The Ben Shapiro Show - Trump BLASTS Somali Immigrants, Media EXPLODES

00:00:00.000 President Trump in hot water after some spicy comments about Somali immigrants to the United States.

00:00:04.000 But should the United States be taking in mass migration from Somalia?

00:00:08.000 Plus, Democrats continue to maintain that our Secretary of War is in fact a war criminal.

00:00:13.000 We'll get to all of that first.

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00:00:20.000 So the President of the United States is now activating immigrations and customs enforcement to go after Somali illegal immigrants in Minneapolis.

00:00:28.000 This, of course, follows hard on these large-scale reports about Somali welfare fraud, the attempt by members of the Somali community, many members of the Somali community to defraud the federal and state governments during the pandemic.

00:00:41.000 A lot of that money ended up going in remittances back to Somalia.

00:00:45.000 The president of the United States yesterday got himself in some hot water by slamming Somalis in the United States.

00:00:51.000 In his typical colorful language, I will say that the language that he used to describe Somalis is not what is typically in the purview of the president of the United States, but his overall take, which is that the United States needs to radically limit immigration from places like Somalia.

00:01:06.000 That, of course, is correct because not all countries are going to be equally useful as sources of migrants to the United States.

00:01:14.000 The people who come from many of these countries do not have any sort of cultural habits that mesh well with the United States. 0.99

00:01:21.000 Here's the president of the United States going after Representative Ilhan Omar as well as other members of the Somali community in Minneapolis yesterday.

00:01:30.000 We could go bad.

00:01:31.000 We're at a tipping point.

00:01:32.000 I don't know if people mind me saying that, but I'm saying that we could go one way or the other.

00:01:39.000 And we're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. 1.00

00:01:44.000 Ilan Omar is garbage.

00:01:46.000 She's garbage. 1.00

00:01:47.000 Her friends are garbage. 0.98

00:01:50.000 Well, I mean, I agree with his assessment of Ilhan Omar as a person.

00:01:55.000 I think that she's a pretty terrible person.

00:01:57.000 And I think that her own personal support for people who were recruited by actual terrorist groups in the past, her support of ongoing terrorist activities in, for example, the Gaza Strip, rhetorically, I think that in and of itself speaks to whether she should be in the United States, whether we should have taken her in in the first place.

00:02:17.000 She is now an American citizen.

00:02:18.000 Getting rid of her, denaturalizing her, of course, is a bit of a different story.

00:02:23.000 The president went on to say that he doesn't want Somalis in the United States.

00:02:29.000 I hear they ripped off Somalians, ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions every year, billions of dollars, and they contribute nothing.

00:02:44.000 The welfare is like 88%.

00:02:47.000 They contribute nothing.

00:02:50.000 I don't want them in our country, I'll be honest with you.

00:02:52.000 Somebody would say, oh, that's not politically correct.

00:02:55.000 I don't care.

00:02:56.000 I don't want them in our country.

00:02:57.000 Their country is no good for a reason.

00:03:01.000 Okay, so I should separate out two comments that President Trump here is making and that are, I think, deliberately being conflated a little bit by the media.

00:03:08.000 One is he says that he doesn't want Ilhan Omar, who is garbage, and her friends who are garbage in the country.

00:03:13.000 That does not mean every Somali in America is garbage.

00:03:17.000 What the media are trying to do today is claim that President Trump is claiming every single Somali in the country is garbage.

00:03:22.000 He did not actually say that.

00:03:23.000 What he said is that Ilhan Omar is garbage and her friends are garbage.

00:03:26.000 Well, I mean, there he could be talking about Rashida Taliban AOC.

00:03:29.000 And again, this is the sort of language the president of the United States, not historically the president uses, but this particular president has used this sort of language.

00:03:38.000 And so the outrage is, in my own opinion, somewhat miscalibrated.

00:03:43.000 If you're not used to President Trump's use of insult at this point, after fully a decade of it, I'm going to have to ask whether you have adapted to the Trump era for good or for ill.

00:03:54.000 When he says that he does not want Somalis in the country as a general point, when he says that they're coming from a culture that does not mesh well with the United States, is he wrong about that?

00:04:08.000 As a general rule, is that wrong?

00:04:11.000 On Tuesday, the administration unveiled a new regulation that would prevent immigration applications from citizens of 19 countries already covered by President Trump's travel bans.

00:04:21.000 Right now, there's a travel ban that says that you're not going to get a travel visa if you're coming from Iran, Venezuela, Haiti.

00:04:27.000 Now he's extending that into a pause on all immigration applications from those 19 countries.

00:04:34.000 And a new operation in Minnesota is going to expand on those moves, according to the Wall Street Journal.

00:04:39.000 Last month, the president said he would revoke temporary protected status for Somalis only in Minnesota.

00:04:44.000 The TPS program, of course, is designed to prevent deportation of people who are seeking asylum.

00:04:52.000 So President Trump focusing on Nilhanoma, again, I think that is well taken. 1.00

00:04:55.000 I think that she truly is quite the horror show in terms of Congress. 0.97

00:05:00.000 And it does speak to the people who are electing her, because of course we are responsible for our representatives.

00:05:05.000 If you elect a person who obviously does not like her own country, and here I mean the United States, or maybe she likes her own country, but her own country is Somalia, which seems to be the sort of thing that she says fairly routinely.

00:05:17.000 I'm not sure why the president is supposed to like that.

00:05:20.000 All of this raises the question as to whether the United States ought to block immigration from third world countries, which, of course, is a point the president has been making over and over and over again.

00:05:29.000 Well, according to the Migration Policy Institute, from 2015 to 2019, Somalis of all sub-Saharan African immigrants had the lowest levels of educational attainment.

00:05:39.000 Only 14% held a bachelor's degree or higher.

00:05:43.000 Somali-headed households of all immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, which is to say, mostly the poorest immigrants who come into the United States, Somali-headed households had the lowest median income at $32,000.

00:05:56.000 Somalis in the United States had a 37% poverty rate, extremely poor, extremely uneducated. 1.00

00:06:03.000 Somalis had the highest rates of being uninsured in terms of health insurance.

00:06:06.000 That'd be 18% uninsured via health insurance.

00:06:10.000 Somalis had the highest naturalization rate of any of these groups.

00:06:13.000 So they come here extremely poor, extremely uneducated, with a not tremendous income and wealth trajectory.

00:06:21.000 And then they get naturalized at a super high rate because they want to stay, which, of course, anyone would want to stay. 0.99

00:06:25.000 This is an amazing country.

00:06:27.000 That does not mean we have an obligation to take everybody in.

00:06:31.000 And when they do earn money, Somalis, a huge percentage of that money gets sent back to Somalia. 0.97

00:06:36.000 And some of that money goes to terrorist groups like al-Shabaab.

