Trump in hot water after some spicy comments about Somali immigrants to the United States. But should the U.S. be taking in mass migration from Somalia? Plus, Democrats continue to maintain that our Secretary of War is in fact a war criminal.
00:00:20.000So the President of the United States is now activating immigrations and customs enforcement to go after Somali illegal immigrants in Minneapolis.
00:00:28.000This, 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.
00:00:41.000A lot of that money ended up going in remittances back to Somalia.
00:00:45.000The president of the United States yesterday got himself in some hot water by slamming Somalis in the United States.
00:00:51.000In 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.
00:01:06.000That, of course, is correct because not all countries are going to be equally useful as sources of migrants to the United States.
00:01:14.000The people who come from many of these countries do not have any sort of cultural habits that mesh well with the United States.
00:01:21.000Here's the president of the United States going after Representative Ilhan Omar as well as other members of the Somali community in Minneapolis yesterday.
00:01:50.000Well, I mean, I agree with his assessment of Ilhan Omar as a person.
00:01:55.000I think that she's a pretty terrible person.
00:01:57.000And 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.
00:02:18.000Getting rid of her, denaturalizing her, of course, is a bit of a different story.
00:02:23.000The president went on to say that he doesn't want Somalis in the United States.
00:02:29.000I hear they ripped off Somalians, ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions every year, billions of dollars, and they contribute nothing.
00:02:57.000Their country is no good for a reason.
00:03:01.000Okay, 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.
00:03:08.000One is he says that he doesn't want Ilhan Omar, who is garbage, and her friends who are garbage in the country.
00:03:13.000That does not mean every Somali in America is garbage.
00:03:17.000What the media are trying to do today is claim that President Trump is claiming every single Somali in the country is garbage.
00:03:23.000What he said is that Ilhan Omar is garbage and her friends are garbage.
00:03:26.000Well, I mean, there he could be talking about Rashida Taliban AOC.
00:03:29.000And 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.
00:03:38.000And so the outrage is, in my own opinion, somewhat miscalibrated.
00:03:43.000If 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.
00:03:54.000When 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?
00:04:11.000On 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.
00:04:21.000Right 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.
00:04:27.000Now he's extending that into a pause on all immigration applications from those 19 countries.
00:04:34.000And a new operation in Minnesota is going to expand on those moves, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:04:39.000Last month, the president said he would revoke temporary protected status for Somalis only in Minnesota.
00:04:44.000The TPS program, of course, is designed to prevent deportation of people who are seeking asylum.
00:04:52.000So President Trump focusing on Nilhanoma, again, I think that is well taken.
00:04:55.000I think that she truly is quite the horror show in terms of Congress.
00:05:00.000And it does speak to the people who are electing her, because of course we are responsible for our representatives.
00:05:05.000If 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.
00:05:17.000I'm not sure why the president is supposed to like that.
00:05:20.000All 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.
00:05:29.000Well, according to the Migration Policy Institute, from 2015 to 2019, Somalis of all sub-Saharan African immigrants had the lowest levels of educational attainment.
00:05:39.000Only 14% held a bachelor's degree or higher.
00:05:43.000Somali-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.
00:05:56.000Somalis in the United States had a 37% poverty rate, extremely poor, extremely uneducated.
00:06:03.000Somalis had the highest rates of being uninsured in terms of health insurance.
00:06:06.000That'd be 18% uninsured via health insurance.
00:06:10.000Somalis had the highest naturalization rate of any of these groups.
00:06:13.000So they come here extremely poor, extremely uneducated, with a not tremendous income and wealth trajectory.
00:06:21.000And then they get naturalized at a super high rate because they want to stay, which, of course, anyone would want to stay.
00:07:06.000Anyone can be critiqued for the language that they use.
00:07:08.000But 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.
00:07:34.000And this is why when you hear the argument, it's made so often, well, this is a country of immigrants.
00:07:38.000Okay, it is certainly true that this was a country of settlers, and then it was also a country of immigrants.
00:07:43.000But the kinds of immigrants you take in help define your country.
00:07:47.000And the systems that they meet here help define your immigrants.
00:07:50.000Alrighty, coming up more on America's immigration policy and what's changed over time.
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00:10:05.000The 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.
00:10:20.000We changed our own immigration system, we changed our own incentive structure, and then we were surprised when different people came, which is crazy.
00:10:30.000The 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.
00:10:43.000Hell, the income tax wasn't even constitutional at that point.
00:10:46.000There were no robust welfare systems even at the state level.
00:10:51.000There 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.
