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March 14, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:01:22

Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!

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	Well, President Trump has chalked up another win with the victory of a continuing resolution in the Senate.
	We'll get to all that in a moment.
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	All right, so Chuck Schumer had made noises a little bit earlier this week about the possibility of holding up a continuing resolution that would fund the government all the way until September.
	And it was sort of unclear why he was doing that.
	Strategically, he had no ground to stand on because, after all, if the United States Senate, the Democratic minority, decided that they were going to filibuster the continuing resolution, there would be a government shutdown.
	And the Republicans would correctly say they had the votes to prevent the government shutdown, and it was Democrats who had actually created the government shutdown, at which point Chuck Schumer and the Democrats would be blamed for everything.
	It was a gigantic unforced error by Chuck Schumer.
	Well, yesterday he reversed himself.
	Democrats are, of course, very upset at Chuck Schumer because they believe that it is their duty to obstruct literally everything the Republicans do.
	Now, to be fair to Schumer, it was a no-win situation.
	On the one hand, if the continuing resolution goes forward, then President Trump continues to unleash the executive branch on itself to use those to cut, to slash, to burn, to fire.
	He had the ability to do that because the continuing resolution basically just says the government is going to continue to run at the same funding levels it has previously run.
	And this continuing resolution did not, in fact, include specific designations of where funding ought to go within each department, which would sort of force Trump to spend the money in each department.
	Instead, it had to have a broad overview, spend X dollars.
	At HHS. Spend X dollars at Department of Defense, for example.
	And that allowed enormous discretion inside the executive branch for President Trump to continue to allow Doge to do its work.
	This is what Democrats were objecting to.
	However, if they'd gone into government shutdown, then President Trump would have had the ability to determine who was an essential worker and who was not an essential worker.
	Because he's the president.
	And that would have meant more firings.
	So Chuck Schumer got himself stuck in this box canyon.
	His radical left-wing base was very upset with him.
	For not standing up to President Trump by filibustering the continuing resolution.
	Here is Jasmine Crockett, who's kind of the new AOC. AOC's lost some steam, and now she's been replaced in the public mind of the crazed left as sort of the hot new thing.
	There's the hotter newer thing in Jasmine Crockett, the congresswoman from Texas.
	Here she was yesterday.
	In my opinion, if we're shut down, you can't be fired.
	And what does that mean?
	It does mean that people will not be paid, but it does mean that they will get their back paid.
	So hopefully we can stop some of the bleeding.
	We just saw that the Department of Education laid off 50% of their workforce.
	So I don't really understand why anybody would say, oh, we got to take the high road.
	Listen, he is decimating the federal government.
	And you're talking about whether or not we're going to keep the doors open?
	He literally is shutting down departments anyway.
	Okay, but here is the problem.
	If you actually shut down the government, then he gets to designate people as essential workers and then furlough everybody else.
	So again, Democrats got themselves stuck here, and this was basically a really, really amazing play by Speaker Johnson.
	Speaker Johnson was somehow able to cobble together the entire Republican majority.
	And there's been a lot of talk about Speaker Johnson, the unworkable Republican majority, because it's so small.
	In some ways, he's actually benefited by that, because any single vote could be the vote that sinks a Trump agenda item, and no one wants to be the House vote except for Thomas Massey to sink a Trump...
	Speaking of which, we'll be having Speaker Johnson on in just a few minutes here on the show to discuss what's going on.
	For Democrats, according to the Wall Street Journal, a key issue in the continuing resolution was the GOP's full year continuing resolution omits the report that details where the executive branch should spend money program by program, as I mentioned.
	Such a report would give Democrats their best chance of defending the existence of shuttered operations in the courts.
	This week alone, the Education Department announced it was cutting about half its staff.
	The Veteran Affairs Department outlined plans to cut about $70,000 from its workforce.
	Now, the continuing resolution would extend funding for fiscal 2025 at prior year's levels.
	There would be some cuts, cutting to non-defense spending by $13 billion, increasing military spending by $6 billion.
	It would also unravel some portions of Joe Biden's Ridiculous Inflation Reduction Act.
	But overall, it really doesn't change the workings of the government all that much.
	It just allows Trump to keep doing what he's been doing.
	This, of course, is why so many wild left-wing Democrats are upset.
	Pramila Jayapal, who's the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, I'm very proud that House Democrats stayed united in voting against this Republican funding bill.
	Please don't call it a continuing resolution.
	It's not, because a continuing resolution keeps the levels of funding the same.
	This is a Republican funding bill.
	And I hope, and we have been working all day, to help...
	Our Senate colleagues understand that they, too, need to stand united against a Republican funding bill.
	Okay, so the Senate did not.
	So Chuck Schumer gave up the ghost yesterday.
	He said he would back the continuing resolution, not that he'd vote in favor of it, but that he at least would not filibuster it.
	Here he explained yesterday.
	Either proceed with the bill before us or risk Donald Trump throwing America into the chaos of a shutdown.
	This, in my view, is no choice at all.
	I believe it is my job to make the best choice for the country to minimize the harms to the American people.
	Therefore, I will vote to keep the government open and not shut it down.
	He went on to explain why with MSNBC's Chris Hayes. .
	To have the conflict on the best ground we have, summed up in a sentence, that they're making the middle class pay for tax cuts for billionaires, it's much, much better not to be in the middle of a shutdown, which should divert people from the number one issue we have against these bastards, sorry, these people, which is not only all these cuts, but they're ruining democracy.
	And one other thing on a shutdown.
	On a shutdown, the courts could close.
	Or at least be totally, totally disabled.
	And the courts are one of the best ways we've had to go after these guys.
	One of the things that Democrats are doing increasingly is they're reverting to cursing.
	If they are upset about something, they curse.
	They have to show performatively that they oppose Trump even if they can't actually obstruct his agenda in any sort of effective way.
	So you'll notice every single Democrat beginning to curse at a higher level.
	Again, that's performative.
	Chuck Schumer doesn't just drop bastards into a normal cable conversation.
	He drops it there because he wants to show his base he's really, really, really mad.
	But it's not going to be enough.
	Jake Sherman over at Punchbowl News, which is maybe the best insider newsletter in Washington, D.C., he says, What a mess this has become for Democrats.
	A government funding fight that began with Democrats demanding restrictions on Trump, Elon Musk, and Doge has ended with Democrats folding and now sniping bitterly at each other.
	House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his leadership team distanced themselves from Schumer's decision but didn't name him in a statement on Thursday night.
	Other House Democrats took direct aim at Schumer, including Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, even Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee and Schumer ally, thinks it is a big mistake.
	Sherman says, let's be blunt here.
	Democrats picked a fight they couldn't win and caved without getting anything in return.
	We'll also note it's more than five months into fiscal year 2025 already.
	Even with another month of negotiation, what Democrats were asking for, it's still not clear they would have notched any policy wins.
