The Ben Shapiro Show - Trump Ends MTG's Career

00:00:00.000 Marjorie Taylor Green has been attacking the president of the United States for months now. 1.00

00:00:03.000 Finally, over the weekend, the president retaliated.

00:00:05.000 We will get into that.

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00:00:46.000 Well, over the weekend, the long-simmering feud between Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and the president of the United States finally boiled over.

00:00:53.000 So, Marjorie Taylor Greene has been attempting to run essentially her own knockoff version, her T-Moo version of MAGA.

00:01:01.000 She's been out retailing it to The View.

00:01:04.000 She's been out retailing it to CNN and MSNBC.

00:01:07.000 She's become the hot new thing in the legacy media.

00:01:10.000 You know, the Jewish space leaders lady, that lady is the hot new thing with regard to legacy media. 0.94

00:01:16.000 They now have strange new respect for Marjorie Taylor Greene because she has decided that she is going to attack Trump full-time.

00:01:22.000 We've been covering it on the show.

00:01:23.000 Well, the president finally noticed, and President Trump put out a statement over the weekend slamming Marjorie Taylor Greene quite properly for trying to undermine his actual administration.

00:01:35.000 He said on Truth Social, lightweight Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Brown, green grass turns brown when it begins to rot, betrayed the entire Republican Party when she turned left.

00:01:44.000 This is Saturday morning.

00:01:47.000 This is following Marjorie Taylor Greene's repeated attacks on President Trump, particularly over Jeffrey Epstein. 0.90

00:01:54.000 Back on Friday, Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested on CVS that actually the president of the United States was attempting to protect the American people deserve to see transparency from their government.

00:02:08.000 Rich, powerful people should not be protected.

00:02:10.000 That is completely wrong.

00:02:12.000 And it's the message to victims everywhere, victims of human trafficking and children who are trapped in terrible situations that the government will not protect the predators, that we will work hard to protect the victims.

00:02:30.000 Now, again, it is ridiculous to suggest the president of the United States is trying to protect predators.

00:02:34.000 And finally, the president of the United States had enough.

00:02:36.000 This line, of course, has been retailed by a wide variety of people who are supposedly allies of President Trump, who have turned on President Trump using the Epstein files as a way of getting at him.

00:02:46.000 We'll get to that in a moment because MTG is part of a broader kind of splinter effort inside MAGA to take control of MAGA because they are angry at the president's policy decisions.

00:02:56.000 And now they've decided to use Epstein as a wedge.

00:03:00.000 And so the president withdrew his support for Marjorie Taylor Greene on Truth Social, suggested that he might, in fact, back a primary opponent to Marjorie Taylor Greene.

00:03:07.000 Again, she would only be famous for her dumb Facebook post if it had not been for the president of the United States touting her, treating her as an ally, building her up.

00:03:18.000 And then, of course, she got very angry because she wanted to run for Senate in Georgia. 0.96

00:03:21.000 And he pointed out to her she was going to lose by 20 to John Ossoff if she ran for Senate in Georgia.

00:03:25.000 This, of course, ticked her off.

00:03:28.000 So President Trump finally lost it at her on Truth Social.

00:03:34.000 He said, I'm withdrawing my support and endorsement of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of the great state of Georgia.

00:03:40.000 He said, all I see wacky Marjorie do is complain, complain, complain. 1.00

00:03:44.000 He said, it seemed to all begin when I sent her a poll stating she should not run for senator or governor.

00:03:48.000 She was at 12% and didn't have a chance. 0.85

00:03:50.000 Unless, of course, she had my endorsement, which she wasn't about to get.

00:03:53.000 She has told many people that she is upset that I don't return her phone calls anymore.

00:03:56.000 But with 219 congressmen and women, 53 U.S. senators, 24 cabinet members, almost 200 countries, and an otherwise normal life to lead, I can't take a ranting lunatics call every day.

00:04:06.000 He then added, I understand that wonderful conservative people are thinking about primary Marjorie in her district of Georgia, that they too are fed up with her antics.

00:04:12.000 And if the right person runs, they will have my complete and unyielding support.

00:04:15.000 She has gone far left, even doing the view with their low-IQ Republican hating anchors.

00:04:20.000 So Marjorie Taylor Greene was excited about this because she's attempting, again, to run an anti-Trump campaign inside the Republican Party. 0.79

00:04:26.000 And so she responded by saying, President Trump just attacked me and lied about me.

00:04:32.000 Always playing the victim, Marjorie Taylor Green.

00:04:35.000 I haven't called him at all, but I did send these text messages today.

00:04:37.000 Apparently, this is what sent him over the edge: the Epstein files.

00:04:40.000 And of course, he's coming hard after me to make an example to scare all the other Republicans before next week's votes to release the Epstein files.

00:04:47.000 It's astonishing, really, how hard he's fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out, that he actually goes to this level.

00:04:52.000 But really, most Americans wish he would fight this hard to help the forgotten men and women of America who are fed up with foreign wars and foreign causes, are going broke trying to feed their families and are losing hope of ever achieving the American dream.

00:05:02.000 That's what I voted for.

00:05:03.000 I have supported President Trump with too much of my precious time, says Marjorie Taylor Greene, too much of my own money, and fought harder for him, even when almost all other Republicans turned their back and denounced him.

00:05:11.000 But I don't worship or serve Donald Trump.

00:05:13.000 I worship God.

00:05:14.000 Jesus is my savior.

00:05:15.000 And I serve my district, GA14, and the American people.

00:05:18.000 I remain the same today as I've always been.

00:05:20.000 And I will continue to pray this administration will be successful because the American people desperately deserve what they voted for.

00:05:25.000 For me, I remain America first and America only.

00:05:28.000 And then she included a couple of texts that she sent to the president about Jeffrey Epstein.

00:05:34.000 Now, this is not true.

00:05:35.000 What she is saying here, that the president is trying to cover up the Epstein files, the president made absolutely clear actually on Sunday that that was not the case.

00:05:43.000 He put out a truth social in which he said, as I said on Friday night at Board Air Force One to the fake news media, House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files because we have nothing to hide.

00:05:52.000 And it's time to move on from this Democrat hoax perpetrated by radical left lunatics in order to deflect from the great success of the Republican Party, including our recent victory on the Democrat shutdown.

00:06:01.000 The Department of Justice has already turned over tens of thousands of pages to the public on Epstein, are looking at various Democrat operatives, Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, Larry Summers, et cetera, and their relationship to Epstein.

00:06:11.000 And the House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to.

00:06:14.000 I don't care.

00:06:15.000 All I do care about is that Republicans get back on point, which is the economy, affordability, where we are winning big, our victory on reducing inflation from the highest levels in history to practically nothing, bringing down prices for the American people, delivering historic tax cuts, gaining trillions of dollars of investment into America, a record, the rebuilding of our military, securing our border, supporting criminal, illegal aliens, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:06:35.000 Let's start talking about the Republican Party's record-setting achievements, said the president on Truth Social, and not fall into the Epstein trap, which is actually a curse on the Democrats and not us.

