US GDP rose at a seasonally and inflation-adjusted 3.0% annual rate in the second quarter, according to the Wall Street Journal. That is wildly exceeding expectations from economists who thought that it was going to be 2.3%. Consumer spending increased at a 1.4% pace, picking up from the first quarter, as a steady labor market underpinned households spending power.
00:00:07.000We're joined by the Secretary of Energy to discuss an enormous move by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department, really, one of the biggest moves in regulatory history.
00:00:17.000And we'll get to the breakdown of the Democratic Party, Senator Corey Booker, bringing out those angry eyes yet again.
00:00:21.000But first, This is it, my first book in four years.
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00:00:32.000Go to dailywire.com/slash Ben to order from any retailer, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, Barnes Noble, and of course, from the Daily Wire.
00:00:39.000That's the only place signed copies are available.
00:00:41.000Again, that's dailywire.com/slash Ben, my brand new book.
00:00:45.000You're going to love it, and it's really important that your kids read it.
00:00:48.000Lions and scavengers, available everywhere, September 2nd.
00:00:50.000Well, huge news for the Trump administration.
00:00:53.000According to the Commerce Department, U.S. GDP, which is, of course, the value of all goods and services produced across the country in the sort of final market effect, rose at a seasonally and inflation-adjusted 3.0% annual rate in the second quarter, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:01:08.000That is wildly exceeding expectations from economists who thought that it was going to be 2.3%.
00:01:14.000Those are economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal.
00:01:16.000It followed a first quarter where GDP shrank at a 0.5% annual rate because businesses were loading up on imports to get ahead of the Trump administration's anticipated tariffs.
00:01:26.000And again, this is despite all of the economic uncertainty surrounding the tariffs.
00:01:29.000This is despite all of the foreign policy conflagrations ranging from the Middle East to Ukraine.
00:01:35.000Consumer spending, the engine of the U.S. economy, increased at a 1.4% pace, picking up from the first quarter as a steady labor market underpinned households spending power.
00:01:44.000Consumer spending was offset by weaker business spending.
00:01:48.000So it is certainly possible to read this as very, very optimistic news for the Trump administration.
00:01:54.000It is also possible to read this as an inflection point where things could theoretically go the other way, where businesses are spending less, consumers are sort of lagging at this point as businesses spend less in anticipation of future tariffs or an economic slowdown.
00:02:06.000We're still going to have to see hiring numbers, for example.
00:02:20.000As the Wall Street Journal points out, consumers and businesses are in wait and see mode ahead of Trump's Friday deadline as far as the tariffs.
00:02:27.000And the unemployment rate continues to tick in at 4.1% in June.
00:02:34.000So we will see kind of where things go from here.
00:02:36.000But this is certainly very good news for the Trump administration.
00:02:40.000And of course, this sort of number exceeds what the Biden administration had foresaw as the future of growth in the United States.
00:02:46.000The Biden administration had seen slow but steady growth for the next 10 years in the United States.
00:02:52.000And they had foreseen, according to our sponsors at Perplexity, their forecast, according to their final economic report of the president in January 2025, was an average growth rate of approximately 2.2% per year for the latter half of the 2025 to 2034 period.
00:03:07.000Okay, which, again, if we get these 3% numbers across the rest of the year, we will exceed.
00:03:13.000Right now, if you average what the Trump administration is doing, things are ticking in around 2% because you had a 0.5% and then you had a 3%.
00:03:21.000And so when you average everything out, you're going to end up in the 2% area.
00:03:25.000But if the economy continues to churn along, then President Trump's numbers are going to continue to go up.
00:03:32.000The economy is going to continue to be solid.
00:03:34.000President Trump is putting a lot of pressure on the Federal Reserve, of course, to lower the interest rates, hoping that's going to spur consumer sentiment, make it easier for people to get loans and all the rest.
00:03:44.000And in fact, he's seeing some support among Federal Reserve governors.
00:03:48.000Some of the Federal Reserve governors are disagreeing openly with Jerome Powell.
00:03:51.000As Jerome Powell nears the end of his term, there are some of these Federal Reserve governors who presumably are lobbying for the job.
00:03:56.000They would have to be appointed by the president.
00:03:58.000And so agreeing with the president is a good way to do that politically.
00:04:01.000But they also, I assume, feel that we have now reached the point where inflation is stable and steady, that the tariffs are not going to radically increase prices, and that monetary policy is not turning money into the economy right now.
00:04:15.000And so it's time to lower those interest rates.
00:04:17.000According to the Wall Street Journal, this week's Fed meeting could produce something that has not happened since 1993.
00:04:22.000More than one governor voting against the Fed chair.
00:04:26.000Welcome to monetary policy in the age of the succession campaign.
00:04:30.000Fed chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues have signaled they favor maintaining a wait-and-see approach at this week's meeting.
00:04:34.000The potential dissenters, Governors Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman, happen to be President Trump's two appointees, both have voiced support for cutting rates, which, of course, President Trump has also publicly demanded.
00:04:44.000The last time that more than one governor dissented in a single meeting was more than 30 years ago.
00:04:49.000That's a streak of 259 policy meetings.
00:04:53.000The Fed's 12-person rate-setting committee includes all seven presidentially appointed governors on the Washington-based boards.
00:04:58.000And then the other members are members of regional banks, the regional bank presidents.
00:05:02.000Five of those take turns voting every year.
00:05:05.000Dissents used to be a lot more common in the 1980s when Federal Reserve policy was much more controversial.
00:05:10.000Paul Volcker was pushing for higher interest rates in order to crush inflation.
00:05:14.000There were some people who dissented at the time.
00:05:17.000It'll be fascinating to see as we move forward in time here whether Jerome Powell is too late again, as President Trump suggests, or whether the wait-and-see approach is the appropriate approach, given the fact that we still don't know sort of what the impact of these tariffs are.
00:05:29.000Again, President Trump is negotiating these tariff deals in real time, and that includes, apparently, tariff deals with India.
00:05:36.000So right now, the president apparently is looking at placing a 20 to 25 percent tariff on India, which is a very significant tariff, obviously.
00:05:45.000He was gaggling aboard Air Force One, according to Breitbart, en route to the United States from Scotland.
00:05:50.000And one reporter asked Trump if he was tracking toward a 20 to 25 percent tariff on India, citing a Reuters report that India was preparing for tariffs that could rise to that.
00:06:01.000And then regarding a precise rate, he added, we're going to see.
00:06:03.000He said, India has been a good friend, but India has charged basically more tariffs than almost any other country over the years.
00:06:07.000Now I'm in charge and you just can't do that.
00:06:10.000Now, the president does have a very warm relationship with the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi.
00:06:16.000And so it is possible that it goes lower than that.
00:06:20.000With that said, is that going to escalate prices in the United States?
00:06:23.000It's difficult to say that decreasing supply or artificially increasing prices through a higher pricing mechanism, which is what a tariff is, is not going to increase prices to the American consumer.
00:06:35.000However, is that the same thing as the Federal Reserve or the federal government injecting massive amounts of money into the system, creating systemic inflation?
