00:06:21.000Hey guys, welcome to another huge episode of Trigger.
00:06:24.000Today, we're following the money, following the fraud, following the corruption.
00:06:29.000And nobody follows it better than our guest, Chris Ruffo, a journalist who I'm sure many of you already follow.
00:06:36.000He's been on the show before, a great guy.
00:06:38.000He put critical race theory on the map, meaning it was out there.
00:06:43.000He put it on the map so everyone knew how insane it actually was.
00:06:46.000And now he's tearing the lid off fraud all across California.
00:06:51.000And as insane as it gets every week, It somehow, amazingly, keeps getting worse.
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00:08:45.000So, listen, you've popped the lid on a bunch of these sort of insane stories about stuff that's been going on around the country that maybe we saw in the periphery, but you really exposed a lot of that.
00:08:56.000So, let's start with the new one, though the story you published recently.
00:09:01.000A California medical supply company pulled more than $40 million.
00:09:05.000Output transcript Out of the Medi Cal program since 2020.
00:09:09.000They went from about $8,000 in 2020 to almost $19 million in 2024.
00:09:15.000I mean, the owner is sitting in a $28 million mansion in a pretty quick period of time, seemingly from nothing.
00:09:24.000Tell people what you've found and what people need to really start looking for.
00:09:29.000Because, I mean, this is literally just coming right out of the American taxpayer pocket.
00:10:11.000Every listed place of business, and there was zero sign that the company even existed.
00:10:17.000There was no office, there was no working phone line, there was no warehouse, there was no production facility.
00:10:23.000And so, what you have is this ghost business that is harvesting millions of dollars in cash out of the Medicaid system, and nobody is looking at all.
00:10:32.000And what we realized is that this Medicaid millionaire phenomenon is not just this story, but it's replicated thousands and thousands of times all over the United States.
00:10:44.000Yeah, obviously, we saw it with the hospice fraud in Minnesota.
00:10:48.000You're seeing the stuff that Dr. Oz and Secretary Kennedy have discovered around the place.
00:10:53.000I know JD Vance is working hard on the sort of the fraud playbook, but you found this, but this is not a one off deal.
00:11:01.000I mean, there's probably thousands of these things going on.
00:11:04.000What do you think the tune of all this money really adds up to?
00:11:09.000I asked that exact question to Treasury Secretary Scott Besson, and he told me that the best estimates from the federal government are that American.
00:11:18.000Taxpayers lose between $300 and $600 billion per year.
00:11:25.000So we're talking about a half a trillion dollars a year that just gets wiped out.
00:11:30.000And there's another dirty little secret that we found in our reporting on this issue.
00:11:34.000We talked to fraud investigators up and down the West Coast, and they said something like 90% of that fraud cash ends up overseas.
00:11:43.000And so the whole world, fraudsters, criminal organizations, drug gangs for all over the world have realized that.
00:11:51.000The American public medical system is a soft target and they're just looting our country hand over fist.
00:11:59.000Okay, so listen, you're really good at this stuff.
00:12:01.000You can find it, but how is it that there's not, you know, other than the new task force that's been formed, how is it that this has just been able to go on, presumably for decades, and no one's even bothered to check?
00:12:16.000As a guy that runs businesses and you're accounting for everything, and I, you know, I know when we had a hotel in DC, they made sure that, you know, because my father was president during the first term, You know, they had to audit us if, you know, if a foreign, you know, government official bought a cheeseburger, we got to get audited because that was emoluments, you know, $12 cheeseburger.
00:12:45.000So it's such an important question and brilliantly put.
00:12:48.000And there's a couple of reasons why people haven't been looking.
00:12:51.000A, you know, you're spending person A's money, goes through person B's federal institution that benefits person C.
00:13:00.000And so, The incentives aren't really aligned.
00:13:02.000It's not like a private company that has a bottom line.
00:13:04.000The government has essentially an infinite bottom line.
00:13:07.000There's no discipline built into the system.
00:13:10.000The second thing is really interesting, and this is something we've also uncovered, especially in California, is that actually a lot of this money that gets really misappropriated, that gets stolen, that gets exaggerated, ends up benefiting labor unions.
00:13:24.000And so the California health sector labor unions, they actually benefit from all this money sloshing through the system.
00:13:31.000They take their cut, they don't ask any questions.
