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June 18, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:08:09
I Met The Pope...PLUS SCOTUS Hands Matt Walsh A Win!
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All righty, folks, an insane amount coming up on today's show.
I'm actually in Rome today, and I met the Pope, so I'll tell you all about that pretty amazing experience.
Also, the latest from the Middle East, President Trump sounding off about the situation regarding Iran and a major Supreme Court decision in favor of reason and against the trans agenda.
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We'll get to all the latest in the news in just a few moments, and there is a lot in the news.
But today, I had a pretty incredible experience.
I actually got to go to the Vatican.
Every Wednesday the Pope holds a general audience.
And it's an amazing event.
There are tens of thousands of people who gather in St. Peter's Square from all over the world.
They're sort of divided by country of origin.
And first the Pope arrives in the Popemobile.
He drives around.
He greets the entire audience.
And then he comes up in the center of St. Peter's Square right in front of the Basilica.
and he gives essentially an address about the Bible.
It's read out in a variety of different languages.
I got to sit up there near where the Pope was, and then I got to briefly meet the Pope and give him a gift, which I'll get to in a moment.
It really is quite a beautiful event.
It's a reminder that godly biblical values are the guiding force for billions of people around the world.
The world seems like a very dark place from time to time, but the reality is that if you stick to eternal values, Actually, what the Pope said was quite beautiful, not surprisingly.
The new Pope.
Pope Leo, I'll have my comments about him personally in a moment, but what he actually had to say, he quoted from the book of John the story about the pool of Bethesda, which is the story in the book of John where Jesus goes to the pool of Bethesda and there are people who are ill and people who are paralyzed, people who are sick and infirm.
There's a man there who's been sick and infirm for 38 years and Jesus goes to that man and he tells him that he ought to get up and walk, take his mat with him and walk.
And what the Pope said is that We should all reflect on Jesus' statement at that moment when we feel stuck and trapped in a dead end, that instead of allowing that to become an excuse for others to take care of us, instead, we should not allow this to become some sort of justification to, as he said, avoid making decisions about our lives.
Instead, we should get away from fatalism and we should embrace personal responsibility.
Again, it's those sorts of messages that are implicit in the biblical narrative that the Pope is spreading, and that is a wonderful thing for the civilization.
I've talked about this before.
I'm an Orthodox Jew, obviously.
I don't have a dog in the fight when it comes to internal battles over doctrine and Catholicism, except to the extent that the Catholic Church remains a lodestone for Western civilization, a great spreader of biblical values to humanity, in the same way there are Protestant churches that do the same.
People of God, people of the book, people of the Bible are spreading eternal values, and it is worth acknowledging that and honoring that.
That's actually what I said to the Pope when I had an opportunity to meet him.
So afterward, After the general audience, the Pope meets a bunch of people who are there.
There are a bunch of bishops who went up and met him, and then there was a small group of people who were able to go up and meet him.
And so I handed him a letter asking for an interview, of course.
I introduced myself, and you're supposed to bring the Pope a gift.
And here's what it looked like.
You can see I shake the Pope's hand, and I explain.
Thank you so much.
Via video to some 30,000 people.
And I told him that while he is Catholic and I am Jewish, one of the miracles that we can agree on is the 2005 White Sox winning the World Series.
And I brought with me from my personal collection a 2005 World Series White Sox signed baseball by the entire team.
And I gave it to him.
And he seemed a little bit surprised.
Not by the fact that I was giving gifts, but he was surprised that it was a gift and not just me showing him something cool, I suppose.
And pretty delighted by it.
So it was really a terrific experience.
Honestly, the entire event was amazing.
My impressions of him are, you know, you have to form your impressions of famous people that you meet for a short period of time in that short period of time.
I will say that from the people who I've spoken to, and I want to say thank you, by the way, to the ambassador of Hungary, to the Vatican, who helped guide us through the process here and who knew Pope Francis well and who also knows Pope Leo a little, that Pope Leo...
What the ambassador suggested is that Pope Francis was Pope Francis before he was Pope, and then he was Pope Francis after he was Pope, and he was essentially the same person.
I'm jovial, warm, joking.
He said that Pope Liot is by nature more reserved, but that he has essentially taken his personality and subsumed it in the role of being Pope, which I think is quite apparent actually when you meet the Pope.
He's a deeply humble man.
You can tell that right away just from meeting him.
And the kind of sheer joy that he had, I think, at the baseball, which again, a small thing.
He's a very important person who has the weight of the spiritual fate of over a billion people on his shoulders, obviously.
Kind of his sheer joy in that.
I think that humility and joy would be the two sort of descriptors I would use for Pope Leo.
So I want to share that with you because, you know, in the political, there's a lot of moments that are not uplifting.
In the political, there are a lot of moments that are fraught.
There are a lot of moments where it feels as though darkness is encroaching.
And so there does need to be a meeting of the minds between all of us who believe in biblical values, that those biblical values ought to be pervaded.
It's one of the reasons why on the show I have encouraged people who are Catholic to go to church, people who are Protestant to go to church.
So I encourage Jews to go to synagogue and relearn their traditions and engage with those traditions.
I'm very much in favor of the strengthening.
I'm very much in favor of people re-engaging with the values that made the West what it is in the first place.
So it's a wonderful experience.
Alrighty, folks, a lot coming up on today's show.
Arnold Schwarzenegger getting beaten up by the ladies of The View for being pro-America.
Meanwhile, Ilhan Omar hating America.
Matt Walsh, it's his birthday, but he just won a big victory at the Supreme Court as well.
Plus, we'll get to President Trump's latest.
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Joining me on the line to discuss is Trent Horn, Catholic apologist, host of the Council of Trent podcast.
Trent, thanks so much for taking the time.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Ben.
So, first of all, I have to say it was a really unique experience.
Obviously, I'm an Orthodox Jew.
I've never been to a Catholic service, let alone to what I experienced today.
It really is an amazing thing.
What's sort of the history of this particular event?
Apparently it happens every Wednesday.
It really is a beautiful thing.
Watching tens of thousands of people congregate in St. Peter's Square just to hear from Pope Leo, it's an amazing thing.
Yeah, so the Pope traditionally holds a Wednesday audience where Mass will be celebrated and he'll give an address.
Sometimes he'll celebrate the Angelus.
And it's a wonderful opportunity for people to be able to come and hear from the Pope.
That really, starting in the 20th century, a lot of popes made themselves more available.
I mean, for much of church history, the pope was a monarch, and he still is, but he was someone that was just in the Vatican, away from most people, not as accessible.
