A GOP lawmaker in the House of Representatives dies, meaning that the GOP majority has now shrunk to the bare minimum. President Trump continues aggressive action against Venezuelan illegal oil shipments. Plus, we bring on Alex Clark of Cultural Apothecary to talk about a major Supreme Court case, and we re joined by Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana to talk everything going down in Venezuela.
00:00:34.000You can watch the clips everyone is arguing about online without subjecting yourself, you know, to the horror that is social media.
00:00:40.000The Daily Wire Plus app is where the community lives, chatting live during shows, sharing ideas, debating the big questions, and because it's ours, it can't be canceled, censored, or shut down.
00:00:48.000Download that new Daily Wire Plus app right now on iOS, Android, Roku, Samsung, and more.
00:00:53.000Well, it is an off-year election this year.
00:00:56.000That means that President Trump is not, of course, on the ballot.
00:00:58.000And so his coattails will really not apply to House Republicans or Senate Republicans.
00:01:02.000And that means an uphill battle for Republicans because, again, the incumbent party in off-year elections tends not to do particularly well.
00:01:10.000Right now, Republicans are running the barest majority humanly possible in the House of Representatives.
00:01:16.000That is thanks to the untimely death of Republican Representative Doug Lamalfa.
00:01:21.000He represented a district in Northern California for 13 years.
00:01:28.000According to the Wall Street Journal, his death further shrinks the already thin House GOP majority to 218 to 213.
00:01:36.000Of course, Representative Marjorie Taylor Green, who wants to run for president herself and seems to be running an anti-Trump campaign, formerly resigned from the House in the middle of her term this week.
00:01:45.000So there are now four empty seats, two in red-leading districts, two in blue districts.
00:01:49.000Also, Representative Jim Baird of Indiana was in a car accident, so he is sidelined at least temporarily, which means that in terms of who's going to show up, you are now down to 217.
00:01:59.000Then you also have people like Thomas Massey, who routinely vote against the president of the United States, and now you're down to 216.
00:02:05.000And so your majority, your workable majority, is shrinking into the arena of unworkability.
00:02:12.000If you're a Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, you always had a very, very tough job.
00:02:16.000Now that job is becoming nearly impossible.
00:02:19.000And so the question becomes: how does President Trump, how do Republicans somehow get something done this year that allows them to claim victory heading into 2026?
00:02:29.000Well, one thing the president is trying to do is pressure some of these erstwhile Republicans to do his bidding.
00:02:36.000That, of course, includes Thomas Massey.
00:02:38.000The president was slamming Thomas Massey yesterday.
00:03:37.000Now, what really hurts is foreign policy losses, but foreign policy wins can help at the margins.
00:03:42.000That is particularly true if you are targeting political constituencies that are drifting away from you.
00:03:47.000So one of the things about the Trump constituency that is really quite fascinating is that obviously in 2024, he had an outsized blue-collar white vote, but he also radically overperformed with Hispanic Americans.
00:04:00.000There's a case to be made that what he is doing in places like Venezuela, possibly Cuba, is going to have an outsized impact on voter turnout in 2026, particularly in some of the swing states.
00:04:11.000President Trump is trying to get his base jazzed up.
00:04:14.000He spoke at the House Republican retreat yesterday, and he told Republicans that he's given them a roadmap to victory.
00:04:42.000There have been two, and they were unusual circumstances.
00:04:45.000So whether it's a Republican or Democrat, whoever wins the presidency, the other party wins the midterm.
00:04:52.000And it doesn't make sense because we've had the most successful year probably in the history.
00:04:57.000They say, and now you add what happened essentially yesterday, we've had the most successful first year of any president in history.
00:05:08.000Now, again, I think there's a lot to that.
00:05:11.000The president of the United States does have a booming stock market.
00:05:13.000The president of the United States has a bunch of foreign policy wins under his belt.
00:05:17.000Doge is targeting waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:05:19.000And that is now filtering down to the state level, which we'll get to in a little while.
00:05:24.000Of course, the stakes are very high because if Democrats were to win the House of Representatives, basically the Trump agenda stops dead at that point.
00:05:32.000As President Trump put it, we need to win or we are going to be in a world of hurt.
00:05:39.000These things are so important because you guys got to get elected.
00:05:42.000Because if you don't get elected, we have a country that's going to go to hell.
00:06:30.000Although I will say that I think the Democrats are being a little smarter in their approach to politics than they were during President Trump's first term.
00:06:37.000They seem to have now recognized that needlessly knocking their head against the wall is actually a bad strategy.
00:06:43.000I'm not so sure that President Trump gets impeached the minute that the Democrats take over the House.
00:06:48.000I think that they do start investigating everybody in Trump's orbit.
00:06:51.000I think they start ruining lives inside Trump's orbit.
00:06:53.000They did that during Trump number one.
00:06:55.000But here's President Trump basically saying that everything stops dead.
00:07:01.000You got to win the midterms, because if we don't win the midterms, it's just going to be, I mean, they'll find a reason to impeach me.
00:07:32.000But when they want open borders, when they want, as I said, men and women's sports, when they want transgender for everyone, bring your kids in.
00:07:41.000We're going to change the sex of your child.
00:09:27.000But one of the things that Republicans, I think, are not going to be able to count on, because again, they are the party that is in power, not the party that is out of power.
00:09:34.000One of the things that they're not going to be able to count on is Democrats being stupid.
00:09:38.000I think Democrats are getting less stupid.
00:09:44.000And now they seem to be jettisoning some of their worst baggage, including the trans issue.
00:09:48.000You do not hear Democrats talking about the trans issue as the social rights issue of our time, the civil rights issue of our time anymore.
00:09:56.000You don't hear them talking about DEI anymore.
00:09:59.000Instead, they are refocusing on quote unquote affordability, right?
00:10:03.000This is the thing that they are focusing in on over and over and over again.
00:10:09.000And you can see why, because they believe that that is essentially their only winning path right now, because affordability, as I've said before, is a mushword.
00:10:17.000No one ever thinks things are affordable.
