Are things going up? Are things going down? What the hell is going on? Plus, we ll get to a new poll showing where Americans agree and disagree, and a peace proposal on the table from the Trump administration with Russia and Ukraine.
00:00:06.000Plus, we'll get to a new poll showing where Americans agree and disagree and a peace proposal on the table from the Trump administration with Russia and Ukraine first.
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00:00:26.000Well, the fate of the Trump administration and perhaps Republicans in Congress as well is tied to American sentiment about the economy.
00:00:33.000And right now, nobody knows what the hell is going on or which way is up.
00:00:38.000Yesterday, according to the Wall Street Journal, stocks surrendered gains and closed sharply lower after a whirlwind day of trading that began after NVIDIA posted strong results.
00:00:46.000The NASDAQ Composite led indices lower after being up on the day more than 2%, and then it ended up closing 2.2% lower.
00:00:52.000NVIDIA itself actually finished the day down 3.2%.
00:00:56.000So they reported an actual profit of something like $62 billion, and they ended up down on the day.
00:01:09.000Again, whenever there's a transformative technology, people seem to think that just because there is a bubble, that means that the underlying technology is not transformative.
00:01:18.000If you look back at the history of investment, there is always a speculative bubble around brand new technologies.
00:01:24.000And then failing companies tend to get cleaned out.
00:01:26.000And you remember the successful companies.
00:01:28.000So you remember Henry Ford because Ford ended up being a wildly successful company.
00:01:32.000But there were dozens of other automobile companies that were startups at the time that ended up crapping out.
00:01:37.000In fact, Ford had several of them before he actually started the Ford Motor Company.
00:01:41.000The same thing was true of the internet.
00:01:42.000When the internet bubble burst in 2000, everybody remembers Pets.com as sort of the thing that represented the era.
00:01:49.000But what we should remember is that actually the internet has completely transformed everybody's life.
00:01:59.000The stock market bubble of 2000 did not mean the internet wasn't important.
00:02:02.000There were idiots like Paul Krugman who tried to suggest that it wasn't important.
00:02:05.000It was very important, but that is not mutually exclusive to a bubble.
00:02:09.000And that's also true with regard to AI.
00:02:11.000So people are looking at the current AI boom and they're thinking that at some point here, it has to crap out.
00:02:16.000Some of these companies are just not going to be able to develop the kind of margins or gross income that justifies the investment they are currently making.
00:02:25.000Open AI being the most obvious example of a company that is not publicly traded, but has so many contracts with publicly traded companies ranging from Oracle to NVIDIA that if it craps out, then that could take down a bunch of companies with it or at least severely damage their market capitalization.
00:02:42.000According to the New York Times, it would not be a stretch to describe this period of hyperactive growth in the tech industry as a historic moment.
00:02:48.000NVIDIA said on Wednesday its quarterly profit had jumped to nearly $32 billion, up 65% from a year earlier and 245% from the year before that.
00:02:58.000Just three weeks ago, NVIDIA became the first publicly traded company to be worth $5 trillion, meaning NVIDIA is now worth more according to the stock market than the entire economy of Germany.
00:03:08.000But some industry insiders say there is something ominous lurking behind all the bubbly news.
00:03:12.000They are looking at the eye-popping growth and the same stunning wealth creation as Jensen Huang, and they see a house of cards.
00:03:18.000Even NVIDIA's growth can be explained away because, again, demand for the company's chips doesn't mean that people want to use AI.
00:03:24.000It means that companies are building giant AI systems in the hope that somebody will pay to use them eventually.
00:03:32.000At some point, the productivity generation from AI is going to have to start matching up to the investments that are being made.
00:03:40.000Evan Conrad, a chief executive of San Francisco Compute, a startup specializing in AI, says Stargate alone, if it does actually reach $500 billion, would be the largest infrastructure project in the world several times over.
00:03:51.000Stargate is, of course, a $500 billion data center project in the United States, enough to fund the Manhattan Project 15 times over.
00:04:01.000It could pay for the entire Apollo Moon program twice.
00:04:05.000So the amount of investment at some point is going to have to be channeled into actual gains.
00:04:11.000Goldman Sachs estimates NVIDIA, for example, will make 15% of all of its sales next year from what critics call circular deals.
00:04:19.000And so people are betting on whether there's going to be an AI boom that justifies all this or an AI bus.
00:04:24.000And we don't know which way it's going, which is why people are freaking out.
00:04:27.000They're also freaking out because if AI does succeed, there will be some temporary job dislocation.
00:04:32.000There are a lot of jobs that will become obsolete.
00:04:35.000If you want to hear me discuss this with Matt Walsh, Andrew Clave and Michael Molls, go listen to our episode of Friendly Fire.
00:04:52.000Your grandparents are working many more hours than you work.
00:04:55.000But it also means that there is, with technological change, significant job dislocation, people losing the kind of jobs they've historically held.
00:05:02.000And then they have to find new jobs, retrain.
00:05:06.000One of the points that I made to Matt Walsh, who's very critical of AI, is that if you named the jobs that many people hold in today's economy to people living in 1997, when the internet was first really getting started, if people in 1997 say, hey, this is going to destroy a huge number of jobs, for example, if you're able to buy everything from Amazon, a bunch of small mom and pop shops might go out of business, which is true.
00:05:29.000So what's going to happen to those jobs?
00:05:31.000Well, you know, they and their kids are going to end up doing online marketing, social media management.
00:05:38.000They are going to end up having small micro businesses that use shipping via Amazon, right?
00:05:44.000All these things would have been unthinkable in 1997.