00:13:34.000And in fact, They've dismantled the oversight.
00:13:37.000They've dismantled the regulations that would actually bring some accountability into the system.
00:13:42.000And there's another really important point why nobody's looking is that it's such a massive amount of money.
00:13:49.000The federal government itself has kept a tight lid on that data.
00:13:52.000And the only reason we were able to actually find these individual stories of alleged, likely fraud is that Elon's Doge kids actually made all of this data open source.
00:14:04.000They finally, for the first time since the 1960s, allowed the public access to figuring out where all this money is going.
00:14:49.000I mean, think of if it's half a trillion dollars for a decade, you could pay down, you know, Man, you could pay down like 12, 13% of our national debt just in what's getting fraudulently pulled out of, and this, I guess, just Medicare.
00:15:17.000You know, 99% of Americans, except for certain labor union leaders, don't want fraud.
00:15:22.000And so I think this is a winning issue for Republicans and the Democrats.
00:15:27.000Have not only excused the fraud, they've tried to cover it up, they've tried to dismantle all the enforcement.
00:15:33.000And in California, they're doing stuff like just taking dictation from the labor unions and eliminating all controls on the system.
00:15:41.000And in one case, California's largest fraud scheme is in home care services.
00:15:48.000And California has changed the regulation to put it on the honor system so that you can harvest $10,000, $100,000, $1 million a year in this in home care program.
00:15:59.000And the only guarantee that you have to give is to sign, yeah, I did the right thing.
00:16:08.000We've essentially put everything on the honor system.
00:16:11.000And the problem is that the country has been really invaded by all of these criminal forces and entities that see it just as a soft target.
00:16:21.000So, obviously, this is happening everywhere, but it does seem to be more rampant, at least in terms of what we've been able to discover in sort of these blue state.
00:16:31.000Is this sort of like a USAID scheme where, hey, these people are kicking back to the politicians and that's what sort of keeps it off their radar?
00:16:38.000And as long as they're getting, you know, they're a little bit of a, again, a VIG, we're just going to leave it alone.
00:16:46.000I don't think it's quite that nefarious, but it doesn't have to be.
00:16:50.000The system's actually designed so that you don't have to have illegal kickbacks or government payouts or, you know, criminal enterprises bribing politicians.
00:17:00.000The Democrats in California have done something even more clever, which is, Just take that legitimate percentage off the top, whether it's good money or bad money.
00:17:12.000It's not even technically illegal for the unions to skim off the top.
00:17:16.000And so they've created this system where they can maintain some plausible deniability.
00:17:21.000They can maintain the requisite distance from these criminal enterprises while still hauling in cash.
00:17:27.000And just to give people a sense of how much money this is, and you've run and worked on these enormous presidential campaigns, so you'll understand the scale here.
00:17:37.000The California public sector unions representing these government workers, government healthcare workers included, are pulling in a billion dollars a year into their political war chest just for the state of California.
00:17:50.000Like, you know, a presidential election costs about a billion dollars, like, you know, for our side.
00:17:56.000That's what, if they're getting that every year in one state, I mean, you know, the order of magnitude of that is just, I mean, it's insane.
00:18:24.000And so, If you multiply that out, conservatives really have to figure out this problem, which is the Dems have set up a system where they can just scrape billions of dollars in government money into their coffers.
00:18:35.000They have this war chest that's renewed perpetually, and Republicans are out there asking for people to make a $2 donation to whatever political campaign.
00:18:44.000We have a massive asymmetry that we have to address, or every state in the United States will start looking like California.
00:18:53.000Because it's a state issue to an extent, but it's also federal taxpayer dollars.
00:19:00.000How does the government or the federal government step in and put an end to this?
00:19:03.000And honestly, no different than perhaps the Save America Act.
00:19:08.000It's something that would be incredibly popular with the vast majority of the populace.
00:19:12.000I'm sure it's an over 90% issue, just like the Save America Act is 83% across the board.
00:19:20.000Is there a desire, or do the politicians just say, hey, again, the labor unions are taking care of us, or we're worried if you're the Democrat, if you go against this and try to actually stop it?
00:19:30.000That their opponents will be very well funded by this same unions and ultimately backstopped by the American taxpayer.
00:19:39.000Yeah, I think there's two ways to get at it there's a direct programmatic method and then a broader structural method.
