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July 30, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:09:26
WINNING: Trump’s EPA WRECKS The Radical Green Agenda
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All righty, folks.
Jam-packed show as always, brand new GDP news.
Very good for the President of the United States.
A big quarter plus.
We're joined by the Secretary of Energy to discuss an enormous move by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department, really, one of the biggest moves in regulatory history.
And we'll get to the breakdown of the Democratic Party, Senator Corey Booker, bringing out those angry eyes yet again.
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Well, huge news for the Trump administration.
According to the Commerce Department, U.S. GDP, which is, of course, the value of all goods and services produced across the country in the sort of final market effect, rose at a seasonally and inflation-adjusted 3.0% annual rate in the second quarter, according to the Wall Street Journal.
That is wildly exceeding expectations from economists who thought that it was going to be 2.3%.
Those are economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal.
It followed a first quarter where GDP shrank at a 0.5% annual rate because businesses were loading up on imports to get ahead of the Trump administration's anticipated tariffs.
And again, this is despite all of the economic uncertainty surrounding the tariffs.
This is despite all of the foreign policy conflagrations ranging from the Middle East to Ukraine.
Consumer spending, the engine of the U.S. economy, increased at a 1.4% pace, picking up from the first quarter as a steady labor market underpinned households spending power.
Consumer spending was offset by weaker business spending.
So it is certainly possible to read this as very, very optimistic news for the Trump administration.
It is also possible to read this as an inflection point where things could theoretically go the other way, where businesses are spending less, consumers are sort of lagging at this point as businesses spend less in anticipation of future tariffs or an economic slowdown.
We're still going to have to see hiring numbers, for example.
Are businesses loading up right now?
Are they spending less because they understand that prices are about to go up and that consumer spending they expect is going to go down?
It's sort of unclear where things go.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, consumers and businesses are in wait and see mode ahead of Trump's Friday deadline as far as the tariffs.
And the unemployment rate continues to tick in at 4.1% in June.
Consumer sentiment is ticking up.
So we will see kind of where things go from here.
But this is certainly very good news for the Trump administration.
And of course, this sort of number exceeds what the Biden administration had foresaw as the future of growth in the United States.
The Biden administration had seen slow but steady growth for the next 10 years in the United States.
And they had foreseen, according to our sponsors at Perplexity, their forecast, according to their final economic report of the president in January 2025, was an average growth rate of approximately 2.2% per year for the latter half of the 2025 to 2034 period.
Okay, which, again, if we get these 3% numbers across the rest of the year, we will exceed.
Right now, if you average what the Trump administration is doing, things are ticking in around 2% because you had a 0.5% and then you had a 3%.
And so when you average everything out, you're going to end up in the 2% area.
But if the economy continues to churn along, then President Trump's numbers are going to continue to go up.
The economy is going to continue to be solid.
President Trump is putting a lot of pressure on the Federal Reserve, of course, to lower the interest rates, hoping that's going to spur consumer sentiment, make it easier for people to get loans and all the rest.
And in fact, he's seeing some support among Federal Reserve governors.
Some of the Federal Reserve governors are disagreeing openly with Jerome Powell.
As Jerome Powell nears the end of his term, there are some of these Federal Reserve governors who presumably are lobbying for the job.
They would have to be appointed by the president.
And so agreeing with the president is a good way to do that politically.
But they also, I assume, feel that we have now reached the point where inflation is stable and steady, that the tariffs are not going to radically increase prices, and that monetary policy is not turning money into the economy right now.
And so it's time to lower those interest rates.
According to the Wall Street Journal, this week's Fed meeting could produce something that has not happened since 1993.
More than one governor voting against the Fed chair.
The groundwork was laid weeks ago.
Welcome to monetary policy in the age of the succession campaign.
Fed chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues have signaled they favor maintaining a wait-and-see approach at this week's meeting.
The potential dissenters, Governors Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman, happen to be President Trump's two appointees, both have voiced support for cutting rates, which, of course, President Trump has also publicly demanded.
The last time that more than one governor dissented in a single meeting was more than 30 years ago.
That's a streak of 259 policy meetings.
The Fed's 12-person rate-setting committee includes all seven presidentially appointed governors on the Washington-based boards.
And then the other members are members of regional banks, the regional bank presidents.
Five of those take turns voting every year.
Dissents used to be a lot more common in the 1980s when Federal Reserve policy was much more controversial.
Paul Volcker was pushing for higher interest rates in order to crush inflation.
There were some people who dissented at the time.
It'll be fascinating to see as we move forward in time here whether Jerome Powell is too late again, as President Trump suggests, or whether the wait-and-see approach is the appropriate approach, given the fact that we still don't know sort of what the impact of these tariffs are.
Again, President Trump is negotiating these tariff deals in real time, and that includes, apparently, tariff deals with India.
So right now, the president apparently is looking at placing a 20 to 25 percent tariff on India, which is a very significant tariff, obviously.
He was gaggling aboard Air Force One, according to Breitbart, en route to the United States from Scotland.
And one reporter asked Trump if he was tracking toward a 20 to 25 percent tariff on India, citing a Reuters report that India was preparing for tariffs that could rise to that.
And Trump said, I think so.
And then regarding a precise rate, he added, we're going to see.
He said, India has been a good friend, but India has charged basically more tariffs than almost any other country over the years.
Now I'm in charge and you just can't do that.
Now, the president does have a very warm relationship with the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi.
And so it is possible that it goes lower than that.
With that said, is that going to escalate prices in the United States?
It's difficult to say that decreasing supply or artificially increasing prices through a higher pricing mechanism, which is what a tariff is, is not going to increase prices to the American consumer.
However, is that the same thing as the Federal Reserve or the federal government injecting massive amounts of money into the system, creating systemic inflation?
In reality, if the prices go up, what you will likely see is a concomitant drop in consumer demand because people are just not going to spend that money.
And if the consumer demand goes down, it may actually Even out the impact of what would be inflationary pricing.
Milton Friedman famously said that inflation is anywhere and everywhere a monetary policy issue, meaning that if you're not injecting actual dollars into the economy, that everything is likely to even out in terms of pricing, because if the prices go up, the demand goes down.
And that is likely to happen here.
We will see whether innovation, new investment in the United States outweighs that in terms of economic growth.
That's sort of the open question at this point.
Now, meanwhile, President Trump continues to avoid the worst excesses of a gigantic tariff on China.
Now, again, my preferred tariff policy, and I've said this many times, would be free trade with everybody but China, that China is a country that deserves to be isolated.
They're a nefarious actor in the world.
They are the lodestar of an anti-American alliance that spans from Russia to China to Iran to North Korea.
And so targeting them economically by essentially cutting extremely warm relationship deals with everybody else except for China would be my preferred policy.
President Trump, however, is not doing that.
President Trump is pursuing tariffs against pretty much everybody at a baseline 10% rate.
It may be higher for the EU, 15%, maybe higher for India, 20%.
We'll have to see where he lands, much higher than it has been in the past.
