who does investigations into sort of these MLMs and pyramid schemes, he did an entire investigation into Tate and what Tate does with his operation.

00:16:33.000 Here's him explaining.

00:16:34.000 Most people know the dates from clips talking about the matrix, politics, and feminism.

00:16:39.000 But the two brothers have made almost all their money from something else.

00:16:43.000 According to Tate, the way they got rich was webcams.

00:16:47.000 Taking advantage of lonely men, they bragged about it.

00:16:50.000 And me and my brother, eventually some staff I trained, would do all the talking.

00:16:54.000 The girls were just pure, just famoosers. 1.00

00:16:56.000 We were taking their money, all of it!

00:16:59.000 And then they broke into male empowerment, which is ironic.

00:17:03.000 Teaching, dating, manliness, and of course, money.

00:17:06.000 You could join Hustler's University for $49 a month, where the best hustle was students reselling the course to their friends, which actually got the Tates quite popular because they encouraged the students to post their videos everywhere.

00:17:19.000 And he continues explaining exactly what Hustler University is.

00:17:22.000 Again, he's making a lot of money off Hustler, not as much as he says he's making.

00:17:25.000 Andrew Tate at one point said that he was going to be the world's first trillionaire and suggested that he was making something like $110 million per year.

00:17:33.000 When you actually dig into how much money he is worth, he had suggested, for example, that he owned a chain of 15 casinos.

00:17:40.000 The UK Guardian found that apparently not.

00:17:42.000 It's tough to find out how much Taste Romanian companies are actually worth.

00:17:45.000 We can find tax returns for only one.

00:17:47.000 Talisman Enterprises listed as a web portal business, which had 1.2 million pounds in debt.

00:17:53.000 And so even many of the places he's declared are like his amazing castle in Italy.

00:17:57.000 These are places that you can rent for like 800 pounds a night.

00:18:02.000 In any case, here was Coffezilla explaining the Hustlers University grift of it.

00:18:05.000 The main project Tate keeps promising, which is real world token.

00:18:11.000 All of those others, if you want to believe Tate, were just promotions.

00:18:14.000 Tate claims that this is the coin he's actually behind.

00:18:17.000 And it's tied to his paid course.

00:18:19.000 It used to be called Hustlers University.

00:18:21.000 Now it's called the real world.

00:18:23.000 Now, this has always kind of been the biggest part of Tate's businesses.

00:18:27.000 This get rich quick scheme.

00:18:29.000 But the problem with monthly subscriptions is, of course, that people drop out.

00:18:32.000 They leave.

00:18:33.000 And so the Tates have always tried tactics to get people to stay.

00:18:36.000 Like they've said, Hustlers University was closing.

00:18:38.000 It's almost full.

00:18:39.000 We do have a cap.

00:18:40.000 So anyone who quits or leaves at any time, if the cap is reached while you're not subscribed, you're not getting in. 0.94

00:18:46.000 Don't give a s***. 0.82

00:18:46.000 That's it. 0.82

00:18:47.000 We're closing.

00:18:48.000 But now the new angle is this real-world token.

00:18:50.000 Tate is promising a crypto airdrop to people who subscribe and stay subscribed to his monthly Get Rich Quick course.

00:18:57.000 It's also very important for you people who think you can join for a month and quit the real world and just go back to being nobody.

00:19:02.000 No, no, no.

00:19:03.000 No, no, no, no.

00:19:04.000 You have to stay inside to increase your rank, your power level.

00:19:08.000 Because if you quit and then you rejoin, you lose all your PowerPoints.

00:19:11.000 So why would you lose all your PowerPoints to save $49?

00:19:15.000 It doesn't even make sense.

00:19:17.000 Okay, so Tate's new plan is that you buy a Get Rich Quick course, gain PowerPoints.

00:19:22.000 You have to stay subscribed to keep your PowerPoints.

00:19:24.000 And then they say they will pay you a percentage that their school makes.

00:19:29.000 The goal is that you can buy the token and own a percentage of the school.

00:19:32.000 So imagine you sign up for the real world, you start to make money, you focus on your tasks, then you can invest that money in the real world token and get paid every single month a monthly dividend from the profits of the school.

00:19:43.000 Alright.

00:19:44.000 I think I get it.

00:19:45.000 So you got the people at the bottom.

00:19:47.000 They're paying up into the course, into the school.

00:19:50.000 Then you got the people higher with higher power levels.

00:19:53.000 They're making money from people at the bottom with the coin.

00:19:56.000 And then all that money flows up.

00:19:58.000 It's just kind of this nice little pyramid scheme.

00:20:04.000 Okay, so there is a person who is actually quite wonderful online named Zach Bonfilio, who goes by Misfit Patriot over on X. A post saying MAGA has an Andrew Tate problem and it's a big effing problem.

00:20:18.000 Y'all better wake the F up and see what he's doing before he ruins everything we've worked for.

00:20:21.000 Stop acting like a dog who finally caught the car. 0.97

00:20:22.000 We still have work to do and you're effing up.

00:20:25.000 And Andrew Tate then replied to that.

00:20:28.000 Hello, Jew.

00:20:30.000 This is who Andrew Tate is.

00:20:32.000 He's a delight.

00:20:33.000 By the way, big fan of Yahya Sinwar as well.

