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Feb. 12, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:03
The Trump-Musk REVOLUTION Continues!
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Democrats keep claiming that we're in a constitutional crisis.
They haven't learned their lesson yet.
They kept saying during the last election cycle that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy.
You heard this over and over and over.
Republicans, Trump, they were a threat to democracy.
Everything Trump did was a threat to democracy.
Meanwhile, they were weaponizing the Department of Justice to go after President Trump.
Joe Biden was thinking of new ways nearly every day to violate the Constitution.
Well, now, when that particular line didn't work, the threat to democracy line, they've transmuted it into a constitutional crisis.
You see, it is now a constitutional crisis if the elected president of the United States appoints a person to go through all of the executive branches of government, all various agencies, and root out waste, fraud, and abuse.
Now, this is a constitutional crisis.
No one thinks this is a constitutional crisis, which is why Donald Trump's approval ratings remain in the mid-50s at this point, the highest they've been in his entire career.
There's a brand new poll out from the UK Daily Mail.
And it shows his approval rating at 53%.
53%.
That includes 57% of men, 49% of women, 51% of people aged 18 to 29, and 59% of people aged 30 to 49. In fact, the people who are least likely to support President Trump at this point are the older folks, the 65 pluses.
Democrats must be absolutely peeing their pants at this point.
Because here's the thing.
Most Americans look at what Trump is doing, particularly with Elon Musk.
And his revolutionary approach to government, which again, should just be common sense.
Send somebody in to audit all these various agencies.
Figure out where the money is being wasted and then don't waste our taxpayer money.
This should just be basic common sense.
This should be a 100% issue.
Democrats are freaking out because, as we've discussed, the reality is the Democrats have built an entire bureaucratic system designed to do their will, whether they are in power or out of power.
The deep state that Donald Trump complained about during his first term.
He was talking about...
The deep state thwarting his will on everything from foreign to domestic policy or militarizing itself against his presidency by putting together ridiculous nonsense like the Mueller report.
But the reality is the deep state, meaning a permanent bureaucratic structure designed to funnel taxpayer money to allies of Democrats in and out of government, that has been a century-long project and Donald Trump is systematically dismantling it.
And the American people are for this.
If Democrats try to claim that that's a constitutional crisis...
A threat to democracy.
The elected president going to unelected bureaucrats and telling them not to spend taxpayer money.
That is one of the least fascistic things I've ever heard in my entire life.
It turns out that fascism is about centralization of power in one man or in an oligarchy who then take more control over the people.
I have yet to hear of a fascist movement that delegates more power back out to the people away from a centralized bureaucracy.
I've never heard of anything remotely like that.
Please, name the last fascist movement.
That minimized the power of the executive in Americans' lives.
You're going to have to figure this one out.
But Democrats don't want to figure that one out, so they're just going to keep shouting nostrums.
Well, yesterday, President Trump kept the momentum going.
According to the Washington Post, President Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order that calls on federal agencies to work with Doge in a bid to cut their existing workforce and limit future hiring.
Ahead of that signing, Trump was joined in the Oval Office by Elon Musk, and it was highly entertaining.
So, first, Trump had in Musk and Elon likes to bring around his son X. Like, everywhere.
When we went to Auschwitz together, he brought his son X. Because his basic principle is, I'm bringing my kid everywhere, and since I'm the richest person in the world, I can.
I will say, I love the normalization of kids in public life.
I think it's wonderful.
I bring my kids virtually everywhere.
I have four of them.
They're constantly with me.
As they get older, I'm going to start bringing them to events so they can experience them and learn.
This is how kids learn, is by following their parents around.
Between J.D. Vance bringing his kids on foreign trips and Elon Musk bringing his kid around, you're seeing a lot of kids in American public life.
And again, these images matter.
We talked about this yesterday.
Imagery matters.
The image of a Secretary of Defense who's working out with the troops.
Or the image of a national security advisor striding into NATO meetings.
Or the images of Elon Musk with his sort of young tech protégés going into various government agencies and clearing them out.
Or children in public places.
All of these things have an impact.
On how human beings feel and how they think.
And it makes a big difference.
So here's President Trump praising Elon Musk's son X, which is hilarious.
X, are you okay?
This is X. And he's a great guy.
High IQ. He's a high IQ individual.
And by the way, you gotta love the sort of juxtaposition of the dress.
Meaning, Elon, for those who can't see, is wearing a sort of typical tech bro outfit.
He's wearing kind of like jeans and a t-shirt and then a black coat over it.
And his son is dressed in the nines.
Looking great over there.
Meanwhile, President Trump says, listen, we've already found billions in abuse, incompetence, corruption.
Who's going to take the other side of this argument?
Why are Democrats taking the other side of this argument other than they are wedded to every penny of spending and more?
There was President Trump yesterday.
Senator Rand Paul today said that doge cuts will ultimately need a vote in Congress.
Do you agree with that?
Is that the plan?
I really don't know.
I know this.
We're finding tremendous fraud and tremendous abuse.
If I need a vote of Congress to find fraud and abuse, it's fine with me.
I think we'll get the vote.
Although there'll be some people that wouldn't vote.
And how could a judge want to hold us back from finding all of this fraud and finding all of this incompetence?
Why would that happen?
Why would even Congress want to do that?
Now, Congress, if we do need a vote, I think we'd get a very easy vote because we have a track record now.