00:06:42.000The inflationary policy that was pursued in bipartisan fashion, by the way, in 2020 during COVID, when we had a massive artificial shutdown and the government paid everybody to stay home, was then followed on in 2021 and 2022 by even more massively inflationary policy under President Biden.
00:07:01.000Now, what that led to is an increase in the price of pretty much everything, but particularly housing, because when people didn't know what to do with their money, they figured, I'm going to plow that into the housing market.
00:07:11.000Because historically, the housing market has been an excellent repository of wealth.
00:07:16.000The way that you got wealthy is you bought a house, and then if you got richer, maybe sold that house and bought another house that was bigger and kept upgrading your wealth level.
00:07:38.000New York is really, really unaffordable.
00:07:40.000And we talked yesterday on the program about many of the reasons that is.
00:07:43.000Regulations, rent freezes, all of that makes it really unpalatable to build new units in New York.
00:07:48.000And many of the units that already exist, it costs more to rent them out to somebody than it would be to keep them empty.
00:07:54.000Like the maintenance costs on it, the taxes on it actually cost more to rent than to just keep it empty.
00:08:00.000So you have 50,000 so-called ghost apartments in New York City.
00:08:03.000Okay, but this is also obscuring a simple truth.
00:08:07.000In many parts of the country, the prices in housing have been on the decline, not the incline.
00:08:12.000Already coming up, we'll get to some things people think about the economy that just are not quite true.
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00:10:24.000So I asked our sponsors and friends over at Comet, which is a project of perplexity, have housing prices gone down in populous areas leaving aside New York, Chicago, LA, and Seattle over the last year.
00:10:37.000And according to Comet, housing prices have declined over the last year in several populous metropolitan areas outside of New York, Chicago, L.A., and Seattle, with the largest decreases seen mostly in Florida, Texas, and some southern and western cities.
00:10:48.000Now, what you'll notice about that is those are all red areas, where, by the way, population is increasing.
00:10:53.000So when you have areas like LA or Chicago or Seattle or New York where population is leaving and the housing prices are increasing, you're reducing demand and yet somehow you are still having the prices go up.
00:11:12.000According to Perplexity, according to our sponsors over a comet, Austin saw median listing prices fall by nearly 15% over the last three years and about 6% year over year.
00:11:23.000Miami's prices have dropped 19% over the last three years and roughly 4% to 4.6% in the past 12 months.
00:11:30.000Because when there was a gigantic rush during COVID to Florida and to Texas, then one of the things that happened is the housing prices went up, right?
00:11:55.000Tampa has experienced a 6.2% year-over-year decline.
00:11:58.000Dallas and Houston saw home values decrease by 3.9% and 1.9%, respectively.
00:12:03.000Atlanta recorded a roughly 3.1% decrease in home values.
00:12:08.000There are a bunch of areas actually that have experienced year-over-year declines between 0.9% and 4.3%.
00:12:16.000Many of the areas in the Rust Belt and the Midwest saw home prices increase, but some of that is because a lot of those home prices were already fairly cheap.
00:12:25.000If you were looking at a house in Cincinnati, it's not going to cost you what a house in, say, New York would cost.
00:12:30.000Nationally, U.S. home values have actually remained mostly flat over the last year.
00:12:35.000So it's important to look at the contrasting areas.
00:12:40.000Saying that it's unaffordable to live in New York City does not mean it is just as unaffordable to live in Austin.
00:12:45.000Now, that doesn't mean there aren't affordability problems in Austin.
00:12:47.000Groceries, particularly, have been a major issue.
00:12:50.000And again, that's because the value of your dollar just is not worth what it once was because there are more dollars chasing the same number of goods.
00:12:58.000As Milton Freeman famously said over and over and over, inflation is anywhere and everywhere, a monetary phenomenon.
00:13:04.000What he meant is you really get inflation as a factor of how much money the government is pumping into the economy.
00:13:11.000With that said, having to explain this, like explaining this in real ways is the job of the Trump administration.
00:13:19.000And one of the things that they are falling into is this routine where they either say that people's feelings are fake, which, you know, I can say because, again, that's my show.
00:13:27.000And I can say that facts don't care about your feelings, but politicians, feelings very often don't care about their facts.
00:13:32.000Howard Luttnick, the commerce secretary, he's been saying that the economic dyspepsia is fake news.
00:13:37.000Well, you know, it may be true that much of what is being distributed about the economy is fake news.
00:13:41.000The dyspepsia is not fake news by the polling data.
00:13:46.000You've got so many factories being built.
00:13:50.000You know, I know people talk about when the factories come online, but the construction jobs alone, you can't invest $3 trillion a year without driving our GDP off the charts.
00:14:04.000You're going to see fours, you're going to see fives, and you're going to see 6% GDP growth under this president because the factory's coming home.
00:14:29.000By historic rates, that is actually close to full employment.
00:14:33.000And in many of the high-tech industries, we actually still have more job openings than we have job applicants in some of these areas.
00:14:40.000Meanwhile, the vice president is begging Americans for patience, which, you know, the problem with begging people for patience is that they are not patient.
00:14:49.000And even though we've made incredible progress, we understand that there's a lot more work to do.
00:14:55.000And the thing that I'd ask for the American people is a little bit of patience.
00:14:58.000This economy was not harmed in 10 months.
00:15:02.000It took a deliberate four-year administration that was making life harder for everyday Americans, that was importing foreign workers instead of giving jobs to American workers, that was over-regulating, over-taxing, overspending.
00:15:18.000And as much progress as we've made, it's going to take a little bit of time for every American to feel that economic boom.
00:15:25.000Okay, so we will see if that is true or if that is not true.
00:15:28.000Okay, but one of the things you actually do have to explain to the American people comes with some strings, right?