00:06:44.000 Make America great again.

00:06:47.000 Okay, so again, Marjorie Taylor Greene kept saying over and over that it was all about the Epstein files.

00:06:52.000 So here she was over the weekend talking with CNN's Dana Bash.

00:06:57.000 What do you think happened?

00:06:59.000 What do you think is the reason for this?

00:07:05.000 Unfortunately, it has all come down to the Epstein files, and that is shocking.

00:07:12.000 Okay, and then she went on in the same interview to slam President Trump for calling her a traitor, even though, again, she has spent the last several months just beating up on President Trump over and over and over.

00:07:24.000 The most hurtful thing he said, which is absolutely untrue, is he called me a traitor.

00:07:30.000 And that is that is so extremely wrong.

00:07:33.000 And those are the types of words used that can radicalize people against me and put my life in danger.

00:07:44.000 Okay, so again, the new line that's being retailed by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene is that criticism of her puts her life in danger.

00:07:52.000 Okay, the president of the United States disagrees.

00:07:54.000 Here's the president responding to that particular idea.

00:08:00.000 Her life could be a danger because of the rhetoric.

00:08:03.000 Her life is in danger.

00:08:05.000 Who's that?

00:08:06.000 Marjorie Taylor Green, he says.

00:08:08.000 Marjorie Trader Green.

00:08:10.000 I don't think her life is in danger.

00:08:12.000 I don't think, frankly, I don't think anybody cares about her.

00:08:16.000 All right, coming up more on Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massey, Steve Bannon, the collective of people who are attempting to hijack President Trump's MAGA movement first.

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00:10:39.000 Okay, so again, this is the idea from Marjorie Taylor Greene is that President Trump has basically betrayed MAGA because of Epstein, but also has betrayed MAGA because she has a different definition of MAGA.

00:10:51.000 And this brings us to what's actually going on under the surface here.

00:10:54.000 Marjorie Taylor Greene started caring about the Epstein files in a serious way with regard to President Trump about the time that she got angry at President Trump's foreign policy with regard to the Middle East.

00:11:03.000 That seems to be the pattern here.

00:11:05.000 She, Thomas Massey, and a wide variety of commentators seem to get very exercised about President Trump and the Epstein files by claiming that President Trump is in fact enthralled to Israel and that what is happening with the Epstein files, that it's some sort of Mossad agency operation.

00:11:21.000 And what made them mad is that President Trump actually is not anti-Israel the same way that they are.

00:11:27.000 And this is met with mainstream media approval, of course.

00:11:30.000 I mean, listen, Marjorie Taylor Greene is making pretty clear what she thinks is happening here. 0.95

00:11:34.000 Here she was blaming Israel for Jeffrey Epstein.

00:11:37.000 Again, without any evidence.

00:11:39.000 And if there's evidence, present it.

00:11:41.000 I'm all in favor of all Jeffrey Epstein files being released, all of it.

00:11:45.000 The reason I think the president didn't want all of that released is because he was tired of talking about it and because his own FBI had told him there was no there there.

00:11:52.000 But I'm all in favor of more transparency on the Epstein files.

00:11:55.000 And anybody who was involved, if in fact there was, as the sort of most ridiculous suppositions, evidence-free suppositions suggest, some sort of intelligence agency operation to underage people in order to blackmail people, which is the theory here.

00:12:10.000 If that's true, whoever engaged in it is evil.

00:12:13.000 Full stop.

00:12:14.000 Bar none.

00:12:15.000 That's just basic morality.

00:12:18.000 But again, the evidence-free nature of this thing is the reason why it is being trafficked by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

00:12:25.000 We saw Jeffrey Epstein with ties to Ahud Barak.

00:12:29.000 We saw him making business deals with them, also business deals that involved the Israeli government and seems to have led into their intel agencies.

00:12:41.000 And I think the right question is to ask is, was Jeffrey Epstein working for Israel?

00:12:49.000 Okay, so again, she's just putting that out there.

00:12:51.000 No evidence whatsoever because she doesn't like Israel and also because she has some peculiar views, shall we say, about Jews.

00:13:00.000 She, of course, believes that the United States is enthralled to the Israelis, particularly President Trump.

00:13:04.000 She thinks that President Trump is somehow controlled by the Israelis.

00:13:06.000 Here she was on Steve Bannon's show.

00:13:08.000 Steve Bannon, of course, is on the same side of this argument because he, too, would like to seize control of the MAGA movement.

00:13:14.000 There is a thing that is happening in the Republican Party, an assumption that President Trump is no longer president and no longer the head of MAGA.

00:13:20.000 And now there ought to be a fight over the pieces of MAGA.

00:13:23.000 That basically the ship is rudderless and somebody is going to grab control.

00:13:27.000 Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks she is that person.

00:13:30.000 Here she is suggesting that the president of the United States is somehow being manipulated by the Israelis.

00:13:38.000 Six months in, C, and here we are turning back on the campaign promises.

00:13:43.000 And we bombed Iran on behalf of Israel. 0.99

00:13:46.000 Yes, it was on behalf of Israel.

00:13:50.000 Well, I mean, that's kind of a strange supposition given the fact that, again, Israel was doing the vast majority of the bombing.

00:13:57.000 And it's always funny, all the people who suggest that the president of the United States was being pushed into that by the Israelis, like full-on pushed into it, that the Israelis got all their heart's desires from President Trump. 0.83

00:14:08.000 Well, no, I assume that the Israeli government would have been fully on board with the idea of toppling the Iranian regime.

00:14:13.000 The president was not.

00:14:15.000 And that's that.

00:14:17.000 And these are the same people who suggested that bombing the Fordo nuclear reactor was somehow going to lead to World War III and full-scale American involvement in Middle East warfare, which, of course, never happened.

00:14:27.000 And again, it's not just Marjorie Taylor Greene.

00:14:29.000 It is also Thomas Massey, who takes the same viewpoint.

00:14:31.000 This is the reason why they're focused on Epstein.

00:14:33.000 Okay, let's be clear about this.

00:14:34.000 It is not because of Epstein.

00:14:36.000 The Epstein files have been out there.

00:14:37.000 They've been in the possession.

00:14:39.000 None of these people were screaming bloody murder about the Epstein files when Joe Biden was president of the United States.

00:14:43.000 President Trump comes on the scene, doesn't do the foreign policy they want.

00:14:46.000 And suddenly they start screaming at the top of their lungs about the Epstein files.

00:14:50.000 Thomas Massey, of course, objects to many parts of the Trump agenda, which is why the president would like to primarily Thomas Massey as well.

00:14:56.000 Here is Massey also accusing President Trump of some sort of cover-up on Epstein.

00:15:02.000 You know, I've never said that these files will implicate Donald Trump, and I really don't think that they will.