We've already found billions of dollars of abuse, incompetence, and corruption.
Okay, so he's right about this, by the way.
If you think that you can't get through the Senate and the House a bill that cuts waste, fraud, and abuse, if Democrats try to filibuster that, that is a losing proposition for them.
Speaking of waste, fraud, and abuse, the White House on Tuesday evening, according to the Washington Post, So, the guy's name was Paul Martin.
He was appointed by President Joe Biden in December 2023. He was informed of his dismissal through an email from Trent Morse, the Deputy Director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel.
The termination of Martin follows his office's publication of a widely read report warning more than $489 million in food assistance was at risk of spoilage or potential diversion after the Trump administration implemented its aid freeze and stop work order.
And the reason presumably he was fired is he leaked all of this to the media.
He put out this report publicly and Trump says we are not a leaky administration.
We are not going to do that anymore.
Plus, it is weird that the USAID inspector general was able to come up with on short notice a report talking about millions of dollars worth of food spoilage.
But had nothing to say about $2.1 billion flowing into, for example, the Gaza Strip so that Hamas could continue to fund its terror war against Israel and murder its own people in the streets.
And so, again, they're moving fast.
They are breaking things.
So Elon was in the Oval Office.
And I think this is what Democrats are having such a tough time with.
President Trump has actually changed in many ways.
One of the ways he has changed is President Trump, because he was going to run for re-election and then because he lost and then he was running again, There's always a certain level of insecurity that kind of surrounded President Trump.
And what that meant is that the easiest way to cede all sorts of chaos with President Trump was to imply or state outright that somebody else was actually the president or somebody else was running Trump.
Now, the reality is no one perceives that to be the case.
Donald Trump is running the presidency.
No one is running Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is coming up with his own ideas.
Donald Trump is making the decisions.
Everyone knows this.
Americans understand this.
Which is why all the polling data shows 7 in 10 Americans think he is a strong president.
Not because they think Elon is the secret president.
And again, much of the media coverage is designed at sort of irritating Trump by claiming that Elon is sort of the shadow president.
But everyone, including Trump, knows that's not the case.
Number one, Elon doesn't have any independent political aspirations.
Elon is incapable of running for president.
He wasn't born in the United States.
But beyond that, everyone also understands that in the end, if Trump says no, Elon doesn't have any power to cut.
Trump's going to be the one who has to actually implement the recommendations that are being made by Doge.
It is Trump empowering Musk, not the other way around.
And so Musk, in solidarity with Trump in the Oval Office, in lockstep, arm in arm, is a major thing.
It is a signifier that Trump is comfortable in his own skin as president, that he doesn't feel threatened by people who are around him, that he's willing to take advice.
But in the end, he is the decision maker.
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So Musk had himself a good time in the Oval Office.
He started off by talking about cutting the budget and he said, listen, to do that requires a couple of things, competence and caring.
At a high level, what are the two ingredients that are really necessary in order to cut the budget deficit in half from $2 trillion to $1 trillion?
And it's really two things.
Competence and caring.
And if you add competence and caring, you'll cut the budget deficit in half.
And I fully expect to be scrutinized and get a daily proctology exam, basically.
And again, Like, where is it?
Who argues with that?
Who's going to argue with that?
Now, is it going to be enough to recommend billions of dollars in cuts from the executive agencies in waste, fraud, and abuse?
Is it all fat?
Or is there some muscle?
Is there some bone?
There's going to be a lot of muscle and bone that gets cut or broken before it is healed.
And this is sort of the way that Musk works.
So, for example, Musk was questioned by the media in this Oval Office.
It is amazing how transparent this administration is, by the way.
Joe Biden would not do a press conference for three and a half years because Joe Biden was not competent.
Because Joe Biden was not mentally there.
Donald Trump is speaking to the press every single day.
Elon Musk, supposedly at the head of a shadow government, is speaking to the press virtually every day when he's not on X 24 hours a day tweeting out his various thoughts.
But Musk is being transparent here.
He says, listen, I'm going to make mistakes in the stuff that I tweet out.
But the point is...
That I would rather make the mistakes and correct them than simply leave this behemoth staggering along the tundra only to die later and rot away.
Ms. Mas, you said on X that an example of the fraud that you have cited was $50 million of condoms was sent to Gaza.
But after fact-checked this, apparently Gaza in Mozambique, and the program was to protect them against HIV. So can you correct the statements?
It wasn't sent to Hamas, actually.
It was sent to Mozambique, which makes sense why condoms were sent there.
and how can we make sure that all the statements that you said were correct so we can trust what you say?
Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected.
So nobody's going to bat a thousand.
We will make mistakes, but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes.
So, you know, if the I'm not sure we should be sending 50 million dollars worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly, I'm not sure that's something Americans would be really excited about.
Correct.
Correct.
Again, what is amazing about all this is the Democrats keep declaring a constitutional crisis over doing sort of baseline governance.
This should be baseline governance.
So Musk was asked about the supposed constitutional crisis inherent in all of this.
Listen, people voted for a forum.
You keep saying people didn't vote for me.
People literally voted for Donald Trump knowing that Elon Musk was going to be part of the cutting effort.
It is not as though Donald Trump hit the ball here.
Again, 7 in 10 Americans believe that Donald Trump is keeping his promises right now, which is a historic number.
I mean, at this rate, the way that Donald Trump is moving, and again, it's unbelievable.
