The Ben Shapiro Show - We’re BACK!

00:00:00.000 Well, folks, we are back.

00:00:01.000 It is a brand new year.

00:00:02.000 I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and a wonderful New Year's, and now it all begins.

00:00:07.000 So, this is going to be a very big year.

00:00:08.000 President Trump is slated to be certified as the President of the United States today.

00:00:14.000 The normal certification process will go through as planned in the Congress of the United States, and he will also have his Speaker of the House.

00:00:22.000 So, President Trump had endorsed Speaker of the House Mike Johnson for re-election.

00:00:26.000 There were, as usual, a coterie of people who were very concerned about Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House.

00:00:31.000 As I have been saying for, I don't know, years at this point, it turns out the Speaker of the House has a very hard job.

00:00:37.000 You have to cobble together a coalition of people across various party lines, and then you have to somehow materialize a majority to do things.

00:00:45.000 So the job of the Speaker of the House is not, in fact, to be quote-unquote an ideological thought leader.

00:00:50.000 There are plenty of people whose job that is.

00:00:52.000 It is the job of the Speaker of the House to actually get done what can be done.

00:00:58.000 And the problem with many of the ideologues, particularly in Congress, but also in the commentariat, is that when they suggest that the Speaker of the House has the magical Nietzschean ability to simply impose his will on Congress and get everything that you could possibly want, they are lying.

00:01:14.000 It is simply not true.

00:01:15.000 So this all came to fruition over the break.

00:01:18.000 So on Friday, despite the attempts of people like Thomas Massey, the representative from Kentucky, to prevent Speaker Johnson from being reelected.

00:01:28.000 Johnson was reelected.

00:01:29.000 Here was Massey looking rather disillusioned, actually, in this particular clip, trying to make the case against Speaker Johnson in the most colorful possible terms.

00:01:38.000 You can pull all my fingernails out.

00:01:42.000 You can shove bamboo up in them.

00:01:44.000 You can start cutting off my fingers.

00:01:46.000 I am not voting for Mike Johnson tomorrow.

00:01:48.000 And you can take that to the bank.

00:01:51.000 Well, he didn't, but everybody else did because President Trump signaled his support for Mike Johnson.

00:01:56.000 And the reason that he did that is because Johnson is as good as it's going to get.

00:02:00.000 Johnson is, in fact, a very conservative Speaker of the House.

00:02:03.000 He is faced with an extraordinarily slim majority.

00:02:06.000 And there are always going to be people in Congress who have decided that the best thing that they can do is go on television and spout rather than actually, you know, doing the job of being in Congress.

00:02:15.000 Congress.

00:02:16.000 But the job of being in Congress is very different from the job of saying what it is that you think about politics.

00:02:22.000 The job of being in Congress, again, is to get as much of the pie as possible.

00:02:26.000 And that changes pretty radically depending on whether you are in the minority or whether you are in the majority, whether there's a Democrat in the White House or whether there is a Republican in the White House.

00:02:34.000 So somebody like a Thomas Massey, for example, might be a true asset to conservatives when the Republicans are in the minority, meaning that they're not in the White House or if they're in the minority in Congress.

00:02:45.000 You want to obstruct Joe Biden's plans after all.

00:02:48.000 And then there's the question of what you do when you have a president of the United States who's an elected Republican, Donald Trump, when you have an elected majority in the Senate, when you have an elected majority in the House.

00:02:58.000 Then the question becomes, how much can you get?

00:03:01.000 And obviously, you want conservatives who are going to push back against the excesses, but you also want people who are going to make pragmatic and practical decisions rather than just standing there and shouting no at everything in order to get, presumably, the love of the clickbaiters online.

00:03:17.000 Over the break, President Trump endorsed Speaker Johnson.

00:03:19.000 Johnson was indeed re-elected on the very first vote out the gate.

00:03:23.000 According to the New York Times, Speaker Johnson on Friday won re-election to the top post in the House, salvaging his job in a dramatic last-minute turnabout by putting down a revolt from conservatives who initially voted to block his assent.

00:03:34.000 Johnson won 218 to 215. He mustered the majority with help from President-elect Donald Trump, who again, Trump is going to be...

00:03:42.000 Absolutely utilitarian in his second term.

00:03:44.000 He wants wins.

00:03:46.000 He wants to chalk up wins on the board.

00:03:47.000 That is the thing that he wants more than anything.

00:03:49.000 He is not concerned with the sort of petty ideological squabbles that you are seeing inside the Republican caucus right now.

00:03:55.000 All he wants is victory for the country.

00:03:57.000 He wants to leave a legacy in his second term, even more successful than his first term.

00:04:03.000 Originally, there were three Republicans who opposed Johnson and six more who had abstained.

00:04:08.000 And then Trump came in like a hammer.

00:04:11.000 In favor of Johnson, Johnson and Trump had both urged Republican lawmakers to elect him speaker so the House could start work on the president-elect's legislative priorities.

00:04:20.000 And this was the thing.

00:04:21.000 None of the people who were voting against Johnson posited an alternative to Johnson.

00:04:26.000 None of them.

00:04:27.000 None of them had somebody better in mind who was going to get the Republican caucus unified rather than Johnson, which means it was all a sort of bizarre attention-seeking move.

00:04:38.000 On the part of these particular congresspeople, if you don't have a better alternative, then you are being obstructionist and useless within your own party.

00:04:45.000 Well, here is Speaker Johnson taking the gavel.

00:04:50.000 This is a powerful new coalition of our country.

00:04:53.000 It's a coalition that insists that we purge the policies of America last and we bury them in the graveyard of history's mistakes because it was a big mistake.

00:05:02.000 To that end, this Congress will renounce the status quo and we will listen to the voices of the people.

00:05:06.000 We will act quickly and we will start by defending our nation's borders.

00:05:12.000 That's the number one priority.

00:05:13.000 Yes.

00:05:15.000 And again, the thing that Republicans want more than anything is get the priorities that Trump wants done.

00:05:21.000 Well, this has betokened some interesting conversations about the strategy going forward for House Republicans.

00:05:28.000 So there are basically two strategies on the table.

00:05:30.000 There are two big issues that are going to come up this year in the Congress of the United States.

00:05:34.000 Basically, because Republicans do not actually have a supermajority in the Senate, that means they have to use a process that is called reconciliation.

00:05:41.000 Reconciliation can only be used on budgetary bills, on budgetary matters.

00:05:45.000 Which means typically it can only be used once or possibly at the most twice inside of a year.

00:05:50.000 The big question for Republicans in the House and in the Senate was whether they were going to separate out two separate bills and vote on them separately over the course of the year.

00:05:58.000 One was going to be a border bill that was going to attempt to maintain border security, increase border security, complete the building of the wall, for example, change the law where necessary in order to make it easier to deport illegal immigrants.

00:06:10.000 That was possibility of bill number one.

00:06:12.000 Possibility of bill number two.

00:06:13.000 Was the making permanent of the 2017 Trump tax cuts.

00:06:17.000 And there are basically two possible strategies here.

00:06:20.000 Again, one strategy would be to separate those two bills.

00:06:23.000 In some ways, that might be better.

