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Oct. 5, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:41
Who Wants To Be Speaker of the House?
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Okay, just one second.
We're going to get into the latest on the now open speakers race.
A race that is open for no reason I can actually perceive.
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Okay, so, The House race to replace the Speaker is on.
Again, the recriminations have only begun at this point, because the fact of the matter is, this was a stupid fight that achieves nothing.
It's all about incentive structures.
As I suggested yesterday on the show, it is not about Kevin McCarthy being a bad Speaker of the House.
The truth is, it wasn't even about Paul Ryan being a bad Speaker of the House.
You can make a better case that it was Boehner being a bad Speaker of the House, but the reality is that in all of these situations, these folks have been ousted Largely because of divided government and then unrealistic expectations from other members of the political caucus who either have unrealistic expectations or who are fibbing to their own crowd.
See, for politicians, the incentive structure is always to tell your own people the things they want to hear.
And what your people want to hear is if they vote for you, they will get the sun, the moon, and the stars.
If they vote for you, you will be able to give them everything they possibly have
wanted.
And then when that doesn't materialize, you have a couple of choices.
One is you could be honest with them.
You could say, listen, we did the best that we could.
We got the most that we can.
The problem there is that you're going to be outflanked by someone else
who's going to come along and promise them the sun, the moon, and the stars.
So you can either rely on the intelligence of your voting base, which you could do.
And I think the most honest and best politicians do do that.
They say, listen, we were shooting for 100% and instead we got 80%.
We got 60%.
That's all we could get because that's the reality of life.
But it does put you in the political danger of being outflanked by someone who's going to promise you everything in the world.
And the way that you were able to keep members in line, to keep them from doing this sort of stuff originally was that the party structures were pretty significant, meaning that they could deny you money, that if you cross the party, the party could punish you in some way.
Well, as the parties have become significantly less important in American political life, And by that, I mean the parties exert virtually no pull over their members anymore.
That is certainly true in the Republican Party.
It's less true in the Democratic Party, where AOC will follow Nancy Pelosi, not because she loves Nancy Pelosi, but because Nancy Pelosi has the power to punish her, or did until very recently.
Well, in the Republican Party, there's no power to punish.
In fact, it's precisely the other way around.
In order for Speaker McCarthy to have become Speaker of the House, he had to make promises to a very small coterie of members of his own caucus, like the vast minority of his own caucus, that a single person could initiate A vote to take down the Speaker.
He had to do that in order to get the Speakership position.
Well, that put him in an inherently weak position.
So here is the problem.
Now when people say, oh, we'll replace McCarthy with someone better.
Fine.
Let's say that you get Jim Jordan.
I love Jim Jordan.
Jim Jordan's great.
Representative from Ohio.
He's on the House Oversight Committee.
He's a real bulldog.
I know him personally.
He's great.
Or let's say you get Steve Scalise.
Steve's terrific.
I really like Steve a lot.
Let's say you get either one of those guys as Speaker of the House.
If the same rules apply to them that apply to Kevin McCarthy, it will not matter if they are, quote unquote, better than Kevin McCarthy.
Because in the end, let's say it comes down to another continuing resolution.
And you are one of these members of Congress who is not beholden to your party, but who does make hay by fibbing to your constituents that the sun, the moon, and the stars are possible.
Well, you can just do the same thing to Jim Jordan.
You call him a rhino.
You say, wait, wait, you weren't willing to shut down the government over spending?
That's because you are insufficiently conservative.
You, you must be ousted.
So the only way this gets better, ironically, is for Matt Gaetz to have all of his power taken away by the new Republican majority speaker.
That's the only way this works.
The only way this gets better is Jim Jordan, in making the deal to become speaker, basically reneges on all the things that Kevin McCarthy promised, including the ability of people to challenge his speakership with one vote.
Because otherwise, this is just going to keep happening.
All it takes is one.
All it takes is like five, because the House majority for the Republicans is so damn slim.
By the way, one of the reasons that it's so unbelievably slim as opposed to what it was supposed to be after the last election cycle, which was, you know, a 30-seat House majority for the Republicans.
The reason for that is because Donald Trump backed a bunch of really bad candidates in purple districts and they lost.
That is the reason.
In fact, moderate Republicans won in New York if they were good candidates.
Florida, they did really well.
A lot of other places in the country, they lost very tight races.
In large part because they were very, very Trumpy.
And they offended a lot of those swing voters for the same reason that Republicans did not win Senate seats in, say, Arizona, or in Georgia, or in Pennsylvania.
So, the problem is systemic, is the point that I'm making.
And so to pretend that this is a principled act by Matt Gaetz and company to oust McCarthy, and that if we get someone better in there, that's going to fix all our problems.
Now we'll get spending under control.
Not true.
It's not true.
And if you believe that, then you're just going to keep getting suckered.
There's a point made by Representative Claudia Tenney.
She is a representative from New York.
And again, she's from New York, which means she's vulnerable.
Now, you may say, well, she's a rhino.
How could she not want to lower spending?
She does want to lower spending.
She's also from New York.
And here's the thing.
You want a national majority, or do you prefer Hakeem Jeffries to be Speaker of the House?
If you would like the Republicans to be in charge of Congress, you need people like Claudia Tenney in Congress.
She's in a swing district.
Here's Claudia Tenney.
We wouldn't have subpoenaed the documents.
