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Oct. 6, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:03
Biden Caves, Builds Trump Wall
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Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Wednesday waived 26 different federal laws that actually allowed him to build border wall in South Texas.
Apparently, among the 26 laws the DHS waived, according to National Review, that includes the Clean Air Act, Drinking Water Act, and Endangered Species Act.
The projects will be funded by a congressional appropriations package from fiscal year 2019.
It's not going to be tons of wall, but it is some wall.
It's like 20 miles of wall along the border in Starr County, Texas.
That's an area experiencing high illegal entry.
The Biden administration has acknowledged that this was necessary.
They put forward a statement saying as much, suggesting that this is the way that this was going to go, that basically we need the wall.
If we don't have the wall, it's going to be very difficult for us to secure the border.
This, of course, creates a major conundrum.
Because Joe Biden suggested during the 2020 race that walls are bad.
They are ineffective.
They are useless.
And in fact, the idea of the Trump wall was incredibly bad.
Racist.
Terrible.
This is why you had Alexander Ocasio-Cortez during the Trump administration jetting on down to the southern border to hang around empty parking lots and fake cry into the camera over offense.
This is why you had the entire media Shrieking and crying about the idea of Donald Trump building more border wall.
This is why just a few weeks ago, you had judges who were stepping in to prevent the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, from putting buoys in the middle of the Rio Grande to prevent people from illegally attempting to cross that border.
Well, now they have flipped.
Now they have flipped.
Again, it's not all that long ago they were saying all this sort of stuff.
As of 2021, Corine Jean-Pierre was saying on behalf of this administration that walls don't work.
He also indicated that certain sections of the border wall should be finished.
Does the President agree?
Well, as you know, we have said that I have to look at the comments.
I have not seen them, so I want to make sure I read it within context.
But we have talked about the border wall here in general as a way that it's been used to close the border.
And we feel that it is a policy that doesn't work.
And it's not just us.
Experts have said that the border wall is not an effective policy.
That was the administration just a couple of years ago.
So what changed?
Well, it turns out millions of people have crossed the southern border under Joe Biden, and they are all going up to northern cities, blue cities, New York, Chicago.
And it turns out that people in those blue cities don't like it very much.
You've got governors like Kathy Hochul in New York calling out the Biden administration.
You have the governor of Illinois, J.B.
Pritzker, and the mayor, Brandon Johnson of Chicago, calling for Joe Biden to fix this thing.
Here they were just a couple of days ago.
We have to have better coordination with every single level of government, and that includes the state of Texas.
There are other things the federal government can do other than sending us money that they haven't yet done.
In a letter to President Biden asking for more help, Governor Pritzker says the crisis is overwhelming the state and the city's ability to provide aid.
Well, all of this has driven the Biden administration into some dose of reality, or at least it did briefly.
There was a brief moment in time, just a couple of days ago, when it appeared that the Biden administration might be shocked into reality, maybe even to stop the overwhelming flow of illegal immigrants at the border.
Mayorca said in an official filing in the Federal Register, this is just a couple of days ago, quote, 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.
In order to ensure the expeditious construction of the barriers and roads in the project areas, I have determined that it is necessary to exercise the authority vested in me by Section 102C of the IIRIRA."
Hey, so, he waived regulations in order to make this sort of thing happen.
But then, Wokenist snapped back into place like a mousetrap.
There was no way the Biden administration was going to be able to flip this dramatically after claiming that Donald Trump was an evil human rights violator for attempting to build border wall.
And so yesterday, Joe Biden, the defunct president of the United States, suggested that actually the border wall won't work, which raises the question as to why then they are building it.
But he says, guys, guys, it's still not going to work.
I didn't change my mind.
It's still not going to work.
We're just building it because we have to build it, which is weird since you had to waive 26 regulations in order to build it.
Here was Joe Biden yesterday.
Do you believe the border wall hurts?
No.
So then why are you doing it? So why are you doing it? The answer is that he's
doing it because he also knows that the consequences of not doing it are really
bad politically but he still has to please his left-wing base. He has created
a situation in which he is caught between a rock and a hard place.
This is a catch-22 for him.
And the same way the crime policy is a catch-22.
If crime goes out of control, it looks really bad for his administration.
If he adds more cops to the streets, it also looks really bad for his administration.
Left-wing policy is a failure.
When you pursue it to its logical conclusion, which is an open border in this particular case, people don't like it very much.
And then you have to backtrack.
And then people yell at you for backtracking.
And this is what Joe Biden doesn't want.
So what exactly is Joe Biden's excuse for having spent the money to, you know, actually build wall?
He says the money was appropriated, so he has to spend it.
Which, again, is weird from a president of the United States who has unilaterally declared himself the ability to relieve student loan debt to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, for example.
But when it comes to money allocated for border wall funding, suddenly, like right now, he discovered that he actually has to spend money that was appropriated in 2019.
Strange.
The border wall, the money was appropriated for the border wall.
I tried to get them to re-appropriate, to redirect that money.
They didn't.
They wouldn't.
And in the meantime, there's nothing under the wall other than they have to use the money for what is appropriate.
I can't stop that.
Well, I mean, you could.
Theoretically, you could say, we couldn't waive the regulations.
Sorry.
That'd be the easy way to do it.
They literally had to waive regulations in order to make this happen.
So they could have made the case.
