Being Speaker of the House with an extraordinarily slim majority is a really tough job.
What it means is that you have to cut deals because you literally have no other ability to get anything done.
Because given the fact that right now there is what is called a one-vote motion to vacate rule that is in place in the House of Representatives, that means any one member of the Republican caucus can challenge the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson's job, at literally any given time.
It also means that if you have a bunch of headline-grabbing people in the Republican caucus who are more interested in going on TV than in actually governing or in maintaining a majority or in growing that majority to actually get big things done, well, that can hold up the works.
All this is coming to a head because Speaker Mike Johnson has now put forward a series of bills related to foreign aid.
Now, let me talk about foreign aid for just a second.
Foreign aid is not the United States being wildly charitable.
It is not the United States randomly deciding to drop goodie bags in poor parts of the world.
We're not talking about simply sending food to Somalia or something.
When it comes to foreign aid, there are always strings attached.
That's what makes it in America's interest to do these things in the same way that if you are attempting to sponsor a friend in order to accomplish a particular goal, you might lend that friend money or you might give that friend money just to get back on their feet.
In order to make sure that person remains a friend, an ally, is able to be strong, that is what American foreign aid does.
And this has historically been the role of American foreign aid.
Obviously, in the aftermath of World War II, the United States effectively single-handedly rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan.
Now, one of the things that's been said by a lot of people on the Republican side of the aisle about foreign aid is that all foreign aid is somehow bad.
All foreign aid is somehow terrible and useless and worse than useless counterproductive because if we're not spending it at home, we shouldn't be spending it at all.
This is insanely short-sighted because there are two ways in reality that we spend our defense money.
One is on actual defense, meaning like creating F-35s and F-22s and creating aircraft carriers and submarines.
The other way that we provide for our national defense is by strengthening our allies.
And when our allies are not strong, we have to step in and we have to take the lead.
It turns out that is a lot more expensive.
Allies who are unable to defend themselves lead to enemies who are able to take advantage of that, thus threatening American interests and forcing American involvement.
This has happened over and over and over in American history.
When our allies are not strong enough, the United States ends up Taking a lead role in areas we have no interest in being.
This is why it is worthwhile for the United States to provide a pittance to many countries.
And when I say a pittance, I'm not talking in raw terms.
Yes, some of this is a lot of money in raw terms.
When you're talking about the federal budget of the United States, let us be clear, foreign aid represents well under 1% of the federal budget nearly every year.
One of the things that I've been noticing is a lot of the people who I see screaming to the heavens about the cost of foreign aid.
Oh my God, I can't believe how much this is costing.
I get the feeling that you have a different set of priorities for many of you.
There are some people who are consistent libertarians.
There are some people who say the government shouldn't be spending on social security, and the government shouldn't be spending on disability, and the government shouldn't be spending on welfare, and the government should not be spending on foreign aid.
That is at least a consistent position.
I think it's wrongheaded because again, I think that America's foreign policy interests require
that we have strong allies who eventually will be able to take care of themselves.
The goal of foreign aid, by the way, should be eventually to get other countries
off our foreign aid in the same way that the goal of welfare should presumably
to get people off welfare at a certain point.
I'm fully in favor of that sort of planning.
When it comes to emergency foreign aid, that is a bit of a different story.
However, there are a group of people in the Republican Party
who are basically taking the view that foreign aid is uniquely a bad spend,
that that is really where we're wasting taxpayer dollars.
I don't believe you that this is about fiscal responsibility.
I just don't.
When you continue to vote in favor of five, six, seven trillion dollar budgets every single year, but here is where you start to pinch the pennies, I start to get a little suspicious.
It's the equivalent of the husband who goes on a gambling spree, who takes all the money from the savings and blows it on random lotto tickets.
And then when the wife says, you know, honey, can we go out to dinner tonight?
The husband says, you know what?
We got to pinch pennies now.
And here's where we really got to cut back.
Well, maybe the reality is that we're spending too much money in many of the wrong places.
Again, if you're going to break down the federal budget, we currently spend about 22% of our federal budget every year on Social Security, which I've discussed before, is a giant Ponzi scheme.
It is a Ponzi scheme because it is a defined benefits plan, not a defined contribution plan.
What you pay in is not, in fact, what you get out.
For most people, you get out way more from Social Security than you ever paid in.
Healthcare, which is Medicare, Medicaid, that represents about 26% of the federal budget.
National defense represents only 13% of the federal budget.
Net interest on the debt alone, this is according to the Treasury Department, net interest on the debt, right, how much money we're just paying other countries or paying institutions that have bought bonds, represents 11% of our budget every single year.
So when you tell me that you are deeply worried about the less than 1% that we are talking about spending on foreign aid to allies in wartime, I think that maybe you have a different set of priorities.
And I've been struggling to figure out exactly what that set of priorities is.
What is the actual argument?
Because it seems to me, again, there are principled libertarians who take the no spending argument.
I get that.
But there are a lot of people who are perfectly fine with spending literally trillions of dollars on wasteful nonsense.
Borrowing on the backs of our children and grandchildren on wasteful, counterproductive, economically illiterate nonsense.
But suddenly, when it comes time to provide the aid necessary to, say, Ukraine so that it doesn't get completely overrun by Russia, Or provide the aid necessary to Israel so as to deter a world war in the Middle East.
