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Aug. 5, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:10
Jesus Christ Erivo vs. MAGA Sweeney!
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All righty, folks, tons coming up on today's show.
Cynthia Arrivo, bisexual, queer black woman playing Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ superstar versus Sidney Sweeney, registered Republican.
Is this our culture war?
Plus, the economy, what's going on there, and Texas Democrats continue to flee and then claim heroism.
But first, there's a lot coming to Dailywire Plus, and it's not inclusive, safe, or moderated by NPR.
You're going to love it.
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You know, a lot of folks have tried to figure out exactly why the Donald Trump phenomenon happened.
Donald Trump has been the most transformative political figure of the 21st century, without a doubt.
It was going to be Barack Obama, and then Trump came in and he's completely remade American politics and global geopolitics.
But what led to the Trump phenomenon in the first place?
There have been a lot of attempts to philosophize Trump.
Maybe it was all about economic grievances in the Midwest.
Maybe it was all about offshoring.
Maybe it was all about tariffs or about immigration.
The reality is that the biggest thing that drove Donald Trump to victory in 2016, and then again in 2024, is the fact that the left went culturally insane.
The reality is the backlash to the left is not an economic program alone.
In fact, it is predominantly not an economic program.
The backlash to the left is less about tax rates than it is about a generalized feeling that the left was trying to dissolve the culture of the United States.
Traditional, basic things like men are not women, like there is such a thing as America, and America is good.
Like the idea that, for example, Christianity ought to be held with a high level of esteem.
These are certain things that Americans took for granted, things like church, apple pie, baseball, the flag, right?
All the stuff that people used to think was corny.
And then the left decided it's not just corny, it's bad.
And then it turns out most Americans don't think that.
Why do I bring this up?
Because you're seeing this all crystallized in what I would term a culture division between the Sidney Sweeney Americans and the Cynthia Arrivo Americans.
Now, to be fair to Cynthia Arrivo, so Cynthia Arrivo, I've praised her before.
She's a terrific actress.
She really is unbelievably talented.
She's a great singer and all of the rest.
But Cynthia Arrivo, who is British, has become emblematic, I would say, of the sort of left-wing social value belief system.
This became a hot issue online over the course of the last 48 hours because she was the star of a production of Jesus Christ Superstar, which is a musical by Andrew Lloyd Weber, really interesting musical, actually, by Andrew Lloyd Weber from the 70s.
And this production at the Hollywood Bowl of Jesus Christ Superstar, which is, by the way, as a musical quite respectful to Christian traditions, it is not meant to make fun of Christian traditions, Jesus Christ superstar.
Again, it's a very interesting musical, but it is certainly not a musical that is meant to be subversive of sort of basic Christian ideals.
Well, at the Hollywood Bowl, they decided they were going to cast Cynthia Arrivo as Jesus Christ.
Now, there are a few problems with this.
One, Cynthia Arrivo is a woman, Jesus Christ was a man.
Two, Cynthia Rivo is black, Jesus Christ was Jewish.
Three, Cynthia Arrivo describes herself as a queer bisexual.
Jesus Christ was not, to say the least.
So you are taking all the things that Jesus Christ was not, and you are turning them into a thing the left wishes Jesus Christ were.
The whole goal of this production at the Hollywood Bowl is to be completely subversive of Christianity and to supplant traditional values with the values of the far left social sphere.
And you can tell in the theater critic Charles McNulty's review over at the LA Times: quote: Cynthia Arrivo, a noted theatrical divinity, redeemed the title of Jesus Christ superstar at the Hollywood Bowl last weekend in a magnetic heaven-sent performance that established God the Savior as a queer black woman, as many of us suspected might be the case all along.
Divine dispensation allowed me to catch the final performance of this revival of Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice's 1971 breakout musical.
I returned from vacation just in time to join the pilgriming hordes, carting cumbersome picnic baskets and enough wine for a few dozen Sicilian weddings.
The vast number of attendees caused bottlenecks and entry points, prompting one wag to crack.
What is this?
The second coming?
Now, notice all of the extraordinarily seething comments of hatred for Christianity just in the first two paragraphs there.
Everyone suspected all along that God the Savior was a queer black woman.
She is a divine personality.
Idolatry, right?
She's a theatrical divinity.
It was only divine dispensation.
It was the favor of God that caused him to catch this performance of Cynthia Arrivo.
The headliners, Revo as Jesus, and Adam Lambert as Judas, certainly have sizable fan bases, but so too does the subject of the greatest story ever told: a Messiah who's following his few equals in the history of the world.
The hard-charging exuberance was appropriate for a production that went back to the concept album roots of a rock opera.
And again, he goes on to talk about Cynthia Arrivo and the magic of a queer black woman playing Jesus.
And by the way, Adam Lambert, who is openly gay, playing Judas.
And so the whole idea from the left is that the entire story of Christianity must be flipped on its head.
And actually, all of the value systems that Jesus stood for, it's really just about social leftism.
Philippe Bas, Mary Magdalene, brought a probing, tentative, and profound intimacy to her adoration of Arrivo's Jesus.
In her exquisite rendition of I Don't Know How to Love Him, the tenderness between Mary Magdalene and Jesus, at once earthy and ethereal, deepened the expressive range of the love between them.
Now, the reason I point this out is because the imagery that emerges from this performance of JC Superstar is astonishingly paganistic, truly subversive.
That is the goal of the thing.
That is the entire goal of the enterprise.
Here is some of the video of Cynthia Erivo performing as Jesus Christ in a performance in Hollywood.
