Ben Shapiro analyzes the second day of the Trump administration, arguing Democrats lost due to "wokeness" intertwined with failing Marxism. He refutes claims that Elon Musk performed a Nazi salute, citing his Auschwitz visit and the ADL's correction against accusations from Rep. Garcia and Sen. Murphy. Shapiro also critiques Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde's partisan speech and highlights Marco Rubio's unanimous confirmation as Secretary of State alongside a $500 billion "Stargate" AI investment by OpenAI, contrasting this with declining World Economic Forum attendance. Ultimately, the episode frames these events as evidence of a fractured left and a decisive shift in American political and technological power. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, folks, day two of the Trump administration, part two is in the books.
We'll get to everything going on in a moment.
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Well, as you can tell, my voice is still not recovered from the party that is.
But the left is still not recovered.
The left has not regained its semblance of reality or normalcy.
One of the reasons why there's a feeling of unity in the country overall is because the era of weird is over.
The era of the normie is in.
And you can sense it everywhere.
From the kind of stylistic choices that were made at the inauguration to J.D. Vance and his wife Usha with their small children.
The era of it's okay to be a normie, it's kind of good to be a normie, is back.
But the problem is that the left cannot embrace this.
The Democratic Party cannot embrace this.
And that's worth exploring for a moment because The most obvious thing about this current election cycle is that the Democratic Party blew it.
They absolutely blew it on wokeness.
Woke issues are an 80-20 issue in the country.
Americans do not believe in discrimination on the basis of race.
That is an 80-20 issue.
They reject it.
Americans do not believe that little boys are the same as little girls and that boys can be made into girls or vice versa.
That's an 80-20 issue.
These issues are losers for Democrats, and that does make you ask a question.
Why don't the Democrats just separate off from it?
Every time a Democrat tries to separate off from it, that person is immediately raked over the coals.
Most obviously, this happened to Congressman Seth Moulton in Massachusetts, who made the signal error of suggesting that boys should not play in girls' sports and then was clubbed about the ears by his entire party.
Why can't they separate off from this?
If it's an 80-20 issue, why is it so core for them to continue embracing it?
And the answer is that wokeness is now the core philosophy of the Democratic Party.
It is the core philosophy of the left.
It cannot be separated from.
The reality is that in a country of immense prosperity and historic wealth, the typical left-wing case, the Marxist case, that there are sort of classes, and these classes are solid and impenetrable.
That if you're born poor in America, you die poor in America.
About the income mobility, the wealth mobility of Americans in the 1840s.
It is true today.
One of the most amazing things about the people who are standing next to Donald Trump during his inauguration, those tech bros, they did not all grow up uber wealthy.
The people who founded my company, I'll just speak about my company for a moment, Daily Wire was founded by three people.
The best you can say is that one of us grew up lower middle class probably.
Jeremy Boring, co-founder of the company, Did not graduate from college.
Caleb Robinson did not even go to college.
I went to Harvard Law School and I grew up in a 1,300 square foot house in Burbank, California with two bedrooms, one for my parents and one for the kids, which meant four kids in one bedroom and one bathroom for all six of us until I was 11 years old.
The amount of income and wealth mobility in the United States is astonishing.
That is always why it has been a land of opportunity, which means that in America, the typical Marxist case for the flattening and destruction of the free market in the name of equality.
It does not work and has never worked for long.
Sometimes it's applied after an economic crisis when people are looking for some sort of answer, and that's when you get the FDR administration.
That's when you get Obama.
But it doesn't last for long because Americans are an aspirational people.
We're people who like innovation.
We like adventure.
We want the exploration.
The typical left-wing economic Marxist case that everything is economically unfair does not tend to work in a system that has those levels of economic mobility.
The aspiration most Americans have for their lives do not match up with what the left believes, which is you freeze society in place and you redistribute all the winnings, and then everybody is equal in penury.
That is not the aspiration of the American people.
When I campaigned with a series of Senate candidates during the last election cycle, whether I was up in the tip of Ohio with a bunch of white folks in the tip of Ohio, or whether I was down in the Rio Grande Valley campaigning with Senator Cruz with an entirely Hispanic population, everyone wanted the same thing.
To be able to keep their wealth, to build wealth for the next generation, to raise their family, to go to church, and to strive so that their kids would have a better life than they did.
That is why Marxism has never successfully been applied in the United States and will not win in the United States.
And that's also the reason why, for the left, economic Marxism had to be recast as something else.
It had to be recast as race Marxism or sex Marxism, which is wokeism.
That you have to completely restructure the system, destroy capitalism.
The minute they give up that argument, they're relegated to arguing economic Marxism again.
