The Ben Shapiro Show - Is Trump WINNING The Tariff Wars?

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Aug. 8, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:11:43

Is Trump WINNING The Tariff Wars?

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	Alrighty, folks, a big show coming up for you here today.
	Gina Carano just won a big victory with Disney.
	We were part of that.
	And so we're really excited for Gina in all of that.
	Plus, all of the latest on tariffs, uncertainty about AI, about trade wars.
	And we'll get to Democrats now claiming that in order to fight Republican tyranny, they have to break all the mechanisms of democracy.
	You know, it's just how it goes.
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	Well, folks, I want to get to all the economic news in a minute because there is a lot of hubbub around President Trump's tariff war, about AI, about inflation.
	We'll get to all of that in a moment.
	First, I just think that the right ought to take a victory lap because today, actress Gina Carano reached a settlement with Lucasfilm and Walt Disney.
	And we here at Daily Wire are very, very close to this story.
	So the settlement is undisclosed for an undisclosed amount, but apparently Gina Carano posted on X that she was pleased with the outcome.
	Lucasfilm said in a statement, Ms. Carano was always well respected by her directors, co-stars, and staff, and she worked hard to perfect her craft while treating her colleagues with kindness and respect.
	With this lawsuit concluded, we look forward to identifying opportunities to work together with Ms. Carano in the near future.
	Now, you'll remember what happened with Gina Carano.
	This is a few years back in 2021.
	So in 2021, she put up a social media posting that was a picture of Nazis chasing a Jew from the Holocaust.
	And basically, she said, when you other other people, this is what it can lead to, which is a pretty vaguely innocent statement.
	And because there were a bunch of people who perceived Gina Carano as right-wing, Lucasfilm and Disney essentially fired her unjustifiably, despite the fact that while she was on The Mandalorian, Pedro Pascal, who's the star of The Mandalorian, was similarly posting Holocaust memes, but comparing Jews in Auschwitz to illegal immigrants being held in detention facilities.
	And that was no problem at all.
	So Gina was fired from Walt Disney Company and from Lucasfilm and from The Mandalorian.
	She was totally taken off the show.
	And I personally called Gina.
	I got her number actually from Dana White.
	And I called up Gina and I said, Gina, they're trying to cancel you.
	So we would like to hire you to do a movie and we should announce it like right now.
	And it would take actual stones for you to stand up to the industry and say, listen, I'm not going to be canceled.
	I'm not going to back down.
	And in fact, I'm going to go do a film with other people outside the system.
	And Gina, to her credit, immediately agreed.
	And so within 48 hours of her firing from Walt Disney, she had been quote unquote uncanceled by Daily Wire.
	That turned into Terror on the Prairie, which is a movie available, of course, over at Daily Wire Plus.
	And it took several years, obviously.
	That was 2021.
	It took several years for Gina to get her due from Walt Disney and from Lucasfilm.
	And good for her.
	Again, I think what this means is that she will probably end up in the Mandalorian movie.
	She'll probably have some sort of cameo or small part in the Mandalorian movie.
	Her lawsuit against Disney was funded by Elon Musk.
	Part of the intention included a promise when he bought X that he was going to fund lawsuits for people unfairly treated by their employers over poster activity on the platform.
	On Thursday, Gina thanked Musk for backing my case and asking for nothing in return.
	I had a chance to text a little bit with Gina last night.
	It's very exciting for her.
	And by the way, I do think that it is a move toward moderation from Disney.
	I think that Disney, they realize that they went too far.
	And you've seen this over the course of the past few years.
	So you'll recall that originally when they launched the trailer for Disney's Snow White, there were no dwarves in it.
	All the dwarves were fully grown, diverse peoples.
	And then we threatened them that we were going to make a Snow White movie and they went back to the drawing board so much that they completely recut the movie.
	Now, I don't think the movie is very good, but it is certainly more in line than it would have been otherwise with the actual original tale of Snow White because it actually has dwarves in it, for example.
	Disney also, apparently, in the recent past, has taken movies that were going to be designed to push really hard social leftism on kids and basically redo those movies.
	Okay, so I asked, for example, my sponsors at Comet, a new web browser by Perplexity, to list Disney movies since 2021 and to show their box office performance versus expectations.
	And the answer is that the ones that were largely perceived as sort of left-leaning in their politics, or at least containing social messaging or social signaling, significantly underperformed.
	Jungle Cruise, you'll remember in 2021, it had some LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign references in Jungle Cruise.
	It's significantly underperformed.
	Encanto performed well because it actually doesn't have any of that sort of stuff.
	So it performed not particularly well at the beginning, but then it's become sort of a Disney classic because it doesn't have any of that stuff in it.
	Cruella, which is sort of feminist rethinking of 101 Dalmatians, it didn't meet blockbuster expectations.
	It did $86 million domestically.
	The Eternals, which again had some of this left-wing social messaging, Giant Fail.
	Strange World, which was an animated film again with references to boys who like boys and such, it earned less than $75 million worldwide and resulted in, according to Comet, a notable financial loss.
	Meanwhile, Moana 2, which was, you know, basically just a sequel to Moana, that did fine, is on track for a billion-dollar global run, Inside Out 2, which again is not woke in any particular way.
	It costs $1.7 billion globally.
	The message here is clear.
	When Disney does not try to pander to left-wing artists inside its shop, it does better.
	So, Disney, it seems, is seeing the light.
	So, good for them.
	Gina's full statement on X. She says, I've come to an agreement with Disney Lucas Film, which I believe is the best outcome for all parties involved.
	I hope this brings some healing to the force.