00:15:08.000 I think he's trying to protect a bunch of rich and powerful friends, billionaires, donors to his campaign, friends in his social circles.

00:15:17.000 And that's my operating theory on why he's trying so hard to keep these files closed.

00:15:24.000 Again, this is all part of an attempt to turn MAGA into something it isn't.

00:15:27.000 And let's be clear about what MAGA is.

00:15:29.000 MAGA is President Trump, period.

00:15:31.000 End of story.

00:15:32.000 All attempts to reduce MAGA to some ideological form or fashion are bound to fail because President Trump is Sweden eras.

00:15:40.000 He contains multitudes.

00:15:41.000 That means that many people who voted for President Trump disagree with him on a lot of stuff that he does.

00:15:45.000 You've heard me on this program disagree with the president of the United States quite frequently on matters ranging from foreign policy to domestic policy.

00:15:54.000 The president defines what MAGA is.

00:15:55.000 He always has defined what MAGA is.

00:15:58.000 Now, you can say that there's a new movement afoot to try and cobble together pieces of Trump's coalition moving forward into something different, but to sort of claim the mantle of Trumpism without Trump is a bizarre move and a ridiculous move in a set sense.

00:16:12.000 But that's one of the things that's happening here.

00:16:14.000 One of the other people trying to grab control of the Trump movement is, of course, Steve Bannon.

00:16:18.000 Steve Bannon, sloppy Steve, as the president has called him in the past, who has glomed, he spends his entire career just glomming onto more powerful people and then using them as essentially a raft in order to jump on a bigger raft.

00:16:30.000 That is Steve Bannon's entire career trajectory.

00:16:34.000 Well, now he has become sort of the most quoted man in media because the media love to use Bannon as a sort of Darth Vader figure hidden behind the scenes and manipulating Republican politics.

00:16:44.000 Now, the media love a good false narrative.

00:16:46.000 In any case, here was Steve Bannon over the weekend, for example, praising Nick Fuentes.

00:16:50.000 Again, the reason this is happening, we should point out, is because there is an attempt to glaze pretty much everybody who is on the anti-Israel and, yes, anti-I mean, Fuentes is just an anti-Semite, anti-Semitic side in order to shift policy priorities away from what President Trump is attempting to do.

00:17:11.000 Alex Jones had a debate with Nick Fuentes and Dinesh D'Souza.

00:17:16.000 And you cannot, you see right there the laziness, the lack of argument, just their attitude that they just own this.

00:17:26.000 Fuentes takes this guy apart brick by brick.

00:17:30.000 It's a full takedown.

00:17:31.000 It's a full takedown because the kid shows up.

00:17:34.000 He's prepped.

00:17:35.000 Not only is he on point and he's always on attack, he happens to have something called facts.

00:17:35.000 He's ready.

00:17:40.000 And he just overwhelms Dinesh.

00:17:42.000 Dinesh goes back and it shows you this old guard who has nothing.

00:17:48.000 Again, it's fascinating to watch as all these people make quasi-allies of people like Nick Fuentes, who, again, stumped against the president of the United States in the last election cycle.

00:17:59.000 It really is an amazing thing.

00:18:01.000 And it is part of a broader effort to tear away at President Trump's coalition.

00:18:05.000 That's what this is.

00:18:06.000 To build something else for the future, I assume.

00:18:09.000 It is worth noting here that Steve Bannon, again, being part of the Epstein scandal team, there must be something going on with Jeffrey.

00:18:18.000 Steve Bannon ran ops for Jeffrey Epstein.

00:18:21.000 He had a long-standing relationship with Jeffrey Epstein because, again, Steve Bannon is a leech on other powerful people.

00:18:27.000 That's what he does for a living.

00:18:30.000 According to the BBC, Epstein and Bannon were frequent correspondents.

00:18:40.000 They worked together.

00:18:41.000 He has apparently hours and hours of footage of Jeffrey Epstein, who's trying to make some sort of documentary about Jeffrey Epstein.

00:18:47.000 And all of that has been hidden.

00:18:50.000 So, again, that's the thing that President Trump is fighting back against when he is slapping at Marjorie Taylor Greene.

00:18:55.000 This attempt to basically declare his administration a lame duck administration and then grab control of MAGA as a movement and then pretend that the president is somehow betraying MAGA in some fundamental way.

00:19:08.000 That is a unique claim, but it's a claim being made softly and not so softly by a wide variety of figures on the quasi-right, tearing apart the Trump coalition for their own particular purposes.

00:19:18.000 And again, there's a difference between criticizing the things President Trump does.

00:19:21.000 We all do that.

00:19:22.000 He's the president of the United States. 0.95

00:19:24.000 And suggesting that he has somehow betrayed the movement he built, which, of course, is just silly.

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00:21:42.000 Okay, meanwhile, concerns about affordability continue to plague the administration.

00:21:48.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, a proposal to give Americans direct payments of $2,000 or more, an antitrust probe into allegations that meatpacking companies are colluding to drive up beef prices, a new plan to lower tariffs on coffee, fruit, and other popular products.

00:22:00.000 President Trump and his advisors are rushing to try to lower prices for American consumers after voters sent a warning shot to Republicans this month over the high cost of living.

00:22:09.000 Following the recent election, Trump's aides have urged the president to focus on affordability.

00:22:14.000 Now, as I pointed out for weeks and legitimately my entire career, the only way to achieve affordability truly is to have a robust economy built on private property and free market economics.

00:22:24.000 That is the way that affordability becomes a thing.

00:22:27.000 It is why products that are subject to private property rights and to open competition reduce in price and improve in quality.

00:22:35.000 That is the chief hallmark of a capitalist economy.

00:22:38.000 Any attempt by the government to intervene in the economy directly to quote-unquote make things cheaper is likely to achieve precisely the opposite effect.

00:22:47.000 And unwillingness to acknowledge that is likely to lead to pretty poor outcomes.

00:22:51.000 So the president of the United States has put out there that maybe there will be $2,000 tariff checks that come back to people.

00:22:57.000 He gave an update on that Friday night.

00:23:00.000 I'll be giving back $2,000 or so to middle-income people, low-income people, everybody but the rich.

00:23:08.000 How soon can Americans see those checks?

00:23:10.000 Will that be in time for Christmas, public shopping?

00:23:13.000 No, no, not for this year.

00:23:14.000 It'll be next year.

00:23:15.000 Do you have a time frame?

00:23:16.000 No, sometime during the year, next year.

00:23:19.000 It's a lot of money, but we've taken in a lot of money from tariffs.

00:23:22.000 The tariffs allow us to give a dividend if we want to do that.

00:23:26.000 Now, we're going to do a dividend, and we're also going to be reducing debt.

00:23:31.000 We have, because of Biden and others, we have the $37 trillion in debt.

00:23:39.000 Okay, so again, he's kind of walking it back a little bit, but let's be real about this.

00:23:43.000 That is not going to solve the price of living problem.

00:23:46.000 That is just helicopter money.