And economic Marxism in the United States tends to lose.
Bernie Sanders is popular with a relatively small cadre of the American people.
His candidacy would have been a disaster for Democrats.
And so they've had to move into a sort of weird combo of economic Marxism, economic progressivism, Elizabeth Warren town, and race Marxism, sex Marxism, wokeness.
Why do I bring this up?
Well, because one thing that's been evident in the aftermath of President Trump's re-swearing in is the left will never give this up.
That made itself absolutely apparent yesterday.
So the National Prayer Service was held yesterday at the Washington National Cathedral.
It's an invite-only event, but it's pretty big.
It's like 4,000 people show up.
President Trump went along with Melania, as well as the entire Trump family.
So too did Vice President Vance and his family as well.
And in the middle of the service, which is sort of interfaith service, kind of, it has a variety of people who get up and speak.
One of the people who was preaching, and I say preaching kind of in scare quotes, is a person named Marianne Buddy.
Marianne Buddy is an Episcopal bishop, a female Episcopal bishop.
So you can imagine, she's not going to be exactly a traditionalist.
And she gets up in front of President Trump and Vice President Vance, and she proceeds to spew a diatribe of woke mind nonsense that has nothing whatsoever to do.
50 years ago, you would be much more likely to hear this in a communist party hall than in a church.
One of the terrible things about the decline of religion in America is that you now hear this kind of trash in churches.
So, this resistance pastor gets up and is going to make herself famous by ripping into Donald Trump and J.D. Vance the day after the inauguration.
And she's going to do so by spewing absolute nonsense wokeness about both trans kids who don't exist.
When I say they don't exist, I mean that there may be kids with gender dysphoria, but the notion that a child knows that their body is not in line with their sex is ridiculous on its face.
She spews nonsense about trans children and about illegal immigrants and suggests that if President Trump wishes to emulate the values of Jesus, Then he must abandon his entire political agenda.
I noticed that Jesus was not in favor of free migration across all borders.
You're going to have to show me where in the Bible he was in favor of that.
And I certainly know that Jesus was not in favor of the idea that boys and girls are the same and are interchangeable and boys can become girls.
But of course, it has nothing to do with religion.
It is what the left has done with nearly every institution.
They've hollowed out the institution.
They hollowed out the church.
And they stuck in a bunch of left-wing, woke garbage.
I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.
There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families.
Some who fear for their lives.
And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.
They pay taxes and are good neighbors.
They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, wadara, and temples.
I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.
Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger.
The notion that you are now citing the biblical injunction to be kind to the stranger to suggest that you cannot have a border as a country is asinine.
The suggestion that the Bible mandates that President Trump...
Allow the mutilation, the hormonal sterilization of small children on the basis that they think they might be a member of the opposite sex is perverse.
And this is a broader issue because, of course, this happened.
Of course, this did.
First of all, shame on whomever did not vet this particular person speaking at the Interfaith Service of Prayer for the Nation on Tuesday.
First of all, the context which your reporting described, that after speaking so harshly and with militaristic overtones to the nation, he had the park of peaceful protesters cleared with tear gas and officers in riot gear to make a symbolic gesture holding a Bible as if to spiritually condone a message and a posture that is antithetical to the teachings.
It's insulting and ridiculous and divisive and silly.
It's also bound to lose because the American people don't believe this, let alone anybody who takes the church seriously, who takes the Bible seriously, whether you're Jewish or whether you're a Christian.
You don't take this particular perspective seriously if you happen to be a person who believes in biblical values.
But the left can't let it go.
They can't let it go.
This is ugly because, again, An interfaith prayer ceremony for the sitting president of the United States should be a pretty nonpartisan affair.
And this person turned it into a deeply partisan affair, which you knew she would.
Again, shame on whoever vetted this person.
But this is part and parcel of a broader unwillingness to let go of the fact that the left's attachment to woke never dies.
The other symptom of this was the most idiotic controversy of the last 48 hours.
And there have already been a bunch of idiotic controversies.
And that was Elon Musk supposedly being a Nazi.
So the press and the left have seamlessly shifted from Donald Trump is a Nazi to Elon Musk is a Nazi.
They can't say that Trump is a Nazi anymore because he's just one.
So instead, they've decided to find the other most prominent person in the administration, Elon Musk, the richest person on earth, and to call him a Nazi.
This all began on Inauguration Day.
So Elon Musk was obviously extremely excited about the election.
And he makes a motion where he reaches over to his chest, his heart, right?
Out to you, and he throws it.
But it's an awkward motion.
It's stiff-armed.