	And then she thanks Elon Musk and her lawyers.
	And she says, I'm humbled and grateful to God for his love and grace in this outcome.
	I'd like to thank you all for your unrelenting support throughout my life and career.
	You've been the heartbeat that has kept my story alive.
	I hope to make you proud.
	I'm excited to flip the page and move on to the next chapter.
	My desires remain in the arts, which is where I hope you will join me.
	Yes, I'm smiling.
	From my heart to yours, Gina.
	Gina's a very sweet person.
	Knowing Gina, it was really devastating for her, what they did to her, because here she was, a mixed martial artist who'd been in a couple of movies, and then she became a very big star on Disney Plus via The Mandalorian.
	And it really kind of wrecked her to be thrown off the show for nothing other than they disagreed with her politics.
	I consider Gina a friend.
	She's been over at her house, met my wife, the kids, and everything.
	She's wonderful.
	Good for her.
	And again, good for Disney for finally starting to see the light.
	That is a good thing.
	And by the way, good for Daily Wire.
	Okay, not to pat ourselves on the back, but no one else will.
	We've been in existence.
	It's our 10th year anniversary here at Daily Wire.
	And this is one of the big things that we do: we push back when the left pushes too far, which is very frequently.
	We are the ones who push back.
	We are the ones who uncanceled Gina Carano.
	We are the ones who sue the federal government when Joe Biden attempts to push a vax mandate.
	We are the ones who push against the trans insanity up to and including in the legislative arena.
	That is what this company does.
	And so I'm very proud of that.
	Okay, on to the economy.
	So, President Trump's tariff wars continue apace.
	Now, there's a lot of talk on the right about how everybody was wrong about tariffs.
	Everybody was wrong about tariffs.
	President Trump has declared tariff wars across the world.
	The current tariff rates, on average, are higher than they were during the Smoot Hawley tariff era, which is essentially in the lead up to the Great Depression.
	And one of the lines that is being retailed right now is that everything is hunky-dory.
	Now, as I've said before, it's possible that it is.
	Maybe conventional economic wisdom is wrong.
	Maybe the United States, by using our leverage, is going to be able to bring manufacturing back home.
	Maybe there will be no real downside ramifications because the economy can simply absorb higher Cost and lower supply.
	Maybe other countries will not retaliate.
	Maybe all of that is true.
	That's possible.
	Or maybe it's too early to tell.
	And we don't really know at this point.
	And when I talk with friends in the investor community, of which I have many, or friends in the manufacturing community, of whom I have many, when I talk with them, the number one mood that I hear expressed is uncertainty, a feeling of disquiet.
	Everybody is very eager to go out and invest.
	Everybody is eager to go out and utilize the opportunities provided by the Trump administration in terms of, for example, taxes and regulation, because the Trump administration is really, really deregulatory, very friendly to business, much more tax-friendly.
	At the same time, it does make a very large difference if, in fact, you cannot get the inputs that you once did from where you once did.
	It does make a very large difference if you have to increase prices on your consumers.
	And one of the reasons that you haven't seen inflation kick in is because very often, if you increase trade barriers, the price spikes a little bit and then demand declines.
	And when demand declines, so do prices.
	Again, to explain, inflation is, as Milton Friedman said, everywhere and anywhere, a monetary phenomenon.
	What does that mean?
	Inflation is when too many dollars are chasing too few goods.
	Well, when you artificially spike the price, but you don't have more dollars that are in the system as a general matter, then what you end up with is a temporary price spike.
	People don't have the money to pay for it.
	And so the demand goes down and then the prices go down.
	So it tends to self-correct in terms of pricing.
	Long-lasting inflation, real inflation comes from monetary policy.
	It comes from central banking policy.
	It comes from, for example, lower interest rates and injections and infusions of cash into the economy, which is what Joe Biden did, what Jerome Powell did for years on end.
	So what is the outcome of all of this going to be?
	I think at this point, it's too early to say.
	And so I think some of the triumphalism is a little bit overstated.
	I think some of the catastrophism is overstated as well.
	But let's just be clear.
	When Donald Trump took office this year on January 21st, the Dow Jones industrial average on January 21st was 44,000.
	Today, the Dow Jones industrial average is about 44,000.
	So it's basically even.
	So does that mean things are disastrous?
	No.
	It just means that things have not exploded the way they would if we removed a lot of these trade barriers.
	Again, I'm still against the trade barriers.
	I still think that the erection of these trade barriers will end up being a negative policy prescription.
	And again, I'm happy, I'd be more than happy to be proved wrong here because I want the Trump administration to succeed.
	I want the American economy to succeed.
	If they don't, the left is going to end up taking over the government in 2028, which will be a full-scale disaster area.
	All righty, guys, coming up more on the current state of the economy, AI, redistricting, and we'll have a couple of guests stop by.
	So a lot coming up first.
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	So what is the current state of affairs?
	Well, President Trump has now announced a wide variety of new tariffs.
	Those tariffs range from somewhere between 20 and 25% on India to some 39% on Switzerland.
	There's a 35% tariff on goods from Canada.
	Those took effect on August 1st.
	Duties on Chinese goods remain at 30%.
	So believe it or not, we are now tariffing Canada more harshly than we are China.
	Some important U.S. trading partners have brokered deals to set their tariffs at 15 to 20%.
	That'd be like the EU, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam.
	But let us be clear: the average tariff rate on all of these countries before the Trump era was far closer to 0%.
	For a lot of these countries, it actually was like Vietnam was 0%, for example.
	We had a free trade agreement with Vietnam.