We wouldn't have had Jason Smith as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee who opened a whistleblower portal.
We would never have known what these whistleblowers brought forth under duress, under threat of their jobs.
We would not know any of these things.
None of this would have McCarthy hadn't been speaker.
And it's not about Kevin McCarthy.
These people are going to hold hostage whoever the next speaker is.
And that is right.
That is right.
So I would hope that whether it's Jim Jordan or Steve Scalise, whoever becomes the next Speaker of the House, the dictate is, I need, I'm not going to even allow a motion to hit the floor unless a majority of the Republican caucus wants it.
I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to have a motion to get rid of me as Speaker unless there's a large contingent, even if it's not a majority, a significant minority, that doesn't want me to be here.
I'm not going to do it for one vote.
I'm not going to do it for four votes.
And that, by the way, should be the same thing offered by every Speaker of the House candidate.
Now, the problem is you have a collective action problem there.
So let's say Steve Scalise and Jordan decide that they are going to say, listen, neither of us is going to take the Speakership position unless we claw back some of the powers that McCarthy gave to Gaetz and Crewe.
Well, all it's going to take at that point is for someone to swing in from the right and say, no, I'll give you whatever you want.
I'll give you whatever you want.
And all it takes, again, is for Gates and crew to say, well, they are going to give us more power, so we'll go with them.
The incentive systems here are completely misaligned.
Even RNC chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, who I think has done overall a pretty horrific job.
And the reason I say that is because when you lose consistently election after election, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022, I don't know how you maintain your job, but apparently this is the new way Republicans do things.
The more you lose, the more we are loyal to you or something.
In any case, here's Ronna Romney McDaniel talking about all of this.
You blame Matt Gaetz and the rebels on the conservative side?
Should they have not taken this step in their frustration?
I'm going to be a happy warrior like Kevin McCarthy and I'm going to say, let's just get the business of the American people done.
Let's get this speaker vote done.
Let's make sure we don't have this motion to vacate so we don't have chaos again.
We can't do this next year.
We cannot do this and win.
If this happens again, we are jeopardizing a very small house majority.
Okay, and she's right about that.
But the problem is all of these incentives have now been created.
You're better off being the free radical than you are being the person who actually cares about the party achieving victories.
And whether or not you like it, this was a pattern set by Donald Trump in 2016.
He ran directly against the Republican Party.
I understand there are a lot of people who are very upset with the quote-unquote establishment Republican Party.
I'm upset with them too.
I think they spent too much money.
I think they caved on social issues.
I think a lot of their foreign policy is bad.
However, this notion that you can simply buck the entire system and that this somehow benefits the entire system, I have yet to see that bear real results.
What are the real results of that?
Where are they, by the way?
I'd like to see them.
Victory is promised, so let's see some victories achieved.
In a second, we'll get to the democratic part in all of this, plus the blowback first.
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OK, so McCarthy pointed out yesterday as he was leaving that Democrats had pledged that they would basically bail him out with the with the Matt Gaetz crew if they brought this votion to replace the speaker.
He mentioned this yesterday.
After we had won the majority, I had became speaker last and Nancy Pelosi came to me.
She was speaker at the time on the way out.
I told her I was having issues with getting enough votes.
She said, what's the problem?
I said, they want this one person who can rule you out.
She was the only speaker to have changed that rule.
I had the power to call the vote on her, but I never would.
I lost some votes because of it.
And she said, just give it to them.
I'll always back you up.
I made the same offer to Boehner, and same thing to Paul, because I believe in the institution.
I think today, Was a political decision by the Democrats.
I think the things they have done in the past hurt the institution.
Okay, he happens to be right about this.
Now, is it a smart idea to place your trust in Nancy Pelosi?
Of course, it's a very stupid idea to place your trust in Nancy Pelosi.
And today I'm seeing a lot of hue and cry from the right side of the aisle that supports McCarthy saying, well, why didn't Nancy, why didn't the Democrats step in?
The Democrats could have saved McCarthy.
Because this entire vote, for all the talk about rhinos, it was eight Republicans who voted along with all the Democrats to remove McCarthy.
And yes, Nancy Pelosi could have carved off, you know, five votes, and she could have saved McCarthy, and then the institution would have continued to move on as normal.
But why would you trust Democrats to do that?
Like, what in your record makes you think that Nancy Pelosi was ever going to bail you out?
Well, the predictable result of this is that, again, more norms are broken.
So there are certain norms in the House of Representatives that have just gone by the wayside, as McCarthy mentioned right there.
One of them is that you don't remove members of the other party from their committees just because you don't like them.
You recall that they actually did this.
The Democrats removed certain Republican members from their committees, even though they really did not have power to do so.
And so Republicans have now threatened to do the same to Democrats.
As they should.
Like, Eric Swalwell should not be on the Indel Committee, for example.
Ilhan Omar should not be on the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Okay, but the rule was you didn't do that, and then Democrats broke that rule, and now Republicans are gonna break that rule in kind.
Well, now, Republicans are taking their revenge on the Democrats by evicting them from their hideaway offices.
According to CBS News, two longtime Democratic leaders, Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, have been evicted from their so-called hideaway offices in the Capitol in the aftermath of Kevin McCarthy's ouster at the House Speaker.
Pelosi confirmed on Tuesday night that Representative Patrick McHenry, the new Speaker pro tem, has ordered she immediately vacate my office in the Capitol.