	And there's a reason Republicans put Democrats in this position, because they knew Democrats would cave.
	And they did.
	As Sherman points out, Democrats never managed to put Speaker Johnson or Senate Majority Leader John Thune or Trump in a tough spot.
	There are plenty of policies House Democrats could have asked for in the CR, more money for certain programs, for instance, that could have placed Republicans in a bind, but they never actually did any of that.
	Meanwhile, Senate Democrats tried to have it both ways.
	They warned each other in private and in public about forcing a government shutdown, but then they tried to force a government shutdown.
	So this set the Democratic base up for disappointment for seemingly no reason.
	And they violated the first rule of politics, never interrupt your opponent while he's making a mistake.
	And right now, the mistake the Democrats should be focusing in on is the tariff war, because that tariff war is driving the Dow Jones Industrial Average down.
	That is an easy case to make.
	If it recovers, of course, that case will disappear.
	But they can say, well, Dow Jones Industrial Average is now in corrections.
	Instead, they decided, hey, maybe we should start a giant fight over a continuing resolution we have no chance of actually stopping.
	And if the government shuts down, we get to own.
	The economic chaos.
	I mean, it's just the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
	In a second, we'll be joined by the Speaker of the House.
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	As I mentioned before, Speaker Johnson has done a masterful job of keeping together an incredibly narrow House majority.
	He joins us on the line right now.
	Speaker Johnson, thank you so much for the time.
	Let's start with the continuing resolution.
	So Democrats in the Senate were thinking about filibustering the continuing resolution.
	This is one of the great own goals that I've seen in recent history because obviously if they'd filibustered the continuing resolution, the government shutdown would have been totally on them.
	Credit really goes to you and the Republican majority in the House, a very slim majority.
	Somehow you keep cobbling together wins.
	How is that happening?
	Well, it's a team effort.
	It really is.
	We do a lot of work to keep everybody on the same page, and it pays off when we do that.
	This is another example of that.
	When the Republican Party sticks together, we can get big things done.
	And this is a big thing.
	Look, we funded the government.
	It's a relatively clean CR, except that it has a couple of innovations.
	Plused up defense spending and we reduced non-defense spending in small amounts, but it was important.
	That's exactly what the Trump administration needed to give them flexibility to do what they need to do.
	We are freezing funding.
	This is a year-over-year decrease in funding, Ben, and that's the first time anybody can remember that that's happened.
	So, you know, I keep making the analogy, we have an aircraft carrier.
	That's what the federal budget is, right?
	And it's taken decades to get into the situation we're in.
	We're going to turn it.
	But you don't turn an aircraft carrier on a dime.
	It takes miles of open ocean.
	So this is an important turn.
	And then when we get to the next FY26, the next fiscal year budget, which we're about to begin immediately after FY25 is done, then it gets real.
	Because then the doge cuts are included, the new revenue streams that the president and the administration are bringing about become a part of that.
	And we're going to be in a totally different situation.
	So we're excited.
	It's a good day for America.
	And I certainly hope the Senate does the right thing here.
	Speaker Johnson, one of the things that you mentioned there is sort of the open ocean that you need in order to get things done.
	The reality is the thing that everybody is waiting for is the one big, beautiful bill.
	So how are the negotiations on that going?
	Obviously, this wraps up a bunch of different topics into one gigantic bill.
	And there's been some controversy between the House and the Senate over what that looks like.
	The Senate had originally suggested they wanted two different bills, one that would be tax-focused, one that would be sort of immigration and defense-focused.
	How are those negotiations going?
	Well, they're going well.
	Look, we did our work in the House.
	We have to lead on this.
	I've told my Senate colleagues, while there are different ideas on how to achieve the ultimate objective, it has to be all in one bill.
	Why?
	Because if Lindsey Graham's strategy played out, and Lindsey's my friend, we've had a fun discussion about this, okay?
	But if you take energy, border, and defense spending, and you do that separately...
	Of course, every Republican will vote for that.
	That's the easy stuff.
	But we need that as sweetener on the larger package.
	Why?
	Because we have tax to do.
	And that's very complicated.
	We've got to check a lot of boxes, all of our campaign promises, all in one big, beautiful bill.
	But it's going along well, Ben.
	And I want to point out, the House began this process a year ago.
	It was last March when I brought in all the committee chairs, deputized them to start thinking about reconciliation, put their priorities together.
	And we've done that.
	So we're methodically working through the process.
	What will happen is over the next Four or five weeks, we'll put all this together.
	We'll meet the equilibrium point amongst all the Republicans and their various priorities and concerns.
	We'll send it to the Senate.
	And I'm hopeful, Ben, we can get this to the president's desk for signature before Memorial Day, hopefully early May.
	Why is that so important?
	Because we have to allow the American people to see the results of all this good policy before the midterm elections and in time to give them relief that they desperately need.
	So one of the big questions that's emerging with regard to the tax bill, Speaker Johnson, is the question of baseline budgeting.
	So typically, the Congressional Budget Office has a 10-year budget estimated on current law because the Trump tax cuts would expire over the course of the next couple of years.
	The idea from some is that somehow we should treat a tax cut continuation as though that's a change in the law and then it wouldn't be deficit neutral.
	Maybe you can explain what's going on.
	Yeah, I mean, so this is the Senate parliamentarian ultimately that makes a decision on this.
	The way it works, all this is kind of a legal fiction, Ben, really, but if the chairs of the two chambers in the budget committees agree that this is permanent policy, that we use current policy baseline, then it makes the tax cuts that we're going to extend permanent and extends it beyond 10 years.
	That's an important thing.
	It's what President Trump wants as a priority, and it's what I think people really need and deserve.
	Because if you're a small business owner, for example, it's very helpful to have certainty, to know that you have, going forward into the future, certainty about what your federal tax rate is going to be.
	That it wouldn't fluctuate in between elections and all of that.
	But now, here's the caveat.
	We want to make sure that we're fighting actual cuts.
	We have to turn this aircraft carrier around.
	We have too much federal spending.
	The government's too large.
	It does too many things.
	Does almost nothing well, right?
	So that's what the Doge effort is about.
	That's what the Trump administration is completely dialed in on.
	We want to reduce the size and scope of the federal government.
	And to do that, you've got to find real savings.
	So we want to encourage all the Republicans.
	We're the only ones that cut spending, not the Democrats, as is on display.
	We're going to encourage everybody to go and find real savings.
	Preserve the safety net programs, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
	Don't believe the hype.
	Don't believe what the Democrats are saying.
	But find efficiencies.
	Root out the fraud, waste, and abuse.
	All these things that we think can find maybe a trillion dollars in savings for the taxpayer.
	That's going to be a great thing, and it's all going to be wrapped into this big process.
	So obviously all this is really important because as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was saying yesterday and has been saying, the goal here is to provide a predictable, economically friendly future for business and investors.