00:06:25.000 And in some ways, it might be worse.

00:06:27.000 The other strategy was to wrap them up into one giant bill.

00:06:30.000 The problem with wrapping them up into one giant bill is more compromises are going to get cut in that giant bill than might be cut if you separated them out into two separate bills.

00:06:38.000 Why?

00:06:38.000 Well, because if you pile everything into one bill, And you give that giant one bill on border matters and tax matters an up or down vote, there will be more crap in the crap sandwich.

00:06:47.000 There just will be.

00:06:48.000 It's like an omnibus package that includes tax matters and border matters.

00:06:51.000 And this is something that many conservatives are concerned about.

00:06:54.000 For example, the House Freedom Caucus is upset about all of that because it will take additional spending on the border in order to secure the border.

00:07:01.000 The Trump tax cuts may have short-term lowering of federal revenue into the tax coffers.

00:07:08.000 So how are you going to offset that in terms of the spending?

00:07:12.000 And meanwhile, Republicans also would like to increase the defense budget in the face of a vastly aggressive China.

00:07:18.000 So all of those things getting wrapped into one bill, it means that if it all gets wrapped in one bill and Trump says to the American body politic and to the constituents of all these Republicans, listen, the bill has a lot of stuff I don't like, but it has a lot of stuff I do like.

00:07:29.000 I'm yes on the bill.

00:07:30.000 Everybody else should be yes on the bill.

00:07:32.000 There's going to be heavy pressure on Republicans to go yes on the bill, even if there's more crap included in the crap sandwich.

00:07:38.000 The alternative, which is to separate the two bills, the border bill and the tax bill, is that you may get neither.

00:07:43.000 It may be an opportunity for people to signal their discontent on matters regarding Donald Trump's approach to the border if you're on the sort of left wing of the Republican Party.

00:07:54.000 On tax matters, there's going to be some pretty serious battles inside the Republican Party with regard to the so-called SALT deductions, state and local tax deductions.

00:08:02.000 So the 2017 tax cuts, one of the things that they did.

00:08:05.000 They said that if you pay taxes in California or New York, that doesn't mean that you can deduct the taxes you paid on the state level against your federal taxable income.

00:08:14.000 Because it's effectively a sort of affirmative action program on taxes for blue states.

00:08:20.000 So that got removed.

00:08:21.000 But there are a lot of people, Republicans from New York and California, who would like to restore the SALT deductions in the tax code.

00:08:27.000 That's going to be an open battle.

00:08:29.000 So strategically speaking, the question is, do you go for two purer and smaller bills or do you go for one less pure, bigger, beautiful bill?

00:08:37.000 So for Johnson, because he's working with such a slim majority, he would love one big, beautiful bill.

00:08:42.000 He would love it.

00:08:44.000 Again, the reason being because he wants to get everything that Trump wants.

00:08:48.000 And so if your choices are get less of what Trump wants and less bad stuff and get more of what Trump wants and more bad stuff, right?

00:08:54.000 Those are the two choices.

00:08:55.000 He prefers more of what Trump wants and Probably a little bit more bad stuff.

00:09:00.000 That's the nature of the bargain here.

00:09:02.000 And there really is no third choice where you just get all the great things that you want and none of the bad things that you don't want.

00:09:07.000 That is not how it works with a majority this slim in the House and a pretty slim majority in the Senate as well.

00:09:14.000 Here was Speaker Johnson explaining Trump is apparently on board with this particular strategy.

00:09:19.000 I respect Lindsey Graham and all my friends who kind of preferred a two-step strategy.

00:09:24.000 The idea would be get something done on the border and maybe defend spending right out of the blocks very quickly in what we would call a skinny reconciliation bill and then do the rest of it in a larger chunk later.

00:09:35.000 But I think at the end of the day, President Trump is going to prefer, as he likes to say, one big beautiful bill.

00:09:40.000 And there's a lot of merit to that because we can put it all together, one big up or down vote which can save the country, quite literally, because there are Again, this is a matter of strategy.

00:09:57.000 It's not really a matter of principle.

00:09:59.000 Johnson is very conservative.

00:10:01.000 So, for example, is House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri, also a very conservative member of Congress.

00:10:06.000 He's also calling for one big, beautiful bill.

00:10:09.000 The idea would be get this thing rammed through by April.

00:10:12.000 Do it fast.

00:10:12.000 Do it quickly.

00:10:13.000 Because, as we all know, the midterms are going to come up in a couple of years.

00:10:16.000 And so, basically, Trump has two years to get everything he can get done done.

00:10:20.000 And that really means he has year one to get it done.

00:10:23.000 Because by the time you hit year two, everybody's already running for re-election, and they've got their eyes on their next race.

00:10:28.000 Well, folks, President Trump has a very short time period to get all of this done.

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00:12:37.000 So Jason Smith, for example, he wants one bill instead of two.

00:12:41.000 He and his allies, according to Politico, are warning that separating the tax package into its own reconciliation bill risks them not passing a measure at all to extend the 2017 tax cuts set to expire at year's end.

00:12:51.000 Now, what he's basically saying is, let's get this bill out the gate, because the closer you get to the deadline, the more leverage a few holdouts are going to have.

00:12:59.000 Instead, wrap it all up in one big bow.

00:13:01.000 Yes, there'll be more trash in there, but at least you will get all the things that Trump wants, along with some stuff that probably nobody likes all that much.

00:13:09.000 As Smith says, my only focus is to deliver on all these priorities that the American people ask for.

00:13:13.000 That's tax, that's border, that's energy.

00:13:15.000 I've always thought the best process of doing that is through one.

00:13:18.000 And he pointed out that literally zero parties have succeeded in passing two reconciliation bills in the same year, in decades.

00:13:24.000 Most recently, congressional Democrats fought amongst themselves for much of 2021 and 2022 to enact a second reconciliation package and then abandoned many of the policies that they envisioned under their Build Back Better plan that eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act.

00:13:39.000 So, it'll be interesting to see how all of this plays out.

00:13:41.000 The bottom line is, Johnson is in fact a very good strategist.

00:13:44.000 So is John Thune.

00:13:45.000 John Thune is the Senate Majority Leader.

00:13:47.000 John Thune says his priority is extending the 2017 tax cuts.

00:13:50.000 Again, I think this is all going to be done in one big bill.

00:13:53.000 I think that we intend to ensure...

00:13:58.000 That we don't have a $4 trillion tax increase on the American people by December 31 of this year.

00:14:04.000 And in order to do that, we've got to act collectively, House, Senate, and White House, to extend the 2017 tax cuts.

00:14:13.000 Again, I think all of this is going to get done, and there should be an expectation of your Congress people and your senators that it should get done.

00:14:20.000 And all these sort of little niggling... 1.00

00:14:24.000 Small issues that people are upset about or issues that are totally insoluble.

00:14:28.000 When you hear Republican Congress, people talk about, we're not solving our national debt with these bills.

00:14:32.000 You're damn right we're not solving our national debt with these bills.

00:14:34.000 And you better stop pretending that anything you're proposing is going to solve the national debt.