00:20:35.000 So why exactly did the right embrace Andrew Tate in the first place?

00:20:38.000 Well, because there was a three-step process that took place on the right.

00:20:41.000 First, in response to the left Hating men?

00:20:45.000 The right delinked strength from virtue.

00:20:48.000 Virtue was supposedly the thing that made you a cuck, that made you unable to defeat the left.

00:20:52.000 Why does conservatism conserve?

00:20:53.000 In order to defeat that, you have to do things that are not going to be virtuous.

00:20:57.000 Then, the right actually linked strength with transgressive behavior, because the idea was that it took bad men to stop bad people, which sometimes is true.

00:21:06.000 But then there was the final step.

00:21:07.000 Some on the right have now fallen into the trap of believing that so long as someone is purportedly anti-left, no matter what insanely non-conservative thing that person believes, from the wonders of promiscuity and mistreating women to standing for Islamic jihadis, all of which Andra Tate has done, you can commit literally any sin, up to and including being a and be treated to applause. 0.99

00:21:28.000 Well, this has to stop because it's stupid and it's counterproductive and it is morally wrong. 1.00

00:21:33.000 It turns out that in a reactionary world, the pendulum, Swings back and forth from wild, disgusting, terrible, radical feminism to sometimes wild and disgusting anti-woman trash. 1.00

00:21:44.000 But there has always been in human life one constant. 0.99

00:21:47.000 This is a conservative point.

00:21:48.000 That constant is virtue.

00:21:50.000 That's the constant.

00:21:52.000 If you're covering for a self-described bad guy like Andrew Tate, you're doing it wrong.

00:21:57.000 If you're traveling to Romania to let him lie about his grift and pretend away his legal cases and act as though he's a paragon of masculine decency, you are participating in the lie.

00:22:07.000 If you spend your days shouting correctly about the evils of but not about Andrew Tate, you are full stop a fraud.

00:22:16.000 And worse, if you're cheerleading Andrew Tate, that makes you an accomplice to what he's doing, not an open minded person just seeking truth or asking questions.

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00:24:35.000 Alrighty.

00:24:36.000 Meanwhile, the news continues apace.

00:24:39.000 The wildfire threat in Los Angeles remains very high.

00:24:42.000 The death count has now risen to 24 from 16. That's what officials said on Sunday evening.

00:24:47.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, the Santana winds aren't done provoking the historic LA fires that have so far claimed at least two dozen lives.

00:24:53.000 A wind advisory and red flag warning, which indicates extreme fire conditions, were in effect Sunday night, with Santa Ana winds expected to move in by Monday and remain all the way until Wednesday.

00:25:02.000 Apparently, the gust could reach 45 to 70 miles an hour in certain parts of L.A. between Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon.

00:25:08.000 And that could make it harder to drop aerial retardant. 1.00

00:25:10.000 It could accelerate the spread of the fires.

00:25:12.000 There's a big problem in Altadena, which has largely been burned, which is in the Pasadena area.

00:25:17.000 Also, the Palisades blaze continues to be extremely large.

00:25:21.000 The containment of these blazes is not even remotely full.

00:25:26.000 The Palisades blaze is only 14% contained.

00:25:29.000 It's already burned almost 24,000 acres.

00:25:31.000 That Palisades blaze, which is the one that you're seeing so much on the news, or you're not seeing as much about the Eaton blaze, which is the one around Pasadena, it really is amazing.

00:25:39.000 If you know these areas, and again, I grew up in Los Angeles, and I know all these areas really, really well.

00:25:43.000 If you look at the map, the astonishing extent of the Palisades fire, it's truly crazy.

00:25:49.000 It's approaching Santa Monica in the south, and it's moving along the coast all the way through Malibu.

00:25:56.000 And in some cases, all the way up towards Santa Barbara.

00:26:00.000 That's how far the fire map is moving.

00:26:02.000 And again, a lot of that is sort of a preliminary attempt to prevent people from being caught by surprise.

00:26:08.000 Because the idea is, if the wind catches correctly, it's going to burn an enormous amount of the dead wood and barren trees that are out there in these areas.

00:26:18.000 But if you look at the actual populated areas of Los Angeles, The evacuation warning zone is now including areas of Bel Air.

00:26:25.000 It's moving all the way toward Beverly Glen.

00:26:28.000 In the north of that particular fire, they've moved the evacuation warning area all the way up to Ventura Boulevard in Encino.

00:26:34.000 It's approaching Sherman Oaks.

00:26:35.000 I used to live in Studio City, which is kind of near that particular area.

00:26:39.000 And then again, parts of Santa Monica are now under evacuation warning.

00:26:42.000 Brentwood is under evacuation warning.

00:26:44.000 Meanwhile, if you look at that Pasadena fire, the Eaton fire, the evacuation warning area is now extending all the way out.

00:26:51.000 Toward the outskirts of Glendale.

00:26:52.000 It's already hit La Cañada, Flintridge.

00:26:54.000 These are massive, massive fires.

00:26:57.000 Truly massive fires.

00:26:58.000 And so there's a conflation of events here.

00:27:01.000 A confluence of events, rather.

00:27:03.000 That confluence of events is horrible wildfires, really, really high winds, enormous seasonal dryness, and, of course, incredibly bad policy.

