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Feb. 14, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:31
SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes The UNTHINKABLE
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Well, folks, President Trump has put enormous effort into killing the Department of Education, which has been a longtime Republican goal.
As long as I've been alive, that's been something Republicans have wanted to do.
And today, we're going to break news on the show with our friend Chris Rufo, tapes of what you have been funding via the DOE, and it is shocking.
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Use code DW40. All right, so the Department of Education has been forever a boondoggle.
Education should be done at the local and state level.
Parents should be in charge of the education of their children.
Whether you're in private school or public school, the reality is the more local the education, the more it reflects the needs, desires, and wants of the parents, who, of course, are the ones most aligned with the interests of their children.
Instead, we in the United States have increasingly devolved authority to the federal government.
And the federal government, virtually all of its agencies have been hijacked, as we've now been learning, by a left-wing bureaucratic mess designed as a permanent pipeline of cash to the friends of the Democrats.
And this is particularly true of the Department of Education.
In fiscal year 2024, the Department of Education spent $268 billion dollars, That is a lot of money.
And since 1980, the DOE's spending has increased 372%, which is almost double the increase of the size of the rest of the federal government.
So the DOE has been growing by leaps and bounds.
Now, most of that goes to subsidize precisely The sort of indoctrination centers that have been churning out radicals in extraordinary numbers, corrupting our body politic for decades.
If you don't like the Hamas tentifadas on campus last year, you can blame the fact that we as a society have decided it is deeply imperative that we send all of our teenagers to institutions of higher education that indoctrinate them in trash.
You can blame that on the fact that our lower education institutions, secondary education, high school, primary education, has been indoctrinating kids and left-wing values for...
Literally as long as I have been alive.
When it comes to higher education, last year, the Department of Education spent $165 billion on higher education.
That's nearly half the total spend of the entire department.
That's money that went to colleges and universities to prop up the great scam that is, again, higher education.
Those are grants to students to go major in lesbian dance theory.
You're wondering how they got that money?
The answer is, you got to pay for it.
Just $40 billion went directly to elementary and secondary education.
So even if you wanted the money going to the small kids, it's not actually going to the small kids.
Predominantly, it is going to the very large overgrown children who are 19 and 28 years old, majoring in nonsense.
The dollars went, at least in part, at the lower level, to the grifters and cretins of the unions, like the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association.
Not directly to them, but when federal dollars go to subsidize schools that are in bed with the AFT and the NEA, you get to subsidize the work of Randy Weingarten.
Some of this stuff goes to waste and fraud, and that doesn't include the $68.1 billion in indirect spending.
Those are block grants, largely, that are given to states.
So, what have been the priorities of the Department of Education lately?
According to Joe Biden's Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, quote, The investments proposed in President Biden's new budget reflect this administration's deep belief in education as the foundation of all opportunity in America.
The goal is to raise the bar for college affordability, inclusive student success, and driving more equitable outcomes in higher education.
Equity, of course, is a code word for, effectively, racial quotas.
That's at least how Biden saw it.
Biden requested $100 million for, quote, developing and implementing strategies to promote diversity in their schools and classrooms.
And here we're not just talking about racial quotas.
We are talking about the curriculum itself.
We are talking about the kinds of material that get taught.
When President Trump came into office pledging to kill DEI programs at our nation's schools, the Department of Education apparently handed out $1 billion in DEI grants since 2021 alone.
Some 229 grants pushing DEI, according to Parents Defending Education, that included $490 million for grants for race-based hiring schemes, which are illegal under the Constitution, $169 million for DEI-based mental health training, $343 million on general DEI programs.
That's just over the past few years.
So what exactly did they do after the Supreme Court banned affirmative action last year?
Well, the DOE then released resources to assist colleges and universities to basically end around the law.
You remember, Joe Biden tried to do this.
He said the Supreme Court may have killed affirmative action, but diversity is still our strength, Abu.
Well, on August 14th, 2023, the Biden administration issued what's called a Dear Colleague Letter, which is effectively an advisory letter from the federal government to a variety of institutions designed to tell them how they want the law applied.
The goal, apparently, is to substitute now mush words like overcoming adversity for explicit racial quotas.
So if you are a college, instead of asking, are you black?
and then deducting 200 points off the required SAT score.
Now they ask you to write an essay about overcoming adversity in which you mention that you're black as a point of adversity.
Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at ED, Catherine E. Lamon, wrote, quote, even after the court's decision sharply limited a tool that colleges and universities with selective admissions practices have used to create vibrant, diverse campus communities, colleges and universities may still lawfully work to admit, support, retain, and graduate racially diverse student bodies.
In other words, ignore the Supreme Court, right?
Remember.
All the rule of law people who keep shouting about Donald Trump and constitutional crises ignored the Supreme Court of the United States and openly said that they would basically defy the Supreme Court in pursuit of their diversity agenda.
So, President Trump is coming into office.
He's seeking to end all of that.
There is no bigger boondoggle, no greater hose of federal taxpayer money pointed at ideological allies than the Department of Education, which is why they are screaming...
Bloody murder over all of this.
Randy Weingarten, one of the most corrupt people in American public life.
And you have to understand the way that these public sector teachers' unions work.
The way they work is that they take, in many states, union dues from their teachers, and then they take those union dues and they pay off Democratic politicians.
They campaign for the Democrats.