	This, of course, brings up the turmoil in the markets.
	There's been a lot of turmoil in the markets over the course of the last three and a half weeks or so.
	A lot of talk about tariffs, reciprocal tariffs and all the rest of this.
	My great hope has been for the Trump administration that when President Trump says reciprocal, he means reciprocal, meaning that the goal is to get other countries to lower their tariffs so we can also lower our tariffs and then we sail off into the future together.
	Is that the impression that you're getting from the administration at this point?
	Yeah.
	You know, and I talk to the president about this daily.
	I do think that's the ultimate endgame here, is that, you know, we have huge disparities, really since World War II, since we became the last great superpower.
	We had the responsibility of the free world placed upon our shoulders, and that's fine.
	America has an exceptional place and a lot of responsibility, but other countries deemed our power.
	To be an excuse for them to have trade disparity with us.
	So we've got huge imbalances with lots of countries, even close allies.
	President Trump is coming in and using common sense.
	He's saying to these countries, this isn't...
	Post-World War II, it's far beyond that now.
	We need to have free and fair trade.
	And I think that's going to be the ultimate result, Ben, as you said.
	I think the reciprocal trade will fix the imbalances.
	I think they'll bring down these huge disparities from the other countries.
	And we'll get back to an actual free trade scenario.
	That's going to be good for America.
	And he is making our allies respect America again for the first time in a long time.
	And that's long overdue.
	Speaker Johnson, you're doing an incredible job under very trying circumstances.
	Really appreciate your hard work.
	And again, congrats on the victory in the continuing resolution fight.
	So good to be with you, my friend.
	Thanks for all you do.
	Thanks a lot.
	Speaking of the economy, now again, if you're a Democrat right now, if you're smart, and again, I don't mean to give advice to people who I hope continue to lose from here until the end of time, but if you are smart and you're a Democrat, the thing that you are focusing in on is not the continuing resolution.
	It is not even Doge, which...
	By and large, it's actually doing pretty popular things.
	Most Americans don't like waste, fraud, and abuse.
	Whatever they think of Elon Musk and whatever the media's take on Musk is irrelevant.
	The real question is whether Americans like somebody going through the books and firing people who are useless on the federal government payroll.
	They're focusing in on the wrong thing.
	The obvious thing they should be focusing in on is the tariff controversies that are being driven by President Trump because they have a pretty clear Narrative win when it comes to the idea that this is creating havoc in the markets.
	Yesterday, U.S. stocks slid.
	The S&P 500 closed in correction territory, down more than 10% from its record high in February, according to CNN. The Dow ended the day down 537 points, 1.3%.
	The S&P 500 fell 1.39%.
	The Nasdaq was almost 2% lower.
	The sell-off extended a route in U.S. markets that has been driven by the uncertainty around Trump's tariffs.
	And by the way, you can see this happening in real time.
	When President Trump does a presser, you can see the actual stock market reaction to his presser based on his answers.
	You'll be watching him on the main screen talking about tariffing the EU, and you will see the Dow Jones Industrial Average dip from green into red as he talks, because the markets react very quickly to what President Trump is saying.
	And as I've said before, even the sort of flip-flop appearance of chaos with regard to these tariffs is bad for markets.
	Uncertainty is just bad for markets.
	This is a point that the Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant, was making.
	And I really hope that President Trump is taking advice from his quite brilliant Treasury Secretary.
	And Besson is an excellent pick.
	He knows exactly what he's doing.
	Here he was, making the case for what the administration really is focusing on, or at least should be focusing on.
	As I told the Business Roundtable yesterday, as I tell your viewers, what we're trying to do is create economic certainty.
	We're going to do it with the tax plan.
	We're going to do it with deregulation.
	And I also said to the Business Roundtable, I think it was 135 CEOs yesterday, if you came out with a plan similar to what Doge wants to do with the federal government, all your stocks would go up 15 or 20 percent.
	It would be considered a miraculous restructuring, cost savings, and put you on a sustainable course.
	And that, of course, is exactly, that's the stuff that Trump really needs to focus in on.
	Unfortunately, the stock market has now dropped, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped from a high on February 19th, which again is less than a month ago, of 44,627, all the way down to yesterday's close at 40,813.
	Okay, which means that the stock market has now dropped something like 3,700 points, almost more than 8% over the course of the last month.
	So that should be a winning case for Democrats, right?
	This is what they should be focusing in on.
	James Carville has been making this case.
	Again, I think James Carville is a schmuck, but James Carville is not stupid.
	And when he says, wait around for your opponent to make the mistake, that, of course, is good political advice.
	Well, obviously...
	I want President Trump's agenda to succeed.
	I've said this a thousand times.
	The way that it's going to succeed is focusing in on doge, on deregulation, on tax cuts, on doing the things that create a predictable investment environment.
	It is not helped by President Trump continuing to bang on the Canadians.
	Smacking around the Canadians, again, it might be fun and games.
	It might be enjoyable to rip on the people up north who keep putting us in words that don't need them.
	I just don't understand what the actual economic...
	Goal here is.
	What is the attempt to achieve?
	This notion that Canada is somehow screwing us on trade is just not true.
	It is not true.
	The average Canadian tariffs on American goods, the average, is one of the lowest in the world on American goods.
	Under an agreement President Trump himself negotiated in Trump Term 1, the Canadian trade deficit is only in oil.
	Every other area, we have a trade surplus with Canada.
	So I suppose if we want to stop buying oil from Canada, we could do that.
	I'm not sure why we would do that, presumably.
	They're not exactly an enemy of the United States.
	Our cruel northern neighbors.
	President Trump keeps suggesting that Canada should simply be absorbed as the 51st state.
	Well, they're a sovereign country.
	They're not going to be absorbed as the 51st.
	Again, I like the joke, but at the point when the joke meets reality, things start to get a little dicier.
	And one of the unfortunate effects, I'll say this over and over, Pierre Polyev was leading in the polls.
	By a huge margin until the trade war started.
	Then the trade war started and now it appears that Justin Trudeau's party is likely to retain power in Canada.
	That is terrible.
	That is bad.
	If you want other countries to sympathize with the Trump agenda and everything from free market economics to foreign policy, you would like for those countries to be friendlier with the United States than you don't want to drive them into the arms of political opponents.
	But here's President Trump yesterday ripping on Canada again, suggesting they need to become the 50s.
	Again, I get the joke, guys.
	I get the joke.
	But when people start taking the joke seriously, it's kind of a problem.
	As a state, it would be one of the great states anyway.
	This would be the most incredible country visually.
	If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it between Canada and the U.S. Just a straight artificial line.
	Somebody did it a long time ago, many, many decades ago, and makes no sense.
	It's so perfect as a great and cherished state.
	Keeping O Canada, the national anthem.