00:27:13.000 Bad policy very often is only exposed when the cover sort of gets ripped off.

00:27:19.000 It's sort of like a termite-infested area.

00:27:21.000 Until you actually break through the drywall and see the termite infestation, you don't realize how bad it is.

00:27:26.000 The fire broke through the drywall, and now you've seen the termite infestation, and it is awful.

00:27:31.000 Basically, the foundations of the entire governmental system in Los Angeles and California more generally have been eaten away at over the course of decades.

00:27:40.000 So it's easy to find sort of excuses for why this particular reservoir was dry, for example.

00:27:44.000 They had to let it out in order to fix it.

00:27:45.000 Okay, the question is...

00:27:46.000 Why weren't there more reservoirs in the first place?

00:27:48.000 And the answer is, California hasn't been in the business of building more reservoirs since like the 1960s and 70s.

00:27:54.000 It's been a very long time.

00:27:56.000 The transformers in the Los Angeles area date back in some cases to the 1920s.

00:28:01.000 Los Angeles and California have been wildly underserved by a far-left progressive administration that has been in place for the past several decades being ruled by environmentalists and redistributionist progressives.

00:28:15.000 Well, the LA Fire Department chief got herself in trouble, Kristen Crowley did, because she did an interview where she pointed out that the budget cuts had made it difficult to actually fight the fires.

00:28:24.000 The budget.

00:28:25.000 There's so much talk about it.

00:28:26.000 It was cut $17 million.

00:28:28.000 It was cut this.

00:28:29.000 It wasn't cut at all, according to one newspaper.

00:28:32.000 Was your budget for the fiscal year 2024-2025 cut?

00:28:37.000 I can tell you, I'm going to go back further than that.

00:28:40.000 Again, since day one, we've identified...

00:28:43.000 Huge gaps in regard to our service delivery and our ability from our firefighters' boots on the ground to do their jobs.

00:28:50.000 Since day one, this is my third budget as we're going into 25-26.

00:28:55.000 What I can tell you is we are still understaffed, we're still underresourced, and we're still underfunded.

00:29:01.000 So with that, whether it's $7 million, $10 million.

00:29:04.000 But was the budget cut?

00:29:05.000 Yes, it was cut.

00:29:06.000 And it did impact our ability to provide service.

00:29:09.000 She's saying the quiet part right out loud.

00:29:10.000 Karen Bass was apparently wildly furious at her and called her on the carpet to yell at her. 1.00

00:29:15.000 The Atlantic, meanwhile, ran a piece titled, quote, How Well-Intentioned Policies Fueled LA's Fires.

00:29:20.000 Okay, who cares about the intent?

00:29:23.000 This is such a difference between how the left and the right think about the world.

00:29:25.000 The left thinks that well-intentioned policies are their own justification.

00:29:28.000 If the intentions were good, it doesn't matter if L.A. burns.

00:29:32.000 Which is, of course, totally insane.

00:29:33.000 Because it turns out that in pursuit of these well-intentioned policies, many, many bad things can be done.

00:29:38.000 So the Washington Free Beacon, which does some of the best reporting in America, Reports today, quote, Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristen Crowley warned city officials in November that her department had about half as many firefighters as it needed.

00:29:49.000 When deadly wildfires struck the city two months later, Mayor Karen Bass's administration pulled Crowley's memo from their website.

00:29:55.000 Crowley wrote to the city's fire commissioners, a five-person board appointed by Bass on November 18th, and asked them to transmit the message to Bass and the city council.

00:30:02.000 The fire department's size, she said, had not increased in decades despite significant population growth.

00:30:07.000 Crowley said in many ways, the current staffing, deployment model, and size of the LAFD have not changed since the 1960s.

00:30:14.000 In 2022, Crowley said 61% of the department's firefighters failed to meet the four-minute first response time, which is a national firefighting standard.

00:30:22.000 The National Fire Protection Association recommends cities like LA employ between 1.51 and 1.81 firefighters per thousand residents.

00:30:30.000 In LA, that number was about half.

00:30:32.000 Two months later, historic wildfires erupted.

00:30:35.000 And Crowley's memo magically disappeared from a city website.

00:30:39.000 Why, shocking.

00:30:40.000 I can't believe that they would make all of that disappear.

00:30:43.000 Well, meanwhile, it turns out that pretty much every area of California law has been screwed up.

00:30:49.000 Many people today are in desperate need of fulfillment from their fire insurance because their house got burned down.

00:30:53.000 The problem is that California has spent decades attempting to destroy the entire fire insurance market by placing artificial regulations on pricing.

00:31:00.000 And what that does is it drives out alternative pricing.

00:31:04.000 It drives out programs that you can buy.

00:31:06.000 It limits your availability of choice.

00:31:08.000 It leads people to go uninsured.

00:31:11.000 According to the Cato Institute, in recent years, state price control regulations have driven private home insurance providers like State Farm and Allstate out of offering new products in the state and led to the non-renual of thousands of existing home insurance policies.

00:31:23.000 This has left many homeowners exposed to catastrophic financial losses from the recent wildfires and created a huge strain on the state-run Fair Access to Insurance Requirements plan, the insurer of last resort.

00:31:34.000 California's price controls, where regulators must approve proposed premium increases, require insurers to submit detailed justifications for rate increases to the California Department of Insurance.