00:06:42.000In reality, if the prices go up, what you will likely see is a concomitant drop in consumer demand because people are just not going to spend that money.
00:06:50.000And if the consumer demand goes down, it may actually Even out the impact of what would be inflationary pricing.
00:06:57.000Milton Friedman famously said that inflation is anywhere and everywhere a monetary policy issue, meaning that if you're not injecting actual dollars into the economy, that everything is likely to even out in terms of pricing, because if the prices go up, the demand goes down.
00:07:14.000We will see whether innovation, new investment in the United States outweighs that in terms of economic growth.
00:07:19.000That's sort of the open question at this point.
00:07:22.000Now, meanwhile, President Trump continues to avoid the worst excesses of a gigantic tariff on China.
00:07:28.000Now, again, my preferred tariff policy, and I've said this many times, would be free trade with everybody but China, that China is a country that deserves to be isolated.
00:07:35.000They're a nefarious actor in the world.
00:07:37.000They are the lodestar of an anti-American alliance that spans from Russia to China to Iran to North Korea.
00:07:43.000And so targeting them economically by essentially cutting extremely warm relationship deals with everybody else except for China would be my preferred policy.
00:07:52.000President Trump, however, is not doing that.
00:07:54.000President Trump is pursuing tariffs against pretty much everybody at a baseline 10% rate.
00:07:58.000It may be higher for the EU, 15%, maybe higher for India, 20%.
00:08:02.000We'll have to see where he lands, much higher than it has been in the past.
00:08:05.000But he's also attempting to mitigate many of the tariffs that he was placing on China.
00:08:10.000According to Breitbart, trade officials from the United States and China concluded their third round of talks in Stockholm, Sweden on Tuesday with a pledge to extend the current tariff truce between the two countries, provided President Trump approves.
00:08:21.000U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer said at a press conference in Stockholm, we're going to head back to Washington, D.C. We're going to talk to the president about whether that's something he wants to do.
00:08:32.000He said that the Chinese have been very pragmatic in their approach to negotiations.
00:08:35.000He said, we have tensions now, but the fact that we are regularly meeting with them to address these issues gives us a good footing for negotiations.
00:08:41.000Now, remember, President Trump had threatened tariffs as high as 145%, and then it was sort of put on postpone, and it was back down to 30, 35%.
00:08:53.000The Treasury Secretary, Scott Besson, has said that an extension needs to be negotiated before August 12th, or the U.S. tariffs are going to boomerang back to those triple-digit levels.
00:09:01.000That's essentially effectually a trade embargo against China.
00:09:06.000I have a feeling that President Trump is going to avoid all of that because the fallout economically would be pretty significant, obviously, if you were to essentially trade embargo China without putting all of your ducks in a row first.
00:09:17.000President Trump himself has said that he may travel to China to try and negotiate something personally with the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
00:09:25.000He wants me to go there, and he's going to come here, and we're just going to work out dates.
00:10:19.000And it'll be interesting to see whether he's able to actually accomplish that, given China's threats to Taiwan, given China's attempts to spread its sort of belt and road economic initiative all around the world as a challenge to the United States and its support for countries that obviously oppose the United States in terms of foreign policy.
00:10:34.000China itself, of course, opposes the United States.
00:10:36.000Already coming up, we'll be joined by the Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, to talk about the energy revolution in the United States.
00:10:43.000We'll be talking about the New York Times totally botching a story on the Gaza Strip, and it really isn't a botcher.
00:10:47.000It's just they really, really hate Israel over there.
00:10:50.000Plus, Corey Booker pops in the angry eyes yet again.
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00:12:51.000So one of the questions you may be asking yourself is with all this turmoil, with all the tariff turmoil, with all of the concern about foreign relations and all the uncertainty in the markets, why are the markets so optimistic?
00:13:02.000Well, there are a couple of reasons that the markets remain pretty optimistic.
00:13:08.000I talk with a lot of sophisticated VC and hedge fund folks.
00:13:11.000And the amount of money that is pouring into AI as a sort of cure-all for economic woes, increasing labor productivity by orders of magnitude, I think justifiably that Amount of optimism remains extremely high, and the United States remains the home of that sort of innovation.
00:13:28.000And so, the United States, as sort of the hub of the next step of the global economy, remains a place where money is going to come.
00:13:34.000But there's something else that's happening here, and it's connected with, again, the Trump administration's generalized policy with regard to business.
00:13:40.000Even if, like me, you do not love the president's tariff policy, if you think the president's trade policy is creating a dampening effect on the economy, that if it weren't there, the economy would be growing at 4% or 4.5% or 5%.
00:13:52.000Even if you believe that, the question becomes, what are the supporting factors that are leading to 3% GDP growth despite the uncertainty?
00:13:58.000And the biggest one, the biggest one is that President Trump cut taxes with the one big beautiful bill.
00:14:02.000And two, the president of the United States is radically deregulatory.
00:14:06.000The president looks at the regulatory state and he sees it as a threat to the growth of the American economy.
00:14:12.000And one of the biggest moves that has been made in modern history in the regulatory state has happened this week.
00:14:18.000The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday, according to the Wall Street Journal, declared Liberation Day from climate imperialism by moving to repeal the 2009 so-called endangerment finding for greenhouse gas emissions.
00:14:29.000So basically, the Clean Air Act, which was put into place in the 1970s, authorized the EPA to regulate pollutants like ozone, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and others that might reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.
00:14:43.000Well, the EPA suggested under Barack Obama that you could use the Clean Air Act in order to regulate carbon emissions, which is insane.
00:14:53.000The kinds of stuff the Clean Air Act was meant to stop was, again, particulate matter.
00:14:58.000It was meant to stop ozone that was breaking down the ozone layer.
00:15:02.000It was not meant to deal with carbon and particularly carbon dioxide, which is a thing that, you know, is a natural byproduct of, for example, breathing.
00:15:12.000Carbon dioxide is not a danger to human beings in the environment.
00:15:17.000You may not like what it does in terms of global climate change, but the idea that the EPA has authority under the Clean Air Act is wrong.
00:15:24.000If Congress wants to give the EPA that authority, then it certainly could, but it never did.
00:15:28.000The Supreme Court found in 2007 that greenhouse gases could qualify as pollutants under an extraordinarily broad misreading of the law.
00:15:37.000But now the EPA is walking that back, and the EPA is suggesting that this is not correct.
00:15:43.000Quote, there is some evidence that elevated carbon dioxide concentrations and climate changes can lead to changes in aero-allergens that could increase the potential for allergenic illnesses, said the Supreme Court and the EPA under their 2009 ruling.
00:15:57.000Well, the Energy Department has now walked that back.
00:15:59.000They published a comprehensive analysis of climate science and its uncertainties by five outside scientists.
00:16:03.000One of those is Stephen Kunin, who served in the Obama administration.
00:16:07.000The crucial point is that CO2 is different from the pollutants Congress expressly authorized the EPA to regulate.
00:16:12.000Those pollutants are, quote, subject to regulatory control because they cause local problems depending on concentrations, including nuisances, damages to plants, and at high enough exposure levels, toxological effects on humans.