Secretary Mayorkas easily could have made the case.
Guys, I want to spend the money, but the regulations prevent me from spending the money because obviously I'd be in violation of law if I did spend the money.
He's not doing that.
He's building the wall.
So they want to have it both ways again.
They want to build the wall, claim the wall does nothing.
So they can simultaneously claim they're doing something to stop the border flow and also claim to all of their left-wing buddies that actually they still agree with themselves when they took the moronic position that walls do nothing, which of course is silly.
Of course walls do something.
You wouldn't have a giant fence around the White House if walls did nothing.
It's an argument that's beneath contempt that walls do nothing.
Of course walls do something.
They have for all of human history.
So stupid.
You'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, so Alejandro Mayorkas was then caught off guard by the fact that his own administration had undercut him.
So originally he said, we need the wall because, you know, we have a big problem on the border.
Then, because Joe Biden decided that he was going to maintain the position
that they don't need the wall and walls are bad, he had to walk it back.
So here is Mayorkas yesterday walking it back.
From day one.
This administration has made clear that a border wall is not the answer.
That remains our position, and our position has never wavered.
The language in the Federal Register Notice is being taken out of context, and it does not signify any change in policy whatsoever.
Oh, it's missing context, is it?
You know, the part where you explicitly said that there's an immediate need to build border wall?
This follows hard on Mayorkas claiming that it wasn't actually border wall.
It was actually just construction along the border.
What were they building, like a castle?
A miniature golf course?
What exactly is it?
What would you call the thing that you are building that is a wall?
A wall constructed in my administration.
So something changed.
What?
Again, wildly untalented press secretary.
So she was asked, you know, what?
Why is it that you want to break U.S.
law in order to put up the wall and then claim that the wall doesn't doesn't do
anything? And she has no answer for this, obviously, because there is no answer
because it's really dumb.
A wall constructed in my administration, so something changed.
What you want us to break the law.
Is that what you want?
You want us to not comply with the law?
You want us to not comply with the law?
You want us to not be in administrations that follow the rule of law?
You guys do this all the time.
The student loan forgiveness program.
You went to court to fight for that.
If this is such a problem, building 20 miles of wall, Why not just go to court?
Why not fight them more?
Congress appropriates the funding.
Congress appropriates the funding.
We asked them to not use that funding for that particular purpose.
They denied it.
And now we're complying with the law.
If you have to build a border wall, but you don't think that it's going to work, then
once it's done, are you just going to tear it down?
I'm not getting into hypotheticals from here.
I'm just telling you what I can tell you from here.
The facts are that DHS is complying with the law.
This is from fiscal year.
This was under fiscal year 2019 under Republican leadership and DHS is required to do this.
The president asked multiple times of Congress to reappropriate.
They did not and we're not complying by the law.
Thanks everybody.
So much legal compliance from this administration.
I mean, if there's one thing we know about this administration, they love complying with the separation of powers in which Congress passes a law and the president signs it and the president abides by that legislation.
That is something this administration absolutely adores.
They would never do anything unilaterally, like say, I don't know, tell OSHA To cram down a VAX mandate on 80 million Americans.
They would never do anything like that.
After all, the power of the legislature controls what OSHA can and cannot do.
And that's not in the enabling legislation.
So obviously they would follow the law.
I mean, they would never try to twist the law to relieve hundreds of billions of dollars of student loan debt.
Just get rid of it.
I mean, they would follow the law, clearly.
And just like they are right here, there's an appropriation to build a wall, and so they're just following the law by building the wall.
Even if they think it's useless, because that's just what sticklers these people are for the law.
Or they're completely full of crap.
They're completely full of crap!
We all know that they're full of crap.
But this is the problem.
When you take positions that are counter logic and decency, and then the effects of those policies come to fruition, you have to somehow mitigate against your own policies.
The reason this is happening is very obvious.
You've got people in New York, and people in Chicago, and people in California, and people all over the left wing, the big cities, big blue cities, who are complaining about Joe Biden's illegal immigration problem.
And there is a reason, by the way, that Joe Biden is doing this, and that is because his poll numbers absolutely stink.
His poll numbers on immigration, they're not just underwater, they're wildly underwater.
I mean, insanely underwater.
Joe Biden's approval numbers on immigration are like 20%.
He has to do something.
But at the same time, he doesn't want to tick off that left-wing base.
And what's amazing to me is that he is so attached to that left-wing base.
Why?
Are they going to go vote for Donald Trump?
Obviously not.
Are they going to stay home if Trump is on the ballot?
Obviously not.
But he feels the necessity, he really does, to cater to that activist base.
And who is that activist base?
It's not black people in America's major cities who are overwhelmingly in favor of less illegal migration.
It's not even Latinos in America who are overwhelmingly in favor of less illegal migration.
It is woke white liberals living in upper class suburbs who never have to deal with the consequences and the minute you ship them to Martha's Vineyards, then all of a sudden they're starting to freak out and complain.
But, until then, they're very happy to put up their lawn signs, their virtue signaling lawn signs.
Man, the Democratic Party policy is a disaster area.
And Republicans could point that out if they weren't in the middle of a speakership battle,
which they declared on themselves.
Because that is definitely the best way to fight a war, is if you're in the middle of
a battle, a political battle with the other side, the best thing to do is immediately
go into an internacing war with your own side.