So naturally, the left decides that Elon has become a brown shirt.
That's clearly what happened.
He covertly became a brown shirt.
Sometime, sometime, over the course of the last 72 hours, Elon Musk morphed into...
An actual, honest-to-God, Hitler-loving Nazi making not particularly covert signs.
Now, listen, I've been through this rodeo before.
I'm old enough to remember when Laura Ingraham was accused of this for speaking at the 2016 Republican National Convention while basically waving to the crowd.
They can't let go of the idea that their enemies are evil, that their opponents are evil.
They're not just wrong, they're evil.
And certainly they're not wrong because they are righteous.
They're righteous in their wokeness.
And so another episode of Everyone I Don't Like is Hitler, Elon, is the latest episode of Everyone I Don't Like is Hitler, according to CNN. I just want to look at that salute that he gave again.
unidentified
Just if anybody missed it, we'll just show it again.
He's just wrapped up here.
You can hear the...
There.
All right, so we just showed that.
We just showed that.
Right.
It was quick.
I think our viewers are smart, and they can take a look at that, but it certainly was.
It's not something that you typically see at American political rallies, to put it that way.
No, no, it was not something that you usually would see.
And it was quick, as you point out.
It was very quick, but it was in a moment of intensity for him as he came out dancing, and then he did that.
In case you haven't seen this yet, this today was Elon Musk, richest man in the world, biggest political donor in the history of our country.
This is him today, twice, throwing something that looks like what is politely called the Roman salute at the hockey arena in Washington before Trump's appearance there tonight.
And maybe this is not what he meant when he did it.
Who among us knows what is in the hearts of men?
Mr. Musk has not yet commented on what he was doing here.
But the Roman salute is a thing.
And that is what it looks like Elon Musk was doing, which added a nice blood-curdling chill to the day for many people today.
I know that awkward hand motions from Elon, who is famous for jumping up and down with his hands in the air, absolutely blood-curdling.
Not blood-curdling to these people is shooting a seven-year-old child full of hormones so that he never goes through puberty before cutting off his genitals.
That's not horrifying.
That's humane in the name of Jesus.
But Elon Musk giving an awkward hand salute when he says, my heart goes out to people, okay?
That obviously is just chilling.
Now, I gotta say, I have a pretty high radar for Nazism.
Stake in this particular game.
I feel like I can spot some Nazis when I see them.
My Nazi radar does not go off around Elon Musk.
You know why my Nazi radar doesn't go off around Elon Musk?
Because he's not a damned Nazi.
In fact, Elon and I, one year ago, this week, were in Auschwitz together, visiting Auschwitz together.
We did an event where he spoke about anti-Semitism and how evil it is.
And the evils of Hitlerianism.
Like, what is wrong with you people?
And the answer, of course, is they know better.
Of course they know better.
Of course they know better.
No one honestly believes that Elon Musk was giving a Nazi salute, but they have to characterize their opponents as Nazis.
This, by the way, has been the tactic of the entire post-World War II left.
Anybody who is not a communist is a Nazi.
That is the way this entire political game is run.
Here is Jon Stewart doing this routine.
What's amazing is hearing people like Jon Stewart supposedly speaking truth to power, by which we mean just parroting whatever the left-wing talking point of the day is.
And you talk to anyone, historians, folks that actually study the Nazis and study this actual kind of disgusting display, will have been very clear that what that was.
And he should not just apologize, he should be condemned for those kinds of actions.
So gross, disgusting, but more of what we can expect, I think, from Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
What do you think of Elon Musk, perhaps the president's most visible advisor, Doing two Heil Hitler salutes last night at the President's televised rally.
I was not at the rally, but I can tell you I've been at many rallies with Elon Musk, who loves to cheer when President Trump says we need to send our U.S. space program to Mars.
Elon Musk is a visionary.
I'm looking forward to his work in DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, and look forward to looking how we can be more efficient and effective.
But that is simply not the case.
And to say so is the American people are smart.
They see through it.
They support Elon Musk.
We are proud to be the country of such successful entrepreneurs.
That is one of our greatest strengths as Americans.
This became so ridiculous that even the ADL, who got this stuff wrong routinely, even the ADL was like, no, I'm sorry, no.
It seems that Elon Musk made an awkward gesture and a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.
But again, we appreciate that people are on edge because the ADL is always trying to have the baby.
But come on, guys.
Come on.
Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, who is just deeply dishonest.
You know, I'm moving away, as you all know, from listening to the show.
I tend to attribute most things to stupidity rather than malice.
AOC, I'm not sure that it's possible for a person to be this stupid.
Like, and still function in society.
So, I think it's malice.