	I love it.
	I think it's great.
	Keep it.
	But it'll be for the state, one of our greatest states.
	Maybe our greatest state.
	Again, hilarious, but not as hilarious when the Canadians, in response to all of this are like, listen, we're a little bit freaked out and so we're going to increase our tariffs.
	And then we get into a tariff war with the EU. And all the rest.
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	And again, all of this is the precursor to what is supposed to happen on April 2nd.
	This is one of the reasons the markets are freaking out right now.
	Because President Trump said in his State of the Union address, and I want to actually quote it here, quote, This system is not fair to the United States and never was.
	He's talking about the trade system.
	He said, On average, the EU, China, Brazil, India, Mexico, Canada, have you heard of them?
	Countless other nations charge us tremendously higher tariffs than we charge them.
	It's very unfair.
	India charges us auto tariffs higher than 100%.
	China's average tariff on our products is twice what we charge them.
	South Korea's average tariff is four times higher.
	Think of that.
	Four times higher.
	And so he says, the system is not fair to the United States.
	It never was.
	And so on April 2nd, I wanted to make it April 1st, but I don't want to be accused of April Fool's Day.
	Just one day, which costs us a lot of money.
	We're going to do it in April.
	I'm a very superstitious person.
	April 2nd, reciprocal tariffs kick in.
	Whatever they tariff us, other countries, we will tariff them.
	That's reciprocal, back and forth.
	Whatever they tax us, we will tax them.
	If they do non-monetary tariffs to keep us out of their market, we will do non-monetary barriers to keep them out of our market.
	There's a lot of that too.
	They don't even allow us in their market.
	We will take in trillions and trillions of dollars and create jobs like we have never seen before.
	Okay, this is where the disconnect happens.
	Reciprocal tariffs as an idea to drive down tariffs is actually precisely what Canada is trying to do with us right now.
	We increased our tariffs on certain products.
	They increased their tariffs in an attempt to get us to ratchet back down our tariffs.
	So President Trump's saying...
	We're going to do that to all these other countries on April 2nd.
	We're going to do it to South Korea.
	We're going to do it, presumably, to China.
	We're going to do it to Brazil, to India, to Mexico, to the EU, basically all of our main trading partners.
	We're going to do that to them.
	Now, it would be one thing if he said we're doing that in order to get them to lower their tariffs.
	Instead, he says that he's doing that because the tariffs themselves will make us richer.
	We'll take in trillions and trillions of dollars and create jobs like we have never seen before.
	Not by getting them to lower their trade barriers, which actually would do that, but by increasing our own.
	Trade barriers.
	And this is why markets are saying, um, it's March 14th today.
	In a couple of weeks, if we get President Trump radically increasing tariffs, and he's already making noises about it now, well, what are the markets going to do in just a couple of weeks?
	This is how people who trade in the markets think.
	They take in the information, and then they just determine on as objective a level as they can whether this means that markets are going to go up or whether they're going to go down.
	Well, yesterday, Martha McCallum over at Fox News was pressing Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who's an advocate for a lot of these tariff measures, about the Canadian tariffs.
	What's the point of these?
	So why not just eliminate the tariffs between Canada and the United States?
	Is that a place that we can get to?
	Because, I mean, it's mind-boggling.
	Like, 25 percent, now it's going to be 50 percent, now we're back to 25 percent.
	You know, why not just eliminate all the tariffs?
	That would be true if you were Fox Canada.
	Fox Canada would like that, but Fox USA. I'm just asking the question.
	I heard President Trump moments ago say $200 million we send in aid, essentially, to Canada.
	So are we going to eliminate that?
	I mean, tell me what the starting points are.
	That's what I want to know.
	The starting point is we care about America first.
	We care about American workers first.
	And we want to bring back those jobs to America.
	Now, again.
	If the idea is the tariffs are going to quote-unquote bring all the jobs back to America, first of all, jobs are not an amazing gauge of the economic health of a country.
	They are a decent gauge if the unemployment numbers are super high.
	It's a good shot the economy is doing really poorly.
	If the unemployment numbers are really fantastic, actually you can have countries where the unemployment numbers are really fantastic that are absolute bleepholes.
	North Korea has a 0% unemployment rate.
	Why?
	Because everybody works for the government.
	So actually it's not a good proxy.
	What you actually want for economic growth is the living standard of the American people.
	Is it getting better or is it getting worse?
	And there's so much gamesmanship that is played, all these sort of bizarre games that are played with regard to numbers, everything from the GDP to inflation rates to living standards and all the rest of it.
	My preferred standard is the standard that is used by the economist Marion Toopey in his book Super Abundance.
	And that is, how many hours do I have to work to achieve a certain good?
	And that is beginning cheaper and cheaper and cheaper over time for virtually every vital good in human existence.
	To take, for example, electricity.
	The reality is that if you were to find the equivalent of electricity 200 years ago, it would be whale oil.
	How many hours did you have to work for some whale oil so you could read a book at night?
	And the answer was you had to work a significant number of hours in order to achieve the money necessary to buy the whale oil.
	Today, you can flip on the light and it costs you almost nothing.
	And that is true for an enormous number of goods, products, and services in the United States.
	For all the people who are nostalgic for the 1950s, I don't see a bunch of these people sending their kids to riveting school because they want them to work on an assembly line at Ford.
	They're all sending their kids to college so their kids can be techies.
	For all of the talk about how Americans are living so much worse than they were in 1980, that is not actively true.
	It isn't.
	You would not trade your economic life.
	I'm not talking about your spiritual life.
	There are lots of problems with America spiritually.
	You would not trade your economic life right now for your economic life in 1980. You wouldn't.
	Because you wouldn't have a cell phone.
	You wouldn't have a computer.
	I remember these times.
	I'm old enough to remember before the internet was a big thing.
	I'm old enough to remember when cell phones were not available.
	And the only cell phone you saw was Gordon Gekko walking around on the beach carrying basically a giant box on his head.
	This sort of stuff is how economies develop.
	So using the proper metrics is important.
	The metric of we're going to bring jobs home, we're going to bring jobs.
	Again, it's not hard to bring jobs home.
	Everybody works for the government, or if everybody is subsidized by the government, the question is economic health.
	Is everybody's economic livelihood getting better?
	And again, you can make the case that in some areas, America's economic livelihood is not as good as it was a few years ago.
	Presumably with home ownership would be a good example.
	But overall, is America worse off now economically than we were in 1980 in terms of America's everyday life?
	Not in terms of the national debt, in terms of America's everyday life.
	The answer, of course, is no.
	We are not.
	Okay, so what is the goal?
	So what are we trying to achieve here?
	Well, Howard Lutnick said, again yesterday, the Commerce Secretary, that all these people, the Canadians, they need to say thank you to us.
	That's what we're looking for.
	We're looking for a thank you.