The Democrats then sign massive, ridiculous, pork-laden contracts with the American Federation of Teachers to enrich everybody at the AFT. And then the AFT just does it all over again.
That's the game.
And meanwhile, the AFT, do they care about students?
Of course not.
That is not a priority.
We learned that during COVID, when the AFT was pushing incredibly hard for students never to go back to school.
Instead, the idea was that they weren't safe.
You remember Randy Weingarten said this, despite literally every piece of evidence.
The idea from Randy Weingarten at the AFT was, you can't let your kids go back to school.
ooh, they're going to die of the COVID.
Didn't matter that virtually no young children were dying of COVID.
All that mattered to Randy Weingarten is, do my teachers get to stay home and like teach on Zoom and still get paid their salary?
That seems pretty great.
So Randy Weingarten is freaking out over the attacks on the Department of Education.
Here she was calling it cruel and inhumane.
You see, the only form of non-cruelty is to just continue signing giant checks with taxpayer dollars to Randy Weingarten.
What we're hearing is just complete chaos.
and frankly, a whole bunch of cruelty.
Because at the end of the day...
You can make departments more efficient, and I'm not a big believer in bureaucracy, but this feels like, as Elon Musk said to you, evisceration.
So here's a guy who has hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts from these departments, and he's not touching them, but what he's doing is really taking money from kids who really need it in the field.
Okay, the Department of Education is not paying Elon Musk.
Billions of dollars to distribute DEI materials.
The federal government has contracts with SpaceX, the most successful private space company on planet Earth.
And apparently the Defense Department has some contracts with Tesla that were signed under, wait for it, Joe Biden.
But again, this is going to be the tale that Democrats try to tell, is that your kid is going to lose their cherished public school education because Donald Trump wants to kill the Department of Education.
Again.
The vast majority of funding for public school in the United States, where we spend an exorbitant amount of money per pupil, is coming at the state and local level.
It is not coming from the federal government.
The stuff that is coming from the federal government is very often attached to precisely the kinds of interest groups that Democrats want it attached to.
So again, the Democrats are just going to keep shouting about this bloody murder because President Trump is just, he is taking a scissors and he is cutting the hose, the fire hose, of gushing dollars.
Coming from the taxpayer to all of the Democrats allies.
Here's former Biden Education Secretary Miguel Cardona claiming that somehow this is a form of monarchy.
So understand, it's democracy when a regulatory bureaucratic agency pumps out $300 billion a year to the friends of Miguel Cardona.
That's called democracy.
It's monarchy when the new president comes in and says, we're not doing that anymore.
When we talk about those cuts, what we're talking about is programming for students or following research that we know improves outcomes for students.
I'm all in favor of reviewing what works best.
And I'm even in favor of assessing policy, whether you agree with it or not.
But I'm not in favor of the change that's happening, which is going from democracy to a monarchy.
And we're seeing examples of that in every agency.
And it's really troubling.
And I think the American people, regardless of party, should be worried about what's happening.
No, no, no.
You're not in favor of auditing anything.
You're not in favor of checking out the curriculum.
You're lying.
That's the thing you don't want done.
That's the reason why you're objecting.
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Meanwhile, Sonny Hostin, who, again, is in a running gun battle with Whoopi Goldberg for stupidest person on The View.
She says the whole goal of defunding the Department of Education is they want a cheap underclass.
No, actually, right now we have a very expensive underclass generated by our crap public education system.
What I would like is school choice, which would allow parents to actually select for their children which school they would like their kids to be able to go to.
That, by the way, is supported by the Republican Party and President Trump, who would like to nationally promote school choice.
People like Sonny Hostin don't want that.
They just want the American Federation of Teachers paid off.
It's not really about saving money.
I think there's a much more nefarious reason for it.
I think it's because without education, you get cheaper labor.
I think what they want to do is create in the United States a permanent underclass, a permanent cheap workforce because educated workers cost more.
That is the bottom line and that's what they're doing.
Okay, this is so stupid in about eight different ways.
First of all...
No one supports illegal immigration more than Sonny Hassan in The View.
You want to talk about a cheap, underpaid labor force?
Illegal immigrants who can't actually bargain collectively in any way or bargain for higher pay because it turns out they're illegal.
And she's in favor of an open border.
Two, the notion that a primary school education is what makes you a high-paid individual, pretty much everybody in America ends up going to school through high school.
A very high percentage of people.
That is not what this is about.
That's never.
What this has been about.
So what is the Department of Education actually spending its dollars on?
Well, joining us online to explain with some breaking news is Chris Ruffo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor of City Journal and author of America's Cultural Revolution.
He has broken an enormous number of clips over the course of the last 48 hours, culminating in Doge, which has been following his work, canceling some $350 million in spending.
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
So, Christopher, why don't you walk us through?
Some of the clips that you dropped a little bit earlier, and also some brand new clips that we are going to drop now on the show.
And tell us what exactly we're talking about here.
What are these agencies that DOE is funding?
So my team has spent the last two months really poring over all of the various nooks and crannies, sub-departments, and grantees of the Department of Education.
This is an institution that spends billions of dollars every year, and it functions in essence as a left-wing patronage machine.
And so I started dropping clips, now that Linda McMahon is in her confirmation hearings to become the secretary, to show the extent of the ideological corruption.