00:15:34.000If you explain, as I just did, that the economy is heterogeneous, that living in Florida and Texas is not the same thing as living in New York, and that blanket solutions are not going to work the same way.
00:15:44.000That is a politically difficult thing to do, but it is a politically necessary thing to do because otherwise people are going to look at the solutions that you are proposing.
00:15:52.000And when they don't work the way they think they should, when the housing affordability crisis in New York does not alleviate, they blame you for that.
00:15:59.000You see some of this in the marketing from the administration.
00:16:02.000So the Department of Homeland Security, they put out a tweet yesterday in which they basically suggested that every single problem in the United States can be attributed to illegal immigration.
00:16:12.000Now, there are a lot of problems in the United States that can be attributed to illegal immigration, but to sort of use the hammer available to treat every single thing as a nail is a mistake and no one's going to buy it.
00:16:24.000They put out a tweet yesterday that said rent is too high.
00:16:26.000There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country.
00:16:29.000Okay, so first of all, there is some truth that there is upward housing pressure based on the population.
00:16:46.000There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country.
00:16:48.000Again, higher demand is true, but there aren't enough jobs.
00:16:52.000There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country.
00:16:54.000Women don't feel safe walking down the street.
00:16:56.000There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country.
00:16:58.000Okay, again, I don't, I'm not even arguing that criminal illegal immigration does not actually drive up prices or create traffic or put pressures on the healthcare system.
00:17:35.000The administration is deporting some people, for sure.
00:17:39.000We have seen one of the tremendous achievements of the administration is that the job growth that has occurred under the Trump administration is going to American-born workers.
00:17:47.000It is not going to foreign-born workers, illegal immigrants, and the rest.
00:17:53.000But promising a panacea is a mistake because then people expect more than they are likely to receive.
00:17:58.000Now, with that said, Democrats do the exact same thing.
00:18:00.000Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, yesterday, he suggested, so if JD Vance is suggesting that home ownership is unaffordable due to illegal immigration, which again, maybe on the margin is true, but that's really not why housing is unaffordable as a general rule.
00:18:15.000Hakeem Jeffries is saying that home ownership is unaffordable because of climate change, which is just insane.
00:18:20.000Home ownership has become unaffordable in far too many places, ripping away the possibility of home ownership for millions of Americans.
00:18:34.000And we know that home ownership has always been central to the great American dream.
00:18:41.000And so it's incredibly important that we deal with the climate crisis because there is only one earth.
00:19:02.000Folks, there's stuff that's solvable and there's stuff that is not solvable.
00:19:05.000And there are solutions being provided that are real and then there are ones that are not particularly real.
00:19:10.000When it comes to the economy, the best thing the government can do is get the hell out of the way as both a mid-range and a long-range strategy.
00:19:18.000That is the best thing the government can do.
00:19:19.000You can always have a short-range strategy, a sugar high where the government pumps money into an economy or the government subsidizes an industry or the government regulates out of existence some sort of practice.
00:19:32.000They are short-term, temporary solutions that actually exacerbate the mid-term to long-term problems.
00:19:37.000And until somebody in politics says the truth about the way the free markets work, things are likely in the midterm and the long range to actually get worse, not better.
00:19:45.000Many of the solutions that Trump is actually pursuing are free market solutions.
00:19:49.000And those are the ones you should be talking about because they are, in fact, working.
00:19:52.000They are, in fact, doing the thing they are supposed to be doing.
00:19:54.000Alrighty, coming up, we'll be joined by Stephen Moore, economic advisor to the president of the United States.
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00:21:54.000Joining me on the line to discuss is Stephen Moore, former economic advisor to President Trump and co-founder of Unleash Prosperity, an organization dedicated to educating policymakers and the public about government policies that have been proven to maximize economic growth.
00:22:07.000Of course, he's the host also of the More Money Show.
00:22:09.000Stephen, thanks so much for taking the time.
00:22:32.000Well, you just used the word bamboozled, and I like that word a lot to describe what's going on in terms of the media perception of the economy and frankly, a lot of Americans.
00:22:42.000So let me start with the very big picture, if I may.
00:22:45.000And one of the reasons I love doing your show in particular, Ben, is because you're reaching an age group that I don't speak to very often.
00:23:38.000I think anybody who gets off their buff and gets off their computer games and watching TV and goes out and get a job, they're out there.
00:23:48.000And one other quick, quick piece of advice to people under the age of especially 25, the best thing you can do is get a job, even if you're 19, 20 years old, 17 years old.
00:23:59.000The younger you get your first job, Ben, the more successful you will be in your life.
00:24:06.000So let's talk about some of the issues that people are themselves apparently feeling and talking about.
00:24:11.000The big one, of course, is the continuation of inflation.
00:24:14.000Obviously, the rates of inflation have come down radically under President Trump.
00:24:17.000And the thing that I keep talking about on the show is that it is true that President Trump has sort of stabilized the inflation rate.
00:24:24.000But the thing that people are comparing the prices to are not the prices last year.
00:24:27.000What they're actually comparing the prices to in their heads are prices from 2020.
00:24:30.000And those prices are just not coming back because the only way to get those prices to come back would presumably be an actual economic downturn involving significant unemployment because we blew too much money in the economy.
00:24:41.000Unless you're going to suck amazing amounts of money out of the economy, those prices are basically going to stay where they are.
00:24:46.000And that is, in fact, Joe Biden's fault and not President Trump's fault.
00:24:51.000So first of all, let's address the first point that you make, which is that we just did some numbers that unleashed prosperity starting from the beginning of the pandemic, COVID, to today, 87.5%, almost 90%, 87.5% of the inflation that you're feeling when you go to the grocery store, when you pay your rent, your utility bill, your medical bill, 87.5% of that happened under Biden, not Trump.