00:14:38.000 The reality is the national debt ain't going to get solved until you touch precisely the entitlement programs that no one is going to touch ever.

00:14:45.000 Until you touch Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, you are not going to be able to tackle the national debt.

00:14:51.000 So what does that mean?

00:14:52.000 You better get those tax cuts made permanent because otherwise Democrats are going to reverse those at the first available opportunity, thus destroying the possibility of economic growth that could help grow you out of things like the national debt.

00:15:02.000 You better get that border bill done now because Democrats sure as hell ain't going to pass a good border bill if they were in charge or if they gain control of the House of Representatives, which is already very tightly split in 2026. Meanwhile, other top priorities for the brand new Congress?

00:15:18.000 Giving Donald Trump his nominees.

00:15:19.000 Lindsey Graham, senator from South Carolina.

00:15:21.000 He says, listen, we have some major national security threats on the horizon and making themselves present right now, give him his nominees.

00:15:30.000 We need our team on the field.

00:15:33.000 We need an FBI director.

00:15:34.000 We need an attorney general.

00:15:35.000 We need them all.

00:15:36.000 Get it done.

00:15:37.000 We've got to get it done.

00:15:38.000 We're under attack here.

00:15:40.000 We're at war.

00:15:40.000 So you're prepared to vote for all of Trump's nominees then?

00:15:43.000 I am ready to go.

00:15:44.000 Bring them up.

00:15:45.000 I'll vote.

00:15:46.000 Let's get it done.

00:15:47.000 Senator, it's great to see you this morning.

00:15:49.000 We're under siege here.

00:15:53.000 And he is right about all of that.

00:15:55.000 The good news is it looks like the votes are in fact there for Pete Hegseth, for Secretary of Defense.

00:15:59.000 Again, if you're talking about the most controversial Trump nominees, in order, they are probably, at this point, Tulsi Gabbard for DNI, who, again, I think is very likely to be confirmed.

00:16:09.000 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services.

00:16:12.000 A little more dicey, but I think he probably will be confirmed.

00:16:15.000 Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense.

00:16:17.000 It looks as though, very good shot.

00:16:19.000 He is confirmed in Kash Patel as head of the FBI. Again, I think there's a very good shot that all these people are confirmed.

00:16:24.000 If there's one who's most on the chopping block, it is probably Tulsi Gabbard because there are some people in the Republican caucus.

00:16:29.000 Who have some doubts about her foreign policy ideas from several years ago.

00:16:35.000 She's going to have to explain those ideas, presumably, to the senators. 0.55

00:16:37.000 But the vast majority of Trump's nominees at this point are going to go through as well they should.

00:16:42.000 And they should specifically because we have some real threats that are currently materializing.

00:16:48.000 One of those threats is obviously the threat of radical Islamic terrorism.

00:16:52.000 That threat was made clear on New Year's Day in a terror attack in New Orleans that killed 14 people.

00:16:59.000 It was carried out by a radical Islamist, a recent convert to radical Islam.

00:17:07.000 According to the New York Times, months before the man behind the New Orleans terror attack plowed a truck into a New Year's Day crowd, he rode through the area on a bicycle, recording videos of his target using eyeglasses with a built-in camera, investigators said on Sunday.

00:17:18.000 He was back again a few weeks later, they said, probably to continue his plotting.

00:17:21.000 Those details emerged as investigators revealed more about the driver and the extensive planning behind the attack, which killed 14 people, injured many others, and left New Orleans starting 2025, grappling with a cascade of anguish and alarm.

00:17:34.000 This person was apparently radicalized by ISIS, claimed alignment with the Islamic State terrorist group.

00:17:42.000 He's a 42-year-old army veteran with a fairly lucrative job, apparently, but his life started to collapse, and it appears that by the time of his terror attack, he was living in a rather impoverished Heavily Islamic area nearby.

00:17:55.000 Apparently, the attacker made trips to Egypt and Canada in 2023. Which, again, traveling to Egypt in 2023?

00:18:04.000 Unless you're going there as a tourist just to see the pyramids.

00:18:07.000 They're probably not an amazing reason to visit Egypt at this time.

00:18:11.000 Our agents are getting answers as to where he went, who he met with, how those trips may or may not tie into his actions here in our city, according to Lionel Murthal, the special agent in charge for the FBI in New Orleans.

00:18:19.000 Now, remember, the FBI immediately made the jump.

00:18:21.000 This is why Cash Patel needs to be the head of the FBI. The FBI immediately, after the New Orleans attack, tried to deny that it was, in fact, being investigated as a terrorist attack, only to reverse themselves just a few hours later.

00:18:32.000 The attack, of course, ended when the attacker was killed in a shootout with the police that left two of the members of the police wounded.

00:18:41.000 The terrorist expressed allegiance to ISIS after a transformation that perplexed and troubled those who knew him.

00:18:46.000 He had the group's flag on a rented Ford F-150 pickup truck he used in the attack.

00:18:50.000 In a video recorded for his family, he said, quote, I wanted you to know I joined ISIS earlier this year.

00:18:55.000 He was living in a heavily impoverished Islamic area that was apparently in Houston.

00:19:01.000 Okay, well, this area was also near a mosque.

00:19:04.000 The police have been reaching out, the FBI have been reaching out to members of the mosque.

00:19:09.000 And other nearby Islamic organizations.

00:19:11.000 And the mosque immediately put out a statement urging members of the congregation not to actually respond to media inquiries and, if contacted by the FBI, not to talk to the FBI, but instead to call up the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

00:19:24.000 And herein lies the Trump 2.0 question.

00:19:28.000 Will the Trump administration, part two, take seriously the threat of radical Islamist terror to the extent that they will actually investigate groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations?

00:19:38.000 A long-time terror-connected organization.

00:19:41.000 The Council on American-Islamic Relations welcomed back into the White House by the Biden administration and the Obama administration, but which was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trials of the 2000s and was founded by very deeply connected friends of Hamas, associates of Hamas.

00:19:58.000 CARE has been treated as a sort of civil rights organization, civil liberties organization for a long time, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the mosque put out a statement suggesting, That its brothers and sisters, instead of working with the FBI, refer to CARE and the Islamic Society of Greater Houston.

00:20:18.000 They're very serious problems with radical Islamic organizations inside the United States.

00:20:22.000 By the way, that's not just according to the U.S. government.

00:20:24.000 That is also according to the United Arab Emirates, which listed CARE as a terrorist group in 2014 over its alleged affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood.

00:20:33.000 There have been calls already.

00:20:36.000 To investigate Care National, there should be such investigations.

00:20:42.000 The reality is that there are 340 million people living in the United States.

00:20:45.000 You can't keep track of everybody.

00:20:46.000 What you can do is keep track of the organizations that seem to be at least somewhat friendly toward radical Islamic terror groups.

00:20:54.000 Representative Mike Turner of Ohio, he was on with Margaret Brendan on Sunday.

00:20:59.000 He says, listen, there are definitely people who are friendly to radical Islamic terror living in the United States.

00:21:05.000 Are there individuals that are affiliated with ISIS and terrorist groups and organizations that have crossed the border that are inside the United States?