I'm thirsty.
It is finished.
Into your hands, Father.
I commend my name.
Spirit.
Peace.
Thank you.
And of course, much of the imagery of her on the stage, Cynthia Rivo also has a particular physical appearance.
She's extremely gaunt at this point, and she's bald.
And so, again, this is like countertypecasting of the highest possible order.
And it's being praised by people like Jane Fonda.
Of course, she appeared transported by a powerful internal force of reverence and the awareness that she had today.
I was moved to tears.
Her body at the crucifixion looked like Al Greco's painting, Christ on the Cross.
What an inspired piece of casting.
Just Seriously, like ridiculous, ridiculous stuff.
I mean, here is a video.
This is supposed to be Jesus and Judas.
This right here is supposed to be Jesus and Judas.
Every time I look at you, I don't understand why you love the things you did get so out of hand.
You'll be better if you had a plan.
Oh!
Thank you.
Now, I'm not a Christian, but obviously I have great respect for Christianity.
I've encouraged probably at this point tens of thousands of people to actually go back to church and many, many people to move back toward their belief system.
Does that look like Jesus and Judas to you?
Or does that look like a queer bisexual black woman and a very, very gay man cosplaying as Jesus and Judas?
Is that what that looks like to you?
The reason this is important is because the backlash to that is one of the things that is driving America's politics right now.
The backlash to the left-wing view that everything must be subverted.
Church must be subverted.
Christianity must be subverted.
Heterosexuality must be subverted.
Whiteness must be subverted.
All these things, quote unquote, must be subverted because they are all emblematic of an evil system of power.
That is the purpose of subversion, after all.
That is why the backlash.
That is why when Donald Trump said, make America great again, all he really meant by that was stop this stuff, stop this crap.
And so Donald Trump represented a giant pulsating orange middle finger to all of this nonsense.
And so on the one side, you have Jesus Christ, Cynthia Rivo.
And on the other side, you have the cultural controversy surrounding Sidney Sweeney.
Sidney Sweeney is all-American, right?
She just is.
Sidney Sweeney is a throwback to every cheesecake star of the 1940s.
She's the kind of woman who is painted on the front of World War II bombers.
That's what she looks like.
She looks like a pinup girl from 1944, Sidney Sweeney.
She grew up in rural areas like Spokane, Washington.
Spokane is closer on its border to the rest of the sort of Republican Midwest.
And so she grew up in those circumstances.
And unsurprisingly, her values sort of reflect that.
So it turns out that Sidney Sweeney, when she moved to Florida, she's registered as a voter in Florida and she's registered as a Republican.
Now, there's nothing in Hollywood that gets people's goat more than being a registered Republican.
This is just the worst.
How dare Sidney Sweeney be a registered Republican in the state of Florida?
Now, first of all, welcome to Florida, which is awesome.
My home state, it's great.
We have lots of registered Republicans down here.
It's terrific.
I'm personally responsible for probably tens of thousands of people moving down here as registered Republicans, including dozens of members of my own family.
But Sidney Sweeney being a Republican shouldn't be that big a deal, right?
In a country that is at least 50% Republican at this point, why shouldn't Sidney Sweeney, who is now a popular actress and advertising icon, why shouldn't she be a registered Republican?
But this is just a reinforcement, according to the left, of all the stereotypical Nazism of the right, right?
Sidney Sweeney, when you look at Sidney Sweeney, just visually, obviously she's a beautiful woman, she's a beautiful young woman, but there are lots of beautiful young women in Hollywood.
What is it about Sidney Sweeney that really drove the left insane?
Well, one of the things about Sidney Sweeney is the feeling that Sidney Sweeney is not of them.
She is not a left-winger.
And this is nothing new in terms of the left's perception of the right.
See, it's not just that the left wishes to uphold the values and rights of the marginalized.
It's that they wish to recenter the marginalized and to turn the mainstream, the quote-unquote normies, into the marginalized.
And so they must attack anybody who is not, quote unquote, of them.
This is why for years, every couple of weeks on Twitter, Chris Pratt would randomly just trend.
Why?
Because Chris Pratt, the very famous actor, is not of the left.
It doesn't mean that he's a rabid right-winger or anything, but because Chris Pratt was not openly saying all of the idiotic nostrums of the left from sort of BLM to LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign, because he wasn't saying all that.
That made him verboten.
That made him bad.
He needed to be targeted.
And the same thing here happened to Sidney Sweeney, but it's now backfiring because Americans have had enough of this crap.
Look, Sidney Sweeney, I think that she is becoming increasingly popular, specifically because she is not doing all this stuff.
There's a video that emerged on social media yesterday of her at the shooting range.
And I gotta say, I think most Americans are like, this is kind of awesome.
Woohoo!
Wow!
921.
Oh, my God, girl.
Your first time?
That was really good.
Okay, so kind of awesome, right?
Kind of awesome.
And listen, if you live in a red state, your wife or your girlfriend probably knows how to shoot.
My wife's actually a shockingly good shot.
Like, that's great.
There's nothing wrong.
Not only is there nothing wrong with that, there's something kind of great about that.
So the backlash to Sidney Sweeney for being a pretty blonde white girl with blue eyes who can shoot a gun and isn't a registered Democrat is the reason that Donald Trump is president.
Not her being that thing, the backlash to her being that thing, which is in fact combined with a left-wing perspective that says the actual realities of life must be Cynthia Arrivo as Jesus Christ and Sidney Sweeney as Nazi.
If that's going to be the juxtaposition, Democrats, you guys are going to lose until the end of time.