00:10:19.000Very few people in their entire life have thought, hey, things are so affordable right now.
00:10:24.000Maybe when your income goes up, things become, quote, affordable for you.
00:10:27.000But affordability is a subjective measure.
00:10:31.000So even though President Trump can look at the inflation statistics and say it was up at 9, 10% under Joe Biden, it is down at 2%, 3% under me, people still understand that the prices are higher now than they were in, say, 2019.
00:10:44.000And so things are quote unquote unaffordable.
00:10:46.000And so even though President Trump is winning victories in, for example, Venezuela, which we'll get to in a moment, Democrats are refocusing on affordability.
00:10:53.000According to Politico, Democrats hoping to win higher office this year are seizing on President Trump's intervention in Venezuela to push a twist on one of his campaign promises, America first.
00:11:03.000Former Senator Sherrod Brown, who's running to reclaim his seat in Ohio, said Ohioans are facing higher costs across the board and are desperate for leadership that will help deliver relief.
00:11:12.000We should be more focused on improving the lives of Ohioans, not Caracas, meaning Venezuela.
00:11:18.000The frame from Democrats, according to Politico, shows how potent the party views affordability as an issue in the midterms, one that President Trump and his team have grown increasingly preoccupied by after across-the-board losses in 2025.
00:11:30.000Longtime Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson, who's a former spokesperson for Hillary Clinton, said the problem Trump was already having was he looked like he was focused on everything other than what matters in people's daily lives.
00:11:40.000And now he has just supercharged that.
00:11:42.000Now, again, I do not think that Americans are under the impression that we cannot, as a country, walk and chew gum at the same time.
00:11:50.000With that said, there is a line of attack here that Republicans are going to have to use, and they're going to have to use it often.
00:11:56.000And that is that the amount of fraud, waste, the amount of abuse of the system that is inherent in a bigger government, Democratic administration everywhere from Minnesota to New York City, that is what is going to crush affordability for you.
00:12:12.000That is the thing Republicans are going to need to focus on.
00:12:30.000And Tim Walz just had to declare that he would not run for reelection again.
00:12:34.000And he had to declare that because of the extraordinary amount of fraud that existed in his blue state.
00:12:42.000Now, when you connect that to the immigration policy pursued by Democrats, that is a toxic combination for Democrats.
00:12:48.000One of the reasons that the fraud in Minnesota has captured the minds of so many Americans is because it does appear to be members of a community who have been imported into the United States, who have not assimilated into American practices and who are then bilking the rest of the taxpayers in Minnesota.
00:13:06.000When you combine those two things, that is a toxic brew for Democrats.
00:13:10.000Their immigration policy combined with welfare fraud is a toxic brew and it exists across the spectrum.
00:13:20.000Republicans need to focus extraordinary fire on this particular issue because it's not just enough to unleash Doge and say waste, fraud, and abuse have to be cut.
00:13:29.000You have to actually connect it with Democratic policy.
00:13:32.000And you have to connect it to something that Republicans have been loath to connect it to for a while, which is the size of government.
00:13:38.000We'll get to the size and scope of government and why that needs to become a Republican argument.
00:13:42.000Yes, again, first, this episode is sponsored by Pure Talk.
00:13:45.000If your credit card balance is stressing you out after all that holiday spending, I have something that can save you money right this moment.
00:13:51.000You can cut your cell phone bill in half by switching to Pure Talk's saver plan, just 20 bucks a month for unlimited talk text and three gigs of high-speed data on PureTalk's super fast nationwide 5G network.
00:14:01.000And as a veteran-led company that cares about giving back to those who serve, if you're active or former military or a first responder, you'll save an additional 20% every single month.
00:14:09.000The easiest way to free up cash flow is to reduce your monthly recurring bills.
00:14:13.000Start with cutting overpriced wireless and switching to my wireless company.
00:14:17.000And I've been using Pure Talk for years.
00:14:32.000You'll save an additional 50% off your very first month of coverage.
00:14:36.000PureTalk is America's wireless company.
00:14:38.000Go check them out right now, puretalk.com slash Shapiro to save an additional 50% off your very first month.
00:14:44.000See, when I was growing up, being a conservative meant that you were against the expansion of the size and scope of government.
00:14:50.000Nowadays, it seems in vogue for Republicans to be in favor of that expansion, but at the same time to want to quote unquote cut that waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:14:59.000Well, that's not a great argument because inherent in a bigger government is waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:15:04.000And when you combine that with loose immigration policy, the way Democrats have, you end up with Minnesota.
00:15:11.000As the Wall Street Journal points out, defendants allegedly set up sham businesses and falsely claim to provide meals to children, pay kickbacks to parents to enroll kids without autism and autism treatment, build Medicaid for phony housing services to addicts, among other scams.
00:15:25.00090 of the defendants who are charged of those 90, over 80 of them were of Somali origin.
00:15:32.000These issues are not relegated to Minnesota by any stretch of the imagination.
00:15:37.000Again, they are inherent in the size and scope of government and the expansion of the welfare roles and of our immigration roles, particularly with regard to either claims of asylum or illegal immigration itself.
00:15:52.000It turns out, as always, that a Scandinavian social model can only exist temporarily as long as you don't crush capitalism and in combination with strong border control.
00:16:02.000And Democrats have pursued weak border control, no controls with regards to waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:16:07.000And the result is what's happened in Minnesota.
00:16:53.000I mean, this is a target-rich environment for Republicans.
00:16:56.000If you want to talk about affordability, you know what makes things unaffordable: people bilking other taxpayers out of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
00:17:03.000The government cracking down on private property ownership and preventing the building of new housing units, by the way, because of things like rent control.
00:17:13.000Here's Zorhan Mamdani defending C. Weaver, a person who has spent the last several years on Twitter railing against basically the existence of white people and in particular, rich white people.
00:17:26.000Have you ever rented an apartment in New York only to find yourself not just paying rent, but application fees, amenity fees, credit score checks?
00:17:32.000In a city filled with old buildings that could use some tender-loving care, some landlords are taking advantage of the housing market to gouge tenants with outrageous fees, all while leaving them trying to survive in homes with collapsing ceilings and sinking floors.