00:31:43.000 Those companies had until recently to demonstrate that proposed premiums are based on historic losses, not analysis based on forward-looking risk assessments, which is insane, by the way.

00:31:51.000 So apparently the insurance companies, in order to justify future price increases, had to say, here's what the fires have been like in the past.

00:31:57.000 So you can't assess future risk, which is literally what insurance is there to do.

00:32:02.000 This, by the way, is true across how Americans think of insurance.

00:32:04.000 We think of insurance totally wrong.

00:32:06.000 Insurance is designed to spec out future risk.

00:32:08.000 It is not designed as a quote-unquote coverage plan.

00:32:11.000 That is not what it is.

00:32:12.000 This is true from health insurance to fire insurance to flood insurance.

00:32:15.000 And the thing about insurance is if it's specking out future risk, that means differential prices if you have a house in the middle of a forest in Malibu than if you're living in downtown L.A.

00:32:24.000 Designed to keep insurance premiums affordable through rates that are, quote, never excessive, inadequate or unfairly discriminatory, these regulations led to rules preventing companies from recalibrating prices to fully reflect what they believed were higher future wildfire risks after 2017.

00:32:38.000 The CDI rejected or laid approval for substantial rate increases in many cases, creating a de facto price cap.

00:32:45.000 Previous research showed average delay was now 293 days between 2020 and 2022, which is significantly worse than 157 days.

00:32:55.000 In fact, California was the worst state in the country for rate suppression.

00:32:59.000 Having the biggest gap between actuarially indicated rate and the rate approved by regulators.

00:33:04.000 And so what ended up happening there is that people just stopped buying their insurance and insurance stopped offering options because they knew they were going to have to pay out more than they were taking in.

00:33:14.000 So what ended up, they all get thrown onto the tax paradigm.

00:33:17.000 As always.

00:33:18.000 And by the way, Karen Bass continues along these lines.

00:33:21.000 So Karen Bass put out a tweet yesterday saying that you should report price gouging.

00:33:28.000 In housing.

00:33:30.000 So, like, a huge percentage of the housing stock in SoCal has now been burned down, which means more demand and less supply, which means the price naturally goes up.

00:33:41.000 And instead, Karen Bass is like, report price gouging to me. 1.00

00:33:45.000 Somebody's doing a capitalism.

00:33:46.000 Stop.

00:33:47.000 Well, how exactly are you going to allocate those housing spots if you can't increase the prices?

00:33:51.000 You can't build anything new in California.

00:33:54.000 The regulations are insane.

00:33:56.000 So hilariously enough, Gavin Newsom is now attempting, the governor of California, to reverse field and campaign as a moderate Republican.

00:34:02.000 We'll get to that in just one moment.

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00:34:38.000 So in the face of his radical incompetence and his state burning down, California Governor Gavin Newsom is now attempting to reverse field on pretty much everything and pretend that he's a moderate Republican.

00:34:47.000 Now he's running as Rick Caruso, the L.A. mayoral candidate who lost to Karen Bass.

00:34:52.000 So, first, he put out a statement that he's going to cut through red tape.

00:34:55.000 Just issued an executive order that will allow victims of the SoCal fires to not get caught up in bureaucratic red tape and quickly rebuild their homes.

00:35:01.000 We're also extending key price-gouging protections to help make rebuilding more affordable.

00:35:05.000 Price-gouging protections.

00:35:06.000 This is what the left suggests is a solution.

00:35:09.000 It is not a solution.

00:35:10.000 The prices are going to go up because demand just went up and supply is still constrained.

00:35:14.000 As far as the beginning, where he says that he's going to cut red tape, why only for the people affected by the SoCal fires?

00:35:18.000 Why are you leaving it in place for everyone else?

00:35:21.000 I love how now you acknowledge the bureaucratic red tape in California.

00:35:24.000 Is bad.

00:35:24.000 By the way, it's absolutely terrible.

00:35:26.000 Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom, he says there will be zero, zero tolerance for looting during wildfires.

00:35:32.000 Again, the question you should be asking yourself is, why is there tolerance for looting not during wildfires, Gavin?

00:35:37.000 How to keep people safe, no looting, zero tolerance for looting.

00:35:43.000 That's why these guys are out here.

00:35:45.000 And I'm very grateful for them, particularly for these critical checkpoints that allow law enforcement to move more globally and do interior work.

00:35:53.000 Well, I only have one question for you.

00:35:57.000 Why did the state of California effectively decriminalize shoplifting in 2020-2021?

00:36:03.000 State law says stealing merchandise worth $950 or less...

00:36:07.000 is a misdemeanor, according to Leo Hanyan at Hoover, which means law enforcement won't bother to investigate, and if they do, prosecutors will simply let it go.

00:36:13.000 So they're totally fine with mass looting during BLM, totally fine with looting just on a regular basis, just walk through a Rite Aid and steal everything in Los Angeles or San Francisco. 0.99

00:36:22.000 Now, of course, it makes for bad headlines, so Gavin Newsom has to cover his ass. 0.96

00:36:26.000 Gavin Newsom also says that they're going to reimagine how the state of California works. 0.98

00:36:30.000 They're going to do the Marshall Plan 2.0.

00:36:32.000 Now, he has no idea what that means.

00:36:33.000 Literally none.