00:11:02.000And so that drew a different kind of person.
00:11:05.000Yes, 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.
00:11:24.000The social safety net was you join a community, you come here, you join a church, your friends and your family help you out.
00:11:31.000But then it is your job to learn English.
00:11:34.000It is your job to go out and get a job.
00:11:36.000It 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.
00:11:42.000That is why the assimilative project in the United States was extremely, extremely successful up until really the welfare era.
00:11:49.000And then the welfare era begins and everything changes.
00:11:53.000And it doesn't mean that we didn't have extreme, really, really extreme conflict over immigration prior to the welfare system.
00:12:01.000Huge controversy over the levels of Chinese and Jewish immigration in the early part of the 20th century.
00:12:06.000Before that, huge levels of ire over Irish immigration in the 1840s, 1850s.
00:12:14.000So 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?
00:12:27.000However, the great guarantor that people were going to assimilate is the fact that they didn't have a choice.
00:12:32.000The incentive structure drove them toward assimilation.
00:12:35.000It drove them toward participation in the American dream.
00:13:46.000This 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.
00:13:57.000And somehow those two things could logically coexist with an assimilative project.
00:14:05.000And then the claim is that if you point this out, that somehow you are bigoted or racist.
00:14:09.000No, 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.
00:14:27.000That is particularly true when you have politicians whose job apparently it is to help people violate the law.
00:14:35.000It 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.
00:14:44.000I guess not every Somali in Minnesota, but from subsets of the Somali community in Minnesota.
00:14:50.000The media found that totally uninteresting for years on end, by the way.
00:14:53.000He was the vice presidential nominee, and this only breaks the year after he was the vice presidential nominee, which is ridiculous.
00:14:59.000People were investigating this going back over a year, well over a year.
00:15:03.000The fact is that you do have a political class that is actively attempting to subvert the assimilative project.
00:15:12.000Again, 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.
00:15:31.000There 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.
00:15:41.000That's what Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is doing.
00:15:44.000He, of course, was recently re-elected mayor of Minnesota with some support of his Somali constituents.
00:15:50.000There'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.
00:16:10.000Well, here he was warning his constituents of reports that DHS is planning to flood the city and deport people.
00:16:19.000If people are violating the law, why are you actively facilitating their avoidance of the law?
00:16:25.000We 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.
00:16:44.000To our Somali community, we love you and we stand with you.
00:16:51.000Okay, now, again, I just have a question.
00:16:53.000How are you simultaneously claiming that the project is successful and also facilitating law breaking?
00:16:59.000If the project were successful, you wouldn't have to facilitate the law breaking, would you?
00:17:05.000It 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.
00:17:31.000And bigotry is the idea that there is no reason for your belief about a group of people or about a particular culture.
00:18:05.000All of that is just statistical reality.
00:18:09.000But again, the goal here is to claim that statistical reality or even a well-made case must be replete with some form of bigotry.
00:18:19.000That 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.
00:18:29.000Here was Jamal Osman, city council member from Minneapolis saying all saying Trump is a racist, a xenophobe, Islamophobic.
00:18:52.000Okay, the idea of xenophobia is the idea that you, for an irrational reason, are fearful of people who come from another place.
00:18:59.000Not 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.
00:19:08.000All of that is a rational reaction to circumstances on the ground.
00:19:12.000And Islamophobia, of course, is the bizarre idea that if you oppose radical Islam, then this is a form of irrational hatred against Muslims.
00:19:27.000But again, if you use these tools, this is the left's idea.
00:19:29.000They've been using it for legitimately decades at this point.
00:19:32.000If you don't agree with their policy prescriptions, which involve the fraying of the social fabric, that means that you are some crazed bigot.
00:19:41.000One 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.
00:19:57.000America has a history of fighting and starving those kind of individuals who continue to divide people and divide communities.
00:20:09.000Again, 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?
00:20:27.000And 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.
00:20:37.000In fact, it remains the place where President Trump is the most popular.
00:20:42.000Because 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.
00:20:53.000If that becomes the status, most Americans are going to reject that and they're going to reject the people who make that argument.
00:20:59.000The Democrats keep claiming that our Secretary of War is a war criminal.
00:21:02.000Do they have any evidence to this effect?
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00:23:29.000Okay, meanwhile, the left continues to make the argument that Pete Hegseth is some sort of war criminal.
00:23:34.000Again, 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.
00:23:43.000And then there was a second strike blowing people out of the water after the boat had basically already been sunk.
00:23:48.000And 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.
00:24:00.000Every follow-up report says that's not what happened.