00:16:24.000In contrast, CO2 is odorless, does not affect visibility, and it has no toxicological effects at ambient levels.
00:16:30.000So you're not going to get sick from CO2 in the air.
00:16:34.000Okay, so the EPA Administrator Lise Elden and Energy Secretary Chris Wright are taking this on.
00:16:41.000They've said the Clean Air Act no longer applies in our interpretation to greenhouse gases.
00:16:46.000It means something extraordinary for the American economy, among other things, which is a massive deregulatory environment.
00:16:54.000The alleged cost of regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act amounts to something like $54 billion per year.
00:17:03.000So if you multiply that out over the course of the last decade and a half, you're talking about a cost of in excess of $800 billion based again on a regulatory agency radically exceeding its boundaries.
00:17:15.000Joining us online to discuss this massive move by the Trump administration is the Energy Secretary, Chris Wright.
00:17:21.000Secretary, thanks so much for taking the time.
00:17:26.000So first of all, why don't we discuss what the EPA just did, what that actually means, how's the Energy Department involved?
00:17:33.000And what does it mean for sort of the future of things like energy development in the United States?
00:17:38.000Well, the endangerment finding, you know, 2007 Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts and a bunch of environmental groups sued the EPA and said, you must regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
00:17:52.000Unfortunately, the Supreme Court decided five to four in 2007 that greenhouse gases could become endangerments.
00:18:01.000And if they were, the EPA had the option, but not the compulsion, to regulate greenhouse gases.
00:18:07.000As soon as the Obama administration came in in 2009, they did kind of a tortured process to say greenhouse gases endanger the lives of Americans.
00:18:17.000And that gave the regulatory state, the EPA, the ability to regulate greenhouse gases that the Obama administration and others had failed to pass through Congress.
00:18:29.000If you pass a law through the House and the Senate and the president signs it, then you can do that.
00:18:33.000But they just did it through a regulatory backdoor.
00:18:37.000And now those regulations disinfuse everything we do.
00:18:42.000Maybe most famously automobiles, the EV mandates, the continual lowering of or increasing in fuel economy standards that brought us the SUV and everyone buying trucks because they don't want to buy small cars.
00:18:55.000But it's regulating you appliances and power plants and home hair dryers and outdoor heaters.
00:19:02.000So it's just been a huge entanglement into American life, big brother climate regulations from the government.
00:19:08.000They don't do anything meaningful for global greenhouse gas emissions.
00:19:12.000They don't change any health outcomes for Americans, but they massively grow the government.
00:19:17.000They increase costs and they grow the reach of the government.
00:19:20.000So Administrator Lee Zeldin is reviewing that and saying, hey, we don't believe that greenhouse gases are a significant endangerment to the American public and they shouldn't be regulated by the EPA.
00:19:34.000The APA does not have authority to regulate them because Congress never passed such a law.
00:19:39.000And what we did at the Department of Energy, sorry for the long answer, is I reached out to five prestigious climate scientists that are real scientists in my mind, meaning they follow the data wherever it leads, not only if it aligns with their politics or their views otherwise.
00:19:56.000And we published a long sort of critical overview of climate science and its impact on Americans.
00:20:02.000And that was released yesterday on the DOE website.
00:20:05.000And I highly recommend everyone to give it a read.
00:20:10.000And in synopsis, it's a big report, obviously.
00:20:13.000What are the biggest findings from that report that you commissioned at the Department of Energy with regard to this stuff?
00:20:19.000Maybe the single biggest one that everyone should be aware of is the ceaseless repeating that climate change is making storms more frequent and more severe and more dangerous.
00:20:37.000But media and politicians and activists just repeatedly repeat it.
00:20:42.000And in fact, I saw The Hill had a piece right away when our press release went out yesterday morning.
00:20:47.000Despite decades of data and scientific consensus that climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of storms, the EPA has reversed the endangerment finding.
00:20:57.000Like just the headlines are just wrong.
00:21:00.000One of my goals for 20 years, Ben, is just for people to be a little more knowledgeable of what actually is true with climate change and what actually are the trade-offs between trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by top-down government actions and what does that mean for the energy system?
00:21:17.000We've just driven up the price of energy, reduced choice to American consumers without meaningfully moving global greenhouse gas emissions at all.
00:21:26.000And when I talk to activists or politicians about it, they're not even that concerned about it.
00:21:30.000They don't act as if their real goal is to incrementally reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
00:21:36.000Their real goal is for the government and them, you know, a small number of people to decide what's appropriate behavior for all Americans.
00:21:46.000Just creepy top-down control sold in the name of protecting the future of the planet.
00:21:52.000If it was really about that, they'd know a little bit more about climate change, but they almost never do.
00:22:00.000Well, this is the part that's always astonishing to me.
00:22:02.000I get in a room with climate scientists from places like MIT or Caltech, and we'll discuss what exactly is going on.
00:22:08.000These are people who believe that there is anthropogenic climate change, that human activity is causing some sort of market impact on the climate.
00:22:15.000But when you discuss with them, okay, so what are the solutions?
00:22:18.000The solutions that are proposed are never in line with the kind of risk that is being sought to be prevented.
00:22:24.000I mean, there's a point that the Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus has made, is that there are certain things that you could do economically that would totally destroy your economy and might save you an incremental amount of climate change on the other end.
00:22:35.000And then there are the things that we actually could do that are practical, things like building seawalls, things like hardening infrastructure, moving toward nuclear energy would be a big one.
00:22:45.000To me, the litmus test of whether somebody is serious or not about climate change is what their feelings about nuclear energy.
00:22:50.000If they're anti-nuclear energy, but somehow want to curb climate change, then you know one of those things is false.
00:22:55.000It cannot be that you wish to oppose nuclear energy development, but also your chief goal is to lower carbon emissions.
00:23:03.000I mean, the biggest driver of reduced greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. by far has been natural gas displacing coal in the power sector.
00:23:12.000It's about 60% of all the U.S. reduction in emissions.
00:23:16.000But they hate natural gas, you know, because again, it's a movement against hydrocarbons towards a society that somehow they think is better.
00:23:24.000It is helping more on the left become pro-nuclear.
00:23:28.000So I'll view that as one of the positive side effects of the climate movement and probably is going to help nuclear energy start going again.
00:23:36.000Of course, there are plenty that are anti-nuclear and climate crazies.
00:23:42.000But as you just mentioned, what Nordhaus said in his lecture was do the things where the benefits are greater than the cost, sort of common sense.
00:23:50.000And in his proposed optimal scenario, you know, we reduce the warming through this century by about 20%, not net zero, not any, because those things are you spend $100 trillion and maybe you get $10 trillion of benefits.
00:24:05.000You know, that's not, and then people tell me, well, it's an admirable goal.
00:24:58.000They don't cool their houses as much in the hot summer days.
00:25:01.000And they live, they've impoverished their people so they can afford less energy.
00:25:05.000This isn't victory, and this isn't changing the global future of the world.
00:25:09.000Like we just need some common sense back around energy and climate change.