00:06:39.000 According to the Migration Policy Institute, from 2015 to 2019, remittances constituted 35% of the entire GDP of the country of Somalia.

00:06:48.000 Remittances are where a Somali American sends their money back to Somalia as a form of financial support.

00:06:57.000 Okay, that is what President Trump is railing against.

00:07:00.000 Now, again, you may not like his language.

00:07:01.000 You may think that it's colorful or purple or whatever.

00:07:04.000 And that's fine.

00:07:06.000 Anyone can be critiqued for the language that they use.

00:07:08.000 But his general point, which is that the United States cannot afford to take in waves of extremely poor immigrants who do not cohere to the American system, that we cannot afford to bring in hundreds of thousands of people with actual allegiances to war-torn countries like Somalia, who then take disproportionate shares of our welfare dollars.

00:07:32.000 That, of course, is true. 0.83

00:07:33.000 It's true.

00:07:34.000 And this is why when you hear the argument, it's made so often, well, this is a country of immigrants.

00:07:38.000 Okay, it is certainly true that this was a country of settlers, and then it was also a country of immigrants.

00:07:43.000 But the kinds of immigrants you take in help define your country.

00:07:47.000 And the systems that they meet here help define your immigrants.

00:07:50.000 Alrighty, coming up more on America's immigration policy and what's changed over time.

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00:10:05.000 The reason that so many people have left their home countries over the course of centuries to come to the United States is because the United States was a place that guaranteed opportunity, but it did not guarantee a gigantic welfare system that actively prevented assimilation.

00:10:20.000 We changed our own immigration system, we changed our own incentive structure, and then we were surprised when different people came, which is crazy. 0.99

00:10:30.000 The argument that's being made is as though we are welcoming people from Eastern Europe or Italy or Ireland or Germany circa 1903 when there were no robust federal welfare systems in the United States.

00:10:43.000 Hell, the income tax wasn't even constitutional at that point.

00:10:46.000 There were no robust welfare systems even at the state level.

00:10:51.000 There was no attempt really by the government to get involved in propping up people who are wildly poor to the tune of not having to assimilate or get a job.

00:11:02.000 And so that drew a different kind of person.

00:11:05.000 Yes, it drew people who were desperate, but the people who were desperate recognized that their path forward lay in embracing Anglo-American legal ideas, lay in embracing biblical values, lay in embracing and assimilating to American rights and responsibilities because that was the social safety net.

00:11:24.000 The social safety net was you join a community, you come here, you join a church, your friends and your family help you out.

00:11:31.000 But then it is your job to learn English.

00:11:34.000 It is your job to go out and get a job.

00:11:36.000 It is your job to put your kids in the local public school and make sure that they get educated the way Americans ought to be educated.

00:11:42.000 That is why the assimilative project in the United States was extremely, extremely successful up until really the welfare era. 0.86

00:11:49.000 And then the welfare era begins and everything changes.

00:11:53.000 And it doesn't mean that we didn't have extreme, really, really extreme conflict over immigration prior to the welfare system.

00:12:00.000 Obviously, we did.

00:12:01.000 Huge controversy over the levels of Chinese and Jewish immigration in the early part of the 20th century.

00:12:06.000 Before that, huge levels of ire over Irish immigration in the 1840s, 1850s.

00:12:14.000 So immigration has always been a real hot point in American politics forever, because when new people come to a country, the question is, are they going to become part of the system or are they going to tear down the system from within? 1.00

00:12:27.000 However, the great guarantor that people were going to assimilate is the fact that they didn't have a choice.

00:12:32.000 The incentive structure drove them toward assimilation.

00:12:35.000 It drove them toward participation in the American dream.

00:12:39.000 And then comes the welfare system.

00:12:42.000 And then comes an incentive structure that says, come here and we give you free stuff and we demand nothing of you.

00:12:46.000 And we say that you can do basically whatever you want in terms of employment.

00:12:50.000 And we say that you can send all your money back home.

00:12:53.000 And we say that you don't have to actually try to get involved in the Anglo-American project, even in legal terms.

00:13:01.000 And then we're surprised when you draw a different type of immigrant.

00:13:05.000 That's ridiculous.

00:13:06.000 It's totally ridiculous.

00:13:07.000 It's the same thing as saying that, you know, I have a donut shop and my donut shop is a prestige donut shop.

00:13:13.000 You come in here, you can get like the best of the best donuts.

00:13:15.000 Like we go and we go in the back every morning and we handcraft our donuts.

00:13:19.000 They're amazing.

00:13:20.000 The constituency that is drawn to that donut shop is going to be of one particular sort of clientele.

00:13:27.000 And then you decide that you're going to change your policy and you just hang a sign in the front window that says free donuts.

00:13:33.000 Who do you think is going to show up?

00:13:34.000 It's going to be a very, very different constituency.

00:13:37.000 And pretending otherwise is silly.

00:13:38.000 And again, this is not the fault of the people attempting to come to the United States.

00:13:43.000 This is not their fault.

00:13:45.000 This is the fault of our authorities.

00:13:46.000 This is the fault of the elite in our society who claimed that you could change the entire incentive structure, take in people from cultures that have nothing in common with the United States.

00:13:57.000 And somehow those two things could logically coexist with an assimilative project.

00:14:03.000 It's silly.

00:14:04.000 It's ridiculous.

00:14:05.000 And then the claim is that if you point this out, that somehow you are bigoted or racist.

00:14:09.000 No, it's not bigoted or racist to say that if people come from a place that does not have anything in common with the United States and there is no actual incentivization of assimilation, that they're not going to assimilate.

00:14:22.000 And clearly that is true.

00:14:24.000 Clearly, that is just the case.

00:14:27.000 That is particularly true when you have politicians whose job apparently it is to help people violate the law.

00:14:35.000 It is incredible to me that the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, who apparently presided over over a billion dollars in fraud from the Somali community. 1.00

00:14:44.000 I guess not every Somali in Minnesota, but from subsets of the Somali community in Minnesota.

00:14:49.000 He presided over that.

00:14:50.000 The media found that totally uninteresting for years on end, by the way.

00:14:53.000 He was the vice presidential nominee, and this only breaks the year after he was the vice presidential nominee, which is ridiculous.

00:14:59.000 People were investigating this going back over a year, well over a year.

00:15:03.000 The fact is that you do have a political class that is actively attempting to subvert the assimilative project.

00:15:12.000 Again, there's this game that's being played that is bad for you to mention that people are not assimilating at the same rates, depending on where they are coming from, and that maybe the United States doesn't have as much of an interest in Somali Americans arriving dirt poor as they do in, say, highly educated Indian immigrants joining an H-1B visa program.

00:15:31.000 There are people who have an incentive to say that in the political sphere and who actively facilitate lawbreaking in order to make that point, I suppose.

00:15:41.000 That's what Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is doing.