00:23:47.000 Helicopter money increases prices.

00:23:49.000 Now, I've seen the administration passing around a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

00:23:55.000 This was originally reported by Breitbart, and the headline was: Fed study vindicates Trump trade policy.

00:24:00.000 150 years of evidence shows tariffs lower inflation.

00:24:04.000 Okay, that is not what the study says.

00:24:06.000 That is not what the study says.

00:24:08.000 What the study actually says is that tariffs eventually lower inflation by leading to economic depression.

00:24:14.000 That's what it actually says.

00:24:17.000 What it says is that prices temporarily increase and then demand levels off and then begins to decline as there is job loss and inability to pay for the inflated prices, and then the prices decline.

00:24:28.000 So, yes, it turns out higher unemployment and deflation is typically the result of tariff policy, which is bad.

00:24:37.000 That's bad.

00:24:38.000 Like you will get a temporary price spike, and then because things are more expensive, your people can afford them, and then your demand goes down.

00:24:45.000 And when your demand goes down, your price goes down.

00:24:48.000 But the problem is that people are losing their jobs because they no longer have jobs in industries that require the inputs that tariffs have now made more expensive, and now they can't pay for anything, and you enter a deflationary spiral.

00:24:59.000 That's the actual report.

00:25:01.000 But that's not the report that is being promoted by Breitbart and by the Trump administration, which is that tariffs somehow magically lower prices.

00:25:09.000 That would be, as the kids say, huge if true.

00:25:13.000 But in fact, it is not true.

00:25:16.000 In fact, that is not true.

00:25:20.000 Tariff shocks act through an aggregate demand channel, is what the study actually suggests.

00:25:26.000 And what does that mean?

00:25:28.000 What that means is that as demand craters, what you end up with is an inflationary spiral.

00:25:33.000 Tariff hikes raise unemployment, lowers economic activity, and lowers inflation.

00:25:39.000 I'm not sure the president wants to lower economic activity.

00:25:42.000 I'm not sure that's what he's looking for.

00:25:44.000 So the argument that it lowers inflation by destroying the economy, I don't think that that's the thing that you're looking for.

00:25:51.000 Quote, regardless of our identification approach, we obtain the same results.

00:25:55.000 A tariff hike lowers CPI inflation and raises unemployment.

00:26:00.000 Higher tariffs lead to lower economic activity and lower inflation in the short run.

00:26:06.000 That is not, in fact, against the prediction of standard models.

00:26:10.000 Tariff shocks appear to act as aggregate demand shocks, moving inflation and unemployment in the same directions.

00:26:16.000 I'm not sure why this person labeled this anti-sort of traditional economics.

00:26:21.000 No, traditional economics says that a tariff will, in the immediate term, spike prices, and then the demand will go down, and then the prices will go down.

00:26:28.000 So, yes, it turns out that government intervention in the economy leads to unworkability.

00:26:34.000 Meanwhile, Scott Besson, the treasurer of the secretary, he says that the costs are going to come down.

00:26:39.000 Here he was explaining on MSNBC's Morning Joe over the weekend.

00:26:45.000 We inherited an affordability crisis.

00:26:47.000 We have slowed the price increases down, and they are going to continue to slow down, and that real working class wages will go up, and that that will address the affordability issue.

00:26:58.000 There are many aspects of affordability that have gotten better under President Trump.

00:27:03.000 They're going to continue to get better.

00:27:05.000 I mean, unbelievably, Bloomberg had an article yesterday that said, oh, mortgages, mortgage rates aren't down that much.

00:27:12.000 Well, on an inauguration day, a 30-year mortgage was 7.8%.

00:27:18.000 Yesterday was 6.22%.

00:27:20.000 That is the single biggest component of buying a new home.

00:27:24.000 And that is a gigantic drop.

00:27:28.000 Okay, so again, maybe the prices come down, but in order for prices to truly come down, you need less government involvement in the economy.

00:27:38.000 That's what you need.

00:27:39.000 Now, meanwhile, Democrats are involved in the business of blackmail.

00:27:43.000 Economic blackmail.

00:27:44.000 So, the basic idea here is that if you won't pay everybody's benefits, we are then going to yell at you for making everybody's life worse.

00:27:49.000 This is the beauty of big government policy.

00:27:51.000 You propose a policy.

00:27:52.000 That policy drives up prices in education, in housing, yes, in food.

00:27:58.000 You subsidize all those things, the prices go up.

00:28:00.000 And then, when somebody cuts back and they say, Hey, we can't afford all of this, it's actually creating economic unworkability.

00:28:05.000 Then you step in and say, If you won't subsidize it, then you're making people's lives worse.

00:28:08.000 We actually need more government funding.

00:28:11.000 This is the magic opiate that is government spending.

00:28:14.000 Once you get people used to a certain level of government spending, then it starts to flatten, the effect starts to flatten out, and you need more government spending in order to achieve the same high.

00:28:23.000 This is what's currently happening with food stamps.

00:28:26.000 According to Politico, millions of Americans greeted the end of the government shutdown with relief, but others are learning they could soon lose federal food aid permanently.

00:28:33.000 Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins directed USDA staff during the record-setting 43-day shutdown to continue ushering states toward compliance with Republicans' signature tax and spending law, which is projected to kick millions out of the nation's largest anti-hunger program in the next few months.

00:28:47.000 Those changes, combined with other provisions in the new law, will represent the most significant cuts to the social safety net in decades.

00:28:53.000 And it all comes as low-income families are confronting stagnating wages that aren't keeping up with the skyrocketing cost of living.

00:28:58.000 Now, again, one of the things that contributes to the skyrocketing cost of living are gigantic food subsidies, which is what SNAP is.

00:29:05.000 That's also why wages stagnate, by the way.

00:29:07.000 SNAP, effectively speaking, is a subsidy to low-wage enterprises like, for example, McDonald's.

00:29:13.000 McDonald's can afford to pay people $8, $9 an hour because SNAP is filling in the other side of what the salary would have to be if SNAP didn't exist.

00:29:22.000 The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program provides an average of $6 per day for nearly 42 million people, which is, again, an insane number.

00:29:31.000 It has only grown dramatically under Joe Biden. 1.00

00:29:34.000 And this is the game that Republicans keep playing, and it's a stupid game. 1.00

00:29:39.000 Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. 1.00

00:29:41.000 They keep playing this dumb game where they think they can somehow outbid Democrats on big government redistributionist programs. 1.00

00:29:47.000 Good luck with that. 0.98

00:29:48.000 Seriously, good luck with that.

00:29:50.000 At a certain point, people are going to get tired of the diluted drug of government spending from Republicans and instead turn to the full-scale, uncut stuff from Democrats.

00:30:02.000 If the only distinction between Republican policy and Democratic policy is the dollar amount, and the Democrats can outbid you like on the price is right, then you're going to lose.

00:30:12.000 You will.

00:30:14.000 And again, this is the Democrats' game.

