On his way out, Joe Biden is attempting to constrain President Trump as he comes in, in the final days of his term. Meanwhile, Biden is desperately attempting to shore up his legacy by crapping all over Kamala Harris.
00:00:37.000Donald Trump will be taking, as we mentioned, his oath of office in just days.
00:00:41.000In order for Donald Trump to take office first, Joe Biden has to go.
00:00:45.000On his way out, Joe Biden is attempting to constrain President Trump.
00:00:49.000As he comes in, according to the New York Times, in the final days of his term, President Biden has issued a series of policy decisions intended to cement his agenda and in some cases make it harder for President-elect Donald J. Trump to put in place his own.
00:01:01.000And this is always the danger of an outgoing administration, particularly one as venal and corrupt and terrible as Joe Biden's administration.
00:01:07.000Joe Biden is going to end up as a footnote in history.
00:01:09.000The guy who ushered Donald Trump back into...
00:01:12.000The White House, the 11th hour decisions, many of them executive actions, according to the New York Times, include measures on environmental justice, which is to say banning fracking and limiting drilling off the coast, prison reform, meaning jailbreak, immigration, foreign relations.
00:01:26.000Some are intended to preserve Biden's legacy.
00:01:28.000Others are last-ditch efforts to expand his approach.
00:01:32.000Well, he's attempted to announce a ban on new oil and gas drilling across more than 625 million acres of U.S. coastal waters.
00:01:39.000President Trump has promised to reverse all of that.
00:01:41.000Biden is creating two national monuments in California that are not really about creating national monuments.
00:01:46.000They're intended to prevent mining and drilling that would cover 848,000 acres of desert and mountainous land in the state that no human will ever visit unless they were actually going to, you know, increase the energy production of the United States.
00:01:58.000The Biden administration announced that they would remove Cuba from a list of state sponsors of terrorism in an attempt to box Donald Trump in.
00:02:05.000Of course, President Biden commuted the sentences of pretty much everybody on federal death row unless they killed particular protected classes of people, which apparently does not include small children.
00:02:15.000The president also issued sweeping rules earlier this week to govern how AI chips and models can be shared with foreign countries.
00:02:22.000The president said that he would cancel student loans for more than 150,000 borrowers, which is a thing that he doesn't actually have the ability to do, and the Supreme Court said he could not, in fact, do.
00:02:32.000The administration issued sweeping extensions of deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of people to prevent President Trump from actually moving those people out of the country.
00:02:41.000And, of course, President Biden signed a piece of legislation that gives full Social Security benefits to some public sector retirees who are currently receiving them at reduced level.
00:02:50.000And he's attempting to shield people from being fired by the incoming President Trump.
00:02:55.000Meanwhile, Joe Biden is desperately attempting to shore up his legacy by crapping all over Kamala Harris, his vice president.
00:03:04.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Vice President Kamala Harris has told close allies and family members she's disappointed in President Biden's recent contention he would have won the 2024 election.
00:03:14.000So it wasn't enough for him to be pushed aside.
00:03:16.000Now she wants him to admit that he would have lost anyway and that it was a good move for him to be pushed aside, which is pretty amazing considering that, again, he was shivved directly in the guts by everybody around him.
00:03:31.000Assassination moment in American politics that we all got to watch as it unfolded.
00:03:35.000And Kamala Harris wants Joe Biden to acquiesce in his political euthanasia.
00:03:40.000Harris, according to the Wall Street Journal, has been reluctant to distance herself from Biden or criticize him throughout her vice presidency.
00:03:45.000Even as several top Democrats pushed her to break from the unpopular president, Harris refused.
00:03:49.000Yes, it was all about her support for the man that she had just destroyed.
00:03:54.000Asked if he thought he could have defeated Trump earlier this month.
00:03:57.000Biden said, quote, it's presumptuous to say that, but I think yes, based on the polling.
00:04:19.000The garbage policies that he planted in the heart of American democracy are going to take a while to come to fruition, and they're going to be completely damaging.
00:04:25.000The vast overspending, the changes to procurement systems, the way that environmental regulations have been done.
00:04:33.000All those things will take time to fully materialize.
00:04:36.000Donald Trump is going to try to reverse as many of those as possible.
00:04:38.000But Corrine Jean-Pierre, she's out there saying, don't worry, Joe Biden will be seen as a historic president.
00:04:43.000How does he reconcile this gap between what he views as achievements, infrastructure investments, job growth, climate initiatives, and the perception that he's failed to deliver?
00:04:54.000The American people have gone through a lot in these four years.
00:04:57.000And so we understand that it's going to take a little bit of time for them, for folks to see the impact that this administration has had.
00:05:07.000There's data out there to show that the work that this president has done building an economy from the bottom out, middle out, has mattered.
00:05:39.000And a bunch of far-left pro-Hamas reporters showed up to harass Tony Blinken as though Tony Blinken had been some sort of stalwart pro-Israel ally throughout the current Gaza war.
00:06:16.000And they receive the outcome that they so richly deserve, which is to be booted out of office and be hated by the very people that they were attempting to parlay with.
00:06:24.000Meanwhile, President Trump is entering the White House with more positive sentiment than he has ever had in his entire political career, including his first term.
00:06:32.000According to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, Trump continues to see majority approval for his handling of the transition, 55% approval, which is a very, very high percent.