It always works out beautifully.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so meanwhile, while Democrats are declaring war on themselves over whether to build a border wall or not, the Republicans are declaring war on themselves with regard to this speakership battle in a fascinating new twist to the speakership battle.
Apparently, the Republicans are now going to hold a speakership debate, apparently televised, which... Okay.
All right.
Here's my objection to this.
My only objection, I'm all for transparency, but who Republicans elect in a closed caucus to lead their caucus really should not be a matter of public scrutiny nearly as much as, you know, you voting for your local congressperson.
The reason I say this is because how the sausage gets made is very different than how people tell you the sausage gets made On talk radio.
On talk radio, what I do for a living, I'm going to give you the purest, most conservative perspective.
Because that's what I get to do.
I mean, I'm lucky.
I don't have to make the sausage.
But behind the closed doors, obviously there's wheeling and dealing.
Trades get made.
But the problem is, that incentive structure is completely skewed.
You can't actually get the deal done.
You can't elect a speaker.
Unless there are some deals that are getting made behind closed doors.
This, for example, is one of the problems with the Republican fight against earmarks.
So for years and years and years, Republicans have said, quite correctly, on principle, earmarks are really bad.
They are.
They're really bad.
Earmarks are the system whereby there's a bill, it's coming through, and I attach a rider for my district.
And I say, I'm only going to vote in favor of this bill if you build the Ben Shapiro post office in my district.
It's really bad because if everybody does that, you end up spending a lot of money.
The problem is if nobody does that, you don't pass any bills and you end up with a giant omnibus package that only gets support because it's a giant crap sandwich anyway.
Usually a larger crap sandwich than would have been attained with a few simple earmarks.
So again, the sausage making process is really ugly.
Televising all of that And that's a great way of prolonging the speaker chaos, I suppose, because you're going to end up with a segment that is very pro-Jim Jordan.
You're going to end up with a segment that is very pro-Kevin Hearn, for example.
This is what's going to happen.
Because it's not as though any one of these candidates is completely dominant.
So, the three big candidates who have been mentioned at this point are Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, and Republican Study Committee Chair Kevin Hearn of Oklahoma.
Apparently, according to Punchbowl News, Fox News' Brett Baier is going to host a closed debate and discussion between the GOP candidates for Speaker on Monday night, according to a source involved with the planning.
And then later, it came out, apparently, that they're going to televise that, which, I mean, it's going to be very...
If you are running for Speaker of the House, now you're basically kind of running for President, right?
Not formally, but you're getting in front of the American people and the Republican base and showing who has most fealty to conservative principles.
The problem is that you can show that fealty, but the system constrains you from actually achieving those goals.
You make the biggest promise.
You can promise everything to everybody.
Two minutes from now, everybody's gonna be real disappointed when we hit the end of the continuing resolution and somebody cuts a deal, which is exactly what's going to happen, as we all know.
Anyway, Republicans are going to host that candidate forum Tuesday night and the closed party election on Wednesday.
There is no timeline for electing a speaker on the House floor.
This thing is probably going to continue for a number of days.
Donald Trump, for his part, after originally recommending Kevin McCarthy for the post, McCarthy was very pro-Trump, and then doing nothing to stop Kevin McCarthy from falling.
Donald Trump is now endorsing Jim Jordan for Speaker, which is fine.
I really like Jim Jordan.
I think he's terrific.
The head of the House Oversight Committee.
Again, I don't know why anyone wants this job.
Most of the time, so in any case, Donald Trump is now endorsing Jim Jordan for Speaker, which
is fine.
I really like Jim Jordan.
I think he's terrific.
The head of the House Oversight Committee.
Again, I don't know why anyone wants this job.
It's a terrible job, but Jim Jordan is an excellent candidate.
He's one of the founders of the House Freedom Caucus.
He's extremely conservative across the board.
And as far as Trump goes, he's a big Trump backer.
Now, the problem is, of course, we're also in the middle of an open primary inside the Republican Party.
While Trump is way in front in that primary, he still represents about half of the Republican Party, and the other half of the Republican Party is split among a myriad of candidates.
So Trump's endorsement is not sure to guarantee that somehow Jordan becomes the guy.
Especially because there's a whole wing of moderates in the party who may not be in love with Jim Jordan.
Kevin McCarthy.
People ripped him for not having centralizing principles.
And to a certain extent, there's some truth to that because he's a consummate politician.
And you kind of have to be in order to be Speaker of the House and broker some sort of agreement between all these disparate groups.
You can't really be a guy who has sort of hard and fast principles unless you're going to be a dictator like Newt Gingrich was very early on when he was Speaker of the House.
And then he ended up being defenestrated anyway after a certain point.
Being an idealist and being Speaker of the House are usually not things that go together.
This is why Mitch McConnell is a very effective Senate Majority Leader, but not the most ideological politician.
Usually, these two things are in conflict.
If you want to be particularly effective as a legislature, as a legislator, usually that means not being a purist.
In any case, Jim Jordan is more of a purist than a lot of people in moderate districts in New York, maybe, who might not love Jim Jordan.
Steve Scalise is considered, again, sort of the party favorite in the sense that he's not coming in from the outside.
He was a second-in-command to Kevin McCarthy.
There are health concerns about Steve Scalise.
There's now been some talk, believe it or not, about Patrick McHenry, possibly.