But we started seeing with Pope Paul VI and the 20th century popes, this greater availability, and of course, with Pope St. John Paul II traveling all over the world, followed by Pope Benedict and Pope Francis, this ability to be able to...
It's a wonderful thing.
I was able to meet Pope Francis myself at a Wednesday audience in 2013 after his election.
My wife and I had just gotten married, and there's a tradition called Sposi Novelli where if you've just been married in the Catholic Church and you attend a Wednesday audience, you have the opportunity to meet the Pope.
Yeah, that I saw right behind me.
There were a series of brides and grooms.
They were in their wedding dresses, the brides obviously, and they got to approach the Pope afterward, which was really an amazing thing.
So the Pope has obviously been, the new Pope has been in place for only a few weeks at this point.
My impressions of him, again, you have to make an impression in a very short period of time.
Tremendous humility.
I mean, that was just the impression that I took away from him as a human being very quickly.
I mean this is somebody who appears to really be his office, significantly less perhaps than Pope Francis who in some ways seemed to be – I was told this by folks who had dealt with Pope Francis pretty closely, who seemed to be the same when he was a cardinal and when he was the pope.
He was always himself.
Pope Leo seems to have really subsumed himself into the office, and that means – What's your impression thus far?
Yes.
Now, I haven't had a chance to meet Pope Leo yet, but I did meet Pope Francis and obviously followed his entire pontificate.
I do notice a difference, and other commenters have said that Pope Leo, he was a friend of Pope Francis.
He served on the dicastery of bishops.
Francis appointed him a cardinal in 2023 and entrusted him with the task of selecting to help consult and select bishops all over the world.
So he had a very good relationship with Pope Francis, though commenters have said he's a bit more shy and reserved than Pope Francis was.
And I think seeing the way you might meet him, so when my wife and I met Pope Francis, we brought him a gift.
We brought a papal zucchetto to give to him as a gift to swap, to have his zucchetto.
And he made a joke and took my wife's tiara, her wedding tiara, and said, maybe I take this instead.
And he would make jokes and shoot from the hip.
And Pope Francis even said once for his papal motto, you know, I'm going to make a mess.
And he did.
He would speak from the hip often and for many good pastoral reasons to reach out to people on the margins.
But what we see with Pope Leo XIV, I would say, is really a return to form.
So Pope Francis selected a very new papal name.
He was the first ever Francis, for example.
And Pope Leo has selected Leo XIV, and he did that very intentionally.
So Pope Leo XIII was pope at the end of the 19th century, and he wrote an encyclical, Rerum Novarum, talking about how...
Literally, the encyclical is called On New Things.
You have the industrial revolution, major changes in society, dealing with factory life, demographic changes, and the Pope wanted to be there for people during these massive changes.
And Pope Leo XIV is saying the Pope needs to be there for people in the changes in the information revolution.
And in his inaugural address, for example, he said artificial intelligence is one of the major things that people have to watch out for and guard human dignity against.
So you see his use of the papal garbs, his traditional residency's chosen.
It's sort of a return to form, if you will.
I did have a very nice moment with, with the Pope in which I, But then I also said to him, I'm a lifelong White Sox fan.
He happens to be a Chicago White Sox fan because, of course, he's American.
I'm a lifelong Chicago White Sox fan.
My father and I wrote a book about the 2005 Chicago White Sox.
That's how big a fan I am.
So I brought him from my personal collection.
I had a 2005 World Series signed baseball by the entire White Sox team.
And so I told him that I was a White Sox fan.
And I said, you're Catholic, I'm Jewish, but the miracle I think we can both agree on.
He's the 2005 White Sox winning the World Series, which he appreciated.
He thought that was funny.
You can see him kind of crack a bit of a smile as he received it.
And then I think he was surprised that that was the gift that I brought to him.
And so he seemed pleased with that.
He seems like a very joyful individual, actually.
Again, humble and joyful would be the two words that I have to describe him after meeting him again quite briefly.
I hope in the future to have a chance to speak to him more broadly.
And that is something I think that...
I mean, obviously, the church has been so embroiled in controversy over the course of the last 25 years that a return to sort of stability and a return to, again, I think humility and joy would be the things that, again, I'm speaking as somebody who doesn't have a dog in the fight other than as a religious person.
I want more people to go to church, and I want more people to return to the traditions of their ancestors.
It seems to me from the outside that's exactly what the church might need.
Well, I think that Pope Leo XIV is going to continue many of the important things that Pope Francis discussed, like reaching people on the peripheries.
So when I was watching the announcement of who the pope was, I did not expect this selection.
And when they said, they were speaking in Latin, of course, and they said, Robert Provost.
And they go on and I was like, and my wife said, oh, is that the Pope?
I said, no, no, it couldn't be.
It's got to be the guy announcing the Pope.
No American's ever going to be Pope.
And then he comes out and I check online.
I'm like, oh my goodness, he's the Pope.
I never thought we'd have an American Pope because it was taboo for a while.
Similar to how back when JFK was president, people worried.
You would never have a Catholic president because what if the president's taking orders from the pope?
It's sort of the reverse problem.
People worrying that if you have an American pope, what if he's taking orders from the president or Langley and the CIA?
And so that's where people always thought you wouldn't have that.
But a cardinal serving as a priest, Father Provost, and Cardinal Provost is very different.
He was born in Chicago, so he grew up in America, went to Villanova.
He studied mathematics.
So he's a very careful—and I love that he studied mathematics for college.
So he's a rigorous, analytical thinker.
He's a careful thinker, something we really need in a pope.
But he served as a missionary priest in Peru through the 80s and 90s.
And so when Cardinal Dolan from New York, who is really lobbying for Provost as someone to be a peacemaker in the church, pointed out, yeah, you may not like having an American pope.
He was born in Chicago, but he's not just some spoiled American.
He did his time.
He spent decades in Peru, in South America.
So he's able to identify people all over the world.
He speaks five languages.
He's not your stereotypical American.
But he's able, though, to bring that American influence.
That one thing the Vatican really needs, people might, you know, But we're good at getting things done and having, you know, orderly things and getting down to business.
Like, Europeans always make fun of us for quote-unquote working too much.
Then again, we have the greatest economy in the world compared to them.
So I think he'll bring that spirit to the Vatican to overhaul the bureaucracy, help the Vatican with its financial problems.
I think it's a lot of good on the horizon with him.
Well, that's Trent Horn.
He's Catholic apologist and host of the Council of Trent podcast.
Thanks so much for the insight.
And again, it was a pretty amazing day, so I appreciate you stopping by.
Happy to.
All right, coming up, Matt Walsh is going to stop by in just a little bit to talk about a huge win at the Supreme Court Plus.