00:06:42.00056% expect President Trump to do a good job in his second term.
00:06:46.000Which, by the way, is an amazing number.
00:06:48.000Almost 6 in 10 Americans expect Donald Trump to do a good job in his second term.
00:06:53.000That's including moderates and Democrats and everybody else.
00:07:57.000And if Congress does the things it is supposed to do, then we are going to see this boomlet turn into an actual boom on behalf of President Trump.
00:08:06.000And you can feel, you can feel the mood changing in the country.
00:08:30.000It's cool to live in a country that makes this sort of thing possible.
00:08:33.000It's cool to live in a country where a guy who comes to America with pretty much no money can build himself into the richest person on Earth.
00:08:41.000Making companies that create electric cars and rockets that are reusable and can be caught from midair that are 20 stories high.
00:09:33.000Now, 30 years from now, people will pretend that it never happened and that it was all a conspiracy theory, but it is, in fact, really, really, really cool.
00:09:42.000The FBI, in December, closed their DEI office.
00:09:46.000That is in anticipation of President Trump doing the same.
00:09:48.000According to Fox News, the agency told Fox News Digital, quote, in recent weeks, the FBI took steps to close the Office of Diversity and Inclusion effective by December 2024. The agency did not specify why it had closed the office, but the obvious answer is President Trump was going to come in and close it anyway.
00:10:05.000DEI practices are on their way out the door as well.
00:10:10.000As DOGE moves toward cutting all sorts of DEI programs, according to the Washington Post, DOGE is going to be identifying hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars in spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion that they are going to identify as possibilities for cuts.
00:10:29.000Again, according to the Washington Post, they're considering a 19-page report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.
00:10:35.000That identified more than $120 billion annually in what it said was diversity, equity, and inclusion spending.
00:10:42.000And Doge is going to target that for cutting.
00:10:44.000And that is going to be excellent as well.
00:10:48.000And you know what I love about New Year's and new beginnings?
00:10:50.000It's not just about watching the ball drop or making resolutions we all forget by February.
00:10:53.000It's about the feeling of possibility, the fresh start we all crave.
00:10:56.000While everybody is talking about new gym memberships and diet plans...
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00:11:53.000When I started The Daily Wire, I thought the hard part would be the content creation.
00:11:56.000Well, it turns out, dealing with all the behind-the-scenes stuff, the hiring, the HR policies, employee issues, that's the stuff that eats up your time.
00:12:04.000When you're a business owner, every second of your time is unbelievably valuable, so don't waste your energy and risk losing money dealing with time-sucking payroll issues, office politics, and HR infractions.
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00:12:58.000Corporate America is beginning to conform to the new reality, as well it should.
00:13:04.000Google, for example, is not going to be doing what the EU wants it to do and adding fact checks to YouTube videos.
00:13:11.000Well, that's because the EU wishes to crack down on free speech.
00:13:14.000The EU is not a friend to free dissemination of opinion.
00:13:18.000Google has never included fact-checking as part of its content moderation practices, but the EU was pushing super hard.
00:13:23.000If Joe Biden had been re-elected, you can guarantee that Google would have moved in that direction because Biden was very friendly toward the EU policy.
00:13:29.000But now, in a letter written to Renate Nicolet, the Deputy Director General under Content and Technology Arm at the European Commission, Google's global affairs president, Kent Walker, said the fact-checking integration required by the commission's new disinformation code of practice, quote, simply isn't appropriate or effective for our services, and said Google will not commit to it.
00:13:46.000That matters because all of the fact-checkers have been historically far-left-wing propaganda outfits that are designed to quash the speech of people who disagree.
00:13:56.000Instead, Walker is moving toward, he says Google is moving toward a sort of community notes program, just like X, which is correct.
00:14:05.000Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg over at Meta is not just changing policy with regard to opening up a free speech, allowing people to say things, allowing people to see things.
00:14:14.000He is also apparently going to start actually operating Meta like the business it originally was.
00:14:19.000He's going to cut low performers faster.
00:14:21.000According to the Washington Post, it's a move that will lead to thousands of job cuts in a layoff that could affect 5% of the company.
00:14:27.000He's decided to raise the bar on performance management.
00:14:31.000Zuckerberg said, this is going to be an intense year.
00:14:32.000I want to make sure we have the best people on our team.
00:14:35.000I'm going to confirm these policies will lead to a dramatic staff cut.
00:14:39.000Again, one of the reasons for that is because they're going to cut a lot of the DEI dead weight.
00:14:57.000But the reality is Starbucks tried this a few years ago.
00:15:00.000The left-wing blowback was so strong, they then said that homeless people could basically walk into their bathrooms and shower.
00:15:05.000And now they realize, hey, wait a second, maybe the cultural tides have turned and we don't actually have to allow people to loiter in our stores.
00:15:13.000Business is very often led by culture.
00:15:34.000Productive investment that grows the economy must be prioritized over wasteful spending that drives inflation.
00:15:42.000As we begin 2025, Americans are barreling towards an economic crisis at year-end.
00:15:49.000If Congress fails to act, Americans will face the largest tax increase in history, a crushing $4 trillion tax hike.
00:15:58.000We must make permanent the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and implement new pro-growth policies to reduce the tax burden on American manufacturers, service workers, and seniors.
00:16:14.000So, again, all of this is good, and you can feel the optimism in the business community, by the way.