This eviction is a sharp departure from tradition, said Pelosi.
Oh my god, like, listening to Nancy Pelosi caterwaul about tradition is laughable.
This lady who was kneeling in kente cloth In the halls of Congress.
As Speaker, I gave former Speaker Hastert a significantly larger suite of offices for as long as he wished.
Office space doesn't matter to me, but it seems to be important to them.
Now that the new Republican leadership has settled this important matter, let's hope they get to work on what's truly important for the American people.
Now again, the hideaway offices, they vary in size and location.
Some are windowless rooms on the basement level.
Others have high ceilings, chandeliers, big windows.
The hideaway office of the late Senator Robert Burt was this really, really nice office.
It's not clear why they were tossed, but the evictions were probably in revenge by the Republican caucus for the Democrats basically allowing Gaetz to hold up the entire process.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, she doesn't care about the institution of Congress.
She tweeted out, Does anyone believe for one minute McCarthy would help
elect a Dem speaker quote unquote for the institution?
McCarthy's hubris is a theme.
He loudly stated he would not negotiate with Democrats called virtually none,
trash those who helped with DCR, and then expected Dem votes for free?
Well, and then she continues, If McCarthy cared so much for the institution,
he wouldn't have opened a baseless impeachment without a House vote.
If he cared for the institution, he wouldn't have voted to overturn election results.
He would have honored his debt limit deal with the president and all the rest.
Again, I understand hard-nosed politics, but what goes around comes around, and that's the way that it's going to be.
I mean, this is the era in which we live.
Any rule that Democrats break is going to be met with equal and opposite fire by the Republicans.
And frankly, I'm totally fine with that.
I'm totally fine with that.
Democrats broke the tradition in terms of judicial nominees suggesting that they could ram people through with a 51-vote majority, Mitch McConnell, and put three of Donald Trump's nominees on the Supreme Court with just over 50 votes.
Democrats decided to break all the rules with regard to committee assignments.
Republicans will respond in kind.
It's just going to be this.
This is going to be the way that it is.
Because all trust between the parties is gone.
In just one second, we'll get to what comes next.
Who exactly even wants to be Speaker of the House?
Seems like a really crappy job.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, so who even wants this garbage job?
Well, there are at least three people who have entered the fray.
One is the House Majority Leader, Steve Scalise.
He announced his candidacy.
So did Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
Here's Jim Jordan yesterday announcing.
Let's suppose the conference does get together and makes that decision as you just described, and comes together, and hypothetically they say the person we need to lead us now is Jim Jordan.
Would you accept that leadership?
Again, yeah, if the conference decides, that's their decision.
And that's how I think it has to be.
When you only control the House of Representatives in the legislative branch, and the Democrats have control of the White House and the Senate, Um, and you got a four vote majority in the house.
You got to have everyone on board with this is the person we want to lead us.
And so it's got to be a kind of a bottom up conference decides who that individual is going to be.
So Scalise's job has been as the house majority leader, his decision, his job has been to sort of bring everybody together.
And that's the case that he's making is that he's trying to quote unquote build consensus where others thought it impossible.
He has good relationships across the conference.
He wasn't particularly close with Kevin McCarthy.
One problem is that he is being treated currently for blood cancer, so that is a serious concern.
Jim Jordan is considered a real firebrand.
He is very closely allied with Donald Trump, but unclear if the left wing of the party is going to support Jim Jordan.
He ended up being close with McCarthy and was upset when he got tossed.
Jordan has some early endorsements from Daryl Issa of California, Thomas Massey of Kentucky, Jim Banks of Indiana.
All of which are good endorsements, obviously.
And then there is a third member, Oklahoma Representative Kevin Hearn.
He also is running for the position.
He's the chair of the Conservative Republican Study Committee.
He said he hadn't made an official announcement.
Also, Chip Roy might get in.
Again, unclear how all of this is going to shake out at this point.
None of this matters if they don't actually change the rules.
There needs to be a change in the rules in terms of who can actually just get rid of somebody.
The motion to vacate the chair, as the Wall Street Journal points out, used against McCarthy is going to hang over the head of the next speaker.
McCarthy-allied representative Don Bacon of Nebraska said, whoever gets to 18, if they can get to a tune with these eight ungovernable people, they'll always hold this over their head.
They'll demand what they just did to Kevin.
I don't believe he can govern with these eight people.
Others say that changing the rule will be a condition for their support.
Representative Carlos Jimenez of Florida, he said the person who wants my vote for Speaker has to commit to reforming the motion to vacate because nobody can actually govern under these particular circumstances.
Now, the truth is that McCarthy, again, represented kind of the center of the Republican Party, if you could say that there is one.
He was very Trumpy, but at the same time, he was in favor of increased aid to Ukraine.
But if the party didn't want the aid to Ukraine, who's going to carve it out of the CR?
He's actually pretty representative of what the Republican caucus wanted.
All these other people have pretty strong positions.
Scalise has been working behind the scenes to replace McCarthy as Speaker, trying to shore up support, according to Fox News Digital.
After House Majority Whip Tom Emmer suggested Scalise make a good speaker, Scalise told reporters that he didn't have anything to announce.
So we'll see how all of this moves forward.
Meanwhile, the knives are out for Gaetz.
And, you know, on a pure karmic level, he deserves it.