00:25:13.000That's where the Trump administration is headed across the administration, not just administer Zeldon and myself, but everyone in the administration.
00:25:21.000We just want Americans to have a government that follows basic common sense.
00:25:28.000Now, Secretary Wright, we were discussing a little bit earlier on in the show this excellent second quarter GDP number, some of which is being driven certainly by mass investment in technologies like AI.
00:25:38.000If you talk to folks who are in sort of the capital intensive arenas, pretty much all the money right now is going into AI that's a race the United States must win.
00:25:46.000And one of the huge components there is the energy that is going to be necessary in order to pursue the sorts of processing that AI is going to require.
00:25:54.000The gigantic data centers that are now being built are going to require inordinate amounts of energy.
00:26:25.000As you just said, I've called it Manhattan Project 2.0, because in the Manhattan Project, when we developed an atomic bomb in World War II, we could not have come in second.
00:26:34.000If Nazi Germany had developed an atomic weapon before us, we would live in a different world.
00:26:41.000If China gets a meaningful lead on the U.S. in artificial intelligence, because it's not just economics and science, it's national defense, it's the military.
00:26:50.000Now we are under serious threat from China and we go into a very different world.
00:27:00.000We have the ability to invest these huge amounts of capital, again, from private markets and private businesses, which a free market capitalist like myself loves.
00:27:08.000The biggest limiter, as you set up, is electricity.
00:27:12.000The highest form and most expensive type of energy there is is to turn it into electricity.
00:27:17.000And as you just said, China's been growing their electricity production massively.
00:27:21.000Ours has barely grown in the last 20 years.
00:27:24.000In fact, it grew like 2% or 3% in the Obama years, but yet they got the Biden years, but yet they got prices up over 25%.
00:27:33.000They helped elect President Trump by just doing everything wrong on energy.
00:27:38.000And they certainly weren't all of the above.
00:27:40.000They were all about wind, solar, and batteries.
00:27:43.000And congratulations, they got them to rounds to 3% of total U.S. energy at the end of the Biden years.
00:27:51.000Hydrocarbons went from 82% in 2019 when Biden promised, guaranteed he would end fossil fuels, to 82% his last year in office.
00:28:04.000So they just believe and cling to too many silly things about energy.
00:28:09.000So today, the world, the United States' biggest source of electricity by far is natural gas.
00:28:15.000And that will be the dominant growth that will enable us to build all these tens of gigawatts of data centers.
00:28:22.000It's abundant, it's affordable, and it works all the time.
00:28:25.000I've never been an all of the above guy because subsidizing wind and solar, you know, globally, a few trillions of dollars have gone into it.
00:28:34.000And the main result is if you get high penetration, you get expensive electricity and a less stable grid.
00:28:41.000You know, the crazy amount of money the United States government spent on wind and solar hasn't grown, as we talked before, hasn't grown our electricity production because they're not there at peak demand time.
00:28:54.000You know, whether you look at Washington, D.C. or Texas is the biggest penetration of wind and second biggest penetration of solar.
00:29:01.000It's 35% of the capacity on the Texas grid.
00:29:04.000But at peak demand, like these cold, high pressure systems or cold or warm high pressure systems, the wind is gone.
00:29:12.000Peak demand time is after the sun goes down and you get almost nothing from wind and solar.
00:29:18.000What they really are is just parasites that in the middle of the day, you know, when demand is low and all the power plants that have to be there to supply at peak demand, they just all have to turn down.
00:29:28.000And then the sun goes behind a cloud and they got to turn up again.
00:29:30.000And then when peak demand comes, when it's very cold, you know, in the evening time, well, all the existing thermal capacity and nuclear capacity has to run and drive the grid.
00:29:39.000So if you don't add to the product, reliable production at peak demand time, you're not adding to the capacity of the grid.
00:29:45.000You're just adding to the complexity and cost of the grid.
00:29:49.000I mean, if Harris had won the election, you know, we would not only have no chance to win the AI race against China, we would just have increasing blackouts and brownouts today, let alone with the extra demand, some extra demand that would have come from AI, even if they had won the race.
00:30:06.000But because President Trump won, common sense came back in spades, and we're allowing American businesses to invest and lead in AI.
00:30:14.000We're in a very different trajectory, a very different trajectory.
00:30:19.000Well, that's U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright doing a fantastic job over there.
00:30:22.000One of the big reasons that the Trump economy continues to churn along.
00:30:26.000Secretary Wright, really appreciate the time and the insight.
00:30:42.000First, let's talk about poison in the water, the kind that doesn't go away.
00:30:45.000Toxic industrial waste leaches into our water supply, leaving PFAS in your water.
00:30:50.000These are called forever chemicals because once they're in the water supply, they stay, you know, forever.
00:30:55.000Up to 95 million Americans have PFAS in their drinking water.
00:30:57.000They've been linked to all sorts of issues like cancer, hormonal effects, developmental issues in kids.
00:31:01.000As a parent, two four kids, my wife and I don't take risks.
00:31:04.000That's why we purify our water with the best filtration system on the market called Cove Pure.
00:31:09.000Not only is it third-party tested, remove over 99% of PFAS, but Cove Pure also removes heavy metals, nitrates, microplastics, and hundreds of other contaminants.
00:31:17.000You think bottled water is a good alternative?
00:31:58.000The big beautiful bill also cut taxes on tips and overtime, secures the border, finishes the wall, and protects Medicaid for Americans, not illegals.
00:32:04.000Leader Thune and Senate Republicans got President Trump's conservative agenda done, providing real relief for every hardworking American that's up early and home late, or bringing back manufacturing jobs home and making America great again.
00:32:16.000Tell Leader John Thune and Senate Republicans thank you for delivering President Trump's agenda.
00:32:22.000Meanwhile, as the Trump economy churns along, the Democrats continue to struggle amongst themselves for relevance.
00:32:29.000Corey Booker, who desperately wishes to run for president of the United States, despite his obvious lack of political acumen, charm, and skill, he continues to do these sort of poser things in the United States Senate in an attempt to garner attention.
00:32:43.000Now, he pops, he's Mr. Potato Head, he pops out the angry always, pops them in, and he gets very angry.
00:32:57.000Well, apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, a routine move to pass bipartisan policing bills turned into a heated exchange between Democrats after Senator Corey Booker accused his colleagues of not fighting hard enough against the Trump administration.
00:33:10.000And this is the big thing from Democrats: the more you can appear to be fighting the Trump administration while actually accomplishing nothing, the more apparently Democrats and the media are happy.
00:33:20.000So yelling at the walls like a crazy person is the thing that is going to win you the Democratic nomination, I suppose.
00:33:26.000So the fight apparently began when Booker rose in opposition to a proposal from Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto of Nevada.
00:33:33.000She had a request to pass a bipartisan bill by unanimous consent that was going to fund policing.
00:33:41.000He cited concerns that the Trump administration would, quote, weaponize public safety grants to punish blue states.
00:33:48.000Cortez-Masto fired back at Booker and said, you're trying to add some sort of poison pill provision to what is a bipartisan bill that's going to go through with unanimous approval.
00:34:35.000He had an opportunity at that time to present this amendment.