And this is the Ibram Kendi, Robin DiAngelo style narrative that is being pushed by thousands of employees associated with the department.
They're saying America is fundamentally racist.
They're saying that all white people function as white supremacists.
They're saying that you have to give up your power, privilege, and resources to the oppressed.
all of the narratives that we've seen over the last four years this is a major point of focus for the department regardless of who's in office so chris one of the sort of centers of spending that you have pointed out here is the equity assistant centers at the department of education what are these why are we spending money on them how do they operate it's really interesting the
These were centers that were established by legislation all the way back in the 1960s to provide a colorblind equality in education, a kind of noble principle.
But as with much of our civil rights apparatus, it's been hijacked by the radical left and these education centers that receive millions of dollars in public funds.
They're in charge of advising public school districts, not just in blue states, but in all 50 states.
They've been captured by left wing radicals who are promoting the Black Lives Matter agenda, who are describing the education system as a concentration camp.
And in one of the clips that you have today, even made the absurd argument that babies are racist, especially white babies, become racist before they can even talk.
So I'm going to go through some of these clips right now.
Now, since 2017, these so-called EACs have taken in about $52 million in taxpayer money.
So let's begin with a clip in which members of the Equity Assistance Centers and the MAEC, or the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium, talk about how effectively our educational systems are a concentration camp.
Here's what it sounds like.
We are working in a structurally racist from its beginning system.
It's like sometimes I feel like I'm working in this concentration camp and there's the gas chambers everywhere and I'm part of that system.
And so you have to make that decision about how far you're willing to push.
Or whether you need to get out and do something different.
Anti-racist teachers recognize, one, that the system is designed, the public education system is designed to harm black and brown children.
It is not designed in their best interest.
It never has been.
And look, I benefited from public education.
I get that.
I'm the exception, not the rule.
We are really heavily focused on how do we get police out of schools.
We also heavily focus on how do we defund policing and SROs and all that.
Ibram X. Kendi has done a great job of putting words to this idea that a lot of us have known for a long time, that there is no not racist.
There is no non-racist.
You're either contributing to racism or you're pushing against racism.
So these are presumably advisors to educational institutions around the country, comparing our current educational system to the Holocaust, I noticed during the Holocaust nobody had a camera talking about how terrible it was in the concentration camps.
You know, like outside in a forest, which is where that lady is when she's talking, actually.
But, you know, who are these folks?
Why should we care?
How much money is flowing to them?
There are, you know, each of these...
Equity centers received an $8 million grant from the Biden-Harris administration.
And when you look at their organizational charts, they essentially support a dozen or two dozen left-wing race and gender activists who are in charge of advising thousands of public school districts, each of these centers.
And so these are very important nodes in a larger system to indoctrinate American kids and to harvest up taxpayer money in service of this left wing ideology.
All I remind you under the guise of the Civil Rights Act itself.
And so what's important is to expose exactly what this means in practice.
And these people are not subtle in their language.
It's very clear what they're trying to communicate.
But for many years, no one was looking.
And so, my job is to try to expose it, to bring it to public attention, and then to bring it to the attention of the doge boys who are in In the Department of Education building right now, looking through contracts to terminate.
And this organization that hosted this seminar that you're rolling the clips from has now had all federal funding revoked moving forward.
I mean, some of the other clips that you've provided us with are absolutely insane.
I mean, make that clip look mild.
Here, for example, is a clip in which these pseudo-educators explain the importance of work in the LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign.
Community and how important it is for children to learn about twerk.
Our third point that we do bring up and cover in this mini presentation is understanding the importance of twerk in the LGBT plus community and in LGBT survival because especially for queer and trans people of color and most emphatically black trans women this often Now,
this is just evil.
I mean, the actual slide talks about how important it is for young people to be supported, and presumably we're talking about here minors, Am I missing something here?
No, it sounds absurd, but you're not missing anything that is exactly what they're saying.
They're saying that actually decriminalizing and destigmatizing...
...work for black transgender children is the new noble calling.
And look, that's certainly opinion that you can have, protected by the First Amendment.
I disagree.
I'm sure that you disagree.
But the important thing here is that this is being subsidized by federal taxpayers.
So every taxi driver, line cook, and electrician around the country that's working hard to feed their family is actually chipping in for this idea that we should destigmatize.
...work for children.
It is so outrageous that it's almost hard to believe it's true.
I mean, that is philia.
And certainly the word grooming would not be an apposite with regard to this.
That is insane.
But just in case you thought that we were done, we're not.
Here's another clip of some of these pseudo-educators explaining that we need to really fight adultism.
Apparently, adultism is the idea that adults have the ability to make adult decisions while children are, in fact, children.
Apparently, this is a bad and a form of discrimination as well.
As service providers and as educators, we want to make sure that we are not reinforcing systems of adultism.
For LGBT young people, adultism is uniquely important because a huge part of Where adultism meets homophobia and transphobia is the notion that as a young LGBT person, you are not in charge of yourself, you are not in charge of your body, you're not in charge of your medical care.
And by denying or trying to control LGBT young people's ability to express themselves as who they truly are, this often leads to things like people running away from home, as we've discussed and shared with you about our personal lives.
This often leads to Homelessness.
This often leads to and creates a lot of the systems that we all here, I would imagine, are trying to prevent.