We're three weeks into his presidency.
If Donald Trump keeps even remotely moving at this rate, he is going to be the most transformative president in American public life since LBJ, maybe since FDR, if we keep going at this rate.
Here's Elon Musk saying, listen, people voted for this.
You keep pretending like people didn't vote.
People never voted for any of these bureaucrats, but they voted for this.
You couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from the public.
The public voted—we have a majority of the public voting for President Trump.
We won the House.
We won the Senate.
The people voted for major government reform.
There should be no doubt about that.
That was on the campaign.
The president spoke about that at every rally.
The people voted for major government reform, and that's what people are going to get.
They're going to get what they voted for.
That makes perfect sense.
And, Elon points out the same thing we've been pointing out, bureaucrats are not elected.
Bureaucrats making rules and spending money they were not allocated on random nonsense that they feel it is a priority to waste money on.
That is not how government ought to work.
Here's Elon.
If there's not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?
If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don't live in a democracy.
We live in a bureaucracy.
He is right about all this.
Now, Elon took the opportunity to mention some of the sort of waste, fraud, and abuse inherent in the system.
And he mentioned this crazy story about how essentially retirement forms are processed by the federal government.
From a limestone mine.
So first of all, it's disappointing to me because if we are going to put government employees anywhere, it should absolutely be a salt mine.
They should actually have to work literal salt mines.
But here's Elon pointing out a thing, and it turns out this is true.
This is not a mistake by Elon.
This is actually true.
And then we're told, this is actually a great anecdote, because we're told that the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000.
We're like, well, why is that?
Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper.
It's manually calculated, then written down on a piece of paper.
Then it goes down a mine.
And I'm like, what do you mean a mine?
Like, yeah, there's a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork.
And you look at a picture of this mine.
We'll post some pictures afterwards.
And this mine looks like something out of the 50s because it was started in 1955. So it looks like it's like a time warp.
And then the limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal government.
By the way, he's right about this.
Here is a picture put out by Doge of the limestone mine.
Insane.
This is crazy.
This is crazy.
Why are we hand-filing retirement files?
Again, like some sort of dystopian sci-fi picture from 1956. This is ridiculous.
The Department of Government Efficiency put out these pictures.
It's Iron Mountain, which is an actual document processing company.
Federal employee retirements are processed using paper by hand in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania.
700 plus mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process 10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes.
The retirement process takes multiple months.
Now, in the modern world, you know how you could retire today?
By hitting a button, like one button, less than a second, done.
That's how you should be able to retire.
Because you can do literally, I can order anything I want from Amazon with the click of a button.
It doesn't take me more than about five seconds.
And yet retirement is supposed to take months because you have to have...
Some 60-year-old schlub wandering around in the limestone mines of Pennsylvania or something?
It's absolutely insane.
So Musk was also questioned about supposed conflicts of interest because, of course, he has his own business interests.
And he says, listen, I'm pretty much the most public person there is.
And if you have questions, feel free to ask them.
I think one of the reasons why Trump and the rest of his team are not super interested in these sort of conflict checks is because...
Those have been used as tools by many of the people in the bureaucracy in order to hold up people.
This is what happened during Trump administration number one.
I have personal friends who are forced to spend tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers because they were tangentially associated with the Trump administration and then they were roped into the Mueller report kind of stuff.
And so what Trump is saying is, I'm not going to do that.
I'm not going to do that.
And as for Musk, again, the most public person in the world except for Donald Trump.
Here's Musk talking about it.
What are the checks and balances that are in place to ensure that there is accountability and transparency?
Well, we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible.
In fact, our actions, we post our actions to the Doge handle on X and to the Doge website.
So all of our actions are maximally transparent.
In fact, I don't think there's been, I don't know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the Doge organization.
You know, the kind of things we're doing are, I think, very, very simple and basic.
So, one of the things that is being done is that Doge is now being allowed into pretty much every government agency to look for waste, fraud, and abuse.
That includes, apparently, the Department of Defense.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that Doge should be welcomed into the Department of Defense to basically audit the Defense Department and find golden toilet seats and the like.
Here was Secretary of Defense Hegseth this morning.
We welcome Doge to the Pentagon, and I hope to welcome Elon to the Pentagon very soon, and his team working in collaboration with us.
There are waste, redundancies, and headcounts in headquarters that need to be addressed.
There's just no doubt.
Look at a lot of the climate programs that have been pursued at the Defense Department.
The Defense Department is not in the business of climate change, solving the global thermostat.
We're in the business of deterring and winning wars.
So things like that, we want to look for to find efficiencies and many others, the way we acquire weapons system procurement.
There's plenty of places where we want the keen eye of Doge, but we'll do it in coordination.
We're not going to do things that are to the detriment of American operational or tactical capabilities.
By the way, got to love PDAG's ethic.
I mean, that is exactly right.
You mean like a war machine that wins wars and kills bad guys as opposed to a giant, toxic, global warming propaganda fest filled with DEI nonsense?
What an idea.
What an idea.
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The constitutional crisis, if it exists at all, which it doesn't, is being caused by federal judges issuing nationwide injunctions.
So, for example, yesterday, a federal judge named John Bates agreed to a request from Doctors of America for a temporary restraining order nationally.
Why?
Well, the judge wants them to restore webpages and data that had been deleted in compliance with Trump's executive order related to gender ideology.