Suddenly they get very shy.
And that suggests to me that there may be a set of ulterior motives that I don't fully understand.
I'll be honest with you.
I don't really understand what the motivation is for those who seem to suggest that Russia taking Ukraine is of zero interest to the United States.
Russia taking Ukraine would be of rather major interest to the United States, not only because Ukraine is the third largest producer of wheat on planet Earth, but also because Ukraine is strategically placed directly on the border between Russia and Europe, which is presumably the reason why Vladimir Putin wants it.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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Here are a couple of maps from the Wall Street Journal, and it shows the danger, the additional danger to Eastern Europe, particularly the Baltic States, if, for example, Russia were to take Ukraine.
So this first map, is a map by Mitchell Belcher and Noel Mickelson and Thomas Bergeron and a bunch of other people from the Institute for the Study of War.
And what it shows, for those who can't see, is the placement, the forward placement, of units, Allied units, in places like Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, and how those could be redeployed in the case of a Russian invasion along the border of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, From Belarus, from Russia itself.
And what you see is that because Ukraine's border is far from the borders of, for example, Lithuania and Latvia, it creates a massive problem for the Russian military.
They would have to worry very deeply about NATO forces being deployed against Russia via Ukraine.
They would, they would, it would free up American forces and NATO forces and in general allied forces to fight an invasion of NATO allies like Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.
Now, here's what the map looks like if Russia actually takes Ukraine.
If Russia actually takes Ukraine, suddenly, in order to, for example, defend the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, you would have to basically lower the ability to defend places like Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia.
In other words, Ukraine right now is in fact fighting NATO's war.
That is a reality.
Ukraine is in fact weakening the Russian military and providing a bulwark against NATO states being invaded.
That is the real politic looking at maps On the ground recognition of reality.
So how is it in America?
I still am waiting to hear an argument.
Why is it in America's interest for Russia to take Ukraine?
I understand the argument that it's in America's interest to be realistic about the end of war goals.
I've been making that case since basically two months into the war.
The Henry Kissinger case that is in the interest of the United States to provide enough materiel to Ukraine to realistically defend territory they currently hold And to look for an off-ramp.
But if that off-ramp is not available, you have to continue funding Ukraine because if there ain't no off-ramp, there ain't no off-ramp.
Vladimir Putin is recognizing that the West basically does not have the cojones to continue to even sign checks.
We are not talking about Vietnam levels of commitment of American troops.
We're talking about a place where America has lost zero troops.
Zero.
We don't even have troops on the ground in fighting position in Ukraine.
And yet somehow people have heartburn about the sending of the money because this is where they choose to cut.
By the way, I'm noticing a heavy crossover, again, between people who want to spend vast oodles of money on subsidies for various enterprises in the United States and people who are very shy about providing aid to Ukraine.
So this has all come to a head because, according to the Wall Street Journal, House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Wednesday he would plunge ahead with a high-stakes vote to move long-stalled funding for Ukraine, Israel, and other overseas allies, elbowing aside criticism from his conservative flank.
The move sets up an unpredictable weekend showdown that could determine both the fate of the foreign aid package and Johnson's political career.
Democrats will line up likely behind the aid effort.
So basically, Johnson's plan is he's going to bring each one of these subjects, Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan.
He's going to bring all of these and a TikTok ban.
He's going to bring all of these as separate bills, and then he's going to package all of them together because the reality is all of them are going to pass, by the way, with a majority of both parties voting in favor.
That is what's going to happen here.
Yes, Johnson will require Democratic support in order to pass that bill.
Also, a majority of Republicans in the House will vote for that bill.
Also, there is a Democratic Senate and a Democratic President, which means that if it is a priority, for example, for Ukraine not to simply fall by running out of ammo to the Russians, then you gotta make the deal that you can make.
This is the point that Johnson has been making.
He says, we're the greatest nation on earth.
It's time to act like this is basic Reagan Republicanism.
I know that Reagan has become a dirty word for some reason, despite the fact that Reagan won the Cold War and led to the greatest peacetime economic expansion in American history.
Somehow we're supposed to believe that a bunch of clowns riding the back seats of the House of Representatives who have not accomplished anything, literally anything in their entire political career.
Those people have some really mean words about Ronald Reagan's foreign policy.
In any case, here's Mike Johnson.
A strong America is good for the entire world.
Since World War II, really, really, the responsibility for the free world has been shifted onto our shoulders.
And we accept that role.
We're an exceptional nation.
We're the greatest nation on the planet, and we have to act like it.
And we have to project to Putin and Xi and Iran and North Korea and anybody else that we will defend freedom.
It doesn't mean boots on the ground.
We're not the world's policemen.
But we're going to do the right thing.
And I think the Congress is going to take an important stand here.
Now, is this going to be a perfect bill?
No.
There's going to be a bunch of crap in the bill that you don't like.
There's a bunch of crap in the bill I don't like.
That's true on the Ukraine aid bill.
That's true on the Israel aid bill, which includes $9 billion in American taxpayer dollars for the rebuilding of Gaza.
I have no idea how that's going to get parceled out, considering that the real problem in the Gaza Strip is not really that Hamas is like an ISIS outside party that has hijacked the mechanisms of government.