00:21:12.000 Director Ray, FBI Director, has said so.

00:21:15.000 We certainly have intelligence that says so.

00:21:17.000 I agree with his assessment.

00:21:18.000 Jim has also seen it.

00:21:20.000 He's testified before our committee publicly of that fact.

00:21:24.000 Those individuals are working in conjunction with ISIS with the intention of harming Americans.

00:21:30.000 The Director has said it.

00:21:32.000 Directly.

00:21:33.000 They are known to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement.

00:21:36.000 And we are working diligently to try to take them down, to prevent them from doing so.

00:21:40.000 And that's why the director is publicly saying such.

00:21:43.000 And that's what the new administration is going to be handed.

00:21:45.000 The fact that these individuals are here, that we need to locate them, we need to remove them, we need to bring them to justice and prevent them from doing harm to Americans.

00:21:55.000 Okay, this also means no more political correctness when it comes to counterintelligence, when it comes to things like investigating the possibility of terror connections inside the United States.

00:22:04.000 No more political correctness.

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00:24:39.000 That's F-I-T-B-O-D dot M-E slash Shapiro.

00:24:42.000 The fact of the matter is that under Democrats, there has been an attempt to whitewash the problem of radical Islamic terror in the United States to focus instead on, quote, homegrown violent extremism.

00:24:52.000 Which is a category error.

00:24:54.000 Yes, of course, you're going to have to worry about white supremacists shooting up churches.

00:24:58.000 That's a thing that has happened in the United States.

00:25:00.000 But if you are talking about ways to monitor preventable terrorism, it seems like a pretty easy way to monitor preventable terrorism would be to trace the funding mechanism for radical Islamic mosques inside the United States, which, by the way, broadcast pretty clearly their intentions on a fairly regular basis.

00:25:17.000 When Alejandro Mayorkas, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Categorizes this as, quote, an increase in homegrown violent extremism.

00:25:25.000 I mean, what kind of extremism?

00:25:26.000 They're not all the same.

00:25:28.000 They're not all equally easy to trace either, by the way.

00:25:31.000 Here's Alejandro Mayorkas, thank God the outgoing Secretary of Homeland Security.

00:25:36.000 We have a heightened threat environment as Director Wray and the Attorney General both articulated and we've been saying this for quite a number of months.

00:25:46.000 We have not only the persistent threat of foreign terrorism that of course created The Department of Homeland Security, but we have adverse nation states, and for the past 10 years we've seen a significant increase in what we term homegrown violent extremism.

00:26:04.000 It is a very difficult threat landscape, and it is why that we as a as a community, not just the federal government, but state and local officials and residents need to be alert to it and take the precautions necessary to avoid violence from occurring. but state and local officials and residents need to be Again, these sort of broad categories are not helpful.

00:26:29.000 You know what would be really helpful?

00:26:30.000 Keeping track of organizations that historically have had ties to terror groups.

00:26:34.000 That would be a really good way of doing this sort of stuff.

00:26:37.000 And it's exactly this sort of politically correct approach that is leading to the current breakdown in politics across the water over in the UK. So over the course of the break, Elon Musk...

00:26:46.000 Went hard on Keir Starmer, who is the new Prime Minister of Great Britain.

00:26:50.000 Starmer, of course, is the leader of the Labour Party.

00:26:52.000 He was also a member of law enforcement during the time where law enforcement was largely ignoring these massive grooming gang cases about radical Muslims in Britain who were legitimately on mass white girls.

00:27:07.000 It has been very well covered by the media now.

00:27:10.000 It wasn't at the time.

00:27:12.000 And the reason it was not covered well at the time, it's been going on for decades, the reason it was not covered at the time was very obvious.

00:27:18.000 And it openly stated was because for years, for literally decades, there were these groups of Muslim men who had been imported into the UK under the guise of multiculturalism, who had then begun to groom and 13, 14, 15-year-old girls.

00:27:33.000 They had set up these gangs to just pass these girls around. 0.98

00:27:37.000 And the authorities full-on knew about it.

00:27:39.000 So did the media.

00:27:39.000 They also knew about it.

00:27:40.000 But there was one problem.

00:27:41.000 They weren't going to report on any of this.

00:27:43.000 The reason they weren't going to report on any of this is because there were far-right extremists who might take advantage of the messaging.

00:27:49.000 This is the way that the politically correct left has decided to approach the problems with its own ideology, ignore them, pretend they don't exist, or pretend that the real problem is the people doing the noticing.

00:27:59.000 That if you notice that there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of girls who are being... 0.99

00:28:05.000 By Muslim men in the UK. If you notice that, that this is somehow a brand of your extremism and we mustn't help. 1.00

00:28:13.000 We mustn't help the extremists to gain political power in Great Britain.

00:28:16.000 And this is not me saying this.

00:28:17.000 This is the journalist who covered the story.

00:28:19.000 So, for example, the BBC did a documentary in 2017 called The Betrayed Girls.

00:28:25.000 And they interviewed one of the journalists who really covered this thing in full in 2010. But he knew about this as early as 2002, 2003. His name is Andrew Norfolk, and here he is, admitting full-scale that the reason he did not cover what was called the Rochdale scandal is because he was afraid that it would lend credence to the British National Party or the English Defense League.

00:28:49.000 Both consider, quote-unquote, far-right extremist organizations for the great crime of saying, perhaps we shouldn't be importing into the West members of radical Islamic civilization.

00:28:59.000 The key point of the press release was that the men who were doing this to these girls were...

00:29:04.000 I think the word used was from the Asian community.

00:29:08.000 I spoke to Anne Cryer's researcher.

00:29:11.000 She told me that the scale of this was far greater than they'd been able to say in the initial press release.

00:29:18.000 They'd only fired over 30 men who were involved.

00:29:22.000 The idea of Young Girls 13, 14...

00:29:27.000 Being befriended by lads who weren't much older than them initially and then introduced to a wider and wider circle of friends, the idea that this was in some way a collective activity, that girls were being passed around men, I'd not encountered anything like that before.

00:29:47.000 I remember so clearly the feeling of how on earth do you report a story that is...

00:29:53.000 A fantasy for the far right.

00:29:56.000 It's everything you could wish for if you're pushing a particular agenda.

00:30:02.000 It's innocent white girls and it's evil dark-skinned men. 1.00

00:30:07.000 The government's failure to control asylum and immigration was a force for bad.

00:30:12.000 Norfolk's fears were not without foundation.

00:30:16.000 The BNP's vote in recent local elections had increased 300-fold in only three years.

00:30:22.000 Winning them seats on councils across northern towns.

00:30:26.000 With a general election looming, immigration, race and asylum were key topics of the day.

00:30:32.000 Yes, it is true that we need to control immigration. 1.00

00:30:36.000 Yes, it is important we discuss it, but it's an issue that should be dealt with, not exploited.

00:30:42.000 For my shame, I allowed my liberal fear about giving succour and credence to the British National Party.

00:30:52.000 To act as a breaker on actually doing my job.

00:30:56.000 Okay, that's an amazing admission by one of the journalists who actually ended up breaking the story.