00:19:45.000The direct programmatic method is to just start enforcing the law relative to Medicaid and to put a cap on expenditures so that a state like California can't go from $100 billion to $200 billion, doubling Medicaid expenditures.
00:20:01.000just in the single term of Governor Gavin Newsom.
00:20:06.000You have to put tight controls on it.0.97
00:20:08.000You have to prohibit illegal aliens, for example, from using that Medicaid system as they're trying to do and subsidize in California.
00:20:16.000But then ultimately, the big kind of structural change that needs to happen is that Republicans have to figure out a way through the courts, through state legislatures, through the federal government to outlaw public sector labor unions.
00:20:27.000The old idea was that if you worked for the government, you didn't get necessarily the highest pay, but you had strong job protections.
00:20:35.000And that you weren't involved in lobbying because you can't have the government and the politicians and the unions lobbying in a circular manner.
00:20:45.000So tight restrictions on Medicaid growth, tight enforcement of anti fraud laws, and getting government unions out of the business of politics.
00:20:56.000Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you'll tell me some differences, but it's really the same playbook as we saw in Minnesota, where anyone who asked about the Somali daycare fraud.
00:21:08.000No, it's just like, I don't like people stealing taxpayer money.
00:21:12.000I mean, the people exposing the fraud ultimately get attacked.
00:21:17.000You know, what have you seen as it relates to that?
00:21:20.000You've seen probably the stuff, they're passing laws to prevent journalists like yourself or Nick Shirley from even being able to talk about any of this.
00:21:47.000Yeah, I mean, you have to keep pushing.
00:21:49.000And right to your point, when we exposed this scheme in California with the $40 million, the Kardashian mansion, the man who was in charge of this business is married to another man.
00:22:03.000And so when we reported out the story, a lawyer who said he was representing them accused us of homophobia.
00:22:10.000It's like, wait a minute, this has nothing to do with homophobia.
00:22:21.000Look, you can never let any of these things stop you.
00:22:23.000And in Governor Gavin Newsom's case, we requested some documents related to certain policies in his administration.
00:22:32.000And his lawyer sent us a letter saying, actually, no, the governor's communications, the governor's schedules, the governor's emails, the governor's deliberations are all exempt from public records requests for 50 years.
00:22:46.000And so they're going to be closed longer than the USSR Soviet archives.
00:22:51.000And so we have to keep fighting and we have to get people engaged with this because the alternative is very grim.
00:22:57.000You have Democrats that have an extremely corrupt system that are scraping money off of your paycheck to pay their own political actors and foreign fraud gangs.
00:23:45.000Again, they're going to limit the amount of exposure, certainly going into sort of the start of the next presidential cycle in a few weeks.
00:23:53.000Again, it's a very unpopular issue if people figure out this is going on.
00:23:58.000They're going to do whatever they can to protect it from ever coming out.
00:24:01.000What do you think happens with all of that?
00:24:05.000The mainstream media is not going to report about it.
00:24:06.000Guys like you and I will talk about it all the time.
00:24:10.000Does it get out there enough to be able to do the damage that it should do to these people who have allowed this stuff andor perpetuated it?
00:24:18.000And that especially will happen in this next presidential cycle when you're going to almost certainly have Gavin Newsom running.
00:24:24.000You may also have Kamala Harris running again.
00:24:27.000So there's going to be a focus on California.
00:24:29.000And that's one of the reasons why I've been focused on.
00:24:32.000Reporting about what's happening in the state.
00:24:34.000And the other issue I think is really important is migration.
00:24:37.000We reported exclusively that in his tenure as governor, Newsom spent more than a billion dollars in public funds facilitating the migrant invasion across the border in California.
00:24:50.000And so he was providing everything from logistics, transportation, legal representation, welfare services, even free solar panels for illegal aliens.
00:25:01.000I mean, it got so crazy that the California government was giving.0.54
00:25:04.000Free solar panels to illegal aliens.1.00
00:25:07.000I mean, it's like the it's so insane, but they were just flooding the state with these migrant populations.1.00
00:25:14.000And so, obviously, the border is sealed now, thank God.1.00
00:25:19.000But that issue is certainly not, you know, not resolved and it could reverse with the wrong president in office.
00:25:27.000And so, I think we have to really just get a detailed record of what are these people doing.
00:25:32.000Because, look, you know, someone like Newsom is very charismatic, he's a good speaker.
