On this week's episode of The Rant, we discuss the latest in the Epstein scandal, Sean P. P. Combs' lawyer quits his sex trafficking case, President Trump fires the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and much, much more!
00:01:43.000A judge defers ruling in the Eric Adams case, appointing a lawyer to guide decision.
00:01:49.000So it seems that Kathy Hochul will not be trying to replace Mayor Eric Adams, but we'll discuss that.
00:01:59.000There's been a bunch of incidents or a bunch of news coming out of Israel with the release of bodies, not prisoners, not even prisoners, bodies of...
00:04:47.000But yeah, I think, you know, other than that, and that lasted four days, I think.
00:04:50.000I think a lot of people thought it would go worse with the nominees.
00:04:53.000There were a lot of people betting a lot of people would have been not gotten through the process, so we're happy to see.
00:04:58.000That's something that I'd like to talk a little bit more about tonight, too, the confirmation process and just how successful Donald Trump has been getting the...
00:05:06.000Not only the people that he wants, but how successful his first, you know, couple weeks has been so far, but we'll get to that.
00:07:12.000Like children being raped, it's a serious story.
00:07:15.000What do you mean by narrow group of people?
00:07:17.000Like just people who have kept their focus on that specifically?
00:07:20.000Yeah, I think that I mean that there are people that are really, really, really interested in this story.
00:07:25.000Connects with the Diddy files, because what it is is both of those cases have become this sort of quasi-catch-all for when somebody doesn't like someone on the internet, they say they're probably in the Diddy files, they're probably in the Epstein files.
00:07:36.000So actually seeing something done about it and seeing follow-through actually is a really, really big deal.
00:07:42.000Yeah, and there are people that I think that it's really important to, but the...
00:07:47.000I say it's narrow because it doesn't have a major impact on most people's lives.
00:07:56.000It's important that People that have done these kind of crimes, committed these kind of crimes, you know, like child trafficking and stuff, it's important that the FBI go after them.
00:08:04.000So I think it's very good that Cash is not only putting this information out so that people can see it and so that we bring this to light, but hopefully there will be arrests.
00:08:13.000If there are names on these lists of people that are implicated in committing crimes, the FBI should get them.
00:08:22.000They should wrap them up and they should be prosecuted, and it doesn't matter who they are.
00:08:26.000When I said narrow, what I mean is it doesn't have a really big effect on the average.
00:08:33.000Well, no, the cases themselves, the actual list does not have an effect on the average everyday person's life.
00:08:39.000But an erosion of trust in the government, an erosion of trust in power speaks to the average everyday person's reasons for voting for Donald Trump.
00:08:49.000And one of the big parts of that is they feel like the government has been held unaccountable.
00:08:53.000They feel like celebrities like that get to spout off anything they want and nothing bad happens to them, no matter how much bad they do in the world.
00:09:00.000So that depends on your idea of average everyday lives and whether it affects them, because if it brings back a certain amount of trust in the people that we're supposed to believe are out to help us or at least enforce the laws, then there is some type of benefit for everybody because it can help start building trust then there is some type of benefit for everybody because it can help start building trust once again with these institutions that we During his speech, it was beautiful when he got when he signed in, I got sworn in, I'm
00:09:28.000He's had accountability like three times.
00:09:32.000The energy in that room when he was talking, everyone was so excited.
00:09:49.000Like, we've seen Cash is extraordinarily effective.
00:09:52.000I think the thing that Cash did during the first administration, he was working for Devin Nunes.
00:09:57.000He did an incredible job revealing what Adam Schiff and what a lot of the Democrats had been doing to try and screw the Trump administration, to try and manufacture the Russian narrative.
00:10:09.000And he's also been targeted by these people.
00:10:12.000I think one of the best parts of the way that Trump has set up his cabinet is in so many cases, He's chosen people that have been in some way the victim of the agency they're now overseeing, right?
00:10:22.000Like he chose Tulsi Gabbard as the head of D&I. Tulsi Gabbard was on the deep sky, blue skies, deep skies?
00:11:01.000Even though she's gone through all the vetting necessary to not only be an officer in the National Guard and then an officer in the reserves, but also to continue to get promotions after they've already started to slime her and stuff.
00:12:17.000Not only has he learned from the mistakes of the first term, has he selected people who are not going to just be captured by their institutions.
00:12:26.000He's also personally very invested in ensuring that the government functions the way it should this time.
00:12:31.000And I think, you know, I really think in many ways it's like the four years off has done him really good.
00:12:40.000I think we're about to have a really amazing four years.
00:12:41.000Even look at how vocal in front of the camera J.D. Vance is in comparison to Mike Pence during the first term.
00:12:48.000He's taken a much more front seat approach to how he's taking on the media and pushing forward the ideas that the Trump administration is trying to push through.
00:12:58.000that and it speaks to a big change between term one and term two.
00:13:01.000Yeah, I think it's important that not only Donald Trump be, you know, Donald Trump and talk to the media the same way that he does and be that, you know, strong persona that But having a vice president that will also take the media to task is one of the things that I really think that...
00:13:23.000Especially looking back, one of the worst things about Pence was he was clearly the old guard establishment, and he wouldn't stand up and say, you know what, no, the president is right, and actually take it to the left.
00:13:37.000And the media has been such a valuable tool to the left.
00:13:43.000And only recently has kind of the rest of the country, or when I say the rest of the country, I mean like the people that used to say, no, it's not that the media is biased, it's just that they're mostly in the city, so they have kind of a...
00:14:02.000They're actually funded by NGOs and funded by organizations that are looking to push a narrative that comes straight out of the government.
00:14:10.000When you talk about the USAID money that was going to Politico and other organizations.
00:14:15.000I think the key thing with Vance is Vance means that Trump isn't a lame duck.
00:15:04.000Kind of in the same way we would joke that Vance had this one bad moment where he tried to go into a donut shop and seem like a normal person and just failed.
00:15:12.000Like, you don't need him to do the normal guy shtick.
00:15:14.000He is a fantastic communicator, he's a fantastic front-of-the-line politician.
00:16:34.000He's on X. And he's using X. And he's getting his message out there.
00:16:38.000He's arguing, not arguing, but he's giving his points across.
00:16:40.000He's being very transparent with what he's saying to the arguments about the whole UK and Russia thing.
00:16:45.000So that, while normies might not know about that...
00:16:49.000A lot of us, a lot of folks who are watching, millions and millions and millions are seeing him be transparent, unlike Biden and everyone else, and give his thoughts.
00:17:02.000I think that the transparency that the Trump administration has and their availability to the press and their not just willingness, but desire to...
00:17:31.000But I'm not a fan of Mehdi Hassan anyways, and I don't remember the exact tweet off the top of my head, so I'm not going to try, but it was absolutely...
00:17:39.000It was brutal and wonderful, and that kind of aggressive...
00:17:46.000But correct and factual take and willingness to correct the media, I think that's going to pay dividends for the administration.
00:17:59.000I feel like everyone was a little sketchy at first about J.D. Vance because we didn't know him, but after hearing him talk the first time, the second time, the third time, and now we're a couple months into it, J.D. Vance is solid.
00:18:09.000He had a fantastic debate performance.
00:18:10.000Yeah, and if you paid attention to J.D. Vance, because he was a senator first, and so if you paid attention to him, he wasn't an unknown quantity.
00:18:18.000People that were in the know knew how smart he is and knew his story.
00:18:22.000He wrote the book the hillbilly elegy.
00:18:24.000I think it was called in that's right And that was really well received and it really spoke to some real Prescient problems in the United States and and and I think that was part of why Donald Trump selected him if you contrast him with Mike Pence you really do see like the growth in his choices.
00:18:43.000Yeah So when you look at Mike Pence, you look at somebody who was very much a part of the old guard and somebody who spoke to the past generations of politics and what J.D. Vance represents is the forward movement of what they consider now to be America first.
00:18:58.000Yeah, I mean, we've had this conversation a little bit before, but the MAGA coalition is not a right-wing coalition.
00:19:09.000The way that some people assume that it is.
00:19:11.000And I think that I was talking a little bit to Sean about this.
00:19:15.000It's really a coalition of not the leftists.
00:19:19.000Because most of the people in positions of power now are 90s Democrats or they were Democrats even very recently.
00:19:26.000And so that is the big tent kind of idea.
00:19:35.000I mean, obviously the conservative Christians are welcome in the tent, but that also means that you have to have room for people that are not conservative Christians.
00:19:43.000That's why the whole Ashley St. Clair Musk thing, it was a big deal to the Christians, like conservative Christians.