00:15:44.000 He, of course, was recently re-elected mayor of Minnesota with some support of his Somali constituents.

00:15:50.000 There's basically a full-on tribal electoral war that happened in Minneapolis between various sort of factions of the Somali community, literal like familial tribal conflicts leading people to vote for either Jacob Fry or to Omar Fateh, who is the Somali candidate for mayor of Minnesota.

00:16:10.000 Well, here he was warning his constituents of reports that DHS is planning to flood the city and deport people.

00:16:18.000 Well, hold up.

00:16:19.000 If people are violating the law, why are you actively facilitating their avoidance of the law?

00:16:25.000 We are here to respond to a number of credible reports from several media outlets relaying that there are as many as 100 federal agents that will be deployed to the Twin Cities with a specific focus on targeting our Somali community.

00:16:44.000 To our Somali community, we love you and we stand with you.

00:16:51.000 Okay, now, again, I just have a question.

00:16:53.000 How are you simultaneously claiming that the project is successful and also facilitating law breaking?

00:16:59.000 If the project were successful, you wouldn't have to facilitate the law breaking, would you?

00:17:03.000 It's pretty incredible.

00:17:05.000 It is also worth noting here that part of the left-wing project, which apparently is to excuse all of this, excuse the fraud, excuse the mass migration, excuse the lack of cohesion, excuse the breakdown of the social fabric, part of that is to call anyone who opposes it, regardless of whether they're using colorful language like Trump or not using colorful language like Trump, to basically suggest that anyone who objects is a racist, bigot, xenophobe, Islamophobe, or whatever.

00:17:31.000 And bigotry is the idea that there is no reason for your belief about a group of people or about a particular culture.

00:17:40.000 There's no reason for it.

00:17:41.000 It's completely specious.

00:17:43.000 It is based wholly in rootless vitriol.

00:17:47.000 That is the idea here.

00:17:49.000 So saying Somali Americans are not assimilating at the same rate as people coming in from other countries.

00:17:56.000 That Somali Americans, on average, are coming in poorer, less educated, remitting more back to their home country. 1.00

00:18:02.000 They're a disproportionate draw on the welfare system. 0.98

00:18:04.000 None of that is bigotry.

00:18:05.000 All of that is just statistical reality.

00:18:09.000 But again, the goal here is to claim that statistical reality or even a well-made case must be replete with some form of bigotry.

00:18:19.000 That was the case made by Jamal Osman yesterday standing alongside Jacob Fry as he was again warning people in Minneapolis to avoid federal agents who are attempting to enforce the law.

00:18:29.000 Here was Jamal Osman, city council member from Minneapolis saying all saying Trump is a racist, a xenophobe, Islamophobic.

00:18:37.000 You have to love the litany.

00:18:39.000 Okay, racism, again, is a belief that people are inferior based on their race.

00:18:44.000 Not that their culture is inferior, that based on their actual race, they are, as a human being, worth less. 0.56

00:18:49.000 No one is making that case.

00:18:52.000 Okay, the idea of xenophobia is the idea that you, for an irrational reason, are fearful of people who come from another place.

00:18:59.000 Not that you are concerned about assimilation, not that you are concerned about the welfare draw, not that you are concerned about law breaking or terrorism support.

00:19:06.000 None of that is xenophobia.

00:19:08.000 All of that is a rational reaction to circumstances on the ground.

00:19:12.000 And Islamophobia, of course, is the bizarre idea that if you oppose radical Islam, then this is a form of irrational hatred against Muslims.

00:19:22.000 I mean, the answer there is no.

00:19:25.000 That is not correct.

00:19:27.000 But again, if you use these tools, this is the left's idea.

00:19:29.000 They've been using it for legitimately decades at this point.

00:19:32.000 If you don't agree with their policy prescriptions, which involve the fraying of the social fabric, that means that you are some crazed bigot.

00:19:41.000 One of the Thing I do want to say, and obviously everyone knows that our president is racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and we are going to fight that.

00:19:57.000 America has a history of fighting and starving those kind of individuals who continue to divide people and divide communities.

00:20:09.000 Again, using those sorts of names, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, just throwing out that litany as though that is going to end the conversation with regard to whether the United States ought to take in almost 200,000 Somali immigrants since 1990?

00:20:24.000 No.

00:20:25.000 The answer there is no.

00:20:27.000 And again, this sort of bizarre attempt to gaslight through what is clearly a major issue in American political life, I don't think that it's going to work.

00:20:37.000 In fact, it remains the place where President Trump is the most popular.

00:20:42.000 Because it becomes a forbidden truth to say that not everybody from every country is equally assimilative and that not everybody from every country is necessarily going to make the best immigrant.

00:20:53.000 If that becomes the status, most Americans are going to reject that and they're going to reject the people who make that argument.

00:20:58.000 Are you coming up?

00:20:59.000 The Democrats keep claiming that our Secretary of War is a war criminal.

00:21:02.000 Do they have any evidence to this effect?

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00:23:29.000 Okay, meanwhile, the left continues to make the argument that Pete Hegseth is some sort of war criminal.

00:23:34.000 Again, all this is based on a single-sourced Washington Post report that suggested that Pete Hegseth gave an order to kill everyone on a narco-terrorist boat.

00:23:43.000 And then there was a second strike blowing people out of the water after the boat had basically already been sunk.

00:23:48.000 And that this was a form of murder because you're not supposed to kill people under international and domestic law or to combat would be the term of legal art.

00:23:59.000 There's only one problem.

00:24:00.000 Every follow-up report says that's not what happened.

00:24:03.000 Every follow-up report, there's one from the New York Times, there's one from the Wall Street Journal today.

00:24:06.000 Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday he did not see two survivors after an initial U.S. strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean, but praised a top military commander for making the correct decision to sink the vessel.

00:24:17.000 Speaking at a cabinet meeting, Hegseth told reporters he had authorized Admiral Frank Mitch Bradley, a commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, to execute the operation to destroy a suspected drug trafficking boat on September 2nd.

00:24:29.000 That initial attack killed nine people on board.

00:24:30.000 There were apparently two survivors.

00:24:33.000 Hegseth, who on September 3rd said he watched the operation live, said Tuesday he witnessed the first strike, but then left the room ahead of the second attack for another meeting, and he only learned about it an hour or two later.

00:24:44.000 Here is Hegseth defending his commander.

00:24:46.000 And I will just end by saying, as President Trump always has our back, we always have the back of our commanders who are making decisions in difficult situations, and we do in this case and all these strikes.

00:24:58.000 They're making judgment calls and ensuring that they defend the American people.

00:25:02.000 They've done the right things.

00:25:04.000 We'll keep doing that.

00:25:05.000 And we have their backs, Mr. President.

00:25:06.000 Good job.

00:25:07.000 Thank you very much.