President Trump goes hog wild on the media, discussing Israel, Iran, a lot of news happening.
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Well, as I was speaking about with the Pope, It is required if you are going to be a member of our civilization.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has been a longtime member of the United States.
He immigrated to the United States in 1968.
He was a bodybuilder at the time, became one of the most famous actors in America.
Then he became the governor of California.
And he appeared on The View yesterday.
And it got very awkward for the ladies of The View because they asked him about immigration and about President Trump.
And he started saying things that are politically incorrect about immigration.
It's something that if you immigrated in 1968 to the United States, as Arnold did, you sort of took for granted.
Like, be grateful for the place where you live.
Imbibe the values of the place where you live.
Understand those values and engage with those values.
Here's Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I just think the world of the great kind of history that we have with immigrants in America.
But the key thing also is at the same time that we got to do things legal.
That is the important thing, you know?
So you gotta do things legal, and those people that are doing illegal things in America, and they're the foreigners, they are not smart.
Because when you come to America, you're a guest.
And you have to behave like a guest.
Like when I go to someone's house, and I'm a guest, then I will do everything I can.
Keep things clean and to make my bed and to do everything that is the right thing to do rather than committing a crime or being abusive or something like that.
So that doesn't really work in this country.
So I think the important thing is when you become an immigrant, to think about, okay, I go to America because I want to use America for the great opportunities that America has in education, in jobs, creating a family, all of those kind of things.
Then you have to think about, okay, If I get all of those things from America, then I have to give something back.
You have a responsibility as an immigrant to give back to America and to pay back to America and to go and do something for your community for no money whatsoever.
Give something back to after-school programs, Special Olympics, or whatever it is.
Make this country a better place.
Now, there are a couple things about this clip that are pretty astonishing.
One is what Arnold is saying.
And people start clapping for it because it's obviously true.
And the other is that about halfway through this clip, Sonny Hostin reaches over and tries to stop Arnold from saying what he's saying.
And so, you know, what's happening here is the sort of Sonny Hostin position in trying to stop Arnold Schwarzenegger from saying what he is saying, that is mirrored by a lot of the domestic-born Americans who are trying to help out people who really don't like the country very much.
And both of these things are quite important because the truth is that the West has, in fact, imported An extraordinary number of people who hate our civilization, who do not like our values, who do not like biblical values or Western values or anything like it.
One of those people currently sits in Congress.
This will be Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota.
So I was curious about the difference between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ilhan Omar in terms of when...
So, of course, I went to our sponsors and my friends over perplexity and I asked, when did Schwarzenegger immigrate to America and when did Ilhan Omar immigrate to America?
Schwarzenegger immigrated to the United States in October 1968 at the age of 21. He moved from Austria to pursue opportunities in bodybuilding, arriving in the U.S. with limited English skills and quickly establishing himself in the bodybuilding community in L.A. It's a difference in era.
Ilhan Omar immigrated.
To the United States in 1995 after fleeing the civil war in Somalia and then spending four years in a refugee camp in Kenya.
In 1968, if you came to the United States, you were expected, like you had been for the vast majority of American history, to actually assimilate to American values.
It doesn't mean give up your home religion or your home foods.
It does mean that you had to take in, imbibe from the well of American constitutional values, Anglo-American values.
These were things that you were supposed to engage with.
And then something changed in America, and it turned out that if you came here, you could be an ungrateful heriton, which is precisely what Ilhan Omar is.
She comes to the United States as a refugee from one of the worst places on Earth, simply to explain to the Americans about how we are, in fact, becoming the worst place on Earth.
So here's Representative Ilhan Omar, who is yet to identify an Islamist terror group that she does not have some sympathy for, talking about how America is actually the worst place on Earth, or one of them.
To be coming out of our country, I mean, I grew up in a dictatorship.
And I don't even remember ever witnessing anything like that.
To have a democracy, a pecan of hope for the world to now be turned into one of the worst.
countries where the military are in our streets without any regard for people's constitutional rights, while our president is spending millions of dollars prompting himself up like a failed dictator with a military parade.
Okay, so, we're becoming one of the worst places on earth, according to a woman who came from Somalia, because President Trump had a military parade.
But this goes deeper than that for Ilhan Omar.
Of course, there's not much about traditional American values that she does like.
She is constantly sounding off about the evils of American colonialism, American capitalism.
A group of people have been brought to our shores over the course of the last 50-60 years who really despise the country.
And that is one half of the equation.
Not immigrants like Arnold Schwarzenegger who came here to, as he says, become part of the civilization to enjoy the fruits of it and to give something back.
But who came here in order to complain about how terrible our civilization is and to change it from within.
That is one half of one of the big problems with the United States right now.
And the other part of this is people like Sonny Hostin sitting next to Arnold Schwarzenegger and telling him not to say the unsayable.
And also legislators like Sonny Hostin, people like Brad Lander.
So Brad Lander you never heard of.
Brad Lander is the New York City comptroller.
He's a candidate for mayor and he's desperate for attention.
Desperate, desperate for attention because the entire Democratic Party at this point being prone before the Republican Party.
The only way they feel they can get ahead is through attention-seeking behavior.
That is the entire shtick right now.
So Bradlander just got himself arrested on Tuesday by federal agents.
Why?
Well, he went to an immigration courthouse in Lower Manhattan as he tried to escort a migrant whom agents were seeking to arrest.
So he was observing proceedings at a city's main immigration courthouse.
And a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said Lander had assaulted and impeded a law enforcement officer.
Apparently, Lander was standing by a migrant man in a hallway on the 12th floor when several men in plainclothes, who appear to be law enforcement officers, some wearing masks, pushed past a crowd in the hallway to arrest the migrant.
Lander asks the agents whether they have a judicial warrant and then refuses to let go of the migrant as the agents seek to shepherd the man toward the elevators.
And Lander continues to grab the migrant.
He says you don't have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens.
But apparently this person is not, in fact, a U.S. citizen.
He said, I'm not obstructing.
I'm standing right here in the hallway.
I asked to see the judicial warrant.
Here's the video.
You have a judicial work.
Keep going.
Now, there's only one problem here.
He is legally wrong, by the way.
Agents don't actually need judicial warrants to make arrests in immigration courts because those are public spaces, according to immigration lawyers.
Lander was then arrested for several hours, and then he was released publicly.
And then he said, don't worry.
Well, it wasn't a premeditated publicity stunt.
Well, yes, it certainly was.
And again, it goes to this attitude in the United States by many on the left that we ought to be actively facilitating the law-breaking of people who come here and don't respect our laws.