00:25:37.000He can lie through his teeth without any feeling of remorse.
00:25:42.000And so we have to nail them on what they've done because the actions should be indelible.
00:25:47.000They should be, you know, front and center for voters to consider as we go into this next cycle.
00:25:53.000So, Chris, you know, you went through the books on California's public sector unions 10 unions, over a billion dollars in dues in one year, 29 million spent on politics and lobbying, spending almost half a million dollars at luxury resorts.
00:26:09.000And now they want more taxes on top of it.
00:26:13.000Maybe the feedback loop here because all of it really does defy any level of common sense.
00:26:22.000Yeah, I mean, look, it's just the business logic.
00:26:25.000So, a public sector union is in the business of expanding the public sector workforce and harvesting tax money from taxpayers.
00:26:35.000And so, they want to have a bigger government, they want to have more taxes, they want to have greater dues as their numbers expand.
00:26:43.000And so, their interest is just to expand government at all turns.
00:26:47.000Look, in California, if you're in the professional class tax bracket, if you're a doctor or a lawyer or a small businessman, entrepreneur, you're likely spending a combined federal, state, and local tax rate of more than 53%.
00:27:02.000And so we already have maxed out Scandinavian-style tax revenues, and they're still searching for more money to take.
00:27:09.000And so what they propose now is a wealth tax, which is really an asset seizure tax, where anyone that has more than a billion dollars, whether it's liquid or whether it's in stocks or non-liquid investments, has to just give the government 5% of their net worth just off the top.
00:27:27.000And so this is, we're starting to get into this dangerous territory.
00:27:31.000And, you know, we scoured some of the documents from California legislative hearings, in particular their reparations task force.0.51
00:27:39.000And they're contemplating a South Africa-style seizure of land and wealth, targeting in particular white Californians, and then redistributing it in part along racial lines to so-called BIPOC, so black, indigenous, people of color.
00:27:55.000And so it's starting to look very ugly.
00:27:57.000And even though the wealth tax is targeted, at least in theory, towards tech elites, there is a real ideological agenda here.
00:28:06.000And what they want to see ultimately is a South Africa-style truth and reconciliation committee stripping the wealthy of their assets and sending it into their own hands.
00:28:17.000Yeah, and it's a shame because, you know, with that tax, that, you know, it's not like some of these guys are just sitting on, you know, billions of dollars, you know, in cash in their bank accounts.
00:28:25.000I mean, these are people, you know, pushing the, you know, innovation in tech.
00:28:30.000You know, they may have a multi billion dollar valuation on their company, but they may be living, you know, paycheck to paycheck.
00:28:37.000You strip out 5%, they got to pay tax.
00:28:39.000They got to sell part of their company to pay the tax.
00:28:41.000Like, think of what that does to innovation and growth.
00:28:44.000Now, I imagine they all move to Texas and they just leave California and then you got a bigger void to fill and that's going to really.
00:28:50.000Screw the people who do need some of these public services in California.
00:28:54.000But it's almost like the people writing these laws either don't care or don't even have a basic understanding of the nuance and difference for when you're an entrepreneur trying to grow things.
00:29:06.000Yeah, they don't know and they don't care.
00:29:08.000I mean, they just have this sense of resentment against people who have been, by all accounts, enormously successful building companies, building technologies, now developing artificial intelligence.
00:29:21.000And, you know, we saw it with Elon, where essentially legislators were just dumping on him for years and insulting him and attacking him and threatening him.
00:29:32.000And you have to think, you know, look, if you're a billionaire, it's actually pretty easy to move.
00:29:45.000You're not harnessing up your oxen and traveling across the plains.
00:29:49.000You can charter a jet to get the hell out of town.
00:29:52.000And in fact, one of my sources, a number of my sources, I was down in San Francisco talking to some people, and they said something around 70% of all California billionaires have either made an exit plan or will make an exit plan if this wealth tax passes.
00:30:06.000So look, if you're the governor of Texas or Idaho or Or Wyoming or Florida, you have a golden opportunity to bring some of these innovators into your state because there will come a point where they say, This is not worth being in California.
00:30:24.000I mean, as we mentioned, there's the guy who clearly wants to be president, Gavin Newsom.
00:30:29.000He claims transparency is a quote, legal and moral requirement.
00:30:35.000But his office is, again, auto deletes emails after 90 days.