But he's also attempting to mitigate many of the tariffs that he was placing on China.
According to Breitbart, trade officials from the United States and China concluded their third round of talks in Stockholm, Sweden on Tuesday with a pledge to extend the current tariff truce between the two countries, provided President Trump approves.
U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer said at a press conference in Stockholm, we're going to head back to Washington, D.C. We're going to talk to the president about whether that's something he wants to do.
The president can make a final call.
He said that the Chinese have been very pragmatic in their approach to negotiations.
He said, we have tensions now, but the fact that we are regularly meeting with them to address these issues gives us a good footing for negotiations.
Now, remember, President Trump had threatened tariffs as high as 145%, and then it was sort of put on postpone, and it was back down to 30, 35%.
The Treasury Secretary, Scott Besson, has said that an extension needs to be negotiated before August 12th, or the U.S. tariffs are going to boomerang back to those triple-digit levels.
That's essentially effectually a trade embargo against China.
I have a feeling that President Trump is going to avoid all of that because the fallout economically would be pretty significant, obviously, if you were to essentially trade embargo China without putting all of your ducks in a row first.
President Trump himself has said that he may travel to China to try and negotiate something personally with the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
He wants me to go there, and he's going to come here, and we're just going to work out dates.
But we look forward to it, actually.
It was one of the most incredible trips in my first term.
It was, I think maybe the most incredible trip nobody's ever seen.
And Saudi Arabia was incredible also, in particular.
Those two trips were nobody's ever seen anything like them.
Very different, but equally incredible.
But the China trip was with the Great Hall.
And I don't think you were there.
Was I?
But it was something that was unparalleled.
There's never been anything.
And they said they're going to do it bigger and better this time.
So we'll see what happens.
But we'll most likely be going to China in the not too distant future, maybe before this year is out.
And he'll be coming here.
So obviously the president is looking for some sort of détente with China.
And it'll be interesting to see whether he's able to actually accomplish that, given China's threats to Taiwan, given China's attempts to spread its sort of belt and road economic initiative all around the world as a challenge to the United States and its support for countries that obviously oppose the United States in terms of foreign policy.
China itself, of course, opposes the United States.
Already coming up, we'll be joined by the Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, to talk about the energy revolution in the United States.
We'll be talking about the New York Times totally botching a story on the Gaza Strip, and it really isn't a botcher.
It's just they really, really hate Israel over there.
Plus, Corey Booker pops in the angry eyes yet again.
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So one of the questions you may be asking yourself is with all this turmoil, with all the tariff turmoil, with all of the concern about foreign relations and all the uncertainty in the markets, why are the markets so optimistic?
Well, there are a couple of reasons that the markets remain pretty optimistic.
One, of course, is AI.
I talk with a lot of investors.
I talk with a lot of sophisticated VC and hedge fund folks.
And the amount of money that is pouring into AI as a sort of cure-all for economic woes, increasing labor productivity by orders of magnitude, I think justifiably that Amount of optimism remains extremely high, and the United States remains the home of that sort of innovation.
And so, the United States, as sort of the hub of the next step of the global economy, remains a place where money is going to come.
But there's something else that's happening here, and it's connected with, again, the Trump administration's generalized policy with regard to business.
Even if, like me, you do not love the president's tariff policy, if you think the president's trade policy is creating a dampening effect on the economy, that if it weren't there, the economy would be growing at 4% or 4.5% or 5%.
Even if you believe that, the question becomes, what are the supporting factors that are leading to 3% GDP growth despite the uncertainty?
And the biggest one, the biggest one is that President Trump cut taxes with the one big beautiful bill.
And two, the president of the United States is radically deregulatory.
The president looks at the regulatory state and he sees it as a threat to the growth of the American economy.
And one of the biggest moves that has been made in modern history in the regulatory state has happened this week.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday, according to the Wall Street Journal, declared Liberation Day from climate imperialism by moving to repeal the 2009 so-called endangerment finding for greenhouse gas emissions.
So basically, the Clean Air Act, which was put into place in the 1970s, authorized the EPA to regulate pollutants like ozone, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and others that might reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.
Well, the EPA suggested under Barack Obama that you could use the Clean Air Act in order to regulate carbon emissions, which is insane.
That's totally crazy.
The kinds of stuff the Clean Air Act was meant to stop was, again, particulate matter.
It was meant to stop ozone that was breaking down the ozone layer.
It was not meant to deal with carbon and particularly carbon dioxide, which is a thing that, you know, is a natural byproduct of, for example, breathing.
Carbon dioxide is not a danger to human beings in the environment.
You may not like what it does in terms of global climate change, but the idea that the EPA has authority under the Clean Air Act is wrong.
If Congress wants to give the EPA that authority, then it certainly could, but it never did.
The Supreme Court found in 2007 that greenhouse gases could qualify as pollutants under an extraordinarily broad misreading of the law.
But now the EPA is walking that back, and the EPA is suggesting that this is not correct.
Quote, there is some evidence that elevated carbon dioxide concentrations and climate changes can lead to changes in aero-allergens that could increase the potential for allergenic illnesses, said the Supreme Court and the EPA under their 2009 ruling.
Well, the Energy Department has now walked that back.
They published a comprehensive analysis of climate science and its uncertainties by five outside scientists.
One of those is Stephen Kunin, who served in the Obama administration.
The crucial point is that CO2 is different from the pollutants Congress expressly authorized the EPA to regulate.
Those pollutants are, quote, subject to regulatory control because they cause local problems depending on concentrations, including nuisances, damages to plants, and at high enough exposure levels, toxological effects on humans.
In contrast, CO2 is odorless, does not affect visibility, and it has no toxicological effects at ambient levels.
So you're not going to get sick from CO2 in the air.
Okay, so the EPA Administrator Lise Elden and Energy Secretary Chris Wright are taking this on.
They've said the Clean Air Act no longer applies in our interpretation to greenhouse gases.
Well, what does that mean?
It means something extraordinary for the American economy, among other things, which is a massive deregulatory environment.
The alleged cost of regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act amounts to something like $54 billion per year.
So if you multiply that out over the course of the last decade and a half, you're talking about a cost of in excess of $800 billion based again on a regulatory agency radically exceeding its boundaries.
Joining us online to discuss this massive move by the Trump administration is the Energy Secretary, Chris Wright.
Secretary, thanks so much for taking the time.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Ben.
So first of all, why don't we discuss what the EPA just did, what that actually means, how's the Energy Department involved?
And what does it mean for sort of the future of things like energy development in the United States?
Well, the endangerment finding, you know, 2007 Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts and a bunch of environmental groups sued the EPA and said, you must regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate activists, basically.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court decided five to four in 2007 that greenhouse gases could become endangerments.
And if they were, the EPA had the option, but not the compulsion, to regulate greenhouse gases.
As soon as the Obama administration came in in 2009, they did kind of a tortured process to say greenhouse gases endanger the lives of Americans.
And that gave the regulatory state, the EPA, the ability to regulate greenhouse gases that the Obama administration and others had failed to pass through Congress.