That is the Joy Behar comparison.
The good Americans who stand in the way of people saying, hey, maybe you ought to follow the law in the United States.
Maybe this performative nonsense actually makes the country a worse place.
And this is what the Democratic Party has decided.
is going to be its form of resistance right now.
So their No Kings rallies were a gigantic fail.
They're trying to claim that millions of people showed up.
I kind of doubt it.
They're claiming it was the single biggest 50-state rally.
Did you notice one of these No Kings rallies over the weekend, unless you were in Washington, D.C., New York, or L.A.?
I really doubt it.
But again, it's all about attention-seeking.
So five Democrats have now gotten themselves arrested in recent weeks in an attempt to garner publicity for themselves.
Lander is only one of them.
Another one, of course, is Senator Alex Padilla.
He is the California senator who is so anonymous that he walked into a press conference with Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, demanding that she answer his questions and trying to muscle past FBI agents.
And then he was forced out of the room and briefly detained before being released.
And now he considers himself a human rights hero of some sort.
So he, of course, took to the well of the Senate to explain that Donald Trump is a tyrant because of that one time that he tried to bust into a press conference as a sort of rando.
And then got manhandled.
Now throughout this country's history, we've had conflict, we've had tumult, but we've never had a tyrant as a commander-in-chief.
And that is not by coincidence.
It's because the American people have always been willing to speak up and exercise their First Amendment right to protest.
Especially when our fundamental rights have been threatened.
So, he, too, is a performative hero.
What's the fundamental right that is being threatened?
What's the fundamental right that's being threatened here?
Seriously.
Illegally immigrating to the United States?
That's the fundamental?
Or maybe the fundamental right is randomly breaking into other people's press conferences without announcing who you are beforehand and getting clearance.
You can't do that at any sort of public press conference with a major official in the United States at all.
But it's all performative.
It's all just performative nonsense.
Meanwhile, speaking of people who facilitate lawbreaking in order to make a point, the Joy Behar's of elected politics, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, he was asked about violence at these anti-ICE rallies, and he just refused to comment on it.
Senator, do you denounce the violence you're seeing at the ICE protests in Los Angeles?
The destruction of federal property.
They're throwing things at ICE agents, sir.
Okay, bye.
See you later.
And again, this is all sort of an astonishing unwillingness to deal with the reality.
If you wish to have a functioning, cohesive civilization, you have to have rules that everyone abides by.
You have to have a culture that everyone integrates into.
And that doesn't mean everybody is the same, everybody's a widget.
That's not what we're talking about at all.
What we're talking about is a baseline set of common rules that apply to everyone.
And the left seems to be...
Ramming away at all of those rules.
That is the only explanation I can find for the fact that New York City is now considering the election of State Assemblyman Zoran Mamdani to mayor of the city.
That's insane.
The polls are currently suggesting, according to the Washington Post, a squeaky tight race for the Democratic nomination between former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and State Assemblyman Zoran Mamdani.
Okay, now, Cuomo obviously has his own problems.
He's the former governor of the state of New York.
He comes from the Cuomo family.
This sort of heritage and family name, but he was ousted as the governor over a grabbing-ass scandal that followed hard on a scandal in which he essentially stashed all the old people who had COVID together, and many of them died.
Well, now he's running for mayor again, and he has somehow become the moderate candidate and the voice of reason in this race, somehow, as opposed to Mamdani, who's a full-scale socialist.
As we talked about last week on the show, Mamdani is now running almost dead even with Cuomo in the Democratic primaries.
Those are scheduled to take place next week.
And according to this Washington Post columnist, the momentum is with the 33-year-old Mamdani, partly thanks to his viral videos, but also reflecting the exhaustion engendered by the idea of a Cuomo restoration.
So, again, there's a bunch of candidates in this race.
It is ranked choice voting, which makes it a little bit more complicated, for sure.
The New York Times is freaking out so much about the fact that Mamdani might win, and they dislike Cuomo so much, they decline to endorse a candidate.
That's how bad things are in the city of New York.
Nonetheless, this speaks to the radicalism of the Democratic Party, truly a radical Democratic Party, that is thinking of taking a full-scale communist and making that guy mayor.
Chicago already did this, by the way.
I should point out that Mayor Brandon Johnson, who's the mayor of Chicago, I believe it's a 9% approval rating.
He's currently attempting to hand out racial reparations in the city of Chicago, like slavery reparations in the city of Chicago.
That is the spirit of Juneteenth, you all.
It is about reflecting on our past.
Other cultures are taught to never forget.
We need to be reminded as blacks here in Chicago and America, remembering our past and working towards a more just future, investing in black.
is not a criminal act.
Sister Sakia says she needs a witness, so I'm going to say it again.
Investing in black is not a criminal act.
So I just have a question.
Is this what New York wants?
Apparently New York may want something similar.
Already coming up, the Supreme Court makes a huge decision.
That is a big win for Matt Walsh and The Daily Wire and for kids across the country first.
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Alrighty, meanwhile, a major decision against radicalism by the Supreme Court coming down in the United States versus Scrametti.
This particular decision, which came out today, concerns a law in Tennessee banning certain medical care for transgender minors, meaning hormone treatments, sterilization surgeries, and all of the rest.
The claim was this violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which is totally insane.
Obviously, the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment was not meant to ensure that a 12-year-old girl could be shot filled with testosterone and then have her breasts hacked off at a particular age.
That was not what the founders of the 14th Amendment were.
Now, Matt Walsh, obviously, a major host here, was involved.
It's a big victory for Matt.
It's a big victory, obviously, for the rational side of this argument.
It says that boys cannot be girls.
Girls cannot be boys.
Our company has been deeply involved in this issue for a long time, including Matt's uncovering of the use of transgender hormone treatment at places like Vanderbilt University.
So it's a big win for Matt.
It's a big win for Daily Wire and for all rational people here.
This is a 6-3 decision.
The decision was written by Chief Justice Roberts.
And what Chief Justice Roberts found is that, again, the Tennessee law did not, in fact, violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
And his logic is fairly simple.
Essentially, he says that SB 1, the first in the Senate Bill 1, bans the use of certain medical procedures for treating transgender minors, in particular.
The law prohibits a healthcare provider from surgically removing, modifying, altering, or entering into tissues, cavities, or organs of a human being, or prescribing, administering, or dispensing any puberty blocker or hormone for the purpose of 1. Enabling a minor to identify with or live as a purported identity inconsistent with the minor sex, or 2. Treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor sex and asserted identity.
SB1 is limited in two relevant ways.