So, the judge ruled, quote, the removal of the webpages and datasets creates a dangerous gap in the scientific data available to monitor or respond to disease outbreaks, deprives physicians of resources that guide clinical practice, and takes away key resources for communicating and engaging with patients.
So, apparently, this judge is now attempting to force the federal government to keep up a bunch of dumb data about gender ideology.
This is the constitutional crisis?
That's the thing?
Again, the outrageous sort of reaction by the left to all of this, it truly is pretty amazing.
And I have to say that Elon Musk trolling the media on all this is also pretty amazing.
So, we've had the spectacle over the past 48 hours.
of major left-wing anchors saying the words big balls and hairy balls.
That is a thing that is now happening in our life.
Here is CNN's Dana Bash announcing that Elon Musk has changed his Twitter handle to hairy balls.
I'm not even kidding you.
This is the world we live in.
It is the most amusing timeline.
Now, the disruptor in chief, Elon Musk, who apparently has adopted the alias, at least he changed his social media handle to hairy balls.
Tweeted this morning, democracy in America is being destroyed by judicial coup.
An activist judge is not a real judge.
Well, oh my gosh.
I'm sorry.
CNN having to cover Elon's trollery is pretty high level.
Meanwhile, Joy Reid is very upset about big balls, as we've discussed before over at MSNBC. Again, Democrats apparently only like big balls if they're on the ladies.
In any case, Joy Reid says that Democrats should actually stop all legislation.
Until big balls can be subpoenaed.
Yes, this is...
Oh my goodness.
Let me ask you this, because the Democrats are in the minority, so you have only so much leverage.
Have you all essentially made it clear to Mike Johnson that until they allow you all to subpoena big balls and the normalized Indian hate guy, at least subpoena them and or subpoena Elon Musk, no votes on the budget.
No votes.
No Democratic votes at all to keep the government open.
That is leverage Democrats have, theoretically, right?
Are you all prepared to use it?
They must get to the bottom of big balls.
That's the thing they have to do.
They don't have to get a handle on big balls.
Slow clap for the Democrat media.
You guys are doing an amazing, amazing job.
Meanwhile, CNN's Anderson Cooper got miffed on air last night because Chris DiNuno, who is about as moderate a Republican as it is possible to find, governor of New Hampshire.
He suggested that Elon Musk wants to make cuts, and then they got into a discussion over the cuts, and Anderson Cooper calls him a d*** on air.
There's irony to that, because actually in this video, Chris Nuno is sitting next to Jeffrey Toobin, who is mostly famous for actually whipping out his d*** on air.
But here we go.
Some of the details that have come out, like the, you know, $59 million spent on luxury hotels, You're talking about the FEMA money that was abused for migrants?
That was FEMA money for migrants?
That's okay now?
No, I'm not saying it's okay.
I'm not saying it's okay.
Don't put words in my mouth.
So would you stop that?
Would you stop that process?
Don't be a...
Oh my gosh.
Well, things are going well for the Democrat media.
Meanwhile, Caitlin Collins at CNN mentions we are so close to a constitutional crisis.
Oh goodness, a constitutional crisis.
Really, where is it?
I'm missing it.
Really, where's the constitutional crisis?
I would love some details.
Please explain how Elon Musk going and recommending cuts inside the executive branch is a constitutional crisis that is going to end democracy in America.
Do you mean that there is tension between the judicial, executive, and legislative branches of the government?
As written in the Constitution, that's crazy talk.
Here's Caitlin Collins at CNN. They can't say threat to democracy anymore, so they just shifted it over to constitutional crisis.
It's really lazy.
We are three weeks into the second Trump presidency, three weeks, and tonight there are warnings that the U.S. is dangerously close to a constitutional crisis.
Now, the first shoe on this dropped when a federal judge today said the White House is defying his order to unfreeze billions of dollars in federal aid, marking the first time that we've had a judge expressly accuse the Trump administration of ignoring a court ruling.
And in a separate case today, federal employees here in Washington told a judge that the administration was defying another order by not reinstating workers who had been put on leave.
Now, this all has prominent Democrats and many of the nation's top constitutional scholars declaring that the U.S. is on the brink of a reckoning.
A reckoning.
Wow!
They found a constitutional scholar who will say that America's on the brink of a reckoning?
Wow, this sounds super scientific and legalistic to me.
It sounds exactly like that doomsday clock.
You know, these fake scientists, they have a thing called the doomsday clock, and every so often they move it a tick toward doomsday.
And we're the closest we've been to doomsday since, like, the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Wow.
I mean, like, oh my gosh.
I think that, what are we going to do?
We're the closest we've been to doomsday since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and all this.
All this sort of fake expertise is really, really stupid.
But this is the line that they are pursuing.
MSNBCs.
Danny Savala says, you know, the president not following the court, that could be super-duper-duper scary.
What would you say if I told you there was a president who literally bragged about not following the court in relieving student loan debt?
And that was last year.
What if I told you that that was a thing?
But here is the MSNBC legal analyst, Danny Savala, panicking, running into walls.
History's lesson is, well, not a whole lot happens to a president or an administration who refuses to follow an order because we operate on this kind of trust that the president will do that.
And while it's probably apocryphal that Jackson said he has his order, meaning the Supreme Court, let's see them enforce it.
It's a scary quote, if true, because it's really an unspoken thing that the courts don't really have their own.