00:16:18.000Again, I'm the co-owner of a fairly large business in the United States.
00:16:22.000I know business owners ranging from the right to the left.
00:16:24.000Everybody, even the people who didn't vote for Trump, are very optimistic about the state of the economy, about the realization that this government is not going to be attempting to quash American innovation.
00:16:33.000That was always the feeling under Joe Biden.
00:16:35.000Joe Biden's closing message was, innovators in our economy are forming an oligarchy to control you, says the man who spent 50 years in American politics at the top of a governmental oligarchy designed to control you.
00:16:47.000And now business owners are saying, you know what?
00:17:35.000Do you think that when so few people have so much wealth and so much economic and political power that that is an oligarchic form of society?
00:17:44.000Well, I would note that President Biden gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to two people who I think would qualify for his oligarchs.
00:17:55.000This is not a condemnation of any one individual.
00:17:59.000I'm just asking you, when so few people have so much wealth and power, do you think that that is an oligarchic form of society?
00:18:41.000He is a loser who has been made into a famous person by a bunch of people who have a zero-sum mentality when it comes to how the economy ought to work and how human life ought to work.
00:18:50.000Bernie Sanders has never hired a human.
00:19:17.000But at least for the moment, we are very much done with that.
00:19:20.000Besant wasn't done roasting senators, by the way, yesterday.
00:19:22.000Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who has just made an ass of himself in every one of these hearings, he decided to ask Scott Besant about an article in The Economist and suggest that Besant hadn't read it.
00:21:11.000That historically, for the past 40 or 50 years, revenues, federal government revenues, have averaged about 17 to 17.5% of GDP. And spending...
00:21:26.000has been slightly over that leading us to a three and a half percent budget deficit which is manageable because we have roughly 3.8 percent nominal growth 1.8 percent real growth 2 percent inflation today as you stated and to be clear this is one of the things that got me out from behind my desk and my quiet life in this campaign was the thought Okay,
00:22:13.000If you think that spending levels are about to drop dramatically, I don't think that's the case.
00:22:18.000Because the American people don't want the spending to drop dramatically.
00:22:21.000We, like every other developed Western country, are going to spend our way into some form of actual economic problem.
00:22:30.000We are going to spend our way into austerity measures eventually because we refuse to take the measures that would actually be necessary.
00:22:36.000And when it comes to the economy, we ought to have a long-term vision, but we also ought to have a long-term vision when it comes to your educational future.
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00:23:47.000The first time I put my Tecovas boots on, it was like they were already broken in, which makes sense because each pair goes through over 200 meticulous steps of hand crafting.
00:23:54.000With every stitch on point, Tecovas boots are made for a good time and a long time.
00:24:52.000I get that that is the actual politically viable thing to say about entitlement programs.
00:24:57.000The reality, of course, is that entitlement programs are going to get solved by neither party because any time anybody tries to do something about it, that person ends up on the wrong side of the American people.
00:25:06.000I'm old enough to remember when George W. Bush, in the aftermath of his reelection, proposed Social Security, quote unquote, privatization, which just would have meant that you would have been taxed for Social Security and would have gone into a savings account that would actually have been invested in the stock market.
00:25:23.000If you had taken that money and invested it in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2005, the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2005, just to be clear about why George W. Bush was right on this, but nobody will do it again.
00:25:35.000The Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2005 was 10,600.
00:25:39.000Today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is 43,000.
00:25:44.000You would have quadrupled the amount of money in those Social Security savings account if you had just put it in the Dow Jones Industrial Average when George W. Bush wanted to do so, but nobody was willing to touch it because everyone's afraid of the issue.
00:25:55.000That includes Republicans and Democrats.
00:25:57.000Here's Besson saying we're not going to touch Social Security or Medicare.
00:25:59.000I want to emphasize that President Trump has said that Social Security and Medicare, they will not be touched.
00:26:26.000Again, I think that Trump knows politically what is palatable and what is not, but let's be real about this.
00:26:32.000Spending levels of ink can radically decrease any time.
00:26:39.000I'm not in favor of eliminating the debt limit.
00:26:41.000I think that it is very good that Congress actually has to consider raising the debt limit so there can be an actual negotiation over not increasing spending in particular areas.
00:26:50.000Although I will say that Congress always goes to the easiest area to cut, which is the area they shouldn't cut, which is defense.
00:26:55.000They always go to defense and pretend it's easier to cut defense than it is to restructure some of the entitlement programs, which is a mistake.
00:27:02.000However, President Trump is calling for an increase in the debt limit.
00:27:08.000Once President Trump takes office, and if I'm confirmed, if he wants to eliminate the debt limit, I will work with him and you on that.
00:27:17.000Like, this is really, you know, again, I don't think great policy, but the reality is that we are about to enter a boom time because taxes are going to remain low, regulation is going to be reduced, innovators and businesses know what is coming, predictable.
00:27:31.000Low-regulation societies are the ones that actually have extraordinary economic growth, and we're about to see that in the United States.
00:27:39.000Other nominees for President Trump had their hearings yesterday.
00:27:42.000That included Doug Burgum over at the Department of the Interior, who's made himself sort of a cult figure after running a Quixada campaign for president.
00:27:48.000Here is the governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum, who is going to be the new Secretary of the Interior.