00:36:34.000 He's asked about, so what do you mean by that?

00:36:36.000 And he's like, well, we're thinking about it.

00:36:38.000 I'm glad you came up with a name for a thing, my dude.

00:36:40.000 Really, good job.

00:36:43.000 We're already organizing a Marshall Plan.

00:36:45.000 We already have a team of looking and reimagining LA 2.0.

00:36:49.000 And we're making sure everyone's included, not just the folks on the coast, people here that were ravaged by this disaster.

00:36:55.000 You just said you're organizing a Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of California.

00:36:59.000 What is that Marshall Plan?

00:37:00.000 Tell us about this Marshall Plan.

00:37:01.000 We're just starting to lay out.

00:37:02.000 I mean, we're still fighting these fires.

00:37:04.000 So we're already talking to city leaders.

00:37:06.000 We're already talking to civic leaders.

00:37:08.000 We're already talking to business leaders and nonprofits.

00:37:11.000 We're talking to labor leaders.

00:37:12.000 We're starting to organize how we can put together a collection of individuals on philanthropy for recovery, how we can organize the region, how we can make sure that we are seeking federal assistance for the Olympics more broadly, but also federal assistance for the recovery efforts, and how we can galvanize the community with folks that love this community to really develop a mindset.

00:37:37.000 So that at scale, we're dealing with the scope of this tragedy and responding to it at scale with efficiency like the executive order I talked about, time value of delivering projects, addressing building codes, addressing permitting issues, and moving forward to rebuilding and being more resilient.

00:37:55.000 What a joke he is. 0.95

00:37:55.000 He just did like a minute and a half without saying a single damn thing. 0.95

00:37:58.000 He's asked, what is that Marshall Plan 2.0? 0.89

00:38:00.000 And he proceeds to babble about synergy.

00:38:02.000 We're talking to local leaders and civic leaders and philanthropic leaders about spending in the giant scale, but also on the particularly small scale.

00:38:12.000 And then he starts doing like mime in a box.

00:38:14.000 The hand motions are not a substitute for policy, my dude.

00:38:18.000 That is a lot of hand motions.

00:38:19.000 Now, as a guy who talks with his hands a little bit, let me just tell you, that is some wild hand motioning.

00:38:24.000 I mean, if you just scrub through that tape once again and watch the number of hand motions, when he panics, that dude goes right back to jazz hands training in middle school theater.

00:38:34.000 He is just going for it.

00:38:35.000 Wow, that is a lot of hand motions.

00:38:37.000 He really went through the full panoply.

00:38:39.000 I'm kind of impressed.

00:38:39.000 I'll be honest with you.

00:38:40.000 I thought he was going to run out and then he would pull a new one.

00:38:42.000 He'd be like, over here and over here and pulling it down from and then all the way from here and out here.

00:38:47.000 And he is so awful.

00:38:49.000 But he knows one thing and that's Donald Trump is the problem. 0.97

00:38:52.000 That's the biggest thing, of course.

00:38:55.000 Mr. Trump has threatened to withhold aid for California wildfires, both as president and now again as president-elect.

00:39:01.000 Are you worried that he might actually do that?

00:39:03.000 Well, I mean, he's done it in Utah.

00:39:05.000 He's done it in Michigan.

00:39:06.000 They did it in Puerto Rico.

00:39:07.000 He did it to California back before I was even governor in 2018, until he found out folks in Orange County voted for him, and then he decided to give the money.

00:39:14.000 So he's been at this for years and years and years.

00:39:17.000 It transcends states, including, by the way, Georgia.

00:39:20.000 He threatened similarly.

00:39:22.000 So that's his style.

00:39:24.000 And, you know, we take it seriously to the extent that in the past it's taken a little bit more time.

00:39:32.000 I've been pretty expressive about that in the context of someone threatening our first responders in terms of supporting the immediacy of their needs.

00:39:44.000 That's what you take it as, that President-elect Trump is threatening the first responders here.

00:39:47.000 Well, I mean, it's what he said.

00:39:48.000 He said, I'm not going to support the firefighting efforts.

00:39:50.000 I'm not going to support the state of California as it relates to its emergency management.

00:39:55.000 He made this pretty clear during the election, unless they do my bidding.

00:39:59.000 Well, actually, what Senator John Barrasso said, Republican from Wyoming, correctly, is actually what we're going to do is we're going to attach some strings.

00:40:07.000 Like, you actually have to clean up your forests if you want us to spend money on you, which makes some sense.

00:40:12.000 Do you expect, though, that Congress and Republicans will still help these Americans in need, even if they don't like their local politics in the party?

00:40:22.000 I expect that there will be strings attached to money that is ultimately approved, and it has to do with being ready the next time, because this was a gross failure this time.

00:40:33.000 It is amazing that Gavin Newsom continues to try to pretend that he is somehow the responsible player in all of this.

00:40:39.000 He's now turned into the online meme.

00:40:41.000 We're all looking for the guy who did this.

00:40:43.000 Who could it be?

00:40:45.000 Oh, man.

00:40:46.000 Or the Who Shot Hannibal meme.

00:40:48.000 It really is.

00:40:49.000 He's a living meme, Gavin Newsom.

00:40:51.000 Well done, California.

00:40:52.000 You guys have done yourselves proud with the people that you've elected.