Not because Patrick McHenry actually has a lot of backing, but because he's the speaker pro tem, so he's sort of just sitting there already.
In order for any sort of speakership vote to happen, the big thing that's going to have to happen is they're going to have to change the motion to vacate rule.
The motion to vacate rule, which is a concession made by Kevin McCarthy to the Matt Gaetz wing of the party, was that he would allow anyone, like a single person, to bring a motion to vacate the chair if they didn't like what he was doing.
And that basically set the stage For him being ousted at any point because he has a very, very narrow House majority.
All it took was basically five Republicans voting against him and he would lose his speakership even if the other 97% of the caucus was in favor of Kevin McCarthy.
And in fact, that's what happened.
So in order for any new speaker to be elected and then have any power at all, that motion to vacate is going to have to be changed.
And according to Punchbowl, that's exactly what's happening.
45 House Republicans, including several power players, have written a letter to the conference effectively demanding changes to the motion to vacate rule that cost McCarthy his job.
A few members who signed this letter said they're not willing to endorse anybody for Speaker until the motion to vacate is overhauled.
Those names include Representative Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma, Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Garrett Graves of Louisiana, Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Mike McCaul of Texas, and Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith of Missouri.
Again, that's a big faction.
That's 45 people.
There's even some talk that McCarthy might get a second go-round here, although I think that that is very unlikely at this point.
Meanwhile, the question is whether any of these people are going to be able to raise a lot of money.
Steve Scalise has.
He's raised about $170 million to support various Republicans over the last decade.
Scalise raised more in the last cycle, 53 million, than Jordan raised over the last decade, 38 million.
So that's going to be a major concern.
Again, being Speaker of the House is not the same as being most ideologically pure.
Usually it's the guy who can cut deals and get people elected.
But this is a pretty significant mess.
We'll get into more of that mess in just one second.
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As we've been saying, in order for any speaker to be able to run the house, he's going to have to have some level of authority over the members of his own caucus.
This is what Representative Johnson was saying, Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, he's saying, you know, we've got a bunch of foundational problems here, and if we don't fix those before a new speaker is named, they're just going to continue.
Let me just lay it out there.
Cut to the chase.
Who are you with in the speaker battle?
Oh, I'm not with anybody yet.
I think that we've got a lot of questions we need these candidates to answer.
In part because if we don't change the foundational problems within our conference, it's just going to be the same stupid clown car with a different driver.
I mean, and that is correct.
If these rules happen to not grant the speaker enough power to actually keep his caucus in line, they're not getting anything done.
Obviously, there have to be consequences for stepping out of line.
It's very funny to me that a lot of people are very happy about Kevin McCarthy getting ousted are a lot of the same people who are very upset at rogues like John McCain in the United States Senate.
I agree with them about John McCain, but the whole point is you can't actually pass anything unless you keep your majority in line.
And so if you remove all the consequences that are available to keep people in line, they will not stay in line.
You'll have a collective action problem.
Representative Max Miller, Republican of Ohio, he says, listen, if we keep fighting each other here, I'm not hopeful we're even going to be able to keep the majority.
I'm going to stand here and tell you by the actions that have taken place this week, I'm not hopeful to keep the majority.
I'm not hopeful to win back the Senate.
You know, I spoke to President Trump three times yesterday, and I explained to him that there could be a coalition government that would happen.
And throughout that process, you know what we would lose in the House of Representatives?
What did Trump say when you told him all this stuff?
He's incredibly upset.
This is where I'd love to get to my point, Manu, about Matt Gaetz using the MAGA cloak to go ahead and to post content on Twitter with no context To make it seem as if he has President Trump's support.
And he paints it in the most broad strokes possible.
That's why he's so good at what he does, is because he's a BS artist.
Okay, so Matt Gaetz is trying to fight back against that perception by doing something that I will say is clever.
So he is saying, okay, I'm going to negotiate on the motion to vacate.
He says, my GOP colleagues want to raise the threshold on the motion to vacate.
Here's a question for them.
If we enact the reforms laid out by Representative Ro Khanna, who's a Democrat from California, nice guy, I've interviewed Ro before, how high would you like the MTV threshold to be?
I'll basically give you whatever you want for this stuff.
What exactly is that stuff?
A ban on congressional stock trading.
Which makes sense to me.
Put everything into a blind trust.
Make some sort of consequence.
You can't involve yourself in it.
12-year term limit for Congress and a ban on political donations from lobbyists or PACs.
Now, we know that this is going nowhere.
Okay, like those last two things are going nowhere.
And the reason those are going nowhere is because there are a bunch of people sitting in Congress right now who are beyond the 12-year term limit.
You're going to open up a bunch of safe districts for Republicans to challenge.
So there's that.
As far as the ban on political donations from lobbyists or PACs, Um, I'm just wondering, if Republicans enact that and Democrats do not, how is that going to work out?
So he's saying he's going to change the motion to vacate rules.
If there's a ban on political donations from lobbyists or PACs, for whom?
For just Republicans?
Because that seems like shooting yourself directly in the face.
Again, I'm perfectly willing to hear Matt Gaetz's list of demands, but if the idea is that all lobbyists and PAC donations go away.
By the way, all a PAC donation is, that is like a group of people who get together and they put together a political actions committee, and then they spend money on behalf of a candidate.
If Republicans take that off the table, and then they let Democrats do it, how exactly is that advantageous for Republicans attempting to win?