It is, in fact, a popular front in the Gaza Strip, and the civilian population largely supports terrorism.
That is a very different story.
The Ukraine aid bill has been changed somewhat to include about $10 billion in forgivable loans.
So Ukraine theoretically should have to pay back that money.
Will they?
Will they not?
Who knows?
But the bottom line is that the deal that's on the table is the deal that's on the table.
You're either up or you're down on it.
President Joe Biden has now suggested that he would back a package of bills along these lines.
Now, I know that for a lot of people on the right, that's enough to say no.
That anything Joe Biden says yes to, that's enough to say no.
But in reality, doing nothing can sometimes be a worse solution than doing the bipartisan thing.
There are a few people in politics more partisan than I, but the reality is that there are still commonalities of interest.
So, for example, When it came to banning the use of TikTok in the United States so long as ByteDance was not sold to an American company, a lot of Democrats supported that.
Just because Democrats supported that didn't mean that it was a bad bill.
It was, in fact, a good bill, and I am glad Republicans voted in favor of it.
Is this bill perfect?
No.
Does this bill have a lot of problems?
Yes.
Is this bill necessary in order to preserve, for example, the strength of America's allies?
Yes.
And that is why Johnson is right to move the bill again.
A majority of Republicans are going to vote for this.
In the swing districts, if you want Republicans to win a broader majority and then actually make the serious kinds of cuts to government that are necessary, you need to win Congress by more than like three votes.
In order for that to happen, you have to win purple districts.
You know what's relatively popular in purple districts?
This foreign aid bill by every available polling metric.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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Joe Biden put an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about all of this.
He says, And I have serious problems with these bills.
the House must pass urgent national security legislation for Ukraine and
Israel as well as desperately needed humanitarian aid for Palestinians in
Gaza. And I have serious problems with these bills. With that said, does Israel
need to rearm in the face of Hezbollah? Does Israel need to rearm in the face of
Iranian massive barrages of missiles and drones with Iran threatening more action?
Yes.
Does Ukraine need a baseline ammunition in order to claw back against the Russians?
Of course.
According to Biden, if Congress passes military aid for Ukraine and Israel, we won't write blank checks.
We'd send military equipment from our own stockpiles, then use money authorized by Congress to replenish those stockpiles by buying from American suppliers.
That includes Patriot missiles made in Arizona, Javelin missiles made in Alabama, artillery shells made in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas.
That, by the way, happens to be true.
When it comes to this foreign aid, it is not as though the United States simply signs a check to Ukraine or Israel and the money just disappears.
Usually, it is given in the form of a usable credit against America's defense industry.
It means that the United States tends to sell its older tech to these various countries and then replenish its stockpiles with newer tech.
That is the way this typically works.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, the editorial board, the need is urgent because Ukraine's position is deteriorating.
Ukrainian shortages in air defenses are letting the Russian military dominate the air for the first time in two years.
Ukraine's cities are at risk.
Ukraine has lowered the conscription age to 25 from 27.
Manpower is solely needed.
Even the Ukrainians will wonder about manning a front line if they lack the ammo to shoot back at the enemy.
So here's what I'm asking for.
What's the actual argument?
What's the actual argument against this?
Not against the supposed perfection of the bills.
Again, I can name half a dozen problems with each one of these aid bills.
Again, with regard to the Israel bill, the big problem, obviously, is slating out $9 billion for quote-unquote humanitarian aid in Gaza when billions of dollars in humanitarian aid have historically gone to build terror tunnels and rockets.
When it comes to the Ukraine bill, Making sure there is full transparency on the spending of that aid so that it doesn't go into some corrupt oligarch's pocket.
I'm not sure what kind of guarantees are in the bills.
There are serious problems with these bills.
But the argument against these bills has typically not been on the margins.
It hasn't been, let's make an amendment that actually ensures that these things don't happen.
It's been, I'm against all of it.
So I want to hear the argument.
What's the I'm against all of it argument?
The only argument that I've heard, the I'm against all of it, is either totally clownish, or as I say, the libertarian argument, which does not obtain for the vast majority of people in Congress who are voting for budget bills every single day.
For example, when you talk about the clownish, Marjorie Taylor Greene, she is one of the people, she's the one who launched this supposed motion to vacate, and I say supposed because it hasn't really materialized yet, this motion to vacate against Speaker Johnson.
Marjorie Taylor Greene put forward an amendment to the Ukraine aid bill.
When I say this is clowns who are attempting to gain attention, Marjorie Taylor Greene is like Exhibit A in this particular category.
The Congresswoman from Georgia proposed amendments to the foreign aid bills for Ukraine and Israel.
One of the amendments says that quote, any member of Congress who votes in favor of this act shall be required to conscript in the Ukrainian military.
I'm sorry, this is dullard stuff.
This is low IQ idiocy.
Required to conscript in the Ukrainian military.
First of all, one of the arguments that I keep hearing that is just nonsensical is this idea that how can we sponsor Ukraine in conscripting people and sending them to the front lines as battle fodder?
I mean, Vladimir Putin is doing that right now with his own people and it turns out that Ukrainians are overwhelmingly in favor of defending their country by every available metric.