This is a giant fail.
Donald Trump was asked about Sidney Sweeney as registered Republican.
Here's what he had to say.
She's a registered Republican.
Oh, now I love her ad.
Is that right?
You'd be surprised at how many people are Republicans.
That's what I wouldn't have known, but I'm glad you told me that.
If Sidney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I think her ad is fantastic.
You got to love that from President Trump.
But that is really, truly, one of the big emotional undercurrents of the last 20 years in our politics.
The left deciding that everything that was traditionally American was bad, colonialist, racist, and terrible.
And the right deciding, and the rest of America deciding, no, actually, you're just wrong.
You're just wrong.
There are things we can all agree on or should be able to agree on.
Like beautiful women are more beautiful than not beautiful women.
Or being a registered Republican does not mean that you are a bad person.
Or maybe Jesus Christ should not be played on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl by a self-described queer bisexual black woman.
Like maybe that's just a dumb piece of casting and an insulting piece of casting.
That backlash, I think, explains so much of our current moment.
And if the left continues along these lines, they will continue to backlash their way into minority status politically speaking.
Alrighty, coming up, Jim Acosta.
You remember him from CNN?
He is now in the business of apparently interviewing slain teenagers, like the AI versions of them.
What does that say about journalism plus?
Zaran Mom Donnie continues his takeover of the Democratic Party first.
Can the Fed take the right action at the right time?
Or are we going to be looking at a potential economic slowdown?
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Okay, meanwhile, in what is one of the more astonishing media stories I think I've ever seen, Jim Acosta.
You remember Jim Acosta?
I used to say about Jim Acosta when he was on CNN.
He was the White House reporter.
I used to say, find you a person who loves you, like Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta.
Jim Acosta is the most self-absorbed pseudo-journalist in modern American history.
My favorite picture of Jim Acosta is one that he actually posted on his own Instagram.
And it was a picture of him reading his book while looking in the mirror.
And it was like Jim Acosta in one photo.
Well, now he has created a conversation.
And I say created because he has.
It's a created conversation that he did with an avatar of one Joaquin Oliver, who's one of the 17 people who was killed in the Parkland shooting back in 2018.
So according to Acosta, he went to the family and he said, I want to essentially load everything that you know or have about this kid who was killed.
Again, this is not a real image of this person.
This is an AI image of this person because it is now 2025.
And so this person was killed seven years ago.
So apparently, Oliver's parents created an AI version of their son.
And then his father, Manuel Oliver, invited him to be the first reporter to interview the avatar.
And Acosta went along with this.
So why is this important, first of all?
A few years back, I believe it actually was many years back now, back in 2012.
I was at the Republican National Convention, the one where Mitt Romney was the nominee.
And it was in Florida.
And I was walking Radio Row.
It's where all the various radio hosts were set up.
One of the radio hosts who was set up on Radio Row was Sam Donaldson, who was then, I believe, doing a radio show for ABC News.
And it was a very left-wing radio show.
Like Sam Donaldson had made all of his biases perfectly apparent.
And I was, I actually walked up to Sam Donaldson to get a quote from him.
I was writing for Breitbart at the time.
I went up to Sam Donaldson and I said, you know, I have a question for you.
You are obviously a left-wing person, right?
You obviously don't like Mitt Romney.
You obviously like Barack Obama.
And he said, yes.
And I said, well, were you lying then or are you lying now?
Meaning, when you were a quote unquote, an objective journalist, did you hold those same beliefs?
And he said, well, yes, I hold those same beliefs.
And I said, well, so you weren't subjective.
You were a left-wing hack masquerading as a journalist, as an objective journalist, because Sam Donaldson, of course, during the 1980s had been one of the big bet noirs of Ronald Reagan.
And he said, do you think you're better than I am?
And I said, well, yeah, because I'm honest about who I am.
I'm very honest about my conservative biases, whereas you hid them for years pretending that you were an objective journalist, when in reality, you were always this thing.
The Sam Donaldson who is doing a show on ABC News with all of his biases out front and center is the same Sam Donaldson who was masquerading as an objective news journalist back in the 1980s.
Well, the same thing is true about Jim Acosta.
So the same Jim Acosta, who is perfectly willing to quote unquote, manufacture news by doing an interview with a person who does not exist and is a fictional embodiment of a person who was killed, which is just ghoulish in every possible respect.
That is the same guy who was the White House correspondent for CNN for years, the self-righteous White House correspondent for years, questioning Donald Trump and talking about journalistic integrity and the importance of the fourth estate and all the rest of this kind of stuff.
But here he was interviewing a person who, again, does not exist.
And there's so many problems with this.
I mean, obviously there is the sort of bizarre ghoulishness of interviewing an AI mock-up of a dead person, especially a person who died as a teenager.
And then there's also the reality, which is that people are not embedded in amber.
And so suggesting that, for example, Joaquin Oliver would have believed everything today that he believed back when he was tragically murdered.
I mean, we don't know that for, I mean, we don't know anything for a fact.
This is all basically manufactured.
And Jim Acosta was happy to promote this, which I think demonstrates the great commitment to journalistic integrity of people like Jim Acosta.
Here was Jim Acosta talking to, again, the avatar of Joaquin, not Joaquin Oliver, who was killed back in 2018, the avatar of Joaquin Oliver, asking him to tell him about himself.
I would like to know more about you.
Can you tell us about yourself?
What did you like to do?
I'm all about love, laughter, and living life to the fullest.
I cherish my family and friends and always try to spread joy wherever I go.