Say, for example, an LGBT child comes out to their parent, and their parent is cis-ha, and their parent's like, oh, you know, well, you know, it could just be a phase you might grow out of it, right?
That's something that is commonly heard by LGBT young people.
That is not just homophobic and transphobic, it's also adultist, because you're presuming, due to that young person's age, that they are unable to recognize themselves as an LGBT person.
So we want to make sure, obviously, as parents, that we're one, not doing and saying things like that.
Not helpful.
It's also violent, which we'll get into in a couple of slides.
But we also want to make sure as educators that we are authentically collaborating with our youth and our young people.
So we want to make sure that we're working when we're working with young people, most especially LGBT youth, we're collaborating with them authentically.
You know, we're asking our young people, well, what do you need?
What do you think?
What is your perspective?
You know, we want to make sure our young people are empowered in acknowledging that they are knowledgeable and, yes, wants people, okay, who are able of making decisions, yes, with support, yes, with love, yes, with guidance, but of making decisions about who they are and what that looks like for them.
Okay, this is actually what we would call in common parlance evil because basically what she is saying is that parents should not parent their children.
Children are fully capable of making decisions in consultation with educators.
I mean, this is exactly the sort of issue that lost Terry McAuliffe, his gubernatorial race in Virginia against Glenn Youngkin, this sort of anti-parental movement, and also the bizarre, sick, and perverse idea that children are capable of making lifelong decisions about important matters.
And as it turns out, we'll see in just a moment, apparently even babies are capable of having racist tendencies or making decisions.
I mean, this is all insane.
And Chris, it does go to something deeper, which is the infusion of all these values throughout our educational system.
That really needs to be rooted out.
Yeah, that's right.
And look, the coinage is unique and funny.
It's called adultism.
But the idea is actually a very old left-wing idea.
If you study the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, one of the key tactics from the Chinese Communist Party was to radicalize children and to turn them against their parents.
And so you had mobs of kids that were being radicalized by communist teachers that were then going door-to-door, tearing down houses, pulling people out of their...
And so while it can appear to be a kind of trivial idea, adultism, there is a rich history of this, and the basic mechanism is one that is very dangerous.
When you get the government in between the parents and children, history suggests that terrible things can happen.
There's more with Chris in a moment.
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Now, Chris, another of the clips that you provide us, and again, it sounds like an endless compendium of insanity that we, the taxpayers, have been funding over the course of the last couple of decades minimum.
Here is a clip in which these, again, pseudo educators, and I call them that because the only thing they're educating in is propagandistic idiocy at the very best, where they talk about race and racism in infants.
Here we go.
So this timeline provides an illustration of how racial awareness develops.
According to research, three-month-olds show a preference for looking at faces that are similar to the race they see most often.
At nine months, infants are unable to distinguish the facial features of racial groups other than their caregiver unless they frequently see images of racially diverse people.
By the age of two, children are putting people into categories based on race and they are observing and internalizing power dynamics.
At age three, children develop biases and begin assigning meaning to race by attributing positive traits to the dominant race.
However, children can still respond to positive messaging about their own and others' racial identities.
By age five, children of all races demonstrate social biases primarily by attributing negative traits to non-white races.
At this age, children are capable of acting against racial injustice.
well the babies are racist And because the babies are racist, presumably the babies have to be hijacked into this beautiful educational or re-educational system as soon as humanly possible, taken out of the hands of their subtly racist parents to prevent white supremacy from taking over the nation or some such.
Yeah, and my favorite part is that at the beginning it says, according to research.
But if you actually take a look at the research, you dig into the footnotes, it is like the most shockingly or maybe not shockingly shoddy garbage imaginable.
And yet this idea that, you know, babies kind of come out of the womb with a Klan hood is just so farcical and ridiculous.
And yet it's captured the minds of people with PhDs.
These people who run these programs are PhDs.
I think that is the perfect example of someone completely suspending their common sense, suspending any experience of children.
Children are incredible at that age.
They're open to so many different people.
They're open to everything.
But also how ideology can really poison you.
And so the story is not really about these education centers themselves.
They should be gone and they will be gone.
But the story is that we have an educational class in this country that is susceptible to this ideological poison and then becomes fanatical about it when they press it onto our kids.
That's the most important thing.
And so wherever you are in the country, if you're in a red state, if you're in Tennessee or Florida or Idaho, you're not safe from these ideologies because these centers and these national ideologies are trying to find a foothold everywhere.
So, Chris, just to sort of conclude this, this all wraps into their broader perception of society, which, of course, we let off with, which is the idea that American society is deeply systemically racist, homophobic, evil, and needs to be torn out at the root.
And, of course, their job as educators, their praxis is to remove all of the barriers to the re-education of America's youth.
Here are, again, some of these pseudo-educators talking about how white supremacist American society innately is.
White children, two white daughters.
They are seven and nine.
And when I think about that question that you asked, what does it mean that's different?
I think about how I'm really trying to force my children to reside in reality.
So that means that they are going to really push through all of the white fantasy that is just part of what it means to grow up in a white supremacist society.
As gets talked about quite a lot is that whites have a lot of fantasy about what it means to be white and how maybe they deserve everything that they've gotten.
There's a lack of history.
Their children are very innocent and that innocence follows them throughout their lives through schooling and in every single institution.
Whereas children of color are even in some cases as Ferguson Studied are adultified at very young ages not even seen as children as innocents that deserve loving correction or the same nurturing and so when I think about how what how how to interrupt that with my own children It comes up in many different ways.