00:27:55.000I do want to begin with gratitude, as I always do, with a special thank you to my friends, Senator Hoven, Senator Kramer, not just for their kind words this morning, but their incredible service to the country and to North Dakota over their lifetimes.
00:28:09.000And Senator Lee, as you acknowledged, I'm deeply grateful for the support of all of my friends, my family, especially our three kids, and my amazing and courageous former First Lady and my wife, Catherine Burgum, who's joining me here today.
00:28:24.000It's certainly an honor to have been nominated by President Trump to serve as the 55th.
00:28:31.000Meanwhile, Lee Zeldin, the former congressperson from New York who ran for governor of New York, that may have saved Republican Congress a couple of years back because he outperformed against Kathy Hochul.
00:28:40.000He was asked by the execrable Senator Sanders about China and our perspective on China.
00:28:45.000He's going to be the head of the EPA. And he says, listen, China's an adversary.
00:28:48.000Why are we pretending they're our friends?
00:28:51.000Are you and hopefully your colleagues, if you are confirmed, prepared to work with China to try to lower carbon emissions?
00:28:58.000Senator, on many different issues, it is important not just to be working with nations that we are the strongest aligned with, but to also be in communication and engaged in dialogue with countries that might be considered competitors and also our greatest adversaries.
00:29:17.000And right now China is an adversary in many respects.
00:29:59.000Listen, I'm speaking as somebody who has 3 million followers, almost 3 million followers over at TikTok, and something like 60 million likes over at TikTok.
00:30:09.000So this is not coming from a small account at TikTok.
00:30:11.000TikTok is a Chinese-owned app that is designed as a psy-op on the American people.
00:30:16.000And yet somehow, there's been this attempt, whether through solidarity with many of China's actual policies, or out of a misguided belief.
00:30:25.000That somehow, if the American government doesn't like Chinese ownership of TikTok, that means the American government is attempting to censor information to the idea that TikTok ought to be banned unless it divests of its Chinese ownership.
00:30:37.000Again, no one is suggesting that TikTok, if it were not owned by the Chinese, ought to be banned.
00:30:42.000No one is suggesting that, right, left, or center, so far as I'm aware.
00:30:46.000I'm not calling for any of the other social media mechanisms to be shuttered.
00:30:49.000In fact, I want them to broaden the amount of speech they allow.
00:30:52.000I've been fighting for that literally my entire career.
00:30:54.000And it's been a major issue for my company, The Daily Wire.
00:31:03.000This is perfectly clear from all available data.
00:31:07.000And yet you're seeing some bizarre folks on the right now saying that if TikTok is shut down, they're going to go and join other Chinese apps.
00:31:35.000So one bizarrely awful account, a person named Kim Iverson, who had just downloaded the Xiaohongshu app, banning TikTok is going to completely, massively backfire.
00:31:45.000This app is showing Americans a completely different view of China.
00:31:57.000This is legitimately like you read a bunch of Walter Durante propaganda about the Soviet Union in 1932. And then it turns out that Walter Durante is basically having his prostitutes and booze paid for by the Soviet government.
00:32:09.000And that comes out and you're like, you know what?
00:32:11.000In retaliation for that coming out, I am now going to subscribe to Pravda and give them all my personal information.
00:32:21.000The Chinese, by the way, this is hilarious.
00:32:24.000The Chinese are actively attempting to ban American users from being able to reach the Chinese on their new Chinese apps.
00:32:32.000So Beijing censors are getting very upset.
00:32:35.000They're getting very upset because, as it turns out, the Americans who are joining all these apps, they don't want the Americans to actually be able to access Chinese viewers via these new apps.
00:33:00.000Maybe it's all just reactionary nonsense.
00:33:03.000Red Note, which is one of these apps, is, again, doing extraordinary technological tracking of all of its users on behalf of the Chinese government.
00:33:10.000So, I mean, I guess if you want to give them your data, that's your problem.
00:33:13.000Just understand, the Chinese government is going to have all of the data that is on your phone if you give it to them.
00:33:18.000According to the New York Times, Manimatana Lee spent the past five years building one of the hottest commodities on the internet, a group of people who reliably watch her videos on TikTok.
00:33:27.000She built an audience of nearly 10,000 followers with videos of herself vacuuming her house in Wisconsin while her youngest daughter napped in a carrier on her back.
00:33:34.000A video of Ms. Lee dancing and doing the dishes has been watched more than one million times since November.
00:33:39.000Now, with the Supreme Court soon to rule on a case that could determine whether TikTok could be banned in the United States over national security concerns, Ms. Lee and other Americans looking for alternatives are downloading...
00:33:47.000Xiao Hongshu, a social media app popular in China and little known outside the country.
00:33:51.000How funny would it be if they banned TikTok and we all just move over to this Chinese app?
00:33:55.000She wrote on Monday on TikTok encouraging her followers to join her.
00:34:06.000You should be pushing for the actual bill that Congress pushed through to be implemented so that TikTok remains a feature of American life but is not owned and run.
00:34:17.000By the way, this is not just a critique of the left.
00:34:20.000This is a critique of pretty much everybody who is pushing this nonsense.
00:34:24.000So Dave Portnoy, who generally I enjoy, the owner of Barstool Sports, he does a lot of great things, Dave Portnoy, when he's doing his...
00:34:30.000The other day, he did something awesome.
00:34:32.000He walked into a pizza shop, and the pizza shop needed like 60 grand to keep operating.