First, it does not restrict the administration of puberty blockers or hormones to individuals 18 and over, so it's for minors.
Which means that, again, you're not going to enter into a sort of more heightened scrutiny from the Supreme Court.
Second, SB1 does not ban fully the administration of such drugs to minors.
A healthcare provider may administer puberty blockers or hormones to treat a minor's congenital defect, precocious puberty, disease, or physical injury.
So, does this violate the Equal Protection Clause?
Says Chief Justice Roberts, no, it does not.
The Fourteenth Amendment's command that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws must coexist with the practical necessity that most legislation classifies for one purpose or another, with resulting disadvantage to various groups or persons.
We have reconciled the principle of equal protection with the reality of legislative classification by holding that, quote, if a law neither burdens a fundamental right nor targets a suspect class, we will uphold the legislative classification so long as it bears a rational relation to some legitimate end.
There are certain legislative classifications that prompt heightened review, so that would be any classification on the basis of race, alienage, national origin.
Sex-based classifications also warn heightened scrutiny.
However, that does not apply to transgenderism.
It does not classify on any basis that warrant heightened review.
As Chief Justice Roberts says, he says, So again, mere reference to sex is not sufficient to trigger heightened scrutiny.
So again, this is the broad decision by the court here.
Now, what's fascinating about this is Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who's been ripped up and down by some members of the right...
Again, that's typically not how constitutional law works.
There are certain justices who just turn to the left and stay to the left.
They start off on the right, supposedly, and then they turn to the left and they stay there.
That would be, for example, Justice Souter, appointed by George H.W. Bush.
And Justice Souter ends up flipping all the way over to the left and just staying on the left.
Anthony Kennedy.
He moved to the left on left-wing issues, on social issues, and sort of stayed there.
On procedural issues, he ended up in a more moderate place, but on left-wing social issues, he ended up on the left.
That is not the case with Amy Coney Barrett.
So Amy Coney Barrett wrote a concurrence in this case with Justice Thomas, who is, again, the most conservative justice on the court, also the best justice on the court, never gets his due, absolutely tremendous.
Love me some Clarence Thomas.
He's awesome.
So the concurrence says, because the court concludes that Tennessee's Senate Bill 1 does not classify on the basis of transgender status, It does not resolve whether transgender status constitutes a suspect class.
I write separately to explain why, in my view, it does not.
So the court doesn't actually say whether transgender status would mean that you have a classification that is protected by, for example, the Civil Rights Act.
Barrett and Thomas are saying no.
That's not a thing.
Says Justice Barrett, joined by Justice Thomas, as a practical necessity, most legislation classifies for one purpose or another.
Laws distribute benefits that advantage particular groups like in-state tuition for residents, draw lines that might seem arbitrary like income thresholds for means tested benefits and set rules for specific categories of people like a particular person.
Again, this is obviously true.
There are age distinctions in the law.
There are, in fact, sex distinctions in the law, depending on what the law is.
There are certainly income distinctions in the law.
Instead, as a general matter, laws are presumed to be constitutionally valid.
A legislative classification will be upheld so long as it bears a rational relation to some legitimate end.
The only exceptions to the rule are classifications based on race, sex, and alienage.
Racial and ethnic classifications receive strict scrutiny.
They have to be narrowly tailored to serve compelling government interests.
Laws distinguishing between men and women receive what's called intermediate scrutiny.
So they have to be substantially related to achieving an important governmental objective.
There is no other protected group.
To determine whether a group constitutes a suspect class akin to race or sex, a test is applied, derived from a famous footnote in United States v.
Caroline Products.
That is a case from 1938.
Incredibly famous in constitutional law circuits.
Basically, that case suggests that prejudice against what are called discrete and insular minorities might be barred by the Constitution, or at the very least, That would lead to a suspicion that would violate the Equal Protection Clause.
So, in determining whether there is a discrete and insular minority here, says Justice Barrett, we consider whether members of the group in question, quote, exhibit obvious, immutable, or distinguishing characteristics that define them as a discrete group, whether the group has, quote, as a historical matter, been subjected to discrimination, and whether the group is a minority or politically powerless.
The test is strict, as evidenced by the failure of even vulnerable groups to satisfy it.
We've held the mentally disabled, the elderly, and the poor are not in fact suspect classes.
In fact, as Coney Barrett says, as far as I can tell, we have never embraced a new suspect class under this test.
Our restraint reflects a principle that when social or economic legislation is at issue, the Equal Protection Clause allows the state's wide latitude.
The Sixth Circuit has already found that transgender individuals don't constitute a suspect class, and it was right to do so.
First of all, transgender status is not marked by obvious immutable or distinguishing characteristics.
How do we know?
Because people can switch back and forth.
You can say you're transgender today and not be transgender tomorrow with exactly the same body.
Nor is the transgender population a discrete group.
The category of transgender individuals is large, diverse, and amorphous.
Finally, holding that transgender people constitute a suspect class would require courts to oversee all manner of policy choices normally committed to legislative discretion, says, The concurrence here from Coney Barrett and Thomas.
The parties agree the states have a legitimate interest in regulating health care.
They also agree that transgender status implicates physical and mental health.
The question of how to regulate a medical condition like gender dysphoria involves a host of policy judgments that legislatures, not courts, are best equipped to make.
Like, what are the relevant risks and benefits to children of puberty blockers and hormone treatments?
What is the age where these treatments become appropriate?
What about surgeries?
Expert disagreements highlight the difficulty of such choices, and the idea that a court is supposed to do it is wrong.
So this is a shot across the bow of the entire trans movement, not just in the judgment, but also in the concurrence here that basically says, stop saying that you are a protected class.
You are not, in fact, a protected class.
Justice Alito also has a concurrence in this case.
He says, I would assume for the sake of argument the law classifies based on transgender status.
I would nevertheless sustain the law.
Because such a classification does not warrant heightened scrutiny.
He also suggests that the reasoning employed in Bostock v.
Clayton County, that of course the 2020 case in which Justice Gorsuch bizarrely decided that classifications based on sex under the Civil Rights Act also include transgenderism as a possibility for discrimination.
He says, well, that is wrong anyway.
So again, there's a major win for people who have any semblance of reason.
The left is very upset today about all this.
Justice Sotomayor issues one of her usual perturbed missives, complete with garbled logic and nonsense.
She was joined by Justice Jackson, and Justice Kagan joined in part of this opinion as well.
Remember, we were this close.
We were this close.
If Donald Trump had never been president of the United States, we would have ended up with a left-wing court suggesting That's how close we were on this one.
We should never forget that.
Reason and irrationality.
That line in electoral politics is incredibly thin.