00:34:39.000This is the first time we're ever hearing about it.
00:34:41.000Tacking on a poison pill language to these bills won't guarantee any additional funding makes it to New Jersey, Nevada, or any other state.
00:34:51.000Instead, what it will do, it will keep critical bills from passing in the first place.
00:34:59.000Well, this prompted Corey Booker to go full angry eyes.
00:35:28.000And dear God, if you want to come at me that way, you're going to have to take it up with me because there's too much on the line right now in America.
00:35:37.000As people's due process rights and freedom of the speech rights and secret police are running around this country, picking people up off the streets who have a legal right to be here, there's too much going on in this country.
00:36:24.000Like, this is the best you've got, guys?
00:36:26.000I know you all went crazy when he spoke for 25 hours, because I guess that since you had a president already who had to be calfed because he was senile, now you're looking for another president who's going to calf just so he can speak for a very long time.
00:36:38.000So if he speaks for 25 hours, you're super excited.
00:36:40.000If Hakeem Jeffries jabbers for seven hours, you guys get really, really excited and all this sort of thing.
00:36:47.000You know who I have a sneaking enjoyment of Senator Amy Klobuchar.
00:36:52.000I do, because she's like, you got to be kidding me.
00:36:56.000She's actually a relatively serious person, the senator from Minnesota.
00:36:59.000And she's looking at Corey Booker like, what the hell, dude?
00:37:01.000What is wrong with you, you posing provocateur, you joke?
00:37:06.000Here's Amy Klobuchar, who's about to throw a binder at Corey Booker.
00:37:10.000And I will note that Senator Booker objected to my police reauthorization bill, the cops funding, the Clinton cops funding, long before Donald Trump came into office.
00:37:22.000These and the other police bills passed during police week, while those police officers are sitting there in the hearing room, when no one objected, they are bipartisan common sense legislation.
00:37:34.000They passed the Judiciary Committee unanimously.
00:37:38.000And I can't help it if someone couldn't change their schedule to be there.
00:37:43.000I think that these hearings should mean something and that people should be saying the same thing they say on police week when those people are sitting out there in the uniform who have lost loved ones as they say on this Senate floor.
00:37:58.000I mean, Klobuchar is one of the last sane Democrats.
00:38:14.000I mean, truly, some of the most backward policymaking and politics I have ever seen, they cannot let go of it because they have trained their base to be ever more leftward.
00:38:23.000And so even the supposed moderates, like for example, Governor Westmore of Maryland, he was on the At Our Table podcast with Jamie Harrison, the former head of the DNC, unsuccessful head of the DNC.
00:38:33.000And he was asked why black people are not voting Democrat as often as they were.
00:38:36.000His answer, because of wait for it, wait for it, wait for it.
00:38:43.000It is true that we have a justice system that has been targeting and weighted against black men.
00:38:50.000We have an education system that has been deliberate about the way that we are criminalizing and punishing black boys when we're watching the results of our young black boys continue to downgrade.
00:39:02.000And we are actually then turning around and blaming the black boys for their failure.
00:39:06.000Not the system, not the structure, but the young men blaming them.
00:39:12.000We do have a system of employment where we make it more difficult for black men to be able to enter into the employment market.
00:39:18.000We do have a system that makes basically every sentence a life sentence that when someone comes back from incarceration, we make it deeply challenging for them to be able to get public housing, challenging for them to be able to get a student loan, challenging for them to get a home loan, challenging for them to reintegrate with their families.
00:39:33.000And then we wonder what's going on with black men and why they're not voting for us.
00:39:49.000Meanwhile, Democrats cannot get over the Zoran Mom dominification of their party.
00:39:53.000Governor Kathy Hochul, who again has failed upward into every job she has ever held.
00:39:58.000You'll recall that she became governor when Andrew Cuomo, who now wants to run for mayor of New York, basically grabbed to mass and then had to resign.
00:40:06.000Well, now she's out there defending Zoran Momdani and saying she doesn't care that Zoran Momdani once wanted to defund the police and probably still does.
00:40:33.000He's the current frontrunner for mayor of New York.
00:40:35.000And the things that he said like five years ago on Twitter are still somewhat relevant, but they can't get over the Mamdanification of the party because in essence, the entire Democratic Party is moving dramatically in the direction of Zorin Mamdani.
00:40:47.000Pete Budijej, again, another one of these supposed moderates in the Democratic Party.
00:40:51.000He says that he's going to talk about endorsing Zorin Mamdani on NPR.
00:40:56.000Yeah, I mean, again, it's kind of distinguishing between tactics and ideology.
00:41:00.000And I would say, you know, he's further left than I am.
00:41:03.000But also, I think that what he's been able to do is something that our party ought to learn from.
00:41:27.000A lot of people on the right have pointed out that Zorin Mamdani, aside from being like an overt communist, Zorin Mamdani also happens to be a supporter of terrorism.
00:41:37.000He is a person who literally rapped about freeing people who are in jail for support of terrorism, what he called the Holy Land Five, people who went to jail for overt financial support of the terrorist group Hamas.
00:41:47.000There's a reason he will not separate off from the message of globalize the antifati.
00:41:51.000So I wouldn't say it publicly, but the general underlying idea is the right idea.
00:41:55.000The reason that didn't hurt him in the Democratic primary is because Democratic voters increasingly agree with him.
00:42:03.000There's a poll that just came out from Semaphore, and it shows that among Democratic primary voters in New York City, 78% said we should reduce U.S. support for Israel.
00:42:18.000The reality is the Democratic support base is increasingly anti-Israel.
00:42:23.000They believe in a conspiracy theory about the world that suggests that the world is broken down into oppressed and oppressors.
00:42:28.000You can identify the oppressed by lack of economic prosperity and also by skin color.
00:42:35.000There's a third worldification that has happened to the Democratic Party in which they seem to believe that America and her allies are bad and that every other country is a victim of America and her allies.
00:42:46.000And so when you look at the Democratic Party and why they're struggling with the mainstream American people, this would be the reason.
00:42:51.000And part of that is also because they've created a massive media echo chamber.
00:42:55.000And this brings us to the current situation in Gaza.
00:42:58.000So I have to say, the media are just trash.
00:43:02.000Legacy media are absolute sheer garbage.
00:43:07.000I remember when my parents first canceled the Los Angeles Times.
00:43:10.000Los Angeles Times used to use the wire for the New York Times.
00:43:14.000The Los Angeles Times used to share content with the New York Times.
00:43:17.000It was back when people actually got physical newspapers back in the 90s.
00:43:20.000I remember when I was a kid, I was like 16 years old, 15, 16 years old.
00:43:25.000And there's a picture that appeared on the front page of the New York Times.
00:43:28.000That picture was, according to the New York Times, a picture of an Israeli policeman beating up a Palestinian on the Temple Mount.
00:43:34.000It was a picture in the foreground of a young man profusely bleeding from the head and an Israeli soldier with a baton yelling.
00:43:42.000And it turned out that that story was not true.