Though my life was cut short, I want to keep inspiring others to connect and advocate for change.
Joaquin, tell everybody a little bit about yourself.
Like, what's your favorite sport i love basketball it's such a fun way to connect with friends and show off some skills plus there's nothing like the thrill of a good game so obviously that's a machine and i mean the cadences are that of a machine it's not even naturalistic really but jim acosta went on from here to ask about gun control and and the again it's an ai avatar of a of a teenager who is killed and this is this is jim acosta's idea of journalism apparently joaquin it's jim acosta
I was wondering if you could tell me what happened to you.
I appreciate your curiosity.
I was taken from this world too soon due to gun violence while at school.
It's important to talk about these issues so we can create a safer future for everyone.
What would you like to know more about?
Joaquin, I would like to know what your solution would be for gun violence.
Great question.
I believe in a mix of stronger gun control laws, mental health support, and community engagement.
We need to create safe spaces for conversations and connections, making sure everyone feels seen and heard.
It's about building a culture of kindness and understanding.
What do you think about that?
I think that's a great idea, Joaquin.
We definitely need more of that.
I'm so glad you think so.
More kindness and understanding can truly make a difference.
Together, we can create a world where everyone feels safe and supported.
Anything else on your mind?
I mean, first of all, the AI needs tremendous work.
I mean, the voice actually changes between answers.
But beyond that, it says more about Jim Acosta than it does about the AI or even about the parents.
Again, you can't blame grieving parents for doing things like this that are grieving parents.
God forbid anybody's in their shoes.
But you can't blame Jim Acosta because this is not even remotely journalism.
It's not even remotely journalism.
And it doesn't even have the sort of historic curiosity factor of loading a bunch of clips, a bunch of writings of Napoleon into a computer and then talking to Napoleon or something.
It's just it's but again, it shows the nature of the kind of people like Jim Acosta.
Jim Acosta was a quote unquote well-respected journalist for years and years and years on CNN.
And it seems to me in the same way that Sam Donaldson, his later life revealed what he was originally in the 80s.
Jim Acosta, again, revealing exactly what he was while he was covering events at the White House.
All right, coming up, Elizabeth Warren is standing shoulder to shoulder with Zoran Mamdani, as the New York Post puts it, African-American with Native American.
We'll get to that in a moment.
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handle your tax issues meanwhile in the markets the market did bounce back very strong yesterday so there was a dump in the markets after that not particularly good jobs report that came out on friday well according to the wall street journal stocks rose on monday with major u.s indices climbing one percent or more and everything from utilities to meme stocks rallying markets of course were buffeted late last week the dow industrials rose 585 points or 1.3 percent snapping a five session losing streak people don't want to wait too long because again there is so
much uncertainty in terms of what is happening right now.
And I think that a lot of people believe that the Federal Reserve is about to cut those interest rates at the next quarterly meeting, that because the economy is clearly slowing, because hiring is slowing, because of all of that, the Federal Reserve's excuses for not cutting the interest rates, those are about to go away.
And meanwhile, obviously, it's going to need to happen because meanwhile, there are some fairly serious problems in the trade sector that continue to percolate.
China, for example, is choking off our supply of critical minerals for Western defense.
If you've been wondering why President Trump is putting off the TikTok ban or for sale, the reason is because he's afraid of pissing off the Chinese.
As I said at the very beginning of this tariff war, I'm very much in favor of tariffing the living hell out of the Chinese government, which is in fact a nefarious government spreading evil pretty much wherever it can put its tentacles, everywhere from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East.
The Chinese government does not like America.
They're not interested in a unipolar world in which American freedoms are the governing fact of the world.
Instead, they would like a multipolar world where they have their entire sphere of domination in the Eastern Pacific, as well as stretching out via the Belt and Road program across continents.
If we were going to do a tariff war with China, however, there are a bunch of preconditions that you needed to do.
Like, for example, you needed to make sure that supply chains of rare earth minerals had been secured before you declare a trade war on China.
You need to make sure that we have
solid trade relationships with all of the nations surrounding china we offer them not just sticks but carrots right ensure that they stay in our camp while china right now is flexing its muscle with regard to those rare earth minerals according to the wall street journal china is limiting the flow of critical minerals to western defense manufacturers delaying production and forcing companies to scour the world for stockpiles of the minerals needed to make everything from bullets to jet fighters earlier this year as u.s china trade tensions soared beijing tightened the controls it placed on the export of rare earths
While Beijing allowed them to start flowing after the Trump administration agreed in June to a series of trade concessions, China is maintaining a lock on critical minerals for defense purposes.
China supplies around 90% of the world's rare earths and dominates the production of many other critical minerals.
So before you declare a trade war on China or really attempt to shut the box on them, what you really need to do is make sure that all the other places you would get rare earth minerals, you have secured deals with them, you have supplies that are forthcoming, that All your supply chains have been lined up.
up.
So I asked our friends and sponsors at Comet, which is Perplexity's new web browser, which countries other than China can best supply the rare earth minerals the United States requires.
And common answers, other than China, the country's best positioned to supply the rare earth minerals required by the United States include Malaysia, which accounts for about 13% of recent U.S. rare earth imports and is a significant global processor.
Japan, which supplies around 6% with advanced refining infrastructure, Estonia, which provides 5% primarily through specialized facilities processing imported ores, Australia, Myanmar, India, Russia, Vietnam, and Madagascar.
And then there are other countries like Brazil, Canada, Greenland, South Africa, Thailand, and Zambia, which have notable rare earth deposits and are increasingly viewed as strategically important sources as the United States seeks to reduce its dependence on China.