00:18:05.000We're excited to share more information about these hearings soon.
00:18:08.000In the meantime, start taking notes so you can share with us how you're getting ripped off.
00:18:14.000So come complain and then attack your landlord.
00:18:17.000You think that's going to contribute to affordability in any way?
00:18:19.000Harmeet Dillon, who, of course, runs the civil rights division over at the DOJ.
00:18:24.000She talked about C. Weaver and the fact that this is a violation of federal law, the sort of discrimination she's been talking about.
00:18:30.000Quote: We have several federal statutes that explicitly protect people of all colors and all different kinds of backgrounds and military status and so forth from the exact kind of land grabs and reallocation and redistribution being promised in New York.
00:18:41.000Mamdani put out a statement: quote, We made the decision to have C. Weaver serve as our executive director for the mayor's office to protect tenants to build on the work that she has done to protect tenants across the city.
00:18:52.000We were already seeing the results of that work.
00:18:54.000Really, they're already seeing the results.
00:18:56.000Incredible how the results are already seen.
00:19:00.000In 2021, C. Weaver argued the state can, quote, further decommodify housing and land by canceling rents outright and shuttering eviction courts.
00:19:10.000Now, again, you want to talk about affordability?
00:19:12.000This is an argument Republicans absolutely should have about affordability because of the fraud in places like Minnesota.
00:19:20.000By the way, how deep is the fraud in Minnesota?
00:19:22.000Incredibly, a person named Abu Khar Dahir Asman, according to Breitbart.com, the permanent representative of Somalia in the United Nations, is actually linked to a home healthcare agency in Cincinnati, Ohio that was prosecuted for Medicaid fraud.
00:19:37.000You have permanent representatives of foreign countries in the United States linked to Medicaid fraud in American domestic states.
00:19:44.000Apparently, Osman had ties to progressive health care services allegedly, that is a home healthcare company plagued by a Medicaid fraud investigation.
00:19:52.000HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O'Neill confirmed that Osman is in fact linked to that particular business and that the federal agency previously took action against the company after a conviction for Medicaid fraud.
00:20:05.000This, again, is a place where Republicans certainly ought to drill down.
00:20:09.000So when it comes to the affordability issue, obviously Republicans do have some room to run, given the fact that you have people like Zorhan Mamdani or Tim Walz or Say Gavin Newsom in California who radically want to expand the size and scope of government while maintaining an open border system that increases the possibility of huge fraud.
00:20:28.000And those sorts of stories are very damaging to Democrats.
00:20:31.000Now, where Democrats are really fighting back on the affordability issue has to do, obviously, with that Obamacare cliff, the time bomb that was placed by Joe Biden in expanding Obamacare subsidies to people earning four times the poverty level of the United States, to people who really did not need Obamacare subsidies.
00:20:48.000But when those subsidies went away, you saw a radical escalation in the price of Obamacare for people, particularly who are elderly or people who are on family plans under Obamacare.
00:20:58.000So President Trump yesterday was speaking at this House Republican leadership conference, and he suggested that when it came to Obamacare, we should let those subsidies continue to expire.
00:21:07.000We should just put money directly into health savings accounts for people and then allow those health savings accounts to be used in order to pay off not just the deductible, but also to pay off the premiums.
00:21:42.000The problem for this particular line is that the insurance companies actually are not making that much money.
00:21:46.000Just on a profit level, the insurance companies are not making that much money because of the extraordinary regulations that they have to go through in order to work with the federal government.
00:21:56.000The fact is that Obamacare consolidated the industry pretty radically.
00:22:01.000Obamacare forces young people who want insurance to get comprehensive coverage as opposed to catastrophic coverage as a sort of backdoor subsidy to elderly people who they group together.
00:22:11.000The Obamacare coverage, it has not bent the cost curve in any material way.
00:22:18.000And again, those subsidies have been rising radically.
00:22:21.000The problem, of course, is that when you hit that cliff, the amount that the Trump administration is talking about putting in HSAs is probably not going to compensate the people who really, really need the help.
00:22:32.000Right now, the average annual deposit that Trump is talking about, $1,000 annual deposit, that's insufficient to cover the premium increases, particularly for people who are elderly and people who have families.
00:22:46.000The average premium increases under Obamacare that just kicked into place are like $1,000 a year.
00:22:50.000So you think, okay, $1,000 a year in the HSA, $1,000 a year increase, those cancel each other out.
00:22:55.000But the problem is that that's unevenly distributed because the high-end premium increase can be over $12,000 per year for older couples or families.
00:23:04.000The average bronze deductible is $7,476.
00:23:09.000People are spending above and beyond their premiums, obviously.
00:23:13.000So what is probably the best case solution, at least in the short term, to get us through the midterms, if you're not going to do a full-scale restructure of Obamacare, which is what Republicans should have been pursuing when they had a much larger majority in Congress during Trump's first term?
00:23:28.000Well, since they didn't fix it then, they're not going to fix it now.
00:23:32.000The proposal that's being put forth by Bernie Moreno of Ohio and Susan Collins of Maine is a two-year Obamacare extension of the subsidies in order to prevent that cliff from just destroying a huge number of Americans' livelihoods.
00:23:44.000It would require enrollees to pay $25 per month to do away with zero premium plans because those zero premium plans where people basically are just handed Obamacare for free, that is rife with fraud.
00:23:55.000You can just apply and then not take advantage of it and just take the money home, basically.
00:23:59.000It would reintroduce the subsidy cliff, meaning if you make $200,000 a year, you don't get the subsidy.
00:24:04.000It would toughen identity and income verification and remove current caps on how much an individual has to pay back to the IRS.
00:24:10.000If you estimate that your income is going to be X and it turns out to be 2X, then you have to pay money back to the IRS.
00:24:17.000So it crops out a bunch of people who are taking advantage of the system.
00:24:22.000That may be the best available solution if the goal is not to get absolutely clobbered in 2026, because this is what Democrats are going to focus on from now all the way to the election.