00:40:55.000 Well, meanwhile, President Trump's administration is preparing for its unveiling.

00:40:59.000 That, of course, is going to begin next week.

00:41:01.000 But we are going to get nominee hearings that begin this week because Congress has already been sworn in.

00:41:06.000 That means it's time to have hearings for SecDef.

00:41:09.000 Prospective Pete Hegseth or Marco Rubio, Secretary of State.

00:41:13.000 And one of the things that you're starting to see is that many of the Trump cabinet members are now starting to say things that are in the realm of the more reasonable.

00:41:21.000 Why?

00:41:21.000 Because it turns out that the advice and consent process and the various constraints of American government tend to wash out most of the radicalism present from the right.

00:41:29.000 Doesn't tend to work on the left because the left then staffs up in the administrative bureaucracy.

00:41:33.000 But when it comes to some of the kind of wackier opinions held...

00:41:36.000 By a wide variety of members of sort of the Team Trump.

00:41:39.000 Those things are being moderated, which makes perfect political sense.

00:41:44.000 So, for example, Tulsi Gabbard, who's been tapped to lead the U.S. intelligence community as Director of National Intelligence, had opposed originally Section 702 foreign surveillance authorities as a member of Congress that allows for metadata gathering and data gathering about foreign parties.

00:41:58.000 And now she's reversed herself and she's going to support that.

00:42:03.000 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He says he'll give advisory opinions rather than issuing outright bans.

00:42:11.000 Pete Hegseth has been avoiding some of the more controversial statements that he's made in the past, for example.

00:42:17.000 And so it's not particularly shocking to watch all this happening.

00:42:21.000 This is how government works.

00:42:23.000 So, for example, again, Gabber told Punchbowl News on Friday she now supports Section 702 surveillance programs thanks to updated whistleblower and civil liberty protections.

00:42:32.000 Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma had said that if she reverses that, there's a good shot she gets confirmed.

00:42:36.000 RFK Jr. told reporters on Capitol Hill last month, I'm all for the polio vaccine.

00:42:40.000 And he said that he actually will pursue anti-abortion policies at HHS despite being pro-choice himself.

00:42:47.000 Hegseth has said that he supports all women serving in our military today, including in combat roles.

00:42:53.000 Again, this is because so many of the Trump cabinet members want to work with President Trump.

00:43:00.000 Trump's agenda...

00:43:01.000 is going to be the thing that actually rules the rooster.

00:43:03.000 There's something Susie Wiles has made absolutely clear, and that's good.

00:43:05.000 The same thing holds true, by the way, of Tom Homan, the out-of-central casting bloodhound who's going to track down illegal immigrants and deport them. 0.91

00:43:15.000 So he is now the realist in the room, according to the Wall Street Journal.

00:43:19.000 Homan has spent the weeks following the election right-sizing Trump's sweeping campaign promise to arrest and deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally, in private transition meetings, and occasionally in public.

00:43:28.000 He has emphasized that immigrants with criminal records should be the primary targets for arrest, a narrower set of people than the 15 to 20 million Trump pledged to go after.

00:43:36.000 Homan also said the administration would not carry out intimidating sweeps of immigrant neighborhoods and that he's unsure how extensive the actual deportation campaign will be.

00:43:44.000 He said, I keep getting asked the question, how many people are we going to remove in the first 100 days?

00:43:48.000 I don't know.

00:43:48.000 I don't know what the resources are that I'm going to have.

00:43:50.000 Congress is going to have to give me funding.

00:43:52.000 Homan says, I've worked for six different presidents.

00:43:54.000 I've seen hundreds of policies come and go.

00:43:56.000 I've seen what policies worked and what policies don't.

00:43:59.000 Well, yes.

00:44:00.000 Now, all the people who are set to be disappointed by the fact that the Trump administration actually has to operate in the real world, get ready.

00:44:07.000 The Trump administration actually has to operate in the real world.

00:44:09.000 And there's no reason to be disappointed about that.

00:44:11.000 That's what happens when you win.

00:44:13.000 When you win, it turns out that many of the sort of outlandish things that you say are not applicable in real life.

00:44:20.000 So there's bound to be some disappointments.

00:44:22.000 And I, for one, am pleased with the realism because I would prefer that things get done even if it's 70% of the pie that I want.

00:44:29.000 This happens to hold true with regard to, for example, the January 6th arrestees.

00:44:34.000 So J.D. Vance, the vice president-elect of the United States, he was asked on Fox News Sunday about who President Trump would pardon day one with regard to January 6th.

00:44:45.000 And he said the reasonable thing, which is people who are guilty of non-violent offenses will be pardoned.

00:44:50.000 People who did violent things against cops should not be pardoned.

00:44:53.000 I know that a lot of people online were very angry about J.D. Vance saying that.

00:44:56.000 I don't know why.

00:44:57.000 If you assaulted a cop, it seems to me you should go to jail for whatever reason you assaulted the cop.

00:45:01.000 Here's J.D. Vance saying what is the rational and reasonable thing?

00:45:05.000 January 6th pardons, President Trump says there's a process.

00:45:08.000 Where is the line drawn on who will and wouldn't be considered for a pardon?

00:45:11.000 I think it's very simple.

00:45:12.000 Look, if you protested peacefully on January 6th and you've had Merrick Garland's Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned.