	The biggest trading partner in the whole world that is vital to Canada's existence says, I'm unhappy.
	And they respond negatively.
	You know why?
	Because for 20 years, 30 years, they've gotten away with it.
	Right?
	It's like Ukraine.
	They came in.
	You imagine coming into this country, sitting in the Oval Office, having received $300 billion in aid from us, and military, and NATO, and all the rest, and the first words out of your mouth aren't, thank you.
	Just say thank you.
	God knows, just say thank you.
	Okay, so first of all, sure.
	I mean, everybody should say thank you to the United States all the time.
	Everybody should thank God for the United States all the time.
	We are the most benevolent world power in human history.
	No question.
	Sure, everybody should say thank you.
	However, is that a way to make trade policy?
	Let's say the Canadians come tomorrow and they say thank you.
	Thank you for being the power on our southern border that protects us from enemies, foreign and domestic, and that helps drive our economy.
	Thank you for that.
	If they say thank you tomorrow, do the tariffs go away?
	And what exactly is the goal?
	Again, if the goal here is to lower the tariffs, I'm for it.
	If the goal here is just the idea that tariffs are going to make us somehow richer, again, no one is for that, including, by the way, Tesla.
	So Tesla sent out a letter to the administration yesterday.
	This is Elon Musk's company.
	It sent out an unsigned letter to the administration warning that President Trump's trade war could make it a target for retaliatory tariffs against the United States and increase the cost of making vehicles in America.
	In an unsigned letter, this is the Financial Times reporting, addressed to U.S. Trade Representative Jamison Greer, Tesla said it supports fair trade, but warned that U.S. exporters were, quote, exposed to disproportionate impacts when other countries respond to U.S. trade actions.
	For example, past trade actions by the United States have resulted in immediate reactions by the targeted countries, including increased tariffs on EVs, electric vehicles, imported into those countries.
	And that, of course, is not a shock.
	If we are hitting other places where they live, they're going to hit us where we live.
	They're going to hit our tech sector.
	The question I have in all this is, what is the goal?
	And this is where, again, I'm bewildered that Democrats are not honing in on this.
	Why are Democrats not honing in on this?
	Just as a matter of politics, it's malpractice.
	Maybe they agree with the tariffs.
	Maybe they have no idea what they're doing.
	I don't know.
	Whatever it is, when markets go down, that is typically a good proxy for a good line of political attack.
	And meanwhile, none of this, it's just not necessary.
	It's not necessary.
	Why are we focusing in on a tariff war initiated against...
	Our allies, mainly.
	Places like Canada.
	Places like the EU. China's right there, and China is perfectly willing to ship its goods anywhere, cheaply, and make deals with Canada and the EU. And there's plenty of stuff that needs to get done.
	Again, as the Treasury Secretary, Scott Besson, suggested, what the administration should be focused on is deregulation, cuts to government, and tax cuts.
	Speaking of which, you can see the panic in the eyes of the public sector employee unions.
	One of the worst aspects of American politics is the fact that you have all of these unions that are in the public sector.
	A taxpayer-funded public unions.
	And these unions are not negotiating against a profit-driven management, against a business-savvy management.
	Instead, they are negotiating against the taxpayer.
	And they are literally electing the people to negotiate on behalf of the taxpayer.
	So these public sector unions donate enormous amounts of money to Democrats, and then they negotiate with the Democrats for their own salary.
	All to be paid for by the national debt or by the taxpayers.
	Well, now Doge is coming in and cutting a lot of these folks.
	And they are freaking out.
	Totally freaking out.
	So here, for example, is the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Everett Kelly.
	And he's freaking out.
	Well, first of all, I think that's misinformation.
	And this administration is very good at putting out false information.
	The government today is the same size it was in the 70s, okay?
	You know, the population has exploded, but the amount of federal workers has not.
	So that's just a false information about it being too big.
	It's the same size it was in the 70s.
	Well, I mean, the idea that the federal government is the same size it was in the 70s belies the fact that the federal budget in 1970 was approximately $195 billion.
	That was the total outlay of the federal government in 1970. $195 billion.
	Today, the annual outlay of the federal government is somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 to $7 trillion.
	Okay, so, no.
	Yes, the federal government has grown just a little bit.
	Just a little bit.
	The federal budget in 1970, on a non-inflation adjusted basis.
	It's about 3% of what the total federal budget is right now.
	So to pretend the federal government hasn't grown is totally psychotic.
	It's just ridiculous on its face.
	Unfortunately, the Trump administration is facing down adversaries across the country in the form of district court judges.
	Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup described the mass firings that have been made by Doge as a, quote, sham strategy by the government's Central Human Resources Office to sidestep legal requirements for reducing the federal workforce.
	and this is one of the really terrible effects of these public sector unions they sign these long-term contracts in which people basically can't get fired which is ridiculous you should be an at-will employee of the federal government if you're working for the federal government this judge was a san francisco based appointee of president bill clinton's Shocker, shocker.
	He ordered the Defense, Treasury, Energy, Interior, Agriculture, and Veterans Affairs Departments to immediately offer all fired probationary employees their jobs back.
	The Office of Personal Management, according to the judge, had made an unlawful decision to terminate them.
	ALSEP said that the agencies have the authority to implement reductions in force, but they have to follow proper procedures, so they're claiming this is a procedural matter.
	Well, we'll find out.
	We'll find out, because all this stuff's going to end up at the Supreme Court.
	By the way, so should the general principle that district court judges have the ability to issue nationwide injunctions on the basis of having jurisdiction over a small share of the United States.
	Well, meanwhile, the Trump administration has been cracking down on...
	Pro-terrorism protests at universities all over the country.
	And hilariously, now Colombia has decided that, you know, it might not be a great idea to have foreign exchange students who actually support terrorism.
	According to the Columbia University statement that was just put out yesterday, the Columbia University Judicial Board determined findings and issued sanctions to students ranging from multi-year suspensions, temporary degree revocations, and expulsions related to the occupation of Hamilton Hall last spring.
	You remember this?
	A bunch of pro-Hamas protesters took over buildings on campus violently.
	With respect to other events taking place last spring, the UJB's determinations recognized previously imposed disciplinary action.
	The return of suspended students will be overseen by Columbia University's Life Office.
	So finally, they are actually enforcing their own rules.
	That is only because the administration threatened to remove their federal aid dollars.
	Until then, they were perfectly fine with their own university being taken over by the radicals because, of course, they largely agreed with the radicals.
	Meanwhile, along the same lines, the controversy continues over Mahmoud Khalil.
	He was a foreign exchange student who apparently attained a green card.
	He was brought to the United States apparently to learn how to agitate because that's pretty much all he did at Columbia University.
	He joined up with a group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
	This was the group that led the violent protests at Columbia taking over buildings.
	He was the chief negotiator on behalf of that group.