If you pass a law through the House and the Senate and the president signs it, then you can do that.
But they just did it through a regulatory backdoor.
And now those regulations disinfuse everything we do.
Maybe most famously automobiles, the EV mandates, the continual lowering of or increasing in fuel economy standards that brought us the SUV and everyone buying trucks because they don't want to buy small cars.
But it's regulating you appliances and power plants and home hair dryers and outdoor heaters.
So it's just been a huge entanglement into American life, big brother climate regulations from the government.
They don't do anything meaningful for global greenhouse gas emissions.
They don't change any health outcomes for Americans, but they massively grow the government.
They increase costs and they grow the reach of the government.
So Administrator Lee Zeldin is reviewing that and saying, hey, we don't believe that greenhouse gases are a significant endangerment to the American public and they shouldn't be regulated by the EPA.
The APA does not have authority to regulate them because Congress never passed such a law.
And what we did at the Department of Energy, sorry for the long answer, is I reached out to five prestigious climate scientists that are real scientists in my mind, meaning they follow the data wherever it leads, not only if it aligns with their politics or their views otherwise.
And we published a long sort of critical overview of climate science and its impact on Americans.
And that was released yesterday on the DOE website.
And I highly recommend everyone to give it a read.
And in synopsis, it's a big report, obviously.
What are the biggest findings from that report that you commissioned at the Department of Energy with regard to this stuff?
Maybe the single biggest one that everyone should be aware of is the ceaseless repeating that climate change is making storms more frequent and more severe and more dangerous.
It's just nonsense.
That's never been in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports.
It's just not true.
But media and politicians and activists just repeatedly repeat it.
And in fact, I saw The Hill had a piece right away when our press release went out yesterday morning.
Despite decades of data and scientific consensus that climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of storms, the EPA has reversed the endangerment finding.
Like just the headlines are just wrong.
One of my goals for 20 years, Ben, is just for people to be a little more knowledgeable of what actually is true with climate change and what actually are the trade-offs between trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by top-down government actions and what does that mean for the energy system?
We've just driven up the price of energy, reduced choice to American consumers without meaningfully moving global greenhouse gas emissions at all.
And when I talk to activists or politicians about it, they're not even that concerned about it.
They don't act as if their real goal is to incrementally reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Their real goal is for the government and them, you know, a small number of people to decide what's appropriate behavior for all Americans.
Just creepy top-down control sold in the name of protecting the future of the planet.
If it was really about that, they'd know a little bit more about climate change, but they almost never do.
Well, this is the part that's always astonishing to me.
I get in a room with climate scientists from places like MIT or Caltech, and we'll discuss what exactly is going on.
These are people who believe that there is anthropogenic climate change, that human activity is causing some sort of market impact on the climate.
But when you discuss with them, okay, so what are the solutions?
The solutions that are proposed are never in line with the kind of risk that is being sought to be prevented.
I mean, there's a point that the Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus has made, is that there are certain things that you could do economically that would totally destroy your economy and might save you an incremental amount of climate change on the other end.
And then there are the things that we actually could do that are practical, things like building seawalls, things like hardening infrastructure, moving toward nuclear energy would be a big one.
To me, the litmus test of whether somebody is serious or not about climate change is what their feelings about nuclear energy.
If they're anti-nuclear energy, but somehow want to curb climate change, then you know one of those things is false.
It cannot be that you wish to oppose nuclear energy development, but also your chief goal is to lower carbon emissions.
That's just a lie.
Exactly.
I mean, the biggest driver of reduced greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. by far has been natural gas displacing coal in the power sector.
It's about 60% of all the U.S. reduction in emissions.
But they hate natural gas, you know, because again, it's a movement against hydrocarbons towards a society that somehow they think is better.
It is helping more on the left become pro-nuclear.
So I'll view that as one of the positive side effects of the climate movement and probably is going to help nuclear energy start going again.
Of course, there are plenty that are anti-nuclear and climate crazies.
So there's plenty of them still left.
But as you just mentioned, what Nordhaus said in his lecture was do the things where the benefits are greater than the cost, sort of common sense.
And in his proposed optimal scenario, you know, we reduce the warming through this century by about 20%, not net zero, not any, because those things are you spend $100 trillion and maybe you get $10 trillion of benefits.
You know, that's not, and then people tell me, well, it's an admirable goal.
It's aspirational.
I'm like, turning dollars into dimes is not aspirational.
It's human impoverishing.
And we can look over to the United Kingdom.
They very proudly announced, you know, they have the largest percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, 40%.
What they don't tell you is they've had an almost 30% reduction in energy consumption in the United Kingdom.
So their main, their dominant mechanism to drive down their greenhouse gas emissions is simply to consume less energy in England.
That comes from two factors.
The biggest one is their energy intensive industry has just shut down in the country and all those jobs have gone overseas.
That stuff is now made in China, loaded on a diesel-powered ship, shipped back to the United Kingdom, and they call that green.
And the other mechanism is they made energy so expensive that people don't heat their houses as warm in the summer.
They don't travel as much.
They don't cool their houses as much in the hot summer days.
And they live, they've impoverished their people so they can afford less energy.
This isn't victory, and this isn't changing the global future of the world.
Like we just need some common sense back around energy and climate change.
That's where the Trump administration is headed across the administration, not just administer Zeldon and myself, but everyone in the administration.
We just want Americans to have a government that follows basic common sense.
Now, Secretary Wright, we were discussing a little bit earlier on in the show this excellent second quarter GDP number, some of which is being driven certainly by mass investment in technologies like AI.
If you talk to folks who are in sort of the capital intensive arenas, pretty much all the money right now is going into AI that's a race the United States must win.
And one of the huge components there is the energy that is going to be necessary in order to pursue the sorts of processing that AI is going to require.
The gigantic data centers that are now being built are going to require inordinate amounts of energy.
Everybody knows this.
Everybody acknowledges this.
China is producing energy at a rate that far outstrips the United States at this point.
So if we wish to actually win the AI race, we have to unleash in all of the above strategy with regard to energy production.
That's obviously something you're very focused on.
And if we don't win the AI race, China becomes the dominant economic power on planet Earth in all likelihood.
So how important is AI to this?
And what does it mean for the energy Sector.
It's massively important.
As you just said, I've called it Manhattan Project 2.0, because in the Manhattan Project, when we developed an atomic bomb in World War II, we could not have come in second.
If Nazi Germany had developed an atomic weapon before us, we would live in a different world.
It's a similar risk here.
If China gets a meaningful lead on the U.S. in artificial intelligence, because it's not just economics and science, it's national defense, it's the military.
Now we are under serious threat from China and we go into a very different world.
We must lead in this area.
We have the leading scientists.
We have businesses.
We have the ability to invest these huge amounts of capital, again, from private markets and private businesses, which a free market capitalist like myself loves.
The biggest limiter, as you set up, is electricity.
The highest form and most expensive type of energy there is is to turn it into electricity.