Because what he is doing here is absolute grandstanding, as I've mentioned over and over again.
It is stupid, counterproductive.
It does not actually achieve anything.
Senator Mark Wayne Mullen of Oklahoma went after Matt Gaetz in a kind of different way yesterday.
He talked a little bit about Matt Gaetz, the personality.
You gotta think about this guy.
This is a guy that didn't have, that the media didn't give a time of day to after he was accused of sleeping with an underage girl.
There's a reason why no one in the conference came and defended him because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the house floor that all of us had walked away of the girls that he had slept with.
He'd brag about how he would A crush ED medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.
This is obviously before he got married.
And so when that accusation came out, no one defended him and then no one on the media would give him a time of the day.
All of a sudden he found fame because he opposed the Speaker of the House back in November and he's always stayed there.
And he was never going to leave until he got this last moment of fame by going after a motion to vacate.
It's important to know Congressman Gates has never been charged with any sex trafficking crime and he gave this
statement to CNN in response I don't think Mark Wayne Mullen and I have said 20 words to
each other on the house floor This is a lie from someone who doesn't know me and who's
coping with the death of the political career of his friend Kevin
thoughts and prayers So things are gonna get uglier and things are also gonna
get stupider One of the big suggestions that came out once the speaker
was vacated was that Donald Trump for the speaker of the house
I'm, sorry. This is clown show stuff This is just clownish. It's clownish and ridiculous Donald
Trump for speaker of the house Now technically you don't have to be a member of the house
to be speaker of the house Donald Trump Are you kidding me?
You think he's going to whip votes?
Donald Trump is going to fundraise on behalf of members of the House?
That dude gave no money during the last election cycle to anyone who was not named Donald Trump.
What are you even talking about?
Have we had enough sufficient shows of sycophantic bootlicking from members of the Republican caucus yet that we have to actually talk about this kind of nonsense?
Like, seriously?
You can vote for Trump for president.
That's fine.
Donald Trump did a lot of good things as president.
Speaker of the House?
Like, anybody who suggests this should be summarily laughed at.
It's ridiculous.
I'm sorry.
It's just stupid on its face.
It has no governing experience in the Congress.
It doesn't know how a single legislative procedure works.
He has spent his entire career basically dividing Republican against Republican.
He achieved a massive victory against Hillary Clinton.
He did wonderful things as president.
And he also would be like the worst Speaker of the House.
Like, what are we even talking about?
This is like, come on!
Be serious for five seconds.
Would you take the job?
A lot of people have asked me about it.
I'm focused.
You know, with leaving, I don't know, I'm sure you don't know me too much.
I'm a bankruptcy.
Great, enjoy now say they're going to back Trump for speaker.
He did weigh in on that this morning.
Take a listen.
Would you take the job?
A lot of people have asked me about it.
I'm focused, you know, with leading.
I don't know.
I'm sure you don't read too much in the papers, but with leading my life, 50 points for president.
My focus is totally on that.
If I can help them during the process, I would do it.
Trump then promptly went on Truth Social and tweeted a picture of himself holding the speaker's
You know, there are people in the United States who actually rely on the federal government.
I'm not talking about people who are on welfare.
I'm talking about, like, people who are in business and want a predictable regime.
I'm talking about people who don't want to see the national debt blown out.
I'm talking about people who would like just to go about their daily lives without worrying about the Chaos clown circus that is Congress.
And is this helpful?
Marjorie Taylor Greene, again one of our brightest lights, she tweeted out that she would only support Donald Trump.
The only candidate for Speaker.
I'm currently supporting as President Donald Trump.
He will end the war in Ukraine.
He will secure the border.
He will end the politically weaponized government.
By the way, he didn't do any of these things as President of the United States.
Just going to point that out.
He didn't secure the border.
He didn't end the politically weaponized government.
He'll make America energy independent again.
He'll pass my bill to stop transgender surgeries on kids and keep men out of women's sports.
He'll support our military.
I'm wondering how he's going to do this as Speaker.
He's not gonna run the Senate.
So that's weird.
He's not gonna be president, if he's the speaker, and so much more.
He has a proven four-year record as president of the United States of America.
He received a record number of Republican votes of any Republican presidential candidate.
We can make him speaker and then elect him president.
He will make America great again, says Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Marjorie, he's not gonna date you.
Like, seriously, what in the, what?
Stop being clowns for five seconds.
Just stop it.
Just stop being clowns.
I know it's too much to ask.
First party to sanity wins.
First party to Sandy wins.
Meanwhile, President Trump, on the presidential level, continues to be bogged down with this ridiculous fraud case in New York.
Again, this fraud case is based on specious assertions that because Donald Trump inflated the value of his real estate assets in negotiations with banks, and then banks didn't actually rely on those inflated values in order to make loans, that somehow this amounts to fraud.
Which is like every single person engaged in real estate in New York, if you want to go about it this way.
Here is Donald Trump correctly saying they've weaponized justice, and also, You notice that we're talking about Donald Trump in the context of his own legal troubles and not in the... You know a name that hasn't been mentioned so far this entire show?
Joe Biden.
You know why?
Because when Republicans set themselves on fire and then jump through circus hoops, it turns out everyone talks about them and not Joe Biden, while Joe Biden is busy pummeling the American economy.
Anyway, here is Donald Trump going off about the weaponization of justice, which of course, he's right.
