This week on Verdict: Kamala Harris tries to steal intellectual property from Donald Trump, the media continues to smear Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and more terror on the border with a new terror threat from a Palestinian bomb maker.
00:02:30.640And he said there was a waitress who came up who complained about the really oppressive enforcement from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris of their efforts to tax tips and how it was really burdensome.
00:02:44.100And the record-keeping, and it was really hard, and Trump says at dinner, pulled out a piece of paper and just wrote down, no taxes on tips.
00:02:51.880And then he said he went to the rally, and he just said it, and he said, and they went wild.
00:02:59.300I got to say, there are moments, I think, of political genius, and I think that was one of them.
00:03:06.720So the next week, I introduced legislation in the Senate to exempt tips from taxes because I heard that idea, and it's exactly right.
00:03:17.100And the reason I introduced legislation, there are a lot of reasons, but one right at the heart is for over a decade, for as long as I've been in the Senate,
00:03:24.880I have been advocating that the Republican Party, we should be a blue-collar party.
00:03:29.640We should be the party of waiters and waitresses.
00:03:33.840We should be the party of hairdressers and nail salon workers and taxicab drivers and everyone who has calluses on their hands because they're working hard.
00:03:46.360And as a policy, the contrast is night and day.
00:05:28.800That I could respect, but she doesn't acknowledge it.
00:05:31.280And the irony is she also doesn't acknowledge what prompted it, which is that her administration, the Biden-Harris administration, she was the tie-breaking vote on the legislation that provided millions for the IRS to go after waiters and waitresses.
00:05:54.020And everyone who's making tips and to enforce it vigorously and to hammer on them, and yet she doesn't acknowledge any of that.
00:06:13.960Know when the media is going to tell you this.
00:06:15.960In February, because what you just said, it's not something 10 years ago and then she had a change of heart.
00:06:20.800Okay, it's not like it was a policy 10 years ago and there was some negative effects came out of it that you didn't realize.
00:06:25.500And then you're like, hey, look, that was a long time ago, a decade ago.
00:06:28.520In February of 2023, it came to light that Biden's IRS planned to crack down on the service industry's reporting on tips.
00:06:38.820The service industry tip compliance agreement program was to be a voluntary tip reporting system in which the IRS and the service industry companies cooperated.
00:06:50.800Which is where they would crack down on the actual workers.
00:06:54.140The program was meant to, quote, improve tip reporting compliance, reduce administrative burdens, and provide more transparency and certainty to taxpayers.
00:07:05.360Again, going after the little guy here.
00:07:08.100And the program feature included, quote, monitoring of employer compliance based on actual annual tip revenue.
00:07:17.000So big brother watching you and charge tip data from an employer's point of sale system.
00:07:23.640So now the computer's tracking you and allowance for adjustments in tipping practices from year to year to protect the employer from getting in trouble by turning in, in essence, their employees.
00:07:38.380And now she's out there saying, I want you to not have to pay taxes on your tips.
00:07:43.220When, again, 2023 February wasn't that long ago.
00:07:47.760Yeah, and look, this is a standard practice and pattern of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, siding with the big guy, siding with giant corporations, whether it's big tech or giant corporations, against the little guy.
00:08:00.340You know, there was an interesting story, the same lunch where Trump was telling us the back story of this proposal.
00:08:07.600The day before the lunch, Trump and Lindsey Graham had played golf.
00:08:12.320And Lindsey told everyone, he said, look, the two of us were playing golf and they're both big golfers.
00:08:16.760And, you know, look, your son is one of the best golfers in the world.
00:08:19.500But Lindsey described how midway through the golf game, he said their two caddies came up and hugged Donald Trump because he had just made the proposal of no taxes on tips.
00:08:33.140And listen, golf caddies like barbers, like bartenders, there are all sorts of professions where a big chunk of their revenue and many of them are just barely making ends meet.
00:08:43.500They're just starting to climb the economic ladder and they literally came and hugged him for that proposal.
00:08:50.020And so Kamala Harris is now trying to pretend, look, I'm glad she's supporting my legislation.