I just like lobbyists as much as the next guy, but the notion that Democrats are going to continue doing this and Republicans are going to stop doing this, it puts you at an inherent disadvantage electorally.
Like, are Democrats going to vote to do this overall?
And how exactly would that tie into Republican attempts to get a speaker to push that?
Like, what Matt Gaetz has already shown is that Republicans can push stuff, and if Democrats don't go along with it, Matt Gaetz blames the Republicans anyway.
He did this with regard to border security.
He literally got up the other day and he's like, you guys say that you passed a harsh border security regimen, why didn't you see that become law?
Right, because there's a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president.
And both those institutions continue to maintain that walls don't do things, so I don't understand.
So if Matt Gaetz wants to put forward a list...
The actual achievable things that don't actively damage the Republican Party's ability to beat Democrats.
I'm happy to hear it.
I said this before with Chip Roy was doing this against Kevin McCarthy, which he did earlier in the year.
And then he named a bunch of concessions.
I'm all in favor of that.
That's fine.
But if these concessions are non doable concessions, the Democrats take advantage of, I'm not sure how that exactly is a big win and how it's not exactly posturing.
Again, all of this puts whoever is running for speaker in a pretty major jam here.
Because, for example, Jim Jordan, he has come forward and he says, we're not going to go to a vote without 218, right?
We're going to need 218 in order to go forward with a vote.
We're not even going to have a vote on the Speaker until we've already decided behind closed doors who's the Speaker.
It has to happen.
We shouldn't go to the House floor until we have 218 votes for the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
We shouldn't have to go through what we did back in January.
I'm all for that.
I think I can bring our team together to accomplish that.
And more importantly, once we get that done, to do the work that needs to be done on the border, on crime, on inflation, on all these issues we have to address, I think I can do that.
That's why I decided to run.
I mean, under what conditions is the big question.
Under what conditions?
What actually gets hammered out here is going to define whether the Alastair McCarthy was good or bad.
And it seems like there was no plan in Alastair McCarthy.
So maybe it ends up okay anyway.
Everybody scrambles and they end up coming with some sort of agreement.
If that's the case, then credit to Gates.
But if it doesn't end up that way, if it's just sheer chaos, or if we end up back in the same situation with an incredibly weak speaker unable to keep his own people in line, then Democrats are going to win.
Because again, if you look as though you're running a clown car, people will vote for Democrats even if their policies are absolute sheer garbage.
The one good piece of news here is that Donald Trump, who was speculating just a few moments ago about possibly running for Speaker himself, at least he has stopped that nonsense.
That was dumb.
I'm not even sure why people were considering that.
There's an active House rule right now on the Republican side that if you're under an active indictment, you can't be House Speaker.
Trump's under multiple active indictments right now.
They would have changed the rule.
It would have been super awkward.
I don't know who thought that Trump had the skill set to be Speaker of the House anyway.
It would have been very strange.
But at least that's off the table when Trump endorses Jordan.
So good for Trump for endorsing somebody at this point.
One of the ways you can tell that Jordan is a good candidate is how much the left hates him.
Sunny Hostin of The View.
She says that Jim Jordan is a terrorist.
Literally a terrorist.
Why?
Is he strapping dynamite to himself?
No, he was mean to her one time.
I will just say about Jim Jordan, he has been called by his own party, by John Boehner, a political terrorist.
He's also been linked to the Ohio State sexual abuse scandal.
I testified in front of Congress about something so simple, cameras in courtrooms.
He came in late.
He looked disheveled, and he immediately was screaming and yelling and terrorized me and the other experts on the panel.
And describing him as a terrorist is exactly that.
He's a chaos agent, and it came out of nowhere.
And he had no command of the subject that we were talking about, which made it even scarier.
So to have him, the thought of him being the Speaker of the House, I think leads to more chaos.
But his role model is Donald Trump, who has no command of the language either.
Okay, Joy Behar ripping people for lack of command of the English language.
And it's like watching a dog try to explain to a human, you know, how language ought to work.
You're mostly just amazed that the dog can speak English at this point.
Like Joy Behar ripping people for command of the English language.
Good stuff right there.
Again, that is the single best case for Jim Jordan I've heard.
Now, here is the awkward thing.
Here's the awkward thing.
Whatever deal gets cut, the Republican Party is going to have to now actually reestablish itself as a party.
We've spent the last 15 years in the Republican Party ripping power away from the people at the top of the Republican Party.
That has come with a couple of benefits and some pretty significant costs.
The benefits are that the Republican Party has gotten more right-wing, or at least it did briefly when it came to, for example, spending.
The Tea Party movement, which I thought was terrific, I was a part of it, called on Congress to actually push back on spending.
The problem is that when you take away the leadership of the institutions and you simply destroy them and you say that pretty much every you create a roiling boiling pot inside, for example, the Republican Party and the Republican Party infrastructure has no power to actually dictate Well, at that point, what you end up with is endless chaos.
It's so funny.
Republicans will look at Nancy Pelosi, on the one hand, with deep and abiding hatred for her policies, and on the other hand, with a bit of admiration for the fact that she's kept her caucus together.
I mean, we say this all the time.
Nancy Pelosi is obviously good at her job.
She had a fractious caucus.
She kept it together.
How?
Because she crammed down on them.
She said, listen, I'm not going to give you money.