00:31:00.000 But it wasn't just the journalistic institutions in the UK that decided to ignore this because it might lend credence to quote-unquote right-wing narratives about mass migration from radical Muslim countries.

00:31:11.000 It was members of authority.

00:31:14.000 It was members of the police who not only looked the other way, they blamed the white girls themselves.

00:31:19.000 Suggesting that they had engaged in consensual activity, which is not even legal.

00:31:22.000 They were like 13, 14, 15-year-old girls.

00:31:24.000 And this carried on for literally decades.

00:31:26.000 As Norfolk says, there were cases in which there were Muslim men who had white girls.

00:31:32.000 Those white girls grew up and became moms. 1.00

00:31:35.000 And later their own daughters would be by the children of the Muslim men. 0.99

00:31:38.000 This is something that Andrew Norfolk says in this particular documentary.

00:31:41.000 And the authorities ignored it for years.

00:31:44.000 And it was only...

00:31:45.000 In 2013, 2014, that the authorities really started to take this very seriously.

00:31:50.000 In 2014, there was a state commission report by a senior social worker named Alexis Jay, this is according to Politico, who found that some 1,400 vulnerable children were targeted and abused in Rotherham alone between 1997 and 2013. That's not even in Rochdale, which is the story that was being covered in this particular BBC documentary.

00:32:08.000 There are tons of towns all over Britain where this was happening.

00:32:10.000 In Oldham, in Rochdale, in Rotherham.

00:32:14.000 All over the place.

00:32:16.000 And the politicians, the mainstream politicians, were absolutely complicit in all of this.

00:32:20.000 They ignored it.

00:32:21.000 They refused to take a look at it.

00:32:23.000 In fact, even certain rare labor MPs who actually attempted to cover this were shut down.

00:32:30.000 So Elon Musk, over the weekend, he went after Keir Starmer.

00:32:33.000 And the reason he went after Keir Starmer is because there was a request that there be a federal investigation in Britain into a national investigation into these grooming gangs, a national inquiry.

00:32:47.000 And Starmer's labor government rejected that, instead pointing to a series of existing inquiries on the issue and a 2022 report whose findings are still being implemented.

00:32:56.000 And Musk immediately went after Starmer and he suggested that Starmer was complicit because Starmer, of course, was involved in the Crown Prosecution Service at the time that a lot of this was going on.

00:33:08.000 Thank you.

00:33:09.000 He called him despicable and said he was, quote, deeply complicit in the mass.

00:33:13.000 In exchange for votes.

00:33:16.000 And again, this is a party.

00:33:19.000 This is in fact a party, the Labour Party, that has been complicit in the attempts, if not actually guilty of the attempts, to cover up crimes related to the failures of multiculturalism in Britain.

00:33:34.000 Remember, I mean, it's Sadiq Khan, who's the mayor of London, who's openly calling for the criminalization of quote-unquote Islamophobic speech.

00:33:40.000 He's a member of the Labour government.

00:33:42.000 Here he was this year.

00:33:43.000 One of the things that is coming up over and over again is Islamophobia.

00:33:50.000 And when you can see the stats, you can see the numbers rising, particularly since October the 7th.

00:33:55.000 Although we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking that before October the 7th, this was all heading in the right direction.

00:34:01.000 It's been far too high for far too long.

00:34:04.000 Clearly we need to just say over and over again Islamophobia is intolerable.

00:34:08.000 That's Keir Starmer, by the way.

00:34:09.000 It can never, ever be justified.

00:34:12.000 And we have to continue with a zero-tolerance approach.

00:34:16.000 And I think there's more we can do in government.

00:34:18.000 There's certainly stuff online, which I think needs tackling much more robustly than it is at the moment.

00:34:23.000 What I'm hoping, Keir, is your experience as a prosecutor means you'll be thinking about the strategy we can use to make sure we take action against those who break the law.

00:34:33.000 Okay, that is the most Orwellian crap I have ever heard.

00:34:36.000 I mean, truly Orwellian in Great Britain.

00:34:38.000 That's Keir Starmer, who is the current prime minister, talking to the mayor of London about criminalizing Islamophobia.

00:34:44.000 What are the things you can do as a former prosecutor, says Siddi Khan, the mayor of London, to criminalize Islamophobia, which Keir Starmer says has risen dramatically in the aftermath of October 7th, which, as you will recall, was a mass Islamic terror attack on Jews.

00:34:58.000 Hey, this is where the Labour Party is.

00:35:00.000 You want to know why there's this massive right-wing backlash happening all over the globe, particularly with regard...

00:35:05.000 This would be the reason, because mass migration has not been a boon to the West, not in the modern era.

00:35:13.000 Mass migration is a massive problem because it has been combined not with assimilation, not with economic growth, but with economic stagnation and non-assimilation.

00:35:25.000 And it has been biased toward countries that are exporting people who have no interest in assimilating to Western values, and in fact, many of whom despise Western values.

00:35:34.000 And if you say that sort of stuff out loud in the UK, apparently you get arrested.

00:35:37.000 There's a better shot you'll get arrested in the UK for saying something quote-unquote Islamophobic than apparently for white girls if you're a radical Muslim. 0.70

00:35:44.000 That seems to be the logic over in the UK and has been for quite a while.

00:35:48.000 Markir Starmer has yelled at Elon Musk.

00:35:50.000 Now he's very angry because Elon Musk attacked him.

00:35:52.000 And so he says that Elon Musk is now a member of the far right.

00:35:55.000 Again, this is the labeling process.

00:35:56.000 What really despicable him.

00:35:58.000 By the way, where's the conservative party in the UK on all this?

00:36:01.000 Because this wasn't just a labor problem.

00:36:02.000 This is a Tory problem.

00:36:03.000 In the UK, where are the people who are willing to stand up and say the truth?

00:36:08.000 There's been a lot of talk about Tommy Robinson, who's in jail, and he has said some very true things on this.

00:36:13.000 And Tommy Robinson has his own sort of checkered history as to saying certain things that are not true, but he is right on this, and he has been right on this particular issue as a general matter, and that's the reason that he has been targeted by law enforcement.

00:36:25.000 Also, this stuff has been ginned up.

00:36:27.000 In any case, here is Keir Starmer responding to Elon Musk.

00:36:34.000 If politicians, and I mean politicians, who sat in government for many years, are casual about honesty, decency, truth and the rule of law, calling for inquiries because they want to jump on a bandwagon of the far right, then that affects politics because a robust debate can only be based on the true facts.

00:37:01.000 Ah, it's only based on the true facts, says Keir Starmer.

00:37:04.000 The facts that you're not allowed to acknowledge in Great Britain.

00:37:07.000 In just one second, we'll get to the further consequences of the immigration debate.

00:37:11.000 First, kick off 2025 with 25% off your new Daily Wire Plus annual membership.

00:37:15.000 This year will be one for the history books.

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00:37:55.000 Okay, meanwhile.

00:37:56.000 The matter of mass migration and how it's affected the West isn't, of course, relegated to the United States or to Great Britain.

00:38:01.000 It is also true in Germany.