00:45:21.000 If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn't be pardoned.

00:45:25.000 And there's a little bit of a gray area there, but we're very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law.

00:45:30.000 And there are a lot of people, we think, in the wake of January 6th who were prosecuted unfairly.

00:45:35.000 We need to rectify that.

00:45:36.000 Okay, so again, what he's saying there is perfectly reasonable and rational.

00:45:40.000 And there are people online who are, of course, going nuts.

00:45:42.000 Everybody should be, they're all political detainees. 1.00

00:45:44.000 I mean, some are, and some assaulted cops.

00:45:47.000 And that's not quite the same thing.

00:45:49.000 By the way, J.D. Vance is saying the same thing with regard to Greenland.

00:45:51.000 So he's asked, you know, Donald Trump has said that he's not going to rule out military intervention.

00:45:55.000 And J.D. is like, what are you talking about?

00:45:57.000 Here's J.D. Vance talking about Greenland.

00:45:59.000 Again, this is what rational politics looks like if you have a high IQ, which J.D. obviously does.

00:46:04.000 What's the deal with Greenland and the Panama Canal?

00:46:06.000 Are we using or considering use of military force in any of those situations?

00:46:10.000 No, look, we don't have to use military force, Shannon.

00:46:12.000 The thing that people always ignore is we already have troops in Greenland.

00:46:15.000 Greenland is really important for America strategically.

00:46:18.000 It has a lot of great natural resources.

00:46:20.000 My friend Donald Trump Jr. was there a couple days ago, and you know what they told him?

00:46:23.000 They want to be empowered to develop.

00:46:26.000 The people of Greenland want to be empowered to develop the resources there.

00:46:29.000 We also need to make sure that Greenland is properly cared for from an American security perspective.

00:46:34.000 And frankly, the current leadership, the Danish government has not done a good enough job of securing Greenland.

00:46:42.000 I think there actually is a real opportunity here for us to take leadership to protect America's security, to ensure that those incredible natural resources are developed.

00:46:51.000 And that's what Donald Trump is good at.

00:46:54.000 He's good at making deals, and I think there's a deal to be made in Greenland.

00:46:56.000 So again, all of this is perfectly rational and perfectly reasonable.

00:47:00.000 And that's true across the board in terms of how Donald Trump is approaching policy.

00:47:03.000 So, for example, last week, the incoming Trump team said, you know, Donald Trump may not get a deal done in Ukraine day one, but it's going to get done in the first few months.

00:47:12.000 There are going to be talks.

00:47:13.000 It's going to be reasonable.

00:47:15.000 That's right.

00:47:16.000 Mike Walls is the incoming NSA, congressman from Florida.

00:47:20.000 He says, listen, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, they're going to have a talk.

00:47:23.000 Will the first meeting with Putin be a...

00:47:25.000 Just Trump and Putin, or will this be trying to bring in Ukraine as well as Zelensky, Putin, and Trump?

00:47:32.000 Well, we haven't set the exact framework for it yet.

00:47:35.000 We're working on that, but I do expect a call at least in the coming days and weeks.

00:47:44.000 So that would be a step, and we'll take it from there.

00:47:50.000 Walsh also continued by saying, listen, it's not realistic to say that we're going to be able to expel every Russian from Ukrainians.

00:47:54.000 Well, this has been true forever.

00:47:56.000 The Biden administration acknowledges as much.

00:47:57.000 It's just they refuse to actually create policy around reality.

00:48:02.000 Everybody knows that this has to end somehow diplomatically.

00:48:07.000 I just don't think it's realistic to say we're going to expel every Russian from every inch of Ukrainian soil.

00:48:14.000 Even Crimea, President Trump has acknowledged that reality, and I think it's been a huge step forward that the entire world is acknowledging that reality.

00:48:23.000 Alrighty, so, again, all of this is rational and reasonable, and that's what Trump 2.0 is going to be.

00:48:29.000 There are going to be a lot of moments where members of the Trump base are unhappy with the kind of deal Trump is cutting.

00:48:34.000 Why?

00:48:34.000 Because he's the actual president now, and he has to get things done.

00:48:37.000 It turns out, getting things done...

00:48:39.000 Involving yourself in negotiations where you don't get 100% of everything, but you get most of what you want.

00:48:44.000 There's going to be a lot of that in Trump 2.0 with an incredibly slim House majority and an incredibly slim Senate majority as well.

00:48:51.000 Okay, meanwhile, we here at The Daily Wire, we have now announced and brought out a brand new documentary called Identity Crisis, all about the transgender movement particularly directed at children.

00:49:03.000 Well, joining us online is one of the people featured in the film Identity Crisis, Adam Veena.

00:49:08.000 He lost custody of his son after he refused to affirm the child's quote-unquote transgender identity. 0.57

00:49:13.000 Adam, thanks so much for joining the show.

00:49:14.000 I really appreciate it.

00:49:15.000 Thank you, Ben.

00:49:16.000 Thank you for having me.

00:49:17.000 It's a great honor to be speaking with you, Ben.

00:49:18.000 So why don't we start from the beginning of your story.

00:49:21.000 How did things come to this point?

00:49:23.000 It started when Aiden was two years old.

00:49:26.000 Is when I first received a picture of Aiden in a dress.