Meanwhile, President Trump is like, what are you even talking about?
You keep saying I'm defying courts.
What are you even saying?
Here's President Trump saying, can you give me an example of me defying the courts?
Like, one?
That'd be great.
If a judge does block one of your policies, part of your agenda, will you abide by that ruling?
Will you comply with that?
Well, I always abide by the courts and then I'll have to appeal it.
But then what he's done is he slowed down the momentum and it gives crooked people more time to cover up the books.
He's right about this.
But again, does this sound like a man who's on the verge of tyranny?
Of course not.
Of course not.
Now, listen, America is in a fairly serious economic situation, and the only answer to that is going to be cutting.
The waste and fraud in the federal government and eventually restructuring entitlement programs and production, economic growth.
Those are the only things.
We're going to have to grow our way out of many of these problems while simultaneously cutting all the waste, fraud, and abuse.
And the Trump administration is focused on both of those things.
Again, there are some systemic entrenched obstacles, including the national debt and including the fact that the Biden administration blew more money into the economy, fake money into the economy, through inflation, than any administration in modern history.
Well, that fight against inflation is not yet won.
Remember, you kept hearing that it was over.
It was all over, right?
Joe Biden had quashed inflation.
The economy was on a solid footing now.
That was his entire campaign and Kamala Harris's campaign, and it turns out that was a lie.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the fight against inflation continued to face headwinds in January, with consumer prices rising more than expected.
The Labor Department on Wednesday reported consumer prices in January rose 3% from a year earlier.
That marked a pickup from December when prices rose 2.9% from a year earlier.
Stock futures turned down after the report was released and bond yields jumped.
The uptick in prices comes as newly sworn in President Trump vows to lower prices for Americans.
Higher housing costs are helping to fuel the rise along with auto insurance and airfare as well as grocery prices.
Prices were up 0.5% from the prior month.
Core prices, which doesn't count food and energy prices, actually rose 3.3% over the year and 0.4% over the month.
Egg prices increased more than 15%, the largest increase since June of 2015, and that is one of the big drivers of how expensive things are at the grocery right now.
There's talk that maybe the federal reserve should actually increase the interest rates at this point in order to continue to quash inflation.
It's a little bit early to blame President Trump for the inflation rates, given the fact that, again, he's been in office for a grand total of three weeks.
But the only way that inflation is going to be brought down in the end is by More productivity.
The only way inflation is going to be brought down in the end is by a more solid basis for the economy other than blowing money into it for the same product.
Basically, inflation is always too much money chasing too few goods.
If you create more goods, if your supply keeps up with your demand, if you create new innovative products, well, it turns out that prices tend to decrease through competition.
And that is what the administration is pursuing.
That is particularly true when it comes to AI. So yesterday, Vice President J.D. Vance was in Europe to speak about AI. And it is pretty incredible how Europe has basically blown it on AI. AI is the single most transformative technology of my lifetime other than the internet itself.
The leaps and bounds that AI is taking, utterly extraordinary, truly extraordinary.
If you are playing around with, say, perplexity AI or Grok or ChatGPT, the quality of the AI is so unbelievably high.
I was playing around with perplexity yesterday, and I took a link to a video on YouTube, like a three-hour interview with an author, and I said, please summarize the main points of this interview.
And in less than a second, it spelled out all of the main points of the interview.
I mean, really amazing.
It's like huge, time-saving, labor-saving innovations.
Europe is way behind.
The reason Europe is way behind is because Europe is always the safety-focused Helicopter parent of business.
They're always worried that the child is going to be on the swings and fall off and break the head, so they put a helmet on the kid and then say, don't go on the swings.
Meanwhile, the United States has always been the innovative country that says, okay, we're going to let you play.
We'll let you play.
And so the AI competition right now is between a heavily subsidized, lying government in China.
It turns out that a lot of the things that China was saying about DeepSeek, which is their own version of AI, about the cost, about the sophisticated chips that they were using or not using, a lot of that turned out to be a lie.
It's not nearly as cheap as they were saying, and they were hijacking NVIDIA chips and using sophisticated chips to actually build their own.
But the real competition right now is between the United States, China, and Europe is, like, still using an abacus.
And this is something J.D. Vance was pointing at.
He said, listen, we're going to keep developing AI, and if you keep trying, I couldn't help but think of the conference today.
If we choose the wrong approach on other things that could be conceived of as dangerous, things like AI, and choose to hold ourselves back, it will alter not only our GDP or the stock market, but the very future of the project that Lafayette and the American founders set off to create. but the very future of the project that Lafayette and Now, this doesn't mean, of course, that all concerns about safety go out the window, but focus matters.
And we must focus now on the opportunity to catch lightning in a bottle, unleash our most brilliant innovators, and use AI to improve the well-being of our nations and their peoples.
Innovation, productivity increases, right?
These are things that America is going to need and the rest of the world is going to need as well.
And businesses are recognizing this.
Goldman Sachs has now abandoned its IPO diversity pledge.
It's abandoning all of its DEI nonsense.
According to Bloomberg, Wall Street's leading investment bank had a policy that would only take a company public in the U.S. or Western Europe if it included two diverse board members, one of whom had to be a woman.
That rule had initially been put in place in 2020. As a result of legal developments related to board diversity requirements, we ended our formal board diversity policy, according to Tony Frato, a spokesperson for Goldman Sachs.