Now, I also asked Comet: so, what are our tariff rates on those various countries?
On Malaysia, the answer is 19%.
On Japan, it is 10%.
Estonia is either 10% or maybe 15%.
Myanmar is 40%.
Other countries like India, Brazil, the EU nations, so India is somewhere between 20 and 25%.
Brazil is now all the way up to 50%.
Again, that one's justifiable as a piece of leverage against the Lula government, which is increasingly authoritarian and dictatorial.
However, the point here is this: if you wish to box China in, you must cut deals with all the other countries that actually are capable of providing the replacement materials that we need.
Harden your own supply lines before cutting off your nose to spite your face, would be the basic policy principle here.
And this is also one of the reasons why the United States should be warming its relations with India.
I mentioned that India is one of the sources of possible rare earth minerals.
Well, India says that it is not going to stop buying and reselling Russian oil, despite an announcement by President Trump that he would substantially increase the 25% tariffs he imposed on Indian goods because of the practice.
Now, again, President Trump usually has a very good relationship with Modi, who's the leader of India.
And so, the sort of ramping up of tensions with India seems to me not to be a particularly useful policy.
One Indian official said the government had not given any direction to oil companies to cut back imports from Russia after President Trump announced a 25% tariff on India last week, along with the threat of an additional unspecified penalty for purchasing Russian oil.
Now, again, the best way of preventing this would be to absolutely flood the Indian energy market, would be to provide, if you actually want to cut Russia out of the picture as an energy supplier to India, we should be shipping en masse LNG to India or working with our allies in the Middle East, like Saudi, to make sure that India gets energy supplies that are not contingent on Russia.
India is now struggling, according to the New York Times, to make sense of the sudden pressure from President Trump on an issue it considered settled.
Some officials and analysts saw the threat of an additional penalty as a manifestation of President Trump's frustration with the lack of progress on Ukraine.
And again, I agree with President Trump that any financial support for Russia is, in fact, a problem for the end of the war in Ukraine.
That, of course, is true, but it can't just be sticks.
It also has to be carrots.
And drawing into a closer relationship with India to provide a bulwark against China, to provide a bulwark, by the way, against radical Islamism, which is being promoted by places like Pakistan, which is a sort of Havzi's American ally.
Pakistan and Qatar are very similar this way.
They're sort of Havzi, American allies.
They do some work with us, but they do a lot of work with terrorists and terrorist regimes as well.
Building up our system of alliances with both carrots and sticks would be a particularly useful thing at this point in time.
Now, meanwhile, on the domestic front, the controversy continues over Texas redistricting.
California right now is threatening to redistrict in response to Texas redistricting its congressional districts.
It's gerrymandering.
I've pointed out before, but it's true.
California Constitution only redistricts every 10 years.
So they just did a redistricting.
They have like an independent board that they put together, and it's by the California Constitution as of 2020.
Theoretically, they're really not supposed to have intra-decade changes, willy-nilly, to the congressional districts.
Really, it should wait until 2030.
Gavin Newsom is now attempting to break the constitution of his own state.
Texas has no such provisions.
And of course, as I've said, gerrymandering applies across the board.
It happens in Illinois.
It happens in Texas.
It happens in California.
It happens in New York.
It happens in Florida.
It happens literally everywhere.
It is the way that congressional districts are drawn.
Well, Democrats are fleeing the state and then pretending that they are acting out of some sort of massive political courage.
So yesterday, the Texas House passed a motion to arrest those absent Democrats.
Now, that arrest doesn't mean they spend time in jail.
It just means that they are prevented from leaving the states that they actually have to come to the legislature and do their jobs.
Here's the Texas House in 85 ayes and six days.
motion prevails.
The sergeant in arms and any officers appointed by her are directed to send for all absentees whose attendance is not excused for the purposes of securing and maintaining their attendance under warrants of arrest if necessary until order of the House.
Now again, those are civil arrest warrants.
It's kind of like if the Congress of the United States would arrest someone for violation of some sort of order by Congress.
It's a civil arrest warrant.
These people aren't going to spend time in jail.
Democrats, of course, are not in the state.
And so it is not as though you're going to see Texas authorities sort of parachute into Chicago to pick up various legislators.
They've done this routine before.
They always end up coming back because at a certain point, their constituents tire of them absconding and not doing their jobs.
What it really is, is providing a way for Democrats to grandstand.
So Governor Kathy Hochul of New York, who again is only in this particular position because Andrew Cuomo killed all the old people and grabbed ass.
He ran out of old people and they kicked him out for the for the ass grabbage.
Anyway, Kathy Hochul, she says that the GOP is leading a legal insurrection, which again is kind of wild.
It's just called gerrymandering, folks.
It has been a feature of American politics for well over 200 years.
I cannot stand by and let this happen while Donald Trump and his co-conspirator, Greg Abbott, erode our democracy and drag us toward authoritarianism.
Now, what Texas and Republican states are doing at the direction of Donald Trump, I say is nothing short of a legal insurrection against our Capitol.
Legal meaning they're using the legal process does not mean it's legal and it must be stopped.
Now, again, the idea that Republicans are supposed to leave Chekhov's gun on the shelf while Democrats fire it continuously is ridiculous.
Redistricting is a thing that happens everywhere.
And if New York wants to do it, then I suppose New York could do it.
If they redistrict, theoretically, they could make disappear perhaps three more seats.
But Democrats already hold 19 of the 26 seats in New York.
There are only seven seats that Republicans hold.