00:19:48.000But in the overall MAGA kind of coalition, they were like, look, you know, maybe it's not maybe it's unbecoming, but it's not something that should be, you know, should be a problem for the broader coalition.
00:20:02.000Because, well, Musk really did have a lot to do with the with with Trump getting elected or some people would take would have a problem with like Scott Pressler's lifestyle choices.
00:20:12.000Well, if it wasn't for Scott Pressler, you don't get Pennsylvania because Scott Pressler went to Pennsylvania, lived there for four years and did more work in Pennsylvania than probably anybody else.
00:20:22.000So as a broad coalition, I think that that's that's why I don't think that it's it's deniable or debatable.
00:20:31.000And that kind of unity is something that comes from the left being so insane.
00:20:38.000And really, really disconnected from what the right has become now, because most of the people, at least the way I've seen it, is the ones that suffer from like...
00:20:47.000Terminal leftism, like the farthest left that you can see, they look at what it is now and they think of it as a far-right Christian nationalist party when anybody who's paying very, very close attention to it knows that there are too many disparate personalities for it to be anything so succinct.
00:21:03.000You're 100% right, and you can hear that, or you could hear that for so long when they were trying to scare everybody with the whole Project 2025 narrative.
00:21:12.000I read a lot of stuff about Project 2025, and I'm not particularly...
00:22:12.000But, like, the heart of Project 2025 was stuff like, oh, yeah, civil service reform, and we're firing bureaucrats, and they're going to obey us, or we're going to fire them for different reasons.
00:22:33.000Phil, are you saying, sir, that folks like us who were, you know, a Democrat back in the past when I was younger, I was never a Democrat.
00:22:41.000I mean, I'm registered now only because I want to be part of the primaries.
00:22:45.000But anyways, are you saying that we're not moving into the Christian right?
00:22:51.000They're not leading the Republican Party anymore.
00:22:54.000They are coming into art, the 10th of middle ground.
00:22:58.000So, no, well, I'm saying that the MAGA coalition is a coalition, right?
00:23:03.000And there was, and this kind of brought, again, I mentioned Musk and the whole Ashley St. Clair thing because this is really kind of what brought it to my attention.
00:23:11.000There were so many people saying, oh, you know, this is not conservative.
00:23:56.000We are religion friendly, but we're also, there's, there is a bigger and bigger chunk of the party that's secular.
00:24:00.000And that's true all over the West too, right?
00:24:02.000Religiosity is going down even as right wing parties are growing.
00:24:05.000And so it's about, I think, you know, everybody understand that this is a coalition that you can, you know, we don't want as a party to be disrespectful.
00:25:37.000It is still the president who pardoned pro-life protesters at the start of his term.
00:25:42.000There is a lot of evidence that despite the fact that the coalition of people around it may not all agree on religion, that the party itself is doing what it can to benefit those who are religious.
00:25:53.000And even and even if you're not religious, I think there's a lot of people in the coalition that are like, you know, maybe I'm not particularly religious myself, but I see that if you don't have a society that has.
00:26:04.000Some kind of religious grounding, something else takes the place of religion, and that something else is always bad.
00:26:30.000It's not religion that's the reason we have crazy beliefs in this world.
00:26:33.000We saw what happens when you have the secular leftists take over.
00:26:37.000They can believe in wilder, crazier things in any religion or any tradition.
00:26:42.000Traditional religion, and I think a big part of that is religions have thousands of – a lot of them have thousands of years of evolution and theologians and people thinking about ethics, and most of the leftist stuff has been invented in the last 75 years by academics who are not grounded.
00:26:56.000Our biggest thing for our coalition is America and what's best for our country and what's best for our kids' futures.
00:27:03.000Yeah, and I think that there's – it's – It's hard to argue that religions, especially long-standing religions, it's hard to argue that they don't provide a very good roadmap on how to have a society.
00:27:17.000And that families first, families being the first kind of small, little...
00:27:29.000And focusing your entire society on making sure that families are the most important thing will provide for a better result than what the left tends to do with centering the margins and stuff like that.
00:27:45.000Or leftists and academics in Hollywood all pushing anti-family messages on just about everyone all the time.
00:27:57.000To the next story, Trump fires chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
00:28:01.000This is actually a very, very big deal because I don't remember the last time that a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was ever fired.
00:28:13.000And some people have been predicting this because the CQ Brown guy was like all in on DEI and was a product of the previous Biden administration.
00:28:22.000And so I think we've been hearing rumblings about it that Hegseth was going to do something like this or that Trump was going to do something, and now it's finally happening.
00:28:31.000It's about time we had a military that was focused on readiness and war fighting and not on social engineering.
00:28:39.000That's something that I want to get to, the social engineering aspect.
00:28:42.000So the AP reports, Washington, President Donald Trump abruptly fired Air Force General C.Q. Brown as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Friday, sidelining a history-making fighter pilot and respected officer as a part of a campaign to rid the military of leaders who support diversity and equity in the ranks.
00:28:59.000The ouster of Brown, only the second black general to serve as chairman, is sure to send shockwaves through the Pentagon.
00:29:28.000I mean, but this speaks to the way that the entire media thinks now, doesn't it?
00:29:33.000You know, the identity of the person in question takes precedence over any of their achievements or any of the things that they've done, you know?
00:29:42.000So, Donald Trump has tweeted about this.
00:29:47.000I want to thank General Charles C.Q. Brown for his over 40 years of service to our country, including as our current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
00:29:54.000He is a fine gentleman and an outstanding leader, and I wish a great future for him and his family.
00:29:59.000Today I'm honored to announce that I am nominating Air Force Lieutenant General Dan Raisin Cain to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
00:30:10.000General Cain is an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a warfighter with significant interagency and special operations experience.
00:30:19.000I like the fact that Donald Trump was magnanimous in his, you know, in the tweet.
00:30:55.000Raisin to be his call sign, but also now that you mentioned it, I do think that it would be even better if Trump was like, no, I'm going to give him a nickname.
00:31:45.000When they said special operations, I was wondering if he was something like a PJ or something like that, or if he had done that kind of special operations job.
00:31:56.000But either way, I do think that it's good that Donald Trump is...
00:32:03.000And Secretary Hegseth are putting the generals and staff on notice.
00:32:09.000I've heard that he's talking about getting rid of, I want to say, half the generals in the military.
00:32:18.000I mean, when's the last time we won a war?
00:32:20.000You guys are all focused on everything I've heard about, what's been going on in the military in terms of what they're putting the rank and file through with all these idiotic trainings and just...
00:32:33.000Recruitment is down horribly to the point that it actually implicates our security.
00:32:39.000That's just not acceptable performance.
00:32:42.000And I think a big thing is that there hasn't been accountability at the top level for failures by our military.
00:32:47.000It's always been lower-level people who've been held accountable.
00:32:50.000How do generals at the top and those in charge of the military get recruitment back up then?
00:32:55.000I mean, I just feel like that's one of those things that there's anti-American sentiment from within America that's very, very hard to reverse.
00:33:02.000So just HEGSF being the SECDEF has increased the...
00:33:11.000I remember there was a guest, and I wish I could remember who it was, was talking about that members re-enlisted after Trump got elected the first time because they weren't interested in the military under Obama.
00:33:24.000And then I'm sure that that once again would probably pick up maybe two now after Trump was re-elected.
00:33:30.000But it's very, very difficult to try and reignite fervor in the military when America's having such a hard time.
00:33:39.000I feel like there are a lot of people who want to join, but when they see the DEI in the service, they see what's going on, and they're not joining.
00:33:46.000Are those people paying attention to those stories?
00:33:50.000Not these stories, but once they see Trump get in, they're like, okay, cool, I can join, I can do what I want to do.
00:33:56.000They want to fight, they want to protect the country, serve without being told they're bad people.
00:34:01.000Yeah, I mean, so, first of all, the...
00:34:05.000I don't know if the majority of young men that were joining the military are white, but I know that there's a lot of Hispanics.
00:34:37.000And dudes are like, yo, I love my country, I love America, and I love my Latin heritage, but I don't want to deal with this kind of BS. And I think it's very, very good that...
00:34:51.000The current sec death has made it abundantly clear that these things are changing.
00:34:55.000And when these kind of stories come out, that Donald Trump has fired the top general in the whole military because of his take on DEI, I think that you'd mentioned how do we get the recruitment numbers up.
00:36:15.000And you also grow up, you become a man within four weeks, or four months, or sorry, four years, whereas you see your college buddy dudes who are just learning about gender, whatever you're talking about.