00:30:40.000He vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have given citizens.
00:30:43.000A way to appeal when records are denied.
00:30:46.000And, you know, again, when you filed requests to his office, they admitted it had been documents that, you know, and basically refused to hand them over.
00:30:54.000You know, what more is he hiding behind the obvious of what we've just discussed?
00:31:01.000I mean, we have some stories that are in the works that could be devastating if we're able to substantiate what's happening.
00:31:09.000And look, Gavin Newsom has always had scandals all around him.
00:31:14.000Since his time as mayor of San Francisco to his time climbing the ranks to governor of California.
00:31:20.000And he's so far been able to outrun them.
00:31:23.000But I think the scrutiny and the spotlight of a presidential campaign is unlike anything Gavin Newsom has ever experienced.
00:31:32.000And I think a lot more information will start coming out about Gavin Newsom, about his public behavior, about some of the mafia like schemes that he's been running as governor.
00:31:45.000And the public should be aware of what's happening because, again, the California model is the model for democratic governance writ large.
00:31:53.000And really, what they want to do is they want to take California and then expand it to all 50 states.
00:31:58.000And I think as we gear up for this 2028 presidential run, that's going to be the idea.
00:32:05.000Is it the Texas and Florida model, or is it the New York and California model?
00:32:23.000You put sort of critical race theory insanity on the map in 2020.
00:32:28.000What's the scorecard in terms of tangible things that we've been able to root out after discovering what was going on?
00:32:34.000I mean, is DEI actually dead inside these institutions or did it just change its name and we don't have it as an official policy, but everyone gets the wink, wink, nod, nod?
00:32:45.000This is what we have to keep doing anyway.
00:32:47.000And if it is hiding, where is it hiding?
00:32:50.000Yeah, well, look, I mean, the second Trump administration has done heroic work to stamp out DEI in the federal government where it's basically gone, and then trying to stamp it out in every corporation, university, major school district around the country.
00:33:07.000And someone like Harmeet Dillon, who's running the Civil Rights Division for the Department of Justice, I think she's a superstar.
00:33:14.000She's done great work going after universities and Fortune 100 companies that are willfully violating the law as it relates to racial non-discrimination.
00:33:24.000And so I think more progress has been made in the past two years than in the past 60 years since the affirmative action system was set up.
00:33:34.000However, there are some organizations like tech companies have actually done a good job just eliminating many DEI programs.
00:33:42.000They're fast, they're nimble, they're not ideologically committed in the same way that you have, for example, a university might be ideologically committed.
00:33:50.000And so I think a lot of work has been done, but more work needs to be done because those organizations that are really fanatics about DEI, about anti-white discrimination, about punishing certain groups based on their race, their sex.
00:34:12.000They've changed the names of their departments.
00:34:14.000They've switched up their job descriptions.
00:34:17.000But a lot of that kind of seething hatred and discrimination is still driving the apparatus.
00:34:24.000And so I think, look, there's no permanent victories, there's no permanent defeats.
00:34:31.000So I think that right now we have good momentum, have to take it much further.
00:34:36.000So, Chris, what do you think the left's actual You know, operating ideology is in 2026, now that maybe you know the woke label is toxic, at least to an extent, probably not to them, but I think they realize it doesn't really play to the masses.
00:34:53.000And how does our side fight an enemy, you know, that basically just keeps changing the costumes, just like you know, all these protesters just change the t shirt, even if they don't really know why they're there?
00:35:03.000Yeah, yeah, it's like a revolving protest.
00:37:24.000I can guarantee you, for a very average government run grocery store, they will be far more expensive than the highest end Whole Foods ever created by a factor of 100.
00:37:35.000And the kickback schemes for all the people who are building them for them.
00:37:55.000And the other thing I would also say on top of that is they're shifting to an ideology called third worldism, which is this idea that the true conflict between the oppressor and the oppressed is between the white colonialist imperialist class and then the kind of brown and black third world oppressed class that needs to rise up to overthrow their oppressors.0.63
00:38:21.000And so it's slightly different than critical race theory, which was really rooted in the history of.
00:38:26.000American slavery and white black relations.