00:43:44.000It turned out that what had actually happened is that this young man was a Jew from Chicago who'd been beaten by 40 Arabs, had run away to a gas station, and the police officer was yelling over his head at the Arabs who were chasing him to move away or they would end up themselves meeting with force.
00:44:01.000The New York Times ran that on the front page as an example of Israeli oppression in the middle of the second Intifada.
00:44:07.000And I remember my parents canceling their LA Times subscription over that, which, you know, I think was justified, although I will say I missed the sports section.
00:44:14.000The New York Times has been garbage for legitimately my entire life on this issue and on many other issues as well.
00:44:21.000And because the New York Times and the legacy media have created this bizarre steel-coated bubble, this echo chamber of left-wing messaging, it is shaping more and more how Democrats think.
00:44:32.000They think everybody agrees with them.
00:44:34.000There's a famous phrase from the movie critic Pauline Kahle back during the 1972 election cycle when Richard Nixon blew out George McGovern, won 49 states.
00:44:44.000And Pauline Kahle expressed supposedly shock at this saying, I don't understand how Nixon could have won.
00:44:52.000Well, that is the Democratic Party in a nutshell.
00:44:54.000Everybody that they know agrees with them because they all read the same media outlets, because they all consume the same information.
00:45:01.000Now that's being transferred all the way down to the youngest generation via things like TikTok and X.com, which are wild sources of just untrue information.
00:45:10.000But the reason I bring this up in the context of Gaza is because the New York Times just did, again, an incredibly egregious thing.
00:45:16.000We've discussed this on the show already this week.
00:45:44.000And the New York Times ran this picture as evidence of starvation in the Gaza Strip.
00:45:48.000Now, there's mixed information coming out from the Gaza Strip, and no one really has great transparency into what is happening because Hamas, the Gaza Health Ministry, they lie routinely.
00:45:57.000They've been lying since the beginning of the war every single day, every single hour.
00:46:01.000Their tactic was launch a war on Israel that they could not win militarily and then win in the press and hope to get something out of it.
00:46:07.000And right now, it seems to be working with the French, who are deeply afraid of their own Islamic population, and with the UK, where Kira Starmer has his head so far up his own ass that it's coming out his head again.
00:46:18.000Well, this story rocketed around the world.
00:46:21.000This picture rocketed around the world.
00:46:22.000And as we showed on the program yesterday, if you expand the frame of that picture, you see that Muhammad has a brother.
00:47:06.000They lied because the way that this works is that if you are a publication of record, you are supposed to actually track down the source of the information.
00:47:17.000You're supposed to actually know what the hell you are printing in your pages.
00:47:20.000And if you print a retraction, you're supposed to do so in the same manner and mode that you printed the original story.
00:47:25.000If the original story gets blasted to 55 million people and your retraction gets printed on page A14 at the bottom with the classifieds, that ain't doing it.
00:47:33.000Well, that's what the New York Times did.
00:47:34.000But not only did the New York Times do that and admit their error, but they also, in the admission, talk about how brave and wonderful they are.
00:47:41.000Here is their actual editor's note appended.
00:47:43.000And again, blasted out to their account of 80,000, not their account of 55 million.
00:47:47.000Quote, children in Gaza are malnourished and starving, as New York Times reporters and others have documented.
00:47:53.000We recently ran a story about Gaza's most vulnerable civilians, including Mohammad Zakaria Al-Mutawak, who is about 18 months old and suffers from severe malnutrition.
00:48:00.000We have since learned new information, including from the hospital that treated him and his medical records, and have updated our story to add context about his pre-existing health problems.
00:48:07.000This additional detail gives readers a greater understanding of his situation.
00:48:10.000Our reporters and photographers continue to report from Gaza bravely, sensitively, and at personal risk so that readers can see the first-hand consequences of the war.
00:48:33.000And this is a thing that legacy media are doing all over the world.
00:48:36.000In fact, according to The Spectator in the UK, the BBC has actively told all of its own reporters what political line to tow on Gaza.
00:48:45.000Quote, a leaked internal email from a BBC executive editor reveals that the corporation has issued prescriptive instructions to staff on how to cover the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
00:48:54.000The memo, titled, covering the food crisis in Gaza, amounts to a top-down editorial diktot that discards impartiality, elevates one side of a deeply contested narrative, and imposes a specific anti-Israel legal political framing as settled fact.
00:49:06.000The email begins by declaring that, quote, the argument over how much aid has crossed into Gaza is irrelevant.
00:49:14.000That's literally the core of the entire argument.
00:49:16.000If Israel has shipped in enough aid for the population and Hamas is stealing it, that goes directly to who is responsible for the starvation to the extent that it is occurring of any Palestinians.
00:49:27.000And we know for a fact that Hamas is stealing it.
00:49:29.000We show you video yesterday of Hamas on the aid trucks.
00:49:33.000This is the reason the UN, which is a tool of Hamas, will not work with the IDF to ship the aid in.
00:49:39.000They insist that they go in alone so Hamas can steal the aid and thus continue the war.
00:49:43.000Because the UN RWA is an arm of Hamas.
00:49:45.000If Hamas dies, so does the UN RWA and its control and its funding and all of its support.
00:49:51.000The BBC explicitly favors a particular explanation of suffering in Gaza, one that blames the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is an aid body established between the United States and Israel, which seeks an orderly distribution of aid.
00:50:03.000And by the way, you can see video online of how it works at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites, which is an orderly queue, people waiting to get their food, as opposed to when the UN brings in a truck, in which people descend en masse on these trucks, try to get everything before Hamas can shoot them.
00:50:20.000That sort of media misinformation is the crux of what is happening in the Gaza Strip right now.
00:50:28.000And it provides the support for absolute ridiculous politicians like Keir Sarmer, who again has to deal with the increased Islamification of his country, suggesting that unless Israel suddenly radically establishes a Palestinian state with no territory, no government, and no functioning systems, that the UK is going to recognize a Palestinian.
00:50:47.000I mean, first of all, the UK should just recognize it in London right now, because it seems like London has seen already a radical Islamic takeover.
00:50:53.000Maybe Kir Starmer should worry more about his own country.
00:50:55.000But here is Kir Starmer saying that essentially, because Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, now there should be a Palestinian state.
00:51:03.000Well, last time Israel withdrew from a territory and attempted to hand full authority over to a Palestinian entity, it was Hamas in 2006, and it ended with October 7th.
00:51:16.000So today, as part of this process towards peace, I can confirm the UK will recognize the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September, unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire, and commit to a long-term sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution.
00:51:46.000And this includes allowing the UN to restart the supply of aid and making clear that there will be no annexations in the West Bank.
00:51:55.000Meanwhile, our message to the terrorists of Hamas is unchanged and unequivocal.
00:52:03.000They must immediately release all of the hostages, sign up to a ceasefire, disarm, and accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza.
00:52:16.000Or, you may have noticed that there's a consequence attached to his demands on the Israelis, which amount to handing More sovereignty over to Hamas, ensuring that the UN can continue to ship aid into Hamas, signing on to a ceasefire that doesn't amount to release of hostages.
00:52:32.000It was Hamas that walked away from the table, not Israel.