00:36:27.000There is a, one of the pictures, actually, if you could go back to that, those pictures that you had for a second there, Serge, there was one picture that has spawned a boatload of memes, and it was Hegseth running with...
00:38:34.000I mean, but it's like when we're talking about the JFK files or the MLK files.
00:38:39.000Americans don't believe that there is any accountability within the government.
00:38:43.000That's one of the reasons why those stories pique the interest of people.
00:38:46.000They're like, wow, am I actually going to get answers on this thing that happened all these decades ago?
00:38:51.000That everybody looks at one another, they know what they're hearing is not the whole story, but they just kind of accept that that's the way that things are.
00:38:59.000And in the current year, to hear about any level of accountability whatsoever, even if it's just the declassifying of files and the releasing of them, That seems monumental to a country that's been left in the dark for a very long time.
00:39:15.000I think that there is a significant distrust.
00:39:19.000I think that not only is it because of things like the JFK files and these kind of like rumored...
00:39:27.000Things that people have an intuition about, but like the obvious things as well, like the whole COVID. I really think COVID was like the final nail in the coffin when it came to the credibility of the United States.
00:39:46.000And then come to find out the reason they said you don't have to wear a mask is because they didn't have enough PPE for doctors.
00:39:51.000So right out of the box, they lied to you.
00:39:54.000Then all of the BS that comes along with it come to find out that masks actually don't do a significant job of protecting you.
00:40:02.000And all of the misrepresentation, all of the lies, and all of the force that went along with it, all of the threats, all of the people that would get arrested.
00:40:11.000The social distancing, which comes out, oh, that turns out that didn't mean anything.
00:40:16.000That was made up and all of that stuff.
00:40:20.000I think you're right about the general consensus and the kind of intuitive feeling people had about the MLK stuff and the CIA with JFK. But I think that the...
00:40:32.000Outright things that the media and government have come out and said, yeah, that was not true.
00:40:38.000I think those were, like, really damaging.
00:40:40.000Yeah, it's when, even if you don't pay close attention to what's going on, you've heard in passing or in some fashion about what we do with our intelligence agencies overseas and the way that we have gone into other countries.
00:40:55.000Nation building and all of these things and then to see those tactics then turn back around on the American people.
00:41:01.000Again, if you're paying attention, makes perfect sense.
00:41:03.000But to somebody who only pays attention to the corners and don't listen to it regularly, they just started to understand just the power of the intelligence apparatus and the way we've weaponized government against other people.
00:41:17.000Yeah, we're going to go on to another story in just a second.
00:41:30.000I think that he's performing an important function now with...
00:41:33.000He's out there in the podcast world again saying, look, these organizations have been corrupted, but that doesn't mean that these organizations are all bad.
00:41:45.000And a country like the United States with the amount of power and with the expectations that the rest of the world puts on the United States, because we are expected to be the hegemon still and we are expected to keep the seas open for trade.
00:42:01.000These type of organizations that that again, they have been corrupted and there shouldn't be DEI stuff in the US shouldn't be trying to go into strongly religious countries and teach them about LGBT issues and stuff like that.
00:42:25.000I mean, I'm a big, you know, this is sort of my general, one of my main critiques of libertarianism, but it's like, do we really want to let somebody else be the guardian of sea lanes?
00:42:37.000Like, we are, it's, I think I tweeted out a while ago, it's like, it was in response to the Trump-Gaza stuff, where I think everybody was freaking out about the idea that we might control some territory.
00:42:45.000And I'm just like, It's okay to be an empire.
00:42:48.000We can just do colonialism if we want.
00:43:09.000Nation-building is when you spend a bunch of money for other people.
00:43:12.000Colonialism is when you spend it for yourself.
00:43:14.000I mean, I think the big issue for a lot of the people is, though, is they're like, these...
00:43:19.000Organizations are so large and the amount of money put into it is so ungodly that they're like, who are we putting in charge to actually put the checks and balances into place to know that what we're doing is right?
00:43:31.000And most of the time what we're seeing now is you see USAID gets exposed and whole entire NGOs fold.
00:43:39.000Well, you're not really a non-governmental agency if you can't survive without the government, right?
00:43:44.000And all I'm saying is to the average person, like I said, Mike Benz is...
00:43:48.000I have said to the—he is one of the best, right?
00:43:50.000You have to go read through everything you post, but you're not going to expect the average person to go into these deep dives and understand all of that.
00:43:57.000What you have to understand is that the size of the country is now vast.
00:44:00.000We are so powerful that it's ripe for corruption, and most people want to see that undone.
00:44:07.000And I fully admit that I, for the most part, have a very utopian— I don't see my viewpoint as the right answer.
00:44:30.000I see it as a jumping-off point for a discussion on how we can pare back some of it and find a middle ground.
00:44:36.000Alright, we're gonna move on to this story here.
00:44:38.000From the New York Post, Sean Diddy Combs' lawyer quits sex trafficking case under no circumstances can I continue.
00:44:45.000You gotta be real dirty when your lawyer's like, bro, you fucked up.
00:44:49.000Imagine being like a defense attorney who's just like, I can't even do it, man.
00:45:16.000One of Sean Diddy Combs' defense lawyers quit the disgraced music producer's criminal sex trafficking case new court paper show.
00:45:23.000Anthony Rico filed a motion Thursday to withdraw as one of Bad Boy Records' six defense attorneys without explanation.
00:45:30.000Rico's bid to step down won't be official until a judge signs off on it.
00:45:34.000A judge must find sufficient reason to approve such a request.
00:45:37.000Under no circumstances can I continue to effectively serve as counsel for Sean Combs Rico wrote in the Manhattan Federal Court affidavit It is respectfully but regrettably requested that court grant the relief requested The lawyer didn't elaborate on why he wanted to step down But noted the decision came after speaking with Combs' lead counsel, Mark Agnifilo I mean, so obviously there's just going to be inference and people are going to make assumptions
00:46:05.000But it seems likely that the things that P. Diddy has done are so egregious.
00:46:14.000That his lawyer is like, I won't be a party.
00:46:17.000I'm finally understanding what's going on here.
00:46:19.000So this is less revealing than I think we would think it would be.
00:46:24.000Because there's six lawyers in the case and it's one of the lawyers being like, I cannot be his lawyer.
00:46:29.000There are a lot of reasons why a lawyer might make that decision or make that ask to be let off the case.
00:46:34.000Conflict of interest is the most obvious one.
00:46:38.000For example, Diddy has all these people that he previously...
00:46:45.000It's conceivable that this Rico guy represented a different client and might have knowledge that came from that and realized that I'm in some sort of conflict of interest situation.
00:46:53.000It also could be payment, but it doesn't seem likely because he's wealthy and there's five other lawyers who are still going to be on board.
00:46:59.000So I'm guessing what this is is some sort of newly...
00:47:03.000A conflict that he became newly aware of because that explains the firmness of the like, I can't be his lawyer, right?
00:47:10.000And that strikes me as very much like conflict of interest.
00:47:14.000Your ethical rules are prohibiting you from going forward.
00:47:17.000And a whole bunch of cases have continued to be pushed forward.
00:47:22.000I believe his name was Tony Busby was the lawyer who was filing all those cases on behalf of people who were filing claims against Diddy that have just come forward and forward.
00:47:30.000And I think some of those have actually been dropped since then.
00:47:33.000And the charges against Jay-Z were dropped in the case between him and Diddy.
00:47:38.000It was like the rape of the girl back in 2000 or 2001, something like that.
00:47:44.000I don't know how much I actually expect to come out of this case, but I think the more interesting discussion is about the concept of him having a list of people, having a list of blackmail against powerful people in Hollywood, 'cause a lot of people see that list akin to the way that they saw the Epstein files with politicians and world leaders. 'cause a lot of people see that list akin to the way that they saw the Epstein files with politicians and world leaders. - Yeah, I think that the P. Diddy list would be more salacious.
00:49:25.000It's those people that have helped push forward that message for a very, very long time.
00:49:29.000And Obama partied around with lots of celebrities and lots of entertainers.
00:49:34.000It's not hard to believe that there is overlap there amongst other people.
00:49:37.000Maybe not to the extent of the FCC. I mean, I'd give it maybe 15%.
00:49:43.000But in the end of the day, that many people with Epstein and P. Diddy, that goes to show us that a lot of people, powerful people in power, are deranged, disgusting, terrible people.