00:24:33.000So what's the advice for 2026 for Republicans?
00:24:36.000Focus in, yes, on affordability, but they should be focusing in on what Democrats would do if they gained power, radically expand government, which radically expands fraud, which radically expands waste, and which radically increases cost.
00:24:50.000Then there's what Republicans have to not do, and that is follow every rabbit hole.
00:24:54.000Vivek Ramaswamy, who's running for governor of Ohio right now, has a great piece over at the Wall Street Journal pointing out that social media is a trap for politicians, particularly Republican politicians, get sucked into the maw of social media and start talking about nonsense that nobody cares about.
00:25:11.000He says, my campaign team will still use social media to distribute messages and videos on my behalf, but I won't browse any of it myself.
00:25:18.000There's a fine line between using the internet to distribute your message and inadvertently allowing constant internet feedback to alter your message.
00:25:28.000He says modern social media is increasingly disconnected from the electorate.
00:25:31.000The messages you're most likely to see are the most negative and bombastic because they are the most likely to receive rapid likes and reposts, which, of course, drives revenue for social media content creators.
00:25:43.000And he points out the online polls politicians glean from social media is increasingly manufactured by foreign actors and non-human bots.
00:25:58.000We don't need more discussions about Curtis Yarvin's fascist proposals from politicians.
00:26:02.000We don't need politicians talking about the vagaries of quote-unquote, what is an American in a way that is likely to both alienate voters and not achieve anything substantial.
00:26:11.000And by the way, avoid the topic entirely.
00:26:14.000So avoid all of that would be one recommendation.
00:26:17.000And meanwhile, on the foreign front, yes, foreign victories do matter.
00:26:22.000The president of the United States, the seizure of Maduro, and now the continued seizure of tankers fleeing Venezuela.
00:26:30.000So Russia has been playing a game in which they re-flag a bunch of what are called ghost ships.
00:26:36.000They reflag a bunch of ships that don't have a flag on them and claim they're Russian ships to try and prevent the United States from stopping illegal oil tankers coming from Venezuela.
00:26:50.000The U.S. this morning seized two oil tankers on Wednesday, including one that had fled a U.S. blockade of sanctioned vessels near Venezuela and was actually being escorted by a Russian submarine and a Russian Navy ship in the Atlantic.
00:27:02.000Helicopters and at least one Coast Guard vessel south of Iceland were used to take control of that tanker, formerly known as Bella One, that had eluded the United States for more than two weeks.
00:27:12.000Apparently, the Russian submarine had been communicating with the tanker over the past three days, and President Trump was not going to be deterred.
00:27:18.000He was not going to pretend that this was the hunt for Red October, and we have to avoid the Russian subs.
00:27:23.000The idea was this is an illegal tanker.
00:27:26.000It is carrying oil that is in international waters.
00:27:29.000And no, we are not going to allow the Russians to pretend that this is a Russian ship.
00:27:33.000The Bella One had begun sailing under a Russian flag in recent days.
00:27:48.000That is a very, very good thing, good for the president of the United States.
00:27:51.000The president also announced yesterday that Venezuela would be immediately selling us 30 to 50 million barrels of oil.
00:27:58.000He put out a statement on Truth Social quote.
00:28:00.000I am pleased to announce that the interim authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 million barrels of high-quality sanctions oil to the United States of America.
00:28:08.000This oil will be sold at its market price.
00:28:10.000That money will be controlled by me as president of the United States to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States.
00:28:16.000I've asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright to execute this plan immediately.
00:28:19.000It will be taken by storage ships and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States.
00:28:23.000Thank you for your attention to this matter.
00:28:25.000Would not surprise me in the slightest if that amount of oil sold off at market prices was used to subsidize the rebuilding of the Venezuelan oil industry under American auspices, which is probably the best use of that money at this point.
00:28:38.000That is not enough oil, by the way, to markedly lower the global price in any serious way.
00:28:43.00030 to 50 million barrels of oil, 50 million barrels of oil represents one-sixth, perhaps, of Venezuelan total output on an annualized basis.
00:28:52.000America is so oil-rich that that represents somewhere between three and five days of American produced oil.
00:29:31.000If you ain't against him, then you're kind of for him.
00:29:34.000You may not want to say it, but that's the rule.
00:29:36.000If it's one-third pro-Trump, one-third anti-Trump, one-third in the middle, that one-third in the middle is much more likely to be quietly pro-Trump than to be.
00:29:43.000There's no such thing as quietly anti-Trump in America.
00:29:55.000We don't know what's going to happen next.
00:29:57.000However, I seriously doubt that the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and the President of the United States, Donald Trump, decided that they were going to arrest and extradite Maduro without any plan for what comes next.
00:32:59.000So let's talk about what the Trump administration and the U.S. military just pulled off an astonishing operation.
00:33:06.000The capacity to launch within, apparently, hours, a gigantic sortie in the air, taking out whatever air defense had to be taken out and then putting people on the ground with zero casualties to take the leader of another country and arrest him and extradite him to the United States is an extraordinary thing.
00:33:28.000I mean, listen, for those of us who come from the special operations community, we've long known that we have these capabilities, and it's wonderful to be able to see them exhibited like this.
00:33:37.000It's obviously a solemn duty to do anything that involves taking the lives of others or putting your life at risk.
00:33:43.000But this is exactly what our special operations task forces were designed to do.
00:33:48.000And what a lot of folks don't know is the history of where special ops came from.
00:33:51.000And there was a mission not unlike this called Eagle Claw in 1980.
00:33:54.000That was an abject failure where we attempted to rescue our hostages out of Iran, being held in the embassy there.
00:34:02.000And as a result, we created the very capable task force that Americans saw execute this mission last weekend.
00:34:07.000And they just said it was a resounding success.
00:34:09.000So I'm incredibly proud of our troops for doing so.
00:34:10.000I'm proud of the president and grateful for the president for making this decision to finally take this criminal out, a criminal who wasn't just a drug dealer or narco-terrorist, but acted as a regional hub for the worst rogue regimes and terrorist groups in the world.