And as you just said, China's been growing their electricity production massively.
Ours has barely grown in the last 20 years.
In fact, it grew like 2% or 3% in the Obama years, but yet they got the Biden years, but yet they got prices up over 25%.
They helped elect President Trump by just doing everything wrong on energy.
And they certainly weren't all of the above.
They were all about wind, solar, and batteries.
And congratulations, they got them to rounds to 3% of total U.S. energy at the end of the Biden years.
Hydrocarbons went from 82% in 2019 when Biden promised, guaranteed he would end fossil fuels, to 82% his last year in office.
Zero change in market share.
So they just believe and cling to too many silly things about energy.
So today, the world, the United States' biggest source of electricity by far is natural gas.
And that will be the dominant growth that will enable us to build all these tens of gigawatts of data centers.
It's abundant, it's affordable, and it works all the time.
I've never been an all of the above guy because subsidizing wind and solar, you know, globally, a few trillions of dollars have gone into it.
And the main result is if you get high penetration, you get expensive electricity and a less stable grid.
That's not good.
You know, the crazy amount of money the United States government spent on wind and solar hasn't grown, as we talked before, hasn't grown our electricity production because they're not there at peak demand time.
You know, whether you look at Washington, D.C. or Texas is the biggest penetration of wind and second biggest penetration of solar.
It's 35% of the capacity on the Texas grid.
But at peak demand, like these cold, high pressure systems or cold or warm high pressure systems, the wind is gone.
Peak demand time is after the sun goes down and you get almost nothing from wind and solar.
What they really are is just parasites that in the middle of the day, you know, when demand is low and all the power plants that have to be there to supply at peak demand, they just all have to turn down.
And then the sun goes behind a cloud and they got to turn up again.
And then when peak demand comes, when it's very cold, you know, in the evening time, well, all the existing thermal capacity and nuclear capacity has to run and drive the grid.
So if you don't add to the product, reliable production at peak demand time, you're not adding to the capacity of the grid.
You're just adding to the complexity and cost of the grid.
I mean, if Harris had won the election, you know, we would not only have no chance to win the AI race against China, we would just have increasing blackouts and brownouts today, let alone with the extra demand, some extra demand that would have come from AI, even if they had won the race.
But because President Trump won, common sense came back in spades, and we're allowing American businesses to invest and lead in AI.
We're in a very different trajectory, a very different trajectory.
Well, that's U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright doing a fantastic job over there.
One of the big reasons that the Trump economy continues to churn along.
Secretary Wright, really appreciate the time and the insight.
Thanks so much for having me, Ben.
Appreciate all you do.
All righty, coming up, Corey Booker is trying to become president of the United States.
And he thinks, does Mr. Potato Head, that if he pops in those angry eyes often enough, it'll work for him.
But now even fellow Democrats are getting upset.
We'll get to that in a moment.
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Meanwhile, as the Trump economy churns along, the Democrats continue to struggle amongst themselves for relevance.
Corey Booker, who desperately wishes to run for president of the United States, despite his obvious lack of political acumen, charm, and skill, he continues to do these sort of poser things in the United States Senate in an attempt to garner attention.
Now, he pops, he's Mr. Potato Head, he pops out the angry always, pops them in, and he gets very angry.
So that happened again yesterday.
And every time he does so, the left-wing media go gaga Over Mr. Potato Head.
It's very awkward.
So, what happened yesterday?
Well, apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, a routine move to pass bipartisan policing bills turned into a heated exchange between Democrats after Senator Corey Booker accused his colleagues of not fighting hard enough against the Trump administration.
And this is the big thing from Democrats: the more you can appear to be fighting the Trump administration while actually accomplishing nothing, the more apparently Democrats and the media are happy.
So yelling at the walls like a crazy person is the thing that is going to win you the Democratic nomination, I suppose.
So the fight apparently began when Booker rose in opposition to a proposal from Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto of Nevada.
She had a request to pass a bipartisan bill by unanimous consent that was going to fund policing.
And Booker got mad.
He cited concerns that the Trump administration would, quote, weaponize public safety grants to punish blue states.
Cortez-Masto fired back at Booker and said, you're trying to add some sort of poison pill provision to what is a bipartisan bill that's going to go through with unanimous approval.
Here is the senator from Nevada.
I agree.
Withholding funding for law enforcement anywhere in the country, across the country, is just not acceptable and it should not be done.
And it should not be based on party affiliation, playing favoritism.
I absolutely agree.
But I also agree that two wrongs don't make a right.
And where we are today, these bills passed unanimously out of the Judiciary Committee weeks ago.
And my colleague from New Jersey, I have respect for him.
He's on the committee.
He voted to pass these bills.
He had an opportunity at that time to present this amendment.
This is the first time we're ever hearing about it.
Tacking on a poison pill language to these bills won't guarantee any additional funding makes it to New Jersey, Nevada, or any other state.
Instead, what it will do, it will keep critical bills from passing in the first place.
Well, this prompted Corey Booker to go full angry eyes.
Hop him in.
Mr. Potato Head, go.
It's time for Democrats to have a backbone.
It's time for us to fight.
It's time for us to draw lines.
And when it comes to the safety of my state being denied these grants, that's why I'm standing here.
Don't question my integrity.
Don't question my motives.
I'm standing for Jersey.
I am standing for my police officers.
I'm standing for the Constitution.
And I'm standing for what's right.
And dear God, if you want to come at me that way, you're going to have to take it up with me because there's too much on the line right now in America.
As people's due process rights and freedom of the speech rights and secret police are running around this country, picking people up off the streets who have a legal right to be here, there's too much going on in this country.
When are we going to stand together?
Sorry, Victor.
For principles that I just heard that were agreed with.
When are we going to stand together?
If we don't stand as Democrats, we deserve to lose.
He's got the full-scale Judge Doom eyes.
He just does from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
The more angry he gets, the more that one button on his coat seems like it is going to burst open.
And what's going to come out is the cartoon of Christopher Lloyd.
That seems like that's where we are going here.
What in the world?
Like, this is the best you've got, guys?
I know you all went crazy when he spoke for 25 hours, because I guess that since you had a president already who had to be calfed because he was senile, now you're looking for another president who's going to calf just so he can speak for a very long time.
So if he speaks for 25 hours, you're super excited.
If Hakeem Jeffries jabbers for seven hours, you guys get really, really excited and all this sort of thing.
But it's ridiculous.
You know who I have a sneaking enjoyment of Senator Amy Klobuchar.
I do, because she's like, you got to be kidding me.
She's actually a relatively serious person, the senator from Minnesota.
And she's looking at Corey Booker like, what the hell, dude?
What is wrong with you, you posing provocateur, you joke?
Here's Amy Klobuchar, who's about to throw a binder at Corey Booker.
And I will note that Senator Booker objected to my police reauthorization bill, the cops funding, the Clinton cops funding, long before Donald Trump came into office.
These and the other police bills passed during police week, while those police officers are sitting there in the hearing room, when no one objected, they are bipartisan common sense legislation.