00:38:03.000 Elon Musk has now endorsed the so-called Alternative for Germany party, the Alternative for Deutschland, AFD. The AFD has been condemned as a quote-unquote neo-Nazi party, but the things that it's arguing for, the AFD today is not a neo-Nazi party.

00:38:17.000 The AFD is arguing in favor of immigration restriction in Germany.

00:38:23.000 In a way that the so-called Conservative Party in Germany has not been, which is why AFD is gaining so much ground.

00:38:28.000 Again, if you won't say the truth, there will be people who will say it, and those people will reap the political benefit of having said the truth.

00:38:34.000 Heather MacDonald writes for City Journal today, The alternative for Germany is a leopard in German political life due to the party's opposition to Germany's lax immigration policies.

00:38:41.000 Germany's Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution, a domestic intelligence agency, has granted itself authority to surveil the party, which it deems a threat to democracy.

00:38:49.000 Germany's other political parties have pledged not to cooperate with the AFD.

00:38:53.000 The AFD is denied committee chairmanships in the national parliament in Berlin.

00:38:56.000 Its numbers would otherwise entitle it to.

00:38:59.000 German courts have almost uniformly rejected the party's efforts to remove these legal and extra legal barriers to normal participation in political life.

00:39:05.000 So why exactly is all this happening?

00:39:07.000 It's because of the mass migration into Germany, starting in 2015, when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel famously announced, we can handle this in response to thousands of Syrians crossing into the country.

00:39:18.000 23% of the German population in 2021 were first or second generation immigrants, and that was before the Ukrainian migration.

00:39:25.000 Over 17% of the German population are first generation immigrants, a higher percentage than in the United States, or less than 14% of the population were foreign-born in 2022. And they have a higher crime rate, and they have serious draws on social benefits, and all the rest of it. 1.00

00:39:42.000 So Elon Musk has already endorsed the AFD, mainly because the conservative party in Germany has decided that they are not going to actually take any of this on.

00:39:50.000 CDU, which is the Christian Democratic Union, is a centrist party.

00:39:53.000 The leader of that party, Frederick Murs, has pledged not to cooperate with what he calls a right-wing extremist party because that would, quote, require selling his party's soul.

00:40:01.000 But the reality is that people are responding to this.

00:40:07.000 People are responding to the lack of support for domestic political institutions on behalf of a multicultural view of the world.

00:40:15.000 So Elon Musk is going to have a sit-down with the leader of the AFD party, a woman named Alice Vidal, possibly on January 10th.

00:40:23.000 There's a lot of consternation about Elon Musk's involvement in foreign politics right now because, of course, he's been speaking out against Keir Starmer in the UK.

00:40:30.000 He's been speaking out against the current administration in Germany in favor of AFD.

00:40:35.000 But he's simply voicing the reality for literally hundreds of millions of people in Europe who have been silenced by the political processes there and also in the United States.

00:40:45.000 Opens another question about immigration in the United States.

00:40:48.000 So, Musk, Trump, the entire right in the United States, totally united on mass migration from countries that do not like the United States.

00:40:56.000 Totally united on these particular issues.

00:40:58.000 Totally united on illegal immigration.

00:40:59.000 By the way, nonetheless, over the break, a vast controversy broke out about H-1B visas.

00:41:04.000 H-1B visas are usually designed for technology companies to import labor from people with college degrees who want to work in tech.

00:41:15.000 People who come and they work in the tech industry, usually it is a pathway toward a green card in the United States, these H-1B visas.

00:41:22.000 And there is some controversy over H-1B visas and the over-application of them, and a lot of that is good-faith political discussion.

00:41:28.000 How can H-1B visas be changed so that they're not being exploited by tech companies simply to bring in lower-wage workers who aren't going to assimilate, for example?

00:41:37.000 However, this broke into the open in, I think, the dumbest possible way.

00:41:42.000 Person who I personally know, actually, his name is Sriram Krishnan, who has worked in the past for everybody from Elon to Marc Andreessen to a bunch of tech bros on the right, was named the AI senior advisor to David Sachs in the new Trump administration.

00:41:59.000 It was a fairly mid-level position.

00:42:01.000 It was sort of a senior advisory position inside the administration.

00:42:04.000 It had nothing to do with immigration.

00:42:05.000 Nothing.

00:42:05.000 It was about AI and the sort of lines that have to be drawn around AI. Well, this launched a thousand think pieces.

00:42:11.000 Because there were certain members of the right, some of them of the fringe right, who decided that he was going to be deciding immigration policy.

00:42:17.000 And not only that, they decided that he was an open borders guy.

00:42:20.000 Now, I know Sriram.

00:42:22.000 He's not, in fact, an open borders guy.

00:42:23.000 He has argued in favor of H-1B visas and for importing foreign talent in the United States so we can brain drain other countries.

00:42:31.000 And so this kind of notion that he's in favor of open borders is really silly.

00:42:35.000 Well, the opposition to Sriram, this notion that this was a foreigner who was going to be, Causing the importation of vast swaths of foreign labor.

00:42:43.000 First of all, again, there are about 85,000 H-1B visas issued every year.

00:42:47.000 You can argue maybe you want it lower.

00:42:48.000 All right.

00:42:48.000 You maybe increase the income limit for people who want to get in on H-1Bs.

00:42:53.000 That's fine, too.

00:42:54.000 We can have those conversations.

00:42:55.000 That was not the conversation that was being had.

00:42:57.000 In fact, the dumbest conversation was being had, as usual in our politics.

00:43:01.000 The argument with regard to H-1Bs that was being made by people who are sort of exclusionary in their immigration viewpoints.

00:43:10.000 We need to stop all immigration, not just mass migration, not just illegal immigration. 0.99

00:43:15.000 We need to stop all migration totally because these are American jobs and we don't need foreigners here. 1.00

00:43:22.000 No more foreigners. 1.00

00:43:23.000 And that rests on a couple of suppositions.

00:43:26.000 That rests on a couple of suppositions.

00:43:28.000 One, that there is such a thing as an American job as opposed to a job that is located in America.

00:43:33.000 And two, that no one can actually become a good American.

00:43:37.000 That if you come in from abroad, If you're from, quote unquote, the wrong country, it's not possible for you to become a good American. 0.95

00:43:41.000 Now, as I say, we should be pretty careful about who we admit to this country. 0.82

00:43:45.000 It's in the interest of the American people to admit people who want to assimilate to Western values or who already hold Western values.

00:43:52.000 Things like free speech and freedom of religion.

00:43:54.000 People who actually want to work for a living and not be dependent on welfare.

00:43:58.000 Who want to form families, join churches, become part of the social fabric.

00:44:02.000 I think we should all be able to agree on that sort of stuff.

00:44:09.000 Close all the borders, even sort of the most qualified immigrants coming in. 1.00

00:44:13.000 One is, again, this idea that people can't culturally assimilate, which I think is not true.

00:44:19.000 I mean, again, there are some people who cannot, but there are many who can.

00:44:22.000 And two, that there are these things called American jobs, and that these American jobs must be reserved for Americans.

00:44:29.000 Now, I think that not only is this economically ignorant, it's counterproductive.

00:44:33.000 So Steve Bannon has articulated this position.

00:44:35.000 I think the best of anybody who's articulating it right now.