00:34:25.000As you know, Venezuela was not just a narco-terrorist state.
00:34:27.000It also served as money laundering, logistics hub for literally a laundry list of every single bad actor in the world, from North Korea to Iran, to China, to Russia, to worst of all, money laundering for groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthi rebels.
00:34:41.000They allowed their ghost fleet and oil reserves to be used as a global financing hub for the worst of the worst.
00:34:47.000And this was a great thing for the world.
00:34:50.000You know, Senator, it has been astonishing to watch many of the people who criticized President Trump in term one over not doing what they thought was enough about Maduro, now criticizing him for taking Maduro out of power in Venezuela.
00:35:02.000I want to get to what comes next, but the hypocrisy of many of the people who are now signing into chat to talk about violations of international law and how horrible all of this is, it's pretty astonishing.
00:35:15.000It would be funny if it wasn't so disgraceful.
00:35:16.000I mean, this is the same party, of course, whether it's Chris Murphy or Zorwan Momdani, that demand that Benjamin Netanyahu be arrested.
00:35:24.000They're lombasting arresting a foreign leader for crimes when every single day they call for the arrest of Netanyahu as a war criminal.
00:35:32.000So they demand that we arrest other heads of state.
00:35:34.000These are the same party that tried to arrest our own head of state, Donald Trump, and depose him from power.
00:35:39.000So they clearly don't have a problem arresting or indicting or going after heads of state because they've been doing it all the time.
00:35:46.000So spare me this bullshit where they're like, how dare we touch the head of state of a foreign country that's so off their reservation, it's so not allowed, which is what they've been advocating for, specifically Maduro.
00:35:56.000As you know, Chuck Schumer himself stood on the Senate floor five years ago and demanded that Trump do more to unseat Maduro.
00:36:03.000So the simple fact is this is politics, plain and simple.
00:36:06.000I wish they would not play politics with the lies of Americans because Maduro's regime, obviously, because it predated Maduro, as Chavez before him, actively illicit, supported the illicit networks that kill Americans every day, tens of thousands of them, by pushing fentanyl and cocaine into our country, by funding these Marxist movements within our own country that are constantly trying to tear our own government down and create unrest within the strongest economy and the strongest democracy in the world.
00:36:35.000His entire regime had been bad actors for the last 30 years.
00:36:38.000And the Democrats themselves have said so.
00:36:40.000So my hope is for the good of the country and the good of the world, that they will eventually come around on this.
00:36:45.000But as we know, Trump during syndrome is a very serious disease and they haven't been cured from it yet.
00:36:53.000Yesterday on the show, Senator, I made the case that President Trump, I think, has ended the Iraq syndrome.
00:36:57.000So we had the Vietnam syndrome, which was the idea that America was a bad actor in the world, that America ought to retreat from the world.
00:37:03.000And then under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, that came to an end with targeted military action in places ranging from Grenada to Panama to the first Gulf War.
00:37:13.000After the Iraq war, after the Afghanistan war, there seemed to be an Iraq syndrome in American politics, the idea that American force abroad used in any way was somehow going to lead to hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground, gigantic quagmires, and that America was a negative force in the world.
00:37:26.000Twice in the last year, the president has used targeted military actions to effectuate extraordinary change.
00:37:31.000And it feels as though the Trump administration has put the Iraq syndrome to bed in a way.
00:37:38.000And in many ways, you know, foreign policy, of course, is constantly an evolving ecosystem of ideas and policies and actions.
00:37:45.000And I think throughout American history, we've seen various phases of foreign policy, of engagement, of isolationism, of the decision of whether we will engage in global affairs and whether we won't.
00:37:57.000And I think you're absolutely right, Ben.
00:37:58.000We're turning the page now to a new era that actually harkens back to kind of our original foreign policy playbook in the early days of our founding republic that said, listen, yes, we have formed our republic to get away from the ills of the old world and we don't want to get sucked into old world conflicts.
00:38:14.000But at the same time, we recognize we must stand up for ourselves.
00:38:17.000And the earliest conflicts we fought as Americans were the Barbary Wars of the Mediterranean, where we saw that our commerce was threatened, our sailors were being impressed.
00:38:25.000And we said, you know what, we're going to take targeted action.
00:38:27.000And as a young nation in 1798 through 1805, you know, we took targeted action very much like this, where we went into specific locations from Tripoli to Morocco, from Gibraltar, all through that region to protect our citizens and our national interest.
00:38:43.000And that's what this comes back to, Ben.
00:38:45.000As you well know, as Mark Aruby, who's done an amazing job.
00:38:48.000I mean, those of us who've known Marco, of course, have known this all along, but the rest of the nation is now finally seeing just what a genius this guy is and how lucky we are to have him at the top of our foreign policy construct because what we're seeing is actions being taken for our national interest.
00:39:03.000And believe it or not, Ben, that's the job of our government is to do things that are good for America and good for Americans.
00:39:16.000This phase of foreign policy we're seeing is a targeted campaign of specific actions that have limited scope, but have very intentional outcomes.
00:39:26.000And those outcomes are what we're seeing in Iran now, which with everything in Venezuela, what folks are not seeing is, as you all know, riots in the streets in Tehran.
00:39:34.000Tehran is at the weakest point it has been in in 46 years since the Ayatollah took over in 1980.
00:39:39.000We are finally seeing that this other terrible, murderous regime is finally on the rocks.
00:39:46.000A years of sanctions through our good friends and allies in Israel, targeted strikes to disable their capabilities, of course, the Midnight Hammer mission and other things, quite simply like the drought that has starved Tehran of the ability to sustain population.
00:39:59.000So there's a combination of factors that have put yet another murderous regime at a tipping point.
00:40:04.000And it's not an accident we got there.
00:40:06.000It's because the very focused policies of Secretary Rubio and the president here are taking our adversaries and letting them know that we're not going to sit there and let them constantly stab us in the back and undermine our republic.
00:40:18.000You know, Senator, one of the things that's fascinating is obviously what comes next in Venezuela.
00:40:22.000There's apparently street gangs who have been going around threatening people.