00:24:03.000Every follow-up report, there's one from the New York Times, there's one from the Wall Street Journal today.
00:24:06.000Defense 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.
00:24:17.000Speaking 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.
00:24:29.000That initial attack killed nine people on board.
00:24:33.000Hegseth, 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.
00:24:44.000Here is Hegseth defending his commander.
00:24:46.000And 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.
00:24:58.000They're making judgment calls and ensuring that they defend the American people.
00:25:26.000This is what you and the press don't understand.
00:25:29.000You 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.
00:25:43.000And then you want to throw up really irresponsible terms about American heroes, about the judgment that they made.
00:25:53.000Okay, so Hegseth did write a book on this topic.
00:25:55.000We had him on the program before he was Secretary of Defense.
00:25:58.000You 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.
00:26:11.000Well, 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.
00:26:20.000This is the case that they are making.
00:26:21.000So Hakeem Jeffries is already threatening political prosecutions.
00:26:25.000He's saying that when the Democrats take control, then they are going to be able to politically prosecute whomever.
00:26:32.000And again, this should apply theoretically to members of the military who follow what they believe to be legal orders at the time.
00:26:39.000One 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.
00:26:57.000It will extend well beyond the end of the Trump administration.
00:27:04.000Okay, I should just point out right now that what he is basically laying the groundwork for is that everyone gets pardoned every four years.
00:27:11.000Joe Biden, by the way, actually started that.
00:27:13.000Joe 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.
00:27:25.000The basic idea now for the foreseeable future is going to be that every party on its way out the door pardons everybody.
00:27:31.000And then everyone feels as though no one is held legally accountable.
00:27:34.000So I'm glad that we now live in this sort of terrible legal world.
00:27:37.000But 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.
00:27:47.000Senator Mark Kelly, who clearly would like to run for president in 2028, he says the Department of Defense is currently being evasive.
00:28:10.000I want to see whatever transcript they have about what was said in the room, you know, at the time.
00:28:19.000Now, 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.
00:28:31.000But Mark Kelly thinks that this is going to be a lever to push him into power.
00:28:35.000Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, he says there's a cover-up.
00:29:08.000It 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.
00:29:16.000And then the media just went and hunted around for a quote-unquote illegal order.
00:29:19.000And it turns out that it's not really true.
00:29:21.000But Democrats ain't going to let it go.
00:29:22.000Republicans, for their part, are saying, listen, we're perfectly willing to do an investigation.
00:29:55.000But 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.
00:30:05.000And at that point, I'll be able to have a more informed conversation with the press.
00:30:14.000We're going to find out what the true facts are, and then there'll be a determination about that.
00:30:21.000Okay, so again, Republicans are not ignoring this.
00:30:24.000They're just saying we would like to get to the bottom of this.
00:30:26.000Now, 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.
00:30:33.000They're going to be forced to rely on the argument that this entire operation is illegal.
00:30:37.000Now, there's a case to be made that the operation in international waters is somehow illegal.
00:30:43.000It's a case that has been made by some conservatives as well as pretty much all of the left.
00:30:48.000The 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.
00:30:57.000That 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.
00:31:08.000You have to make the case that it is an act of self-defense to strike these boats.
00:31:12.000Now, I think you can make a very strong case.
00:31:15.000If 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.
00:31:27.000And 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.
00:31:35.000Drug cartels historically have been treated as transnational criminal organizations, not terrorist organizations.
00:31:40.000The definition of a terrorist organization is relatively unspecific.
00:31:46.000It basically says that if you participate in particular acts, then you could theoretically be qualified as a terrorist organization.
00:31:53.000So 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.
00:32:04.000Now we know that drug cartels engage in a lot of that sort of stuff.
00:32:07.000The question is whether that is quote-unquote terrorist activity or criminal activity.
00:32:11.000Maybe a distinction without a difference in the law.
00:32:14.000The 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.
00:32:22.000Here is one Democrat having the audacity to make the case, Representative Adam Smith from Washington.
00:32:31.000And no matter where you do the strike, if it's not self-defense, then it's illegal.
00:32:35.000And 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.
00:32:44.000When you look at what was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan and you're stopping someone, do they have a gun?
00:32:52.000When 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.
00:33:12.000But 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.
00:33:23.000Okay, 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.
00:33:32.000That's a hard case to make, and we'll find out whether Democrats are able to make that case effectively on an electoral level.
00:33:39.000Already coming up, will the United States be pursuing regime change in Venezuela?
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00:35:34.000Okay, so we begin with the situation in Venezuela.