And so, you know, that's going to have to withstand court challenge if she does that.
But listen to the language here.
Kathy Hochul says, we're at war.
We're at war.
Do you really believe?
So, first of all, I hate this language.
I truly despise this language.
This language that we are at war with each other in the United States.
No, we're not.
Will you stop?
Seriously, we're not on the verge of civil war.
We're not on the verge of Americans picking up guns and shooting each other.
This sort of language, this sort of, we are going to war language.
language from politicians who have never held a gun in their lives.
Truthfully, when you're not talking about actual war with like an armed enemy, it's the luxury of spoiled rich people, which is what a lot of our politicians are.
Here's Kathy Hochul talking, we're war.
It's war.
Here we go.
History will judge us and how we respond to this moment.
But here in New York, we will not stand on the sidelines with the timid souls on the sidelines who don't care, will not invest their heart and soul into this battle.
This is a war.
We are at war.
And that's why the gloves are off.
And I say, bring it on.
Oh, it's a war.
Bring it on.
Bring it on.
Give me a break.
There's nothing to bring on.
You'll do something, according to a rule, and that'll be it.
Meanwhile, I do love when people say that they're not doing something they are clearly doing.
So Texas State Representative Gene Wu, Democrat, he, again, showed up not in Texas and he says, we're not here to play games.
You are literally there to play games.
That is why you are there.
Here we go.
We're not here to play political games.
We are here to demand, to demand an end to this corrupt process.
Yeah, absolutely.
We asked them to stop hiding things from the public.
We asked them to stop doing things behind closed doors.
We asked them to stop attacking Texas communities.
They refused because their loyalty and fealty to Donald Trump overrides all other interests.
Okay, he's in Chicago right now in one of the most gerrymandered states in America, run by J.B. Pritzker, who must be lowered into the state capitol each morning by Crane, who says that he's on team fight.
That is also tiresome.
I've been on team fight since I first got elected in 2018.
I really believe, you know, we have to make choices right now about whether you're going to be on team fight or team cave.
And the Republicans are using every, frankly, everything, whether it's cheating, breaking the law, you know, trying to do things that I think are non-traditional.
And we Democrats can't live by the old rules.
We've got to live by the rules, but we've also got to react and fight.
Fight vaha.
I love when J.B. Pritzker, the scion of a billionaire family, pretends to be a hard-nosed man of the people.
It's very entertaining.
Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, he says Republicans are running scared, which is weird since literally Democrats are running scared from their own states and their state legislatures.
This moment does require an extraordinary response because this is an extraordinary act that Republicans have been ordered to undertake to try to gerrymander the Texas congressional map as part of an effort to rig the midterm elections, Wolf.
That's what this is all about because Donald Trump, House Republicans, and the Texas Republican Party, they're all running scared because they have failed the American people.
The Republicans are running scared.
Literally, Democrats are running out of the state screaming.
Governor Greg Abbotti says, listen, the fleeing Democrats, they could face charges.
So very simply, it would be bribery if any lawmaker took money to perform or to refuse to perform an act in the legislature.
And the reports are these legislators have been both, they sought money and they offered money to skip the vote, to leave the legislature, to take a legislative act.
That would be bribery.
And so the facts will have to come out.
But I think based upon comments made by legislators themselves, they face a possibility of facing bribery charges, which is a second-degree felony in the state of Texas.
So he is suggesting, of course, that there may actually be some form of criminal prosecution of these folks who are leaving the state.
It'd be fascinating to see how far he carries that.
Well, meanwhile, as the Democrats are fleeing states like Texas in order to prevent redistricting, they are also moving solidly behind Zoran Mamdani.
And that, of course, includes faux Native American Elizabeth Warren.
So Elizabeth Warren, who failed dramatically, as you recall, running for president and then said that she was one 1,024th Native American in order to defend her career-long lie that she was, in fact, a Native American.
Well, now she's out there endorsing Zoran Mamdani.
So here we have a Ugandan American and a Native American, as the New York Post has pointed out on its cover today, coming together to talk about how America sucks.
Here is Elizabeth Warren endorsing Zorin Mamdani's message.
When someone stands up and says, I will lead this city by making it more affordable.
And here are my plans, real plans, plans to deliver on child care, plans to deliver on housing, plans to deliver.
We're going to experiment.
We're going to try things on groceries.
That is the Democratic message.
Okay, good luck with this.
Good luck with this.
They're going to experiment on groceries.
He says, there's one thing we know in America.
It's that tons and tons of people are going hungry in America.
We know that the biggest problem in America is child starvation as opposed to, say, child obesity.
So yes, I mean, clearly, the biggest thing that we need is government-run grocery stores, according to Zora Mamdani and Elizabeth Warren.
By the way, thanks to Elizabeth Warren for her modern monetary theory nonsense, which led to the worst inflationary spiral in four decades.
This person should never be listened to about anything ever again.
One of the great amazing things about being part of the left is you can go from reasonable to crazy in about that fast.
I'm old enough to remember.
When I was at Harvard Law School, Elizabeth Warren was a property professor.
I met her briefly a few times when she's a prop, and she had written a book called The Two Income Trap, which is a really kind of fascinating middle-of-the-road book that comes out in favor of things like school vouchers.
And then when she ran for Senate in Massachusetts, she decided she was going to be Bernie Sanders, and now she's just female Bernie Sanders hectoring and scolding you.
And it's just, this is what they want.
Okay, this is what they are going to get.
By the way, she is also a big fan of raising taxes in order to accomplish all of this.
I was in New York City yesterday, and I was talking with a major investor in New York City.