	That group put out many statements in solidarity with the violent actions of Hamas.
	And somehow the idea is that he can't be deported now because he has a green card.
	Again, we're not talking about an American citizen.
	And by the way, the real question here is not whether he should be deported.
	The question is why the hell he was here as a foreign exchange student in the first place.
	How did he end up with a student visa?
	Well, yesterday, pro-Hamas protesters took over Trump Tower in New York City.
	And so I hope that all these people who are illegally inside Trump Tower and trespassing, I hope that they, in fact, are prosecuted.
	And if they are here on a student visa, then they can go home as well.
	That'd be fun.
	Because it turns out that violating the law by taking over somebody else's property...
	It is in fact a deportable crime.
	Here we go.
	Okay, and then they started chanting, Bring Mahmoud home.
	Okay, which again is a riff on the Israeli attempt to get actual hostages to be brought home from the predations of Hamas.
	Just wonderful people.
	And these are the people that the Democrats have decided that they truly need to reach out to.
	And this is the single moral issue on which they are absolutely unified, is that terrorist supporters who get in here on a student visa should be allowed to get a green card and then should be allowed to stay permanently in the country.
	That's what America needs more of.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, about 300 protesters entered the Manhattan skyscraper that houses the Trump Organization and the president's New York penthouse on Thursday and then swarmed the ground floor.
	The New York Police Department arrested 98 pro-Palestinian protesters.
	No injuries reported.
	No property was damaged.
	Okay, but if you're arrested...
	And you're here on a visa.
	You can go.
	We don't need you here, actually.
	That's fine.
	And it's not the same thing if you're an American citizen.
	If you're an American citizen, you have the right to say whatever dumb thing you want to.
	That is not the same thing if you are here as a guest of the United States.
	Obviously.
	Meanwhile, the Trump administration is moving in strong ways to cut the Department of Education.
	According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration...
	Okay, so then they fixed it.
	This, of course, is going to be used as an excuse to suggest that there can't be any cuts to the Department of Education at all.
	But the reality is that when you are moving fast and breaking things, you're going to rebuild the pieces that you most need.
	And that's what's going to happen.
	With federal student aid, for example, the percentage of people who were laid off in the federal student aid arena were about 30%, so that shouldn't kill federal student aid by any stretch of the imagination.
	The number of people who were fired in the Institute of Education Sciences, that's more like 78%.
	These are huge layoffs.
	According to Frederick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, we're talking about huge layoffs, unprecedented layoffs.
	So, of course, Democrats are freaking out about this.
	Randy Weingarten, in particular, is freaking out.
	She says it's death by 2,000 cuts.
	Well, I can only hope that her evil leadership of the American Federation of Teachers ends up on the chopping block.
	Look, I don't know.
	She's only been on the job for five days.
	And I think she's well-meaning enough.
	But you can't basically cut half the people that work on these things and expect that...
	You're going to have the grants go to schools directly.
	So it is basically death by 2,000 cuts.
	Okay, so we will find out soon enough whether that is true.
	We can only hope that that is the case.
	Meanwhile, the negotiations over Ukraine continue.
	Vladimir Putin has rejected them.
	Vladimir Putin has said that he is not interested in an immediate ceasefire.
	He instead wants a longer-term ceasefire, but without any of the conditions that would actually be necessary to achieve that ceasefire.
	Let's be real.
	There is not going to be a ceasefire, an armistice, anything like that unless there are security guarantees to Ukraine preventing this from happening again in two years when Russia has rearmed.
	That is the only way Ukraine will sign on to anything, and frankly, it's the only reason that Ukraine should sign on to anything.
	And if Vladimir Putin continues to press forward militarily, it would not be in the interests of the United States or any of our allies for him to take Eve.
	That would be a mistake.
	If you actually want to get to an off-ramp that freezes the lines where they are, you have to maintain enough pressure to keep Vladimir Putin from strolling through Kiev and rolling tanks into western Ukraine.
	Well, Putin apparently feels like he's got control of these negotiations, which, honestly, the United States should take as an insult.
	Putin said on Thursday he did not support an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine.
	Calling for more discussion on a permanent end to the war as Moscow's army made rapid gains toward expelling Kiev's forces from the Kursk region.
	Again, the interruption in aid and intelligence that the United States was trying to use to leverage Ukraine back to the table has had some significant downside impact in the Kursk region.
	Kursk, of course, is in Russia.
	It is one of the areas where Ukraine is pushed forward.
	Why?
	Because they then want to trade that territory for area in Crimea or the Donbass.
	Putin said any pause in fighting at this point would be in Ukraine's interest because Russia is gaining on the battlefield and a host of issues would need to be resolved before a ceasefire could be reached.
	Those were the first official responses from Moscow after Ukraine agreed this week to US back proposal for a pause in the war.
	Putin spoke as President Trump's Special Envoy Steve Witkoff was due in Moscow.
	Trump said that he planned to speak with Putin soon and was pressing to a speedy end to the conflict.
	Here was President Trump talking about this yesterday flanked by the NATO Secretary General Mark Rudy.
	So we're saying, look, this is what you can get, this is what you can't get.
	They discussed NATO and being in NATO, and everybody knows what the answer to that is.
	They've known that answer for 40 years, in all fairness.
	So a lot of the details of a final agreement have actually been discussed.
	Now we're going to see whether or not Russia's there, and if they're not, it'll be a very disappointing moment for the world.
	And it will be a disappointing moment for the world if Vladimir Putin continues to push forward.
	He said, who will give orders to stop fighting?
	What is the price of those orders?
	Who will determine where and by whom they were violated?
	Well, I mean, if you guys crossed the border into Ukraine again, then you'd be the one violating the orders.
	President Zelensky of Ukraine called Putin's response highly predictable and manipulative words aimed at dragging out the process by setting unworkable preconditions.
	And, of course, Zelensky actually is right about that.
	He said, Putin is afraid to tell President Trump directly he wants to continue this war and keep killing Ukrainians.
	Putin does this often.
	He doesn't say no.
	He drags things out and makes reasonable solutions impossible.
	Again, that is accurate from Zelensky.
	Everything is Zelensky.
	Putin is the one who's not accepting an immediate ceasefire right now.
	And Putin is the one who's suggesting an inordinate number of preconditions that are just not doable.
	They're just not doable.
	He says that he doesn't want Ukraine to rearm.
	Well, of course Ukraine is going to rearm.
	You just invaded them.
	What do you think they would do?
	Sit there with a half-scarred military?
	It's ridiculous.
	It's ridiculous.
	So, it'll be interesting to see what happens from here.
	Obviously, the ire of the Trump administration should turn to the intransigent party now, and the intransigent party is not Vladimir Zelensky, who has been properly chastened by the Trump administration.
	The obstinate party right now is pretty obviously Vladimir Putin, who feels as though he has his opposition on the run.