00:30:15.000 They design programs that are bound to fail unless you have to keep the subsidies up.

00:30:19.000 And then the minute the subsidies go away, they blame you.

00:30:21.000 Tim Kaine, the senator from Virginia, he's doing this with regard to Obamacare.

00:30:24.000 Of course, the costs of Obamacare have risen dramatically ever since the implementation of Obamacare, one of the worst government programs in existence.

00:30:32.000 But here is Senator Tim Kaine saying that Republicans now have to sign off on larger subsidies or be blamed for the fallout from a failed Democratic program.

00:30:41.000 It would be political malpractice of the highest order for the House to not take up a bipartisan bill coming out of the Senate.

00:30:48.000 And if they don't take it up, I'll give you a prediction.

00:30:50.000 The November 2026 elections are going to look a whole lot worse for Republicans than the November 2025 elections did when we just swept Virginia in a historic way and won big races in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia, California, all over the country.

00:31:08.000 Americans will see who's standing with them and who's standing them against them on affordability of health care.

00:31:13.000 That will be clarifying.

00:31:15.000 And I think the fact of that is the window that we have of being able to find a solution.

00:31:22.000 Okay, so again, this is a form of economic blackmail.

00:31:26.000 So Tim Kaine says there is a path to fix healthcare.

00:31:28.000 I don't believe you, sir.

00:31:29.000 I don't believe you because Obamacare was supposed to fix it and it didn't fix it.

00:31:36.000 40 days in, the Republicans were saying, we know we need to talk about health care, but we will not engage on health care until government is reopened.

00:31:46.000 Now, it's fair to test somebody's red lines, and we tested them over and over again in October, and they didn't budge from that.

00:31:52.000 So, frankly, I viewed the situation last weekend as we had no path, none to a health care fix until we reopened government.

00:32:01.000 Now, we have a path, not a guarantee, but we at least have a path.

00:32:07.000 Okay, well, yes, we'll see how your path goes.

00:32:09.000 Meanwhile, Chris Murphy, Democrat from Connecticut, he doesn't even want to do that path.

00:32:14.000 He says that the Democrats never should have reopened the government unless they got more government spending from the Republicans.

00:32:21.000 I thought it was a mistake for Democrats to give up what was real political advantage coming off the elections that could have allowed us to reduce these premiums.

00:32:30.000 In the end, I thought we had a real shot to get a continuing resolution passed that would have lowered prices for people.

00:32:37.000 And I also worry that by capitulating, we have empowered Donald Trump, that Donald Trump is going to act even more brazenly and more lawlessly in the future because of how this vote turned out.

00:32:49.000 Now, when it comes to Obamacare, there are actually real ways to lower prices in the healthcare industry.

00:32:54.000 There are.

00:32:55.000 One of them is a plan by President Trump that is a good plan, which is to actually just give people money in their health savings accounts and let them use that how they want.

00:33:04.000 That creates competition.

00:33:05.000 It allows them to decide how much health care they actually want.

00:33:08.000 Democrats are upset because they say that that will death spiral the ACA, the Obamacare marketplaces, because essentially what the Obamacare marketplaces are, are forcing young, healthy people to buy comprehensive plans they don't need in order to subsidize older, sicker people with pre-existing conditions.

00:33:23.000 That's what they are.

00:33:25.000 Trump instead would like to return power to the people by allowing them the elective ability to buy health care of their choice, and Democrats don't want that.

00:33:33.000 According to the Washington Post, the scenario smacks of deja vu, with lawmakers and experts acknowledging the seemingly interminable battle around the 15-year-old health law.

00:33:41.000 Republicans long struggled to deliver an AC alternative that can pass Congress and the return of a dynamic from Trump's first term that repeatedly ended in failure.

00:33:49.000 Again, Democrats are always going to have an upper hand here as long as we're talking about subsidized marketplaces, always, because they can always outbid everybody.

00:33:59.000 And Americans have an unfortunate habit when it comes to the polls.

00:34:02.000 They're constantly saying they want to cut spending and cut the debt and cut the deficit.

00:34:05.000 And then when asked if they want to spend money from the government on stuff that they want, the answer is always yes, which is why, according to the Washington Post, about three quarters of Americans say Congress should extend the enhanced tax credits for people who buy their own insurance through the ACA marketplaces, including half of Republicans.

00:34:23.000 According to the CBO, permanently extending the subsidies would increase the number of insured people by nearly 4 million across the next decade at a cost of $350 billion to taxpayers.

00:34:32.000 Now, the question that we should be asking, of course, is whether your coverage through ACA, particularly if you're young and healthy, improves your health outcome.

00:34:38.000 But nobody actually cares about that.

00:34:40.000 We don't actually talk about the thing we're supposed to be talking about, which is quality of your health care.

00:34:45.000 Do you get the doctor that you want?

00:34:47.000 What is the price of that?

00:34:49.000 The reality is that when it comes to healthcare in the United States, there's constant conversation about how much we spend on healthcare.

00:34:55.000 That is true.

00:34:56.000 But here's a chart of U.S. healthcare spending per capita.

00:35:00.000 That is the Y-axis and the X-axis is U.S. GDP per capita.

00:35:05.000 As you can see compared to other countries, it's kind of a straight line.

00:35:07.000 There's some outliers, but in fact, there was a divergence.

00:35:10.000 There was a divergence here.

00:35:12.000 And so I asked our sponsors and friends over at Comet, which is a project of perplexity, when did the U.S.'s healthcare spending per capita begin to exceed competitors based on GDP per capita?

00:35:22.000 According to our sponsors of our comet, U.S. healthcare spending per capita began to consistently exceed that of comparable wealthy countries, both in absolute terms and as a share of GDP, starting in the 1980s and rapidly accelerating through the 1990s and 2000s, far outpacing GDP per capita growth and competitor nations spending.

00:35:40.000 So I then asked, how much does Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare, how much do these contribute to this dynamic?

00:35:47.000 And Comet answers.

00:35:49.000 Medicare and Medicaid have been major contributors to the growth and high level of U.S. healthcare spending, each accounting for a sizable share of national health expenditure since their inception, while the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, has had a complex effect, dampening spending growth rates in some areas, but increasing total coverage and thus increasing costs.

00:36:05.000 Medicare represented about 21% of total U.S. healthcare spending as of 2023.

00:36:10.000 That is up from 10% in 1970 and 19% in 1990.

00:36:16.000 Medicaid accounts for about 18 to 19% of total national health expenditures.

00:36:21.000 Medicaid expansion since 2014 increased access and reduced some uncompensated care, but also contributed to higher overall spending, especially in states that adopted expansion.

00:36:31.000 So if the costs have risen disproportionately from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s on, might that have to do with the gigantic government expenditures that have eaten up a bigger and bigger portion of our healthcare spending overall?

00:36:43.000 And so the question becomes, as always, how do you generate lower prices?