One of the things I think that white parents need to not be afraid to do, and which I know that they are, is to actually name racism as a power dynamic between white people and people of color.
So, Chris, I think the most important thing for people to understand is that all these people are going to lose their jobs, these particular agencies are going to be defunded, but...
The biggest problem is the Department of Education, as you say, overall is just a giant agitprop machine on behalf of these ideologies at this point.
This is the reason why Republicans have been calling for the disestablishment of the Department of Education overall.
I mean, the kinds of money that you're talking about for these particular agencies is a drop in the bucket of the overall DOE budget, which was about $268 billion in fiscal year 2024. But the point of that is that if you are throwing, say, $160 billion at higher education to subsidize exactly this kind of trash at our nation's higher education schools.
You're doing the same thing.
It's just that it's not quite as obvious.
It's not on all the tapes.
And what you're doing here is a real service because it is indicative of a much broader rot.
These are just symptomatic of something much deeper happening inside our educational systems, and it needs to be ripped out root and branch.
Yeah, that's right.
And there are already encouraging signs.
Of course, Elon's Doge team is going in and eliminating contracts, but the president has greater ambitions.
He's called for the abolition of the Department of Education.
There is a lot of debate over how he can do that, how far he can take executive action, where he'll need the legislature to actually come through.
But there's really a simple three-part plan.
You spin off the federal financial aid for universities into a separate portfolio that you can then privatize down the line.
You continue to spend the money for K-12 schools, special ed, lunch programs by directly block granting it to the states so states have greater oversight over how those dollars are used.
And then you just absolutely crush, demolish, and then salt over all of the quote-unquote research, which is really just ideological production.
And then you never look back because there is no good that's happening from these programs.
You can save the programs that, for now, are going to have to be passed through.
But we cannot let this survive another four years.
It survived under Trump.
It survived under Bush.
It survived under Reagan.
Now is the time.
Americans are finally aware of what's happening with public schools and these left-wing ideologies.
We have to capitalize on the momentum and actually get this job done.
No one is getting the job done quite like Chris is.
Chris, amazing work, as always, and thanks for...
Again, an ongoing contribution to the fixing of all the broken systems.
Really appreciate the time, and thanks for breaking these tapes with us.
Thank you.
All right, coming up, RFK Jr. has now been confirmed by the Senate, and we have some breaking news on what should be on the chopping block first off for HHS. It's Valentine's Day, and here's a deal you'll love.
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Promo code DW40. Okay, meanwhile, RFK Jr. has now been confirmed by the full Senate.
He's going to have a heavy lift because obviously the Make America Healthy Again agenda is its own agenda.
And he's going to have to balance between a couple of different sort of militating forces inside the Republican Party.
One, Republicans tend to like freedom of choice.
They don't actually want Big Macs banned.
President Trump is not interested in Diet Coke going away because of aspartame or something.
Traditionally, Republicans have been much more freedom-oriented as opposed to regulation-oriented.
On the other hand, RFK Jr. is pledging to take a much harsher look at much of the stuff that goes into our food and that he believes might be making us unhealthy.
Presumably, that means...
Funding will be increased in places like the National Institutes of Health in order to actually research just how unhealthy things are making us.
One of the big problems with some of the studies done on, say, red dye number 40 or stuff like that is that the conclusion that is drawn in the public about the lack of safety of some of these particular ingredients is rooted in studies in which a rat was drowned in 40 gallons of red dye 40, for example.
That sort of stuff needs to actually be applied in a user, human-friendly way.
And again, none of that is an argument for bad stuff in our food.
It's just a recognition that an overburdened, overweening regulatory state is not something that Republicans really signed up for.
They would like, however, to take a much harsher look at how HHS does its business.
Now, again, HHS is the single largest spender in the federal government.
So I'm hoping, and I think that Bobby Kennedy will, bring in a bunch of experts on, for example, CMS, the Medicare Payment Services and Medicaid Payment Services.
Take a look for the fraud and the waste.
Already, apparently, a House subcommittee has discovered a massive amount of waste in this area, according to Caroline Lovett today at the White House.
Here she was.
The subcommittee headed by Chairman Marcia Taylor Greene, her and her staff, discovered $2.7 trillion in improper payments.
To Medicare, Medicaid, overseas, to people who should not have gotten it.
Some of this room might have missed that press conference.
Can you elaborate on what the President is thinking at this point?
Well, again, that's another example.
There's a very long list of the fraud, waste, and abuse that Doge is identifying on a daily basis.
Elon Musk also talked about yesterday about Social Security payments that are going out the door for people who are no longer with us, unfortunately.
I would say that is certainly fraud.
There's also a lot of contracts they've identified that just as a hypothetical example are a million bucks, but only 500,000 went out the door.
So where's the rest of that cash?
And so that's the thing.
Those are the things that Doge is working on every single day.
By the way, if that subcommittee report is correct, 2.7 trillion dollars.
That is a lot of money.
I mean, that is basically, at this point, what, 8% of our national debt just there?
If that's right.
I'd love to see whether that's right or not, because that's pretty wild.
But one of the places that...
RFK Jr. should absolutely put his focus, has been uncovered by our very own Luke Rosiak over at Daily Wire.