	So the question is: what is the purpose of the tariffs?
	And there are really three purposes to tariffs.
	One purpose of tariffs is to receive revenue.
	So, for example, there are countries, like, for example, the Bahamas that have very high tariffs.
	Those tariffs are designed to increase tax revenue because they don't actually have an income tax in some of these places.
	And so, the idea is like early America.
	Early America also didn't really have a federal income tax.
	It wasn't constitutional.
	And so, instead, federal revenue was raised via tariffs.
	That's one way to do it.
	And that is, in fact, being successful.
	Now, to be fair, it is consumers who are paying for that.
	It is indeed consumers who are paying for the price of the tariffs, but it is revenue that goes to the government.
	It could be up to $300 billion this year from the tariffs that we weren't going to get last year.
	So, that's number one purpose, and that purpose is being achieved.
	Number two purpose is leverage to get countries to do other things, that you are ratcheting up the tariffs to ratchet down the tariffs.
	You're ratcheting up the tariffs in order to get collateral wind from those other countries on, say, security matters.
	And there's been some of that as well.
	The president of the United States has used tariff policies, for example, in order to get countries in the EU to up their defense spending for NATO.
	He's trying to use tariff policy right now to get Brazil's Lula de Silva to stop being such a tyrant with regards to his political opposition.
	And again, I think you're seeing some of that from the president, and I think that's good.
	And then there is the third idea, which is that tariffs are in and of themselves good, that they strengthen American industry.
	And the president believes this.
	I do not believe this.
	I do not think this is true.
	I think that the idea that tariffs themselves are a way of developing domestic American industries in a stronger way is disproved by the entire failure of what was called dependency theory in Latin America.
	So, dependency theory is a sort of offshoot of Marxist economic theory, which suggests that trade with other countries amounts to exploitation of those other countries.
	And so, the best way to develop your economy is to be non-dependent, to be autarkic, to essentially develop everything in-house.
	So, what you do is you erect these gigantic trade barriers in order so that you can redirect monies into developing significantly less efficient businesses at home, infant industries, which can then theoretically grow and compete globally.
	The problem is it rarely happens that way.
	Because if these businesses are not exposed to an international market, what you end up developing are extremely bloated, heavily subsidized businesses that die on first contact with the international markets.
	And that's what happened to all the countries in Latin America that tried to operate on the basis of dependency theory.
	So, again, I'm laying all this out so we understand the stakes of what's happening with regard to this tariff war.
	So, where are we right now?
	The answer is nobody knows.
	Maybe I'm wrong.
	Maybe I'm right.
	No one really knows.
	Larry Kudlow over on Fox, he says the doom and gloom recession catastrophe, they haven't happened.
	That's true, obviously.
	Does that mean that the policy is the best policy?
	Too early to say, I think, would be the best case scenario.
	All the gloom and doom, tariff inflation, tariff recession, tariff catastrophe.
	None of that has happened.
	Okay.
	And in fact, as you noted earlier, the tariff revenues are pouring in.
	Okay, he could do as much as $400 billion this year alone in tariff revenues.
	Okay, so again, when it comes to tariff revenues, as I say, yes, that is happening.
	Those tariff revenues will decline over time because, again, what a tariff revenue is, is other countries shipping their goods here, us buying those goods.
	If we stop buying those goods from abroad, then people stop shipping them here and you don't get tariff revenue.
	So if tariffs work, many of the purposes that I just talked about are at cross-purposes with one another.
	If tariffs work and you develop infant industries in the United States or stronger industries in the United States and you're buying from Ford, not Toyota, then Toyota just stopped shipping its cars over here.
	And then you don't actually make the money from the tariffs.
	So some of these purposes of tariffs are actually at cross-purposes.
	But Stephen Moore was at the White House yesterday and he was praising the Trump economic performance thus far, which again, it's not that the economic performance has been bad.
	It hasn't.
	The economic performance has been fine.
	It's just not booming in the way that it probably would if we had the great Trump tax policy, the great Trump regulatory policy, and we didn't have the tariff wars.
	Here is Stephen Moore.
	I was telling the president in his first five months in office, starting in January through the end of June, the average median household income adjusted for inflation for the average family in America is already up $1,174.
	That's an incredible number.
	Just came out just came out.
	So that's a giant gain.
	And if I would have said this, nobody would have believed it.
	Here's your number.
	We're doing well.
	Now, again, he's right.
	Median household income is, in fact, up significantly.
	And the reason the median household income is up significantly is largely because the inflation came down, right?
	It's real median household income, meaning what you can purchase in the market for your income.
	And because the inflation of Joe Biden has been wiped out of the economy under President Trump, that does mean a real median household income.
	That's a good thing.
	This is a very good thing.
	Stephen Moore also pointed out the real household income increase under Donald Trump versus Joe Biden in his first term.
	And this is the one I think that actually matters, because you know what we didn't have in the first term?
	Liberation Day.
	We had the tax cuts in the first term.
	We had some of the deregulation in the first term.
	We did not have a gigantic tariff war in the first term.
	We finally have the 2024 data on what happened with real family income in the United States.
	And so what I did was I compared the record and Donald Trump's first term with the Joe Biden first term.
	And you can see that, by the way, these dotted lines here, Mr. President, that's COVID.
	So if it had not been for COVID, these numbers would have been substantially better.
	But even taking account President Trump's last year in 2020, we saw a $6,400 real after-inflation gain in income for the average family.
	And that compares with Joe Biden, which was a measly $551.
	So, Mr. President, you gain 10 times more income for the average family than Joe Biden is because of your policies.