00:10:34.060I just wonder, like mile three, is he sitting there thinking about that's the same Congresswoman that said that the terrorists that attacked us on 9-11 were some people that did some things?
00:10:43.120Look, Ilhan Omar is a Congresswoman and that's something that just brightens you up.
00:11:16.200When we all sing happy tunes and sing Merry Christmas and wish each other Merry Christmas, these children are not going to have a Merry Christmas.
00:12:55.480We've seen this happen now multiple times over the last couple of weeks.
00:12:59.280We saw them say that J.D. Vance is weird, right?
00:13:02.800And everybody, we played that montage of the media saying it over and over again, every outlet.
00:13:07.560Then we had this, the same montage with Kamala Harris's campaign, except it was positive news for her that she's surging, surging, surging.
00:13:15.620Everybody used that word over the weekend.
00:13:17.920Clearly, it's coming, I think, from the Harris campaign.
00:13:20.240And now you have the same headlines written 50 different ways this Sunday with this conversation between Trump and Musk that wasn't true and a lie.
00:13:31.340How is this not an in-kind donation, the Harris campaign?
00:14:26.260I want to play one exchange that was kind of classic.
00:14:32.060Well, there were a lot of exchanges that were classic Donald Trump, but this one really stuck out to us.
00:14:38.360And Nagasaki were bombed, but now they're like full cities again.
00:14:42.060So it's really not something that, you know, it's not scary as people think, basically.
00:14:48.400So that was more Elon Musk than Donald Trump talking about, sort of suggesting that what happened almost 80 years ago, I think 80 years ago next year, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, now it's okay.
00:15:05.160Kind of trying to blow off the impact of that.
00:15:12.160Number one, let's start with CNN's perspective that apparently they think America winning World War II was a bad thing.
00:15:21.740And that our bombing, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they're not crediting that that saved an enormous number of lives.
00:15:29.520And the World War II would have gone on for much, much longer without those bombs.
00:15:33.680CNN takes it as a given that America was in the wrong and that is horrible.
00:15:38.360But that being said, look, if you didn't listen to the Elon Musk Trump interview, if you just heard that little segment, if all you get your news from is CNN, I understand you're being a little startled going, huh, that's weird.
00:15:51.240Trump is like going out of his way to say, hey, no big deal that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked.
00:16:40.040And it's actually, you know, people have this fear of nuclear, nuclear electricity generation.
00:16:46.380But it's actually one of the safest forms of electricity generation.
00:16:50.580It's it's just a huge misunderstanding.
00:16:53.580And if you look at the injuries and deaths, you know, caused by, say, I mean, I'm not going to try to pick on a coal mining, but just any kind of mining operation.
00:17:00.920And there's a certain number of injuries and deaths per year.
00:17:35.000You know, when you see what happened, when you see what happened in Japan, where they say you won't be able to go on the land for about 3000 years.
00:18:01.440So like after Fukushima happened in Japan, like people were asking me in California, you know, are we worried about like a nuclear cloud coming from Japan?
00:18:32.040You know, it's it's like, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed.
00:18:37.380But now they're they're like full cities again.
00:18:39.400So it's really not that's something that, you know, it's not it's not as scary as people think, basically, but not even close to how CNN presented their conversation and clearly edited to make it seem like that Elon Musk and Donald Trump were basically insane.
00:18:59.240When if you put the conversation in context, the way that we just played it right on edited, you know, now seen and just straight up lied to you.
00:19:08.320They said, hey, find something in there and we'll just make crap up and tell everybody that this guy's unhinged.
00:19:15.160By the way, he wasn't slurring his words there.
00:19:16.860I think everybody heard Donald Trump and he sounded just like Donald Trump always sounds.
00:19:21.640Well, and the whole conversation was about nuclear power.
00:19:24.980And the point they were saying is that nuclear power is very reliable.
00:19:29.240That it that it is safe, that that you have fewer fatalities, fewer accidents than other sources of power generation.
00:19:36.860That if you care about the environment, nuclear power has by far the least emissions, the least carbon emissions, the least pollution.