Apparently, numerous agencies seeking to thwart President Trump's efforts to lay off DEI employees have been changing their job titles after the election.
That includes the HHS's chief diversity officer, who billed himself as, quote, authentically, unapologetically, blackety-black-black.
His profile said, quote, greetings and salutations.
I am Dia D. Harris, ACF Chief Equity Officer.
My pronouns are he, him, L. Ill.
You know what that means.
I'm unapologetically a black man.
He said that in one HHS presentation.
But after the election, his title was then changed to Chief Organizational Development Officer who's no longer committed to authenticity on LinkedIn.
He then falsified his resume, changing his previous job titles across an entire career spent as a DEI consultant and advocate.
So, stuff like this, that needs to be rooted out immediately.
By the brand new Health and Human Services Secretary.
Congratulations to RFK Jr. By the way, it's not just in HHS. It's in the Department of Labor.
It's in the NIH. There are a bunch of agencies where all of the equity diversity officers are basically just changing their past titles in order to avoid the consequences of their job.
Meanwhile, RFK was sworn in yesterday.
Here was some footage of what that looked like.
I, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
That I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.
That I take this obligation freely.
Without any mental reservation.
Or purpose of evasion.
And that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.
So help me God.
Congratulations.
RFK Jr. then gave a speech explaining that he's been spending his entire life trying to get to a position where he could make America healthy again, and he credits God with President Trump's election.
Twenty years, I've gotten up every morning on my knees and prayed that God would put me in a position where I can end the childhood chronic disease epidemic in this country.
On August 23rd of last year, God sent me President Trump and he gave me...
He's now given me, he's kept every promise that he's made to me.
He's kept his word in every account and gone way beyond it.
I'm so grateful to you, Mr. President.
A lot of people told me that I couldn't trust President Trump, that I better get it in writing.
And we did a handshake, and everything that he told me he was going to do, he has done.
And I'm so grateful to him, and I've told you before.
I genuinely believe that you are a pivotal historical figure, and you are going to transform this country.
So what exactly is going to be on RFK's agenda?
Well, some of the things he's talked about are banning direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical ads, which is politically popular.
It may run into some free speech concerns.
His basic idea is that it causes consumers to basically request drugs that they don't even know what the drugs do, and it doesn't put the doctor in the driver's seat to sort of recommend.
He wants to purge employees at the NIH. The NIH is going to be run by the excellent Jay Bhattacharya, by the way.
So I assume that Jay Bhattacharya has no interest in, for example, getting rid of polio vaccines.
Kennedy is also pushing work on sort of regulations surrounding food safety.
He has some momentum here, for sure, because...
There is a generalized feeling that Americans are fat and out of shape and in bad health shape, and that is not a wrong perception.
The fact of the matter is that the United States is filled with obesity and is filled with chronic disease, and RFK Jr. is not wrong about that.
Again, the rubber is going to meet the road when it comes to specific proposals that are less advisory than mandatory in their effect.
Meanwhile, President Trump has been exploring in serious ways an end to the Ukraine war.
He has suggested.
That there will be a get-together in Saudi Arabia involving Vladimir Putin.
And he believes that peace is in the offing, or if not peace, then at least a ceasefire.
Kaylin Collins over at CNN was very upset with Trump for saying this.
She says, do you believe that Vladimir Putin wants peace?
Now, the reason this is sort of a dumb question is because what is Trump supposed to say?
No?
I mean, how does the negotiation go if he says no?
Right there.
The whole purpose of the negotiation is to try to get to something.
I think I'd like to see peace.
Do you trust President Putin?
Yeah, I believe that he would like to see something happen.
I trust him on this subject.
This should have been done by Biden years ago.
This should have never been allowed to happen.
I know he's a friend of yours.
He's a friend of CNN. That's why nobody watches CNN anymore, because they have no credibility.
Again, does he actually trust Vladimir Putin?
President Trump is not in the business of trusting people.
Again, this is, I think, one of the great myths about Trump is that, oh, he must have trusted Kim Jong-un.
Did he trust Kim Jong-un?
Did he really?
Or did he say nice things about Kim Jong-un when he thought there was something to be done?
And then when there wasn't, he was talking about how his red button was bigger than Kim Jong-un's.
This is, I think, the entire stupidity of the media's approach to Trump, particularly in his second term.
And again, they keep trying to play as though Trump is doing something out of the box by suggesting publicly...
That Donbass and Crimea are likely to end up in Russian hands at the end of this.
CBS's Nancy Cordes, she acknowledges that even the Biden administration knew that much.
Privately, even Biden officials often acknowledge that Ukraine would ultimately have to give up some territory in order to secure a deal to end the war, though those Biden officials usually avoided saying that out loud.
Trump officials say they're just being realistic three years into this invasion in order to drive both sides to the bargaining table.
Now, there are many ways in which President Trump is actually quite reminiscent of Ronald Reagan.
One of the things about Ronald Reagan that was really interesting in the way that he negotiated agreements is that he was very, very optimistic and almost utopian in the way that he would approach foreign policy problems, but then very realistic and hard-headed in the implementation of the solutions.
So very famously, in 1986, he had a meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev.
In Reykjavik, Iceland, in which he discussed the possibility of almost complete denuclearization of Europe by both sides.
A massive reduction in nuclear weapons armament.
And when it came down to, for example, the Strategic Defense Initiative, when it came down to Star Wars, Reagan famously said no to Gorbachev.