00:35:36.000Right now, it appears the United States is gearing up for some sort of operation in Venezuela.
00:35:41.000It is not particularly clear what that operation is going to look like.
00:35:44.000Yesterday, the president warned that he will attack on land in Venezuela to go after narco-terrorists.
00:35:50.000So the designation of drug cartels as narco-terrorists does not just mean that we're going to blow up boats in the Caribbean.
00:35:56.000It also means that once they're a terrorist organization, then we're going to treat them like we would al-Qaeda, presumably.
00:36:01.000Here's the president talking about this yesterday.
00:36:04.000If 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.
00:36:17.000They have cocaine manufacturing plants, okay?
00:36:43.000Whenever you're talking about the possibility of using military force, the question is risk and reward.
00:36:48.000And so the question here is: what is the risk and what is the reward?
00:36:51.000So is the United States talking about landing 200,000 troops in Venezuela to topple Nicolas Maduro?
00:36:56.000Not by anything the president has said.
00:36:58.000And 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.
00:37:06.000That 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.
00:37:34.000With that said, the U.S. is attempting to ratchet up the pressure.
00:37:37.000Again, 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.
00:37:45.000That would be the best possible solution here.
00:37:47.000That is typically how coups are done in the Latin American and South American part of the world.
00:37:52.000According 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.
00:38:02.000Apparently, Secretary of State Rubio has floated allowing Maduro to relocate to Qatar.
00:38:07.000I mean, that seems like a good place for him since Qatar is, you know, another oil-rich dictatorship that is anti-American in nature.
00:38:16.000Three current and former administration officials describe the scenario as somewhat plausible: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, they love to do stuff like this.
00:38:23.000It helps build chips with the U.S. at a source close to the administration.
00:38:26.000All three compete against each other in the region and for the ultimate affection of the United States.
00:38:32.000Apparently, Maduro is not currently mansion shopping in Doha, but obviously, this would be a fine solution.
00:38:40.000I mean, moving Maduro to some third-party country where he cannot impact Venezuela would be a good thing.
00:38:45.000Consolidating a more pro-American regime in Venezuela would be positive.
00:38:49.000And by the way, freeing tens of millions of Venezuelans of the predations of a communist dictatorship would also be a very good thing.
00:38:59.00028 million people are currently living under Nicolas Maduro's tender mercies.
00:39:05.000Well, the Pope, for one, is upset about this.
00:39:08.000Apparently, Pope Leo is now urging President Trump not to try to oust Nicolas Maduro using military force.
00:39:14.000He said it would be better to attempt dialogue or impose economic pressure on Venezuela.
00:39:23.000Also, I'm very much in favor of dialogue if dialogue works.
00:39:26.000Economic pressure is already imposed on Venezuela.
00:39:29.000I don't think anyone is talking about a mass invasion of Venezuela.
00:39:34.000Asked 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.
00:39:43.000He said they should search for other ways to achieve change.
00:39:46.000Now, again, also, yes, no one is in favor of large-scale war.
00:39:52.000Diplomacy is war by other means, just as war is diplomacy by other means.
00:39:58.000The Pope said, on the one hand, it seems there was a call between the two presidents.
00:40:02.000On the other hand, there is the danger, there's the possibility there will be some activity, some military operation.
00:40:07.000Okay, now, again, military operations against drug traffickers seems like a good thing.
00:40:12.000I 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.
00:40:21.000He 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.
00:40:30.000However, 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.
00:40:39.000The great popes of the past, including John Paul II, were, of course, extraordinary advocates against communism.
00:40:45.000Pope John Paul II was one of three people who essentially brought down the Soviet Union along with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
00:40:53.000And so it seems to me that something similar from Pope Leo would go a long way here or could go a long way.
00:40:58.000Meanwhile, Democrats are very upset with the idea that we're going to attack drug cartels in Venezuela or in Colombia.
00:41:04.000Chuck Schumer said that Congress would invoke the War Powers Act if President Trump initiates an attack on land.
00:41:09.000So first of all, he could initiate the War Powers Act right now.
00:41:12.000He could say that President Trump's war on narco-terrorists in the Caribbean is a violation of the Article I authority of Congress.
00:41:19.000The War Powers Act, by the way, may be unconstitutional.
00:41:26.000Basically, 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.
00:41:34.000That's how the war, in practice, it never works that way.
00:41:37.000Again, specious threats here from the Senate minority leader.
00:41:42.000He said, I want those votes taken out.
00:41:44.000And if we have to, we will attack on land also.