00:44:38.000 He did an interview with the Free Press in which he sort of expressed his desire to close all immigration.

00:44:45.000 I'm also for big restrictions on legal immigration. 0.97

00:44:47.000 Until Silicon Valley, until these places have, I don't know, 20% African American and 20% Hispanic and kids that can go to college and every college you go to, every engineering school you go to is flooded with foreign students taking American jobs. 0.83

00:45:03.000 I don't agree with that.

00:45:04.000 American jobs should be for American citizens.

00:45:08.000 Okay, again, so again, there's the notion of American jobs, and you can see he's using this very bizarre formula where all these quote-unquote American jobs also have to be representative of the American demographic, which actually is a DEI left-wing argument.

00:45:19.000 It's the argument that's made by people like Ibram X. Kendi.

00:45:22.000 If 20% of the population is black and 20% of the jobs aren't black, that means some sort of racism is occurring.

00:45:29.000 Okay, so there are a few problems with this.

00:45:31.000 Number one, there is no such thing as an American job.

00:45:33.000 There's just a job that is in America.

00:45:35.000 And the question is, Two-fold.

00:45:37.000 One, who should fill that job?

00:45:39.000 And two, how do you keep that job in America?

00:45:41.000 Because it turns out that there is no job being a baseline-level programmer for a million dollars a year in America.

00:45:47.000 Because that job doesn't exist anywhere.

00:45:48.000 And if you try to make that job exist in America, that job is going to disappear and it's going to go elsewhere where you can pay somebody $100,000 a year to be a programmer.

00:45:55.000 This is particularly true in the mobile age of the internet, where location is not necessarily where you have to be located for the job anymore.

00:46:05.000 Then there's the stupid counterargument that's being made.

00:46:07.000 So there are some people who made a dumb counterargument.

00:46:08.000 So there's the dumb argument.

00:46:09.000 The dumb argument was that they're just these American jobs.

00:46:12.000 We protect the American jobs by shutting the borders. 0.93

00:46:14.000 That's called economic autarky, and it is generally a failure.

00:46:17.000 Because when you artificially limit the supply of labor, what you end up doing is pushing up the price of labor.

00:46:22.000 And a few things happen.

00:46:24.000 One, inflation.

00:46:25.000 Two, prices go up to the point where they are not competitive.

00:46:29.000 With imports from other places, and so companies in America go out of business, this generally leads to either outsourcing or automation.

00:46:35.000 This is true across industries in the United States.

00:46:37.000 It's true across the world.

00:46:38.000 This is how markets work.

00:46:40.000 So if you want to make the case that we shouldn't be importing labor to marginally lower the labor costs for Silicon Valley, and instead we should be recruiting Americans, I agree with that.

00:46:51.000 I totally agree with that.

00:46:51.000 And I think we should be building programs that specifically go and recruit Americans to fill these jobs.

00:46:56.000 Also, there are, in fact, jobs.

00:46:59.000 Where immigrants who are coming to the United States, brain-draining other countries, they're coming in, and they can fill those jobs, and they're maybe the best qualified person to fill those jobs. 1.00

00:47:12.000 Now, again, if you want to increase the level of pay necessary for an H-1B visa, right now it's $100,000, you want to increase that higher, that's fine.

00:47:21.000 We get to pick the cream of the crop.

00:47:23.000 You only get to come in the country if you're a person capable of earning $300,000 a year.

00:47:27.000 Now, you want to do that because you want to, quote-unquote, reserve the other jobs for Americans? 0.69

00:47:31.000 That's fine.

00:47:31.000 You have to recognize there are downstream effects to this, economically speaking.

00:47:35.000 That that is, in fact, like all tariffs, a subsidy to certain groups of the population at the cost of the rest of the population, where prices go up and outsourcing takes place, and all the rest.

00:47:46.000 This is why, for example, Elon has defended H-1B visas.

00:47:50.000 Elon says that he would like to brain drain other countries.

00:47:53.000 He would like to bring in the best labor.

00:47:55.000 He wants Americans to get as many American jobs, jobs in America, as possible. 0.77

00:48:00.000 But you can't just magically determine what the pay level is for a job.

00:48:03.000 That's not the way that markets work.

00:48:05.000 And if you try to do that, that's going to have significant externalities that are quite bad for the American economy and for American competitiveness more broadly.

00:48:12.000 Now, there was a really stupid counterargument that started to be made by some.

00:48:15.000 And that was that the reason we need to import labor is because American culture is somehow insufficient.

00:48:20.000 Now, there are some Americans who are lazy.

00:48:24.000 There are some Americans who grow up in broken homes.

00:48:27.000 There are some Americans who have poor educations.

00:48:29.000 And we should fix all those things, obviously.

00:48:32.000 And there are plenty of qualified Americans for a lot of these jobs.

00:48:34.000 And we should go out of our way to try and recruit those Americans before we rely on foreign labor. 0.93

00:48:41.000 And all of that is fair.

00:48:42.000 But again, it all gets reduced to kind of the dumbest possible arguments.

00:48:45.000 And this is the thing to which I object.

00:48:49.000 And there are a bunch of things we should be able to agree on.

00:48:50.000 One, illegal immigration is wrong. 1.00

00:48:52.000 Two, Mass migration is particularly problematic today.

00:48:57.000 Now, the United States has historically always had a sort of fraught relationship with mass migration.

00:49:01.000 That goes back to waves of people coming in from Ireland and from Italy and from Germany and from Sweden and from China and from Eastern Europe and Russia.

00:49:09.000 All throughout American history, there's been great trepidation about mass migration.

00:49:14.000 That is true.

00:49:15.000 Also, it happens to be that in a system like the United States used to be, Where you're expected to assimilate, one, and two, there were no substantial welfare systems.

00:49:23.000 What you ended up doing is acting like a magnet to the iron filings of the people who are the most risk-taking, most entrepreneurial from other countries.

00:49:33.000 It wasn't just they were coming to the United States because they were poor, although many of them were.

00:49:36.000 It was because they were willing to give up what they had in their homeland to come to a place where if they failed, there was no backup system.

00:49:43.000 This is one of the things about American immigration historically.

00:49:46.000 And then the immigration bargain changed in the United States.

00:49:49.000 That immigration bargain started to change with massive welfare systems that now immigrants could take advantage of, and now you had to balance who should get in and who should not get in. 0.71

00:49:57.000 It used to be if somebody got in and they failed economically, it wasn't like the state and the taxpayer had to pick them up.

00:50:03.000 Now once you establish welfare systems, that all changes.

00:50:06.000 And then it massively changes again in 1965, when Democrats pass an Immigration Act that fundamentally shifts where immigrants are coming from.

00:50:14.000 It used to be they mostly came from Europe.

00:50:15.000 After 1965, they started to come mostly from Latin and South America.

00:50:19.000 And that was an actual stated goal of people who sponsored it, like, for example, Senator Ted Kennedy.

00:50:24.000 And this has changed the nature of mass migration.

00:50:27.000 It's been a huge problem.

00:50:28.000 Combine that with the left's insistence that multiculturalism means that you never have to assimilate.