00:36:47.000 And the answer to generate lower prices is more supply, not higher demand, which is what everyone keeps focusing on.

00:36:53.000 What if we create higher demand with subsidies?

00:36:55.000 Well, then the prices will go up.

00:36:57.000 What if we get more people on health insurance by using government dollars to do it?

00:37:00.000 What do you think is going to happen in the prices?

00:37:03.000 You retained a similar supply and the demand went up.

00:37:06.000 The prices are going to go up.

00:37:07.000 This is basic stuff.

00:37:08.000 It is supply and demand.

00:37:10.000 But politicians, again, always have a stake in trying to outbid the other guy for short-term political gain.

00:37:15.000 Already coming up, Zorn Mamdani is pledging to stop ICE.

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00:39:36.000 Joining us on the line to discuss is Avic Roy.

00:39:38.000 He's co-founder and chairman of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.

00:39:42.000 Avic, thanks so much for taking the time.

00:39:43.000 I really appreciate it.

00:39:44.000 Hey, Ben, always a pleasure.

00:39:47.000 So there's a lot of talk about the word affordability, but nobody actually wants to discuss what actually needs to happen in order to achieve affordability.

00:39:54.000 That is particularly true in the realm of healthcare, where Democrats seem to have played a wonderful trick on the American people.

00:40:00.000 They said they were going to solve the affordability crisis in healthcare with Obamacare.

00:40:04.000 And then it turns out that the prices of health insurance skyrocketed.

00:40:08.000 People don't have the coverage that they want.

00:40:10.000 And now they're saying that if they don't get further subsidies, then obviously affordability will be very, very difficult.

00:40:14.000 So it's always this constant spiraling blackmail game where if you don't give them more money, then they say there's an affordability problem.

00:40:21.000 And then you give them more money, it fails.

00:40:22.000 And then they require more money in order to make that more money work.

00:40:26.000 So how do we actually change, obviously, the healthcare system in the United States, a mixed healthcare system. 1.00

00:40:31.000 It's got its good aspects and its bad aspects.

00:40:32.000 I want to start with, before we get to what needs to change, I want to ask you, there's a lot of talk about how much Americans spend on healthcare.

00:40:39.000 Do we actually spend a wildly disproportionate amount per household on healthcare compared to, say, other developed countries?

00:40:47.000 The answer is yes.

00:40:48.000 We spend way more on healthcare.

00:40:50.000 Not only do we spend way more on healthcare than other industrialized countries, but we actually subsidize healthcare more per capita than any other country in the world.

00:40:59.000 So when you hear people on the left say, well, the problem with healthcare is we don't subsidize it enough.

00:41:04.000 Actually, the subsidies per capita, the government subsidies of healthcare in the U.S. are way higher than any other industrialized nation.

00:41:12.000 So the answer that'll be given by members of the left is, well, that's just because of the evil insurance companies and their profit motive.

00:41:18.000 So how do we actually bring down the prices?

00:41:22.000 Well, that's a big topic and we don't have as much time for that broader topic of healthcare costs.

00:41:29.000 But the one thing I'll say, the one core element of this, Ben, that your listeners can appreciate, the one thing we did that is the original sin of why American healthcare is more expensive than every other country in the world is what we did in World War II and its aftermath. 0.66

00:41:44.000 So I think you know this story, Ben, which is that we imposed wage and price controls in World War II because we're worried that with all the men off to war, there wouldn't be a labor force and there would be spiraling wages and that would lead to inflation.

00:41:55.000 That would be a bad thing.

00:41:56.000 So the Roosevelt administration literally passed a schedule where if you were a mechanic, you could make this much an hour.

00:42:02.000 If you were a barber, you could make that much an hour.

00:42:04.000 But the loophole was employers figured out they could offer health insurance to people and that would evade the wage controls.

00:42:11.000 And then after the war was over, the wage controls were lifted, but the Eisenhower administration decided that they were going to exempt from taxation the value of your health insurance.

00:42:21.000 So if you made $100 in wages, that you pay income taxes on Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes, state and local taxes.

00:42:28.000 But $100 in health insurance would have no taxes.

00:42:31.000 So what happened?

00:42:32.000 All of a sudden, all these things that never used to be categorized as covered by health insurance got covered by health insurance.

00:42:37.000 And you as a worker didn't know how much you were paying for your health insurance because your employer bought it for you in theory.

00:42:43.000 Of course, it's still being taken out of your paycheck.

00:42:46.000 But that system, that 80-year-old system of your employer being the middleman of buying your health insurance instead of you buying it for yourself, that was the fundamental distortion that has led to every other problem in the healthcare system.

00:42:59.000 So when you look at the healthcare system now, President Trump has been suggesting something that has been suggested by Republicans probably as long as I've been alive, which is the better use of health savings accounts instead of sending money directly to insurance companies via your employer.

00:43:12.000 Instead, what we really should be doing is allowing particularly younger people to decide on where they want to spend their money.

00:43:18.000 How would that impact healthcare in the United States?

00:43:22.000 Frankly, not much because unless you reform the insurance system alongside with health savings accounts, health savings accounts can't really work.

00:43:30.000 So let's say every American had $2,000 in a health savings account.

00:43:33.000 That's great for your mammograms and your annual checkups and your lab tests.

00:43:37.000 But if you get hit by a bus or you have a stroke or you have a $100,000 hospital bill for whatever reason, that $2,000 health savings account is not going to go very far.

00:43:45.000 So you still need something like insurance.

00:43:48.000 And the big problem, the thing that Obamacare did that was the most damaging of all the things Obamacare did was it created a one-size-fits-all federal regulatory architecture for insurance that people buy on their own.

00:44:02.000 Remember, I mentioned that most people get insurance through their employer.

00:44:04.000 A lot of people through Medicare and Medicaid get insurance through the government.

00:44:08.000 But there's about 30 million people or so and 50 million in theory who could buy insurance individually, just like they buy car insurance or homeowners insurance or what have you.

00:44:17.000 That's the spine, the foundation of a free market healthcare system is people buying their own insurance.

00:44:23.000 And that requires you to deregulate Obamacare.

00:44:27.000 And the trick there is you cannot deregulate Obamacare without 660 votes in the Senate because the regulatory aspects of Obamacare require a fillerbuster proof majority to reform.

00:44:41.000 And so this is a core of why my strategy has differed from what a lot of other people are talking about when it comes to how should we deal with the current situation.

00:44:52.000 So what is your strategy for dealing with the current situation given all the concerns about affordability?

00:44:58.000 So we have these, as you mentioned, we have these Biden era enhanced subsidies.

00:45:03.000 So there were subsidies originally in the so-called Affordable Care Act that were enacted.

00:45:08.000 It was passed in 2010, but they didn't go into effect until 2014.

00:45:12.000 And those have been trucking along and defraying the cost for some people of the high premiums in Obamacare.