And also, this isn't about Joe Biden.
He's right.
He's right.
me, the former president, the leading candidate, I'm leading Joe Biden by a lot, which is probably
why this is all happening. Not probably, but it's definitely they're coordinating with Washington
100 percent. But without that, none of these cases would be going on.
They've weaponized justice in our country. This trial is a disgrace.
He's right. He's right. And also, again, what are we not talking about?
We are not talking right now about Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, again, Trump continues to be by far, far and away the poll leader in the clubhouse right now for the Republicans.
The latest national average has Donald Trump at 57% and the closest competitor, Ron DeSantis, at 14.
The latest Economist YouGov poll that just came out yesterday has Trump at 58 and DeSantis at 13.
If you look at the state levels, it's a little bit Closer.
They haven't had enough state polling in Iowa, frankly, at this point.
DeSantis has gotten about a $15 million infusion.
He's putting it all into Iowa.
He's moving his entire staff into Iowa.
The current polling in Iowa still has Donald Trump up on the field by 30 points.
In New Hampshire, Donald Trump is still up on the field by 30 points.
The latest USA Today Suffolk poll actually has Nikki Haley jumping into second place against Ron DeSantis.
That poll does have a margin of error.
Of 4.5% or so.
In the RealClearPolitics polling average, it's basically Trump and then a group of people.
Haley at 14%, DeSantis at 10%, Christie at 9%.
Bottom line is, there is no one challenger to Trump at this point.
Which means, we're going to be talking about these issues, as I say over and over again, if this is your bet, this is your bet.
I don't think it's a great strategy, but apparently strategy is of no impact at this point, which is really exciting.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is running this economy into the ground like a plane without wings.
We'll get to that momentarily.
First, let's say that you have an employee.
You know, we'll call him Matt Walsh.
And let's say that guy, he's done an enormous amount of good in the world, like really done tremendous things for the country.
Let's say he also goes absent for long periods of time with no explanation.
And let's say that at a certain point you decide, you know, we actually need a person on the Matt Walsh show.
And if Matt's not going to do it, we're going to need someone else to replace Matt Walsh.
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Also, if you've been watching Convicting Murder, you've already seen many instances where making a murder skillfully curated information to align with their preferred narrative.
Get ready to dive into their most egregious manipulation yet.
Making a murder conveniently omitted a crucial detail that completely unravels their insane theory.
You're not going to want to miss this in-depth look at how so many people were tricked.
Episode 7, now available on DailyWirePlus.
Take a look.
Coming up on Convicting a Murderer.
They got Brendan down at the police station.
Brian, something to do with you.
The police did not have Brendan Dassey on their radar at all.
Kayla brings up that they should talk to her cousin Brendan.
They initially went down to that high school because they were worried about him because his cousin made some comments about him losing weight.
She mentioned things like staring off in his face and weight loss.
She estimated to be about 40 pounds.
They thought that maybe he had seen something and he was having trouble dealing with what he had witnessed.
You should have said to them, I want my mom in there.
Yeah.
You definitely can see how someone like him was easily manipulated.
I really feel sorry for Brendan.
Getting roped into some scheme that Steven decided he was gonna come up with.
We did not expect what he was telling us.
♪♪ New episodes of Convicting a Murderer
are released every Thursday exclusively Plus, if you're not a member, head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and sign up today.
Important to note that there is a brand new Rasmussen Reports survey previewed exclusively by DailyWire.
It is about Disney.
So Disney, of course, is a company that I have long had tremendous admiration for, or at least I did up until a few years ago.
When we lived in California, we were annual pass holders over at Disneyland.
It was the best place to go with your kids.
I have pictures of myself with my own parents when I'm a small kid at Disneyland.
My fourth date with my wife was at Disneyland.
Love Disney product.
Big Disney fan.
Up until they decided a few years back that they were going to go completely woke.
They were going to move to the left.
They were going to start injecting a bunch of LGBTQ+.
Well now, this Rasmussen Report's survey shows that 60% of Republicans have an unfavorable opinion of Disney, including 35% who say they have a very unfavorable opinion.
because you're taking legacy properties and you're still making your money off your legacy properties
while simultaneously promoting a woke left-wing agenda that targets children. That is what Disney
has been doing. Well now this Rasmussen Reports survey shows that 60% of Republicans have an
unfavorable opinion of Disney, including 35% who say they have a very unfavorable opinion.
That survey was conducted in late September. Only 32% of Republicans have a favorable view.
For Democrats, the results are precisely the opposite.
Because, of course, for a lot of Democrats, they are perfectly happy with spoon-feeding a bunch of leftist tropes into children's programming.
And again, this is no surprise.
There's another study that came out just yesterday from GLAAD.
GLAAD is the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
Pretty much all the big Hollywood studios pre-screen their films.
I kid you not, this is a thing they actually do.
They pre-screen their films and TV shows for GLAAD's board of censors.
And GLAAD actually goes through and determines whether or not this is acceptable to GLAAD.
Well now, GLAAD has put out a report rating major Hollywood studios on how much LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign content they are squeezing into their films and TV content.
And here's what they found.
They found that Disney is the top company, along with Netflix, that is what they call LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign inclusive.
In fact, according to their statistics, they give them a 41% rating, which is a good rating.
They made 59 total films.
24 of them were LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign inclusive.