00:25:09.000 Okay, the Secretary of War then went on to blame the fog of war for the operations that took place.

00:25:16.000 I did not personally see survivors, but I stand because the thing was on fire.

00:25:21.000 It was exploded in fire and smoke.

00:25:23.000 You can't see anything.

00:25:24.000 You got digital.

00:25:25.000 This is called the fog of war.

00:25:26.000 This is what you and the press don't understand.

00:25:29.000 You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nitpick and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post about kill everybody phrases on anonymous sources not based in anything, not based in any truth at all.

00:25:43.000 And then you want to throw up really irresponsible terms about American heroes, about the judgment that they made.

00:25:49.000 I wrote a whole book on this topic.

00:25:53.000 Okay, so Hegseth did write a book on this topic.

00:25:55.000 We had him on the program before he was Secretary of Defense.

00:25:58.000 You can go back and watch that old episode where we talked about the rules of engagement for soldiers, the difficulty of making decisions in the fog of war and then being held accountable by civilians who have no idea what actual war is like.

00:26:10.000 So what are Democrats doing?

00:26:11.000 Well, their first line of attack is to pretend that they actually have full, clear-cut information that Hegseth ordered a strike on people who are basically floating on driftwood in the water.

00:26:20.000 This is the case that they are making.

00:26:21.000 So Hakeem Jeffries is already threatening political prosecutions.

00:26:25.000 He's saying that when the Democrats take control, then they are going to be able to politically prosecute whomever.

00:26:32.000 And again, this should apply theoretically to members of the military who follow what they believe to be legal orders at the time.

00:26:39.000 One thing that should be clear to all of these Republican extremists and sycophants and the people who are either actively involved in corruption, violating the law, engaged in extrajudicial activity, is that the statute of limitations for any crimes being committed now is five years.

00:26:57.000 It will extend well beyond the end of the Trump administration.

00:27:04.000 Okay, I should just point out right now that what he is basically laying the groundwork for is that everyone gets pardoned every four years.

00:27:10.000 That that is the new mode.

00:27:11.000 Joe Biden, by the way, actually started that.

00:27:13.000 Joe Biden, by pardoning his son Hunter and by pardoning everybody else who is associated with his administration and who is an ally of his administration, he now set the predicate for this and by sicking his FBI and DOJ on President Trump.

00:27:25.000 The basic idea now for the foreseeable future is going to be that every party on its way out the door pardons everybody.

00:27:31.000 And then everyone feels as though no one is held legally accountable.

00:27:34.000 So I'm glad that we now live in this sort of terrible legal world.

00:27:37.000 But again, Democrats, when it comes to this particular situation, the narco-terrorist boat that got blown out of the water and then the follow-on strike, they are trying to make the case that there is a cover-up going on.

00:27:47.000 Senator Mark Kelly, who clearly would like to run for president in 2028, he says the Department of Defense is currently being evasive.

00:27:55.000 We asked a bunch of questions.

00:27:57.000 They seem to me to be sort of evasive.

00:28:00.000 Their legal analysis about this entire operation has a bunch of holes in it.

00:28:08.000 So I want to see the video.

00:28:10.000 I want to see whatever transcript they have about what was said in the room, you know, at the time.

00:28:19.000 Now, again, all of this based on a single Washington Post report that was actually rather debunked by a New York Times report that we quoted yesterday on the air and that is now denied by pretty much everybody in the Defense Department.

00:28:31.000 But Mark Kelly thinks that this is going to be a lever to push him into power.

00:28:35.000 Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, he says there's a cover-up.

00:28:37.000 I mean, again, based on what?

00:28:38.000 Based on what?

00:28:41.000 Is that they have video of the entire operation of all these strikes?

00:28:46.000 Then they could essentially and effectively dispute the allegations that have already been made.

00:28:53.000 So I'm very suspicious that they've never shared that tape with us and that they are consciously trying to cover up what took place.

00:29:05.000 Okay, this sounds like it's made up out of holecloth.

00:29:07.000 That's what it sounds like.

00:29:08.000 It sounds as though a bunch of Democrats came out several weeks ago and made the claim that members of the military need to ignore illegal orders without defining an illegal order.

00:29:16.000 And then the media just went and hunted around for a quote-unquote illegal order.

00:29:19.000 And it turns out that it's not really true.

00:29:21.000 But Democrats ain't going to let it go. 0.94

00:29:22.000 Republicans, for their part, are saying, listen, we're perfectly willing to do an investigation.

00:29:26.000 We'll find out what happened.

00:29:27.000 This, by the way, would be the actual responsible thing for Democrats to say.

00:29:30.000 They'd say, we're troubled by that Washington Post report.

00:29:32.000 We don't know whether it's true or not.

00:29:34.000 We require a full investigation to get to the bottom of it.

00:29:36.000 If it's true, there should be consequences.

00:29:38.000 If not, then, you know, we don't know if the story is true or not.

00:29:41.000 Instead, Democrats are going whole hog on this thing.

00:29:43.000 Here's Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi saying, we'll find out the facts.

00:29:48.000 Don't worry.

00:29:50.000 Were there survivors who were killed at Second Turn?

00:29:52.000 I don't have that information.

00:29:54.000 Do you worry?

00:29:55.000 But I do think we'll get that information, and we're certainly going to have available to us all of the audio and all of the video.

00:30:05.000 And at that point, I'll be able to have a more informed conversation with the press.

00:30:14.000 We're going to find out what the true facts are, and then there'll be a determination about that.

00:30:21.000 Okay, so again, Republicans are not ignoring this.

00:30:24.000 They're just saying we would like to get to the bottom of this.

00:30:26.000 Now, Democrats in the end are going to be forced to rely on a different argument because I don't think the facts are going to be there to support this outsized allegation.

00:30:33.000 They're going to be forced to rely on the argument that this entire operation is illegal.

00:30:37.000 Now, there's a case to be made that the operation in international waters is somehow illegal.

00:30:43.000 It's a case that has been made by some conservatives as well as pretty much all of the left.

00:30:48.000 The basic argument is that there is no such thing as a narco-terrorist, that basically that designation is a rhetorical designation, but it is not, in fact, a legal designation.

00:30:57.000 That if you wish to have authority to strike, for example, a boat that is filled with drugs in the middle of the Caribbean, you do have to make the argument that it is either an armed attack or an imminent threat.

00:31:08.000 You have to make the case that it is an act of self-defense to strike these boats.

00:31:12.000 Now, I think you can make a very strong case.

00:31:13.000 It is an act of self-defense.

00:31:15.000 If they are shipping fentanyl up to the United States or attempting to do so, and that's killing 100,000 Americans a year, seems to me that that should fall under the imminent threat issue.

00:31:27.000 And then there's the question of whether you need some sort of military authorization to go after what President Trump has now designated as a foreign terrorist operation.