00:35:08.000Businesses, creators, whatever you want to say who earn a living through TikTok, they have no clue.
00:35:14.000So just to strip these people of their livelihoods overnight, because why?
00:35:18.000The only thing I can come up with, you're afraid China could use it for like disinformation, control the algorithm, show people what they see.
00:35:25.000Listen, again, if people are too dumb to check where they're getting information that is important in the first place, like...
00:35:33.000What, the U.S. government doesn't do disinformation?
00:36:08.000Instead, apparently, the Trump administration is having the head of TikTok, a person named Xiao Chu, to sit among the president-elect's high-profile guests during the inaugural.
00:36:18.000Now, listen, I understand there are a lot of TikTok stars who are fans of President Trump.
00:36:22.000Again, I have a lot of followers on TikTok.
00:36:23.000I'm a big backer of President Trump, and I think that this administration is going to be great.
00:36:27.000But the reason people are animated about TikTok has nothing to do...
00:36:49.000We're delivering it straight to you live and uncensored.
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00:37:41.000Meanwhile, Marco Rubio's Senate replacement has been named in the state of Florida.
00:37:45.000That would be the Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, who was named by Governor Ron DeSantis, to replace Rubio, who's going to be the Secretary of State.
00:37:54.000She's been an excellent Attorney General.
00:37:55.000In the state of Florida, to replace her, Governor DeSantis named his chief of staff, James Uthmeyer, who will also be an excellent AG. So, again, the Republican Party is pretty stacked top to bottom, and the Senate constituency has a chance of getting bigger, because there are a bunch of Democrats who are in red states, and if Republicans actually run people who are good, they are going to win those particular states.
00:38:19.000Meanwhile, the UK has now announced a rapid review into the scale of the child...
00:38:24.000Abuse grooming gangs in an attempt to avoid the blowback from Elon Musk naming and shaming members of the UK government.
00:38:30.000Britain's government on Thursday, according to the New York Times, bowed to pressure and announced new investigations into child exploitation and abuse.
00:38:36.000Speaking in Parliament, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, said she commissioned a rapid three-month audit into the current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation across the country that would examine data on the ethnicity of perpetrators.
00:38:47.000She also said the government would support and help fund up to five local inquiries into the issue of so-called grooming gangs.
00:38:53.000I've heard a sort of grooming gang lottery in which they determine almost by lottery which cities are audited for grooming gangs.
00:38:59.000So it will not, in fact, be a nationwide audit of the grooming gang scandal, which is one of the great cover-ups in all of Western history.
00:39:06.000Grooming gangs represent a fraction of the total number of recorded cases of child abuse in England and Wales, says the New York Times, attempting to cover for the fact that, yes, child abuse exists in pretty much every race, in pretty much every culture.
00:39:18.000But when you have organized gangs of men, of one particular...
00:39:22.000Race and culture are engaged in a thing that is a different thing.
00:39:49.000If you look at what's gone on in Rotherham, where there are people taking young girls, grooming them for sex, that is what I'm talking about.
00:39:59.000Well, we know in London there are issues about exploitation of young people, but they're not as defined by the member in her definition of what those types of gangs are.
00:40:10.000So are you saying we haven't got the same sort of gangs that are in Rotherham, Bradford, and lots of other places in the country?
00:40:26.000What he's trying to do is bait her into saying these are Pakistani men who are gathering together to exploit white girls, which is the actual truth.
00:40:33.000And then, if she says that, he's going to call her an Islamophobe.
00:40:36.000That is the stupid game that Sadiq Khan is playing.
00:40:39.000I think those days are over, and if the government insists, like Sadiq Khan, on insisting that these gangs don't exist for purposes of political correctness and promoting the lie that multiculturalism is the strength of a country rather than assimilation into Western values, then I think the Labour Party is doomed for failure in Britain, and that will be quite well deserved.
00:40:58.000Joining us online is Senator Tim Sheehy.
00:41:00.000He's a brand new senator, one of the excellent senators added to the Republican roster.
00:41:04.000I had the privilege of campaigning with Senator Sheehy in Montana during the last election cycle.
00:41:08.000I wanted to have him on to talk about what's going on in D.C. plus what's going on in California because he founded Bridger Aerospace, which was an aerial firefighting and wildfire management company.
00:41:17.000Senator Sheehy, great to see you on the program as an actual sworn in senator.
00:41:22.000So let's talk about what you are expecting next week, the inauguration.
00:41:26.000What is the first job of the Senate as the new administration begins?
00:41:30.000Well, the first job is really what we're already doing, which is pretty incredible that Leader Thune's got us on an aggressive schedule, which is get Trump's nominees confirmed, get them in place so we can be operational moving forward on the agenda.
00:41:42.000And I think we've got 12. We've already had 12 hearings and appointments go through this week alone through committee.
00:41:50.000I mean, the president's not even sworn in yet, and we're already making incredible progress towards getting his cabinet confirmed and in place.
00:41:58.000That's what we have to focus on because...
00:41:59.000To get all the trickle-down effects of the America First agenda, which won decisively in November, we have to get the executive agencies turned over and ready to execute on that day one.
00:43:22.000So, Senator Sheehy, one of the big questions going forward is going to be sort of the strategy of the Senate in terms of getting President Trump's agenda through.