00:50:08.000I mean, I know people want to say it's like, oh, it's because Diddy's so disgusting.
00:50:13.000And it's like, I'm pretty sure that's not the reason.
00:50:15.000One, the guy would have signed on to this case well after a lot of these revelations would have been revealed, so he knew what he was getting into.
00:50:21.000Two, you want to be a criminal defense lawyer.
00:50:24.000You can't just abandon your client if some bad news about them comes out.
00:51:08.000Being a criminal defense lawyer is perfectly ethical.
00:51:10.000I mean, our whole system is built on the idea that people have a right to a criminal defense.
00:51:14.000So if you're if you're actually going to try and go be a high profile criminal defense lawyer who represents wealthy people, you better be used to the idea that they might have done something really disgusting.
00:51:23.000And it's your job to defend them anyway.
00:51:31.000So we just got this breaking news that I want to cut to here.
00:51:38.000Zelensky surrenders to Trump and will sign mineral deal within hours.
00:51:41.000This is something that we were debating on talking about.
00:51:44.000We didn't have any news at the beginning of the show.
00:51:48.000But Daily Mail is reporting Donald Trump appears to have won his trade standoff with Volodymyr Zelensky as the Ukrainian president is set to give in and signed a deal giving the U.S. access to deposits of critical minerals.
00:52:01.000The deal was seen as crucial for satisfying Washington's demands for a peace settlement between Ukraine and Russia to end the three-year-long war.
00:52:09.000It's a staggering surrender from Zelensky, who I had seen.
00:52:16.000I don't know that he's actually selling it.
00:52:21.000Zelensky said on Friday that officials from his country and the U.S. are working on concluding an economic deal to ensure that the accord worked for and was fair to Kiev.
00:52:29.000We're signing an agreement hopefully in the next fairly short period of time, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office when asked about a deal for Ukraine's minerals.
00:52:53.000So, you know, Trump coming in and I mean, Zelensky made some real mistakes in over the last few years, but I don't think there's a bigger one than deciding to go to Pennsylvania and effectively campaign for the Democrats.
00:53:03.000So, you know, I don't I don't have a lot of sympathy.
00:53:06.000And I think I watched there were some clips.
00:53:08.000I think Rubio had an interview on with Catherine Herridge, actually, that was on X.
00:53:12.000And Rubio in that interview described how.
00:53:15.000Look, we thought we had an understanding with Zelensky about the fact that we're going to work together on this deal, and then we hear him saying, like, I'm not going to sign anything.
00:53:23.000And Rubio basically said something along the lines of, well, that's not very productive for our relationship going forward.
00:54:08.000I think that if Zelensky had been more, you know, I think about Netanyahu as a good example of a comparison, right?
00:54:14.000Like, Trump's not going to Netanyahu and demanding, like, mineral rights in Israel, partially because Netanyahu and Israel are able to defend themselves a lot more effectively.
00:54:25.000In particular, I think that Zelensky has just played the global neoliberal card so aggressively.
00:54:34.000And then Donald Trump comes into power and it's like, oh yeah, maybe this is a reason that countries that are dependent on American aid try not to weigh in on our domestic politics because it goes from one way to another.
00:54:47.000I think at a certain point, you've got to wonder if Zelensky has got to realize he's going to need to resign.
00:54:53.000His relationship with Trump is simply not strong enough that the Ukrainians need someone new in there to have a fresh start in terms of their relationship with the Trump administration.
00:55:03.000So this is the first time that I've heard actually anyone articulate that.
00:55:08.000Yeah, no, I'm seeing a little bit of that.
00:55:10.000I mean, I don't know that that's ever been discussed officially, but if you're running the government of Ukraine right now, You can't be in a position where you have a bad relationship with the United States government.
00:55:46.000You know, I mean, we would say the same thing if you were thinking about your own—what you would want is your own leader.
00:55:52.000You'd want your own leader to be on good terms with the president of the United States.
00:55:55.000And so you'd be pissed at him for, like, going, you know, creating this tension with people like Vance and Rubio.
00:56:02.000You'd be pissed at him for going off and saying all sorts of nasty stuff because you'd be saying to yourself, rationally, the worse your relationship with Trump is, the worse it's going to be for me and my family.
00:56:13.000So that's why I think, ultimately, I suspect Zelensky, I don't think he'll make it through the year.
00:56:34.000Like, when Trump took office again, and we keep talking about economic sanctions and tariffs, and you see all of the times that he would Level these on other countries.
00:56:46.000They would bluster and say, we're not going to bend the knee.
00:57:12.000And I think that most Americans don't realize, because I feel the exact same way.
00:57:20.000The way that our government has behaved for 12 of the past 16 years has been...
00:57:29.000As if we could not risk upsetting anyone else.
00:57:34.000And the way that Trump exercises power, soft power, clearly, because he's not gotten us into any kind of wars, and he's made far greater overtures towards peace with our adversaries, or with what people that we consider adversaries.
00:57:52.000I'm thinking of North Korea, specifically.
00:57:57.000The things that are possible for the United States really become clear.
00:58:02.000And I think that, again, that's a great point because I felt the same way.
00:58:05.000I did not, I guess I didn't really understand how much soft power the United States had.
00:58:12.000It's clear that the U.S. can blow up every other country, right?
00:58:25.000I have a problem with that argument, but go ahead.
00:58:26.000But the point being is that, look, we're not even talking about intervention of the U.S. military.
00:58:31.000We're just saying that we're going to slap sanctions on you, we're going to cut off trade, and then you start to realize just how big and powerful the nation is.
00:58:40.000And it's crazy to me how much, like you said, the left will gaslight you and say, these other nations are laughing at us.
00:58:46.000I'm like, if they are, it's because they don't care about their own selves.
00:58:49.000Because if they do, they understand they're going to lose out by not being involved with us, whether it's through trade, whether it's through the use of our military to protect their own borders.
00:58:59.000There's a thousand ways in which we could be doing more for our country that we're starting to do now.
00:59:04.000And I worry that the second you lose power, then it just goes back to the way it was.
00:59:10.000You have to start imparting the idea that our own self-interest is key.
00:59:13.000So that's one thing that I want to get your take on, Will.
00:59:16.000I agree completely with what Brett's saying.
00:59:18.000And I think that the idea of America First has been so foreign to Americans, we don't understand the potential that our country has.
00:59:29.000Donald, because we were talking earlier about the MAGA coalition versus the left, I think that Donald Trump has really demonstrated that the United States can do great things for itself and still operate in a moral and ethical way internationally.
00:59:44.000And this is how not just the right, though the right is probably, you know, screaming how much they love it, but this is the way that the right and the not left should look at the The not left, whoever isn't in the crazy leftist, these are the way that politicians should act towards the United States.
01:00:07.000And I'd really love to hear your thoughts on that.
01:00:09.000So I think, you know, for a long time we had on the left a sort of general globalist internationalist sense that we shouldn't be rocking the boat, that we should be seeking consensus, that we should just be doing what everybody else wants.
01:00:20.000The right had antibodies against that because the right's historically more nationalist, anti-UN, for example.
01:00:26.000But the right also has this long-standing free trade approach that would totally exclude the idea of using tariffs as an economic weapon as a way to...
01:00:35.000And the combination of those two things meant it's like, well, we have hard power or nothing, and most of the time it's nothing to get people to behave the way we want.
01:00:42.000And Trump comes in, he's like, well, I'm obviously not some internationalist cuck.
01:00:49.000But also that I'm not, at the same time, afraid of using tariffs.
01:00:56.000And so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go around and be like, wait a second, you all are completely dependent on access to our market.
01:01:03.000Your economies are completely dependent on access to American consumers.
01:02:36.000And they spend 2% of their GDP. I don't know what Poland's GDP is, but it's obviously dramatically less than the United States, because they're just a smaller country with fewer people.
01:02:45.000And so the actual ask of the individual...
01:02:50.000European countries or other countries in NATO in absolute dollars is minuscule compared to what the United States.
01:02:57.000And then they get, you know, they really start talking about how we're like being, you know, appeasing.
01:03:24.000If we start defending you, you'd fall to Russia in an instant.
01:03:29.000Be grateful for the continued support of the American taxpayer.
01:03:33.000Despite the fact that you guys have been obnoxious towards our current sitting president.
01:03:37.000I mean, that is a lot of where I think a lot of the leftist arguments come in these days about when you see people, you know, coalescing online and talking about healthcare and they talk about it in foreign countries and we talk about how they say, oh, it's amazing that Americans don't just get free healthcare.