And elections have serious consequences.
This is one of the best consequences of President Trump's first term.
I assume that in his second term, he will also appoint, if there are new openings, excellent judges to the federal courts or to the Supreme Court.
Joining me on the line is my friend Matt Walsh.
Of course, you know him from his extraordinarily popular and successful documentaries, Am I Racist?
and What is a Woman?
He also has been, perhaps, America's leader in the fight against the radical trans agenda, particularly the attempts to surgically and hormonally mutilate children.
Today, of course, the Supreme Court came down with a 6-3 ruling in the United States v.
Scrimetti that said a Tennessee law was pushed by Matt that bars all of these pseudo-healthcare providers from providing this sort of mutilation of children.
Matt, first of all, happy birthday.
Second of all, congratulations.
It's a pretty good birthday gift from the Supreme Court.
Yeah, you know, most people know I'm skeptical of birthdays.
I'm not big on birthdays, so I feel like a hypocrite saying this.
But it does feel like a wonderful birthday present.
More importantly, of course, it's a great gift and win for all the kids in this state and states across the country that will now be protected from this kind of butchery.
You know, I think all the way back to, I guess, three years ago now when we launched our investigation into the child butchering practices of Vanderbilt and followed that up with the big rally on the state and the state capitol.
And then our lawmakers in the state followed that with their law banning the practices.
And, you know, dozens of other states have followed suit since then.
were a couple of states that already had laws like this on the books before us.
And it's kind of funny, because for the last couple of years, I've been hearing from trans activists who don't, don't don't want to don't want to acknowledge There are many realities they don't want to acknowledge, and they certainly don't want to acknowledge what time it is right now and what the scorecard is.
And so they've been very confident that, well, it's not going to survive the courts.
So you guys have fun with all your little laws, but the courts will save us, because of course left-wing activists have grown accustomed to that, that the courts always do save them.
But that wasn't the case.
This time.
And because it's, look, you don't have to be conservative to get this one right.
And the Supreme Court, their decision was not that, you know, it was not a decision saying that we have to ban these practices across the country.
Although I think that decision would have been perfectly justified.
Because it does violate the human rights of children to do this.
But the decision was just, no, well, of course states have the right to regulate these, to make laws dealing with these kinds of practices.
And so that means that, of course, not just Tennessee, but these dozens of other states that have these laws, it will be upheld for them.
And that also means that after we're done popping the champagne and celebrating the victory, which we should do, it's a good thing to celebrate victories.
But as soon as we're done doing that, have one glass of champagne, put it down, and then let's get to work on the next step, which is banning it federally, banning it nationwide.
Matt, I'm not sure how much time you had to actually read the decision.
It's a fairly long decision.
If you include all of the concurrences and the dissents, it's something like 118 pages.
But the chief, his opinion, avoids, as usual, Chief Justice Roberts avoids one of the bottom line questions here by trying to find a way around it, which is whether, in fact, In a concurrence,
Justices Barrett and Thomas both say that this is not a protected class.
There is no such thing as a class of transgenders because that is a mutable class.
It is not an immutable characteristic.
People can be trans one day and not trans the next.
It's a shifting, moving definition, a case that you've made really persuasively.
Obviously, I think the concurrence is right.
I think there are a lot of people on the right who have been disappointed so far with Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
They've been characterizing her as a liberal.
That is not the way courts work typically.
There are certain justices who move to the left and stay to the left.
Justice Souter being one.
But it's actually fairly rare, especially Trump appointees.
Even the ones you disagree with some of the time, you end up agreeing with 85 percent of the time.
This kind of labeling of Justice Amy Coney Barrett is a wild leftist.
It's hard to say that after you read the concurrence with Justice Thomas, the most consistently conservative member of the Supreme Court.
Yeah, I think, look, I obviously don't agree with every decision that she's made or the Supreme Court has made.
But I will say that it says something about this Supreme Court that I – The idea that they would find that Tennessee doesn't have the right to pass this kind of law was just, I found to be.
I wasn't worried about it.
I'm worried about a lot of things, and I'm pretty pessimistic, as I know you could be as well.
But on this one, I was pretty confident, very confident, in fact, the entire time, which I think should tell you something.
So, Matt, you've mentioned the possibility of other states doing this.
And then there's another possibility, which is Republicans do control the Congress.
They do control the Congress of the United States.
And so, while it would have to presumably overcome a filibuster, it seems absolutely worthwhile to me to have Republicans push this in the House and Senate.
Force people on record defending child mutilation tactics.
If you're a Democrat and you want to filibuster that, man, go ahead.
Try that.
See how that works out for you electorally.
Exactly.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has a bill on this right now and protecting kids from these procedures.
It's an absolute win.
This is, I mean, you talk about an 80-20 issue.
This is probably a 95-5 issue, if not more than that.
Because, you know, when you look at the polls, it's, But then there's even a small minority of people who will say to the pollster that, yes, I'm in favor of castrating children.
But even a lot of people that will say that, they're only saying that because they think that they have to say it.
How many people actually think it's a good idea to chemically castrate a child?
I think that number is very, very, very, very small.
So it's a winning issue.
It's the right thing to do, and it's a political winner.
And any time you have those two things lining up, the right thing and a political winner, there's absolutely no reason to do it.
But it's a small window of time that we have.
We have right now, when we have Congress and we have the White House.
And you have to take advantage of it.
You have to do it.
And as you say, let the Democrats get up there and make their argument about why we have to continue chemically castrating children.
Let them do it.
Let me tell you right now, that's not an argument they want to make.
This is not a fight they want to have.
This is not a discussion they want to have.
They're absolutely terrified of it.
So they are hoping they are hoping that Republicans just for whatever reason back off and take the Supreme Court victory as like the final.
The last thing they want is to actually have to stand up there and argue in favor of this butchery.
They don't want to have to do it.
This is politics.
Think about what your opponents don't want you to do, and then do that.
Do the thing they don't want you to do.
That's a pretty good rule of thumb.
It will rarely fail you, and I don't think it'll fail you here.
Well, Matt Walsh, congratulations again.
I think congratulations to Daily Wire.
We've obviously been pushing on this issue for an awful long time.
And again, I know you don't like birthdays because you're not responsible for your own birth, but take the win.
Take the birthday gift.
Happy birthday.
And again, congratulations, Matt.
Thanks, Ben.
Appreciate it.
Meanwhile, there's some brand new polling out about President Trump and Israel and Iran.
And for all those who are saying the Republican Party is split over this, I don't see that in the polling.
I don't.
The only controversial question in the Republican Party is one that no one is asking, which is, should the United States be involved in full-scale nation-building in Iran?