But Marjorie Taylor Greene doing this ridiculous, you have to join the Ukrainian military in order to want Ukraine to stand up to Russia.
It's just dumb stuff.
I'm sorry.
If this appeals to you, I don't know what to tell you.
It's a dumb argument.
It is not even an argument.
It's an emotional appeal of absolute stupidity.
By the way, Two other amendments introduced by agreeing to the Ukraine bill are to force Ukraine to close all of its bio-laboratories before it receives any more money.
Okay, there's been this myth that's going around that somehow Ukraine has a series of bio-laboratories that are creating bio-weapons for unleashing in Russia.
The evidence to this has been scanty at best.
And for a report to be carried out before any more funding is sent to prove that, quote, Christian churches in Ukraine are able to operate free from government interference.
Okay, this particular line of nonsense has been that because Ukraine has cracked down on the Russian Orthodox Church, which is a tool of the Russian state inside Ukraine, that somehow this amounts to cracking down on Christians more broadly.
Russia cracks down on Seventh-day Adventists.
They literally arrest them.
There's a bunch of specious arguments masquerading as a policy, and it's not a policy.
It's basically just oppositionality for cliques.
Here are some of the Republicans who said that they will not support the aid bills.
Again, some of the reasons may be good, like we spend too much money on everything, including this.
And some of the reasons are just garbage.
Bet for hours last night and proposed different paths for the speaker that would have avoided the abject surrender represented by his strategic choice here.
There's no other way to describe it.
It's surrender.
It's disappointing.
I won't support it.
It's disappointing.
It's completely detached from what our base wants, what our voters want.
The strategy is not to try.
I think the strategy is to fall on a sword.
Now, the reality is that what you hear one of those Congress people from Arizona saying, that the base doesn't like the Ukraine aid, that's true.
By polling statistics, Republicans right now, about 57% of Republicans, according to Gallup, say that the United States is doing too much for Ukraine.
However, that is because of the drumbeat that suggests that there will be no ill consequences if the United States does not actually provide additional aid to Ukraine.
That drumbeat is false.
There will be ill consequences if you actually provide no additional aid to Ukraine.
The actual question should be, how many Republicans are okay with Russia taking Kiev?
How many Republicans are fine with Russia being in charge of Ukraine, ingesting it?
That would be the actual question right there.
And that's the one that nobody will answer, including many of the people who currently oppose the aid to Ukraine.
I just want, like, what is their plan?
I just...
So much of the of the sort of no caucus in the Republican Party right now is about not having a plan.
It's about saying a thing and then having no plan whatsoever.
It's what they did when they got rid of McCarthy.
They got rid of McCarthy like, oh, what's what comes?
We have no idea what comes next.
We just didn't like him.
So he's gone.
So now we'll spend weeks and weeks and weeks going through every Republican until we get to Mike Johnson.
And now, they also have no plan.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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Their new no plan is, what if we get rid of Johnson in favor of literally no one?
So here is Thomas Massey, who has now joined this charge.
Here he was, trying to explain that Johnson should resign.
Now, let's be clear about this.
The Republicans currently hold, after all the retirements, 218 seats in the House, which means they have like a two-vote majority.
With that said, Johnson has the support of probably at least 200 members of the Republican caucus.
Maybe more, given the fact that nobody wants to do this crap again.
So, when he says that Johnson should resign, Thomas Massie has the support of him and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
And Johnson has the support of 200 plus members.
Why exactly should he resign in favor of a guy who has no support?
That's silly.
But Massey says that he should announce his resignation and that will give people time to find a replacement.
Or maybe he doesn't have to because you know what you're going to do the next time you don't like something that the Speaker does, which you will because your name is Thomas Massey and you oppose all these things.
Again, Thomas Massey, I will say this for Massey, Massey is a consistent libertarian.
He's like Ron Paul.
He just doesn't want any spending on anything.
Now, that doesn't mean that I think that all of his motives are pure.
He has tweeted out in the past, for example, that being pro-Israel is effectively being anti-American patriotism, which is insipid.
But he's at least consistent in his voting record.
That consistency, however, is the hobgoblin of a small mind when it comes to how the Speaker is supposed to govern.
The Speaker can't just say no to everything the way Thomas Massey would, which is why Thomas Massey is not Speaker.
And if he were Speaker, the Republicans would be in the majority for, oh, approximately however long until it is the next election.
Here is Massey saying Johnson should resign.
Well, yesterday in our GOP conference, I asked him to resign.
And I'll tell you why.
Number one, he's just not equipped for this job.
Every negotiation he's gone into with Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden, he's received nothing in exchange.
He's either not good at negotiating or he's negotiating for their side.
He's done an omnibus that broke Nancy Pelosi's spending records.
He reauthorized FISA without warrants.
Now he's going for the trifecta to pass the Ukraine spending without doing anything to enforce our border.
That will be three strikes in addition to just the poor management of the House here, the House of Representatives.
Okay, the Republicans, by the way, it should be mentioned here, on the border security part of the foreign aid package, they had additional border security in a Senate bill.
Republicans decided it wasn't enough.
I thought it wasn't enough.
I thought it was a problem.
And so Republicans stripped that out, saying that Joe Biden already has the authority to take many of the actions necessary to secure the border.