01:03:54.000And then we say, well, that's because your military is pretty much subsidized by the might of our military.
01:04:03.000I understand that that's a very simplistic argument, but I do understand the anger from the average American who does think maybe the hospital, maybe all your medical bills shouldn't be covered, but you shouldn't go into insane debt because you broke your arm.
01:04:17.000And to know that we're doing that so that we can defend other countries is infuriating on some level.
01:04:27.000Most of that kind of perspective comes from a lack of understanding of what the actual problem is.
01:04:33.000Because the idea that you shouldn't have to go into Hawk just because you break your arm.
01:04:39.000Well, breaking your arm, while it's a bad thing, it's something that...
01:04:44.000Modern medicine is very capable of dealing with, and it happens frequently enough where it shouldn't cost you $10,000 to get your arm x-rayed and set.
01:04:57.000I mean, you can go and get your teeth cleaned from a dentist for a couple hundred bucks.
01:05:02.000That should probably be 50 bucks because it takes them like 10 minutes nowadays.
01:05:07.000And that, even that is still, it's like, it's not outrageously expensive to get your, you know, spend $150, $200 to get your teeth cleaned.
01:05:13.000It shouldn't be more than a couple hundred bucks to get an arm set because it's something that's fairly routine and unless they need to do, you know, put in, you know, steel and those kind of repairs.
01:05:24.000They go in and they're like, we need to take an x-ray.
01:05:26.000And then like when, and then they set your, they set them on like, we need to take another x-ray.
01:05:30.000And the poor person's like, do you need to do the second x-ray?
01:05:33.000But the point being is like when we talk about like plastic surgery or LASIK or those kind of procedures that aren't covered, all of that stuff, the prices have gone down because – and this is where I'm most libertarian.
01:05:49.000It's a miracle that it happens and that it works the way that it does.
01:05:53.000But because we don't have a market for health care, all the prices are – It's going to be through the roof because the insurance companies just pay.
01:06:03.000It's a nightmare, but that's not the fault of the American population.
01:06:12.000And then the scary part is they somehow turn that on its head and say that that is an argument for single-payer health care, and then you're like, hold up.
01:06:35.000Washington, a federal judge on Friday, declined to block the Trump administration from putting thousands of employees with U.S. Agency for International Development on administrative leave and recalling others from overseas, clearing the way for President Trump to resume his efforts to overhaul the agency as part of his plan to slash the size of the federal government.
01:06:52.000I do think that it's a good idea to do these.
01:06:56.000I think the real tangible results when it comes to the significant changes of USAID are going to be the fact that the left doesn't have the access to federal money the way that it used to.
01:07:12.000First off, this is a big W for the Trump administration.
01:07:18.000One of the cases where there had been a temporary restraining order put in place.
01:07:23.000And, you know, I'd followed a lot of these cases.
01:07:25.000This Judge Nichols, you know, I've got a friend named Bill Shipley who is heavily involved with J6 defendants, so he actually was in front of Judge Nichols a lot.
01:07:34.000And he was saying, everybody's getting really mad at Judge Nichols over this particular injunction.
01:07:47.000USAID. You know, or these labor unions try to say, it's like, well, you can't get people off from USAID in foreign countries because they need access to, like, foreign alerts about danger in their country.
01:07:57.000And he's like, well, okay, I'll give you, like, five days to demonstrate that that's true and, like, that you're actually entitled to, like, not get fired.
01:08:05.000And five days later, he's like, nope, we can fire you.
01:08:08.000Actually, they can go ahead and do what they want.
01:08:14.000Do you anticipate that there will be another challenge to this?
01:08:18.000No, I think this is going to be the end of this particular case.
01:08:22.000I think that you've lost your attempt to get an injunction to stop Trump from putting all of USA basically on administrative leave and telling them all that you can sit at home for the next six months until we finally fire you.
01:08:38.000And I just don't think that once this ruling's been denied, they're not going to go to a different judge and try and judge stuff here.
01:08:44.000A new judge will look at it and be like, you already filed this case in D.C. It's already been resolved.
01:08:51.000I think this is just a straight W. There's a lot of different ones of these injunctions all over the country, obviously, where liberals are trying to lawfare and stop Doge and stuff, you name it.
01:09:05.000There's been a discussion that we've been having around the table here about what the goal of the Trump administration is and about trying to return the power to the executive and get it away from the...
01:09:17.000The bureaucracy, and that was one of the reasons why he's trying to do the birthright citizenship, because that should go before the Supreme Court, and that'll really bring the question, does the executive have the authority to fire people that are in the bureaucracy or not?
01:09:30.000And I wanted to get your thoughts on that.
01:09:32.000So yeah, I think the big case, and I think in the next...
01:09:35.000Probably early next week, because it's Friday, right?
01:09:37.000So there's nothing going to happen in the next few days, but probably Monday, Tuesday, I would expect the Supreme Court's going to rule on the...
01:09:45.000The case that's before them, I think it's the first one, which is Trump fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, I think a guy named Dellinger.
01:09:54.000Dellinger went to the D.C. District Court, got an injunction saying, you need to keep your—you, the Trump administration, are not allowed to fire this guy.
01:10:00.000And that went up on appeal, and the D.C. Circuit Court said, well, it's a temporary restraining order, we don't— Meddle with temporary restraining orders because the idea being you don't need to appeal them because they're going to expire in 28 days on their own terms.
01:10:14.000But the administration has gone to the Supreme Court and said, no, no, no, no, no.
01:10:19.000Judges do not get to tell us who to hire and who to fire, and they can't use temporary restraining orders to deny us the ability to fire people for a month.
01:10:28.000That's a ridiculous interference with such an obvious core article to power that not even a temporary restraining order should be allowed to stay in place.
01:10:37.000And so that's already at the Supreme Court, right?
01:10:42.000We're probably gonna hear about that Monday, Tuesday.
01:10:44.000I expect the Trump administration's gonna win.
01:10:47.000And if they win that, they might essentially win a huge knockout to a slew of these temporary restraining orders, basically saying, like, the Supreme Court's either gonna, you know, take a wider view of this or just put in some dicta, basically saying all these temporary restraining orders have gone wildly beyond the judge's authority.
01:11:08.000People need to stop messing with the executive branch, period, and stock.
01:11:12.000Some of the things that I've been hearing people discussing when it comes to this kind of stuff...
01:11:16.000Even when FDR was making massive, massive executive orders that really changed the structure of government, there were no federal judges that were just saying, well, we're going to throw an injunction on this and stop it.
01:11:26.000And this is really kind of an innovation that's happened, started, I guess, in the 60s, but really took off in the Barack Obama administration.
01:11:35.000Yeah, so the idea of a nationwide injunction, it's not obvious at all that judges should be able to issue injunctions beyond the parties to the litigation directly in front of them.
01:11:45.000You know, a good example of this, I think there was a case in Florida where, you know, the state of, I think DeSantis was trying to, like, ban puberty blockers or something.
01:11:58.000And, you know, in federal court, the injunction was crafted so that DeSantis was not, while the case was being resolved, DeSantis was not allowed to prevent these two specific people from getting puberty blockers.
01:12:09.000You can enforce the law broadly, but he couldn't enforce it to them.
01:12:12.000That's the normal understanding of what power do district courts have?
01:12:16.000Well, they have power over the litigants in front of them.
01:12:19.000They can say, you don't do this to this person until we've settled your dispute.
01:12:24.000So the idea that an injunction could be just broad and affect everybody in the country, despite the fact that not everybody in the country is in front of the court, it's not obvious that that should be allowed.
01:12:36.000Especially given how aggressive some of these district court judges have been.
01:12:39.000I mean, you know, there was the New York case where Judge Engelmeyer told Doge that they weren't allowed to access Treasury data.
01:12:46.000I mean, they were straight up telling—it created this artificial distinction between political and career appointees, and it's like, you, the political appointees, are not allowed to see this data.
01:13:10.000And I think in general, what you're going to see, I mean, I know justice Thomas has talked about tailoring these down and basically, you know, we way too many judges are getting way too quickly involved in the working as the executive branch.
01:13:22.000Uh, I think that it's time for that to stop.
01:13:25.000I think it's personally time for that to stop as a normative claim, and I think it will stop.
01:13:29.000Is that just – is that where I hear so much about the term and the concept of activist judges now?
01:13:34.000Is that just because it's all become so heavily politicized?
01:13:36.000Like I've heard a lot of people discuss about the idea of the Supreme Court wasn't always seen as something that was politically biased but rather something that was just supposed to be about interpreting the Constitution.