00:25:20.000And Trump is right to say, look, I inherited this inflation invest.
00:25:48.000We want to get it down to the Fed target, which is 2%, which is the sort of rated growth of the overall U.S. economy.
00:25:54.000But Trump is right to say, look, I didn't cause this crisis.
00:25:57.000And especially, by the way, Ben, in the case of healthcare, where if you really want to see a villain here for the high cost of living, look at President Barack Obama, who said that his signature achievement as president was to, you remember this, they passed Obamacare.
00:26:13.000And people like me said this is going to blow a lid off of spending.
00:26:18.000It's going to bankrupt the country and bankrupt the healthcare system.
00:26:33.000So, you know, there are some other questions with regard to inflation that I have.
00:26:36.000And one of them is the president has constantly called for a lowering of the interest rates.
00:26:41.000And to me, I'm talking with investors.
00:26:43.000It doesn't seem like there is a lack of liquidity in the economy.
00:26:46.000Typically, you lower the interest rates when there's a lack of liquidity, when it feels like there's an economic contraction that's happening.
00:26:51.000You're not going to lower the interest rates when the economy is running hot and when the stock market continues to churn and when the inflation rate is still riding about 50% higher than the Fed's target rate.
00:27:10.000The attempt to push the Federal Reserve into lowering those interest rates as though what we really have is a problem to spur liquidity and consumption.
00:27:19.000Why is the president still pushing that?
00:27:21.000Wouldn't he be better off at this point, basically just saying, listen, the Fed policy is what the Fed policy is, and let's work on deregulation and freer trade, for example.
00:27:30.000So, let me put this in a big broad perspective because I'm what you call a supply sider with Art Laffer and Larry Kudlow and Ronald Reagan and Steve Forbes.
00:27:40.000And the reason they call us supply siders is that we believe that the best solution for almost every problem in the economy is to grow the economy, increase the supply of goods and services, increase production, because it's very simple.
00:27:53.000And it's amazing how many even PhD economists don't understand this universal truth.
00:27:58.000Ben, if the economy produces more apples, what happens to the price of apples?
00:29:46.000Well, sometimes there's a lot of idiotic thinking in Washington.
00:29:49.000We've got to grow our way out of this.
00:29:50.000I'm very proud of the fact that because of so many of Trump's great policies on reducing taxes, reducing regulations, producing more energy, we are seeing we're starting to see the inflation rate go down and we've achieved almost 4% economic growth.
00:30:06.000That's a phenomenal rate of growth over the last six months.
00:30:10.000So meanwhile, there are a lot of worries, obviously, about AI and not just about AI itself.
00:30:14.000I tend to be an optimist when it comes to tech, but about whether we are actually in a stock market bubble, because the vast majority of gains in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, for example, have accrued to the Mag 7.
00:30:25.000The Mag 7 represent an extraordinary percentage at this point of all stock market growth over the course of the last several years.
00:30:32.000Obviously, NVIDIA's numbers are eye-watering and eye popping.
00:30:35.000According to the markets, the company NVIDIA is now worth more than the entire economy of the country of Germany.
00:30:41.000And so when you look at NVIDIA and then you look at the sort of circular deals that are being made between, say, NVIDIA and private companies like OpenAI, where OpenAI is talking about expending $1.4 trillion in capital over the next 10 years just on data centers and data infrastructure, and they generated a $20 billion return this year, there are a lot of people, including me, who are pretty nervous that we may be in an AI bubble.
00:31:04.000Not to say that AI isn't important, but two things can be true at once.
00:31:07.000AI can be really important and transformative.
00:31:09.000And also, whenever you get a new technology, there tends to be a lot of speculation in that area.
00:31:14.000And then it tends to consolidate down into the most productive companies.
00:31:19.000So would we be surprised if this happened with AI as well?
00:31:23.000Well, I could probably talk to you for about 45 minutes about AI.
00:31:26.000And there's a lot in that question, but I'll just make a couple of observations on this.
00:31:30.000Number one, I mean, I'm so envious of younger people like you.
00:31:35.000I'm 65, but especially people in their 20s and 30s, you're going to see the most amazing economic transformation over the next 25 or 30 years.
00:32:17.000This is very much like the revolution that happened in agriculture 100 to 150 years ago, where it used to be 35 out of every 100 Americans was working in the fields.
00:32:26.000And now two out of every 100 work in the fields and we produce more food than we can possibly consume.
00:32:32.000And so this is going to be an exciting period ahead.
00:32:36.000You asked the question of whether there's a bubble, maybe.
00:32:39.000You know, I'm a little nervous about it too.
00:32:45.000We have seven companies, the magnificent seven.
00:32:49.000You mentioned a few of them, Amazon, Apple, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Tesla, Meta, that are worth more than all of the companies in Europe combined.
00:33:01.000So we need to dominate the AI and robotics age the way we've dominated the internet age.
00:34:06.000And so there is real concern, and I understand it on an individual level about the job dislocation that's going to happen, right?
00:34:13.000There's no question that, for example, automating trucks is going to make things more efficient.
00:34:17.000It's going to bring down prices for the vast majority of Americans.
00:34:19.000Where do the truck drivers go is always the question.
00:34:22.000And so, you know, I think that this is one of the dangers for the Trump administration or for any administration that's in power, because there is no, the creative destruction that Chumper describes when it comes to markets is real.
00:34:33.000And there is a destruction half to that creative destruction, meaning, you know, in 10 years, all those people will have new jobs.
00:35:03.000And that's what's essentially happening with this, just like it happened with the age of the tractor and then the age of the computer and now the age of AI.