	Right.
	You know, those policies did not include in term number one, a gigantic tariff war with the rest of the world.
	President Trump is very critical of the Wall Street Journal, which has also been critical of the tariffs.
	He put out a statement on Truth Social, quote, the reason the Wall Street Journal editorial board is always negative on Trump and the hundreds of billions of dollars we're bringing into our country through tariffs, numbers that the USA has never seen before, is because they are China-centric or at a minimum globalist.
	And they would rather see China and the world, for unknown reasons, win-baby-win.
	If the United States were not able to charge tariffs to other countries, it would be economically defenseless and have no further force and effect.
	The only thing that can destroy our country are crooked radical left judges, of which there are many.
	Now, I don't think that's correct.
	I just don't think that's right.
	Actually, if you wish to defeat China, what you should do, I'm a big fan of tariffing China.
	I think we ought to be punishing China economically.
	In order to do that, you have to actually create a vast network of trade with all of the countries surrounding China.
	You need to offer all of those countries the carrot of access in the American markets and the stick that they will lose that access if they continue to do business with the Chinese.
	Then you need to secure your supply of all of the things China currently produces and that we actually use as our inputs.
	In order to do that, you need more free trade, not less free trade.
	If you are worried about pharmaceuticals and you want to reshore those, you can try to reshore them to the United States.
	That's very, very expensive.
	Or you could reshore those to Vietnam or Indonesia or India.
	But if you tariff all those places, it makes it very difficult for businesses to actually reshore to those places, especially knowing that three years from now, God forbid, a Democrat takes over and the policy reverses.
	When it comes to rare earth minerals, China right now is using its leverage over rare earth minerals to ensure that its tariff rate is lower than that of Canada.
	Again, I simply do not understand.
	Listen, I think Mark Carney's a schmuck.
	Canada is America's top hat.
	And also, the tariff war against Canada makes zero sense to me.
	Zero.
	If you take out the oil that we import from Canada, we have a trade surplus with the Canadians.
	I think trade deficit or surplus, by the way, is a terrible measure of whether we have a healthy economic relationship with the country.
	I do not think that we are being screwed by Ethiopia because we buy a lot of coffee from Ethiopia.
	But with that said, even if you do believe that sort of thing, Canada is not on the list.
	Doesn't matter.
	President Trump is now tariffing Canada harsher than he is tariffing China.
	That to me is a policy that is not designed to lock in China.
	And as we'll talk about in a moment, there are open questions about the approach on China because it seems like we are sort of giving with one hand and taking away with the other when it comes to our relationship with China.
	As far as the tariffs themselves, and the reality of the situation is that it's the American taxpayer who pays for the tariffs.
	Yes, importers pay the check at the dock.
	But if people don't buy their product in the United States, they stop sending product to the United States.
	They're not going to send product here to not sell it and pay tariffs to the United States.
	The Treasury Secretary Scott Besson, who, again, I think is the man who's been keeping this thing on the rails.
	Here he was trying to explain who's paying the tariffs.
	And in the end, he does have to come to the conclusion that the American people end up paying those tariffs.
	Assuming it does come from Brazil, say, or it comes from any country with a tariff, who writes the check to the Treasury?
	Well, the check is written to the person who receives it at the dock in the U.S. The check is, quote, written by the person who receives it.
	So tariff is paid in this country by the importer.
	Is that right?
	But the Brazilian exporter could decide that they want to keep market share.
	They could lower their price so that the full 50% of the tariffs, say, you know, and you're going to eat part of the cost.
	They can eat part of the waiting.
	Which is what we've seen.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	But the check is written by the importer, right, at the dock.
	Yeah.
	And then the importer can pass it on or not.
	Well, this goes to what happens now with inflation, right?
	Inflation killed the Biden presidency, among other things.
	I mean, Joe Biden killed the Biden presidency, obviously, by not being alive.
	But aside from that, inflation was the biggest issue of the Joe Biden presidency.
	There's been a lot of worry about inflation.
	Now, as I've said, the generalized kind of econ 101 idea is that when you increase regulatory burden or tariffs, you will get a one-off price spike, and then demand will lower, and then the price will go down.
	So you won't get vast inflation.
	The problem becomes if, for example, you artificially lower the interest rate.
	So the interest rates right now, you can make the case they're too high, fine.
	If you lower the interest rates, injecting liquidity into the economy, which is the goal, if you do that, you are going to get more dollars chasing fewer goods in the economy, which actually could lead to an inflation spike.
	Now, it'll be interesting to see what happens.
	I think Jerome Powell at the next Federal Reserve meeting is probably going to lower the interest rates by 25 basis points, maybe even 50 basis points, depending on how far demand has fallen.
	Is that going to lead to an Inflationary spiral?
	I don't think so.
	But in the end, if American productivity does not go up, if we are not getting better goods, products, and services, then you will get inflation or stagflation in the long run.
	Forget about like the short run or the medium run.
	If the American economy does not develop, if it does not become more productive, if it does not generate the things that people want to buy, new cool things, if that does not happen, then what you will end up with is a stagnating economy that the government attempts to continually stimulate by injecting cash into the system.
	That, by the way, is exactly what Joe Biden was predicting.
	Joe Biden was predicting that through the end of the decade, there would be less than 2% GDP growth.
	Well, the big hope against that, and I think this is what the Trump administration is also banking on, is AI.
	All righty, coming up, we'll get to AI.
	We'll save the American economy.
	Plus, we'll get to Democrats being absolutely insane.
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	If you talk to investors today, pretty much all focus is on AI.