00:31:35.000 Drug cartels historically have been treated as transnational criminal organizations, not terrorist organizations.

00:31:40.000 The definition of a terrorist organization is relatively unspecific.

00:31:45.000 It's a little vague.

00:31:46.000 It basically says that if you participate in particular acts, then you could theoretically be qualified as a terrorist organization.

00:31:53.000 So under the U.S. Code, if you participate in, say, hijackings, bombings, assassinations, hostage taking, if you do any of that, then theoretically you could be a terrorist organization.

00:32:04.000 Now we know that drug cartels engage in a lot of that sort of stuff.

00:32:07.000 The question is whether that is quote-unquote terrorist activity or criminal activity.

00:32:11.000 Maybe a distinction without a difference in the law.

00:32:14.000 The bottom line, however, though, is that if Democrats are forced to now make the backup argument that actually blowing drug boats out of the water is bad, good luck for them on this one.

00:32:22.000 Here is one Democrat having the audacity to make the case, Representative Adam Smith from Washington.

00:32:30.000 This is not self-defense.

00:32:31.000 And no matter where you do the strike, if it's not self-defense, then it's illegal.

00:32:35.000 And look, I have a lot of sympathy for the general idea that when we send our service members out into combat, they got some very difficult decisions to make.

00:32:44.000 When you look at what was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan and you're stopping someone, do they have a gun?

00:32:49.000 Do they have a suicide vest?

00:32:51.000 Are they a threat?

00:32:52.000 When you are in the middle of an insurgency with roadside bombs and car bombs and all of that, even in the aftermath of the Afghanistan pullout when we had that suicide bomber kill 13 service members and hundreds of people in Kabul, and we did that strike against a car that we thought was a threat that turned out not to be a threat.

00:33:10.000 I have some sympathy for that.

00:33:12.000 But people on a boat in the middle of the Caribbean carrying cocaine are not a direct threat to the lives of our service members or Americans.

00:33:23.000 Okay, I just have a question as to why people on drug boats who are carrying fentanyl into the United States allegedly, why they would not, in fact, be a threat to Americans.

00:33:32.000 That's a hard case to make, and we'll find out whether Democrats are able to make that case effectively on an electoral level.

00:33:39.000 Already coming up, will the United States be pursuing regime change in Venezuela?

00:33:43.000 What's happening over there first?

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00:35:31.000 All righty, time for some fast facts.

00:35:34.000 Okay, so we begin with the situation in Venezuela.

00:35:36.000 Right now, it appears the United States is gearing up for some sort of operation in Venezuela.

00:35:41.000 It is not particularly clear what that operation is going to look like.

00:35:44.000 Yesterday, the president warned that he will attack on land in Venezuela to go after narco-terrorists.

00:35:50.000 So the designation of drug cartels as narco-terrorists does not just mean that we're going to blow up boats in the Caribbean.

00:35:56.000 It also means that once they're a terrorist organization, then we're going to treat them like we would al-Qaeda, presumably. 0.52

00:36:01.000 Here's the president talking about this yesterday.

00:36:04.000 If they come into a certain country or any country, or if we think they're building mills for whether it's fentanyl or cocaine, I hear Colombia, the country of Colombia, is making cocaine.

00:36:17.000 They have cocaine manufacturing plants, okay?

00:36:20.000 And then they sell us their cocaine.

00:36:22.000 We appreciate that very much.

00:36:23.000 But yeah, anybody that's doing that and selling it into our country is subject to attack.

00:36:29.000 So, not necessarily just Venezuela.

00:36:31.000 No, not just Venezuela.

00:36:33.000 No.

00:36:35.000 Okay, so again, now he's making the case that the war on drugs is actually a war on drug traffickers.

00:36:40.000 And I'm fine with this, frankly.

00:36:41.000 I think this is totally fine.

00:36:43.000 Whenever you're talking about the possibility of using military force, the question is risk and reward.

00:36:48.000 And so the question here is: what is the risk and what is the reward?

00:36:51.000 So is the United States talking about landing 200,000 troops in Venezuela to topple Nicolas Maduro?

00:36:56.000 Not by anything the president has said.

00:36:58.000 And one thing about President Trump, you know, is that he does not like the idea of being bogged down in gigantic foreign conflicts, not his favorite thing.

00:37:06.000 That is why all of the specious and ridiculous talk about how a single B2 sortie over the Fordo nuclear facility in Iran was going to lead to World War III and a vast loss of American lives.

00:37:17.000 That was all bunk.

00:37:18.000 It was all nonsense from the beginning.

00:37:20.000 Clearly nonsense.

00:37:21.000 And the same thing I think is true here.

00:37:23.000 This sort of bizarre idea that Donald Trump is going to send the 101st airborne en masse into Venezuela.

00:37:30.000 Yeah, I'm sure.

00:37:32.000 Sure, he is.

00:37:32.000 No, he certainly is not.

00:37:34.000 With that said, the U.S. is attempting to ratchet up the pressure.

00:37:37.000 Again, this is why my hope is that they've identified some rival to Maduro with actual support in the military who is going to defenestrate Maduro.

00:37:45.000 That would be the best possible solution here.

00:37:47.000 That is typically how coups are done in the Latin American and South American part of the world.

00:37:52.000 According to the New York Post, U.S. officials are discussing allowing Venezuela's socialist strongman Nicolas Maduro to live out his days in luxury in one of the world's richest countries.

00:38:02.000 Apparently, Secretary of State Rubio has floated allowing Maduro to relocate to Qatar.

00:38:07.000 I mean, that seems like a good place for him since Qatar is, you know, another oil-rich dictatorship that is anti-American in nature. 0.63

00:38:16.000 Three current and former administration officials describe the scenario as somewhat plausible: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, they love to do stuff like this.

00:38:23.000 It helps build chips with the U.S. at a source close to the administration.

00:38:26.000 All three compete against each other in the region and for the ultimate affection of the United States.

00:38:32.000 Apparently, Maduro is not currently mansion shopping in Doha, but obviously, this would be a fine solution.

00:38:40.000 I mean, moving Maduro to some third-party country where he cannot impact Venezuela would be a good thing.

00:38:45.000 Consolidating a more pro-American regime in Venezuela would be positive. 0.94

00:38:49.000 And by the way, freeing tens of millions of Venezuelans of the predations of a communist dictatorship would also be a very good thing.

00:38:59.000 28 million people are currently living under Nicolas Maduro's tender mercies.

00:39:05.000 Well, the Pope, for one, is upset about this.

00:39:08.000 Apparently, Pope Leo is now urging President Trump not to try to oust Nicolas Maduro using military force.

00:39:14.000 He said it would be better to attempt dialogue or impose economic pressure on Venezuela.

00:39:19.000 I mean, sure, cool.

00:39:21.000 I mean, like, me too.

00:39:23.000 Also, I'm very much in favor of dialogue if dialogue works.