I'm going to find people to primary you.
I'm going to threaten your committee memberships.
I'm going to run this place like a dictatorship.
This is not a democracy.
This is not a group of people getting together late night at the club and figuring things out with comedy.
This is me running the place.
And so you can't have it both ways.
Either you want to fight Nancy Pelosi, which requires a national consolidation of power around institutions with leadership, or you want to argue amongst yourselves in the name of principle and then lose to people like Nancy Pelosi.
Which is why there are going to have to be some sort of tools that are put in the hands of the House leadership that are going to allow punishment for the members.
Now, right now, I understand everybody's running for Speaker.
And so, at the moment, it's going to be all of them basically appealing to the better angels of nature, right?
So, you have Jim Jordan, for example, defending Matt Gaetz from the calls for expulsion.
There have been some members of the Republican caucus who have said that what he did here is ridiculous.
They should expel him from the caucus.
I don't think you expel him from the caucus when you have a four-seat majority.
But the basic notion here, that going forward, the leadership will not have the tools to punish people.
How exactly are you going to operate it, then?
How exactly are you going to operate it?
So right now, one of the people who's coming under even greater fire than Matt Gaetz in some ways is Nancy Mays.
She joined for no reason anyone can explain seven hardliners in ousting McCarthy.
She is, at best, a moderate Republican, particularly on abortion.
It shocked everybody when she joined to oust McCarthy.
According to Politico, McCarthy and Mace didn't always see eye-to-eye, but the California Republican had helped Mace secure her seat in Congress by pumping millions of dollars into her once-struggling campaign.
Mace has moved to aggressively fundraise off of her vote to balance McCarthy as only intensifying her colleagues' anger towards her.
For Mace, the anti-McCarthy vote may prove a purposeful step in a chameleonic career that's already seen her swing repeatedly between Trump-centric conservative and establishment-bucking centrism.
Mace is making clear her vote for Speaker is up for the taking by either Steve Scalise or Representative Jim Jordan.
Elsewhere in the GOP, revenge is on the menu.
House Republicans are now weighing to expel Mace from at least two centrist-leaning groups she belonged to in the first place.
That follows hard on a very awkward appearance for Nancy Mace on CNN, where she was sending out fundraising emails in the middle of the Astro McCarthy and she was asked on CNN, uh, you ripped Matt Gaetz for doing exactly the same thing earlier this year.
I'm asking people to go to my website at nancymace.org to help me to show their support because there are folks that are coming after me tonight.
I'm glad you brought that up because back in January when there were the marathon votes for Kevin McCarthy to get this job, he was fighting to take the gavel, this is something that you said.
Matt Gaetz is a fraud.
Every time he voted against Kevin McCarthy last week, he sent out a fundraising email.
What you saw last week was a constitutional process diminished by those kinds of political actions.
Of course, now here we are in October.
You and Congressman Gaetz are in agreement on at least ousting McCarthy.
You were on a podcast together today.
You yourself have been fundraising off that vote.
How do you explain that to now?
Well, I have not been fundraising off of this every step of the way.
I made my decision last night.
I made the decision to fundraise over the last 24 hours because of the threats that I have received over fundraising and money drying up, which is why I need help.
Okay, so here's the deal.
Republicans, whoever takes over, is going to have to have some tools at their disposal.
By the way, a government shutdown is still a possibility about 40 days from now.
They have to figure this thing out really quick.
They have to figure out a new speaker.
They have to figure out what their approach is going to be on this government shutdown.
They need to do all of that, like, forthwith.
Brian Reidel, a former aide to Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, who's now at the Manhattan Institute, said it becomes substantially harder to do a government spending deal because the message has been sent that Republicans should not rely on Democrats to pass any bills.
Things can always get worse.
The no-compromise fringe has been strongly empowered and essentially has a veto over House Republican policy, which can't be squared with what Democrats in the White House want.
So if we end up with a government shutdown in the middle of bad economic news, I'll bring you some of that news in just a moment, and it's because Republicans are smacking each other in the back of the head, how are voters going to take that in the next congressional election?
Again, we ought to have a little bit of vision beyond the next five minutes.
We'll get to that in just one second first.
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Okay, meanwhile, the Biden economy here is on very thin footing.
Mohamed El-Erian, who I really trust as an analyst on this sort of stuff, he says that the possibility of avoiding a hard landing here is really, really decreasing pretty significantly.
He has a piece over the Financial Times pointing this out.
He says the economy is likely to weaken as markets internalize the significant likelihood that rates will stay higher for longer.
He says an intense period of rising interest rates, high oil prices, and a stronger dollar is pushing the financial market consensus on U.S.
economic growth away from the comforting notion of a soft landing.
By my count, this will be the sixth time in the past 15 months that conventional wisdom shifts for the world's most influential economy.
It's a pivot that unfortunately is likely to stick for longer this time around, threatening what has been an impressively strong U.S.
economy, undermining genuine financial stability and exporting volatility to the rest of the world.
In just the last two weeks, the yield on the benchmark U.S.
10-year bond has risen by some 0.5 percentage points to around 4.8% as part of a comprehensive shift in the entire interest rate structure.
The move brought the change in yields to an eye-popping one percentage point since the end of June, leading to higher borrowing rates for companies, more burdensome car loans for households, more pronounced and uneven deposit outflows from the banking system as investors shift cash into money market accounts.