00:52:50.000Because it seems to me that all of this would be over and could have been over in the first, first of all, never would have started if Hamas didn't actually launch October 7th.
00:52:58.000But number two, it seems to me that if you're going to make demands, it should be on the party that is continuing the conflict, namely Hamas, which is shooting its own people in order to prevent them from getting aid so it can monopolize the aid and continue its fight to dominate the Gaza Strip that is still holding hostages and refuses to go into exile.
00:53:15.000But again, typical Islamicized country in Europe.
00:53:20.000President Trump remains the only morally clear figure on this issue, perhaps in the West.
00:53:26.000Here was President Trump on this idiocy from Kierist Armer.
00:53:29.000Is there any use at all in pressuring Israel now to come to some sort of longer-term solution?
00:53:35.000Well, you could make the case that you're rewarding people, that you're rewarding Hamas if you do that.
00:53:41.000And I don't think they should be rewarded.
00:53:43.000So I'm not in that camp, to be honest.
00:53:47.000We'll let you know where we are, but I am not in that case.
00:53:52.000President Trump, a man of actual moral clarity.
00:53:55.000Well, the good news is, for at least the anti-Israel radical right, the horseshoe theory right, they have an avatar, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, again, is one of the more unintelligent people in Congress.
00:54:07.000She's called an avatar of MAGA on Capitol Hill by the New York Times, but suffice it to say that if you poll people who vote MAGA on who they like more, President Trump or Marjorie Taylor Greene, she doesn't chart.
00:54:19.000There's a reason the media are trying to play up the comments on this matter of, for example, Marjorie Taylor Greene or Steve Bannon as though they are the avatar of MAGA.
00:54:27.000They are trying to create conflict inside MAGA where very little conflict exists by the polling data.
00:54:32.000Today, there is higher support among Republicans for Israeli action in Gaza than there was back in September of 2024.
00:54:40.000So there is at 71% approval, by the way.
00:54:43.000So that is not a lot of dissent inside the Republican Party over the finishing of Hamas.
00:54:48.000Marjorie Taylor Greene, however, is now horseshoe theorying around to the AOC side of the almost shock there, suggesting that there is a genocide in Gaza.
00:54:57.000So, you know, suffice it to say that she has very little to no support inside the Republican Party for this proposition.
00:55:05.000And this is part and parcel of a broader attempt by some members of MAGA to try and wrest control of the MAGA movement away from President Trump.
00:55:13.000The same people who are going hog wild on the idea that President Trump is somehow covering up an Epstein scandal are the same people who disagree with President Trump on foreign policy.
00:55:24.000That is a deliberate attempt to undermine President Trump.
00:55:26.000It's a deliberate attempt to undermine his agenda.
00:55:29.000And they will use any tool at their disposal in order to build support for an alternative, quote-unquote, MAGA agenda that they have nothing to do with in the first place.
00:55:36.000Meanwhile, they're horseshoe theorying around all the way to the Potsey of America, bros.
00:55:40.000Yesterday, the Padse of America Bros totally lost their mind.
00:55:43.000And so we're going to go through what they had to say about this.
00:55:45.000They're now just representatives for Hamas.
00:56:18.000They've basically now taken the position that the United States should not militarily support Israel in any way.
00:56:21.000You can make that argument on the basis of Israel's a sovereign country and they should, instead of getting a subsidy for $3 billion a year, which all goes back, by the way, to American-made weaponry.
00:56:31.000It's actually a subsidy to American defense manufacturers.
00:56:34.000You can make an argument that among other countries, we basically should provide no military aid to anybody.
00:56:38.000And if countries want to buy our military material, then they can damn well fund it themselves.
00:56:42.000That's an argument that I'm willing to hear.
00:56:44.000But listening to these guys say that in the aftermath of October 7th, this is literally what they said, that they can't go back to October 6th mentality about Israel.
00:57:05.000So they were fine with Israel until Israel defended itself and fought Hamas, at which point they got angry.
00:57:10.000Not a shock from the Positive America bros, who of course are allied with Ben Rhodes, the former national security advisor to Barack Obama, whose literal nickname in the White House, no joke, was Hamas.
00:57:23.000So if you're on the right and you find yourself in the same category as the Positive America Bros, you might want to check your priors because something has gone deeply, deeply wrong, obviously.
00:57:34.000But the Positive America bros didn't just stop at the military funding, which, of course, you could make an argument in favor of.
00:57:44.000I would like to see talk about sanctioning Israeli government officials who use genocidal rhetoric or who talk about ethnic cleansing openly.
00:57:51.000We should support a ceasefire resolution at the UN.
00:57:53.000We should demand that international press be allowed into the Gaza Strip to report on what's happening without an IDF minder.
00:59:21.000The future of the Democratic Party is in catering to people who hate the state of Israel and who side with terrorism all over the world.
00:59:28.000That is where the Democratic Party's future is going to be.
00:59:32.000Here's John Lovett saying the same thing.
00:59:35.000Especially if we're going to head into a primary, like table stakes, there's going to be no more military aid for Israel.
00:59:40.000So there will just have to be a shift.
00:59:42.000And I do think that will mean putting far more pressure on Israel.
00:59:45.000And that's what I think Democrats want.
00:59:46.000By the way, that's what the country wants.
00:59:48.000And when you poll Israelis, they say they want a ceasefire.
00:59:51.000Israelis want the hostages returned through a negotiated settlement.
00:59:54.000And by the way, that's the way in which the vast majority of hostages who were returned were able to be returned.
01:00:00.000Okay, they were returned after Israel bombed the hell out of Hamas, went house to house, eviscerating Hamas, and then Hamas was forced to the table.
01:00:08.000Do you think that Hamas just handed over the hostages like the day after October 7th?
01:00:14.000This is where the Democratic Party is moving.
01:00:16.000It's a frightening direction, but the moral relativism, stupidity, oppressor-oppressed matrix within which they work means that they were eventually going to end up here.
01:00:27.000And it turned out it was a very short road.
01:00:29.000It turned out all it took was the greatest terror attack on Jews in half a century to get the Democratic Party to abandon Israel and move towards solidarity with Hamas.
01:00:40.000I love when people say, by the way, the Israelis should sign a ceasefire.
01:00:43.000There's another party to that prospective ceasefire who keeps walking away from the table.
01:00:49.000You think Joe Biden didn't want a more durable ceasefire?
01:00:53.000Even Joe Biden couldn't get Hamas to the table through concessions.
01:01:20.000So it is rare on this show that we got to cover any good news, particularly in the social arena, but you have a piece in The Atlantic talking about the durability of the marital institution.
01:01:28.000Obviously, one of the major concerns in the United States for decades was the divorce rate.
01:01:32.000And then there are concerns about the fact that people are not having kids.
01:01:35.000But you have some good news about the durability of marriage.
01:01:38.000Why don't we start with the good news?
01:01:40.000The good news, Ben, is that divorce is down.
01:01:42.000Most marriages in America are going to make it today.
01:01:45.000We think divorces come down from about 50% in 1970s to about 40% today.
01:01:51.000And we're also seeing an uptick in the share of kids who are being raised by their own married parent family.