00:19:45.040And and and that point is is absolutely right.
00:19:48.300And the left and it's one of the points, you know, the the radical left, the climate alarmist, they talk about carbon emissions.
00:19:54.840But then they're rabidly anti nuclear because they give in to alarmist fear.
00:20:00.600And in that point, Elon Musk was making the context that even when you have cities, he said, first of all, Fukushima, where they had a nuclear accident in Japan.
00:20:09.760Yes, it was an unfortunate accident, but the fallout has not been that severe.
00:20:14.520They also were talking about Chernobyl and in in Russia.
00:20:18.740But but the point he made about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is even there.
00:20:23.960There are now people living and it's come through.
00:20:25.740He's obviously not advocating for nuking cities.
00:20:29.280He's saying that the risks of nuclear power generation are overstated by alarmists.
00:20:37.120Now, CNN knows that they listen to the same interview you and I listen to, but they are being deliberately dishonest when they cut out that little tiny snippet.
00:20:47.760And notice they only played what, like 15, 20 seconds of it.
00:20:50.840They cut out that tiny snippet with the deliberate purpose of creating a false and misleading impression because they're not engaged in news.
00:21:00.680They are propagandists. And it's the same thing the Kamala Harris campaign would have done because CNN, like the rest of the corporate media, is effectively the communication arm of the Kamala Harris campaign.
00:21:13.720Senator, finally, let me ask you, and if you put all of this show into context, especially if you look at what they're having to do to lie about this conversation with Musk and Trump.
00:21:25.200Is this just what we can expect from now until eternity with the media when they lose control?
00:21:31.840They have a meltdown. They lie to you about whether it's J.D. Vance or they lie to you about Kamala Harris and what she actually does at the border and she's not the border czar.
00:21:40.880Or they lie about President Trump slurring his words and saying, hey, that worked with Joe Biden, getting him out of the race.
00:21:46.320Maybe we can attack Donald Trump the same way.
00:21:48.960Is this the reality of the world we now live in?
00:21:52.080So I don't think it is. And we are seeing in America and across the world massive disintermediation.
00:22:01.060The mediators, the middlemen, are being removed from the transmission of ideas.
00:22:06.320We saw that powerfully this week with Elon Musk and Donald Trump going directly to a billion people on X without the reporters being able to block it.
00:22:15.340But we see that on this podcast. Listen, why do you and I do the podcast often at 11 o'clock at night or midnight or even one or two in the morning?
00:22:27.860We do it because if your only source of news is the corporate media, if you only watch CNN or MSNBC or ABC, NBC, CBS, you do not know what is happening.
00:22:38.540They are lying to you. And the reason this podcast, we've got roughly a million unique listeners, is because people find it valuable.
00:22:47.160We give you facts that CNN will never air.
00:22:52.020We play the full segment of what Elon and Trump said about Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead of their dishonestly edited snippet that was designed to mislead you and lie to you.
00:23:05.540And this podcast goes right around the corporate media.
00:23:09.820And in fact, just about every podcast we put out drives stories in the corporate media.
00:23:15.860That is going to accelerate. People are going to podcast. People are going to social media. People are going to X.
00:23:23.460Elon's buying Twitter remains, I think, the single most important step for free speech in decades.
00:23:30.840And I think that's only going to accelerate. And you're going to see a panic as the corporate media.
00:23:37.260They want a monopoly on what we know, what we hear, what we understand.
00:23:41.840And they're losing their monopoly. So I so I predict more and more frantic panic, but also more and more power to the people, which is a very good thing.
00:23:52.080As before, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation on this topic, you can go back and download the podcast from early this week to hear the entire thing.
00:24:01.040Canadian women are looking for more, more out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders and the world around them.
00:24:08.220And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.
00:24:13.120And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.
00:24:23.840So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
00:24:26.840Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:24:32.760I want to get back to the big story number three of the week you may have missed.
00:24:37.100I want to switch to another topic, Senator, we mentioned earlier.
00:24:40.620And this is another cautionary tell, a warning.
00:24:45.840And the border czar doesn't seem to give a crap.