They passed the Judiciary Committee unanimously.
And I can't help it if someone couldn't change their schedule to be there.
I think that these hearings should mean something and that people should be saying the same thing they say on police week when those people are sitting out there in the uniform who have lost loved ones as they say on this Senate floor.
I mean, Klobuchar is one of the last sane Democrats.
Corey Booker, my goodness.
So his campaign for president is just going to be to stand there and scream about how he Spartacus and all the rest.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party cannot let go.
They cannot let go of their radicalism.
It's insane.
I mean, truly, some of the most backward policymaking and politics I have ever seen, they cannot let go of it because they have trained their base to be ever more leftward.
And so even the supposed moderates, like for example, Governor Westmore of Maryland, he was on the At Our Table podcast with Jamie Harrison, the former head of the DNC, unsuccessful head of the DNC.
And he was asked why black people are not voting Democrat as often as they were.
His answer, because of wait for it, wait for it, wait for it.
Racism.
It is true that we have a justice system that has been targeting and weighted against black men.
We have an education system that has been deliberate about the way that we are criminalizing and punishing black boys when we're watching the results of our young black boys continue to downgrade.
And we are actually then turning around and blaming the black boys for their failure.
Not the system, not the structure, but the young men blaming them.
We do have a system of employment where we make it more difficult for black men to be able to enter into the employment market.
We do have a system that makes basically every sentence a life sentence that when someone comes back from incarceration, we make it deeply challenging for them to be able to get public housing, challenging for them to be able to get a student loan, challenging for them to get a home loan, challenging for them to reintegrate with their families.
And then we wonder what's going on with black men and why they're not voting for us.
I'm, I'm, wow, wow.
So, the problem with America, according to Wes Moore, and the problem with the Democratic Party is that they are not DEI enough.
They need to do more of this.
Meanwhile, Democrats cannot get over the Zoran Mom dominification of their party.
Governor Kathy Hochul, who again has failed upward into every job she has ever held.
You'll recall that she became governor when Andrew Cuomo, who now wants to run for mayor of New York, basically grabbed to mass and then had to resign.
Well, now she's out there defending Zoran Momdani and saying she doesn't care that Zoran Momdani once wanted to defund the police and probably still does.
That's about as pathetic as it gets.
I mean, seriously, going after an unelected official who said something back in 2020 when many people were.
I mean, come on, give me a break.
Give you a break.
I mean, he's running for mayor.
He's the current frontrunner for mayor of New York.
And the things that he said like five years ago on Twitter are still somewhat relevant, but they can't get over the Mamdanification of the party because in essence, the entire Democratic Party is moving dramatically in the direction of Zorin Mamdani.
Pete Budijej, again, another one of these supposed moderates in the Democratic Party.
He says that he's going to talk about endorsing Zorin Mamdani on NPR.
Yeah, I mean, again, it's kind of distinguishing between tactics and ideology.
And I would say, you know, he's further left than I am.
But also, I think that what he's been able to do is something that our party ought to learn from.
Would you endorse him?
Say, Big Ten approach.
I don't agree with him about everything, but I endorse him.
He hasn't asked me to endorse.
I'm not really a player in New York City municipal politics, but I've seen that he asked.
I would talk to him about it.
Sure.
He would talk to him about it.
Sure.
I mean, of course.
Of course they would.
They all would.
And here's the thing.
A lot of people on the right have pointed out that Zorin Mamdani, aside from being like an overt communist, Zorin Mamdani also happens to be a supporter of terrorism.
He is.
He is a person who literally rapped about freeing people who are in jail for support of terrorism, what he called the Holy Land Five, people who went to jail for overt financial support of the terrorist group Hamas.
There's a reason he will not separate off from the message of globalize the antifati.
So I wouldn't say it publicly, but the general underlying idea is the right idea.
The reason that didn't hurt him in the Democratic primary is because Democratic voters increasingly agree with him.
They are increasingly radical.
There's a poll that just came out from Semaphore, and it shows that among Democratic primary voters in New York City, 78% said we should reduce U.S. support for Israel.
The reality is the Democratic support base is increasingly anti-Israel.
They believe in a conspiracy theory about the world that suggests that the world is broken down into oppressed and oppressors.
You can identify the oppressed by lack of economic prosperity and also by skin color.
There's a third worldification that has happened to the Democratic Party in which they seem to believe that America and her allies are bad and that every other country is a victim of America and her allies.
And so when you look at the Democratic Party and why they're struggling with the mainstream American people, this would be the reason.
And part of that is also because they've created a massive media echo chamber.
And this brings us to the current situation in Gaza.
So I have to say, the media are just trash.
Legacy media are absolute sheer garbage.
And this has been true for decades.
There's nothing new here.
I remember when my parents first canceled the Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times used to use the wire for the New York Times.
The Los Angeles Times used to share content with the New York Times.
It was back when people actually got physical newspapers back in the 90s.
I remember when I was a kid, I was like 16 years old, 15, 16 years old.
And there's a picture that appeared on the front page of the New York Times.
That picture was, according to the New York Times, a picture of an Israeli policeman beating up a Palestinian on the Temple Mount.
It was a picture in the foreground of a young man profusely bleeding from the head and an Israeli soldier with a baton yelling.
And it turned out that that story was not true.
It turned out that what had actually happened is that this young man was a Jew from Chicago who'd been beaten by 40 Arabs, had run away to a gas station, and the police officer was yelling over his head at the Arabs who were chasing him to move away or they would end up themselves meeting with force.
The New York Times ran that on the front page as an example of Israeli oppression in the middle of the second Intifada.
And I remember my parents canceling their LA Times subscription over that, which, you know, I think was justified, although I will say I missed the sports section.
The New York Times has been garbage for legitimately my entire life on this issue and on many other issues as well.
And because the New York Times and the legacy media have created this bizarre steel-coated bubble, this echo chamber of left-wing messaging, it is shaping more and more how Democrats think.
They think everybody agrees with them.
There's a famous phrase from the movie critic Pauline Kahle back during the 1972 election cycle when Richard Nixon blew out George McGovern, won 49 states.
And Pauline Kahle expressed supposedly shock at this saying, I don't understand how Nixon could have won.
Everyone I know voted for McGovern.
Well, that is the Democratic Party in a nutshell.
Everybody that they know agrees with them because they all read the same media outlets, because they all consume the same information.
Now that's being transferred all the way down to the youngest generation via things like TikTok and X.com, which are wild sources of just untrue information.
But the reason I bring this up in the context of Gaza is because the New York Times just did, again, an incredibly egregious thing.
We've discussed this on the show already this week.
There was a picture that went out.
It was printed on the front page of the New York Times.
It was a picture showing an 18-month-old named Muhammad Zakaria al-Mutawak.
Hey, this kid suffered from, I believe, cystic fibrosis.
And there's a picture of mom holding this kid.
We talked about this on the strip, I believe, yesterday.
Holding this kid.
The kid, you can see his spine through his skin.