00:50:33.000 And now you got a real problem.

00:50:34.000 You got a problem of ethnic enclaves who are not interested in assimilating to American values at all. 0.97

00:50:39.000 However, those are all the things that we can agree on before we even get to high-skilled immigration.

00:50:44.000 Again, when it comes to high-skilled immigration, there are basically, again, two cases against high-skilled immigration.

00:50:49.000 The cultural and the economic.

00:50:50.000 The cultural case is, well, people might come here, they might not assimilate, or they go back to their...

00:50:54.000 Fine.

00:50:55.000 So make it that they have to assimilate to get in. 0.80

00:50:57.000 And make it more restrictive to people who want to assimilate and want to gain citizenship.

00:51:01.000 Fine.

00:51:01.000 The second case is the economic case.

00:51:03.000 This is the one that's really dicey.

00:51:05.000 Again, there will be downstream effects to economic protectionism and autarky.

00:51:08.000 Pretending not is simply blinding yourself to the realities of economics.

00:51:15.000 We need more people like Elon Musk in the United States.

00:51:18.000 Barring Elon Musk from the United States would not have been good for the United States.

00:51:21.000 We need more people like Sergey Brin in the United States, founding giant companies in the United States.

00:51:25.000 We need unicorn founders in the United States.

00:51:27.000 Again, you want to raise the bar as to who gets in, that's fine.

00:51:29.000 But we do need those people.

00:51:31.000 And if we don't gain them, other people will.

00:51:34.000 Other countries will.

00:51:35.000 And then we'll lose.

00:51:36.000 And I like America winning, which is, by the way, why Donald Trump agrees with this.

00:51:40.000 Donald Trump says that he supports immigration visas.

00:51:44.000 He said, I have a lot of H-1Bs on my property. 0.99

00:51:46.000 He said, I've always liked the visas.

00:51:47.000 I've always been in favor of the visas.

00:51:48.000 That's why we have them.

00:51:50.000 I've been a believer in H-1B. I've used it many times.

00:51:52.000 It's a great program.

00:51:54.000 And I think that there's going to be a lot of Nixon going to China in this administration for a lot of people who seem to believe that Donald Trump mirrors their more sort of nationalist predilections.

00:52:06.000 Donald Trump is utilitarian.

00:52:07.000 He wants wins for the United States.

00:52:09.000 And that means a thriving economy.

00:52:11.000 That means Americans doing well across the board, not just in particular sectors.

00:52:16.000 It'll be fascinating to see how it all plays out.

00:52:18.000 And meanwhile, Joe Biden is going out with a whimper, not a bang.

00:52:24.000 Goodness gracious.

00:52:25.000 So he has decided that he's basically going to find every despicable person in the United States and then give those people a presidential medal of freedom.

00:52:31.000 Why the hell not?

00:52:32.000 You know, got to leave it all on the field if you're Joe Biden.

00:52:34.000 At this point, F it to life.

00:52:36.000 You're done.

00:52:37.000 So Joe Biden has decided, among others, That recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom ought to be Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and Bill Nye the Science Guy, among others.

00:52:48.000 Which is pretty incredible.

00:52:50.000 George Soros has single-handedly helped destroy the law enforcement mechanisms of the United States.

00:52:55.000 He has funded left-wing prosecutors who have destroyed the ability to prosecute criminals across the urban areas of the United States.

00:53:02.000 He has funded every far-left cause he can find in the United States, undermining Basic American principles, George Soros is a disaster area.

00:53:10.000 So, of course, Joe Biden is giving him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which, of course, is also designed to bribe his son, Alex Soros, who is actually the person who showed up to pick it up.

00:53:19.000 Alex Soros is also kind of famous for tweeting out photos with prominent Democratic politicians standing high above the city of New York, where all of these politicians come to kiss his ring.

00:53:29.000 Hillary Clinton also showed up to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

00:53:33.000 Presumably for lying about Benghazi, shredding all of her documents and all of the rest, as well as initiating Russiagate.

00:53:39.000 That's what her campaign did. 1.00

00:53:42.000 Other people included humanitarian and chef Jose Andres, who has lied repeatedly about the humanitarian situation in Gaza and allowed his World Central Kitchen to unfortunately be used as a prop by members of Hamas.

00:53:59.000 Bill Nye, the science guy, Who's mostly famous for now becoming a left-wing kook.

00:54:04.000 And some others.

00:54:06.000 So, so many deserving.

00:54:09.000 Liz Cheney also.

00:54:10.000 He awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to 20 recipients, including members of the House January 6th Committee, as a final slap at President Trump.

00:54:18.000 Also over the break, by the way, he decided to commute the sentences of a bunch of death row prisoners.

00:54:22.000 37 out of 40 death row prisoners.

00:54:24.000 Apparently, certain victims just don't count, according to President Biden.

00:54:28.000 So President Biden granted clemency to 37 of the 40 federal inmates facing death sentences.

00:54:33.000 The only three inmates who did not receive clemency are the convicted murderer in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, the gunman in the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, that was the white supremacist shooting, and the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, the terrorist.

00:54:47.000 But apparently everybody else who committed murder, all those people are basically going to stay alive on death row now.

00:54:55.000 Now, if Biden were truly principled about the death penalty, he'd commute it for everybody.

00:55:00.000 So he's not.

00:55:02.000 He just thinks that some crimes are worse than others, and apparently murdering little girls is not on the same level as up a synagogue in Pittsburgh, which is kind of an amazing statement. 0.98

00:55:10.000 As a final slap, of course, Joe Biden is also going to be putting in place a ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in vast areas ahead of the Trump term.

00:55:18.000 Remember, Kamala Harris ran as somebody who is not going to fight fracking.

00:55:21.000 So did Joe Biden, right?

00:55:22.000 They were going to open America's energy exploration.

00:55:25.000 Wrong.

00:55:25.000 He's a liar.

00:55:26.000 According to Reuters, Joe Biden will ban new offshore oil and gas development along most U.S. coastlines, a decision President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to boost domestic energy production, may find it difficult to reverse.

00:55:37.000 So Biden's going to use his authority under the 70-year-old Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect all federal waters off the east and west coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and portions of the northern Bering Sea.

00:55:47.000 In Alaska, the ban affects 625 Absolutely ridiculous.

00:55:55.000 Absolutely terrible.

00:55:56.000 The problem is the Lands Act, which allows presidents to withdraw areas from mineral leasing and drilling, does not grant them legal authority to overturn prior bans.

00:56:04.000 That order from a court came in 2019 as a response to Trump trying to reverse a Barack Obama ban on drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic Ocean.

00:56:14.000 Another disgraceful move by a horrible president.

00:56:18.000 Joe Biden is going to go down in history.

00:56:19.000 As probably our second worst president.

00:56:22.000 I say probably because there is one other person on the list and that person died over the break.

00:56:28.000 That'd be Jimmy Carter.

00:56:28.000 We're going to get to Jimmy Carter's legacy in just a moment.

00:56:31.000 First, if you're not a member, become a member.

00:56:33.000 Use code Shapiro.

00:56:33.000 Check out for two months free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - January 06, 2025

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