00:45:18.000 But during COVID, the Biden administration with the Democratic Congress passed these enhanced subsidies that basically allowed a lot of wealthy people to be eligible for Obamacare and also decreased the cost sharing or the amount of premiums that lower income people had to pay.

00:45:33.000 Those, that was supposed to be temporary.

00:45:35.000 It was supposed to expire in 2023.

00:45:37.000 Then the Democrats extended it to 2025.

00:45:39.000 And so it's expiring at the end of the year.

00:45:41.000 And Democrats are trying to blame Republicans if they expire.

00:45:44.000 It was Democrats who passed the law that expires.

00:45:46.000 It's their fault.

00:45:47.000 If they wanted to pass something permanent, they could have done it when they were in charge.

00:45:51.000 But here's the thing.

00:45:51.000 So you hear a lot of Republicans say, well, let's just let the subsidies expire.

00:45:54.000 What's the big deal?

00:45:55.000 It's not our fault.

00:45:56.000 And that's a, I understand a sentiment.

00:45:58.000 I sympathize with it a lot.

00:46:00.000 But here's the strategic point that I'm trying to make is that if we want to reform these regulations in Obamacare, we need 60 votes in the Senate.

00:46:08.000 In the current Senate, that means we need all the Republicans, 52, and we need eight Democrats.

00:46:12.000 So can we get eight Democrats to help us reform some of the regulations in Obamacare?

00:46:18.000 And I pitched an idea in the Washington Post about a month ago where we trade a temporary extension slash phase out one to two years of those enhanced subsidies in exchange for that 60 vote form of deregulation of Obamacare because the deregulation would be permanent because to reenact it, you'd have to get 60 votes again to change it again.

00:46:41.000 And it would be a temporary win for the Democrats on the subsidy side.

00:46:44.000 So let's do that.

00:46:46.000 And in that way, we can actually make the individual market for health insurance more affordable.

00:46:50.000 And if you want a free market healthcare system over the long term, that again has to be the foundation.

00:46:55.000 If we can't help people buy insurance on their own, we're never going to have a free market system for everybody.

00:47:02.000 And I think that that is the biggest point here is that our system is a mess.

00:47:06.000 It is a mixture of nationalized health care through Medicare and Medicaid and heavily subsidized health care through Obamacare and then actual private health insurance, which has been made very difficult to actually obtain, employer-based health insurance.

00:47:18.000 It is indeed a complete mess.

00:47:20.000 And basically, the only way to unwind it is going to have to be piecemeal, piece by piece, with hard due regulatory work that is unrewarding in the short term and perhaps more rewarding in the long term.

00:47:29.000 Abik Roy, thanks so much for taking the time.

00:47:31.000 Really appreciate it.

00:47:32.000 Thank you, Ben.

00:47:34.000 Meanwhile, Zorn Mamdani is pledging over in New York that he will not work with ICE officials.

00:47:40.000 According to the New York Post, if ICE or other immigration agents go out of bounds, the place to fight them is the courts and off the streets.

00:47:46.000 And New York politicians from mayor-elect Zorn Mamdani on down are courting chaos if they play the issue otherwise.

00:47:52.000 This is according to the Post editorial board.

00:47:54.000 Consider city councilman Sean Abreu, Smear Wednesday, posting an inflammatory video he claimed showed Homeland Security officers pulling a migrant out of an SUV in Washington Heights without due process.

00:48:04.000 Abreu blasted the arrest as, quote, deeply disturbing and part of a despicable pattern of intimidation, huffing that agencies, quote, carrying out President Trump's agenda of detaining people without due process have no place in our city.

00:48:15.000 In actuality, the person who is being arrested was a person who hopped the border in 2021 and had gotten due process and had a removal order, actually.

00:48:25.000 Mamdani continues to promise to resist removals of even violent criminal, illegal immigrants, calling ICE a rogue agency and vowing to stop it from enforcing the law with deportations.

00:48:34.000 We'll see how that works out for him.

00:48:36.000 Meanwhile, ICE continues cracking down.

00:48:39.000 According to Axios, Homeland Security is launching its operations in Charlotte and now has New Orleans in its sights.

00:48:47.000 Operation Midway Blitz, which targeted undocumented immigrants in the Chicago area, resulted in 3,000 arrests, according to Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam.

00:48:56.000 And now, apparently, they're going to escalate in places like Charlotte and also New Orleans.

00:49:02.000 Here is the Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks talking about the effect of all of this.

00:49:09.000 Our recruitment numbers are through the roof, Griffin.

00:49:11.000 I tell you this.

00:49:12.000 You know, imagine that when you have an administration like President Trump and Secretary Noam that actually support the men and women of U.S. Border Patrol, allow us to go out there and do our work.

00:49:20.000 People want to be a part of this mission.

00:49:22.000 This is an important mission.

00:49:24.000 Border security is national security, and our recruitment numbers are through the roof.

00:49:28.000 We've put over 1,000 new agents on the ground this year, have 1,000 at the academy, and plan on tripling that next year.

00:49:36.000 Yeah, and the president's immigration policy, particularly on the southern border, has been wildly successful in terms of internal deportations.

00:49:43.000 ICE has been doing good work, but that was always going to be more dicey.

00:49:47.000 They have been largely targeting criminal, illegal immigrants, meaning illegal immigrants who are here and then have committed other crimes other than the illegal immigration.

00:49:54.000 And, you know, all the talk about mass deportation, millions and millions of people being deported from the interior of the United States, that is very unlikely to happen, but you are getting some level of what Mitt Romney used to call self-deportation, people who believe that they will be arrested and thus are going back to their home countries.

00:50:08.000 Meanwhile, Hunter Biden is back and he's better than ever.

00:50:11.000 Yeah, you missed him, didn't you?

00:50:12.000 Hunter, Joe Biden's son.

00:50:14.000 He's back to compare President Trump to Adolf Hitler because we haven't had enough of this.

00:50:21.000 It is the same thing that we sat as students of history and wondered like I think everybody does is how did the German people, how did the German people allow that to happen?

00:50:35.000 How did they allow it to happen?

00:50:36.000 Here's how it happens.

00:50:37.000 And I'm not saying that there is a Holocaust.

00:50:39.000 And by the way, I'm not saying that Donald Trump is Hitler because Hitler had an ideology, okay?

00:50:46.000 And he had a grand plan. 0.99

00:50:48.000 Donald Trump is purely corrupt. 0.99

00:50:53.000 So, yeah, this, yes. 0.99

00:50:56.000 So Trump is actually worse than Hitler because Hitler had an ideology.

00:50:59.000 Good stuff there from Hunter Biden.

00:51:02.000 That's just great.

00:51:02.000 Meanwhile, Michelle Obama is still on her whining tour.

00:51:06.000 She says that she's never going to run for president because America isn't ready for a woman. 0.88

00:51:10.000 Yeah, that must be it.

00:51:12.000 And it must be that America is sexist, not that Hillary Clinton was a really, really bad candidate and that so was Tom LaHarris.