41%, which is next to Warner Brothers Discovery, the highest rate They are one of only three studios that received a good rating from GLAAD.
And again, all of this is designed for a purpose.
And the purpose is, particularly when it comes to a kids' company like Disney, to target children.
It's one thing for Netflix to do this sort of stuff.
Netflix is largely designed not for children.
But Walt Disney is designed explicitly for children.
It has films like Lightyear, which bombed at the box office, largely due to the fact that one of the major storylines was about a lesbian couple.
It's about the fact that Disney has decided that they wish to, in the words of one of their own animators...
Sledgehammer you with the not-at-all-secret gay agenda.
Okay, meanwhile, Joe Biden is doing a horrific job again.
We have now been through most of today's show and not mentioned Joe Biden.
How is that possible when the President of the United States is running this economy into a ditch?
How is that possible?
The answer is when Republicans, once again, kick themselves in the balls repeatedly.
Everyone points and laughs at the guy kicking himself in the balls, even if the building behind that guy is completely on fire and children are running and screaming.
Like, that's how it works.
That's how it works.
In any case, Joe Biden continues to be terrible at his job.
He was asked yesterday how to confront family members who are MAGA family members, and here was Joe Biden at his most convincing and charismatic.
How would you advise those people who do share your concerns, but may be wary about talking to a MAGA parent, neighbor, coworker, how would you advise them to do that?
Vote.
Vote.
But I also think that we should be engaging people more and not be worried about our neighbor.
Talk to them.
Sit down and say, what do you think?
And not get into arguments, but say, this is what you say this, but how about this?
Force people to get in a two-way conversation.
Wow, that is riveting stuff there from the dead president of the United States.
When they used to say dead presidents, they meant, you know, the guys on dollar bills.
Now we actually mean the president of the United States, who is a walking zombie at this point.
Meanwhile, the economy headed for disaster.
According to the Wall Street Journal, The U.S.
has long been the lender of last resort to the world.
During the emerging market panics of the 90s, the global financial crisis of 2007-2009, and the pandemic shutdown of 2020, it was Treasury's unmatched capacity to borrow that came to the rescue.
Now, the Treasury itself is a source of risk.
No, the United States isn't about to default or fail to sell enough bonds at its next auction, but the scale and upward trajectory of U.S.
borrowing in the absence of any political corrective now threatens markets and the economy in ways they have not for at least a generation.
That is the takeaway from a sudden sharp rise in treasury yields in recent weeks.
The usual suspects can't explain it.
The inflation picture has gotten marginally better.
The Federal Reserve has signaled it's nearly done raising rates.
Instead, most of that increase is due to the part of yield, called the term premium, which has nothing to do with inflation or short-term rates.
Numerous factors affect that term premium.
Rising governments' deficits are a prime suspect.
Deficits have been wide for years now, so why should they matter right now?
The better question is, what took so long?
That larger deficits push up long-term rates had long been economic orthodoxy.
But for the past 20 years, interest rate models that incorporated fiscal policy didn't work.
Noted Ricardo Trezzi, former Fed economist.
That's understandable.
Central banks had kept interest rates around zero while buying up government bonds.
That was inflation.
It was quantitative easing.
They just pumped money into the system.
Private demand for credit was weak.
This trumped any concern about deficits.
Mark Weidman, Senior Managing Director at BlackRock, says we had 25 blissful years of not having to worry about this problem.
But today, central banks are worried about inflation being too high.
They've stopped buying.
In some cases, they're shedding their bond holdings.
Suddenly, fiscal policy matters again.
So again, as I've said a thousand times, whatever goes up starts to come down.
And that is true when it comes to the American economy.
When you inflate things, they tend to burst.
When you inflate a bubble, it tends to burst.
Right now, no one wants to buy U.S.
debt.
Why does no one want to buy U.S.
debt?
Well, the answer is because there are a bunch of answers.
One reason is because if the Fed, to fight inflation, has to continue increasing rates, that means that the bond that you bought yesterday is no longer worth money.
Why?
Well, because the bond that's coming out tomorrow has a higher face yield.
That is why the yields on bonds are increasing.
Bond yield, by the way, when I say the yield on bonds, what I mean is the price of bonds is dropping.
So typically speaking, interest rates and price of bonds work in inverse proportion.
So as interest rates go up, the price of bonds drops.
Why?
It seems counterintuitive.
The answer is because people are worried that the next interest rate increase makes the last bond worthless.
This is what happened to Silicon Valley Bank, right?
They banked on a certain facial rate of interest on the bonds they bought, and then the Fed started issuing bonds at a much higher rate.
And so, all the bonds that Silicon Valley Bank was banking on were now worthless.
You couldn't sell them in the open market.
Meanwhile, at the same exact time that the Federal Reserve is increasing those interest rates, they're trying to sell bonds into the market.
I mean, they're trying to sell tons of bonds into the market, which also undercuts the price.
Why are they selling bonds in the market?
Because of the deficit.
Because of the debt.
So, this is going to be a serious problem.
The federal deficit was over 7% of GDP in fiscal 2023 after adjusting for accounting distortions related to student debt.
That is larger than any deficit since 1930, outside of wars and recessions.
This is occurring at a time of low unemployment and strong economic growth, suggesting that in normal times, when things are actually worse, deficits are going to be a lot higher.