Because it turns out that actually many of the most important businesses in the world do not have quote-unquote diverse boards.
All they have is merit-driven boards.
That is good.
And by the way, those who stand up against merit, those who stand up against innovation, they're going to get run over and they should be run over because they're standing in the way of positive externalities for everyone else.
Meritocracy has positive externalities for everyone else.
No other system of rewarding talent.
It creates positive externalities.
If you reward people based on group status, that has negative externalities.
It hurts everybody who's not a member of that group.
If you reward people based on merit, that has positive externalities because the most meritorious are going to be more productive than any other group put in place.
And they're going to do more work.
And they're going to be better at that work.
Well, DEI is dying everywhere, not just at Goldman Sachs.
Disney is now moving away from its DEI efforts.
And that's because the American public did not like what they were seeing.
It is because the state of Florida said no to all of this trash.
It's because the Daily Wire announced that we would launch competition to their actual DEI nonsense.
That is why Disney is doing this.
They went woke and they went broke.
And now they're trying to revert back to normalcy.
And you know what?
Good for them.
Good for them.
I'm a forgiving man.
I mean, I'd like to see them do it across the board.
I'd like to see less left-wing propaganda on Disney.
I'd love to see the Star Wars properties restored to their former place of glory.
Lori and Kathleen Kennedy put out by the side of the road with the rest of the recycling.
However, according to Axios, Disney is now changing its DEI programs to focus more closely on business outcomes.
As part of the shift, sources tell Axios Disney is moving and changing the content disclaimers that started releasing around certain titles in 2020.
Those are those annoying placards that you see before Aladdin saying that this is fostering cultural stereotypes and negativity and racism right before they make money off of you watching Robin Williams voice the genie.
In a note to employees sent Tuesday morning, Chief Human Resources Officer Sonia Coleman outlined ways Disney's DEI efforts will change.
Beginning this fiscal year, Disney will replace the diversity and inclusion performance factor used to evaluate executive compensation with a new talent strategy.
Wow.
Disney is getting rid of its controversial Reimagine Tomorrow initiative and the corresponding website, which was used to highlight stories and talent from quote-unquote underrepresented communities.
The company has now rebranded its business employee resource groups to belonging employee resource groups.
The transformation is meant to highlight the focus on BERGs and strengthening the employee community and workplace experience.
Disney is also updating the language of the content advisories that run before certain titles on its streaming services.
Again, this is all because Disney decided that they were going to move to the left politically.
And it turns out parents didn't like that crap.
Disney's reputation score among Republicans has been jumping because of these moves, compared to 2023. According to the Axios Harris 100 brand reputation poll.
So its score jumped from 61.03 in 2023 to 67.9 in 2024, which is, in fact, a significant jump.
Because, you know, again, they're getting rid of all this.
Meanwhile, PBS has shuttered its DEI office.
PBS, of course, is publicly funded.
The public broadcaster said in a statement, quote, In order to best ensure we are in compliance with the president's executive order around DEI, we have closed our DEI office.
The staff members who served in that office are now leaving PBS. We'll continue to adhere to our mission and values.
PBS will continue to reflect all of America and remain a welcoming place for everyone.
Ah, nature is healing.
This is a joy.
Disney getting back to normal.
PBS getting back to normal.
It wasn't that tough, as it turns out.
All it took was Democrats losing an election.
Meritocracy must rule.
Which is why, frankly, I'm excited.
That there were people who were protesting the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, yesterday at a military installation in Germany.
This is great.
We can now identify their parents and kick them out.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Meanwhile, Democrats are celebrating because a bunch of American students at a U.S. military installation in Germany walked out of their middle school on Tuesday as part of protests aimed at an official visit by the new Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth.
Why?
Because the Defense Department is killing DEI initiatives.
This is according to the Washington Post.
The students attend Patch Middle School in Stuttgart, Germany, and peacefully walked out of class for nearly an hour.
We used to just call that ditching class when I was in middle school, actually.
But this is a great way of figuring out which parents are the Wokies and then, you know, booting them out of the military, actually.
That seems like a good idea.
Separately, a small group of adults, dressed in civilian clothing, likely parents, gathered outside at Stuttgart and protested within view and earshot of Hegseth's delegation, booing and chanting DEI. Again, good luck to you.
Seriously, good luck to you.
Americans are not up for this crap.
They are not.
And the media covering this has like a front page story that you had a couple of dozen students out of something like 700 students at this middle school who walked out and whoop-de-doo, whoop-de-freaking-doo.
Meanwhile, the actual big headline from yesterday was that Mark Fogel was freed by Russia.
So Mark Fogel had essentially been kidnapped by the Russians.
The Russians have been taking American hostages.
They've been condemning people to penal servitude.
For minor crimes, this is true of Brittany Reiner, the WNBA player.
The difference is Joe Biden had to trade a Russian arms dealer to get her back, as opposed to Mark Fogle, who came back for nothing, actually.
According to the Washington Post, President Trump thanked Vladimir Putin on Tuesday night for releasing American teacher Mark Fogle, who was freed after three and a half years of Russian imprisonment on drug charges in an exchange earlier in the day.
President Trump welcomed Fogle back by ushering him into the White House, and then he also invited him to stay the night in the Lincoln bedroom.
Fogle, for his part, was obviously grateful and celebratory about all this.
He kissed the ground when he reached the United States.