00:39:26.000 Economic pressure is already imposed on Venezuela.

00:39:29.000 I don't think anyone is talking about a mass invasion of Venezuela.

00:39:34.000 Asked during a news conference about Trump's threat to remove Maduro by force, Pope Leo said it is better to search for ways of dialogue or perhaps pressure, including economic pressure.

00:39:43.000 He said they should search for other ways to achieve change.

00:39:46.000 Now, again, also, yes, no one is in favor of large-scale war.

00:39:50.000 No one would like that.

00:39:52.000 Diplomacy is war by other means, just as war is diplomacy by other means.

00:39:58.000 The Pope said, on the one hand, it seems there was a call between the two presidents.

00:40:02.000 On the other hand, there is the danger, there's the possibility there will be some activity, some military operation.

00:40:07.000 Okay, now, again, military operations against drug traffickers seems like a good thing.

00:40:12.000 I think that some of the exaggerated headlines coming out here about what Pope Leo actually said to a disservice probably to Pope Leo, he is not claiming that there shouldn't be any pressure to make Maduro go.

00:40:21.000 He is, I think, arguing against a straw man that doesn't really exist, that the United States is about to, again, drop hundreds of thousands of people into Venezuela to fight a full-scale war.

00:40:30.000 However, it seems to me that the Pope putting additional pressure on Maduro and less pressure on the United States would probably be a good thing.

00:40:39.000 The great popes of the past, including John Paul II, were, of course, extraordinary advocates against communism.

00:40:45.000 Pope John Paul II was one of three people who essentially brought down the Soviet Union along with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

00:40:53.000 And so it seems to me that something similar from Pope Leo would go a long way here or could go a long way.

00:40:58.000 Meanwhile, Democrats are very upset with the idea that we're going to attack drug cartels in Venezuela or in Colombia.

00:41:04.000 Chuck Schumer said that Congress would invoke the War Powers Act if President Trump initiates an attack on land.

00:41:09.000 So first of all, he could initiate the War Powers Act right now.

00:41:12.000 He could say that President Trump's war on narco-terrorists in the Caribbean is a violation of the Article I authority of Congress.

00:41:19.000 The War Powers Act, by the way, may be unconstitutional.

00:41:22.000 It's always been vaguely treated.

00:41:26.000 Basically, the War Powers Act says that if you initiate a military conflict within 60 days, you have to go to Congress and Congress has to greenlight it or they can defund it.

00:41:34.000 That's how the war, in practice, it never works that way.

00:41:37.000 Again, specious threats here from the Senate minority leader.

00:41:42.000 He said, I want those votes taken out.

00:41:44.000 And if we have to, we will attack on land also.

00:41:48.000 Let me be clear.

00:41:50.000 If Trump were to order an attack on land, that would be an act of war.

00:41:56.000 And Congress would invoke the War Powers Act.

00:42:00.000 It's Congress's prerogative to go to war.

00:42:04.000 And I hope Republicans will defend that role.

00:42:11.000 Again, it's always fun when the parties switch places and suddenly the advocates of broad presidential powers and foreign policy, see Joe Biden or Barack Obama, suddenly become constitutionalists again.

00:42:21.000 It's always very, very entertaining.

00:42:23.000 Okay, meanwhile, on the electoral front, Democrats are cheering that they lost last night in the Tennessee congressional elections.

00:42:30.000 So there's a special election in Tennessee 7.

00:42:32.000 We had on Matt Van Epps, who was the Republican candidate yesterday.

00:42:36.000 He won by apparently nine points.

00:42:38.000 Now, that is a downshift from the margin of victory for Republicans in 2024.

00:42:43.000 In 2024, Republicans won that seat by something like 20 points.

00:42:48.000 And so some Republicans are very concerned about this.

00:42:51.000 Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, he said, I'm glad we won.

00:42:54.000 The GOP should not ignore the Virginia, New Jersey, and Tennessee elections.

00:42:56.000 We must reach swing voters.

00:42:58.000 America wants some normalcy.

00:42:59.000 I don't think Don Bacon is wrong about all of this.

00:43:02.000 It was too close, said one House GOP leadership aide to Politico.

00:43:06.000 President Trump is saying that basically this is an indicator that Republicans are still doing fine over here.

00:43:13.000 He had said yesterday before the election, the whole world is watching.

00:43:18.000 Go get them and get out tomorrow morning, get out and vote, and let's make it a sweeping victory.

00:43:23.000 The whole world is watching Tennessee right now, and they're watching your district.

00:43:28.000 The whole world is a big vote, and it's going to show something.

00:43:33.000 Now, again, the reality is it was an off-year election.

00:43:36.000 In an off-year election, you're not going to have kind of the looky loo voters who show up for the presidential. 0.95

00:43:40.000 President Trump is famous for being able to bring low-propensity voters into the fold.

00:43:45.000 And so the fact that he wasn't on the ballot this time, well, that means that fewer low-propensity voters are going to show up.

00:43:50.000 Republicans have become the party of low-propensity voters, which is kind of amazing. 0.96

00:43:54.000 In other words, when more people vote, Republicans do better.

00:43:57.000 That's the reverse of how the Republican Party was, say, 15 years ago.

00:44:02.000 With that said, was this an amazing election cycle for Republicans?

00:44:06.000 No.

00:44:06.000 Mark Green, during the last off-year election, won by 22 points in that same district.

00:44:13.000 He won by more than 40 points in 2020.

00:44:17.000 If you go all the way back to 2018, he won again by something like 34 points.

00:44:24.000 So obviously the margin is shrinking.

00:44:27.000 And that could be a problem.

00:44:28.000 It doesn't bode particularly well for Republicans in the midterms.

00:44:30.000 And pretending that a way isn't going to solve the problem.

00:44:34.000 Now, in order to solve the problem, we have to figure out what the problem is.

00:44:38.000 On immigration, the Trump administration has done a good job.

00:44:41.000 And in some ways, solving the immigration issue has actually taken the issue off the table for the Republicans.

00:44:46.000 President Trump yesterday pointed out that for six months, there have been no illegal immigrants coming into the United States.

00:44:51.000 That's a hell of an accomplishment.

00:44:53.000 It also means you can't really run on illegal immigration as kind of your point of the spear.

00:44:58.000 It's just not as much of a concern as it was a year and a half ago against Joe Biden, who opened the border wide.

00:45:05.000 For six months in a row, zero illegal aliens have been admitted into the United States.

00:45:09.000 You believe that?

00:45:10.000 Zero.

00:45:11.000 We had millions of people coming in a year, millions.

00:45:15.000 Now we have zero.

00:45:19.000 Okay, so obviously solving the problem, good in terms of policy.

00:45:23.000 In terms of electoral politics, solving problems means that people aren't worried about them anymore.

00:45:26.000 So what are people worried about?