01:13:48.000Now you expect most of these cases a lot of the time to fall along party lines.
01:13:54.000I mean, I'm probably biased in my assumption, but I do think that the argument that the conservatives or the textualists are the ones that are correct in their understanding.
01:14:05.000You have to go by what the words on the paper mean, and you can't infer meaning.
01:14:12.000So even though it's the conservatives that are the textualists, and my political opinions align far closer to conservatives than to progressives, I do think that that is the true thing.
01:14:29.000Is the Constitution is meant to be interpreted, and so the meaning will change.
01:14:34.000But I find, like, there's arguments made by, like, Judge Napolitano that says things like, if the Constitution mean, if it doesn't mean what it says, then it doesn't mean anything.
01:14:44.000It either means what it says or it doesn't, and if it doesn't mean what it says, then it doesn't mean anything at all.
01:14:49.000Or things like, if the Constitution was meant to be interpreted, then they would not, the framers would not have put an amendment process into the Constitution.
01:14:58.000That is not only there so that way you can change it but also arduous and very difficult.
01:15:04.000Like it's the reason that the amendment process is arduous is because they didn't want you to just change the meaning of the words on the paper based on what is popular at the time.
01:15:15.000I guess I just think of it from a it's from a media framing device, which is that we talk about Soros backed DAs or Obama appointed judges or Trump appointed judges, which is a tool that both sides of the aisles friendly media apparatus uses as a way to frame their arguments when they're covering a story.
01:15:34.000I just want to, like, you've actually sort of landed on a very interesting bigger debate in American constitutional law and the question of, like, should, you know, it almost goes to, like, should we even allow judicial review?
01:15:48.000We treat it as obvious that our Supreme Court can weigh in on the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress and can overturn them.
01:15:54.000It's not obvious that you have to allow that to happen.
01:15:57.000You can just say that all the court's job is only to interpret the laws passed by Congress and then see if people's behavior conforms to it.
01:16:06.000And then that connects to the question you're also talking about, which is like, okay, when exactly did judicial activism start and what is judicial activism?
01:16:16.000That's, you know, query whether or not, like, some of our most famous cases that most people would think of as the best cases the Supreme Court has ever decided weren't, in fact, very activist.
01:16:25.000Board is a sort of classic example of this, where, you know, there's 80 years of precedent saying separate but equal is okay, and the court just decided, nah, change your mind.
01:16:35.000And, you know, was it super principled in terms of, like, if you read the legal reasoning or you're like, man, this is just a masterpiece of legal reasoning.
01:16:41.000Nobody could poke any holes in their argument here.
01:16:44.000No, you could poke some holes in how they got from, how they just threw out 80 years of precedent.
01:16:49.000But I think nobody wants to see Brown v.
01:16:57.000I mean, you know, these things are, there's, you know, I think...
01:17:01.000Conservatives always want, I think, and I'm sympathetic to this, the idea that you want it to be black and white, but the project of interpreting text and understanding meaning is there's always some amount of gray.
01:17:15.000And I think, in general, the idea that the conservatives have the better of the argument that in a world where you completely go to language is totally indeterminate and it can just mean whatever we want it to mean.
01:17:26.000Then basically you're saying that there is no constitution and it's just a pure exercise of power.
01:17:43.000And to your discussion about it's just a language, it doesn't matter, it's just an exercise of power.
01:17:48.000That is kind of the furthest postmodernist leftist.
01:17:53.000And that's a fundamental belief that they have, that there is no, like, that discourses are only an exercise of power, that the words that you say don't really mean anything.
01:18:06.000That's where the foundation for the, you know, everyone's a Nazi kind of comes from.
01:18:11.000The important thing isn't whether or not they're Nazis.
01:18:14.000The important thing is, do you convince the people listening that they're bad people?
01:18:18.000So you use whatever hyperbole that you want.
01:18:21.000And these are arguments that are made by people.
01:18:22.000I think it was like Foucault and Sartre and stuff like that.
01:18:27.000It doesn't matter what you're saying, just that you're convincing the people listening.
01:18:31.000It's really easy to understand why that tactic became so popular as phones became more commonplace and our communication went digital, which was that those bludgeoning arguments of name-calling and categorizing you as something abhorrent became far more tactical when everyone was now connected via which was that those bludgeoning arguments of name-calling and categorizing you as something abhorrent became far more tactical when everyone was now connected via social media and they could use that as a way of silencing people they disagreed with because people weren't used
01:19:02.000I wouldn't disagree, but I think there's a lot to it because these ideas, like I said, like the postmodern kind of left kind of got their start, you know, in like the 60s, like late 50s, early 60s and stuff.
01:19:15.000So now you have, you know, you have your academics and your students who go to your four year colleges and have years of indoctrination into those beliefs, arguing online with somebody who works at an auto body shop.
01:19:29.000And they think that those tactics of sounding unbelievably erudite while insulting you are going to work forever.
01:19:34.000But we're seeing that that's less and less true now as those kind of arguments hold less weight.
01:19:40.000Yeah, well, I mean, as long as people – when you're first called a Nazi, it's shocking because you're like, what?
01:19:56.000And it's like you have to kind of take stock of yourself.
01:19:59.000But the more you hear it, the more you get called it, when you know that you've never zigged a heil, you're just like, that's not true at all.
01:20:07.000There's nothing that I have ever done that even remotely resembles that.
01:20:11.000So you're just saying this, and then people kind of get used to it.
01:20:46.000So it allows you to kind of do whatever you normally want to in terms of law, right?
01:20:50.000So that's the first, you know, the power of if you can basically win that all language is totally indeterminate and that then really law just becomes an exercise of power.
01:21:02.000There's no principled basis on which to say like you can or can't do anything.
01:21:07.000I mean, the left prefers that because it, you know, it believes in what's so-called like living constitutionalism.
01:21:11.000I think this is what you were getting at with a lot of your kind of, you know, the critique of interpretation.
01:21:16.000But, you know, the left really doesn't want to be constrained by the past understandings and past written texts.
01:21:22.000They just want, you know, they want to go.
01:21:25.000Is that like when they talk about well-regulated militia in regards to the Second Amendment when they understand that's not what they meant?
01:21:35.000If you look at the context of a well-regulated in the time frame, it's pretty clear that they meant a working properly militia.
01:21:45.000They weren't talking about the government regulating things because now the government regulations, like the way that we think of the administrative state, when you think of regulation, you think of the bureaucracy deciding laws, making rules.
01:22:07.000Regulated militia being necessary to a free people, something like that.
01:22:11.000The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
01:22:14.000You know, this is a good example of where English is actually not indeterminate.
01:22:18.000That phrase is a prefatory phrase that is basically saying the way that sentence reads properly is the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
01:22:30.000But it's not saying this is, you know, this is the only reason why and this is therefore the only purpose for which bearing arms is acceptable.
01:22:37.000No, that's not the right way to read that English.
01:22:39.000So would it have been easier if they just didn't give any reason and just said the...
01:22:43.000Right, yeah, well they didn't assume that, I mean, it's pretty clear actually.
01:22:48.000I mean, my understanding of, you know, the history of the Second Amendment, they understand exactly what they were doing.
01:22:52.000I mean, you know, there's a lot of like really cruddy Second Amendment arguments that the left puts out there.
01:22:57.000Things like, well, you know, they only had muskets back then.
01:23:00.000So like you can only have muskets now.
01:23:02.000It's like muskets were state of the art.
01:23:09.000I mean, there are there are, I mean, obviously, like some limits on that, but the there's a whole slew of terrible left wing arguments.
01:23:17.000But the worst of them is sort of seizing on this prefatory clause and then just butchering not only English grammar.
01:23:25.000When the thing was written, but English grammar now.
01:23:29.000Have you ever seen the meme where it's like, women, if they go back, if they had a time machine, men, if they had a time machine, and the men, it's like, write it as if they're two.
01:23:38.000Write the Second Amendment as if they were five years old.
01:23:42.000We're going to go ahead and we're going to jump to one last story, and it's a light one to end the week.
01:23:58.000So the ceasefire deal still on track amid uproar over fate of two Israeli boys and false return of their mother's bodies.
01:24:06.000So this is a situation that I find particularly disgusting, and it's something that people seem to ignore when they're talking about the Israel-Palestine argument, if they're sympathetic to the Palestinian side.
01:24:47.000The Israeli Defense Force said in a statement on Friday afternoon that autopsy results and military intelligence concluded that members of Hamas used their bare hands to kill Ariel Baez 4 and his 10-month-old brother Kiffer when they were seized in October 2023. If I understand correctly, there's actually no evidence that these kids and their mother were actually seized by Hamas.