00:49:29.000 And I sent out some text messages basically saying he's a boy, not a girl.

00:49:33.000 And I thought it had stopped at that point.

00:49:35.000 And on Aiden's third birthday, we were potty training Aiden at the time.

00:49:40.000 And he asked if he could use the restroom.

00:49:42.000 I said, absolutely, buddy.

00:49:43.000 Do you need help?

00:49:44.000 Or do you want to do it by yourself?

00:49:46.000 He said, I want to do it by myself.

00:49:48.000 He went by himself.

00:49:49.000 He came back out to me.

00:49:50.000 And he said, Daddy, Mommy bought me a pink dress.

00:49:54.000 And the way I tell you and everybody else, I got down on one knee.

00:49:57.000 I looked him in the eye.

00:49:58.000 I said, hey, buddy, you're a boy, not a girl. 1.00

00:50:00.000 And boys don't wear dresses.

00:50:02.000 And he said, okay, daddy.

00:50:03.000 And at that point, I sent out another group of text messages.

00:50:08.000 And in those groups of text messages, none of them were threatening of violence or anything like that to her or him.

00:50:15.000 But they were able to get a temporary restraining order put on me.

00:50:18.000 So I've technically been on a temporary restraining order.

00:50:22.000 For almost five years for no violence, no neglect to either my son's mother or to her.

00:50:31.000 The judges in California ordered a gender assessment to be done on my son, which I have...

00:50:38.000 Mr. Shapiro, this whole thing has been extremely one-sided.

00:50:42.000 Not at one time has the court system, the attorneys, ever took the father into consideration into this situation.

00:50:49.000 They've always...

00:50:51.000 So I wanted to sit in on the gender assessment at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, and they denied me that.

00:50:58.000 I hired my own therapist to sit in on the assessment, and they denied me that.

00:51:03.000 And I wanted to have a phone call with the doctor, and they denied me a phone call.

00:51:08.000 so the doctor has never called the father to ask his side of what he thinks is going on with his son so let's talk about what was going on with your son i mean obviously you're spending a lot of time with your son but by the same token you know did you ever see any signs that your son absolutely thought he was a girl or anything like that No, sir.

00:51:27.000 I asked Aiden's grandparents every single day, did I miss something in Aiden?

00:51:31.000 Was there an inkling that he wanted to be a girl?

00:51:36.000 And there was never any inkling that my son Aiden wanted to be a girl.

00:51:40.000 He was just your normal, typical little boy.

00:51:43.000 Wanted to play with trucks, play in the dirt, your normal little boy thing.

00:51:47.000 So there was never anything that...

00:51:49.000 He wanted to be this way.

00:51:51.000 So what do you think happened with his mother?

00:51:53.000 I mean, why did all of this begin?

00:51:55.000 I think she started wanting to get back at me because we were no longer together at this point.

00:52:02.000 But I truly believe that the judges, her attorney, the therapists, the children's hospitals, doctors, I really truly believe that they brainwashed my son's mother to be 100% on board with this whole transition.

00:52:18.000 It wasn't just up until recently in court where she actually started referring to Aiden as a her, referring to him as Luna.

00:52:29.000 Aiden now has she, her pronouns.

00:52:32.000 I received an email from a parent from school that she sent to school saying that Aiden is now full transgender at four years old.

00:52:40.000 He goes by she, her pronouns.

00:52:42.000 He goes by the name of Violet.

00:52:44.000 Two years ago it was Violet.

00:52:46.000 Now it's Luna.

00:52:47.000 So as we all know, there's a transgender book out there for kids that the main character's name is Luna.

00:52:54.000 And a lot of these kids are taking that name up because they're referencing that book to what's going on with them.

00:53:00.000 So my son goes by Luna as of right now.

00:53:03.000 So is there still a restraining order in place?

00:53:05.000 What is the current legal status?

00:53:07.000 The current legal status, I'm in the appeals process right now, waiting to get an appeals hearing.

00:53:13.000 But if this goes all the way through to the end, I'll be on an eight-year restraining order for no physical violence.

00:53:20.000 And in the state of California, the only way a child can be removed from a parent or parents is if there's abuse or neglect.

00:53:26.000 And in this case, there was never any abuse or neglect with my son.

00:53:31.000 Well, it's a horrifying story.

00:53:33.000 Obviously, we wish you the best.

00:53:35.000 Whatever help you need, we're happy to cover it.

00:53:37.000 That's Adam Vina, the father of five-year-old Aiden who lost custody of his son after disagreeing with his girlfriend about...

00:53:42.000 The son's alleged transgender identity.

00:53:45.000 Adam, thanks for telling your story.

00:53:47.000 It's a really important one.

00:53:48.000 Thank you.

00:53:49.000 I appreciate that.

00:53:50.000 Folks, if you want to see the rest of that story, you want to hear more about that, you should go check out this brand new documentary, Identity Crisis.

00:53:57.000 It's a project of The Daily Wire as well as TPUSA, and that is available over at Daily Wire Plus right now.

00:54:04.000 Already coming up, there are some on the right who bizarrely are now trying to defend TikTok, even though it's obviously a Chinese op.

00:54:09.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

00:54:10.000 Use code SHAPIRO. Check out for two months free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - January 13, 2025

The Right Should DUMP Andrew Tate

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