Notably, the cost of a 30-year mortgage is up to 8%, making already expensive home purchases even less affordable.
Pushing yields up in an increasingly disorderly manner is a combination of markets recognizing that the higher policy rates set by the Fed will be here for a while and the need to absorb a significant supply of treasury bonds due to large budgetary deficit.
Plus, there's high oil prices.
These are developments that the economy and markets do not enjoy.
They damp growth.
They increase the threat of stagflation.
And that continues to be a serious threat.
There's a jobs report that at first glance looks really, really nice.
A jobs report in September that showed 336,000 jobs added, but If the idea was that the economy is overheated and that we've spent too much money and that the economy needs to be cooled, then adding 336,000 jobs, that's a very high rate, and doing that without really increasing the labor force participation rate in any serious way, which just means that, you know, basically the same percentage of people are in the labor force who were in the labor force before,
Continuing that sort of thing is not going to lead the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates.
They're going to increase interest rates again.
According to ABC News being a little optimistic, it's possible the cooling of pay growth may help reassure the Fed's inflation fighters who are scrutinizing every scrap of data to determine whether to raise their key rate again this year still.
The outside's job growth may stoke worries the economy will expand too fast for inflation to cool.
If they think, if people think, by the way, that the rates are going to go up on bonds, for example, what does that do?
It drives the bond yield up.
The price on the bonds that we have already released into the market is going to go down.
As those bond yields increase, that means eventually people are going to shift their money out of stocks and into these very high yield bonds.
When they do that, the stock market is going to stagnate.
Already, earnings are threatened.
So again, we are in A really tenterhook situation on the economy.
What Joe Biden, I think, might be waiting for here, frankly, is for Republicans to shut down the government.
If they shut down the government, at least he can blame his failing economy on somebody who is not him.
This is just another reason why Republicans need to be smart and strategic about this sort of stuff, as opposed to grandstanding and creating a new speaker who has no power to actually cudgel his own members into line.
Because, let's be real about this, the idea that you're going to pass a party-line budget without any ability to cudgel your own members into line, that's going to be a very difficult thing to do, particularly in the face of a Democratic Senate.
And meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, she just comes out of the woodwork every so often to really wreck American politics further.
I don't know why she's still on the TVs, but she is.
She has now called for the formal deprogramming of MAGA members.
They're in a cult, you see.
If you're a Democrat, and you cultishly and slavishly worship Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, or now an elderly dotard who has the inability to speak from his facehole, then that's because you're normal.
But if you're a Trump fan, or even if you're not a Trump fan, but you voted for him, this means that you are a MAGA member who must be deprogrammed.
I mean, we had very strong partisans in both parties in the past.
And we had very bitter battles over all kinds of things, gun control and climate change and the economy and taxes.
But there wasn't this little tale of extremism waving, you know, wagging the dog of the Republican Party as it is today.
And sadly, so many of those extremists, those mega extremists, take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who Has no credibility left by any measure.
He's only in it for himself.
He's now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions.
And when do they break with him?
You know, because at some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, but something needs to happen.
What does that mean, a formal deprogramming of the cult members?
Does that sound fascistic to you?
It sounds fascistic to me.
Are you talking about fun adult camps like she once talked about?
Re-education camps?
What would formal deprogramming even look like from Hillary Clinton?
This should be frightening.
It should be particularly frightening given the fact that according to Newsweek, the federal government believes the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S.
presidential election is so great, it has quietly created a new category of extremists it seeks to track and counter, Donald Trump's army of MAGA followers.
The FBI, apparently, is going to pursue and prevent what it calls domestic terrorism without direct reference to political parties or affiliations, but the vast majority of its current anti-government investigations are of Trump supporters, according to classified data obtained by Newsweek.
A current FBI official says the FBI is in an almost impossible situation.
The FBI is intent on stopping domestic terrorism in any repeat of January 6th, but they're focusing on former President Trump and his MAGA supporters.
This is what they are doing right now.
Newsweek spoke to over a dozen current or former government officials specializing in terrorism in a three-month investigation to understand the current domestic security landscape and to evaluate what Biden is doing about what he calls domestic terrorism.
And they've been looking at secret FBI and DHS data, tracking incidents, threats, investigations, and cases.
It seems as though they are cracking down on MAGA members.
Presumably at the behest of President Biden, who tweeted out last September, Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country.
So that means the people who oppose Joe Biden need deprogramming.
The FBI needs to target them.
All of this should scare the living hell out of you.
And it's not just, by the way, that they are targeting the common Donald Trump voter.
They're also targeting anybody who's just heterodox.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, continues to target Elon Musk.
How many agencies are targeting Elon Musk at this point?
We've got the SEC, which is targeting him.
We've got the FTC, which is targeting him.
That the NLRB, I believe, is targeting him.
It's just like every agency of the federal government is now targeting Elon Musk.
That's weird.
Why is that happening?
I can't imagine.
Other than that he has heterodox political opinions.
The SEC said Thursday it is seeking another court order that would compel Elon Musk to testify as part of an investigation into his purchase of Twitter, now called X. The SEC said in a filing in a San Francisco federal court, Musk failed to appear for testimony on September 15th, despite an investigative subpoena served by the SEC and having raised no objections at the time it was served.
But two days before scheduled testimony, Musk abruptly notified the SEC staff he would not appear.