00:35:13.000I'm very concerned about our education system.
00:35:17.000I don't think we're preparing young people for this revolution.
00:35:20.000I mean, you've got kids that are graduating with political science degrees and psychology degrees and ethnic study degrees.
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00:37:08.000Okay, well, some of this is likely to come to a head today when Zorhan Mamdani, the communist mayor of New York, is to arrive at the White House.
00:37:15.000That is happening around 3 p.m. today.
00:37:18.000Apparently, they're going to be meeting behind closed doors.
00:37:20.000So it won't be one of those open sessions like with Vladimir Zelensky earlier in the year, which would have been the most amusing form of all of this.
00:37:26.000Zorhan Mamdani says he wants to speak plainly to President Trump about affordability.
00:37:31.000This is according to the New York Post.
00:37:33.000Mamdani gave a City Hall Park news conference on Thursday.
00:37:37.000He said, I have many disagreements with the president.
00:37:38.000I believe we should be relentless and pursue all avenues and all meetings that could make our city affordable for every single New Yorker.
00:37:44.000Well, I mean, he could start by resigning.
00:37:45.000That would probably be the best way to start making it more affordable to live in New York.
00:37:50.000He said, I intend to make it clear to President Trump I will work with him on any agenda that benefits New Yorkers.
00:37:54.000If an agenda hurts New Yorkers, I will also be the first to say so.
00:37:57.000The White House is significantly more skeptical of Zorhan Mamdani's visit.
00:38:04.000It speaks volumes that tomorrow we have a communist coming to the White House because that's who the Democrat Party elected as the mayor of the largest city in the country.
00:38:14.000I think it's very telling, but I also think it speaks to the fact that President Trump is willing to meet with anyone and talk to anyone and to try to do what's right on behalf of the American people, whether they live in blue states or red states or blue cities.
00:38:28.000By the way, it is also true that Zorn Mamdani continues his unbroken record of virtue signaling to the worst people in America.
00:38:35.000So one of the big controversy that has broken out in New York is that just the other night, a bunch of anti-Semites, and I use that word advisedly because of what they were yelling, gathered outside of an Orthodox congregation in Manhattan's Upper East Side chanting from New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada.
00:39:21.000There's a group called Mefesh Benefesh in Israel that facilitates for people who want to move to Israel, if you're in England, America, wherever.
00:39:30.000They help facilitate your move to Israel.
00:39:32.000So how did Zora Mamdani respond to the anti-Semitism?
00:39:38.000His spokesperson said, quote, the mayor-elect has discouraged the language used at last night's protest and will continue to do so.
00:39:44.000He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.
00:40:18.000American domestic law protects First Amendment religious activity.
00:40:23.000International law typically protects some of the worst people on earth while attacking places like America, which is why the United States is not a party to, for example, the International Criminal Court that Zorhan Mamdani likes to cite.
00:40:35.000The International Criminal Court used by human rights violating regimes like South Africa as a sword against any place they don't like.
00:40:51.000If you're an American living in an American city and your mayor is saying that you can't go to your synagogue or church because you might be quote unquote violating international law, I mean, listen, there are international standards that pertain to, for example, the quote-unquote abuse of religious materials that largely are focused on not violating the scruples of radical Muslims.
00:41:17.000There are, in fact, bodies that prosecute acts like that under hate speech.
00:41:20.000Is that something that we're going to do in the United States because Zorhan Mamdani says it violates international law?
00:41:43.000Those issues are, for example, democratic values.
00:41:48.000So asked whether political leaders should compromise with the other party to get some things done, even if they don't like some parts of the compromise, or whether political leaders should stick to their beliefs and avoid compromise, even if nothing gets done.
00:41:58.00080% of Americans believe that political leaders should compromise with the other party to get things done.
00:42:03.000Now, of course, when you dig beneath the hood, the question is what's the nature of the compromise?
00:42:06.000But Americans are not actually, in fact, begging for kind of the wild partisanship that was demonstrated by the Democrats during the latest government shutdown.
00:42:14.000On political violence, 83% of Americans say it is never okay for people to use violence to achieve a political goal.
00:42:21.000And by the way, that does include a broad majority of Democrats.
00:42:27.000On the question of whether the U.S. is stronger as a nation because it has people from different races, religions, and cultures, or the U.S. is weaker as a nation because it has people from different races, religions, and cultures.
00:42:38.00084% of Americans believe the United States is stronger as a nation because it has people from different races, religions, and cultures, that America is not, in fact, homogenous.
00:42:47.000Now, we will get into another under the hood question in a minute here from this poll about how fast American culture has been transitioning, which is the real objection that many people have.
00:42:57.000That objection, which is a very real and legitimate objection, is being misread into a critique of America as a creedal nation entirely by large parts of the right at this point, where people say things are changing too fast.
00:43:09.000We don't want this many people coming in.
00:43:10.000Mass migration is changing the fabric of the country incredibly fast and in the wrong ways.
00:43:15.000Those are all legitimate perspectives, and they are all perspectives that I think most Americans probably agree with.
00:43:21.000However, to read that into, okay, what we need is a homogenous nation, racially, religious, like totally homogenous.
00:43:30.000That, of course, is not traditionally American, and it is a massive electoral loser.
00:43:36.000On facts versus opinions, 88% of Americans say there are facts and then there are opinions.
00:43:41.000Only 10% of Americans say facts are just opinions and points of view.
00:43:46.000Okay, so again, some of the breakdown here is really, really interesting.
00:43:49.000So that under the hood question that I think is the big one that is dividing the country basically right down the middle is the nature of change in America.