By the way, it is worth noting at this point that China and Japan are not buying our debt in the way that they were.
According to Reuters, foreign holdings of U.S.
Treasuries rose in July, rising for a second straight month despite an uncertain interest rate outlook muddied by a mixed set of economic figures.
China's stash of Treasuries, however, dropped to $821.8 billion, the lowest since May of 2009.
Analysts said that China has been under pressure to defend its weakening currency and the selling of U.S.
debt may have been used for intervention purposes to prop it up.
So they're putting more of our bonds, old bonds, on the market, which floods the market with American debt, which means it's harder to raise the debt, which means that we have to increase those interest rates that we are giving people in order to get them to buy the debt, which means we're going to have to pay off those new interest rates at a higher rate of interest.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden keeps spending into this because he is a moron.
Yesterday, President Biden announced student debt forgiveness for another tranche of Americans on Wednesday, months after the Supreme Court blocked the administration's most ambitious borrower relief plans.
This is unconstitutional.
It's already been declared he can't unilaterally simply get rid of student loan debt.
He's doing it anyway, because this is what he does.
The string of politically advantageous announcements comes thanks to the administration's use of existing programs that allow the government to waive debt for certain borrowers.
The moves are separate from the administration's troubled attempt to cancel as much as $20,000 in student debt for any borrower earning less than $125,000 a year struck down by the Supreme Court.
Wednesday's announcement of $9 billion in student debt cancellation for 125,000 borrowers, the latest in a string of sizable discharges, helps just a small slice of the more than 40 million people who own debt.
But again, this is part of the inflationary policy of this administration, is to basically blow money into the system by relieving debt.
The administration is touting those cancellations.
On the same week, most borrowers returned to making payments for the first time since they were paused in March 2020 as part of the COVID-19 pandemic relief.
The piecemeal approach to debt cancellation adds up.
The administration has now wiped out $127 billion in student debt, nearly one-third of the projected cost of the failed mass cancellation plan.
So the Supreme Court says you can't do it.
Joe Biden just finds another way to do it.
That's the way this works.
Meanwhile, mortgage rates are hitting 7.5%.
The real estate market is beginning to tank because, again, there's no one out there to buy up the real estate that's being put on the market.
And right now, there's no inventory.
It's a weird, sticky situation.
You're not going to sell your house to get into an 8% mortgage when you have a 4% mortgage on your house right now.
So there's not a lot of inventory.
So the prices aren't really dropping because there's not a lot of inventory.
But if there were inventory, the prices would be dropping because nobody can afford to buy this stuff.
That's gonna come unglued at a certain point.
At a certain point, people aren't gonna be able to make their mortgage on the 4% house.
They're not gonna be able to pay that, and they're gonna be forced to sell the house.
And once that starts happening, then you're gonna see a real estate crash.
Mortgage applications, by the way, are plummeting for just this reason.
At the exact same time that all of this is happening, Joe Biden is presiding over massive strikes affecting the American economy.
The autoworker strike has still not been resolved.
Meanwhile, Kaiser Permanente is now on strike.
This is the largest U.S.
healthcare walkout on record.
That's just what we need right now, in a time of rising cost, is we need all of the healthcare workers walking out.
According to the Wall Street Journal, more than 75,000 nurses, pharmacists, and other employees of Kaiser Permanente walked off the job Wednesday in the largest U.S.
healthcare strike on record.
The workers struck after contracts expired and their unions couldn't reach an agreement with Kaiser on how much a new deal would increase wages and staffing.
Kaiser has brought on thousands of temp workers to fill some vacancies.
They're starting to postpone appointments, I mean, what a disaster area.
Acting U.S.
Secretary of Labor Julie Hsu has met with both sides to help resolve the strike and is seeking to move the talks forward to reach a resolution.
The strike, which is scheduled to last as long as three days, adds hospitals, pharmacies, and clinics to workplaces ruled by labor action this year.
Why do you think this is happening?
Why is this happening?
Well, people say it's the tight labor market.
It's not the tight labor market.
The tight labor market automatically drives up the price of labor.
The reason they're striking is because Joe Biden is in the White House and his entire administration is in hock to the labor unions.
That is why they know that the Secretary of Labor is going to jet on in and cram something down on Kaiser.
Kaiser, by the way, serves almost 13 million members at 40 hospitals and more than 620 medical offices.
The work stoppage involves Kaiser workers in five states and Washington, D.C.
It's the largest action by healthcare workers since 1993.
Kaiser Union said inflation has eroded employee wages.
Whose fault is that?
Joe Biden's.
Staff shortages are burning out workers while compromising the quality of care.
Workers are demanding that Kaiser do more to boost hiring and keep workers, such as offering better raises.
The cost of living is not matching the current wages we are losing in people.
Kaiser said its compensation leads its markets and the company has already increased hiring.
The reason these strikes are happening, again, is because Joe Biden is President of the United States.
That is the reason that Joe Biden is presiding over all of this.
He owns this economy.
Bidenomics is all of this.
It is healthcare strikes.
It is UAW strikes.
It is a failure to be able to sell American bonds at the rates that are necessary to even be able to sustain our debt.
Economic stagnation is the real threat of the Biden administration.
I've said this for at least a year and a half at this point.
The threat is not inflation.
Inflation is bad.
Inflation is terrible.
The real threat is economic stagnation built off inflation, higher interest rates, regulatory strictness, labor unions.