	And if you look at whatever gains there are in the stock market over the course of the last several years, they're basically accruing to the biggest tech companies and to not a lot of other companies.
	You're saying I'm a slow rate of growth for the rest of the stock market, but the top companies in the stock market, the Googles and the Teslas and the big tech companies, Facebook's, Meta, all those ones are skyrocketing.
	Everybody else is basically on even keel.
	A lot of money is going to AI right now.
	And so if you're looking for places in the economy that could theoretically be a bubble, AI is definitely one of those places.
	Tens of billions of dollars are pouring into AI investment right now.
	Someone is going to win.
	Somebody is going to lose.
	And so the question is, is all of that going to automatically convert over to additional productivity?
	Again, better goods, products, and services the American people wish to consume?
	Or is there going to be a bit of a wipeout?
	In other words, are we living in like 2007 of the internet, where all of these new companies, at that time, Meta was a new company?
	It was Facebook then, Google.
	Are all these new companies going to spring up and then they're going to usher in an era of internet prosperity?
	Or are we living right now in 1999, 2000, when the internet was first starting?
	Everybody knew it was going to be a big thing.
	But because everybody knew it was going to be a big thing, they basically took a fire hose of cash and aimed it at the internet and just sprayed it everywhere.
	And what you ended up with was pets.com with an extraordinary stock market valuation that turned out to be effectively worthless.
	I think it's probably the latter.
	I think that you're probably in an AI bubble right now, that the spending is not going to end up all being justified in the immediate term.
	That doesn't mean AI isn't going to transform the economy.
	It absolutely will, but things tend to move slower through the economy than I think people think they do.
	It takes a while for new products, especially new product lines like that blow your mind like AI, to really filter through every aspect of the economy.
	I think most people who engage with AI do so in sort of a fun and marginal way.
	I think most businesses in the United States, for example, don't even know what to do with AI to make their business more productive.
	It's going to take a while for that tech to filter through the economy.
	And so that means there's likely to be a bubble in the AI sector.
	With that said, obviously AI is sort of the great hope of the Western economic future.
	And so the administration has really been focused like a laser beam on ensuring that America wins the so-called AI race against China.
	Here is the Treasury Secretary Scott Besson talking about making the U.S. an AI superpower.
	What we want to do is make sure that there's not a timing difference here so that as the old jobs disappear, the new jobs aren't created in time.
	And there has to be some kind of a bridge.
	But we're very aware of this.
	We have David Sachs at the White House, who is the AI czar.
	So the administration has embraced this and is aware of it.
	We want to make the U.S. the AI superpower.
	But there could be downsides too.
	So we're looking at all the economic potential consequences.
	So in an attempt to actually push forward AI, the federal government is not only pushing forward vast energy exploration, which is a very good thing.
	AI requires extraordinary energy consumption.
	China right now is vastly outproducing us on an energy level.
	They have no regulations environmentally.
	So they're basically just ramming through huge energy projects that are designed in order to foster their AI system.
	The United States, under President Trump, is opening up the energy sector, which is absolutely necessary, really, really necessary.
	The United States is also deregulating a lot of the tech economy, which is excellent.
	It means that there will be more capital that flows into the AI race.
	And that matters for both reasons, military and technological generally.
	American companies are still leading this race.
	Yesterday, ChatGPT released GPT-5, which is their new flagship AI model.
	OpenAI executives called GPT-5 a major upgrade over the systems that previously powered ChatGPT, saying the new technology was faster, more accurate, and less likely to hallucinate or make stuff up.
	OpenAI has consistently improved the technology that underpins its chatbot.
	OpenAI has many rivals, including Google, Meta, Anthropic, China's DeepSeek, Comet, which is perplexity, they've released similar technologies.
	This is the first time OpenAI has used a so-called reasoning model to power the free version of chat GPT.
	Unlike the previous tech, a reasoning model spends time thinking through complex problems before settling on an answer.
	So instead of it being a predictive text mechanism, it basically checks its own work to prevent error.
	So all of this is indeed transformative.
	And the U.S. federal workforce is apparently going to be provided access to chat GPT at essentially no cost.
	So it's going to filter through the federal workforce, which is good.
	But this does raise the question of what do we do with China because it is a race between the United States and China.
	And as I mentioned yesterday on the show, there is some conflict in thinking among people on the right about what to do with China.
	There are some people, for example, who believe that China should be provided access to everything except the H-100 from NVIDIA, because get China dependent on American silicon, and then they will have to build on our platforms.
	And that's better than them developing domestically their own industry in microchips.
	And then there is the side, which I tend toward, which is, no, no, no, no, no.
	You don't give China anything.
	Make them steal it.
	Like really make them steal it.
	And the Trump administration seems kind of split on this, frankly, because on the one hand, you'll see the Trump administration say China is cheating.
	And President Trump will go after the Intel CEO for having too many close ties to China.
	This happened yesterday.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, Intel shares fell over 3% Thursday after President Trump called on the company's chief executive to resign because of past ties to China.
	He wrote in a post on Truth Social on Thursday, quote: The CEO of Intel is highly conflicted and must resign immediately.
	There's no other solution to this problem.
	Thank you for your attention to this matter.
	Here he was referencing Intel CEO Lip Bhutan's past business dealings in China.
	Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas had called them out, pointing out that that deep relationship meant that Intel chips were probably getting into China illegally.
	Cotton wrote an open letter to Intel's board questioning Tan's ties to the Chinese government, including apparent connections to the country's military and investments in other semiconductor companies.
	Okay, well, I agree with that.
	But on the other hand, the administration is also opening up the possibility of NVIDIA shipping H-20s to the Chinese government effectively.