00:41:50.000If Trump were to order an attack on land, that would be an act of war.
00:41:56.000And Congress would invoke the War Powers Act.
00:42:00.000It's Congress's prerogative to go to war.
00:42:04.000And I hope Republicans will defend that role.
00:42:11.000Again, 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.
00:46:07.000The only way, historically speaking, you get a serious deflation is with an extraordinary productivity growth.
00:46:14.000That's hard to do in places like real estate and, for example, food prices.
00:46:19.000Very difficult to get a massive deflation in those areas without kind of recession.
00:46:25.000But I think what people are really calling for is for something that probably will not happen.
00:46:30.000That's a point the president is making here.
00:46:32.000When 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%?
00:46:46.000Are the American people, do you believe, getting impatient with the reforms that you're making?
00:46:52.000They've talked about it's about affordability is a hoax that was started by Democrats who caused the problem of pricing.
00:49:24.000There'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.
00:49:32.000That is not a solution to affordability.
00:49:35.000That is actually a driver of unaffordability.
00:49:39.000Again, the laws of supply and demand are undefeated.
00:49:43.000The only way for actual affordability to happen is an increase in supply or a decrease in demand.
00:49:49.000And policies can drive both of those things.
00:49:53.000This 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.
00:50:02.000So 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.
00:50:12.000And he cited self-driving cars as something that he would ban because he said it'll get rid of trucker jobs.
00:50:18.000Okay, well, it is always true that when there is technological development, there is creative destruction, in the words of Joseph Schumpeter.
00:50:24.000And that means some jobs go away and then they are replaced by other jobs.
00:50:28.000But if you want your products to be cheaper, if you want affordability, one way to do that is things like self-driving trucks.
00:50:54.000You 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.
00:51:08.000You 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.
00:51:18.000Of 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.
00:51:27.000That's not how it works for individual human beings.
00:51:29.000But the way that the economy broad scale works is that if you cut down the innovation, you're cutting off the affordability.
00:51:36.000Not only that, you're making life unsafer for people.
00:51:39.000Fascinating article by a guy named Jonathan Slotkin in the New York Times yesterday called the data on self-driving cars is clear.
00:51:49.000The data is that autonomous vehicles are way, way, way safer than non-autonomous vehicles.
00:51:57.000So 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.
00:52:09.000When you're talking about cars, you know, to some extent, you are sacrificing a certain level of human life.
00:52:17.000The risk factors for death are increased.
00:52:20.000According to the New York Times, the results on Waymo's data are impressive.
00:52:25.000When 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.
00:52:33.000It 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.
00:52:42.000If 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.
00:53:13.000Would 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?
00:53:30.000In 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.
00:54:19.000But 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.
00:54:29.000If we are going to move toward a more affordable economy, innovation is the way out.
00:54:35.000Innovation is the way productivity increases.
00:54:38.000This 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.
00:54:52.000Free markets make things better and more affordable.
00:54:54.000Government makes things worse and less affordable.
00:55:08.000And 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.
00:55:24.000You're not going to outbid Democrats on this.
00:55:50.000His term is going to be over fairly soon.
00:55:52.000The Trump administration is looking as though they're going to settle on longtime Trump economic advisor Kevin Hassett, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:55:59.000There are other finalists for the job, they include Fed governor Kevin Warsh and the sitting Fed governor, Christopher Waller.
00:56:06.000Apparently, there were some interviews that had been scheduled with Vice President JD Vance.
00:56:12.000Unclear if the meetings are going to be rescheduled.
00:56:16.000Trump told reporters during a cabinet meeting on Tuesday he had narrowed down the list of candidates to one.
00:56:21.000Presumably, this would be Kevin Hassett.
00:56:23.000Hassett, of course, is a Trump loyalist.
00:56:27.000I do think that at this point, President Trump owns whatever the Federal Reserve is going to.
00:56:31.000That would be particularly true after Kevin Hassett takes over.
00:56:34.000I 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.
00:56:42.000Just let Kevin Hassett, be the Fed chair, and then he owns whatever comes next.
00:56:46.000Seems to me that that's actually not a horrible policy.
00:56:49.000Again, I'm very much against the sort of manipulations the Federal Reserve undergoes on a regular basis.
00:56:54.000I am an Austrian school of economics guy.
00:56:56.000I think that the target inflation rate should not be 2%.
00:57:09.000Howard, 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.
00:57:18.000All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now.
00:57:20.000Fascinating essay in The Atlantic saying that legitimately millions and millions of students are apparently claiming disability now.
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