And the answer to that question is no.
The United States should not be involved in full-scale nation-building in Iran.
I am saying this, okay?
So all the people who are telling you that folks like me are saying there should be full-scale nation-building in Iran by the United States, the answer is no.
I want no part of this.
I'm not interested in that.
What Israel is doing right now is unprecedented.
It's excellent.
It is ending the Iranian nuclear program as it currently stands.
If the United States drops a couple of bunker busters on Fordow, thus ending the Iranian nuclear program for good, that's the extent of it.
I'm not interested in American boots on the ground.
I'm not interested in American regime change and regime building.
If the Iranian regime falls, it's up to the Iranian people to fix it.
I never bought the sort of Colin Powell, you break it, you bought it model.
This bizarre notion that what anyone is calling for here, aside from perhaps Lindsey Graham, Is a full-scale nation-building campaign?
Who is calling for that?
The answer is no one.
And if the position here is, should the United States follow President Trump and drop a couple of bunker busters, a couple of Moabs, on Fordow to thus end the Iranian nuclear program, by polling data, that is a highly popular position with Trump voters.
There's a poll from Greyhouse among Trump 2024 voters.
These are people who 95% to 5% approve of President Trump as president.
And they've been asked a series of questions about America, Iran, Israel.
Do you support or oppose Israel's recent military strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities and military targets?
67% strongly support.
16% somewhat support.
That's 83%.
Only 10% somewhat opposed.
That's plus 73. That is not a broken party on this matter.
Intelligence agencies believe this could be used to develop nuclear weapons.
How concerned are you about Iran potentially obtaining nuclear weapons?
74%, very concerned, somewhat concerned, 15%.
Okay, that would be 89%.
Which of the following statements comes closer to your opinion about Iran developing nuclear weapons?
1. Iran developing nuclear weapons is an existential threat to the United States and our allies that must be stopped.
Two, Iran developing nuclear weapons is concerning but not worth risking American lives for getting involved in another Middle East war.
And again, even that question is phrased in such a way that it's sort of biased to the anti-position.
Because what we're talking about is not the idea that America should heavily risk American lives here.
We'll talk about the possible blowback of an airstrike in a moment.
Iran, of course, is threatening hell and fury like nobody's business.
They've been doing this all the time.
This is nothing new.
And Iran is constantly threatening terror attacks all over the world in order to get done what it's trying to get done.
No great country can be held hostage by a terror-sponsored state threatening action if you do something to oppose its nuclear ambitions.
Otherwise, you may as well just let every terrorist state get a nuclear weapon.
And Iran threatens a lot.
And sometimes those threats actually happen.
The question is, can any...
Is that something that you want or not?
Okay, so, by the way, the answer there was 64% say that Iran's developing nukes is an existential threat that must be stopped.
Only 28% say that it's concerning but not worth risking American lives or getting involved in another Middle East war.
And again, what we're talking about in terms of involvement here, by pretty much all available accounts, is, in the grand scheme of things, more akin to the killing of Qasem Soleimani than the invasion of Iraq.
Which of the following statements comes closer to your view about dealing with Iran's nuclear program?
Do you believe the United States should provide military support to help Israel defend against Iranian attacks?
48%.
Yes, definitely should.
24%.
Yes, probably should.
That is 72%.
Okay, do these sound like numbers that are wildly split?
It's a giant split right down the middle of the MAGA movement.
Do you support or oppose the U.S. providing defensive weapon systems like missile defense to help Israel protect itself?
68% strongly support.
18% somewhat support.
Again, just adding up, that's an 86% approval rating.
Do you support or oppose the United States providing intelligence?
76% strongly support, 15% somewhat support.
So 91% support.
Do you support or oppose the United States taking its own direct military action if necessary to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons?
Strongly support, 35% somewhat support, 37%.
Again, that is 72% approval.
Only 19% say no.
I'm not seeing it.
You know who else isn't seeing it?
President Trump.
So President Trump did a presser today.
Took a bunch of questions on what's going on.
And he was asked, are you going to strike?
Are you going to use B2s or B52s?
What are you going to do here?
He said, I might do it.
I might not do it.
Again, strategic ambiguity.
The goal here is to get Iran to simply capitulate.
That is what President Trump wants to do.
I've been saying this for days.
If President Trump gets the Iranians to say, listen, we will let you in to blow up Fordow.
And then we'll let American inspectors on the ground to examine all of our nuclear program and all the rest?
This is over, like, this minute.
President Trump would love that.
But he says, listen, I'm not taking options off the table right now.
That's silly.
You don't seriously think I'm going to answer that question.
Will you strike the Iranian nuclear component?
And what time exactly, sir?
Sir, would you strike it?
Would you please inform us so we can be there and watch?
I mean, you don't know that I'm going to even do it.
You don't know.
I may do it.
I may not do it.
I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do.
The president's enjoying himself now.
This is good TV for the president of the United States.
And by the way, it also happens to be good policy.
He's playing his very strong hand incredibly well.
Israel has done an extraordinary amount of work over the course of the last few days.
This is a graphic of the number of missile strikes that have been sent by Iran, or missiles that have been sent by Iran over the course of the last few weeks.
Last few nights.
As you can see, radical decrease.
Why?
Because Israel is blowing up all the missile launchers in Iran.
Israel has destroyed all air defense capacities in Iran.
President Trump acknowledges as much as, listen, it's pretty late here.
There is a big difference between now and a week ago.
Have Iranians reached out to you?
Yes.
I said it's very late.
You know?
I said it's very late to be talking.
Mr. President, we may meet.
It's, I don't know, there's a big difference between now and a week ago, right?
Big difference.
Mr. President, you said you may meet.
Okay, well, he also said unconditional surrender.
So that's something that he had actually put out on Truth Social yesterday.
So he's asked, what do you mean by unconditional surrender?
And he says, well, you know what those words mean.
They have meanings in the language of English.
Here's what they mean.
Unconditional surrender.
Two very simple words.
Very simple.
Unconditional surrender.
That means I've had it.
I've had it.
I give up.
No more.
Then we go blow up all the nuclear stuff that's all over the place there.
No, they had bad intentions.
For 40 years they've been saying death to America, death to Israel, death to anybody else that they didn't like.
They were bullies.
They were schoolyard bullies.
And now they're not bullies anymore, but we'll see what happens.
Again, President Trump has not been consistent on this point.
This is what's amazing.
For all the people who are opposing President Trump, oh my gosh, he's betrayed MAGA, says Tucker Carlson.
Oh my gosh, says Marjorie Taylor Greene.