You can't have it both ways.
You can't have it where I want more border security, but not like that.
No, no, no.
And then it gets stripped out.
Well, but there's no border security in this bill.
They've already passed H.R.
2.
You know where it's going?
Nowhere.
Democrats are not passing H.R.
2.
One of the signal errors that people make when it comes to politics is the assumption that people who oppose you have no agency.
That people on the other side of the aisle somehow don't exist.
It's a wild assumption when it comes to politics, both foreign and domestic.
On the foreign policy level, you'll see people when it comes to foreign policy, well, America didn't do that, then the other side wouldn't act like they are.
Maybe they would.
Maybe they have their own independent interests.
Maybe it turns out that Vladimir Putin had an interest in taking the Donbass and Crimea, regardless as to what sort of confusing things were being said about NATO.
Maybe it turns out, for example, that Iran wants to destroy Israel regardless as to whether Israel goes into Rafah or not.
Maybe it turns out that there are plenty of people on Earth who all have free will and all have their own interests, including Democrats, who are going to be on the other side of the table of a negotiation in which they hold the Senate and the presidency.
But, you know, it's fun to pretend that you're the only person on Earth, and especially when you're on an island like some of these legislators, meaning just doing what you want to do without any real impact on the world.
Well, I mean, I guess that's fun.
I guess that's interesting.
The problem is when you're holding up another 210 members of Congress out of some sort of peculiar ire against Mike Johnson, the most conservative Speaker of the House by every available metric in the history of the United States, somehow it just doesn't wash.
It just doesn't wash.
This is all unworkable.
It's all foolish.
All the incentive structures for Congress are off.
The only way to rectify this problem is for Mike Johnson to stop giving in to the people on the fringe, which is what he is doing by pushing forward these bills, all of which will pass with a majority of Republican support, including the Ukraine aid bill in the House.
My prediction is the Ukraine aid bill in the House will pass with a majority of Democrats and a majority of Republicans.
The Israel aid bill will pass with a majority of Republicans and, I would think, a majority of Democrats.
The Taiwan aid bill will pass with a majority of both parties.
When you're talking about a bipartisan bill and it gets a majority of both parties, that's kind of the definition of the thing.
And again, I know bipartisanship has become a dirty word because anything the other side likes must be terrible.
That also happens to be the nature of any negotiated settlement.
Everyone walks away from the table unhappy.
That's just the way negotiations happen.
There's never been a negotiation that was successful in which both parties walk away happier than they were with their original positions.
That's not how it works.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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Again, this is all about making the House unworkable, which means, again, there are a lot of Republicans who like being in the minority.
They want Hakeem Jeffries to be Speaker.
That's really what they want at this point.
I don't see any other logic to challenging Johnson.
Which is why, after these foreign aid bills are done, Johnson needs to nuke this idiotic rule.
I've been urging him to do it for weeks on the air.
He needs to nuke this idiotic rule that one member of Congress can hold up the entire works of government.
Out of some peculiar ire at the Speaker of the House.
Here is GOP Representative Kelly Armstrong correctly summing up who the hell wants this job.
Well, I'm standing with the Speaker because I actually consider him a friend, and I think he is trying to do the toughest job in politics, and I think, given all the circumstances, he's doing it very admirably.
My recommendation to any of my colleagues that are thinking about doing this is go back to October, where we have 13 weeks, where we go through all of this.
Now we're walking into an election cycle.
We have tremendous things that we can campaign on.
That is correct.
But maybe that's the idea.
No one wants the job.
Maybe the idea is only Democrats want the job.
So, if that's the case, pack up your bags and go home.
Because you screaming from the opposition benches does nothing to actually advance the agenda.
And meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to dotter around saying idiotic things.
So Iran is threatening more retaliation against Israel should Israel take action after it openly declared war on Israel.
Iran literally fired 350 drones, missiles against Israel, and Israel has not yet responded.
Not only that, over the course of the last 48 hours, Hezbollah, which is an Iranian proxy, fired a suicide drone into an area of Northern Israel, wounding 14 people and killing four.
That is an Iranian offensive action.
And Israel has responded in Lebanon.
They've not responded in Iran.
One of the reasons they've not done this is because it seems that there's been a deal with the United States to postpone any sort of strike against Iran directly, at the behest of the United States and the EU, so long as Israel gets to clean up in Rafah and finish the job in Rafah.
Now, Joe Biden is not going to say that out loud, because Joe Biden still wants to cater to the anti-Semites in his base, the pro-Hamasniks in his base.
So here was Joe Biden yesterday.
He is not with us.
This is an incredible clip.
So Joe Biden is talking about how he told Israel not to go into Rafah.
Okay, but he doesn't know anything.
So he literally says that Israel should not go into Haifa.
And now, for those who are not versed in the Middle East, Rafah is a Palestinian city in the Gaza Strip on the border with Egypt.
Haifa is an Israeli city on the coast of Israel.
So apparently he told Israel not to invade its own city.
Well, I mean, I think maybe they'll agree, actually.
The first time Israel has agreed with Joe Biden on anything for a while, I presume they also will not invade Haifa.
I'm so glad he stopped it.
And I made it clear to Israelis, don't move on Haifa.