00:40:24.000These are people loyal to Maduro have been threatening folks.
00:40:27.000Obviously, Delsi Rodriguez, who's the vice president, who has now taken over as the leader, she is under the thumb of the U.S. military.
00:40:34.000There's a lot of wondering about is that a long-term relationship?
00:40:37.000Is she going to eventually transition to democracy?
00:40:40.000Obviously, we're on like day four of this thing.
00:40:42.000And the decision that was made by the Trump administration was clearly that we're not going to put hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground in Venezuela.
00:40:48.000We're going to use the forces available to us.
00:40:50.000And then we're going to put such extraordinary pressure on the current regime that they're forced to essentially do our bidding.
00:40:55.000That seems to be the way that things are unfolding so far.
00:40:58.000What do you make of the plan thus far?
00:41:13.000It took us, you know, 15 years to get a constitution in place in America, 1775 to 1789.
00:41:19.000It's going to take some time to stabilize this.
00:41:22.000It's not going to be perfect on day four.
00:41:24.000And to your point, actually, to go back to kind of the Iraq doctrine, which listen, we all know that there were mistakes made and being someone who served there.
00:41:32.000But what also gets lost in the history is Iraq actually became quite a functional place relatively quickly.
00:41:38.000And if Barack Obama had not pulled us out in 2011 to just fill a shallow campaign promise, we were on a pretty good track there.
00:41:45.000And ultimately, Iraq is on a better track now.
00:41:47.000But I think with Venezuela, as far as next steps, Rubio, Stephen Miller, the president, are very focused on that.
00:41:53.000And what they didn't do specifically, Ben, was regime change.
00:41:56.000They didn't go in and bomb out the regime and turn Venezuela into a parking lot and drop 300,000 troops in and establish a provisional government.
00:42:04.000What they did do was arrest a criminal, remove him from power and said to the existing regime, listen, we don't really like you very much, but here's the four corners of the expectations that we will have around you.
00:42:15.000We're going to continue to sanction you.
00:42:17.000We're going to continue to put guardrails around your ability to destroy a fabric of our nation with drugs and criminal activity, mass migration into America.
00:42:27.000We're going to put a box around you and set expectations for your actions.
00:42:31.000And if you violate those expectations, there'll be further consequences.
00:42:34.000And I think you said very clearly, they said very clearly yesterday they expect elections to take place because as you all know, this regime was defeated in elections two years ago.
00:42:45.000And the Machado movement very clearly was preferred by the Venezuelan people.
00:42:50.000And I think there's been demands that why don't we just parachute them in to take over?
00:42:55.000Well, the reality is the regime is not loyal to them.
00:42:57.000The bureaucracy is not in place to conduct that kind of a change.
00:43:00.000And to do that regime change that everyone's accusing us of would invite the kind of stability that we're instability we're all trying to avoid.
00:43:07.000So I think it's very important that we use the existing regime to the extent possible in a transition period to where we can effect a change in government that will reflect the democratic values of the Venezuelan people.
00:43:18.000Who, by the way, everyone demonstrating in the streets that's happy about this are, guess what? Venezuelans.
00:43:24.000All the people who are against it are all like, you know, the white liberal college kids, you know, who yesterday were marching for Palestine and Hamas.
00:43:32.000Today they switched out their Kafiyas for sombreros and now they're marching for Maduro.
00:43:38.000It's ridiculous that this is a shallow astroturf movement paid for by Roy Singen, who's hiding out in China using his capitalist-earned fortune to fund communist exercises in America from anti-Semitism to, of course, now ridiculous opposition to us taking out a drug dealer.
00:43:53.000So I think the next phase is going to be, of course, complex.
00:44:12.000Speaking of dishonest, I have to say that the New York Times takes the cake this morning for a piece talking about how China is now going to take advantage of what happened to Maduro in order to expand its own power.
00:44:27.000Quote, the speed with which U.S. forces acted to capture Mr. Maduro sent a blunt message to Beijing about the limits of its influence in a region Washington treats as its own.
00:44:37.000China now risks losing ground in Venezuela after Saturday's assault in Caracas, despite decades of investment and billions of dollars in loans.
00:44:43.000But the assault also reinforces a broader logic that ultimately favors President Xi Jinping's vision of China and its status in Asia.
00:44:50.000When powerful countries impose their will close to home, others tend to step back.
00:44:57.000The idea that China has been waiting around to see whether the United States would be aggressive in Venezuela to determine whether to be aggressive in Taiwan, or that the lesson they're going to take away from the United States being aggressive in Venezuela is that the United States will not act to defend allies in Taiwan is this is insipid.
00:45:17.000If you think China is sleeping easier tonight because Donald Trump decided to do what he just did to Nicholas Maduro, you're out of your mind.
00:45:43.000And there are reports that there are certain cities, particularly in the border areas of Iran, that have essentially already fallen to many of the people who no longer want to live under the thumb of the Ayatollah.
00:45:55.000Here's some of the video from the Grand Bazaar in Tehran.
00:46:45.000The IRGC is sort of the praetorian guard for the Ayatollahs.
00:46:50.000But if there is somebody inside that infrastructure who wants to do the same thing that just happened in Venezuela, I am sure that that would be fairly easy to effectuate.
00:47:02.000And this is not going to let up, it seems, because Iran's centralized government does not seem to have the wherewithal, the power, or the will to actually just start shooting people en masse.
00:47:12.000They're afraid that President Trump might do something like what just happened in Venezuela.
00:47:16.000Trump has, of course, openly threatened the Iranian regime if they start shooting people in the streets.
00:47:22.000Meanwhile, closer to the West, President Trump's obsession with Greenland continues apace.
00:47:28.000So the other day, President Trump suggested that we need Greenland.
00:47:31.000I'm just going to point out right now that under a current treaty that we have with Denmark, we actually have the ability to build kind of whatever bases we want in Greenland.
00:47:47.000He tried to offer Denmark $100 million in gold back in 1946 for Greenland.
00:47:52.000And Denmark was like, nah, not so interested.