00:45:28.000 Well, the idea is affordability is the big problem.

00:45:31.000 Affordability.

00:45:32.000 Now, honestly, I think President Trump is right about this.

00:45:34.000 I know, unpopular view.

00:45:35.000 So President Trump says that when people are talking about affordability, basically it's too broad.

00:45:41.000 That affordability means that things are too expensive.

00:45:44.000 And sure, things are too expensive.

00:45:45.000 They got really expensive under Joe Biden, and now things are kind of evening out under Donald Trump.

00:45:51.000 It seems to me that many Americans are waiting for all the prices to drop back to 2020, 2019 levels.

00:45:56.000 They are not going to do that.

00:45:58.000 That is not how inflation typically works.

00:46:00.000 In order for prices to reverse, you have to now have deflation.

00:46:03.000 It is not enough to stop inflation.

00:46:05.000 You have to deflate the prices.

00:46:07.000 The only way, historically speaking, you get a serious deflation is with an extraordinary productivity growth.

00:46:14.000 That's hard to do in places like real estate and, for example, food prices.

00:46:19.000 Very difficult to get a massive deflation in those areas without kind of recession.

00:46:25.000 But I think what people are really calling for is for something that probably will not happen.

00:46:30.000 That's a point the president is making here.

00:46:32.000 When they say affordability, what is he supposed to do if the inflation rate is already down from 9, 10, 11% under Joe Biden all the way down to 2.5%, 3% under Donald Trump, and we hope headed back toward 2%?

00:46:46.000 Are the American people, do you believe, getting impatient with the reforms that you're making?

00:46:52.000 They've talked about it's about affordability is a hoax that was started by Democrats who caused the problem of pricing.

00:47:05.000 And they didn't end it.

00:47:06.000 You know, there's this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about, affordability.

00:47:11.000 They just say the word.

00:47:12.000 It doesn't mean anything to anybody.

00:47:14.000 Just say it.

00:47:15.000 Affordability.

00:47:17.000 I inherited the worst inflation in history.

00:47:19.000 There was no affordability.

00:47:20.000 Nobody could afford anything.

00:47:22.000 The prices were massively high.

00:47:24.000 Do you remember when we took over eggs?

00:47:27.000 You did a great job on that, Madam Secretary.

00:47:30.000 The word affordability is a con job by the Democrats.

00:47:34.000 They say affordable.

00:47:35.000 I watched the other day where some very low IQ congresswoman talked about affordability, affordability, affordability. 1.00

00:47:44.000 She had no idea that prices were much higher.

00:47:49.000 Okay, so he is right that the prices were somewhat higher in some areas last year.

00:47:54.000 The reality is that even the way the president talks about affordability, he should be saying, listen, we stabilize the prices.

00:48:00.000 That's the most we can really do other than massive productivity growth.

00:48:04.000 And this is where you require technological innovation.

00:48:07.000 And this is why the populist wing in the Republican Party with regards to economics is the enemy of affordability.

00:48:13.000 Affordability is not going to come through government subsidization.

00:48:17.000 It is not going to come through additional regulation or through Luddite opposition to technology.

00:48:23.000 Again, prices only go down if one of two things happen.

00:48:26.000 Supply increases dramatically or demand decreases dramatically.

00:48:30.000 If demand decreases dramatically, that is typically the result of a recession.

00:48:34.000 If supply increases dramatically, that is typically the result of technological innovation.

00:48:38.000 And this is why the kind of foolish economic populism that says, for example, get rid of self-driving cars.

00:48:45.000 Bad.

00:48:45.000 Self-driving cars, bad.

00:48:46.000 And you see this.

00:48:47.000 There are legitimately large-scale figures in the Republican commentarians who say this sort of stuff.

00:48:52.000 We have to ban AI, ban self-driving cars, ban all this stuff.

00:48:55.000 How do you think things are going to get more affordable?

00:48:58.000 By the way, there is also a conflict between some of the things that these folks say and other things that they say.

00:49:04.000 So they will say, we need affordability.

00:49:05.000 America is just unaffordable.

00:49:06.000 It's so difficult for young people right now.

00:49:08.000 Also, we need to stop dollar stores.

00:49:10.000 Dollar stores must be stopped.

00:49:11.000 They're ugly and they're bad.

00:49:12.000 Okay, that's an elitist point of view.

00:49:14.000 I'm sorry.

00:49:14.000 That really is.

00:49:15.000 My wife and I were not nearly as wealthy.

00:49:17.000 We used to routinely shop at places like the dollar store because it was cheaper there.

00:49:22.000 And that was a good thing for us.

00:49:23.000 It made our life easier.

00:49:24.000 There's still lots of people who are reliant on those kinds of stores and ripping on those stores because you want the mom and pop shop that charges four times the price.

00:49:32.000 That is not a solution to affordability.

00:49:35.000 That is actually a driver of unaffordability.

00:49:39.000 Again, the laws of supply and demand are undefeated.

00:49:43.000 The only way for actual affordability to happen is an increase in supply or a decrease in demand.

00:49:48.000 There is no third choice.

00:49:49.000 And policies can drive both of those things.

00:49:53.000 This is why, again, one of the kind of main issues that you're seeing this come to a head on is, again, I mentioned briefly, self-driving cars.

00:50:02.000 So there's an interview that I did with Tucker Carlson, pretty fascinating, I think back in 2018, where we were talking about a book that he had recently brought out in which he made the argument, essentially a Luddite argument against technology.

00:50:12.000 And he cited self-driving cars as something that he would ban because he said it'll get rid of trucker jobs.

00:50:18.000 Okay, well, it is always true that when there is technological development, there is creative destruction, in the words of Joseph Schumpeter.

00:50:24.000 And that means some jobs go away and then they are replaced by other jobs.

00:50:28.000 But if you want your products to be cheaper, if you want affordability, one way to do that is things like self-driving trucks.

00:50:36.000 Why?

00:50:36.000 Because now you don't actually have to pay the truckers a large-scale wage in order to move the product from place to place.

00:50:43.000 This brings down the inputs in the price that the grocery store charges you.

00:50:48.000 When you reduce the inputs to a product, the product becomes cheaper.

00:50:52.000 So these are mutually exclusive.

00:50:54.000 You can subsidize truck driver jobs by essentially forcing consumers to pay higher prices by banning technological innovation that makes things cheaper, but everybody's going to pay for that.

00:51:05.000 That is, in fact, the reality.

00:51:07.000 And again, this is not an argument.

00:51:08.000 You shouldn't have local and state programs that help transition workforces from one area to another or a vibrant social fabric that helps that happen.

00:51:18.000 Of course, the economy does not work the way that it works sort of theoretically in Econ 101, where you move directly from a trucker job to a completely different job in a different line.

00:51:27.000 That's not how it works for individual human beings.