00:38:30.000And so you've seen the aperture widen.0.61
00:38:32.000And the reason why you're seeing such interest in someone like Mom Dhani, someone like El Said in Michigan, is because they represent this new third worldist ideology and third worldist identity that can kind of shift away from that tired and destroyed and discredited BLM narrative and try to present itself as something new.0.53
00:38:53.000Yeah, except it feels like everywhere else where they've tried importing the third world, you end up being.0.71
00:38:58.000Being or becoming the third world.1.00
00:38:59.000So I don't know why anyone would actually want that, but I guess I don't know why they'd want any of these things, and yet they keep trying.1.00
00:39:07.000You know, I've traveled a lot in the third world over the last, you know, 25 years.
00:39:13.000And look, there's some beautiful places and beautiful historical sites and many virtues of these places.
00:39:22.000But I think most Americans don't really understand that all cultures are not the same.
00:39:28.000And in fact, some cultures are more compatible with ours than others.
00:39:31.000Some cultures have produced more productive and capable citizens than others.0.98
00:39:38.000And so we have to be very careful in figuring out who we want to allow entry into our country.0.99
00:39:46.000And we have to be very realistic about what it's like in third world countries like Haiti, like parts of Sub Saharan Africa, parts of Central America, even.
00:39:58.000And I think Americans have this kind of romantic notion that.
00:40:03.000Humans are essentially stamped from birth as equal in every way, in every capacity, in every part of cultural imagination.
00:40:16.000And I think we're starting to see some adverse consequences.
00:40:20.000Without question, I mean, I've seen people sort of refer to it.
00:40:23.000I sort of like the line of suicidal empathy.
00:40:25.000We want to be so nice, but we'll do that at the destruction of our own society, at the expense of our own children, their safety, their well being.
00:40:35.000And if we look at other places who've had the same sort of suicidal empath, namely much of Europe and the way that they've sort of opened up their migratory corridors to places that, let's just say, yeah, all cultures aren't created equal, it's not worked out well for anyone thus far.
00:40:52.000And the notion that, like communism, well, it'll work over here, it'll just be different.
00:40:58.000Then you see rape statistics go through the roof, crime statistics go through the roof, the amount of people fully dependent on government aid and welfare in perpetuity.
00:41:07.000You know, it's scary, but I guess for Democrats and the people who are encouraging these kind of policies, it's like, well, listen, if they're fully dependent, they're going to vote Democrat because that's all we have to offer.
00:41:18.000And your point about suicidal empathy reminds me of a story that we reported a couple of months ago in California.
00:41:25.000And the Newsom administration had given a grant to a nonprofit that specialized in bringing undocumented migrants with AIDS across the border from Mexico into the United States.
00:41:50.000And you look at the documents and you're like, wait a minute.
00:41:52.000No, this can't actually mean what it looks like it means.
00:41:56.000And then you read all the reports, you read the grant write-ups, you read the interviews with the organizers of these NGOs, and you realize, actually, yes, the left is so committed to this victim ideology that they want to bring in undocumented migrants with AIDS and provide them with wraparound services, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in benefits.
00:42:20.000And you have to say this is not practical, this is not prudence, this is not any kind of calculation, except that it serves a deep ideological need.
00:42:29.000And I think conservatives on our side make a mistake, assuming that everyone's thinking on politics operates on a shared or common sense of how the world should be and how practical, in a practical sense, we should approach these issues.
00:42:45.000You have to realize, no, a lot of these people are totally out of their minds.
00:42:59.000So I'm curious about sort of the broader downstream cultural impacts and how it affects our institutions.
00:43:06.000For example, look at the Lindsey Clancy case.
00:43:09.000I mean, you've spent years writing about a culture where every act gets a diagnosis and a personal responsibility just totally goes out the window.
00:43:25.000You know, 10 days since the Clancy verdict, but it's like, wow, you know, I figured there were one or two people that were just insane and saying, hey, you know, okay.
00:43:33.000But you see a lot of people out there.
00:43:37.000Like, of course, like a mother can just slaughter her children because her hormones were a little bit off.
00:43:41.000I was like, I have a feeling if I got on TRT right now and I murdered my children or if I murdered anyone or if I did anything, I'd be in jail forever.
00:43:50.000And they just want someone to walk free.
00:43:55.000Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this and, and, Here's what I think is happening.
00:44:00.000We've had decades and decades of abortion on demand in the United States.
00:44:05.000Democrats in places like Virginia and California have either proposed or enacted abortion up to 40 weeks, essentially up to the moment of birth.