It's just not, I mean, anyway, I just, look what we did recently when Israel was attacked.
He is so ridiculous.
He is not with us.
He is a weakling.
Everyone perceives him as a weakling.
Just another reason, by the way, why the United States should actually signal its support for its allies with things like foreign aid.
It's the only thing the legislature can do.
The president has plenary power over foreign policy, but the legislature does get to declare what its priorities are in terms of, say, funding American allies so that those allies are strong.
Here's the unspoken reality.
Once the aid goes through to Israel, Israel will have the wherewithal to take action independent of Joe Biden, which will be good for the United States because Joe Biden's foreign policy is trash.
It is absolute trash.
And the same thing is true in Ukraine, where Joe Biden slow walks the aid to Ukraine such that all of the battle lines got frozen.
One of the ways of ending around Joe Biden's foreign policy is by making sure that America's allies have weaponry so that they can act on their own.
Because Joe Biden is such a bad foreign policy president that it turns out that America's allies are doing a better job of assuring American interests than Joe Biden is.
That is the reality.
Okay, in just one second, we will get to the latest in progressive anti-Semitism.
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Okay, meanwhile...
Progressive antisemitism continues apace.
Now, progressive antisemitism is built on a conspiracy theory, as all antisemitism is.
Antisemitism is a conspiracy theory about Jews.
It's different from other forms of racism because of the way in which it manifests.
So because Jews are both an ethnicity as well as a religion, antisemitism is a theory about those who hold the religion and people of Jewish ethnicity, depending on the manifestation.
And it basically says, unlike other forms of racism, which declare that a group of people is lesser, If you are racist against blacks, it's because you believe they are inferior.
Antisemitism is a conspiracy theory about Jews that they are coordinating in control of power in various industries and thus in charge of systems.
And because they're in charge of those systems, those systems are designed for their own benefit and they're harming other people.
It's why antisemitism is incredibly virulent because, as it turns out, people who are powerless very frequently hate the system.
And if they see a disproportionate number of Jews who are doing well in the system.
They then blame the Jews, and they claim that the Jews have rigged the system for their own benefit.
Also, it's really virulent because if you believe that people are actually controlling the system that harms you, that justifies violence against them.
Which is why anti-Semitism has tended to be incredibly violent over the long history of anti-Semitism.
So when it comes to progressive antisemitism, it does cross paths with the DEI mentality.
The DEI mentality is that if there is inequality in group outcome, it must be because of injustice in the system.
Therefore, groups that are disproportionately successful in the system are beneficiaries of the system and The designers of the system.
That is the case for progressive anti-Semitism.
And it's why you see people like Queers for Palestine, people who hate the system.
They don't like the patriarchy.
They don't like heteronormativism.
They don't like the system.
And similarly, you have people who are pro-Hamas.
They also don't like the system because they are disproportionately unsuccessful because they support terror and evil.
And they look at the system, all of them.
They say, I don't like that system.
That system is bad.
And you know who's in charge of that system?
See a lot of Jews there.
Must be the Jews.
That is where progressive antisemitism comes from.
It drinks from the same exact well as the sort of Marxist conspiracy theory about power, which is why Karl Marx was the world's most notorious example of a self-hating Jew.
He was ethnically Jewish, but really, really hated Jews, like a lot, and wrote full essays on it.
And so progressive antisemitism has come to the forefront.
A protest in New York City on April 15th, just a few days ago.
They're out of the closet now.
I mean, it used to be that they were pretending that it was about protecting Gazans, their opposition to Israel taking out Hamas.
They tried to pretend that for like a hot second.
There were a few problems with that.
Number one, it clearly was untrue.
They were protesting Israel between the October 7th attacks and Israel's retaliation against Hamas.
Second, they're going out to rallies now and just waving Hezbollah flags and Hamas flags and all the like.
Here we go.
That yellow flag is the flag of Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is a terror group.
It is a terrorist group, and they are waving the flag of Hez... First of all, how do you even obtain a flag of Hezbollah?
Can you get that on Amazon?
Like, where do you get that?
My guess is not from good people.
I don't feel like you're heading down to your local Salvation Army and picking up a Hezbollah flag.
Well, don't worry.
They were also wearing Hamas headbands at this rally.
So that was great.
Here is some footage of them wearing Hamas headbands, as you'll see in just a moment.
There we go.
So we're wearing a keffiyeh and a Hamas headband.
Again, I'm not sure where you get the shahada, which is the Hamas headband, which pledges martyrdom, or why you would be in the United States wearing it, but it seems to me that that's kind of a threat to the United States.
You are a terror supporter.
You like terrorism.
Hamas is a terror group.
Not just that.
Just in case you were worried that maybe it really isn't about America at all.
They burned American flags and chanted Death to America at this rally.
So, you know, they're being pretty obvious about this sort of stuff.
So what happened here is a pro-Israel student from Colombia brought an American flag.
The protesters grabbed the flag, stomped on it, and then tried to set it on fire.
So yeah, delightful group of people.
The good news is pro-Palestinian activists, they think that death to America is just like a normal phrase.
It's just a thing you say, right?
It's like how around the holiday season, you say Merry Christmas to people.
I mean, when people say death to America, apparently it's just like, you know, aloha in Hawaii or something.