00:44:00.000The right is not anti people of all races or people of a wide variety of religions, while acknowledging, of course, the biblical heritage of the United States.
00:44:12.000So according to this Gallup poll, for this statement, please indicate which comes closer to your view, even if neither is exactly right.
00:44:20.000Over the past 25 years, cultural changes in U.S. society have happened too fast or cultural changes in the United States have happened at a reasonable pace over the course of the past 25 years.
00:44:32.000So that answer is 4949, 49, 49, right?
00:45:25.000Again, that's fascinating because what that means is that the sort of radical left, which wants to accelerate change, is not going to be popular.
00:45:32.000And a radical right that also wishes to radically decelerate like change in the opposite direction or to a place that America never historically has been.
00:45:56.000Another basic split among Americans is whether people are responsible for their own needs on a basic individual level or the government is responsible for making sure the basic needs are met.
00:46:09.000Democrats, 70-30 believe that the government should be responsible for making individuals' basic needs are met.
00:46:15.000Republicans, 72 to 27, believe the opposite.
00:46:19.000So despite the sort of populist movement believe that they can just side with the Democrats, most Republicans do not believe this.
00:46:27.000Republicans are still pro-free market and individual responsibility.
00:46:30.000This is, in fact, a hallmark of conservatism.
00:46:32.000And the bizarre attempt to sort of retcon conservatism into a left-wing social democratic populism from Wisconsin in 1918 is bizarre for sure.
00:46:43.000By the way, independents are split right down the middle.
00:46:45.000Slightly more independents believe that people should be responsible for maintaining their own basic needs than that the government should be.
00:46:54.000Okay, meanwhile, again, the bottom line is that there is discord here, but this is the Overton window.
00:47:01.000Okay, the Overton window in America, meaning the place of kind of rational discourse is in the middle of all of this.
00:47:06.000There are a lot of open questions to be left there, but there are a few things that Americans are pretty clearly rejecting overall.
00:47:26.000They certainly don't want things accelerating from here.
00:47:29.000So any accelerationism from either side is likely to be rejected by the American people.
00:47:34.000Okay, meanwhile, our media are very much focused on accelerationism and partisanship and exacerbating it.
00:47:40.000And again, this is not to avoid blame for partisan politicians who also do it, but I have to say that things are increasingly stupid here in the United States, like truly stupid.
00:47:51.000So yesterday, the big story of the day was a rather stupid story.
00:47:56.000It was let off by a bunch of Democrats.
00:48:01.000This is a bunch of Democrats ranging from Senator Alyssa Slotkin of Michigan to Representative Crowe, Jason Crowe of Colorado, calling on members of the military to disobey illegal orders.
00:48:14.000Now, we should note what this is and what it isn't.
00:48:16.000There's what it says, and then there's what it implies.
00:48:18.000And now we're playing in the dumb space between them.
00:48:20.000So what it actually says is not illegal.
00:48:22.000Telling people they don't and cannot obey illegal orders, that, of course, is true.
00:48:28.000If somebody gives you an order to go mow down a bunch of school children for no reason, and there would be no reason, if someone tells you to go do that, then you have to disobey that order if you're in the U.S. military, obviously.
00:48:42.000Okay, so the question becomes why they filmed that video.
00:48:44.000And the answer is because the implication is that the Trump administration is routinely giving illegal orders, and thus you should just disobey the Trump administration.
00:48:51.000So once again, we are living in stupid land where Democrats will interpret this video as saying nothing new and Republicans will interpret this video as saying that members of the military should disobey legal orders, not illegal orders.
00:49:03.000Here's the video: like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this constitution.
00:49:09.000Right now, the threats to our constitution aren't just coming from abroad, but from right here at home.
00:49:38.000Okay, so this pissed off President Trump, I think, kind of justifiably, because the implication is that President Trump is routinely giving illegal orders, which, of course, is not true.
00:49:46.000Well, that then caused the President of the United States to put out a statement on Truth Social in which he said that these lawmakers were guilty of what he called, quote, seditious behavior, punishable by death, which, I mean, is that true?
00:50:04.000I mean, no, there's not a court in America that could convict them of seditious behavior punishable by death.
00:50:51.000Are we going back to 2017 when everybody just went nuts with their hair on fire about the crap that he was putting on at that time X or what was called Twitter at the time?
00:51:01.000These sort of bizarre news cycles where Trump says something that is uncalibrated, to say the least, and then everybody runs around like a chicken with their head cut off.
00:51:11.000Can we just point out Trump is not actual?
00:51:14.000I understand that now we're doing the reverse, right?
00:51:17.000Democrats are going to read that comment.
00:51:18.000They're going to say he is literally calling for them to be arrested and put on trial and executed.
00:51:22.000And if you read the language, that is literally what he is calling for.
00:51:25.000And then there's the reality, which is Trump is not going to do any of that stuff, which we all know, obviously.
00:51:30.000When Caroline Levitt was asked if President Trump wants people executed, here's what she had to say at the White House.
00:51:36.000Just to be clear, does the president want to execute members of Congress?
00:51:42.000Let's be clear about what the president is responding to, because many in this room want to talk about the president's response, but not what brought the president to responding in this way.
00:51:53.000You have sitting members of the United States Congress who conspired together to orchestrate a video message to members of the United States military, to active duty service members, to members of the national security apparatus, encouraging them to defy the president's lawful orders.
00:52:14.000Okay, so, again, the answer that matters there is the beginning, where she says, no, he doesn't want people executed.
00:52:20.000Democrats, of course, decided to jump on this and they make hay out of it, as one would.