00:51:19.000 Do you think that that impacts the room that we've made for a woman to be president?

00:51:24.000 Well, as we saw in this past election, sadly, we ain't ready.

00:51:30.000 That's why I'm like, don't even look at me about running because you all are lying.

00:51:34.000 You're not ready for a woman. 1.00

00:51:36.000 You are not.

00:51:38.000 So don't waste my time.

00:51:40.000 You know, we got a lot of growing up to do.

00:51:43.000 And there's still, I'm sadly, a lot of men who do not feel like they can be led by a woman.

00:51:48.000 And we saw it.

00:51:52.000 Okay, so, yeah, it must be the sexism. 0.99

00:51:55.000 Again, the Democratic whining, I'm not sure this is a strategy for them, but we'll see how it works out.

00:51:59.000 Michelle Obama also had comments about black women's hair. 0.95

00:52:03.000 Now, I understand this is a frequent complaint.

00:52:05.000 This has been a thing for a very long time.

00:52:07.000 The talk about how black women are expected to straighten their hair as opposed to wearing their hair naturally when they go into their jobs.

00:52:14.000 This may have been an issue 30 years ago.

00:52:17.000 I would love to see some stats on whether it is an issue today.

00:52:19.000 I have serious doubts.

00:52:22.000 Let me explain something to white people. 0.70

00:52:26.000 Our hair comes out of our head naturally in a curly pattern.

00:52:30.000 So when we're straightening it to follow your beauty standards, we are trapped by the straightness.

00:52:37.000 That's why so many of us can't swim and we run away from the water.

00:52:43.000 People won't go to the gym because we're trying to keep our hair straight for y'all.

00:52:49.000 Why do we need an act, an act of law to tell white folks to get out of our hair? 0.50

00:52:58.000 I mean, number one, you don't.

00:53:00.000 Number two, you're sitting there with straight hair.

00:53:01.000 I feel like if Michelle Obama wanted to make a statement, she probably should not do that, correct?

00:53:05.000 I mean, if that's submission to white people, then Michelle Obama's pretty powerful and she's on a stage filled with people who love her. 0.73

00:53:12.000 She could wear her hair however she damn well chooses. 1.00

00:53:14.000 I assume she prefers her hair that way, which is why she's wearing it that way, unless there is some unseen white hand forcing her to straighten her hair. 0.91

00:53:21.000 Michelle Obama running around the country complaining.

00:53:24.000 I mean, truly, our country has a lot of complainers.

00:53:27.000 I will say that a lot of people complain about this country a lot, who really should not be complaining about this amazing place to live.

00:53:34.000 Meanwhile, new details emerging in the case of Thomas Crooks.

00:53:38.000 He, of course, is the would-be assassin against President Trump, who ended up actually murdering somebody who is behind him.

00:53:45.000 He murdered Corey Comperatori, as you recall, the firefighter, volunteer firefighter, and seriously wounded a couple of other people who are sitting in the bleachers behind Trump at that Butler, Pennsylvania rally.

00:53:56.000 According to Miranda Devine writing for the New York Post, there are now new details emerging regarding the background of the shooter.

00:54:04.000 Well, thanks to an enterprising source who uncovered Crooks' hidden digital footprint, we can see that actually the FBI misled Congress by omission because they left out an entire section of Crooks' online interactions from January to August 2020 when he did an ideological backflip and went from a rapidly pro-Trump to rapidly anti-Trump and then went dark, never seeming to post again.

00:54:25.000 Among the 17 accounts uncovered by our source were ones on YouTube, Snapchat, Ben Moselle, GroupMe Discord, Google Play, QuizletChess.com, and Quora.

00:54:33.000 Apparently, in his sort of original iteration, he loved Trump.

00:54:39.000 He was violent in his rhetoric.

00:54:41.000 He wrote on December 12, 2019, murder the Democrats in all caps.

00:54:45.000 But apparently, in early 2020, he flipped and became incredibly critical of President Trump.

00:54:53.000 The first time he criticized Trump was on January 23rd, 2020, when he commented on a video of law professor Jonathan Turley talking about Trump's first impeachment. 1.00

00:55:02.000 Crooks wrote, keep in mind the only reason we may know about any of this is because of Trump's stupidity. 1.00

00:55:06.000 And then he started calling Trump's supporters a cult and called Trump a racist. 1.00

00:55:10.000 So the question is, what exactly changed?

00:55:14.000 Well, fascinatingly, one of the aspects of Crooks' background that is coming out here in Miranda Devine's reporting, Crooks appears to have been interested in furries and exploring gender identity.

00:55:27.000 He described himself with the pronouns they them on the platform DeviantArt, which is one of the biggest online hubs for furry art and the furry community.

00:55:35.000 Two accounts linked to Crooks' primary email were found on DeviantArt under usernames with Epic Microwave and The Epic Microwave.

00:55:43.000 The account suggests he had an obsession with scantily clad cartoon characters sporting muscle-bound male bodies and female heads.

00:55:50.000 So could this be another situation like the alleged murderer of Charlie Kirk?

00:55:55.000 Clearly could be.

00:55:58.000 In other information that we now have, apparently one of the people Crooks interacted with online was a Willie Tepis, a member of a Norwegian neo-Nazi group, the Nordic Resistance Movement, which has since been designated a terrorist organization by the State Department.

00:56:10.000 Apparently, he encouraged violence and Crooks' extremism using the Maoist phrase, political power comes from the barrel of a gun.

00:56:19.000 So the question as to what the FBI knew and when they knew it, that remains out there.

00:56:24.000 The FBI obviously should reveal as much information as humanly possible about all of this.

00:56:30.000 My understanding is that the president has been reticent to release this because, kind of like the Epstein files, the president just doesn't like distracting stories.

00:56:38.000 But I think what the president should get at this point is that there is a streisand effect to everything, everything online.

00:56:44.000 That if you say, I don't want it out there, there is likely to now be significantly more coverage than if you had never said anything about it at all.

00:56:52.000 Apparently, the Secret Service told Susan Crabtree, an investigative reporter for Real Clear Politics, that Crooks was not a person of record at the U.S. Secret Service in 2020 and was not known until Butler.

00:57:06.000 So, again, it is worthwhile just revealing all the files, seriously, at this point.

00:57:10.000 I mean, the would-be shooter is dead.

00:57:13.000 He was killed on site by Secret Service.

00:57:16.000 And so, continuing to obscure information, I think, serves zero purpose at this point, if it ever did.

00:57:24.000 Alrighty, coming up, we'll get into the latest in Venezuela.

00:57:28.000 Will the United States be pursuing further on-land strikes in Venezuela?

00:57:32.000 Plus, Nicolas Maduro reduced to singing John Lennon in order to dissuade President Trump.

00:57:37.000 First, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

00:57:38.000 If you're not a member, become a member at Use Code Shapiro checkout for two months of free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - November 17, 2025

Trump Ends MTG's Career

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