Here's what she said.
Quote, just to be clear, you are defending a Heil Hitler salute that was performed and repeated for emphasis and clarity.
People can officially stop listening to you as any sort of reputable source of information.
You work for them.
Thank you for making that crystal clear to all.
So AOC is now accusing the ADL of working for Elon Musk.
The ADL and Elon Musk have been at odds for literally years.
And if we're talking about people who are quite tolerant of the actual Nazism that exists on planet Earth today, AOC is real high on the list.
She's perfectly fine with Hamas ruling the Gaza Strip while denying Israel Iron Dome funding to prevent missiles from falling into state roads.
I noticed that many of the people who are most upset about Elon's supposed neo-Nazi salute had not a word to say when Jews were being massacred on October 7th and had many words to say about Israel's ability to defend itself.
It seems the only type of Hitlerism that they can't identify is the actual Hitlerism that exists on planet Earth today.
The genocidal attempt to destroy Jews in Israel and elsewhere.
Unbelievable.
But again, this all ties into a broader narrative for the left.
And that broader narrative is not just, of course, that Elon is a Nazi, but that the entire right is filled with fascists.
Because if you can't convince people that your economically Marxist program is a good idea, because it isn't.
And if wokeness isn't selling, you are now left with the final argument.
And it's the argument they keep going back to.
They're going to keep going back to this well, even though that well is absolutely bone dry.
That well is, they're fascists.
Now, remember.
Joe Biden ran his entire campaign until he died on stage on this issue and lost.
And then Kamala Harris tried it and lost.
But they ain't got nothing else there.
That's all they got, this empty playbook.
So here, for example, was Jimmy Kimmel suggesting you might go to jail for clapping too loud in Donald Trump's America if you clap at Jimmy Kimmel's jokes.
So Simone Sanders, who was once the press secretary for Bernie Sanders' campaign and then for Kamala Harris in short-lived fashion.
She suggests that the reason that Donald Trump signed the pardons for the January 6th rioters and trespassers and protesters was because he's constructing a private army.
Yes, nailed this.
They're going to be his private army.
One of the things that the left finds the hardest to grasp about January 6th is that despite all attempts, no evidence was ever uncovered suggesting that Donald Trump directed all of the people involved in January 6th to violently overthrow the United States government.
Well, I don't anticipate a single one of our partners will ask about it, obviously.
And you know this well from your time in the administration.
My job is to focus on the foreign policy of the United States.
I have a different job this morning and a different focus.
And it's one that demands 100% of our attention.
And so that's what I'll be focused on and won't be opining on domestic matters at this point because...
Frankly, my focus needs to be 100% on how I interact with our counterparts, our adversaries, our potential enemies around the world to keep this country safe, to make it prosperous.
That's the clear mandate from the president.
It's what he campaigned on.
I think he made it pretty clear yesterday that he wants to reinvigorate an American foreign policy that makes America safer and stronger and more prosperous.
That's the promise that Donald Trump was elected to keep, and that's the one we're going to help him keep at the Department of State.
As well as, by the way, on his way out, commuting the sentence of a man convicted of killing FBI agents.
Zero police officers were killed on January 6th.
On his way out, Joe Biden commuted the sentence of a murderer named Leonard Peltier who killed two FBI agents on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. Any questions, George?
In the end, the left just can't handle it.
They can't handle it.
Donnie Deutsch, who's certainly not a member of the right, is on MSNBC. He said, listen, you may not like Donald Trump, but you really do have to acknowledge that Donald Trump has captured something here.
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Meanwhile, speaking of Secretary He was unanimously confirmed to his position by unanimous vote of the Senate.
Secretary of Defense incoming Pete Hegseth was approved in committee to move forward to a full Senate vote.
I expect that he will be approved.
That is also true of Scott Besant, who has now moved out of committee as well.
So Trump is going to have a full cabinet very shortly.
Marco Rubio gave a statement upon his swearing-in in which he talked about what American policy would be.
He was speaking.
With the folks over at NBC News, here's what it sounded like.
My job is to focus on the president's foreign policy.
And it's going to be a foreign policy that's, frankly, as straightforward as any in modern times.
And that is that the priority of the Department of State of the United States is going to be the United States.
And that's what we're going to focus on.
Today we'll have a meeting with the Quad, with foreign ministers from Australia and India and Japan, to reaffirm the importance of working with allies across the world on the things that are important to America and Americans.
And that's what I'm focused on moving forward.
And so, you know, I hope you guys all understand.
I mean, my days, at least in the time I'm at Department of State of engaging in domestic politics, will be put aside as I focus on the affairs that the United States has around the world and the engagements we have to have to make our country a safer, stronger, more prosperous place.