00:52:24.000So apparently, Democrats put out a statement from Mark Kelly, Alyssa Slotkin, Jason Crow, Crystal Luzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlihan, who are the people in the video, in which they said, what's most telling is that the president considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law.
00:52:39.000Our service members should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oaths to the Constitution, an obligation to follow only lawful orders.
00:52:45.000It is not only the right thing to do, but also our duty.
00:52:47.000So they're going to rely on the literal thing that they said, which, again, understandable.
00:52:52.000And they're going to avoid the implication of what they said.
00:52:54.000This is what Representative Crowe had to say in his own defense.
00:52:58.000To be clear, we are not calling on folks right now to debate, to disobey any type of unlawful order, right?
00:53:04.000There is very real and deep concern about what this president has threatened to do over and over again.
00:53:11.000There are three more years left of this administration.
00:53:13.000If we are not talking about this and having a conversation about it and demystifying this conversation, we are not fulfilling our duty.
00:53:21.000We are reminding people that have taken the oath what that oath requires of them to do.
00:53:26.000Okay, can I just point out this whole controversy is incredibly stupid, like truly stupid, that Democrats put out there something inflammatory.
00:53:32.000President Trump bit on the inflammatory thing and said something even more inflammatory.
00:53:35.000And now everybody is just taking their various sides and complaining about it.
00:53:52.000And then everybody went nuts in response.
00:53:54.000Okay, now there's sort of a parallel stupid story, and that is that the president and vice president were not actually invited to the funeral for Dick Cheney.
00:54:20.000If you are Dick Cheney and you opposed Trump and Vance and And Trump and Vans routinely attacked Liz Cheney, and Liz Cheney has a horrible relationship with Trump.
00:54:31.000Your dad is dead, and he's in the box in front of you on the stage.
00:54:34.000You don't want to be looking over and seeing the people who basically destroyed your political career and who you attempted to foster impeachment charges against in President Trump or go after him post-January 6th.
00:54:46.000You don't want that at the funeral, right?
00:54:47.000I mean, just on a human level, you understand that.
00:54:49.000I think the bigger question here is why, for example, President Biden was invited.
00:54:54.000Because if you're talking about somebody who helped destroy Dick Cheney's legacy, one of those people would be Joe Biden, who is vice president, was very much in favor of the precipitous withdrawal from Iraq that led to the loss of some of the gains that had been actually made in the late stages of the Bush administration with the 2007 surge.
00:55:12.000And then also, it was Joe Biden who presided over the complete collapse of American support in Afghanistan, handing the entire country back to the Taliban.
00:55:19.000So, yeah, I have more critiques of the Cheney family for inviting Joe Biden than I do for the Cheney family inviting and not inviting Trump and Vans.
00:55:29.000But, you know, the right is going a little bit nuts over this.
00:55:35.000When it comes to funerals, basic rule, you get to invite who you want.
00:55:39.000Joining us in the studio is Michael Watley.
00:55:41.000He most recently served as chairman of the Republican National Committee after President Trump asked him to help lead the party's 2024 efforts.
00:55:48.000He also previously served as the North Carolina Republican Party chairman.
00:55:52.000Now he's running for Senate in North Carolina.
00:55:54.000Michael, thanks so much for taking the time.
00:56:50.000You're looking possibly at Texas, possibly at Iowa.
00:56:53.000It's not an easy map for Democrats, but if they take North Carolina, the map starts to get significantly more blue quickly.
00:56:58.000One of the problems in North Carolina is that it used to be a little bit more red.
00:57:01.000It's obviously moved more purple in recent years.
00:57:03.000It was a bad gubernatorial race last time around.
00:57:05.000Josh Stein is now the governor in North Carolina.
00:57:07.000You're facing down Roy Cooper, the ex-governor of North Carolina.
00:57:12.000Where do you think his vulnerabilities are?
00:57:13.000What should people in the country and in North Carolina know about the former governor?
00:57:17.000Well, I think the fact that he is a card-carrying member of the woke mob, and he has portrayed himself very successfully throughout his tenure as an elected official, as an awshawks guy from Nash County, North Carolina, trying to portray himself as a moderate.
00:57:31.000But the fact is that this is a guy who has a record that is out of mainstream with North Carolina, whether it's on crime, whether it's on the budgets and tax cuts and the economy, or it's on any number of other issues where he is out of the mainstream.
00:57:48.000But we need to spend the time prosecuting that case and letting people know about his record.
00:57:53.000So when you talk about his record and in specific, what went wrong under his tenure in North Carolina, what do you think are sort of the big points that people need to know?
00:58:02.000Well, when you think about how you win in a state like North Carolina, right, or really any battleground state around the country, what we did with President Trump was we made it sure that everybody understood his agenda, which was to rebuild the economy, to restore our borders, and to make sure that America is respected again around the world.
00:58:20.000What that translates to in North Carolina is you need economic policies that are going to create jobs and raise wages.
00:58:26.000We need tax policy, trade policy, and regulatory policy that are going to help our small businesses, our manufacturers, and particularly our farmers.
00:58:35.000So we're going to go out and we're going to work on that all day long.
00:58:39.000We also have more men and women in uniform and veterans than any other state in the country.
00:58:44.000So being able to ensure that they have what they need to protect our interests and allies around the world is going to be extraordinarily important for us.
00:58:52.000And in this particular race, we really want to spend a lot of time focusing on the fact that the highest and most important function of any government is protecting its citizens.
00:59:02.000And we have a governor who has not only vetoed legislation which would force sheriffs to honor ICE detainers and move criminal illegal aliens out of the state, he also issued an executive order while he was governor that created cashless bail, created pretrial release, and really emptied the jails.
00:59:21.000And so we have a revolving door with criminals right now, with violent criminals in North Carolina that has caused a huge problem.