00:47:55.000Right now, it would actually be illegal for Denmark to just sell Greenland because they have a level of home rule and self-government.
00:48:02.000A referendum would likely not result in Greenland joining the United States, which I don't understand the logic there.
00:48:08.000If you're a member of the Greenland population, it seems to me you should damn well want to join the United States.
00:48:13.000You have a choice between independent Greenland and being part of the greatest country on the planet by far, being under the protection of the U.S. military and also benefiting from our magnificent free market system.
00:48:26.000And it seems to me that would be a better use of time.
00:48:29.000But, you know, I'm not from Greenland.
00:48:31.000I'm not, you know, unlike Fezwick from the Princess Bride.
00:48:51.000Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.
00:48:56.000We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.
00:49:01.000And Denmark is not going to be able to do it, I can tell you.
00:49:06.000Okay, so, you know, again, this idea that we're going to grab Greenland, I don't think so.
00:49:10.000But Stephen Miller does enjoy going on cable TV and being very aggressive about his approach to places like Greenland.
00:49:19.000It has been the formal position of the U.S. government since the beginning of this administration.
00:49:25.000Frankly, going back into the previous Trump administration, that Greenland should be part of the United States.
00:49:31.000The president has been very clear about that.
00:49:33.000That is the formal position of the U.S. government.
00:49:35.000Right, but can you say that military action against Greenland is off the table?
00:49:39.000You're going to need military action against Greenland.
00:49:42.000Greenland has a population of 30,000 people, Jake.
00:49:46.000The real question is, by what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland?
00:49:50.000What is the basis of their territorial claim?
00:49:52.000What is their basis of having Greenland as a colony of Denmark?
00:49:56.000The United States is the power of NATO.
00:50:00.000For the United States to secure the Arctic region to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests, obviously Greenland should be part of the United States.
00:50:10.000So, you know, it'll be interesting to see how all this plays out.
00:50:13.000Doesn't mean that the United States is about to invade Greenland.
00:50:18.000In other news, the Health and Human Services Department has now overhauled the childhood vaccine schedule, trying to mirror countries, apparently more like Denmark, Japan.
00:50:28.000There's been an attempt in the media to portray this as a gigantic revamping cut to vaccine guidance that people are being told not to take crucial childhood vaccines.
00:50:39.000Actually, it just changes the advice with regard to, for example, hepatitis A, flu shots, rotavirus.
00:50:47.000And the idea is that now you should go talk to your healthcare provider, your clinical decision maker, as opposed to guidance that you should just get it sort of automatically.
00:50:59.000According to American Academy of Pediatrics President Andrew Racine, he said, at a time when parents, pediatricians, and the public are looking for clear guidance and accurate information, this ill-considered decision will sow further chaos and confusion and erode confidence in immunizations.
00:51:13.000Okay, I mean, saying go talk to your doctor about those ones, well, still maintaining, by the way, that kids be vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella, polio, whooping cough, tetanus, diphtheria, and HPV.
00:51:28.000That does not seem like a massive, massive change to me.
00:51:31.000They're not saying don't take the vaccine.
00:51:32.000They're saying go talk to your doctor about the vaccine schedule.
00:51:35.000Again, pointing out Denmark, Germany, and Japan as pure developed nations with slimmer schedules.
00:51:40.000Again, the best sort of counter argument that I've seen seems to be Americans are too dumb to understand that you should go talk to your doctor and say they just won't take things unless the doctor tells them to take it.
00:51:49.000The reality on a practical level, most doctors are going to tell people that they should give it to their kids.
00:51:53.000That is the reality because doctors are trained in medical school and they know medicine.
00:51:58.000And so doctors tend to be quite pro-vaccine as a general rule because they understand also how herd immunity works.
00:52:04.000Joining me on the line to discuss this and more is Alex Clark.
00:52:06.000She's host of Culture Apothecary, a health and wellness podcast produced by Turning Point USA.
00:52:11.000And of course, she's a leading activist in Maha, the Make America Healthy Again movement.
00:52:15.000Alex, thanks so much for taking the time.
00:52:37.000We are looking into what's involved in baby formula ingredients that are allowed there.
00:52:42.000There's supposed to be a very big announcement happening this week.
00:52:45.000We're thinking on the dietary guidelines.
00:52:47.000They've brought back the presidential fitness test in elementary schools.
00:52:50.000That's really going to kind of culturally transform how we think about health at, you know, a huge level when you're talking about, you know, teaching children about these issues.
00:53:00.000So there's a lot that we've done, but there's a really, really big thing happening at the Supreme Court this Friday that's very important.
00:53:12.000What is happening at the Supreme Court?
00:53:14.000Yeah, so this should actually really matter to every American family, especially parents.
00:53:19.000And this is why people should be paying attention.
00:53:22.000So on Friday, the Supreme Court will decide whether to hear a case brought by Bayer.
00:53:26.000Bayer is the company that owns Monsanto and sells Roundup.
00:53:30.000And so the question at stake is, do American families still have the right to hold chemical companies accountable when their products make people sick or not?
00:53:39.000And Bayer wants the court to give them immunity from lawsuits.
00:53:42.000They're arguing that if the EPA approved their product label, then no one should ever be able to sue them for failing to warn, even if people get cancer, even if new science comes out, and if kids are harmed.
00:53:54.000And so if the court agrees, this wouldn't just apply to Roundup.
00:53:58.000What's really important for you to understand is that this would apply to over 57,000 pesticide products currently on the market.
00:54:06.000We're talking about bug sprays, ant traps, disinfectants, chemicals used in homes, backyards, schools, playgrounds, chemicals that many families, your family might assume are safe because they're sold at the store and they don't have a warning label.
00:54:20.000So the part that makes this even more disturbing is that the EPA approved Roundup without a cancer warning based on science that we now know was fraudulent.
00:54:30.000So one of the key studies that the EPA relied on was ghostwritten by Monsanto.
00:54:37.000And just recently, that study was officially retracted in the last month.
00:54:41.000So Bayer is asking the Supreme Court to protect them using an approval that was based on fake science.