He's moved against America first.
He, first of all, built those movements, not you.
Second of all, no, he never changed his opinion on this.
As President Trump says, he's been saying this for decades.
I only want one thing.
Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
That's it.
I'm not looking at long-term, short-term.
And I've been saying that for 20 years.
I've been saying it as a civilian who got a lot of publicity.
People would cover it.
Very simply, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
That's it.
It's not a question of anything else.
And if you did, you wouldn't have much of a country because they would use it on us and they'd use it on other people and they'd be a terror all over the world.
So I may have some people that are a little bit unhappy now.
But I have some people that are very happy, and I have people outside of the base that can't believe that this is happening.
They're so happy.
And there was a poll that just came out today that my approval rating is the highest it's ever been.
All I'm doing is saying you can't have a nuclear weapon.
And I tried to do it nicely, and then on day 61 I said, let's go.
Okay, again, he is saying things that he's been saying all along, the whole time.
He's not wrong about the polling, I just read you the polling.
So President Trump was finally asked, what does he say to the Ayatollah?
And all-time classic Trump line here.
You say good luck.
Good luck.
Man, when he's good, he is just the best.
Meanwhile, Ayatollah Khamenei, he's trying to rage-tweet through this thing.
He put out a statement this morning saying, Iran will not ignore any attack on its territory.
Its armed forces are on alert.
Oh, you mean they're not ignoring any of the, you mean like how their entire airspace is controlled?
He also put a statement saying that actually Iran controls Israel's airspace, which, um, nope!
In fact, the home front command in Israel just told people they're allowed to go back to work.
He said you can go back to like your normal life, go back to work, just, you know, be available to go to a bomb shelter if you have to.
But is that something that's been happening in Tehran or in Iran?
No, the answer is no.
Khamenei is also trying to threaten the United States as the U.S. entering in this matter is 100% to its own detriment.
The damage it will suffer will be far greater than any harm that Iran may encounter.
I mean, he's rage-tweeting that from a basement, literally a basement.
The 86-year-old Ayatollah.
Now again, this notion that what is being discussed here is another endless war.
No one, for the one millionth time, no one is calling for that.
No one.
Some things are different than other things.
This is not the Iraq War.
No one wants it to be the Iraq War.
There's a point made by State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce.
She said that the goal here is to come to the end of what has been a 40-odd-year war against the West by Ayatollah Khomeini and then Ayatollah Khomeini.
And she says that the way to end this forever war might be an airstrike or it might be Iran capitulating, but the goal is to get to the end, not to have a whole other round of nation building or anything like that.
Agree, agree, agree.
He says he wants an end, as he has said, about every conflict that he has, as a peacemaker, worked to stop peacefully through diplomacy.
That has been his commitment.
And he wants these things, as he said, about a number of situations.
Not for a month or six months, but durable ends to this nature of forever wars.
And that has been his posture, and that's his posture now.
Again, there will be excellent impact from President Trump making Iran stop its nuclear program, whether it is through negotiations at this point in ultimatum being offered and accepted by the Iranians, or whether it is the Israelis themselves destroying Fordow, or whether it is the United States doing it.
That would be good, because if you wish to prevent China from, for example, attacking Taiwan, people have to know that your threats are credible.
President Trump has said a thing.
He has set a line, and that line will now be met.
That is the goal.
This is the point of the Wall Street Journal editorial board today.
They say the isolationists say bombing Iran would be another nation-building exercise, but no one is talking about sending American ground troops.
An Israeli ground incursion is more likely if the U.S. does not bomb Fordow, meaning Israel will send some sort of strike team, which is probably accurate.
Destroying the nuclear sites could end the war sooner and at less cost in lives on both sides.
The Biden precedent is instructive here, and not merely on Afghanistan.
As Russia invaded Ukraine and Iran's Houthi proxies attacked U.S. ships, Biden's strategists shrank from a robust response because they feared quote-unquote escalation.
In practice, that meant Russia and Iran controlled when and how to escalate.
That is correct.
If the U.S. won't help one of its strongest and most loyal allies finish the job of eliminating Iran's nuclear threat in uncontested airspace, the message to Iran will be that there is no chance the United States will defend Taiwan.
That, of course, makes...
This is how deterrence works, of course.
Now, meanwhile, Democrats, people on the left, they're already mocking President Trump, suggesting that he's not credible in his threats.
Here's Stephen Colbert trying to make that claim last night.
Certain Iranian hardliners spoke bravely, but they didn't know what was about to happen.
They're all dead now, and it will only get worse.
Hold on, wait a second.
Worse?
Worse than dead?
Oh my God, is he going to invite them to his next parade?
Because...
Thank you.
He's bowing for that joke?
That's like his best joke?
Really?
Alright.
Again, so much of the opposition inside the Republican Party to Trump.
And again, it is a small voice statistically inside the Republican Party, inside the MAGA movement, that is anti-Trump on this.
Because Trump knows how to play this hand.
They say that he is out of touch.
I would like to suggest that statistically speaking, it is they who are out of touch.
Candace Owens is one of the people who suggested that President Trump was completely out of touch.
I'd like to just say, I do not think that her perspective on this particular issue is in keeping with the generalized GOP perspective.
Here is what she wrote about her take on this issue.
And you tell me if you think this is a mainstream position inside the GOP or inside MAGA or from the Trump White House or anyone inside the Trump White House.
They tried to redefine anti-Semitism.
She doesn't say who they are.
They tried to redefine anti-Semitism, criminalize criticism of Israel on college campuses, and most crucially, cede the idea that the declaration of Christ as our king amounted to hatred against Jews.
Again, I don't know who they is.
All of this was done in preparation for the greater Israel agenda, regarding which they attempted to emotionally manipulate Americans to accept.
I'm not sure who's articulating the greater Israel agenda, but again, okay.
The conspiracy theorists were right again.
It was always about a planned war with Iran and a doomed heretical belief that mass slaughter of women and children is messianic.
Again, Israel is engaging in targeted strikes in Iran, despite complete ownership of the Iranian airspace.
She continues, if you believe the Polish, Benjamin Milikowski, that's what she calls Benjamin Netanyahu, is chosen by God to impart murder, starvation, I mean, it is worth noting here that Vladimir Lenin was not actually Jewish.
The most Jewish he was is that he had apparently a maternal great-grandfather who converted, actually, to Russian Orthodoxy in 1844.
If this is in some way representative of the...
I'd love to see the statistical proof of that position.
Alrighty, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.
Caitlin Clark keeps getting roughed up in the WNBA, and the WNBA kind of keeps letting it happen.
We'll get to why.
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