And this person was thinking of investing in a major way in New York real estate.
And they're already to close the deal.
And then Mom Dani won the Democratic primary.
And now that deal is on hold, specifically because nobody knows what the hell Zorin Mamdani is going to do about crime, about housing.
You're going to watch the economy of New York City grind to a halt if Zorin Mamdani becomes mayor, which he is likely to do at this point, cheered on by people like Elizabeth Warren.
Here she is promoting high taxes.
New York does not operate in a vacuum.
It competes with other cities.
And so this idea of somehow raising taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers, who, by the way, I would point out, pay roughly 15% of their income right now between city and state, raising taxes on them will simply drive them away.
Shouldn't the focus of a mayor be on delivering services to the constituents of the city and doing that by raising the most revenue as possible without chasing businesses and the high Income taxpayers out of the city because they can go to Austin.
They can go to Dallas.
They can go to Atlanta.
They can go to Nashville.
This is your issue.
It's a national issue, not a local issue.
The issue is affordability.
Do you know how many working families are chased out of New York City every day because they can't afford housing?
They can't afford groceries.
They can't afford child care.
What Zoron is saying is, I want people to be able to afford to live in New York City.
That's what keeps it a vibrant city.
That's what makes people want to live.
Nobody disagrees with that, Senator, but raising taxes in order to do it.
Why is that the answer?
Oh, dear.
Are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry?
No, I'm worried that they're going to leave and spend their money elsewhere.
You know, they've threatened to do that over and over.
Oh, my goodness.
They keep threatening to do it.
They'll never do it.
Yeah, they will.
Yeah, they will.
A lot of investors are going to move down to Florida.
Luxury Real Estate will boom if Zarin Mamdani is elected mayor of New York in Florida.
Half the snowbirds are just going to become full-time Floridians if this is what happens here.
Meanwhile, Corey Booker, who again has only two modes: one is running away from questions, and the other is angry eyes because he's Mr. Potato Head.
Well, he got away from the angry eyes for just half a second and was asked about Zarin Mamdani.
And again, every Democrat is becoming brave to Robin running away.
I have learned a long time ago, let New York politics be New York politics.
We got enough challenges in Jersey.
I got a governor's race.
I'm supporting Mikey Sherrill.
I got legislative races.
That's where my energy is going to go going into November.
New York City, I love you.
You're my neighbor.
You're about 10 miles from where I live.
You guys figure out your elections.
I'm going to focus on mine.
Good job not answering that question at all, Senator.
Really, really excellent job.
Well, speaking of the mamdonification of the Democratic Party joining us on the line is Lucy Biggers.
She's currently the social media editor at the free press.
Before that, she worked as a producer and host at Now This News, and she contributed to AOC's early campaign.
She has a piece over at the free press talking about what changed and what exactly Zarin Mamdani is selling.
Lucy, thanks so much for the time.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much for having me on.
So, first of all, that is a hell of a picture with you and AOC that leads off that piece.
I mean, obviously, the two of you were, it looks like fairly close.
Why don't you explain sort of what got you into AOC's orbit?
What drew you to her campaign in the first place?
Yeah, so AOC and I are the exact same age.
And like you said in my intro, I worked for this news company called Now This News, which is a very big millennial left-wing news organization in the 20 teens.
If you know, you know what it was.
We were known for our viral videos that would play on Facebook.
And I met AOC at a small event that was scheduled after Trump won.
And the idea for the event was to get Democrats to take back the house because they had had this huge shellacking after Trump won.
And AOC was one of the candidates that was put up to run.
And I met her.
It was a small event.
I got her number.
We totally hit it off.
And so I ended up interviewing her at Now This about two months after I met her, which was like an hour-long interview that we cropped down to make a viral video that then got millions of views on our channels.
And then throughout the years, we just sort of stayed in touch.
I mean, she like had this stratosphere rise.
So her number stopped working after that.
But we did have different interactions over the years while I was still at Now This.
So, you know, obviously your viewpoints have changed, but your piece here is really about why young people are falling into the AOC Zorin Mamdani trap.
So what is the big driver?
Because I've been making the case actually that I know there's been a lot of heartburn over Zor Mamdani's positions on Israel and Gaza and terrorist groups and all the rest of this stuff, his unwillingness to dissociate from globalize the intifada and all the rest of it.
And I think people are reading that wrong.
I think that the people are reading that.
They say, why doesn't he dissociate?
It'll make him more popular.
And I keep saying to folks, no, no, you don't understand with the Democratic base.
Actually, this is quite a popular point of view.
That's actually a feature, not a bug for Zorin Mamdani.
Why is that?
Do you, number one, do you agree with that?
Number two, why is that?
What are young people seeing in AOC or Zorin Mamdani?
Yeah, so having been on the left for a number of years, I can speak from my experience, my experience, which for me, it was a motivation to be seen and feel like I was a good person.
And the left tells you, you know, you have to believe these certain ideas.
You know, you have to condemn Israel and support Hamas.
You have to say you want free college.
You want to have less inequality, all these different things.
And it's very entrenched in this ideology, which maybe this is like too heady to say, but the cultural Marxism of the oppressed versus oppressor mindset.
And so everything goes through that lens, right?
So they say capitalists are bad, you know, millionaires are bad.
Israel is a bad because those are oppressors.
And then you have the oppressed class, which is Hamas, which is, you know, the working man, whatever it may be.
And it all goes through that.
And so from my experience, as a young person who was not inoculated against those more extreme ideas, I just absorbed that from working in a very left-wing news organization and realizing this is what all the good people were thinking.