00:43:29.000Obviously, while we won a big victory, we meaning conservatives, won a big victory over the course of the election cycle, that only resulted in a 53-seat majority in the Senate, which means you really can't lose a lot of votes on any sort of bill, which means also that the filibuster comes into play.
00:43:43.000Reconciliation means probably there's only one or two big bills that get passed this year.
00:44:05.000And I'm a constitutionalist and respect that deeply.
00:44:08.000So, you know, there's certain things we're going to be able to get done through reconciliation and hopefully make the tax cuts and job deck permanent.
00:44:14.000A handful of other things, obviously, border legislation.
00:44:17.000The good news about border legislation is it's been such an abject disaster.
00:44:22.000That, like you saw with the Lake and Rally Act, I mean, there's been a lot of Democrats realizing, you know, I need to be behind this.
00:44:27.000Not only do I need to be, I should be, because this is a crisis we have to fix.
00:44:31.000So I think that really the key things that folks are going to be focused on, like the border, like getting the economy sorted out, I think we can actually probably pass those with Democrat support.
00:44:40.000But you're right, you know, after that, it's going to get a lot tougher.
00:44:43.000Senator Sheehy, I also wanted to ask you about the California wildfires, given your history in aerial firefighting, wildfire management.
00:44:49.000You've been watching this disaster unfolding in California.
00:44:52.000You know, being on the inside of the industry, having founded a very successful company in that industry, what is the thing that Americans don't know about firefighting that maybe they need to know to understand what policy scripts were made in California?
00:45:04.000Well, there's no national standard for wildfire response time or ability.
00:45:09.000You know, if you dial 911 where you're sitting right now, NFPA, the National Fire Protection Association, mandates that there'll be a fire truck and a fire crew at your house in about five minutes.
00:45:20.000And that was founded after the great fires of the 19th century, the great Chicago fire, Kansas City.
00:45:25.000When entire cities would burn down on these firestorms, folks came out of the ashes of those and realized we can't keep letting our cities burn to the ground.
00:45:33.000We need to come up with a way, with a code to build buildings, to respond to fires.
00:45:37.000And to create fire departments that can promptly respond to fires.
00:45:40.000And as a result of that adoption of those codes, you know, structure firefighter and civilian deaths have dropped over 80% in the last few decades because we focus on response time and having firefighters and aircraft ready to go.
00:45:53.000You go to wildfire, there is no requirement nationally to respond to a wildfire in a certain amount of time.
00:46:17.000We don't pay them like the professionals they are.
00:46:19.000We send the airplanes and the helicopters home.
00:46:22.000And then when a fire starts, like in L.A., like in Texas last spring, like in New Jersey in November, We are not ready to launch on these incidents in the same fashion that we would for structure fire.
00:46:33.000So we need to adopt far more aggressive national codes.
00:46:36.000And of course, as we're seeing in California, environmental policies, as well-intentioned as they may be, have consequences.
00:46:44.000And when you decide that you're going to prioritize an endangered species, spotted owl, you know, the smelt fish, the Eurasian snailfish, whatever the hell you want to list today, when you prioritize that over the safety of your communities, There are impacts, and now we're seeing what those impacts are.
00:47:00.000I wrote an op-ed in December, and I hate to be right on something like this, but I wrote an op-ed in December that literally, and many of us have been, I wrote a book called Mudslingers, where all the proceeds go to wildline firefighters.
00:47:11.000But it talked about this exact scenario, that we are not ready for the big one.
00:47:15.000It's coming, and America's going to have a very rough wake-up call when they realize we cannot fight wildfire at the level we need to.
00:48:14.000Well, meanwhile, the world of Hollywood has been rift, torn apart by a brand new controversy.
00:48:21.000Named Justin Baldoni and another human named Blake Lively.
00:48:24.000Now, you've probably heard of Blake Lively because she's an actress who's married to Ryan Reynolds.
00:48:27.000Justin Baldoni is significantly less famous, but they did make a movie together called It Ends With Us.
00:48:33.000The long line for that film is, quote, when a woman's first love suddenly reenters her life, her relationship with a charming but abusive neurosurgeon is upended, and she realizes she must learn to rely on her own strength to make an impossible choice for her future.
00:48:53.000In any case, this film became the subject of a thousand think pieces and two massive lawsuits because, as it turns out, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni were the stars of the film and Baldoni directed it.
00:49:06.000Apparently, rumors of a feud began during their promotional tour in August 2024.
00:49:11.000There was speculation that Blake Lively had actually brought in her husband, Ryan Reynolds, to help take over creative control of the film, and Baldoni wasn't showing up at press events.
00:49:20.000And then Baldoni hired Johnny Depp's crisis management and PR professional, a person named Melissa Nathan, to represent him.
00:49:26.000Lively herself was doing some kind of strange things during her press tour tour.
00:49:33.000She was criticized for her tone-deaf approach to the movie, which is supposedly a fairly serious movie about abuse and all the rest.
00:49:39.000Here, for example, she was doing a strange interview.
00:49:43.000But for people who see this movie, who relate to the topics of this movie, On a deeply personal level, they're really going to want to talk to you.
00:49:50.000This movie is going to affect people and they're going to want to tell you about their lives.
00:49:54.000So if someone understands the themes of this movie, comes across you in public, and they want to really talk to you, what's the best way for them to be able to talk to you about this?
00:50:03.000How would you recommend they go about it?
00:50:04.000Like asking for my address or my phone number or my location share.