He was at the White House drinking a Pennsylvania brew at the White House.
Here it was yesterday.
I'm a middle class school teacher who's now in a dream world.
We're going to show you the Lincoln bedroom.
It's a very special place.
Appropriate for tonight.
Very appropriate.
And thank you all.
And I love our country.
And I'm so happy to be back here.
And I wish I could articulate it better.
You've done beautifully.
And he's got a great mother.
And when I saw the mother at a rally, she said, if you win, will you get my son out?
And I promise she's 95 years old.
And I said, we'll get him out.
And we got him out pretty quickly.
Apparently Steve Whitcoff, who is the Envoy to the Middle East was the broker of this particular agreement.
He had a three-and-a-half-hour meeting with Putin while in Moscow arranging Fogel's release.
Unclear what exactly the United States gave up to get Fogel back.
It wasn't nothing.
Presumably, it was some sort of criminal, but probably not on the level of the, you know, the merchant of death was the actual name of the person, the actual nickname of the person who was traded for Brittany Griner.
Remember that Joe Biden did not get out Mark Fogel.
In fact, even Obama's ambassador to Russia was celebrating Mark Fogel's prison release yesterday.
Here was President Obama's ambassador, Michael McFall, celebrating Fogel's prison release and thanking Trump for it.
Ambassador, you worked hard.
You wanted to see your friend, Mr. Fogel, released.
You know him.
You know his family.
I cannot imagine the relief that you and, of course, a lot of people who love him are feeling right now.
Tell us what you are feeling.
Hallelujah.
Fantastic news.
Praise be to President Donald Trump.
That's not a phrase I get to say very often.
I don't know the circumstances.
I don't know the deal.
We'll learn those later.
And I don't care.
Mark was in bad health.
He was wrongfully detained for years.
This is an American patriot.
This is a fantastic human being.
He was a teacher to one of my sons.
Integral member of our community in Moscow when I lived there.
And this is just fantastic news for anybody who cares about patriotic Americans.
The Biden administration had refused or delayed actually labeling Fogel as wrongfully detained during the administration.
Very, very late in the administration.
Trump moved quickly with lacrity to get...
Fogel outs.
That is a big win.
And again, this is part of a broader attempt to thaw relations, presumably, with the Russians in advance of some sort of deal to be cut over Ukraine.
The Europeans are being asked to pick up more of the slack, as they should be.
Ukraine is being told by the Trump administration that they are probably not going to get to keep Donbass and Crimea because they really have no military prospect of winning back those areas.
And the Russians are being told that they are not going to win Kyiv.
That was always going to be the outline of a deal.
I've been saying this since August of 2022, just months after the beginning of the war, is that this is the way the war was going to end.
It appears that is the direction that is currently being taken.
According to Politico, the strategy for Ukraine is quietly shifting in Europe to match the changing tone of the United States from a promise of unyielding support to an effort to bring Kiev to the bargaining table with a strong hand.
A new strategy will play out most clearly this week at the Munich Security Conference, one of the biggest gatherings of defense leaders in the world.
Now remember, this has to be done because Zelensky He's going to have to explain to his own people why he's not winning back everything.
And Zelensky is still, despite his war powers, a democratically elected leader who is going to be subject to the voting population.
If he goes back to that population, and again, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, wounded in Ukraine, going back and saying, listen, we have to get Crimea and Donbass to get to some sort of off-ramp here is not going to be a popular move.
If, however, Zelensky says, listen, I didn't want it.
I want all that stuff back, but I was forced by everybody else to do the thing, that gives him an off-ramp.
And some of us have been saying this for nigh on three years at this point.
It's a dramatic departure from the Biden era, according to Politico, when the meeting reinforced the U.S. and its allies had Ukraine's back for, as former President Joe Biden often said, as long as it takes.
But that was never a good policy.
Because if you say as long as it takes without any off-ramp, what's the off-ramp then?
Biden kept saying, we're going to do this until they reached their goals.
And then when asked what the goals were, they were never articulated.
I mean, a good war has an actual goal at the end of the war.
If you don't have a goal, it's very difficult to win.
How's victory even defined at that point?
Well, Trump campaign vowed to end the war in a day, but the conference is going to have Vice President Vance meeting with Zelensky.
Vice President Kamala Harris had gone to Bavaria to meet Zelensky three times.
But Europe is saying, we will for the moment take the lead if the Americans don't.
Good, fine, do it.
Seriously, do it.
All you guys, enjoy.
And meanwhile, speaking of foreign policy, things are ratcheting up again in the Gaza Strip.
That is because Hamas had said that they were not going to release any more hostages this weekend.
And President Trump responded by saying you should release all the hostages this weekend or Israel should go in and just clean the ground with you.
And now it was unclear whether the Israeli government was going to go along with that or try to, in some way, preserve the ceasefire deal.
The Israeli government has now gone along with President Trump's demand.
They're mirroring his demand correctly because his demand is right.
This should have been the approach of the Israeli government from literally the first day and the approach of the American government from the first day.
Trump is right.
On these matters, as always, President Trump in the Middle East tends to be right more often than any other politician.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded that Hamas release Israeli hostages by noon Saturday or face a return to war.
Hamas had set off a rupture in the talks on Monday by saying it would postpone the release of three hostages scheduled to be freed this weekend to protest delays and deliveries of humanitarian goods.