You can see his ribs.
It's a horrifying picture.
And the New York Times ran this picture as evidence of starvation in the Gaza Strip.
Now, there's mixed information coming out from the Gaza Strip, and no one really has great transparency into what is happening because Hamas, the Gaza Health Ministry, they lie routinely.
They've been lying since the beginning of the war every single day, every single hour.
This is their tactic.
Their tactic was launch a war on Israel that they could not win militarily and then win in the press and hope to get something out of it.
And right now, it seems to be working with the French, who are deeply afraid of their own Islamic population, and with the UK, where Kira Starmer has his head so far up his own ass that it's coming out his head again.
Well, this story rocketed around the world.
This picture rocketed around the world.
And as we showed on the program yesterday, if you expand the frame of that picture, you see that Muhammad has a brother.
His brother is perfectly well-fed.
In fact, mom, who's holding him, seems perfectly well-fed.
So what exactly was happening?
This kid has a congenital condition, a horrifying congenital condition.
This is not due to starvation, in other words.
So the New York Times had to walk this back.
So what did they do?
Well, the New York Times has a Twitter account, an X account.
Their X account has 55 million followers.
That is where the original story went out on their original X account.
Then they have a comms account, New York Times PR.
It has 80,000 followers.
They put out a statement admitting that they got the story wrong.
Now, they didn't get the story wrong.
They lied.
They lied because the way that this works is that if you are a publication of record, you are supposed to actually track down the source of the information.
You're supposed to actually know what the hell you are printing in your pages.
And if you print a retraction, you're supposed to do so in the same manner and mode that you printed the original story.
If the original story gets blasted to 55 million people and your retraction gets printed on page A14 at the bottom with the classifieds, that ain't doing it.
Well, that's what the New York Times did.
But not only did the New York Times do that and admit their error, but they also, in the admission, talk about how brave and wonderful they are.
Here is their actual editor's note appended.
And again, blasted out to their account of 80,000, not their account of 55 million.
Quote, children in Gaza are malnourished and starving, as New York Times reporters and others have documented.
We recently ran a story about Gaza's most vulnerable civilians, including Mohammad Zakaria Al-Mutawak, who is about 18 months old and suffers from severe malnutrition.
We have since learned new information, including from the hospital that treated him and his medical records, and have updated our story to add context about his pre-existing health problems.
This additional detail gives readers a greater understanding of his situation.
Our reporters and photographers continue to report from Gaza bravely, sensitively, and at personal risk so that readers can see the first-hand consequences of the war.
Okay, that's a lie.
They are using stringers on the ground who work with Hamas because if you are working in the Gaza Strip, you are working with Hamas.
Otherwise, you are dead.
That is the way that it works in the Gaza Strip.
It's been true for the AP.
It's true for the New York Times.
They put out active misinformation.
And this is a thing that legacy media are doing all over the world.
In fact, according to The Spectator in the UK, the BBC has actively told all of its own reporters what political line to tow on Gaza.
Quote, a leaked internal email from a BBC executive editor reveals that the corporation has issued prescriptive instructions to staff on how to cover the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
The memo, titled, covering the food crisis in Gaza, amounts to a top-down editorial diktot that discards impartiality, elevates one side of a deeply contested narrative, and imposes a specific anti-Israel legal political framing as settled fact.
The email begins by declaring that, quote, the argument over how much aid has crossed into Gaza is irrelevant.
How is that irrelevant?
That's literally the core of the entire argument.
If Israel has shipped in enough aid for the population and Hamas is stealing it, that goes directly to who is responsible for the starvation to the extent that it is occurring of any Palestinians.
And we know for a fact that Hamas is stealing it.
We show you video yesterday of Hamas on the aid trucks.
This is the reason the UN, which is a tool of Hamas, will not work with the IDF to ship the aid in.
They insist that they go in alone so Hamas can steal the aid and thus continue the war.
Because the UN RWA is an arm of Hamas.
If Hamas dies, so does the UN RWA and its control and its funding and all of its support.
The BBC explicitly favors a particular explanation of suffering in Gaza, one that blames the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is an aid body established between the United States and Israel, which seeks an orderly distribution of aid.
And by the way, you can see video online of how it works at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites, which is an orderly queue, people waiting to get their food, as opposed to when the UN brings in a truck, in which people descend en masse on these trucks, try to get everything before Hamas can shoot them.
That sort of media misinformation is the crux of what is happening in the Gaza Strip right now.
And it provides the support for absolute ridiculous politicians like Keir Sarmer, who again has to deal with the increased Islamification of his country, suggesting that unless Israel suddenly radically establishes a Palestinian state with no territory, no government, and no functioning systems, that the UK is going to recognize a Palestinian.
I mean, first of all, the UK should just recognize it in London right now, because it seems like London has seen already a radical Islamic takeover.
Maybe Kir Starmer should worry more about his own country.
But here is Kir Starmer saying that essentially, because Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, now there should be a Palestinian state.
Well, last time Israel withdrew from a territory and attempted to hand full authority over to a Palestinian entity, it was Hamas in 2006, and it ended with October 7th.
So today, as part of this process towards peace, I can confirm the UK will recognize the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September, unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire, and commit to a long-term sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution.
And this includes allowing the UN to restart the supply of aid and making clear that there will be no annexations in the West Bank.
Meanwhile, our message to the terrorists of Hamas is unchanged and unequivocal.
They must immediately release all of the hostages, sign up to a ceasefire, disarm, and accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza.
Or, you may have noticed that there's a consequence attached to his demands on the Israelis, which amount to handing More sovereignty over to Hamas, ensuring that the UN can continue to ship aid into Hamas, signing on to a ceasefire that doesn't amount to release of hostages.
It was Hamas that walked away from the table, not Israel.
But it doesn't matter.
Unless Israel does all of that unilaterally, apparently, he's going to declare a Palestinian state.
Well, whoop Dee Doo!
That's like Michael Scott's declaring bankruptcy.
Who cares?
But you notice he said, Hamas must put down its weapons and release the hostages.
Or what?
Or what are you going to do?
Because it seems to me that all of this would be over and could have been over in the first, first of all, never would have started if Hamas didn't actually launch October 7th.
But number two, it seems to me that if you're going to make demands, it should be on the party that is continuing the conflict, namely Hamas, which is shooting its own people in order to prevent them from getting aid so it can monopolize the aid and continue its fight to dominate the Gaza Strip that is still holding hostages and refuses to go into exile.
But again, typical Islamicized country in Europe.
That's Kiera Starmer.
President Trump remains the only morally clear figure on this issue, perhaps in the West.
Here was President Trump on this idiocy from Kierist Armer.
Is there any use at all in pressuring Israel now to come to some sort of longer-term solution?
Well, you could make the case that you're rewarding people, that you're rewarding Hamas if you do that.
And I don't think they should be rewarded.
So I'm not in that camp, to be honest.
We'll let you know where we are, but I am not in that case.
President Trump, a man of actual moral clarity.