	So a policy must be settled on with regard to how to view China and developments in AI.
	Are we going to be in open competition with China?
	Is it going to be sort of a friend-emy situation with China?
	That remains utterly unclear.
	So amidst all of this turmoil, all I can say is what the markets are really looking for in the end is stable policy.
	This is the thing every investor will tell you: stability, stability, stability.
	There's been a lot of flip-flopping.
	There's been a lot of movement with regard to, for example, tariff policy.
	There's been a lot of movement with regard to China policy.
	There's been a lot of movement with regard to: can you ship chips in?
	Should you take chips out?
	Should we buy from TSMC in Taiwan?
	Should we fund TSMC in Arizona?
	Stability is the name of the game.
	And no one should be more invested in the success of the American economy than President Trump.
	One of the things that I've said about Trump is that Trump tends to respond to incentive structures.
	And one of those incentive structures is the reality of the stock market.
	And so we will see.
	I think the wrong way of looking at the stock market since the beginning of his term is to say, well, it hasn't really dropped dramatically despite all of this variability.
	The right way would be to think, how much would it have grown if it had not been for this sort of vicissitudes of economic policy?
	We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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	Meanwhile, an enormous amount of hubbub over Texas's plan to redistrict.
	So again, redistricting, gerrymandering, this is a part of the process.
	The notion that Texas is doing anything wrong here is silly.
	Actually, when Gavin Newsom threatens to redistrict, he may be in violation of the California Constitution because you're really only supposed to redistrict under the California Constitution once every 10 years.
	Texas has no such constitutional provision.
	All of the complaints about, oh my God, I can't believe they're doing this.
	It's so terrible.
	There have been some great ironies here.
	So, for example, the governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healy, she came out, Democrat, and said, well, if they do that, then we'll also redistrict.
	There's one problem, Moira.
	The problem is that there are nine congressional districts in Massachusetts.
	All of them are Democratic.
	There is no way for you to redistrict further.
	It's absurd.
	The other issue is that the redistricting being proposed in Texas is not insane.
	Here's Karl Rove explaining that Texas redistricting actually creates two black majority districts.
	What does the Texas effort do?
	It creates two black majority congressional districts, first time in the history of Texas.
	Isn't that a goal of the Voting Rights Act?
	It creates an eighth Hispanic majority district, albeit one that's Republican.
	And it does so without involving themselves in these goofy lines like that we see in Illinois that, you know, in which there's a deliberate attempt to go hundreds of miles across the state in order to link together pockets of one party supporters in order to get a congressional seat.
	So again, he's right about that.
	Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, he says, hey, did you know that four out of the five new districts will be Hispanic districts?
	What Texas is doing, actually, we are drawing districts to provide every voter in the state the opportunity to cast a vote for the party in Canada of their choice.
	For the five districts we are drawing, they're going to be Hispanic districts.
	They happen to be Hispanic Republican districts.
	One is going to restore the Barbara Jordan district in Harris County, Texas.
	Okay, I just want to show you a couple of maps.
	Here are the current legislative districts that are being looked at and juxtaposed with the proposed legislative districts that are currently being looked at.
	Do you see like major differences here?
	Like really, really big differences?
	No.
	The answer is no.
	In fact, the new legislative districts look significantly less crazy than the old ones.
	Look at that district in Texas, the current one that stretches from Austin to San Antonio with like a small, tiny little land bridge that goes all the way across.
	That disappears in the new one because it turns out Austin and San Antonio are not actually right next to each other.
	Actually, Austin and San Antonio are like 80 miles apart.
	So having them in the same congressional district is definitely a little bit weird.
	You may note.
	So is that like a big deal?
	According to the left, it is a massive, massive deal.
	Also, a massive deal is President Trump's suggestion that he wishes to perform the United States Census again because it was counted wrong last time.
	And this time, he doesn't want to count illegal immigrants.
	I have to say, it is astonishing to me that there are so many people, including judges, who have made the case that the census is supposed to count illegal immigrants.
	They're saying that by reading the 14th Amendment, Section 2, with regard to the census, quote, representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.
	So that is the important provision there.
	So they say, well, it doesn't say citizens, right?
	It says the whole number of persons in each state, right?
	Meaning it's counting women and children because children can't vote and women at the time could not vote when the 14th Amendment was put into law.
	There's only one problem.
	You will notice a provision there that says excluding Indians not taxed.
	What does that mean?
	Well, that means that there were Native Americans living in various states who are under the domain of a separate jurisdiction.
	They were governed by their tribal jurisdiction.
	And so they weren't taxed by the federal government.
	Question: Do illegal immigrants who are not taxed because they are not citizens and are under the jurisdiction of a foreign government?
	If you're a Mexican who comes across the border illegally and you live in LA and you don't pay taxes, does that sound more like an Indian not taxed under the 14th Amendment?
	Or does that sound more like just a person who is living in a household that is taxed and is part of American society?
	And the fact that judges have suggested that persons means everyone, but are ignoring the excluding Indians non-tax provision is kind of shocking to me, just on a raw textual level.
	So what President Trump is doing here makes perfect sense.
	Why in the world would you count people in the census who not only cannot vote, have no possibility of ever voting absent a change in the law?
	That's a bizarre thing to do.
	And yet the left is declaring this is a violation of democracy.
	And so Texas state representatives have been running headlong from the state.
	Here, for example, is Texas state Democratic Representative Gene Wu, who has absconded from the state of Texas.
	He won't answer when he will return.