What do you think about people chanting death to America as they did in one video clip?
I think that that's just a phrase maybe said by an individual.
Well no, the whole crowd began joining in.
I didn't see that.
Yeah, yeah.
So this guy said it and then the whole crowd began chanting it.
Would you condemn that?
I'm here to talk about the entire Israeli government.
You're here to answer my questions, actually.
Would you condemn what they were chanting, death to America?
I think we should condemn Palestinians actually being killed.
OK.
That's not the question I'm asking you.
So I will ask you about Gaza.
But on the question I asked you, would you condemn people in America chanting death to America?
What do you say?
I don't condemn how people choose to express their rage verbally.
I don't condemn that because at the end of the day, the reason they're saying that is because the US is sending the tax dollars and the weapons that are actually creating death to Gaza.
So do you support them chanting death to America?
I don't chant that myself, so I don't know why you're trying to trap me in this type of argument.
I'm asking you to condemn it, you don't want to.
Okay, well there's a reason she doesn't condemn it, because she's fine with it.
It's just a phrase people use, you know, because they're mad.
Because they like Hamas.
Meanwhile, by the way, that is an opinion that is also apparently held by progressive representatives.
Here's Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who's a member of the Hamas squad.
She was asked about the protesters chanting death to America, and she's like, oh, I didn't hear it.
Don't know anything about it.
Okay.
The queen of TikTok knows nothing about the TikTok pro-Hamasniks.
Does it sound like this is pro-Palestinian or anti-American if they're burning American flags and chanting death to America?
I'm not privy to... I haven't seen these reports.
I'd have to check for them myself.
Do you support burning the American flag and chanting death to America?
Anti-Israel protesters blocking the Brooklyn Bridge burned the American flag and chanted death to America.
Do you condemn this type of rhetoric?
We've got to get her on to her next event.
Are you okay with people burning the American flag?
We're in a big hurry, guys.
She's walking, no answer.
That is an unbelievable thing.
By the way, it should be in every Republican campaign ad against these people.
And if Republicans had their heads out of their asses and weren't too busy shooting each other, they might, you know, direct their fire at the progressives in the Democratic caucus who are well respected and treated with the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.
Who literally cannot condemn people burning the American flag.
It turns out the American people don't like that very much.
Meanwhile, the Columbia president was at a hearing on the Hill.
I know a lot of students at Columbia.
The anti-Semitism at Columbia has been extraordinary.
Huge levels of anti-Semitism, including against some professors who have been, in some cases, physically confronted.
But this Columbia president learned her lesson.
So you remember last time there was a congressional hearing with university presidents,
including Claudine Gay of Harvard, who's no longer the president.
They refused to suggest that from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
Genocidal calls for the destruction of Jewry were anti-Semitic.
The Columbia president learned her lesson, and she gave a little more ground.
Were you aware of those statements before the hiring?
I share with you your repugnance at those remarks.
I totally understand that.
On my watch, faculty who make remarks that cross the line in terms of anti-Semitism, there will be consequences for them.
What are the consequences in this case?
I have five cases at the moment who have either been either taken out of the classroom or dismissed.
And is he one of those?
He will never work at Columbia again.
Columbia has learned its lesson.
Okay, so the Columbia president is trying to wiggle out of the fact that Columbia has been extraordinarily tolerant toward anti-Semitism, but it seems like maybe the worm is beginning to turn a little bit here.
It turns out that even mainstream leftists are beginning to realize that the pro-Hamas people may be not their best political friends.
Maybe they're a problem.
So, I had urged yesterday Google to fire all of the idiot employees who occupied their offices.
And they did.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Google has now fired 28 employees who protested this week against the tech giant's cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.
In a company-wide email, Vice President for Global Security Chris Rackow said that Google dismissed the employees after an investigation found they were involved in the protests at the company's offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California.
The protests were unacceptable, extremely disruptive, and made co-workers feel threatened, Rackow said.
The overwhelming majority of our employees do the right thing.
If you're one of the few who are tempted to think we're going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again.
Well, good for Google, because this is the way companies ought to work.
Maybe the worm is beginning to turn.
Maybe the radicals are starting to lose some of the steam.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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Meanwhile, the Senate Democrats, people who really, really believe in the Constitution
and procedures and institutions, because Donald Trump is a threat to the Republican, all this.
So yesterday they did something that was actually unprecedented.
They simply just voted down impeachment charges.
So the House of Representatives impeached Alejandro Mayorkas very, very narrowly by like one vote the other day.
And Alejandro Mayorkas then had those charges moved over to the Senate for trial.
The Senate simply rejected the charges.
They said, we're not even going to consider this.
They said that we know that this doesn't meet the high standards for removal.
They have a 51-49 majority.
They said they had to quote, set a precedent that impeachment should never be used to settle policy disagreements, which is amazing.
The Democratic Party, including Chuck Schumer, impeached Donald Trump twice basically for policy disagreements without alleging a crime.
And those impeachments were in fact heard in the Senate of the United States.
Here's the Senate voting down the impeachment articles without even hearing them.
A wild day on Capitol Hill today.
We're following breaking news in the Senate where the Senators are just wrapping up their vote to end the impeachment trial of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Democrats voted against both measures and they are moving on to new business.