00:54:48.000And that should really stop everybody cold because when real people, juries, were allowed to hear the full truth, they overwhelmingly held Monsanto responsible.
00:54:57.000Five appellate courts upheld those verdicts because juries saw what regulators didn't.
00:55:01.000They saw that Monsanto never tested the actual Roundup formula for long-term cancer risk.
00:55:07.000They saw internal emails where Monsanto scientists admitted, you can't say that Roundup doesn't cause cancer.
00:55:15.000They saw evidence showing that Roundup absorbs through the skin and that matters for kids because parents are spraying Roundup on playgrounds, on lawns, around swing sets.
00:55:32.000There's no warning on the bottle telling parents that this chemical can soak through skin or that it's been linked to cancer or that it could disrupt hormones during critical developmental windows.
00:55:42.000It can actually affect sexual development in the womb and cause genital abnormalities.
00:55:47.000So it can really also affect child's fertility later in life.
00:55:52.000And if parents walked into a store, Ben, and they saw a label that said warning, linked to cancer, absorbs through the skin, not safe for children, a lot of them would put it right back on the shelf.
00:56:03.000Bayer has billions of dollars on the line.
00:56:05.000They know that informed consent changes behavior.
00:56:08.000And so instead, they're wanting the Supreme Court Friday to say that once the EPA signs off, even if that approval was based on manipulated data, that companies will be untouchable.
00:56:19.000Even if new evidence emerges, kids are going to pay the price.
00:56:22.000And so this is bigger than one company.
00:56:25.000What the American people need to understand is that if Bayer wins, this opens the door to immunity for all 57,000 pesticide products regulated under federal law that are linked to cancer, Parkinson's, infertility.
00:56:39.000It would even protect foreign companies, chemical companies, Chinese manufacturers selling products in the United States that are banned in their own country.
00:56:47.000So we are potentially looking, Ben, at the United States government awarding immunity for bio-terrorism.
00:56:54.000So the claim in this case is about, I guess, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act.
00:57:00.000Again, this is when the federal government gets involved, things get very messy.
00:57:03.000They have labeling requirements under what's called FIFRA.
00:57:05.000And I guess the question at issue here is whether FIFRA preempts state tort claims, because what we're talking about here is really not whether it preempts warning labels on the state level.
00:57:16.000It's whether you got damaged by the thing and you can now sue in state court and whether this act preempts.
00:57:23.000As you say, the circuits have been a little bit split on this.
00:57:25.000The Supreme Court has not been active on it.
00:57:27.000It'll be interesting to see how that case comes down, but it is a very, very important case because, again, the question is whether the duty should be on the companies to ensure their products are safe or whether as soon as they've gotten some sort of stamp from the federal government, now they're good to go and do whatever they want, essentially.
00:57:56.000And the reason they're doing this is because they have millions and millions of dollars in lawsuits that are on the line right now that they don't want to be responsible for.
00:58:05.000Congress explicitly said that EPA registration is not a defense against failure to warrant claims.
00:58:12.000So they knew regulators rely on company submitted data and they know that state courts exist to catch what regulators miss, especially when companies lie.
00:58:20.000So, you know, this case would blow that safeguard up.
00:58:23.000And point blank, the message this could potentially send is terrifying.
00:58:27.000If you deceive regulators well enough, you're protected.
00:58:30.000If families get hurt too bad, if children absorb toxic chemicals through their skin, there's no accountability.
00:58:41.000It's corporate immunity at the expense of informed consent.
00:58:45.000And so the question in front of the court this week is really not complicated.
00:58:49.000It's do we reward fraud or do we protect families?
00:58:52.000Because once accountability is gone, safety is going to completely disappear.
00:58:56.000And American parents deserve better than that.
00:58:59.000So if the Supreme Court decides that fake science and weak labels matter more than informed consent, then they're telling American parents that their children's health is negotiable.
00:59:08.000And I believe that is a line that we should never cross.
00:59:21.000No, I mean, bizarrely enough, this actually isn't a limited government issue.
00:59:24.000It's actually the government trying to protect things that normally would not be protected.
00:59:28.000That's the part that's sort of astonishing is that what we're talking about here is a federal act that would preempt normal sort of state level activity.
00:59:36.000And so what you're talking about is growth of federal government actually crowding out the kinds of answerability that you're asking for.
00:59:43.000The Maha movement, as you've talked about, is also obviously much more than just the federal government.
00:59:47.000It is now extended to the state level.
00:59:49.000A number of states just a few days ago enacted snap bans on soda, candy, and other foods.
00:59:54.000There are five states that have done that.
00:59:55.000I know you've testified in front of the Arizona legislature about that particular issue.
01:00:01.000I mean, the fact is that a huge number, particularly of low-income people in the United States who are reliant on food stamps, are using those food stamps to buy food for their kids or for themselves that really unhealthy sponsored by the taxpayer, which then lead to all sorts of health issues down the line that putting aside the difficulties of the person suffering the health issue also tosses more cost at the taxpayer because then we end up paying for the medical care.
01:00:25.000I mean, listen, we've all all week, we've been talking about, you know, little Somalia or whatever and all the fraud that's going on there and how taxpayers are subsidizing them.
01:00:33.000Taxpayers should also not be subsidizing the obesity epidemic, right?
01:00:37.000So that's essentially what's going on when you have the American Beverage Association and people lobbying and saying, you know, it's really imperative that soda is on snap.
01:01:10.000And, you know, there's stuff that with vaccines, we just announced that we're taking the childhood recommended vaccine schedule from over 70 down to, I don't know, what is it, 11 this week?
01:01:21.000That was a massive win from President Trump that I think a lot of people were kind of wondering if he was going to be able to do that.
01:01:40.000And so noise from the public doesn't usually matter.
01:01:44.000But what could matter is us getting loud online and talking about the fact that if they do choose to do this hearing with Monsanto, that it is based on completely fraudulent science about how safe glyphosate is, that was all redacted.
01:01:57.000So that's the thing that we should be talking about because that could make its way to the hill and kind of alert people there.
01:02:04.000So that's why it was really important for me to bring that up.