Well, the good news is, for at least the anti-Israel radical right, the horseshoe theory right, they have an avatar, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, again, is one of the more unintelligent people in Congress.
She's called an avatar of MAGA on Capitol Hill by the New York Times, but suffice it to say that if you poll people who vote MAGA on who they like more, President Trump or Marjorie Taylor Greene, she doesn't chart.
There's a reason the media are trying to play up the comments on this matter of, for example, Marjorie Taylor Greene or Steve Bannon as though they are the avatar of MAGA.
They are trying to create conflict inside MAGA where very little conflict exists by the polling data.
Today, there is higher support among Republicans for Israeli action in Gaza than there was back in September of 2024.
So there is at 71% approval, by the way.
So that is not a lot of dissent inside the Republican Party over the finishing of Hamas.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, however, is now horseshoe theorying around to the AOC side of the almost shock there, suggesting that there is a genocide in Gaza.
So, you know, suffice it to say that she has very little to no support inside the Republican Party for this proposition.
And this is part and parcel of a broader attempt by some members of MAGA to try and wrest control of the MAGA movement away from President Trump.
It's ridiculous on its face.
The same people who are going hog wild on the idea that President Trump is somehow covering up an Epstein scandal are the same people who disagree with President Trump on foreign policy.
That is not a coincidence.
That is a deliberate attempt to undermine President Trump.
It's a deliberate attempt to undermine his agenda.
And they will use any tool at their disposal in order to build support for an alternative, quote-unquote, MAGA agenda that they have nothing to do with in the first place.
Meanwhile, they're horseshoe theorying around all the way to the Potsey of America, bros.
Yesterday, the Padse of America Bros totally lost their mind.
And so we're going to go through what they had to say about this.
They're now just representatives for Hamas.
This is the takedown.
And I don't think Democratic candidates should take money from AIPAC or vote to fund military support for Israel anymore.
Like, I really don't.
This government, absolutely not.
And that especially includes, I think, the next Democratic nominee for president.
Things I want to see Democrats at least calling for is cutting off military assistance to Israel.
It's a rich country, by the way.
They don't need our $3 billion a year.
And hands up, right, Barack Obama signed a 10-year MOU for $3.3 billion a year.
Like, so we're part of the problem here.
Let's correct it.
These guys are psychotics.
They've basically now taken the position that the United States should not militarily support Israel in any way.
You can make that argument on the basis of Israel's a sovereign country and they should, instead of getting a subsidy for $3 billion a year, which all goes back, by the way, to American-made weaponry.
It's actually a subsidy to American defense manufacturers.
You can make an argument that among other countries, we basically should provide no military aid to anybody.
And if countries want to buy our military material, then they can damn well fund it themselves.
That's an argument that I'm willing to hear.
But listening to these guys say that in the aftermath of October 7th, this is literally what they said, that they can't go back to October 6th mentality about Israel.
That's insane.
So in other words, on October 6th, they were fine with supporting Israel.
After Hamas attacked Israel and killed 1,200 people and kept 250 hostages, that's when they turned.
That's when they turned.
So they were fine with Israel until Israel defended itself and fought Hamas, at which point they got angry.
Not a shock from the Positive America bros, who of course are allied with Ben Rhodes, the former national security advisor to Barack Obama, whose literal nickname in the White House, no joke, was Hamas.
That's who the left have become.
So if you're on the right and you find yourself in the same category as the Positive America Bros, you might want to check your priors because something has gone deeply, deeply wrong, obviously.
But the Positive America bros didn't just stop at the military funding, which, of course, you could make an argument in favor of.
They went even further.
They said that the United States should sanction Israel as opposed to, you know, Hamas.
Here we go.
I would like to see talk about sanctioning Israeli government officials who use genocidal rhetoric or who talk about ethnic cleansing openly.
We should support a ceasefire resolution at the UN.
We should demand that international press be allowed into the Gaza Strip to report on what's happening without an IDF minder.
It's insane.
The press still can't go into Gaza and cover what's happening.
And I also think like there has to be a total mindset change in the Democratic Party.
When the war ends, we are not going back to the pre-October 7th status quo because it's not where the party is.
It's not where the world is.
We are not going to shovel billions a year in military aid.
We're not going to veto every effort to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN.
We should not take money from AIPAC.
And like I will hold out hope for better political leadership in the U.S. and in Israel.
But we have to also recognize that the Biden-era hug B.B. Netanyahu strategy has to be thrown in the trash can for forever.
Netanyahu is a bad actor.
He's continuing a war for political purposes.
He bombs Lebanon when he wants to.
He bombs Iran when he wants to.
He bombs Syria when he wants to.
This is not a partner we can count on.
This is not someone who is like leading to calm and stability in the region, which should be a core interest.
It sounded better in the original Persian when it was actually being said by the leadership in Iran.
I mean, that's great.
He can Bomb Lebanon.
Do you mean when Hezbollah is threatening Israel with hundreds of thousands of rockets?
He can bomb Syria whenever he wants to.
Do you mean when he took out the gigantic weapon stores that Syria had under Bashar Assad so they would not be stolen by terrorist groups?
Or when he's protecting the Druze in southern Syria?
He bombs Iran whenever.
Do you mean he bombs Iran when Iran is developing a nuclear weapon to wipe the Jewish state off the map?
Is that what you mean?
Again, this is where the Democratic Party is.
And we should just recognize that this is the future of the Democratic Party.
He's not wrong about that.
The future of the Democratic Party is in catering to people who hate the state of Israel and who side with terrorism all over the world.
That is where the Democratic Party's future is going to be.
Here's John Lovett saying the same thing.
Especially if we're going to head into a primary, like table stakes, there's going to be no more military aid for Israel.
So there will just have to be a shift.
And I do think that will mean putting far more pressure on Israel.
And that's what I think Democrats want.
By the way, that's what the country wants.
And when you poll Israelis, they say they want a ceasefire.
Israelis want the hostages returned through a negotiated settlement.
And by the way, that's the way in which the vast majority of hostages who were returned were able to be returned.
Okay, they were returned after Israel bombed the hell out of Hamas, went house to house, eviscerating Hamas, and then Hamas was forced to the table.
Do you think that Hamas just handed over the hostages like the day after October 7th?
But again, they're not wrong.
This is where the Democratic Party is moving.
It's a frightening direction, but the moral relativism, stupidity, oppressor-oppressed matrix within which they work means that they were eventually going to end up here.
And it turned out it was a very short road.
It turned out all it took was the greatest terror attack on Jews in half a century to get the Democratic Party to abandon Israel and move towards solidarity with Hamas.
I love when people say, by the way, the Israelis should sign a ceasefire.
There's another party to that prospective ceasefire who keeps walking away from the table.
You think Joe Biden didn't want a more durable ceasefire?
Even Joe Biden couldn't get Hamas to the table through concessions.
Insanity.
But that is the insane nature of the Democratic Party these days.
Well, you know, it's a lot of bad news, but there is some good news.