Okay, so they voted it down with only Democratic votes.
There were no Republicans who voted in favor of getting rid of the impeachment without even so much as a hearing.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, he said what he has said before about Democrats violating precedent, which is this is going to come back and bite you.
Madam President, we've set a very unfortunate precedent here.
This means that the Senate can ignore, in effect, the House's impeachment.
It doesn't make any difference whether our friends on the other side thought he should have been impeached or not.
He was.
And by doing what we just did, we have, in effect, ignored the directions of the House, which were to have a trial.
We had no evidence, no procedure.
This is a day that's not a proud day in the history of the Senate.
Okay, what it really means is that impeachment is no longer a tool.
That's what it really means.
As long as the party of the president and of the Senate majority are the same, every single impeachment that is brought by the opposition party in the House, for example, or brought even by a bipartisan majority in the House, will immediately be summarily rejected.
Without any necessity for actually hearing evidence or doing a trial or anything remotely like that.
So, once again, Democrats, they're taking the short-term win at the expense of what is going to be a long-term failure on their part.
If Donald Trump is elected again, Democrats will try to bring an impeachment forthwith, and he'll just get killed in the Senate, like, immediately.
Without any sort of serious consideration at all, no matter what Donald Trump does at this point.
That is the way impeachment is likely going to work from here on out.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden focusing in on the issues that really matter.
So yesterday, Joe Biden has a habit of telling weird stories.
So here was a weird story that Joe Biden told.
This is one of his weirder stories.
I hadn't heard this one before.
And whenever we hear a weird Joe Biden story, I feel a necessity to put a spotlight on it because frankly, they're wildly entertaining.
It's like the most entertaining part of Joe Biden is that somehow he mixes up stories of his life with like Warner Brothers cartoons.
It's really great.
He'll be talking about, I remember one time I was hunting in the woods and I saw a wascally rabbit and I tried to hunt that wascally rabbit but suddenly the wascally rabbit was dressed as a very attractive female and I wanted to marry but it was all a trick.
And so he told a weird story about his uncle.
Ambrose Finnegan, we called him Uncle Bozy, he was shot down.
He was in the Army Air Corps before there was an Air Force.
He flew single-engine planes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea.
He volunteered because someone couldn't make it.
He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals.
So there he was, telling a story about his uncle getting eaten by cannibals or something.
So his uncle was Captain James Cook.
I'm alive.
So there he was, telling a story about his uncle getting eaten by cannibals or something.
So his uncle was Captain James Cook.
Good story, Pops.
By the way, how did he tie that into what's happening?
He then said, what I was thinking about when I was standing there was when Trump refused to go up to the memorial for veterans in Paris and he said there were a bunch of suckers and losers.
Okay, again, that is a completely unsubstantiated story from Democratic Party stenographer Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic.
But I love that he somehow is able always to tie it into a family story that is usually false.
Right, usually it's like somebody dies in a terrible incident in Afghanistan.
He's like, my son Bo died in Iraq.
It's like, no, he didn't.
That's not true.
Or he meets a gay couple.
He's like, that reminds me of that time when my dad said, Joey, it was 1957 in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
And there were two men just going at it like jackhammers on the street.
And my dad said, that's what love looks like, Joey.
That never happened.
I got to tell you, I would listen to a Garrison Keillor-like show from Joe
Biden, where he just tells these bizarre stories. That's when Gordon Bob started rubbing my leg hair.
This person, yeah, yeah.
And meanwhile, Donald Trump is still very much alive and kicking.
So, Donald Trump is stuck to New York.
He has to be in New York for his trial.
And so, he ended up down at a bodega.
This is a thing that Donald Trump is very good at.
Many of his best moves, politically, lately, have been going to places and then just meeting with regular people, which is a thing that Joe Biden looks really awkward with because, like every other octogenarian who is losing it, he doesn't know where he is.
And he goes to eat ice cream and they're like, and he doesn't even know where he is or what's happening.
They have to usher him to a seat.
But here was Donald Trump at a bodega in New York.
David, you mentioned the trial.
Of course, the former president, unable to hit the campaign trail because of that trial, go to key battleground states, so he's using what's available right here in Manhattan.
Take a look at this video right here.
This is the moment Mr. Trump arrived tonight.
People lined up along 139th and Broadway, some of them cheering, others heckling the former president as he made his way inside the Hamilton Heights bodega to meet with Jose Alba.
Alba is the bodega worker who fatally stabbed the man in July of 2022 in a case of self-defense.
I think it's good for the community to see that he's showing up, you know, and I've never seen Trump come to like a community like this, so it shows a lot and I appreciate him doing that and showing the community that he's there to make things better.
He's only here for the campaign and everything else.
When the incident actually happened, he was nowhere to be found.
Like the rest of the politicians.
So why does he care now?
It's an election year.
Okay, well, yes, of course he's there because it's an election year.
Also, Democrats tried to prosecute the owner of the bodega.
It was a good political win for Donald Trump.
Joe Biden is stumbling around, not knowing where he is or how to speak English anymore.
So, that's a pretty strong contrast in imagery.
Okay, in just one second, we'll get to Joe Biden's latest campaign, which he believes that WNBA players need to be paid more.
We'll get to it in a moment.
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