00:50:09.000I could just location share you and then we could...
00:50:22.000And then, apparently, an interview with a journalist named Kirstie Fla resurfaced from 2016, in which she was being very, very weird with her co-star from a movie called Cafe Society, which was a Woody Allen film.
00:50:35.000First of all, congrats on your little bump.
00:51:54.000Also, I didn't realize that Parker Posey had done a movie since Coyote Ugly.
00:51:57.000I didn't realize that she was still a working actress.
00:51:58.000In any case, in December, Blake Lively filed a legal complaint against Baldoni's Wayfarer studio.
00:52:05.000She claims harassment, retaliation, failure to investigate or prevent harassment, aiding and abetting harassment, breach of contract, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence, false light, invasion of privacy, interference with prospective economic advantage.
00:52:17.000And Lively had set forth a list of 30 HR-related demands to meet Baldoni and his production company.
00:52:22.000Those demands included no more showing nude videos and images to Lively or her employees, no mentions of Baldoni's addiction or discussions of personal encounters, no more inquiries about Lively's religious beliefs or weight, and all intimate scenes to be highly choreographed.
00:52:36.000Well, as we will explore in a moment, many of these accusations are taken wildly out of context.
00:52:43.000And because you hear that, initially you're going to be sympathetic to the actress who's accusing and director of that sort of activity.
00:52:50.000Well, she then apparently went to the New York Times.
00:52:53.000And the New York Times did a giant propaganda piece on her behalf, talking about how dare Justin Baldoni defend himself with the PR campaign.
00:53:02.000The New York Times says, quote, She claimed Baldoni had improvised, unwanted kissing, and discussed his sex life, including encounters in which he said he may not have received consent.
00:53:10.000Mr. Heath, the producer Jamie Heath, had shown her a video of his wife naked, she said, and he had watched Miss Lively in her trailer when she was topless and having body makeup removed, despite her asking him to look away.
00:53:20.000She said both men repeatedly entered her makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed, including when she was breastfeeding.
00:53:26.000And then the hit piece had a bunch of text messages and emails between Baldoni and his PR team.
00:53:32.000Baldoni ended up being dropped from William Morris Agency, which is one of the biggest agencies in the world.
00:53:38.000Lively claimed that she missed hosting SNL because of the Baldoni smear campaign.
00:53:44.000And then Baldoni is now counter-suing.
00:53:47.000He sued the New York Times for $250 million.
00:53:49.000He claims that Ryan Reynolds aggressively berated him.
00:53:56.000And yesterday, Baldoni sued Lively and Reynolds for $400 million.
00:54:02.000Well, joining us online to discuss the details of this salacious story is my friend Megan Kelly, journalist and host of The Megan Kelly Show.
00:54:09.000Okay, Megan, so I need you to walk me through the Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni scandal here because I will be frank with you.
00:54:14.000Until my producers put this on my agenda, I literally had no idea this was happening because I've not seen a movie with either of these people I think maybe ever.
00:54:25.000It's a dispute between two Hollywood actors that's on every one of the tabloid magazines, etc.
00:54:31.000And effectively, what I think has happened here, and the reason I think people are interested in this, is because she has made herself into the new Amber Heard.
00:54:59.000She suffered through a round of somewhat negative press because, as often happens when these stars drop a movie, people start digging around for other interviews of them, etc.
00:55:07.000And it was just sort of a course of, well, she seems like kind of a jerk.
00:55:31.000But like a lot of thin-skinned Hollywood types, she couldn't stand the fact that it was still lingering in any way out there.
00:55:39.000And she decided to file a complaint with the California Human Rights Division.
00:55:44.000But that was really, I believe, and it is alleged by Justin's lawyers now, just to set up so that she could give the New York Times cover to do a huge hit piece on him and attempted rehab of her.
00:55:56.000Saying, oh, that wasn't an organic round of bad press.
00:55:59.000Really, it was Justin Baldoni and his PR team trying to hurt her.
00:56:03.000And the reason he allegedly did this is because she'd accused him during the filming of the movie of sexual harassment.
00:56:19.000Well, Justin Baldoni did a very smart thing, and he hired Brian Friedman, my lawyer who represented me, in my fight with NBC. And let me tell you, you could ask for no better.
00:56:28.000He knows how to fight, and he will find where all your bodies are buried, you know, on the other side.
00:56:33.000And there are a lot of bodies for Blake Lively.
00:56:36.000So he's first filed a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times for their totally irresponsible report about this matter.
00:56:42.000In which they made mistakes, so egregious mistakes, intentional errors, you could argue, about this case that showed, for example, a text showing how Justin and his PR team were out to smear poor, innocent Blake, conspiring, saying, look, look at this article in the Daily Mail saying she's terrible and she's about to be canceled.
00:57:03.000And the other PR hack writes back, you're that good.
00:57:07.000And the first PR hack writes, yeah, can you believe me?
00:57:10.000This is part of their evidence against the evil Justin team.
00:57:13.000And then Brian Friedman and his lawyer and his legal complaint against the Times shows you the whole text exchange, which the Times had, we presume, in which they use a sarcasm emoji and the woman saying, I did it, explicitly says, except I didn't do it.
00:57:29.000And they're lamenting that they, you know, they didn't do it, but everybody's going to think that they did do it, but they didn't.