And so I'm going to think this too.
And you don't really take it past the point of realizing that these ideas don't really work, you know, supporting even things like open borders or just more government spending.
You don't really look at the real world impacts of these really bad policies because you just feel so good supporting them.
So I think a lot of people are naive.
They're motivated by the emotion and the identity as a feeling like they're a good person.
And that's sort of where the thinking stops, because if they were to stop and think about it, they would realize that these policies are really bad.
But I think that they're more motivated by being part of the group, which is the left-wing group.
And it takes too much to leave the group.
I mean, I'm 35.
It took me five years actually to ultimately speak out and put my neck out and say, hey, guys, slow down.
These ideas are not good, right?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
So I think most of them are not willing to put stick their neck out like I have, or they're just not there yet.
And so they stay with these awful anti-West, anti-capitalist ideas.
One of the points that you make in the piece is that we should have some grace and sympathy for these folks because they really kind of don't know what they're doing.
They haven't really thought through their ideas.
But one of the things that's sort of fascinating is that obviously you say you're 35, you have a couple of kids, you're a homeowner now, and that sort of changed your perspective.
This is a typical sort of conservative talking point is this idea that when you're 20, if you're liberal, we get it.
You haven't had any life experience.
And then you get married, you have kids, life changes, you get a job, and then you sort of move into the real world and the real world clocks you into reality.
Well, one of the big problems right now is number one, is there anything we can say to a 20-year-old to convince them or move them?
And number two, with the sort of delayed adulthood that American society has now promulgated, where people are not getting married, where people are waiting until their mid-30s to have kids, where people aren't buying their first home until they're 40 years old, if they buy a home at all, with that kind of prolonged transitional period, does that spell sort of the end of the normalizing process for young people, which makes all this way more dangerous?
Because if you basically stay a 17-year-old politically until you're 40, that may be enough to get somebody like AOC into the presidency.
Yes, but I will say I'm hopeful.
I mean, the amount of messages that I get from people who have had similar evolutions to me that I would never expect, but they're messaging me privately and they're saying, hey, just letting you know, thank you for your content.
I totally agree with what you've said.
I've had a similar evolution.
And I also think we saw with the last presidential election, I mean, every demographic swung right.
And I think it is happening enough that people are waking up to it.
And I think it depends on the issue, right?
Like for a lot of like Jews, it's been the Israel-Hamas conflict.
They're all of a sudden getting hit in the face by some of this ideology.
For some people, it's the open borders.
All of a sudden, they were seeing immigrants in their communities running gangs in Colorado, right?
And they're going, oh, wait a minute.
So I think because the left ideas that are just not were not working for so long and they were ignored, enough people were hit by that reality.
So maybe it wasn't becoming a homeowner and having kids, which was sort of my slow evolution, but being hit in the face by other left policies that haven't worked well.
And that's been their evolution.
But again, I think the like spiral of silence is still so real just from seeing my direct messages that I get on my accounts.
It's amazing to me the amount of people who would say, hey, I agree with everything you're saying, but I'm afraid to speak out.
And the only reason I can speak out is because I work at the Free Press and other news organizations where this type of stuff is encouraged and a part of our founding.
And so I can put my neck out there, but if you're just a regular person, you kind of keep it hidden.
But then in the voting booth, I think we saw with Trump, a lot of people made their voices heard.
Well, that's Lucy Biggers.
You can go check out all of her work over at the Free Press.
Lucy, really appreciate the time.
Yeah, thank you so much.
And meanwhile, the Trump administration, you want to talk about making people's lives better, but in a way that the left really doesn't like.
So HHS has now released a statement saying that they are going to get rid of junk food from SNAP, which makes perfect sense.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is meant to ensure, we were talking about hunger.
SNAP was meant to ensure that people who are very, very poor will have access to food.
But it turns out that an enormous number of the poor in the United States are eating truly unhealthy food.
It is making them unhealthy and obese.
And so HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and U.S. FDA Commissioner Marty McCary joined Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins to celebrate her signing six new supplemental nutrition assistance program state waivers to advance the Maha, the Make America Healthy Again agenda.
These SNAP waivers amend the statutory definition of food for purchase and end the subsidization of junk food beginning in 2026.
Again, the goal here is if you're going to get a food stamp, if the tax fair is going to subsidize your eating, we shouldn't subsidize your unhealthy eating habits.
Here's the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins.
SNAP is a supplemental nutrition program meant to provide health food benefits to low-income families to supplement their grocery budget so they can afford the nutritious food essential to health and well-being.
That is the stated purpose of the SNAP program.
The law states it, and President Trump's USDA plans to deliver on it alongside our partners at HHS.
So today, I'm proud to sign six more waivers for Florida, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and Colorado.
This is in addition to the waivers we've already signed for Iowa, Indiana, and others across the country.
So, you know, again, this is a good policy.
Here is the Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., explaining just how much of this money American taxpayer dollars are going for Mars bars and Coke.
We're spending $405 million a day on SNAP.
About 10% is going to sugary drinks.
And between, and if you add candies to that, it's about 13 to 17%.
And we all believe in free choice.
We live in a democracy.
People can make their own choice about what they're going to buy and what they're not going to buy.
If you want to buy a sugary soda, you ought to be able to do that.
U.S. taxpayers should not pay for it.
Okay, that seems perfectly rational to me.
All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now.
We'll get into the fake controversy over apparently the Trump administration attaching pro-Israel ideas to federal grants on disaster aid or something.
That's not what's happening.
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