But that's not what it was about.
The reason Hamas said they wanted to delay delivery of the hostages is because all the hostages look like Holocaust survivors.
And they realize that there is serious PR blowback to their treatment of the hostages.
So presumably they want several weeks to fatten them up so they don't look as though they're on the verge of death, the ones who are alive when they are, in fact, released.
Trump is saying, no, none of that.
Just let everybody out.
Do it now, or Israel has full reign to go back in and do whatever the hell they want.
Trump said, I don't think they're going to make the deadline personally.
I think they want to play the tough guy.
We'll see how tough they are.
Netanyahu issued an ultimatum of his own.
He said, if Hamas does not return our hostages by Saturday at noon, the ceasefire will end.
The IDF will resume intense fighting until the final defeat of Hamas.
This, of course, was always going to happen.
I said this from the beginning of this ceasefire deal.
There was never going to be a good ceasefire deal, but Israel was always going back to war.
Hamas was never going to be left in charge.
Meanwhile, President Trump had King Abdullah of Jordan to the White House yesterday, and he is not backing off of his position on the Gaza Strip.
He's saying, look, people who are there and suffering need to be let out.
That place can be cleared.
It can be turned into basically the Riviera on the Mediterranean, and it's going to bring jobs.
It's going to make life better for people.
Here's President Trump with his out-of-the-box proposal that continues to be the best available proposal.
No one else has one.
Let's hear it, guys.
Where's your proposal?
Because it turns out status quo ante was shit.
It was terrible.
So here's President Trump spelling out his proposal in front of King Abdullah of Jordan.
Now, Abdullah does not want this proposal to go forward.
Why?
Well, because he's afraid that many of those Palestinians will be pushed into Jordan.
Jordan's population is already 60 to 70 percent Palestinian.
The population of Jordan is extraordinarily radicalized because the Palestinians are an extraordinarily radical group of people.
They've been threatening the fall of the Hashemite dynasty.
The dynasty in Jordan is not Palestinian, although Queen Rania is.
And so they've been complaining about a lack of a Palestinian state while 70% of their population is Palestinian.
If the Jordanians actually wanted a Palestinian state, they could hold an election tomorrow.
The problem is, of course, that King Abdullah would then likely be hanging from a crane.
So that is the reason why they don't want more Palestinian refugees.
Trump, however, is saying, listen, if you're not going to take him, somebody should.
So here he was yesterday.
If you didn't have the October 7th catastrophe and it was a horrible catastrophe, then probably you wouldn't be talking about that.
But the only thing I can say is this is going to bring stability and peace to the Middle East.
And ultimately, when it's developed, which will be in quite a while from now, because we want to let things calm down.
But when it's developed, it's going to bring tremendous numbers of jobs to the Middle East, including the people of your country.
And hilariously, King Abdullah was forced to sit there and take this.
and he too admitted that President Trump is bringing stability in the region.
Mr. President, I truly believe that with all the challenges that we have in the Middle East that I finally see somebody that could take us across the finish line to bring stability, peace and prosperity to all of us in the region and it is, I think, our collective responsibility in the Middle East to continue to our collective responsibility in the Middle East to continue to work with you, to support you, to achieve those lofty goals.
So I'm very delighted to be here and as you said, sir, we've got some very interesting discussions ahead of us.
Very good.
Very good.
Thank you very much.
And President Trump working his will in the Middle East.
And as far as the notion that populations never move in the aftermath of losing a war, that obviously is untrue.
Andrew Roberts, a very famous historian.
It has a piece over the Washington Free Beacon spelling out that reality, which is that when you start a war and you lose a war, you tend to lose territory and your population tends to have to move.
And that is true everywhere from the end of World War II to the end of the Korean War.
Quote, after North Korea launched its vicious, unprovoked attack on South Korea in June 1950, it was punished so severely by the American-led United Nations force, it lost over a million dead.
North Korea lost territory in the armistice in 1953 and has been a pariah state ever since.
When the Argentinian military dictatorship suddenly invaded the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic in April 1982 and were utterly defeated 10 weeks later by Margaret Thatcher's task force, the entire junta in Buenos Aires was deposed from power.
Some were jailed.
Democracy returned to Argentina.
Saddam Hussein's surprise attack on Kuwait was a similar example, where a country invades its neighbor suddenly and without provocation.
After a defeat in war loses both the government, Saddam was hanged, and its sovereignty while the U.S.-led coalition attempted to rebuild the country.
In the collapsing former Yugoslavia of the early 1990s, Serb leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic, General Ratko Mladic, and Radovan Karadzic took the cold-blooded decision to invade neighboring Bosnia and conduct an appalling program of what came to be known as ethnic cleansing, which was mass murder.
Those critics of Donald Trump, who tritely referred to his population transfers under the Gaza plan as ethnic cleansing, ought to revisit what the phrase actually means in terms of horror, violence, and bloodshed.
Once NATO finally took to the air an operations deliberate force to end the brutality, all three of those Serb leaders were imprisoned.
Serbia's borders were decided by the West rather than by the Serbs.
In other words, start a war, lose a war, lose.
That is typically the way that war has worked.
And it's only when it comes to the Palestinians that magically the rules don't apply, which has less to do with the Palestinians, it seems, and more to do with the treatment of the Jews by the international community.
All right, coming up, Republicans are wrangling over the budget.
We'll get to what that means.
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