01:02:02.000Because obviously there has been a radical campaign against marriage that is now horseshoeed around.
01:02:06.000It used to be a campaign largely from the left talking about marriage as a sort of patriarchal institution that kept women underfoot.
01:02:13.000And now you've seen a horseshoe theory move from some parts of the so-called manosphere to claim that marriage is actually a matriarchal institution that is designed to keep men underfoot.
01:02:24.000What is the current state of the marital debate?
01:02:27.000Yeah, so Ben, we've seen from the left a long time women kind of saying things like there was a New York Times piece a few years ago that said, married motherhood in America is a game that no one wins.
01:02:36.000So kind of painting a pretty anti-nuptial message from the left targeting women.
01:02:41.000But in recent years, as you well know, we've gotten people on the right, like Andrew Tater, telling men now that there is, quote, zero advantage to marriage in the Western world for a man.
01:02:50.000And he's obviously discouraging men from going ahead and getting married.
01:02:55.000So that's kind of the bad news is there are elements both the left now and the right, on the far left, in a sense in the far right, who are kind of encouraging women on the left and men on the right to steer clear of marriage.
01:03:06.000And what our research shows is that married moms and married dads in America are the happiest men and women out there in this country today.
01:03:17.000Well, one of the things that you're pointing out in terms of the statistics is that we may have, in fact, hit the bottom of the valley in terms of marital rates because fewer and fewer Americans were getting married.
01:03:26.000That seems to have leveled off that the percentage of Americans who are starting to get married is actually, it seems like moderately increasing at this point.
01:03:33.000How optimistic are you that that's an actual turnaround and not just a dead cat bounce?
01:03:38.000So I think we have reached the nadir when it comes to, you know, kids and families.
01:03:43.000We're seeing an uptick in the share of kids raised by their married parent families.
01:03:46.000What's not clear to me, Ben, is whether or not kind of this plateau we're seeing with the marriage rate for adults is going to kind of dip again in the future or if it's going to kind of rebound.
01:03:54.000I think one of the big challenges is technology.
01:03:57.000If we can kind of figure a way to help young adults kind of embrace in-person socializing, in-person living, I can see marriage coming back.
01:04:06.000But if we're going to be kind of basically slaves to our devices, then I would see kind of this potentially marriage rate coming down even more and then family life becoming just more selective for people who are more educated, more affluent, and more religious, which is what we've been seeing in recent decades in the U.S. So you mentioned more religious and some of the social science data is showing an uptick in the number of young people particularly who are attempting to re-engage with church or becoming more religious, particularly true among men.
01:04:34.000Are you optimistic that that's going to continue, that there's going to be a sort of return to faith and family?
01:04:39.000Or again, is this sort of us looking for glimmers of light in a very dark tunnel here?
01:04:44.000No, I do think we are seeing some signs that Gen Z men are more religious today, Ben.
01:04:48.000And I think there is a kind of upswing in both influencers like yourself and your peers at Deli Wire, and then, you know, local clergy and other religious leaders are kind of helping to sort of usher younger adults, particularly younger men, back into the church.
01:05:04.000So I do see that kind of trend increasing, and that's encouraging.
01:05:09.000But I am also kind of keeping an eye on what's happening among a lot of more secular and progressive young adults, as well as working class and poor young adults.
01:05:16.000And I think for a lot of those young adults, the future is more so bred.
01:05:25.000So, let's talk for a second about the economics of all this.
01:05:27.000There's been an argument that's made by both the populist right and the progressive left that essentially the reason people are not getting married and having kids is because of lack of economic opportunity.
01:05:36.000That if you pour money into people's pockets, then they're more likely to get married, more likely to have kids.
01:05:42.000That all of this is a function of lack of upward mobility in American society.
01:05:46.000I see very little evidence of that, considering the fact that there is an extraordinarily high correlation, actually, between societal wealth and not getting married and not having kids.
01:05:53.000Actually, it turns out that poorer societies have many, many more kids than rich societies.
01:05:57.000What do you think is the sort of economic aspect of this?
01:06:00.000Is this a problem that can be solved by economic redistributionism?
01:06:03.000Or in the end, is marriage and family building more reliant, as it is in my life, on sort of a religious belief in the morality of the institution?
01:06:13.000Well, but I think there's actually both an economic story here and a cultural story.
01:06:16.000And there's just no question that people kind of who embrace marriage and family life are more likely to get married, stay married, and to be flourishing in their families today.
01:06:22.000And that's true for both religious Americans and oftentimes more conservative Americans, both of whom are more likely so that they're happily married.
01:06:29.000But there is, as you know, also a class story.
01:06:31.000What we see is that a majority of prime-aged adults who are college educated are married today, and only a minority of less educated adults are married today.
01:06:40.000So I think there's part, you know, there's a class dynamic, but it's primarily about the employment of men.
01:06:45.000What we see is that particularly working class and poor men are much less likely men to be employed full-time.
01:06:51.000And that's still a huge predictor both of getting married and staying married.
01:06:55.000So I think until and unless we can kind of figure out how do we reconnect poor and working class men to the labor force on a full-time basis, we are not going to see kind of the revival of marriage across the board, across class lines.
01:07:12.000One of the questions that I've always had about that is whether we are looking at a correlation and then drawing a reverse causation.
01:07:17.000So suggesting people can't get jobs and therefore they're not getting married.
01:07:21.000Right now, the unemployment rate in the United States is 4.1%, which is close to full employment.
01:07:26.000We have many more job openings in the United States than applicants for those job openings by several measures.
01:07:32.000The question is, I think, one also of government dependency, meaning if you are dependent on a government check, that is not going to jog you into getting married.
01:07:42.000It used to be that when those welfare benefits were not nearly as easy to come by, people actually had to go get a job.
01:07:48.000And actually, one of the predictors of wealth is doing all of these things will make you wealthier.
01:07:51.000Meaning, if you get married and then you get a job, you are more likely to end up in the upper quintiles of income earning.
01:07:58.000It's not sort of the other way around that you're poor, therefore you can't get married.
01:08:01.000It's if you don't get married and you don't get a job, you are going to remain poor.
01:08:06.000So there are a few steps, as you know, called the success sequence.
01:08:09.000And Americans get at least a high school degree, who work full-time in their 20s and who get married before having any children are basically 97% likely to avoid poverty.
01:08:18.000Only 3% of those young adults are poor, who follow all three steps.
01:08:22.000And 86% of them reach the middle class or higher.
01:08:24.000So it's no, kind of, there's no question that, again, a certain modicum of education, work, and marriage are conducive to realizing the American dream.
01:08:34.000But it is the case that I think for a variety of technological, cultural, and educational reasons, a lot of our young men are floundering.
01:08:41.000And we've got to figure out a way to kind of get them back on track so they can be flourishing and be more attractive as boyfriends and potential husbands and fathers as well.
01:08:52.000Go check out all of his work over at The Atlantic, among other places, and check out his book, Get Married, Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, a really important book, especially in the face of dullards, particularly in the Manosphere right and the progressive left, who suggest that marriage is bad for you.