	How long are you willing to stay out of Texas to block this redistricting plan ahead of tomorrow's deadline to return?
	Yeah, so again, when we're out here, it's not just because of redistricting.
	The main reason that we're here is simply because the state of Texas, under Republican leadership, under Governor Abbott's leadership, simply does not listen to the people anymore.
	The state of Texas, the citizens of Texas, have said loudly to everyone, we want you to focus on disaster readiness.
	We'll focus on disaster recovery and focus on the Kerrville disaster first and only.
	So then, how long are you willing to stay out of Texas to make your point here?
	Our group is committed to ending this corrupt special session.
	Whether that's a week, whether that's two weeks, I don't know.
	That's not up to us.
	Governor Abbott and the Republican leadership of Texas hold all the cards.
	So again, this kind of insanity, I'm not sure how you put it on the psychotic scale, but it's pretty high.
	The same guy is saying it's the end of our republic.
	Like a normal gerrymandering or gerrymandering you don't like is the end of our republic.
	What everyone needs to tell tell their legislators, tell their leaders is everyone needs to stop.
	If you believe in a country that still values hard work and fair play and following the rules, like you have to stand up and speak up for it now, not whoever wins this one time, you get to rewrite all the rules whenever you want.
	That's not the American way.
	That's not the way we should work.
	And if we don't fight against that now, once this happens, that's the end of our democracy.
	That's the end of our republic.
	It's the end of democracy.
	Well, good news is Democrats have figured out how to save democracy.
	According to James Carville, the way to save democracy is wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, add states, add judges to the Supreme Court, completely skew every institution of American life.
	If the Democrats win the presidency, the Senate and the House in 2028, which is not impossible.
	I don't know if you say likely or possible.
	I don't know.
	It would work, you know, but it's certainly not impossible.
	They are just going to have to unilaterally add Puerto Rican to District of Columbia state.
	They're going to have to, the Congress does give the Constitution gives Congress power over federal elections.
	I don't think they can redistrict, but they're things that have to do it.
	Okay, so I'm just going to point out that some of us predicted this during the last election cycle.
	In fact, here I was speaking last year on exactly what Democrats would do at Miami University if they won the election.
	If Kamala Harris were, God forbid, able to become president of the United States and able to have, say, a Senate majority and a House majority, should promptly rewrite all the rules of government.
	They've already pledged to do this.
	They pledged to kill the filibuster in the Senate.
	They would rewrite the voting rules to essentially make ballot harvesting almost mandatory across the country.
	They've talked about packing the Supreme Court.
	They've talked about adding two states to the Senate of the United States, presumably Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, in the hopes that this would then set up a permanent Democratic majority.
	The kinds of change that Kamala Harris would love to wreak upon the country are, broadly speaking, transformative.
	Okay, so not that I was right, but I was right.
	And this is what Democrats are doing.
	As always, if they call Trump a dictator, that means that they can do dictatorial things, which is why they cannot be allowed to regain power.
	They just cannot.
	They really cannot, especially because they continue to move hard to the left, like very, very hard to the left.
	The Mondonification of the Democratic Party continues apace.
	It is kind of interesting to watch as some of the old guard Democrats, who, again, when I was growing up, Nancy Pelosi was the furthest left member of Congress.
	Now she is somehow the most moderate member of the Democratic caucus.
	She's still sort of dodging an endorsement of Zorin Mamdani, the pro-terrorism communist who is going to probably be the next mayor of New York.
	Are you ready to give your whole-throated endorsement to his candidacy, like Elizabeth Bourne, and a few others?
	I have not, I have not participated in married races throughout the country.
	That's for the people there.
	That's not for me.
	So let them make their own decision about who they want to be their mayor.
	By the way, Pelosi, however, despite her sort of hesitation about Zorin Mamdani, she still believes that there ought to be gender-affirming care for trans kids, meaning it's time to trans the children.
	These are like the moderates in the Democratic Party.
	Well, that is something that I'm working for at the national level.
	And we have hoping that we can have gender affirming here for our trans kids.
	And that it's a sad thing for us.
	Meanwhile, ex-Republicans, now Democrats like Tim Miller, are out there calling ICE agents cops and robbers with masks.
	Joe Rogan's been talking about this himself.
	None of those people signed up for this, right?
	Like this kind of cops and robbers co-splay, mask men jump out of a car and they give themselves a cute name and then they take ladies that are just sitting there trying to sell food to workers.
	I understood when they carried mass deportation signs now that that was going to be part of the agenda, but I think a lot of people that supported Trump did not.
	Well, meanwhile, it's been a busy week, as always, over at the White House.
	And Daily Wire, White House correspondent Mary Margaret Olihan was there to cover all of it.
	Mary Margaret, good to see you.
	How are you doing?
	Hey, Ben, great to be here.
	So let's talk about the White House events this week.
	First of all, do we have any idea what President Trump was doing up on that roof?
	There was a very funny tete-a-tete where he was walking around part of the White House roof a little bit earlier this week, and he was shouting at reporters.
	They were shouting back at him.
	Do you have any insight into what was going on up there?
	Yes, so the president obviously is a builder.
	He's been really excited about a lot of different projects around here.
	One main one is this announcement that he's building a ballroom that's supposed to fit up to, I think, 600 people.
	He's building this on the White House grounds with an architect that I know, actually.
	He's a Catholic architect that's built a lot of really beautiful churches all over the United States and perhaps outside of it as well.
	And this architect's name is James McCurry, and he was up on the roof with the president the other day.
	And they were both up there looking down at the reporters.
	And obviously, all the reporters around here get very excited to speak to the president whenever we can.