The SEC said it has been conducting a fact-finding investigation involving the period before Musk's takeover last year when Twitter was still publicly traded.
The agency said it has not concluded that anyone violated federal securities laws.
They're just investigating, you know, for the fun of it and for the hell of it.
By the way, why would you investigate Elon Musk for buying Twitter and turning it into X?
By pretty much every available account, he has lost tens of billions of dollars in that transaction.
So what exactly is the horrible thing that he did when he took the hit?
The answer, of course, is that put pressure on Musk and hope to shut him up is the basic idea.
Hillary Clinton, of course, spells that one out once again.
She says, you know, we need these big platforms to do what Hillary Clinton wants them to do.
People from all walks of life are mounting a massive resistance to autocracy, to the oppression of women and girls, to irresponsible big tech companies whose platforms are absolutely rife with misogyny and sexism and viral attacks on women in the public sphere.
So we're trying to tell a different story, a different narrative for the future by not only standing up for democracy, human rights and progress, but highlighting women who are doing it in their lives every single day.
So it's the big platforms that are to blame, obviously, says Hillary Clinton.
And we all know which platforms she's talking about right there.
So, Elon Musk tweeted out, He says the probability of it happening is 100%.
Well, we can only hope and pray that that is true, because the threats against Musk have been pretty extraordinary.
against those individuals who have abused their regulatory power for personal and political gain
can't wait for this to happen. He says the probability of it happening is 100%. Well,
we can only hope and pray that that is true because the threats against Musk have been
pretty extraordinary. Okay, meanwhile, it's time for some things I like and some things that I hate.
So, let's begin with a quick thing that I like from my colleague Candace Owen.
So, Candace recently spoke at a campus, I'm not sure which campus this was, and she was hit with the usual question, which is some activist got up, a trans LGBTQ plus divided by sign activist, and said, why are you hurting my feelings?
And hats off to Candace for this excellent response.
Hello.
What do you have to say to the trans students on this campus who actively feel victimized by your presence here today?
Life's tough.
Get a helmet, man.
I'm too pregnant for this.
Next question.
Yep, that is right.
By the way, I love the, I'm too pregnant for this line.
Candace, you know, again, showing her status as a birthing person.
How dare she?
But that's where Candace is at her best.
Okay, other things that I like.
So obviously, I was on a very long plane ride over the course of the evening, and I got a chance to watch a movie that I had not seen when it came out in about 2010, but it's excellent.
It's called Temple Grandin.
Good weekend watch if you happen to be able to get access to it.
The entire movie is about a woman who is Known as one of the great advocates for people who are autistic.
She was diagnosed with autism when she was very, very young.
And the movie is essentially what it's like to be autistic.
It's an excellent depiction of what autism is like.
How autistic people see things in visual terms, but can't really communicate with people in the same way that everyone else can, but have different abilities.
And it's really quite a beautiful movie.
It's definitely worth the watch.
It was on HBO originally.
It has David Straythorn and Chloe Dane and it's really quite good.
So totally worth the watch.
Excellent performances all around.
Temple Grandin, something unique to watch this weekend.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so CBS, I gotta say this is pretty astonishing.
So CBS has different rules for whose face they blur when they're showing criminals or alleged criminals
being taken from say a one particular station to another.
So CBS News in New York covered two different situations very differently.
There is a suspect who stabbed to death a left-wing guy named Ryan Carson in New York City.
And this suspect, his face was blurred by CBS News.
Somebody on the Twitters took that footage and juxtaposed it with the footage of Daniel Penney.
Remember Daniel Penney?
He was the Marine who subdued a threatening man on the subway.
The threatening man was black.
The guy ended up dying.
Daniel Penney, they were perfectly fine with showing his face on the news.
This suspect, however, they were not going to show the face on the news.
Here's what the footage looked like.
This is footage of the man police say they were looking for.
He has not yet been identified, but we are blurring his face at the moment while charges are pending.
We watched again as all of this went down.
More than a dozen officers were around when it happened before entering a home here on Lafayette Avenue.
Well, that's weird.
That's weird.
I wonder why they would do such a thing.
Probably for the same exact reason that every time you read a crime story, if it's a white person who commits a crime against a person of minority status, their race is mentioned in every single story.
And if it's a black person who, for example, punches an Asian person, the race is never mentioned because the media would rather obscure for you the actual data involved in the story than allow you the possibility of maybe thinking the wrong thing.
You can't think the wrong thing.
Meanwhile, people who don't want you to think the wrong thing, that would include Ryan Carson's friends.
So remember, Ryan Carson was murdered And now, people have started to GoFundMe for his death, and they are using the money, I kid you not, to, this is his friends, to give themselves time off from work.
Quote, Hi everyone, we are a collective of Ryan's close friends, reeling from a brutal loss.
We are asking for your help on behalf of his partner in easing the burden and stress of this horrifying situation so that we can have space and time to grieve and remember Ryan.
Immediate needs are to offset the cost of working class people taking time off of work to properly mourn.
So they are paying themselves, in other words, not family members.
Not his girlfriend themselves, which is, I suppose, a unique grift.
That's pretty astonishing sort of stuff right there.
Again, bad ideas have consequences.
All righty, guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into the topic of Sexy Red.
She is a rapper most famous for Poundtown, and she has some interesting words about Donald Trump.
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