00:24:49.260A Palestinian on the terror watch list was arrested on the southern U.S. border.
00:24:57.780It's an individual named Omar Shahida, who is accused of explosives and arms use and was caught in Santa Teresa, New Mexico.
00:25:07.860Omar Shahida is a Palestinian from Judea and Samaria.
00:25:11.440And he is on the terror watch list for alleged prior use of explosives and arms.
00:25:17.800He was arrested, the New York Post reported.
00:25:21.800And let me read from the memo that has been leaked showing the arrest notification of the suspected Palestinian terrorist.
00:25:28.800The arrest notification says on August 12th, 2024, Border Patrol agents assigned to the Santa Teresa Border Patrol Station encountered a person with a terror screening data sent record.
00:25:40.800At approximately 1.10 a.m., agents apprehended a group of seven individuals who illegally entered the United States from Mexico near Santa Teresa, New Mexico.
00:25:51.140During processing, research revealed that Omar Nawaf Issa Shahida was a possible match to a terror watch list record.
00:26:01.000Border Patrol agents at the National Targeting Center generated an NTC event.
00:26:05.160Shahida was confirmed to be a positive match and is watch listed as a Category 15 used explosives slash arms.
00:26:18.660Global APIS revealed that Shahida traveled from Madrid, Spain to Bogota, Colombia on a flight with a connecting flight to Panama City.
00:26:30.860And that Shahida arrived in San Salvador, El Salvador, on a flight.
00:26:46.880Weeks earlier, three other suspected Palestinian terrorists were caught at the California border.
00:26:52.900Those and we talked about that, those three on this podcast previously.
00:26:56.340One of them had a photo on their phone, including pictures of a masked man holding an AK-47 rifle.
00:27:04.660Kamala Harris, the border czar, is responsible for an open border that continues to be a magnet inviting terrorists to come into this country.
00:27:14.300And, and, and, and in fact, an alert that was issued by the Border Patrol said, quote,
00:27:22.900Individuals inspired by or reacting to the current Israel-Hamas conflict may attempt to travel to or from the area of hostilities in the Middle East via circuitous transit across the southwest border.
00:27:38.680This is what Kamala Harris's open border is doing to us.
00:27:41.800You, you, you look at this and you put it together with the fact that they say she's not the border czar.
00:27:50.340And then she says, oh, I'm doing everything I can to protect you at the border.
00:27:58.020It's just lie after lie after lie after lie.
00:28:01.500And, and you look at these, these gang leaders that are arrested.
00:28:05.100You look at the, the children that are being assaulted.
00:28:07.520Unfortunately, now it's on a weekly basis.
00:28:09.360We also know, and I think we should just remind people that the system is so broken now that the administration has just been busted handing kids over to non-family members.
00:28:21.460Okay, non-family members at lost track within a month, a third of the kids are hand over to their quote sponsors who are non-family members with no response and no follow up from the federal government.
00:28:35.100So in other words, they hand a child over to a non-family member.
00:29:05.540He doesn't know anything about health care.
00:29:07.480But what he is, is a radical left-wing lawyer who was the Attorney General of California.
00:29:11.640And that's who Joe Biden and Kamala Harris wanted in charge of HHS.
00:29:15.580And HHS is the one that, that, that deals with, with unaccompanied minors.
00:29:21.260And we've seen an explosion of unaccompanied minors coming into this country because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris opened up the border.
00:29:27.420And it ended up with a lot of little boys and a lot of little girls being trafficked in by human traffickers, being abused, many of them physically, many of them sexually.
00:29:35.460But then when they get here, the Biden administration had a problem.
00:29:42.300And they had a problem because they wanted to avoid kids in cages.
00:29:47.420They had made a huge deal of it under Donald Trump.
00:29:50.140Never mind that, that, that the, the actual cages were, were built by Barack Obama.
00:29:55.980But they wanted to avoid the bad optics of having kids in cages under, under Joe Biden.
00:30:02.540So what they did is they began releasing young people and releasing them to adults who, who couldn't pass basic background checks.
00:30:15.020And when people in the system said, wait, we don't know who these adults are.