Look, it's a war and it's a conflict that was started by Russia.
But it is now a stalemate, a protracted, bloody conflict, been incredibly destructive, I would argue, for both Russia and Ukraine.
But Ukraine is paying the biggest price of all to its energy infrastructure, to the people and lives that have lost, to the millions of Ukrainians that have had to leave their countries and are living overseas, the conflict needs to end.
And it's a policy in the United States that we want it to end.
We want to do everything we can to help it end.
We're going to engage in making it end in a way that is sustainable, meaning we don't just want the conflict to end and then restart in two, three or four years down the road.
We want to bring stability.
We have a lot of important and pressing issues around the world.
And I think everyone should wake up this morning and be very happy that we have elected as our 47th president a man in Donald J. Trump that wants to promote peace in the world and bring it to the end of these conflicts.
I support President Trump's commitment to bringing this war to a resolution, to stop the killing.
And he campaigned on that issue, and he feels very deeply, and I support that.
And I believe it falls squarely in line with the founding mission of the United Nations to bring international peace and security.
If you look at my record over the course of my time on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, I have a very strong record when it comes to deterring Russia, pushing back on Russia, including during President Trump.
I think our effort should be supporting, my effort will be supporting President Trump's mission to bring that to a resolution.
Speaking of Elise Stefanik, one of her other points that she was making is that the United States under Donald Trump is going to cut off American funding for terrorism, which is a pretty good start.
We should never tolerate any U.S. taxpayer funds going towards terrorism.
As in my question with the ranking member Shaheen, I was one of the members that voted to defund UNRWA. I was one of the leaders in standing for that important appropriations vote, which there is a bipartisan consensus on with significant members, Republicans, as well as some Democrats who voted to defund it.
I think we can look to organizations within the U.N. system.
Such as UNHCR, such as the World Food Program, working with USAID, which are proven organizations.
They still need reform efforts and modernization, but don't have the terrorist ties that UNRWA had, particularly that were exposed during the October 7th Hamas attack against Israel.
Whether it was Hamas's leader, Sinwar, carrying a UNRWA teacher's passport or whether it was the UNRWA office above a Hamas data center or individuals within UNRWA who participated in the terrorist attack against Israel on October 7th.
So that I fully support the president's commitment to defunding.
And I'm proud to have voted for that in the Congress.
Again, this foreign policy team is not a break from the Trump idea of Trump 1.
It is the same, more of that.
And by the way, the world's a better, safer place when that was happening.
Meanwhile, President Trump is also moving domestically.
Yesterday, he announced.
An up to $500 billion investment from the private sector in AI infrastructure in the United States, which is, in fact, going to be a necessary adjunct to the United States, once again, leading the world in artificial intelligence.
Because either we're going to develop it here in the United States, or it will be developed by many of our enemies and opponents.
OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle are planning a joint venture called Stargate.
On Tuesday afternoon, SoftBank CEO Maisa Yoshisan showed up at the White House along with Sam Altman of OpenAI and Larry Ellison of Oracle to announce the deal.
They say they're going to plan to commit $100 billion initially and pour up to $500 billion into Stargate over the next four years.
These will be giant data centers because, of course, AI requires these enormous data centers in order to process all of this.
And that means energy utility.
And that needs to happen in states like Texas that have an energy surplus.
Together, these world-leading technology giants are announcing the formation of Stargate.
So put that name down in your books.
Because I think you're going to hear a lot about it in the future.
A new American company that will invest $500 billion at least in AI infrastructure in the United States and very quickly moving very rapidly, creating over 100,000 American jobs almost immediately.
Us, when we meet today, we also have to face an erosion of trust in our society.
We all must work together to regain trust in order to progress.
This can only be achieved if we genuinely address the existential fears of the many.
The fears of marginalized, the fears of those who are afraid of accelerating environmental degradation, and the fears of those Who worry about being left out in the transition to the intelligent age?
Was it maybe the high-handed, elitist way in which you decided that the entire world economy was going to run on your values rather than, say, free markets and individual joys?
As the left across the globe begins to deal with the ramifications of President Trump's victory, Olaf Scholz, who will soon not be the Chancellor of Germany, he said, you know, it turns out maybe this whole America first thing, there's nothing wrong with it.
unidentified
It's probably okay.
Yes, President Trump says America first, and he means that.
Nothing wrong about that.
To focus on the interests of one's own country, all of us do that.
However, cooperation and mutual understanding also is in the very own intrinsic interest.
I said that for Germany many times, the European Union is the greatest national interest for Germany.