According to a piece in The Atlantic by Brad Wilcox, marriage rates in the United States appear to be on the rise.
Actually, there's some good news about marriage.
Joining us on the line to discuss is Professor Brad Wilcox.
Brad, thanks so much for taking the time.
I really appreciate it.
Good to be here with you, Ben.
So it is rare on this show that we got to cover any good news, particularly in the social arena, but you have a piece in The Atlantic talking about the durability of the marital institution.
Obviously, one of the major concerns in the United States for decades was the divorce rate.
And then there are concerns about the fact that people are not having kids.
But you have some good news about the durability of marriage.
Why don't we start with the good news?
The good news, Ben, is that divorce is down.
Most marriages in America are going to make it today.
We think divorces come down from about 50% in 1970s to about 40% today.
And we're also seeing an uptick in the share of kids who are being raised by their own married parent family.
So that's the good news, Ben.
So what is the bad news?
Because obviously there has been a radical campaign against marriage that is now horseshoeed around.
It used to be a campaign largely from the left talking about marriage as a sort of patriarchal institution that kept women underfoot.
And now you've seen a horseshoe theory move from some parts of the so-called manosphere to claim that marriage is actually a matriarchal institution that is designed to keep men underfoot.
What is the current state of the marital debate?
Yeah, so Ben, we've seen from the left a long time women kind of saying things like there was a New York Times piece a few years ago that said, married motherhood in America is a game that no one wins.
So kind of painting a pretty anti-nuptial message from the left targeting women.
But in recent years, as you well know, we've gotten people on the right, like Andrew Tater, telling men now that there is, quote, zero advantage to marriage in the Western world for a man.
And he's obviously discouraging men from going ahead and getting married.
So that's kind of the bad news is there are elements both the left now and the right, on the far left, in a sense in the far right, who are kind of encouraging women on the left and men on the right to steer clear of marriage.
And what our research shows is that married moms and married dads in America are the happiest men and women out there in this country today.
Well, one of the things that you're pointing out in terms of the statistics is that we may have, in fact, hit the bottom of the valley in terms of marital rates because fewer and fewer Americans were getting married.
That seems to have leveled off that the percentage of Americans who are starting to get married is actually, it seems like moderately increasing at this point.
How optimistic are you that that's an actual turnaround and not just a dead cat bounce?
So I think we have reached the nadir when it comes to, you know, kids and families.
We're seeing an uptick in the share of kids raised by their married parent families.
What's not clear to me, Ben, is whether or not kind of this plateau we're seeing with the marriage rate for adults is going to kind of dip again in the future or if it's going to kind of rebound.
I think one of the big challenges is technology.
If we can kind of figure a way to help young adults kind of embrace in-person socializing, in-person living, I can see marriage coming back.
But if we're going to be kind of basically slaves to our devices, then I would see kind of this potentially marriage rate coming down even more and then family life becoming just more selective for people who are more educated, more affluent, and more religious, which is what we've been seeing in recent decades in the U.S. So you mentioned more religious and some of the social science data is showing an uptick in the number of young people particularly who are attempting to re-engage with church or becoming more religious, particularly true among men.
Are you optimistic that that's going to continue, that there's going to be a sort of return to faith and family?
Or again, is this sort of us looking for glimmers of light in a very dark tunnel here?
No, I do think we are seeing some signs that Gen Z men are more religious today, Ben.
And I think there is a kind of upswing in both influencers like yourself and your peers at Deli Wire, and then, you know, local clergy and other religious leaders are kind of helping to sort of usher younger adults, particularly younger men, back into the church.
So I do see that kind of trend increasing, and that's encouraging.
But I am also kind of keeping an eye on what's happening among a lot of more secular and progressive young adults, as well as working class and poor young adults.
And I think for a lot of those young adults, the future is more so bred.
So, let's talk for a second about the economics of all this.
There's been an argument that's made by both the populist right and the progressive left that essentially the reason people are not getting married and having kids is because of lack of economic opportunity.
That if you pour money into people's pockets, then they're more likely to get married, more likely to have kids.
That all of this is a function of lack of upward mobility in American society.
I see very little evidence of that, considering the fact that there is an extraordinarily high correlation, actually, between societal wealth and not getting married and not having kids.
Actually, it turns out that poorer societies have many, many more kids than rich societies.
What do you think is the sort of economic aspect of this?
Is this a problem that can be solved by economic redistributionism?
Or in the end, is marriage and family building more reliant, as it is in my life, on sort of a religious belief in the morality of the institution?
Well, but I think there's actually both an economic story here and a cultural story.
And there's just no question that people kind of who embrace marriage and family life are more likely to get married, stay married, and to be flourishing in their families today.
And that's true for both religious Americans and oftentimes more conservative Americans, both of whom are more likely so that they're happily married.
But there is, as you know, also a class story.
What we see is that a majority of prime-aged adults who are college educated are married today, and only a minority of less educated adults are married today.
So I think there's part, you know, there's a class dynamic, but it's primarily about the employment of men.
What we see is that particularly working class and poor men are much less likely men to be employed full-time.
And that's still a huge predictor both of getting married and staying married.
So I think until and unless we can kind of figure out how do we reconnect poor and working class men to the labor force on a full-time basis, we are not going to see kind of the revival of marriage across the board, across class lines.
One of the questions that I've always had about that is whether we are looking at a correlation and then drawing a reverse causation.
So suggesting people can't get jobs and therefore they're not getting married.
Right now, the unemployment rate in the United States is 4.1%, which is close to full employment.
We have many more job openings in the United States than applicants for those job openings by several measures.
The question is, I think, one also of government dependency, meaning if you are dependent on a government check, that is not going to jog you into getting married.
It used to be that when those welfare benefits were not nearly as easy to come by, people actually had to go get a job.
And actually, one of the predictors of wealth is doing all of these things will make you wealthier.
Meaning, if you get married and then you get a job, you are more likely to end up in the upper quintiles of income earning.
It's not sort of the other way around that you're poor, therefore you can't get married.
It's if you don't get married and you don't get a job, you are going to remain poor.
So there are a few steps, as you know, called the success sequence.
And Americans get at least a high school degree, who work full-time in their 20s and who get married before having any children are basically 97% likely to avoid poverty.
Only 3% of those young adults are poor, who follow all three steps.
And 86% of them reach the middle class or higher.
So it's no, kind of, there's no question that, again, a certain modicum of education, work, and marriage are conducive to realizing the American dream.
But it is the case that I think for a variety of technological, cultural, and educational reasons, a lot of our young men are floundering.
And we've got to figure out a way to kind of get them back on track so they can be flourishing and be more attractive as boyfriends and potential husbands and fathers as well.
That's Brad Wilcox.
Go check out all of his work over at The Atlantic, among other places, and check out his book, Get Married, Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, a really important book, especially in the face of dullards, particularly in the Manosphere right and the progressive left, who suggest that marriage is bad for you.
Precisely the opposite is true.
Marriage is actually quite good for you.
Brad, really appreciate the time.
Thanks, Brad.
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