They're like at the very end of the negotiation, and Gorbachev wanted SDI killed, right?
That would have been our space-based missile defense.
And Reagan said, no, we're not giving that up.
Catch you later.
And that was the end of the negotiation.
And the left still complains about that, but that was one of the key points in the end of the Cold War because the Soviets knew they could not compete with the United States on that footing.
And that ramping up their military budget would effectively bankrupt the country.
Well, President Trump is just as utopian in some ways as Reagan was.
Here he was yesterday suggesting that he would like to cut the defense budget in half.
But of course, is he going to cut the defense budget in half?
Is President Trump really going to do that?
He doesn't trust Xi enough to do that or Putin enough to do that.
President Trump is not a sucker.
I know the media want to turn him into a sucker, but I have yet to see the evidence.
You know, when I left, we had no Middle East problem.
We had no Russia going into Ukraine.
They never would have done it.
Putin never would have done it.
And I came back and we got like the whole world is blowing up.
So when we straighten it all out, then I want to have one of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia.
And I want to say, let's cut our military budget in half.
And we can do that.
And I think we'll be able to do it.
Okay, now, does he really believe that China's going to cut its military budget in half, or Russia?
That they're really just going to stop competing on the world stage?
I doubt it.
But setting that up as a possible carrot is not a bad negotiation tactic.
Again, I don't think that President Trump wants to get taken to the cleaners.
Meanwhile, by the way, while he's saying all of this, while he's talking about massive defense cuts, for example, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, is out there telling NATO, They need to increase their defense spend to 5% of GDP. Leaders of our European allies should take primary responsibility for defense of the continent, which means security ownership by all allies, guided by a clear understanding of strategic realities, and it's an imperative given the strategic realities that we face.
And that begins with increasing defense spending.
2% is a start, as President Trump has said, but it's not enough.
Nor is 3%, nor is 4%, more like 5%.
Real investment, real urgency.
And by the way, the NATO Secretary General is saying, well, he's not wrong.
Like, if we actually wish to be an independent body, then probably the nations of NATO really should increase their own defense spending.
Last night we discussed a lot of things.
Obviously defense spending.
Clearly we have to do more.
We have to ramp up defense spending because we know we cannot protect ourselves four or five years from now if we don't.
And also we need to ramp up defense spending because it is clear that the U.S. rightly requires us to do more here on the European side and the Canadian side of NATO. It's only fair.
It's only sensible.
By the way, speaking of Europe, it's not just a matter of Europe actually increasing its defense spending.
It's a matter of Europe actually shutting down its asinine immigration policies.
Yesterday, I love the headlines from the legacy media.
It really is amazing.
The Wall Street Journal, which has a great editorial page, but its news section is to the left of the New York Times.
Here was the headline yesterday, quote, Car hits crowd in Germany, injuring at least 30 in suspected attack.
Man, I hate when cars just do that, just on their own, just hitting crowds.
What's the actual story?
You know what the story is.
The actual suspect is an Afghan refugee.
It's a terror attack in all likelihood, wounding more than two dozen people in what authorities said was a suspected terror attack.
The suspect was a 24-year-old Afghan citizen who had a German residence permit.
The suspect was previously known to authorities from investigations in which he was a witness to his previous work in store security, actually.
And again, this is just the latest attack in Europe.
Deadly attack using a car in a crowded place.
Again, springing from devotees of the most radical form of the religion of bees.
Europe is going to have to take a hard look at itself, because it turns out their policies have been a giant fail for quite a long time.
Well, meanwhile, on the cultural front, it's a Friday, so we've got to talk a little bit of culture.
Apparently, we have breaking updates.
Breaking updates, very important, on the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni saga.
I know, people are really into this, like really, really into this.
So, what is the latest update?
Well...
It turns out that Blake Lively was caught on tape talking about how she manipulates people around her in order to take control of the movies upon which she works.
Oops!
Oops!
That turns out to be a bad tactic.
As I've said before, my first advice is a lawyer to all possible clients.
Don't do criming on tape.
Criming on tape is stupid and bad, and don't do it.
It's not a crime to do this, but it does make it look a little suspicious that you are using exactly these tactics against Justin Baldoni, apparently.
It's just as important to say, okay, I believe in this and that's why I'm standing up for it and that's why I'm not being difficult.
And then there are other moments to go like, am I the...
In the room, like, what is happening here?
I would show up on a set.
I knew that they just wanted me to show up and look cute and stand on a little pink sticker where I'm supposed to go and say what I'm supposed to say.
But I also knew that, like, that wasn't fulfilling for me, that I wanted to be a part of the storytelling, that I wanted to be a part of the narrative, whether that be in the writing, in the costume design, in creating the character.
And sometimes I had directors or producers or writers who would welcome that and invite that once they saw that I was able to offer that.
And sometimes I would have...
I have people who really resented that because they were like, we just hired you to be an actor.
Yet when I went in the meetings, I would just seem like I'm just there to be the actor and ready to get the gig.
I wouldn't reveal that I actually need to have authorship in order to feel fulfilled.
So I think that for them, sometimes that might have felt like a rug pull because you're like, you're trying to assert yourself into something that we didn't hire you to do.
And so it was a really strange position to be in because I felt like I don't want to just be an actor.
I want to have more authorship.