01:25:44.000And there's a lot of people that would make the argument that there were a lot of Palestinians that just went into Israel and were kidnapping people.
01:25:51.000And I find it difficult to disprove that theory.
01:25:56.000Again, because they weren't wearing, you know, they weren't wearing uniforms.
01:26:00.000So you can't really prove that there is a distinction.
01:26:03.000And that's something that I find difficult to...
01:26:10.000There are people that say, oh, well, you know, not everyone in Gaza is Hamas, sure, but I think they had like 70% approval rating or something like that in a poll or something.
01:26:23.000Where's the Gazan-Oskar Schindler, right?
01:26:26.000Where is the Gazan, you know, there have been hundreds of, it's been a year and a half.
01:26:33.000It's not like, also, Hamas is not as powerful as the Nazi regime was in Germany, right?
01:26:39.000Like, Hamas got their ass kicked very quickly.
01:26:42.000I want to, just for a point, I want to articulate that.
01:26:45.000In Germany, there were Germans that saved Jews.
01:26:49.000In Gaza, there were no Gazans that saved Jews.
01:27:31.000The Israeli government ripped Israeli citizens from their homes and their settlements in the Gaza Strip in 2005. They made the Gazan Strip free of Jews.
01:27:41.000Well, that's why there's no Gazan Schindler's List, because there was no one living there at the time.
01:27:52.000The people of Gaza don't have any day-to-day interactions with Israelis unless they were among the few who were getting work permits to go work in the Strip.
01:28:01.000So you just have no relationship and no sort of empathy.
01:28:08.000Because there's none of that cross-cultural interaction.
01:28:11.000And I think that that probably is a good explanation for whereas not everybody in Germany agreed with Hitler.
01:28:16.000And certainly there were plenty of Jews just living in Germany prior to Hitler that Germans would have been interacting with.
01:28:22.000So that's the point that folks are standing in line.
01:28:48.000And very could have easily been mass casualty events.
01:28:53.000Yeah, and this is also, I mean, I was just in Israel, just like full disclosure, I was in there for about a week, and I've never had any security issues myself.
01:29:01.000But the big discussions have been all about these hostage release deals, and where Israel's giving up 30 or something prisoners for every one hostage they're getting back.
01:29:12.000And a lot of these prisoners are convicted criminals, people who were used to be involved in bus bombings back in like the Second Intifada in like 2000, and even more recently.
01:29:21.000And all of a sudden, You know, after Israel has now released something like a thousand of these convicted criminals, all of a sudden buses are blowing up again.
01:29:28.000Like, not, you know, I'm a fan of Israel, but I gotta say, and, you know, I really don't like the hostage deals they've been doing.
01:29:35.000I think they've been really too, a little bit too cavalier about the future consequences of releasing these criminals, like that their own citizen, a lot of their own citizens are going to die or be taken captive in the future by some of the people that they're releasing.
01:29:48.000Are they releasing them into the city, or are they sending them...
01:29:50.000Some of them are getting released into the West Bank.
01:29:52.000Some of them are getting released into Gaza.
01:31:38.000Like, that's like, you know, blow up an Israeli civilian terrorist attack, you get rewarded by the government of the Palestinian Authority.
01:31:44.000So these people, and they're notoriously corrupt, too, as often, you know, Arab governments are, because, I mean, we can get into the reason why.
01:31:52.000Are they as, do they do the bidding of Iran the same way that...
01:33:22.000So the Egyptians have been, they're not interested in taking the Palestinians.
01:33:27.000The Jordanians are not interested in taking the Palestinians because I know that there was some kind of uprising attempted in Jordan, right?
01:33:34.000Well, I mean, historically, the Palestinians have been a major source of instability in both countries, particularly in Jordan.
01:33:39.000They tried to assassinate, you know, the PLO when they were there.
01:33:43.000I mean, we're talking about all the 80s, 70s, 80s.
01:33:45.000They were, like, trying to assassinate the king of Jordan.
01:34:00.000I'm actually a little more sympathetic to the Egyptians and the Jordanians than maybe not the Egyptians because they did allow all those weapons to go into Gaza and then are like, ooh, me?
01:34:14.000You know, as I think we articulated at the beginning of the segment, there's a lot less distinction between Hamas and the Gazan population at large than people try to articulate.
01:34:21.000This isn't like, you know, ISIS just randomly coming in and not having a serious amount of domestic support.
01:34:26.000Like, the people of Gaza support Hamas by and large.
01:34:32.000I sent that to the Egyptians and the Jordanians not wanting an additional, like, Sunni Islamist, you know, population in their country to, like, destabilize their own countries.
01:34:44.000You're going to have to take some people, I think, probably.
01:34:47.000And assuming we go there—or, again, you're going to have to figure out a way to solve the underlying problem in Gaza in a way that satisfies the Israeli security concerns, which are substantial.
01:34:56.000I mean, the argument—I find the argument compelling that if the—I think it was—it might have been Hugh Hewitt that said this, but he said, if the— If the Gazans put down their weapons, or if Hamas puts down their weapons, then there will be peace.
01:35:11.000And if the Israelis put down their weapons, there's going to be a lot of dead Jews.
01:35:15.000Yeah, and the thing that really is interesting is the way that the West kind of projects its own way of viewing the world onto and saying that the people in Gaza and the West Bank think the same way, or should think the same way.
01:35:50.000When ISIS was actually a real power, they had their magazine they were putting out, it was called The Beak, and they had an article called Why We Hate You and Why We Fight You, and it literally went through all the reasons why the Sunni Islamists hated people that were not...
01:36:21.000And Barack Obama was still making the argument, and this is to your point about, like, the West projects their ideas on.
01:36:27.000Barack Obama was making the argument, well, no, it's economics.
01:36:29.000They're doing this because they don't have iPhones, and they don't have modern things.
01:36:34.000It's like, no, they literally put out a magazine with better copy editing than your average New York Times, and they were straight up saying, hey, this is what, it's called, this is why we hate you, and this is why we fight you.
01:36:48.000And we should just have the seriousness and the respect for them to tell you.
01:37:24.000It actually kind of explains the origin of Islam because, you know, tribalism emerges because there's not a lot of water in the Middle East, so individualism doesn't work.
01:37:35.000And so there's a lot of, you know, there's on the one hand a lot of internal support, but also that's where, you know...
01:37:41.000Inbreeding in the Muslim world comes from.
01:37:42.000It's actually not a phenomenon of Islam.
01:37:44.000It's a phenomenon of the underlying tribalism.
01:37:46.000Islam is actually supposed to be the corrective to that because it was like Muhammad who was saying things like, you should marry from afar.
01:37:57.000And also, we should all be coming together underneath the banner of Allah rather than constantly fighting with each other over water sources.
01:38:06.000Talking about a really wildly oversimplifying history of the Arab world, but basically because Islam managed to unify tribes, get them to stop fighting each other, deal with inbreeding, and tamp down blood feuds, it was able to unite a lot of people and then swallow up a huge part of the Arab world.
01:38:22.000But anyway, the tribalism hasn't gone away.
01:38:26.000And so when you're trying to explain the Middle East why are certain countries peaceful and why are they not, you might say, oh, well, some of them have oil and some of them are wealthy.
01:39:05.000Everywhere that's stable in the Middle East has, like, a stable tribal sovereignty.
01:39:13.000Thus, this guy's solution, he said, Palestinian Emirates.
01:39:16.000There should be an Emirate of Ramallah, one of the cities, an Emirate of Hebron, an Emirate of Bethlehem, an Emirate of Janine.
01:39:23.000Like, you have small, little areas that are run by, like, with, by a, you know, essentially put the family in charge, and then they own it, and they can run it and keep it stable.
01:39:35.000Because the thing is, one thing people don't realize, if there were, in fact, a Palestinian state, like, of all the area of the West Bank with all these different cities in it, the only thing that would unify it is hostility to Israel.
01:39:48.000Because the moment if they, you know, other than that, they'd all be fighting amongst each other with their own regional and sectarian biases against each other.
01:39:56.000And so it would just, like, the only way to glue the state of Palestine together is...
01:40:24.000So that's, you know, that's like a sort of long, that's the short form explanation of why, like, the two-state solution isn't, one, many reasons why the two-state solution is bad.
01:41:44.000It was, and that was one of the things that, even though I didn't mention, that was one of the things that I was thinking about when we were talking about how the president will, you know, he will assert himself.