00:44:16.000And this is that logic taken to its conclusion.
00:44:20.000If it's okay to murder your child at 40 weeks as the child is exiting the womb, Maybe it's also okay to murder the child if that child is causing you the same kind of discomfort or encroaching on your lifestyle when that child is three or four or seven.
00:44:39.000Yeah, well, there was a professor at Princeton, I believe, that wrote a paper that basically said you should be able to murder your kids up to the age of six or seven.
00:44:48.000Like, this isn't, you know, I mean, I guess it's a radical place in terms of all of academia is fairly radical, but like, you know, this is a top institution in the world.
00:44:55.000And yet you have someone that not only can have the thought, But, like, actually write it down.
00:45:11.000And I think this kind of fantasy world that these women are inhabiting on social media, the women who are showing up to kind of cheer for Lindsey Clancy as she's coming to the courthouse, look, it's something very dark.
00:45:24.000And, you know, as far back as Greek and Roman myths, you have these characters, these women in these mythologies where they kill their own children, you know, infanticide.
00:45:33.000It's a brutal, horrific, primal experience that is, it kind of touches something deep in our subconscious.
00:45:41.000And I think what's different is that that.
00:45:44.000Classical audience would recoil in horror because it was such a moral transgression.
00:45:49.000And now we have people who are addled on social media that are actually celebrating it openly, rationalizing it, making excuses for it.
00:45:58.000And so I think we've reached a cultural point where things have degraded to such an extent that we have people celebrating the worst transgressions.
00:48:07.000And then the children become expendable.
00:48:09.000And so we're taking all of these cultural threads that have been insinuating themselves in our society for many decades.
00:48:17.000And they all kind of are woven together in a very Tight way with this Lindsey Clancy story.
00:48:23.000And look, I think this is why she's sparked sympathy.
00:48:28.000But I think a lot of it is denial because a lot of the women that were marching for her or whatnot, you know, they blame the husband, you know, even though Clancy admitted to doing it.
00:48:37.000They're like, no, you sent him out like with a purpose.
00:48:39.000I mean, you know, that's why it doesn't seem like, you know, this was a moment of passion and insanity.
00:49:17.000And then conservatives, I think, have to also, you know, more broadly, politically and sociologically, we have to explain to people that life is about trade offs.
00:49:27.000No matter how rich you are, no matter how, you know, intelligent or less, it's like no matter how privileged you are in life.
00:50:19.000There is a double standard that seems to give these women a lot less accountability that if it was you or me or anyone else that wasn't female would face.1.00
00:50:53.000If a man, you have news stories where a man kills his kids or a murder suicide, and you feel horror, you feel shock, you feel anger, you want vengeance.
00:51:06.000I think in the Clancy case, at least as I react to it, it's a slightly different thing.
00:51:11.000It's a mother who, obviously, you know, Had some kind of brutal psychological possession, you know, psychological problem, psychological crisis.
00:52:28.000If you had to pick one fight for conservatives to go all in on between now and November, what is it and what's most effective?
00:52:39.000Yeah, I mean, I think you've got to counter some of these left wing narratives that are coming down the pipe.
00:52:45.000And then I think, look, I think the administration, conservatives more broadly, need to also make a The case for all of the good things that have happened as the result of the first two years of this administration.
00:52:58.000There was a study that came out recently that almost 3 million undocumented have returned to their country of origin in the last two years.
00:53:07.000So you have an immigration picture that is, I think, very favorable.
00:53:12.000It's showing that there's progress being made.
00:53:14.000You have rents declining in certain key cities as the population shifts and new housing is being built.
00:53:23.000You have a booming economy with great jobs numbers, a lot of investment, and blue collar employees, blue collar workers.
00:53:32.000Having the best wage gains of any group in the economy.
00:53:36.000And so there's a lot of good news, and I'm afraid that a lot of it isn't quite punching through to voters who still feel some anxiety about prices, about inflation, about housing and healthcare.
00:53:48.000And I think if the debate is going to be about those issues, we have better answers, but we have to make better arguments.
00:53:57.000And that's something that I think can happen in this cycle, certainly in the next cycle, it's still going to be a live issue.
00:55:29.000It's not easy to support a show like this.
00:55:31.000If you have a need for a product and you're comparing between two, maybe the guys that, I don't know, support this show are people who share your values.