00:59:29.000You know, many people recall that video, the horrific video from Charlotte Light Rail, where Irena Zorotska got off work at 1130, beautiful young lady, gets on the wrong rail car, sits in the wrong seat, and the guy behind her just horrifically slit her throat and killed her.
00:59:46.000That guy had been arrested, DeCarlos Brown Jr., 14 times and released 14 times under Roy Cooper's soft-on crime policies.
01:00:09.000And so when we think about what are the issue sets that really are going to matter in a place like Charlotte, in a place like Raleigh, in a place like Wilmington, North Carolina, in our rural areas, our urban areas, it's going to come down to making sure that we're keeping our kids and our communities safe.
01:00:26.000As I mentioned before, the amount of money that's going to pour into this race is extraordinary.
01:00:29.000Democrats are expected to raise just tons and tons of money to try and take this seat.
01:00:35.000How much money are they going to raise for this race?
01:00:37.000You know, we're hearing projections as much as $600 to $800 million is going to be spent in North Carolina.
01:00:44.000You know, and it was one of the most expensive Senate races in history back in 2020, the last time we were up with Tom Tillis.
01:00:52.000And that's the seat that I'm going to be running for right now.
01:00:55.000So it is, as you said, the Democrats understand that this is one where they think they can pick this off.
01:01:01.000Roy Cooper has raised a ton of money for his governor's races previously.
01:01:06.000And we know that he's going to have a ton of money.
01:01:08.000So we're out making sure that we have the resources.
01:01:11.000But I firmly believe, and Donald Trump is the most clear example of this in our lifetime, that good politics is a reflection of good policy.
01:01:21.000And that when you go out there and you argue for the issues that the American people vote on, in my case, the issues that the North Carolina voters care about and put solutions on the table, that ultimately is going to be the most important factor in the race.
01:01:34.000So for people who want to help out your campaign, obviously it's a huge campaign.
01:01:40.000You know, that's the website where folks can go and they can invest.
01:01:43.000They can also sign up to be a volunteer.
01:01:45.000You know, this is going to be a movement campaign.
01:01:47.000We need to make sure that we have people that are up and that are out that are going to be making phone calls and knocking on doors.
01:01:53.000And most importantly, having that five-minute conversation.
01:01:57.000You know, anytime we have somebody have a five-minute conversation with a friend or a family member, a colleague, a coworker to talk about how important this race is, that's really, truly the most important factor that we can have.
01:02:08.000And they can also follow me on X at Watley NC.
01:02:13.000We've got about 100,000 followers and we've got a really good presence there and talk about all the issues that we really care about in this race.
01:02:20.000Well, meanwhile, while the Democrats are spending enormous amounts of money or looking at spending enormous amounts of money in North Carolina, they're having some cash problems of their own.
01:02:27.000So obviously that used to be your job at the RNC.
01:02:29.000When you look at the Democratic National Committee having to take out a $15 million loan, what does that say to you?
01:02:34.000Well, I think it says that the Democrats have really, truly learned nothing after the 2024 election cycle.
01:02:39.000They ran as an open borders inflationary policy, woke, weak America party.
01:02:50.000And they've really truly doubled down on that agenda right now.
01:02:53.000It's not a surprise that they cannot raise the type of money that they are used to having, right?
01:02:59.000And the Republican Party, we set up a very positive relationship with donors and supporters all across the country and were able to make sure that we had the resources that we needed.
01:03:11.000When I left the RNC, I think we were $80, $85 million cash on hand for the DNC right now to have $3 million cash on hand before that loan.
01:03:20.000I really think it shows you that not just physically they're bankrupt, but in terms of their agenda, that they do not have an agenda that is inspiring the American people right now.
01:03:30.000Well, Michael Wiley, good luck in your race.
01:04:03.000This guy named Dow Feng, who's a businessman who escaped communist China and loves America, teamed up with the National Journalism Center and kind of went all out.
01:04:14.000So there was this fancy gala in D.C. on Wednesday.
01:04:17.000Everybody was there in the Washington, D.C. conservative reporting world.
01:04:22.000And they gave out some big prizes, including big cash prizes.
01:04:27.000And all of this is because the Pulitzers, of course, have given awards to left-wing stories that are like literally provably wrong.
01:04:36.000So let's talk about your reporting on Doge.
01:04:38.000Obviously, you won an awards for going inside what Doge was doing.
01:04:43.000What has been the long-term impact of Doge?
01:04:44.000Because obviously it was a very hot topic very early on in the administration.
01:04:47.000It seems to have fallen out of the headlines a lot.
01:04:49.000What do you think the impact of Doge was and is?
01:04:53.000You know, we've got to make sure it has long-term impact.
01:04:56.000I think the best thing that happened was sort of just a renewed enthusiasm, putting the idea that we as conservatives should be against government waste back on the radar, because it was certainly something we had kind of forgotten about for a few years there.
01:05:13.000Obviously, they've got to deal with the injunctions.
01:05:15.000They've got to make sure that not too many layoffs are kind of reversed because of things like the shutdown negotiations.
01:05:24.000But I think that really it just was a return to sort of founding principles that this is a classic thing that Republicans should be concerned about.
01:05:34.000So there was a lot more attention to things like inspectors general and the government accountability office and people like that who hopefully will be empowered and will be sort of in the spotlight even as Doge itself kind of recedes.
01:05:49.000So Luke, obviously one of the big factors here was the involvement of Elon Musk.
01:05:54.000Elon and the president have had some hot times, have had some cold times, been a love-hate, lukewarm, very hot, very cold relationship.
01:06:01.000Where do things currently stand with the president and Elon?