01:41:52.000And for people that don't know, Donald Trump and the Maine governor got into a disagreement today about federal funding.
01:41:59.000Actually, it was about trans women, so boys, on girls' sports teams.
01:42:07.000Donald Trump had said, hey, you're going to have to stop doing this.
01:42:12.000And the Maine governor said, well, we'll see you in court.
01:42:14.000And he's like, well, if you see us in court, we're not going to give you any federal funding, so you're going to do it.
01:42:19.000And I know that Maine isn't all that blue.
01:42:34.00080% of the people don't like young boys that are dressed as girls on girls sports teams.
01:42:40.000I think that's generally kind of the split in the U.S. Most of the people are kind of like, you know, even if you decide you want to go live your life and maybe I'll call you she, you still can't play sports with the girls.
01:42:53.000So there's your backstory for that one.
01:42:58.000WhiskeyDrankers says, Hey Phil and crew, I was hoping to get a shout out for Heroes Never Alone, a 501c3 out of Legionnaire, PA. A good place to move without West Virginia 1099BS. Thanks for all you guys do.
01:43:58.000The hardest part for me when we're doing the show is reading the articles, because I suck at reading out loud doubly as hard when it's reading the Super Chats.
01:46:06.000I'm just, like, going to throw out there that maybe the people who sex traffic children should, you know, the consequences should be more substantial than awkwardness.
01:46:42.000They would actually have hashtag unmanned because there was an all-woman crew, which is...
01:46:48.000Cringe, but typical of feminists and stuff.
01:46:52.000Common Sense Fishing says, the way politicians flip-flop like fish, I don't trust anyone who hasn't been America first from the get-go.
01:47:00.000Even before Trump showed up, like Ron and Rand Paul, they're all swamp creatures nearly all.
01:47:06.000I mean, you do have to give some grace to politicians that have...
01:47:11.000turned things around and have stood by their convictions since then, right?
01:47:14.000From what I understand, J.D. Vance had some stances early on in his career that didn't necessarily line up.
01:47:19.000J.D. Vance didn't like Trump in the 2016 primary.
01:47:22.000The point is kind of more to – if the ideas that you're promulgating are good for the country and they're held by a lot of people, you want to get the politicians to go to work for you and your views.
01:47:34.000I don't go to politicians or actors for honesty.
01:47:38.000I go to them because either you're making a piece of art that I want to consume or you're potentially in charge of helping put forth laws and ideas that I want to see come forward.
01:47:48.000And in that case, I don't know the person.
01:47:50.000I don't know whether they honestly believe that, but it's about making sure that the views that the movement are pushing are the ones that are popular because they're the ones that they're doing.
01:48:03.000If the option is a politician with integrity that I disagree with or a politician that's going to lie about what he believes but still going to do the things that I like, I'm going to go with the guy that's going to lie and do the things that I like.
01:48:16.000And that is more likely to be the case even for the ones that are going to do things that you don't like.
01:48:21.000You're more than likely going to get one void of integrity going against you or for you.
01:48:27.000Very rarely do you get a politician with integrity.
01:48:30.000And there's one thing that I want to say on this.
01:48:32.000We talk about it fairly regularly on here.
01:48:35.000It's easy for us as pundits or people that are on the internet talking about politics and stuff.
01:48:41.000It's easy for us to get wrapped up in, this is what I want, and it's got to be this way.
01:48:44.000But you've got to remember, the Republicans only have a two-seat majority in the House, and they only have a one-seat majority sometimes in the Senate.
01:48:54.000And that means that you have to deal with the opposing party to get them to vote with you.
01:49:01.000Like, how the sausage is made sucks, but this is the system that we live in.
01:49:06.000And it's real easy for us to say, we want this and we want that, and if we don't get it, then we're going to primary this guy and blah, blah, blah.
01:49:12.000But that doesn't mean that the next guy is going to have a different circumstance if the split in the House or the Senate remains the same.
01:50:09.000And the difference is kind of that the Republicans look at that as somebody who's voting to support what his constituents want, whereas the left sees it as somebody who's not obeying their rules.
01:50:25.000Or it's incumbent on us to remind people that there are realities that we're dealing with and whereas we're going to, like I said, we're going to sit here and pontificate and we're going to say we want this and we wish this and we think this.
01:50:38.000That doesn't mean that that changes anything in Washington, and the realities on the ground are always going to be the realities on the ground.
01:50:45.000If we can get two-thirds of the House and then 75 seats in the Senate, then let's go do everything we want.
01:50:55.000Go repeal everything, get rid of all the stuff we can get rid of.
01:50:59.000That sounds awesome to me, and I'm all for it.
01:51:02.000But considering we don't have that kind of majority, there are limitations as to what we can do.
01:51:07.000And if we end up with two big bills like they're talking about, it's better to have the stuff that you want and a bunch of garbage that you don't want than have nothing at all.
01:51:50.000So we're going to go ahead and read some more Super Chats.
01:51:54.000Shane H. Wilder says, one thing I noticed MSM not covering is the 70 Christian martyrs beheaded by ISIS-linked terrorists in the Congo in the Kasanga Massacre?
01:52:56.000I could go into detail on this, but I spoke with a number of, actually a couple of Palestinian Christians who came to speak with us, and they had really, really interesting stories about, you know, like, one of them was involved in like a sort of kind of Palestinian, like, not terror group, but a Palestinian activist group, and he thought like he had his friends, and then one day, like, one of these Islamists kidnapped his sister.
01:53:22.000And brought them back to a different city.
01:53:39.000And that's the point I was making about there's an underlying tribalism and sectarianism in a lot of Arab culture that like, oh, you're not our religion?
01:53:59.000And then you compare that to what they get in Israel where, yeah, the Christians are definitely a minority in Israel, obviously.
01:54:07.000And really what they're fighting for is to not be treated.
01:54:10.000Under the Arab rubric, because there's the palette, there's the Jewish rubric and the Arab rubric that are sort of settled in because those are the much bigger populations.
01:54:16.000And there's fights that the Christians are having to be like, no, no, no, we're different from both.
01:54:50.000I mean, if you put a can on a rifle, especially like a...
01:54:56.000Medium cartridge, like a 5.56 or whatever.
01:54:58.000Like, it's still got a loud snap when you're shooting it, but it's totally different than shooting that same rifle without any hearing protection and without a can, man, it's...
01:55:10.000One time when I first started shooting rifles, one time I went to the range and I forgot my ear pro and I was like, oh, I'm going to go ahead and shoot anyways.
01:55:27.000And it sucked, but I was not shooting anymore because, man, that rings your bell.
01:55:30.000Yeah, no, I don't shoot often, but I think I got invited to go to a shooting range once and it was the first time I'd gone shooting in like 20 years.
01:56:36.000Regular riflemen infantry, they're pretty well eclipsed.
01:56:39.000They're walking out with hard armor for rifles, and they're walking out with a decent amount of armor for flak, and they're walking out with...
01:56:49.000Ear Pro and most of them are getting at least a single tube night vision.
01:57:31.000There's multiple little speakers in there and stuff, and they've got a full range and stuff.
01:57:36.000I've been doing it 25 years and I have tinnitus, you know, on stage.
01:57:41.000I'll start out at a certain volume and depending on the size of the stage or where we're playing, it's like if you're playing a smaller place and you're right on top of the drums or you're close to the drums, you kind of need to crank it up and it gets loud in there.
01:57:52.000But if you're playing in a big arena, you know, you kind of turn it down.
01:58:18.000That's part of the reason why, like, I'll wear these for a little while, but before the end of the show, usually I'll end up taking them off because just having that kind of...
01:58:25.000Over the ear, even though I turn every time, no matter where I sit down, whoever was there before me has it way louder than I want it.
01:58:34.000I'll go and sit down where Mary does to do PCC, and she's got it cranked up.
01:58:38.000He just jumps out of his seat because her volume is just sky high.
01:58:42.000Girl, you're going to be deaf in a year.
02:01:24.000We are, you know, we haven't really talked a huge amount about this, maybe a little.
02:01:29.000We're all about getting people confirmed.
02:01:30.000Now, a lot of President Trump's main nominees have gotten firm, but now we're on the subordinates and there's a lot of very important people.
02:01:46.000But there's a lot of people like Harmeet Dillon, who's going to be running the civil rights section at DOJ. People like Gail Slater is going to be running antitrust and going after big tech.
02:01:53.000There are a lot of secondary nominees that some of these senators might be getting ideas about.