	Well, folks, a little bit earlier this week, I had a chance to sit down with my friend Seth Dillon from the Babylon Bee to talk all things comedy, humor, and politics.
	This is a great conversation.
	Here's what it sounded like.
	Well, I'm joined here in studio by Seth Dillon, the founder of the Babylon Bee, which is, of course, the funniest news site in America.
	It's a satirical news site, as it constantly points out.
	And yet the left seems never to understand.
	Seth, great to see you.
	Great to see you, too.
	I have to correct you, though.
	Not the founder, just CEO.
	Just CEO.
	Adam Ford.
	That's true.
	I don't want to take that away from Adam.
	He's the brilliant mind that began the whole thing.
	I wish I'd started it, but I took it over in 2018.
	It's been an amazing journey for the Babylon Bee.
	It is also amazing to think that...
	The change that has happened across the world may have happened because you guys got banned at Twitter for making a joke that boys are not girls.
	Yeah.
	I mean, to be caught up in that whole thing was crazy.
	I avoid saying that we were the reason he bought Twitter because we weren't.
	The reason he bought Twitter was free speech.
	It was free speech.
	The Babylon Bee was a symptom of that, right?
	So you had...
	He was...
	Getting really concerned about the fact that there was these bad ideas, wokeness in particular, which he called divisive, exclusionary, hateful, a civilizational threat.
	He was really concerned about the spread of these bad ideas and the inability of people to push back on them and respond to them because it was considered hate speech or misinformation or whatever.
	So when we got kicked off for telling a joke that we weren't supposed to tell, which those are the ones we should be telling, it alarmed him.
	It got him really concerned and worked up about it.
	Maybe it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
	I don't know.
	Well, I mean, again, it is kind of funny to think that you guys are that first domino in the domino, maybe, that ends with President Trump destroying DEI in the Oval Office with a baseball bat and all the rest of it.
	That must be an amazing thing.
	But I want to ask you about how to do comedy in this particular era because comedy is now closer to prophecy.
	We've done entire segments of the show talking about how Babylon B headlines end up being prophetic.
	The lag time has gone down.
	It used to be like a five-year lag time between when you'd write a headline and when it would materialize.
	Now it seems to be about a month headline between when you write a headline and then it materializes.
	How do you do comedy in an era that is this outlandishly absurd?
	It's challenging.
	I think that probably a common misconception is that it's easier because there's a lot to make fun of.
	And there's truth to that to an extent.
	Obviously, there's crazy things happening in the world that are easy to make fun of.
	But the problem is when you're...
	I think the more, like...
	We swing back in the direction of sanity and stop doing some of the really crazy things.
	Like the joke that we had told about that got us kicked out of Twitter was a joke about Admiral Rachel Levine having been named, you know, she was named she.
	He was named Woman of the Year by USA Today.
	Tricky language.
	And we mocked that by naming Rachel Levine our pick for Man of the Year.
	Well, you know...
	Comedy like that, you look at the real headline and it seems like it is satire.
	It seems like a parody.
	It seems like something you'd see on South Park.
	And so in that environment, obviously it's a target-rich environment, but it's hard to satirize what already feels like parody.
	But as we swing back in the direction of sanity, I think that dies down a little bit.
	And you've got to look for other things to make fun of.
	And one of the other things that seems to have happened over the course of the last 10, 15 years is I actually think people have lost a lot of their sense of humor.
	It used to be that you could laugh at a joke, particularly about your own side.
	It was okay to laugh at jokes about your own side.
	Things that I would say on the show in 2015 that were kind of jokes about Republicans or President Trump or Ted Cruz or whomever was running, because that was a really funny primary.
	I mean, 2016 was a hysterical time in American life.
	If you don't remember all the way back to 2016, youngins, let me just tell you, that race, that primary race was hysterically funny.
	That was right when the beast started, too.
	Exactly.
	It was like Donald Trump on stage insulting Rand Paul's hair by saying he had like a dead animal on his head.
	And President Trump going after.
	And it was inherently funny that President Trump became President Trump.
	I just remember the night of the election literally bursting out laughing hysterically for like 90 seconds live on air when it was announced that he'd won because it was so outlandish.
	And yet now it's obvious why that happened.
	And in retrospect, you can kind of see the historic moment happening.
	But at the time, it was really, really humorous.
	But everybody, I think, also was willing to laugh at things.
	Do you feel like people are less willing to laugh at things on pretty much all sides of the aisle in a lot of ways?
	Yeah, I mean, it's kind of disconcerting to see it happening on the right, too.
	But it was becoming a major problem, you know, to the point where Seinfeld was talking about how he won't do college campuses anymore.
	You know, he had this kind of safe space.
	I need to be insulated in a bubble.
	My feelings can never be hurt.
	That whole thing was...
	It destroyed...
	The ability of people to look at themselves in a critical way, especially with mockery, where they're able to actually have that introspection where they say, some of the things that I do are ridiculous too, and I should be willing to laugh at that.
	There's a maturity in that, and we kind of stunted our own growth, I think, as a culture by suppressing that and saying, no, your feelings should never be hurt by anything, including a joke, and humor is actually harmful.
	I don't think humor is harmful.
	I think we were more unified than ever when we were joking about each other.
	And willing to laugh at ourselves.
	And if you go back 20, 30 years in comedy, that was much more prevalent than it has been over the last decade.
	And I've seen some, you know, on the right getting angry about jokes at their expense in the way that the left used to.
	And I bristle at that.
	I don't like people taking themselves too seriously.
	I think it's unhealthy that we take ourselves so seriously.
	You know, you've got to be willing to laugh at yourself.
	And if you can't do that, you know, if you're taking yourself that seriously, you're not going to enjoy life.
	For one thing.
	But you're going to be stuck as a child in an adult's body.
	You need to grow up and be willing to laugh.
	And you'll have more fun.
	One of the things I think that you guys have done an incredibly great job at is somehow navigating the line of humor where you don't just become over-the-top edgelords.
	One of the things that's happened in meme world, and we all now live in meme world because the lord of all memes is the head of Twitter.
	Elon is a living meme.
	I saw him at CPAC. And he literally turned to me as he was wearing the ridiculous meme sunglasses and carrying a chainsaw.
	And he turned to me and he goes, Ben, I'm just living the meme.
	That's the guy who is the head of Doge and the head of X and the head of Tesla and the head of SpaceX.
	So we now live in that world.
	That has some benefits in that it's inherently funny.
	But it also means that one way that people get attention is by being edgelords.
	And so the idea is the more provocative, more violative, more transgressive you get.
	Then that's like a form of humor.
	And that's always been a form of humor, shock humor.
	But shock humor seems to be a huge and growing part of sort of the humor contingent.
	The problem with shock humor is that sometimes the reason that the thing is shocking is because it's actually bad.
	And not because...