00:30:30.860And so let me read from the Wall Street Journal.
00:30:32.540This is an article on July 8th in the Wall Street Journal.
00:30:35.840In 2021, when the new Biden administration was struggling to cope with a sudden influx of unaccompanied migrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border,
00:30:42.620the government repeatedly overrode the concerns of lower level workers who warned about placing them in certain households.
00:30:50.600Documents and interviews show, quote, it does not appear safe for the minor to be released to a home environment that was not fully assessed.
00:30:57.980A caseworker wrote about a child slated to live in a hostile like home in Florida with at least three adults.
00:31:05.660A few days later, an official dismissed the recommendation to reject the proposed guardian.
00:31:10.860According to internal government memos at another facility in Pomona, California, about 30 miles east of Los Angeles,
00:31:18.660more than 100 children that summer were sent to temporary guardians who were issued denials early in the process by case coordinators,
00:31:29.240according to a review of internal government data that tracks unaccompanied children, emails and other communications and interviews with caseworkers.
00:31:36.700About two dozen more denials were overturned because of clerical errors or issues such as missing fingerprints that were resolved, records show.
00:31:46.660But many of the others were approved with scant details explaining why.
00:31:53.160And stunningly, the Wall Street Journal couldn't determine what happened to the children after they left the facility.
00:32:02.060Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have lost over 80,000 children that came as unaccompanied minors to this country.
00:32:12.420They don't know where they are. They don't know who has them.
00:32:14.560They don't know what has happened to the kids.
00:32:17.300And you know what? Kamala Harris has zero interest in finding the answer to that.
00:32:22.540She will never talk about it. Mind you, she was the border czar.
00:32:25.400She still is. And yet losing 80,000 children apparently doesn't concern her at all.
00:32:32.420Yeah. And there's doesn't seem to be accountability for this either.
00:32:35.520Is there anything that Congress can do now knowing what we just learned in that report?
00:32:41.300There's a lot Congress can do. But in the Senate, the Senate will do none of it.
00:32:45.840And the reason is the Democrats who are in the majority of the Senate do not care.
00:32:50.540I've raised this issue repeatedly in the Judiciary Committee.
00:32:53.180You know what? Democrats in charge of Judiciary, we have not had a single hearing in four years on the crisis at our southern border.
00:33:01.440We've had multiple hearings on the Democrats' desire to grant amnesty to illegal aliens.
00:33:06.340We have not had a hearing in Judiciary on the 80,000 kids that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris has lost because the Democrats want to cover it up.
00:33:15.700And listen, we know that some significant number of those individuals are in child labor work sites, are being abused, are being physically abused, are being sexually abused.
00:33:29.960If you look, for example, I'm going to go back to the Wall Street Journal article that says,
00:33:36.520following an internal investigation, the inspector general for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
00:33:41.220which oversaw a network of shelters caring for unaccompanied minors, found gaps in the process to screen temporary guardians.
00:33:48.600It's it's it's said in February that 16 percent, 16 percent of records for children who were released to sponsors in March and April 2021 lacked evidence that a required safety check was conducted.
00:34:02.680Quote, although well-intentioned, these sites were unregulated and unsafe, said Neha Desai, the senior director of immigration at the National Center for Youth Law.
00:34:14.680There was enormous pressure placed on the sites to rapidly release children from custody.
00:34:20.620And the Biden-Harris administration pressed them to release at these emergency shelters.
00:34:26.600Caseworkers were told to discharge children within 10 to 14 days.
00:34:32.680And so they released kids without knowing if the people they were giving them to were dangerous, without knowing what was happening.
00:34:40.880And yet, tragically, the result is many kids suffered horrific mistreatment.
00:34:49.680As always, thank you for listening to Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you.
00:34:54.860Don't forget to download my podcast and you can listen to my podcast every other day.
00:34:58.520You're not listening to Verdict or each day when you listen to Verdict afterwards.
00:35:01.480I'd love to have you as a listener to, again, the Ben Ferguson podcast.
00:35:05.400And we will see you back here on Monday morning.