Oh my God.
And then she did exactly that to Justin Baldoni, apparently.
That's literally the accusation as to what happened.
And then she went and complained about it by attacking him and trying to wreck him because she apparently was at one point in a room with her, Ryan Reynolds, and Taylor Swift trying to bully Justin Baldoni.
To make changes to the script for this movie?
So first of all, let me point out to Blake Lively.
You are an actress.
Unless you signed on as a producer or a director, there's literally no reason why your creative input should matter.
You're an actor.
If you want to write your own script, you should go write your own script.
If you want to sign on to a movie with the understanding that you're going to actually make script changes, then great.
But if the idea is that you sign on as an actor and then you turn around and try to take control of the script, this makes you a jerk.
At the very, very least, there's a reason why the public has shifted from being a little skeptical of Justin Baldoni to basically just rooting outright for Justin Baldoni at this point.
Speaking of which, it's time for a thing I hate that is actually attached to the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni situation.
So, I had the misfortune a couple of months ago of being on a plane and looking for a movie to watch and settling on Deadpool vs.
Wolverine.
I know some people like this movie.
Some people are stupid.
This movie is bad.
It is a bad movie.
Every joke is too long.
It's the same joke over and over, which is some sort of strange homoeroticism between Deadpool and Wolverine, mainly from Deadpool toward Wolverine.
The plot makes zero sense at all.
It's eight hours long.
It's just terrible.
Again, apparently people...
Sort of loved this movie because they thought that it was kind of just wise, cracking Ryan Reynolds doing his thing.
But every line is ad-libbed and not particularly well.
It is just a bunch of jokes about the male appendage.
This movie has now also become rather notorious because there's a character called Nice Pool who apparently is a spoof of Justin Baldoni.
He looks like Justin Baldoni, talks like Justin Baldoni.
He's actually maybe the only character I kind of thought was hilarious in Deadpool vs.
Wolverine was Justin Baldoni's character, apparently.
Here's what that looked like.
Who are you?
Oh, I'm Deadpool.
And I guess you're Deadpool, too.
But in here, everybody calls me Nicepool.
Oh, my goodness.
Wait till you see Ladypool.
She is gorgeous.
She just had a baby, too, and can't even tell.
I don't think you're supposed to say that.
That's okay.
I identify as a feminist.
Right.
He ends up being killed, of course, and in a rather gruesome fashion.
I thought that was actually maybe the only funny part of the movie.
But if you can't avoid this movie, you absolutely should because it's absolute trash.
Speaking of absolute trash, another thing that I hate today.
So I was informed by producer Jessica, who informs me of all of the bad movies that I never want to watch, that I had to take a look at a movie called Kinda Pregnant, starring the veritable pustule on the ass of American popular culture, Amy Schumer.
And this movie is...
Just an abomination.
It is a war crime, this movie.
Truly, you belong in The Hague for having made this movie, Amy Schumer.
The logline is, when Lainey, she is Lainey, has a plan to settle down and start a family, and it falls apart.
So she puts on a fake baby bump, tells a lie, and accidentally falls for her dream guy.
How this movie was ever made is beyond me.
It is a horror show.
It also happens to be filled with abortion jokes.
That's exciting.
Here is a scene in which Lainey finds out that her best friend is pregnant.
And jokes, she's upset because her best friend is pregnant and she's a loser.
And so she makes a joke about maybe she should just get rid of the baby.
Hilarious!
Abortion, killing babies, hilarious.
You're not drinking.
You look like s***.
You don't want to talk about holes.
Are you f***ing pregnant?
No!
No?
No!
Get rid of it!
What?
No, I'm sorry.
I don't know why I said that.
I'm sorry.
God, I just, I thought that I would have a baby first and you would, like, wait too long and, you know, try and adopt and that wouldn't really pan out and you would just get, like, some weird pet, like, off-brand, like a ferret or some sh**.
I'm so happy for you.
A baby!
Looks great, guys.
Looks great.
If you didn't like that abortion joke, maybe you'll like this other abortion joke.
Everyone at school and on the web knows that I am the sexiest teacher in the world and that kindness is my favorite hobby.
So I want this to be your day, too.
I don't want it to be.
It's your day, so please leave me alone.
Really?
Please leave me alone.
Please, this is your day.
Context, Lainey is pregnant and thinking of terminating, which is so fine because you know I'm pro-choice like a Rolls Royce, but this could be our unicorn's last chance.
Wait, no, you need to go into the wrinkles.
So we're hoping that we can talk her into keeping it, right?
Oh my God, the chat is on fire.
Enough!
Wait, no, that's my phone.
Your phone's over there.
I'm turning it off.
Stop it!
Stop!
I'm not having an abortion!
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Jesus, Shirley, I would.
Kate has. - My mom tried. - Hmm.
Didn't like that one either, did you?
Abortion.
Hilarious.
See, it's totally fine.
It's totally great and totally fine in a movie about pregnancy.
Well, I guess the good news is that there's bad news.
The bad news is apparently it was the most watched title during the week of its release at 25.1 million views over at the Netflix, apparently.
The good news is that Rotten Tomatoes got it right.
23% critics score, 23% audience scores.
That means it's terrible across the board.
It is indeed terrible across the board.
Okay, in just a moment, if you stick around past this, I will actually give you some things that you should watch that are actually good and interesting.
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