	You can make people laugh in a lot of ways, but the cheapest way to make somebody laugh is to say the F word.
	It has always been true in humor.
	If you want to make somebody laugh, the discomfort laugh, right?
	Saying the F word or graphically describing sex or something.
	These are ways that...
	Vulgarity.
	Vulgarity.
	And there is such a thing as sort of a political vulgarity where you say something that is so kind of gross that people laugh because it's gross and violative and taboo.
	You guys have never gone there.
	You always have had sort of a moral line that you won't step beyond.
	Just for the sake of the laugh.
	How do you find that sort of ground where you're being moral and humorous at the same time, which is a hard thing to do?
	Yeah.
	Well, we've never aimed for the shock humor.
	We've never tried to do comedy that just puts people down to make them feel bad about themselves or goes for that shock value.
	What we're trying to do is really just communicate truth to a post-truth culture.
	And use humor as an effective way to do that.
	And so there are, I mean, there's a value system at play there where what we're trying to do is not just entertain and make people laugh, but make them think about whether or not these bad ideas should be taken seriously.
	And so those are more likely to be the things that we would challenge with our comedy rather than the kind of behavior that we would engage in.
	So when you look at sort of the political spectrum, a lot of the issues that were great sources of humor seem to be on their way out.
	The right is in the ascendancy, particularly culturally.
	And so a lot of the stuff that has been mined for humor by you guys, by us, we made Lady Ballers, which is an entire movie just about the idea of transgender people in sports, men playing women in sports, and all of that.
	That's on the way.
	I mean, the president has signed executive orders essentially banning that from sports that are sponsored by taxpayer dollars.
	Wokeness has been banned at the highest levels of the American government.
	Like, the battles are getting won on the cultural level.
	So what do you see are sort of the next battles?
	As I say, the Babylon Bee is half prophecy, half dark prophecy, and half humor.
	What are sort of the next big cultural battles that you see on the horizon that you guys are going to mine for the joke?
	For one thing, it's a good thing that they're on the way out.
	That was kind of the point, right?
	This is the reason we made fun of these things, is because we didn't want people to take them seriously and adopt it into the culture.
	That was the entire reason to make Lady Ballers, was because this is a bad idea.
	It needs to be ridiculed.
	It needs to be mocked.
	Let's reject it instead of taking it seriously.
	I don't think they're going to go away quietly.
	You saw the speech that Trump was giving the other night.
	You had the Democrats refusing to stand or applaud for a lot of these.
	The return to sanity that he was talking about.
	We're going to return to sanity, safety, reason.
	We're going to take care of women and children.
	There's no such thing as a child born in the wrong body.
	God made you as you are and you're perfect that way.
	These are things to applaud.
	These are good, reasonable, sane things to applaud.
	And he sat down and refused to do that.
	So they're going to continue to fight us, I think, tooth and nail on these issues.
	So whether we've won, well, the ascendant power thing, you know, we have more influence than we had before.
	We have more control than we had before.
	But I don't know that these things are just going to go away.
	These are going to continue to be fights, you know, at the state level, at the local level.
	There's still going to be situations where you have trans athletes getting in these meets with other girls.
	And the girls are going to have to make a decision on whether they compete or stand down.
	Because, you know, it's...
	It's not completely eradicated yet, and that could take a lot of time.
	Your question was, what's next?
	Yeah.
	What's next on the horizon?
	Man, how do you try to predict what the Democrats are going to go for next and how crazy that might possibly be?
	I don't know.
	I would keep an eye on the Babylon Bee headlines, and maybe those will come true in a few months because whatever we're talking about is probably going to be what they're pursuing.
	But I don't know.
	I would ask you, what do you think?
	I think they're going to move into sort of the realm of economic insanity because they've already played out the cultural insanity.
	And they'll continue to do that to a certain extent.
	And again, I think they've kind of hit the edge cases already.
	I mean, when you're sitting on your hands because you can't applaud a 13-year-old cancer survivor at the State of the Union address, I'm not sure how much further you can go to hate President Trump.
	So they hate President Trump.
	He's not going to be president in four years.
	So they're going to have to move on to whatever is the next thing.
	And it seems to me that the Democratic Party, if they are going to have any shot at electoral success in the future, is going to have to move away from a lot of these cultural kind of wokeness-based issues and into the sort of demagoguery of success.
	And you see that in a lot of the attacks on Elon, right?
	A lot of what they're doing right now is Elon is bad, Elon is evil, Elon is corrupt.
	That's my favorite one, is when they say that Elon is corrupt.
	He's the richest man on planet Earth.
	What would you have to pay him to buy Elon off?
	How would you even accomplish this?
	But I think you're going to see...
	An enormous amount of this left-wing economic populism, which is mirrored by parts of the right, that starts to become a sentence.
	And that has its own sort of bizarre logic.
	Yeah, we're seeing some of that already, for sure.
	So, what's next for you guys?
	You've done a number of projects.
	You have The Bee Itself, which is text-based.
	And then you've done videos.
	You've done now a movie about January 6th, the worst day.
	What's the name of the film?
	I don't want to screw it up.
	Yeah, January 6th, the most deadliest day.
	The most deadliest day, correct, exactly.
	So what's next on the horizon for a bigger project?
	Well, that was fun.
	So that was kind of our first foray into, you know, I guess you could kind of style that or call that a mockumentary, you know, where we're taking an idea and treating it like super seriously when it shouldn't have been taken as seriously as it was and mocking the actors involved in that.
	That was a fun foot in the door for us to do a larger project, a long-form project beyond just a short comedy sketch for YouTube.
	So we're going to dabble in more of that, try some of these other ideas that we have floating around and see if we can make some more films like that because the audience loved it.
	We generated a lot of subscribers with that, got a lot of really good feedback.
	There's a lot we learned from it that we can do differently and better the next time.
	And so we'll iterate on that some, but I think for the beat...
	The primary thing for us, what we do really well is news satire.
	We mimic a news publication and publish satirical headlines.
	Funny fake news you can trust.
	That's our thing.
	That's what we do really well.
	And the next logical extension of that is probably some kind of a show that is a satirical news show.
	A daily show style thing.
	Something like that I think could be really successful under the Bees brand.
	We have some things in the works along those lines that we're looking at, too, that we're really excited about.
	So where that lives and when that lands is anyone's guess.
	But we're excited about, you know, kind of continuing to do what we've done well that the audience really enjoys and bringing that out to a broader audience in new forms.
	Now, Seth Dillon, it's always great to see the Babylon Beat.
	It's great, folks.
	If you haven't checked it out, well, you've been living under a rock, but you definitely should.
	BabylonBeat.com, go check them out right now.
	Alrighty, coming up, we'll get to...
	Representative Sarah McBride.
	He, Tim McBride, says that the Republicans are obsessed with culture war issues.
	We'll also jump into today's mailbag.
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