All of that is just sand in the mill.
It is sticking up all of the wheels of the economy.
And Joe Biden is responsible for every single part of that.
And meanwhile, Joe Biden is in such serious political trouble that he's starting to just implement Donald Trump's plans right now.
According to the Associated Press, the Biden administration announced it waived 26 federal laws in South Texas to allow border wall construction on Wednesday, marking the administration's first use of a sweeping executive power employed often during the Trump presidency.
Wait, are you saying now there's a crisis on the border?
Are you saying that people are just rushing the border?
Are you now saying that maybe it's a good idea to build the wall, Joe Biden?
I thought it was really bad.
Where's AOC crying at the border?
Where is she in her white outfit crying at empty parking lots?
Where is she?
The Department of Homeland Security posted the announcement on the U.S.
Federal Registry with few details outlining the construction in Starr County, Texas, which is a busy border patrol sector seeing high illegal entry.
According to government data, about 245,000 illegal entries have been recorded so far this fiscal year in just the Rio Grande Valley sector, which contains 21 counties.
Alejandro Mayorkas, who should absolutely be impeached, he's not doing his job, he said there is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas.
I love how far they are going to just not say the word wall.
Pretty amazing, right?
Construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border.
Do you mean a border wall?
Is that what you are trying to say?
Star County's hilly ranchlands sitting between Zapata and McAllen, Texas is home to about 65,000 residents.
Although no maps were provided in the announcement, CBP announced the project in June and began gathering public comments in August when it shared a map of the additional construction that can add up to 20 miles to the existing border barrier system in the area.
So now, it is Joe Biden who is building the wall.
During the Trump administration, about 450 miles of wall were built along the southwest border between 2017 and January of 2021.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been doing it himself.
The DHS's decision on Wednesday contrasts the Biden administration's posturing when a proclamation to end the construction on January 20, 2021.
Quote, building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution.
So, good to see that Joe Biden has been clocked in the face by reality.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
William Lane Craig, I've recommended his books on the program before.
He writes a lot about logical proofs of God.
I have an entire video in my series debunked where I talk about plausible logical proofs for God.
Do I think any of them are dispositive or inarguable?
Of course not.
I don't think that you can logically prove that there is a God.
I do think that you can suggest that there are very logical arguments to suggest a God.
I think that you can say that there is a prevalence of the evidence that suggests that there is a God.
And again, I actually don't think that most people come to God by being argued into it.
With that said, one of the best expositors of these sorts of arguments is William Lane Craig, who's a Christian apologist.
He has a great book called The Kalam Cosmological Argument.
It's actually based on ancient Islamic sources.
It's discussed in Maimonides.
The Kalam Cosmological Argument is all about the idea that there is a first cause to the universe.
And William Lane Craig gets very detailed in this.
This is one of his more sophisticated books.
He also has a bunch that are directed at the more general reader.
Totally worth the read.
William Lane Craig's The Kalam Cosmological Argument.
Go check it out today.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So, Pope Francis seems wildly unconcerned about human sin, but he's very concerned about climate change.
Again, I'm not a Catholic, so I don't have a dog in this fight.
Other than, as a member of Western civilization, I think that the Catholic Church moving away from its traditional roots in terms of morality is a massive mistake that is going to lead to extraordinary societal consequences.
Pope Francis is putting outsized impact on what he terms social justice, which is to say redistributionist economics.
And then he is adding on to that climate change, and these are like his top priorities.
Meanwhile, he's talking about how maybe, maybe, maybe, priests should be able to give blessings to same-sex unions, which of course is weird since homosexual activity in the Bible is a sin.
And the Catholic Church has always said that.
By now, Pope Francis is focusing laser-like on climate change.
Pope Francis on Wednesday, according to the New York Times, once again implored the world to protect the suffering planet, lamenting in a major new document that scant progress had been made in the eight years since he refocused the Roman Catholic Church more fully on environmental issues in a landmark treatise that catapulted him to the forefront of climate activism.
In the near decade since global fanfare plaudits from leaders and talk of a game-changing shift for the church greeted France's first call to confront climate change, things have only gotten worse.
Well, yeah, because as it turns out, you have a massive collective action problem when it comes to climate change.
China ain't signing on.
India ain't signing on.
It is unclear what level of actual mitigation of the amount of carbon moving into the atmosphere would result in what amount of actual lowered climate over time.
Those are pretty systemic barriers.
Also, you're the Pope.
Shouldn't you really be worried a lot about, you know, saving souls and human sin?
Shouldn't that be like the biggest thing that you're focused on?
While Francis' message remained the same, his voice has faded, Wednesday's document, an apostolic exhortation called Laudate Deum, or Praise God, amounted to a tacit acknowledgement that Francis' initial appeal to save the planet has gone largely unheeded.
He says, once and for all, let us put an end to the irresponsible derision that would present this issue as something purely ecological, green, romantic, frequently subject to ridicule by economic interests.
Well, I mean, it is green and romantic if you don't actually have a plan to effectuate the thing.
Or if the plan to effectuate the thing means people in developing countries have to live in abject poverty.
Or if your idea is let's just wreck the Western economy.
None of that stuff's gonna happen.
So again, Pope Francis, let's just say not my favorite pope.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into a sitting United States Senator.
Apparently his wife struck and killed the dude while driving in 2018.
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