00:51:29.000 But the way that the economy broad scale works is that if you cut down the innovation, you're cutting off the affordability.

00:51:36.000 Not only that, you're making life unsafer for people.

00:51:39.000 Fascinating article by a guy named Jonathan Slotkin in the New York Times yesterday called the data on self-driving cars is clear.

00:51:46.000 We have to change course.

00:51:47.000 So what exactly is the data?

00:51:49.000 The data is that autonomous vehicles are way, way, way safer than non-autonomous vehicles.

00:51:57.000 So it's not just that you're sacrificing technological innovation and economic efficiency, which means, by the way, cheaper prices and better products in favor of maintaining the status quo.

00:52:09.000 When you're talking about cars, you know, to some extent, you are sacrificing a certain level of human life.

00:52:17.000 The risk factors for death are increased.

00:52:20.000 According to the New York Times, the results on Waymo's data are impressive.

00:52:25.000 When compared to human drivers on the same roads, Waymo's self-driving cars were involved in 91% fewer serious injury or worse crashes and 80% fewer crashes causing any injury.

00:52:33.000 It showed a 96% lower rate of injury causing crashes at intersections, which are some of the deadliest that this particular author encounters in the trauma bay.

00:52:42.000 If Waymo's results are indicative of the broader future of autonomous vehicles, we may be on the path to eliminating traffic deaths as a leading cause of mortality in the United States, which, by the way, is a good thing.

00:52:54.000 That is a good thing.

00:52:56.000 And go back and review that interview I did with Tuck again.

00:52:58.000 It's really interesting.

00:52:59.000 He actually says, I say, on what basis would you ban self-driving cars?

00:53:02.000 And he said, on the basis of safety.

00:53:03.000 And I say, well, you know, they're safer than like normal people driving cars.

00:53:07.000 He says, you asked me on what basis I would ban it, not what's true.

00:53:11.000 It's a pretty wild statement.

00:53:13.000 Would you, Tucker Carlson, be in favor of restrictions on the ability of trucking companies to use this sort of technology specifically to, you know, sort of artificially maintain the number of jobs that are available in the trucking industry?

00:53:26.000 Are you joking?

00:53:27.000 In a second.

00:53:28.000 In a second.

00:53:30.000 In other words, if I were president, when I say the DOT, the Department of Transportation, we're not letting driverless trucks on the road, period.

00:53:37.000 Why?

00:53:38.000 Really simple.

00:53:39.000 Driving for a living is the single most common job for high school educated men in this country in all 50 states.

00:53:45.000 By the way, that's the same group whose wages have gone down by 11% over the past 30 years.

00:53:50.000 The social cost of eliminating their jobs in a 10-year span, five-year span, 30-year span, is so high that it's not sustainable.

00:53:59.000 So the greater good is protecting your citizens.

00:54:03.000 What I care about is living in a country where, you know, decent people can live happy lives, actually.

00:54:10.000 And so, no, I would say immediately.

00:54:11.000 No, are you joking?

00:54:13.000 And I maybe would make up some pretext for public consumption, like, oh, they're dangerous.

00:54:16.000 The technology is not quite finesse.

00:54:18.000 No, no.

00:54:19.000 But the truth would be, I don't want to put 10 million men out of work because you're going to have 10 million dead families and the cascading effect from that will wreck your country. 0.80

00:54:29.000 If we are going to move toward a more affordable economy, innovation is the way out.

00:54:35.000 Innovation is the way productivity increases.

00:54:37.000 These are the way out.

00:54:38.000 This is why, again, Republicans should stop engaging in the conversation about how government can provide affordability and should start engaging in the conversation about how government can provide opportunity by getting out of your way.

00:54:52.000 Free markets make things better and more affordable.

00:54:54.000 Government makes things worse and less affordable.

00:54:56.000 That is a general rule.

00:54:57.000 Every single major product, good or service subsidized by the government has gotten worse over time and has cost more.

00:55:06.000 Every single one.

00:55:08.000 And for the Republican Party to get caught up in this populist death spiral in which they're trying to outbid the Democrats on how much weight they can put on the free market economy in order to alleviate the kind of bizarrely vague line about affordability, that is not something.

00:55:24.000 You're not going to outbid Democrats on this.

00:55:25.000 You're not.

00:55:26.000 You're not.

00:55:28.000 Republicans ought to be talking about how opportunity is the name of the game in the United States.

00:55:33.000 And affordability is a result. of innovation and opportunity.

00:55:37.000 It is a byproduct of innovation and opportunity.

00:55:40.000 Okay, meanwhile, the president of the United States is looking at a new Fed chair.

00:55:47.000 Obviously, Jay Powell is coming up.

00:55:50.000 His term is going to be over fairly soon.

00:55:52.000 The Trump administration is looking as though they're going to settle on longtime Trump economic advisor Kevin Hassett, according to the Wall Street Journal.

00:55:59.000 There are other finalists for the job, they include Fed governor Kevin Warsh and the sitting Fed governor, Christopher Waller.

00:56:06.000 Apparently, there were some interviews that had been scheduled with Vice President JD Vance.

00:56:12.000 Unclear if the meetings are going to be rescheduled.

00:56:16.000 Trump told reporters during a cabinet meeting on Tuesday he had narrowed down the list of candidates to one.

00:56:21.000 Presumably, this would be Kevin Hassett.

00:56:23.000 Hassett, of course, is a Trump loyalist.

00:56:27.000 I do think that at this point, President Trump owns whatever the Federal Reserve is going to.

00:56:31.000 That would be particularly true after Kevin Hassett takes over.

00:56:34.000 I know that there are some economists like Mohamed El Aryan from Alianz who's made the case that Jay Powell should step down right now and just give Trump what he wants.

00:56:42.000 Just let Kevin Hassett, be the Fed chair, and then he owns whatever comes next.

00:56:46.000 Seems to me that that's actually not a horrible policy.

00:56:49.000 Again, I'm very much against the sort of manipulations the Federal Reserve undergoes on a regular basis.

00:56:54.000 I am an Austrian school of economics guy.

00:56:56.000 I think that the target inflation rate should not be 2%.

00:56:59.000 It should be zero.

00:57:00.000 And the manipulations by the Federal Reserve have made it the policymaker of first resort, not the sort of safety net of last resort.

00:57:07.000 I think that's a huge, huge problem.

00:57:09.000 Howard, Kevin Hassett for the Fed chair, I suppose, as good a pick as any, given that the Federal Reserve inherently is political and there is kind of no way around it.

00:57:18.000 All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now.

00:57:20.000 Fascinating essay in The Atlantic saying that legitimately millions and millions of students are apparently claiming disability now.

00:57:27.000 Remember, in order to watch you have to be a member, if you're not a member, become a member.

00:57:30.000 Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - December 03, 2025

Trump BLASTS Somali Immigrants, Media EXPLODES

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