00:57:36.000Now in this lawsuit, That he just filed again.
00:57:40.000This is a second lawsuit by Brian Friedman on behalf of Justin.
00:57:42.000This is against Blake, Ryan Reynolds, and their PR hack.
00:57:47.000And what they're alleging is that they had nothing to do with that negative round of press that Blake suffered last summer, that it was organic, but that they did have internal PR meetings about what they might have to do because this woman, Leslie Sloan, who works for...
00:58:07.000Ryan and Blake was dropping hit piece after hit piece on Justin.
00:58:11.000And that Blake had spent the entire prior year trying to wrest control of this movie away from Justin Baldoni.
00:58:20.000He's the one who found the book and got the idea for it.
00:58:22.000And she was such a brat that she wanted to control every scene, wanted to see all the dailies, wanted to do her own cut and did her own cut of the movie.
00:58:30.000All this is very unusual for just an actress in the film, even if she's the lead.
00:58:34.000And that she's now tried to turn this whole thing into a PR victory for her to get past what appears to be the fact that she is an egotistical bully.
00:58:44.000So, what about the sexual harassment allegations?
00:58:46.000When you first read those, I read that New York Times piece, and the allegations, just the way the Times reported them, seemed pretty bad.
00:58:52.000It was like, oh, he's showing her, one of the producers is showing her naked pictures of his wife, he's talking about...
00:58:57.000Now, they walked in on her while she was breastfeeding, even though she'd said not to.
00:59:00.000But it turns out that on, like, any level of examination, a huge percentage of this seems to fall apart, correct?
00:59:07.000So Brian Friedman, in that first lawsuit against the Times, produced the text messages, and I've seen them all.
00:59:12.000And it shows that, take the two that you alleged.
00:59:16.000The alleged that they subjected poor Blake Lively to was by Justin's business partner, who is a producer of the film.
00:59:22.000From Wayfair, that's the name of their company, who she has a birth scene in the movie, and he showed her a still shot from his wife's delivery of their child, which I've also seen.
00:59:34.000You can't see any R-rated parts at all.
00:59:38.000It's actually a really lovely artistic photo of a husband with his arms around his wife in a bathtub and the baby on top of the wife.
01:00:10.000I'm breastfeeding the baby in the trailer, but come on over.
01:00:13.000Like, it's written there, black and white.
01:00:15.000She invited him in, and a lot of women are comfortable having someone around when they breastfeed, so it's not so weird, especially out in Hollywood, for him to assume, yeah, I guess she's fine with this, because she did let him in.
01:00:28.000He had them over to their penthouse in New York, and Taylor Swift was believed to be there, according to this latest complaint, who's Blake Lively's BFF. And what they allege is that they blacked out a lot of names, but we think it's Taylor.
01:00:43.000That the three of them sat there and they berated Justin for, you know, things that were going on on the set that they didn't like.
01:00:52.000Blake personally, with Ryan's help, rewrote scenes.
01:00:55.000Again, not within the purview of an actress.
01:00:58.000And then after that, they have text messages in which Blake tells Justin, this is in the latest lawsuit, you know, I know you've never watched Game of Thrones, but when you get around to watching it, you'll realize, I'm Khaleesi.
01:01:57.000And this guy who had, you know, comparatively very little power was forced now to come out and tell the truth about Blake Lively.
01:02:04.000So, I mean, this is all more fascinating than I thought it would be, to be honest with you.
01:02:07.000And I have to say that the blowback to Ryan Reynolds, I think, is going to be pretty severe because his whole image is this cool guy who's very easy to get along with, friends with everybody, jokey-jokey.
01:02:18.000But if it turns out that he's standing sort of in the wings of the shadows ready to go after anybody who crosses Blake Lively's bizarre machinations, that's not a great look for him.
01:02:27.000No, and by the way, good look to Blake Lively in getting hired again because...
01:02:31.000All of her diva antics are coming out, and the way she behaves behind the scenes, and now this with the lawsuit and the New York Times thing, because she's now filed against him as well.
01:02:40.000So it's a terrible move by her and them, PR-wise.
01:02:44.000But Ryan Reynolds, one of the things he allegedly exploded on Justin Baldoni over was alleged fat shaming of Blake, because I guess when she was shooting this movie, she was postpartum, and she was trying to get back into shape.
01:02:57.000Well, now they've produced the text messages.
01:02:59.000Baldoni and team in this latest lawsuit against her, showing Justin being like, don't worry about any of that.
01:03:05.000We can shoot any scenes that require exposure toward the end of the movie when you feel better about things.
01:03:12.000This is the last thing you should have to worry about.
01:03:15.000The alleged fat shaming that Ryan Reynolds went off on him over, that's all over her lawsuit that he's been excoriated for in the press, the left-wing press, was when he went to It was either his trainer or her trainer or the trainer on the set.
01:03:39.000Turns out Justin Baldoni, this has been documented, has serious disc issues and was actually in the hospital for like two months after this film wrapped because of his disc issues and was worried because he had to pick her up in a scene.
01:03:54.000Like, you know, Officer in a Gentleman style.
01:03:57.000And he was very concerned about his discs.
01:03:59.000He didn't want to go to her and be like, hey, how much do you weigh?
01:04:46.000And God bless, because I think those executive orders we're going to get before he even finishes the inaugural ceremony are going to have us celebrating, cheering, and then going to start changing the country immediately.