	So everyone kind of gathered actually sort of near where I'm standing right now to try and talk to the president.
	And he called down to them, lightly chatted with them.
	Of course, everyone's yelling up to him, Mr. President, what are you doing up there?
	And I think he said something along the lines of he was surveying the property and seeing what else needed changes.
	And he even made a quip about how he's going to use his own money to spruce up the grounds, which he's actually doing.
	He is paying for this ballroom project.
	I think he considers it kind of a historic contribution to the White House.
	And I actually had a source tell me that they're thinking about making it even bigger than they had previously said.
	So seating maybe even more than the 600 people who were supposed to fit in it already.
	So I think this is just kind of a classic Trump move.
	It's not something that we've seen before where the President of the United States just strolls across the roof and is conversing with reporters.
	He even yelled down to Peter Ducey, hey Peter, how are you doing?
	And I think he said something along the lines of, you're looking good, Peter.
	So classic Trump.
	This is another day at the White House.
	And he's making a lot of different changes to the property.
	I think you probably noticed, Ben, the Rose Garden, there's been a little bit of hubbub about that because he paved over the Rose Garden.
	He had joked with some people about how the ladies can't really walk across it because their heels get stuck in the mud and the grass.
	Well, now it's completely paved over and he put out a bunch of kind of mar-a-lago style tables and umbrellas.
	So that's another big change to the White House as well.
	I haven't gotten to see them myself, but I'm told it looks a lot like Mar-a-Lago, and he has, I think, the same exact umbrellas he has down there.
	So another Trump move here at the White House.
	So meanwhile, on a policy level, the president has been pushing forward with the idea of doing a new census.
	He also talked the other day about mobilizing federal law enforcement to protect Washington, D.C. Obviously, you're living out there.
	What do you make of all of it?
	Yeah, Ben, I've lived here since I went to college here.
	D.C. has never been a super safe place, but in recent weeks, we've seen a lot of complaints about some of these attacks on staffers, most noticeably this attack on, I believe his name is Edward Korstein, more colloquially known around here as Big Balls.
	He is an employee of Elon Musk, or was an employee of Elon Musk's Doge, where he's been working for some time.
	And he's been the subject of some controversy around here.
	But this week, I believe, or maybe it was last week, this young man was involved in an attack where he pushed his girlfriend into the car to save her from about 10 young attackers, which is what we're told by the police, who started beating him up.
	And we had pictures of this young man really bloody and bruised and sitting in the street.
	And so this, of course, came to the attention of the administration since he's worked and continues to work for them.
	And President Trump put out a big statement saying that we need to focus on this crime in D.C., that no one should be being hurt in this manner.
	And he's mobilizing federal law enforcement to protect the people of D.C. So we're going to see some units patrolling.
	Obviously, they'll be marked clearly so people know who they are.
	But this is a big move by the president.
	We've talked about this kind of thing for a long time.
	The mayor is not a huge fan of it, I'm told, and that this is something that she has resisted for quite some time.
	But just anecdotally, Ben, I was talking about this attack on Edward Korstein the other day with some of these reporters.
	Two different reporters I was chatting with said, oh yeah, I got mugged on the metro here.
	It's something that's happened to pretty much everyone.
	In fact, you're kind of lucky if you haven't been in that type of situation.
	So crime around here is absolutely something that needs to get under control, whether, you know, this is going on down by Union Station or down by the Kennedy Center.
	It's something that we're seeing everywhere.
	And so the president is mobilizing this law enforcement to take care of that.
	And hopefully we'll see a reduction in crime.
	That is Mary Margaret Olihan.
	She, of course, our Daily Wire White House correspondent Mary Margaret, thanks so much for the time.
	Thank you, man.
	So again, this is the new left.
	The new left are virtue signaling nutjobs.
	And their goal, presumably, is to use the threat of Trump to be able to enshrine their viewpoint into law for the future.
	Join us online to discuss the sort of virtue signaling of the left.
	What has been called the luxury belief system is the coiner of that term, Rob Henderson.
	I sat down with him yesterday to talk about the luxury belief left.
	Joining me on the line to discuss all this is Rob Henderson, best-selling author of Troubled, a memoir of foster care family and social class.
	He's currently a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
	You can check out his Substack newsletter as well.
	Rob, thanks so much for taking the time.
	I really appreciate it.
	Thanks, Ben.
	Great to be here.
	So why don't we start with the thing that made you pretty famous back in 2019, which was the idea of luxury beliefs.
	We're seeing all this play out in real time.
	I don't think it's relegated to just the left at this point, although I think that it is largely located on the left.
	But the idea, if I am not misdefining, of a belief system where you don't actually feel the consequences of it, but it acts as a sort of moral virtue signal to all of your friends and family is the idea of luxury beliefs.
	How do you see that manifesting in today's politics?
	Yeah, that's right.
	Luxury beliefs I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent and educated while inflicting costs on the less fortunate members of society.
	And, you know, I've written various essays going through examples at length.
	So, you know, a recent one, an intuitive one for a lot of people, both on the right and on the center left, is the defund the police movement.
	So I went through the survey data in 2020 and 2021 and found that the highest income Americans were always consistently the most in favor of defunding the police.
	The lowest income Americans were always the least in favor of this.
	And then even when you broke it down by political orientation, it was always white progressives who are the most in support of defunding the police and black and Hispanic Democrats were less in favor of it.
	There are other examples as well, such as this denigration of the family, the downplaying of the family, which is a major theme throughout my book, Troubled.
	So if you go back to 1960, you'll see that 95% of American children, regardless of social class, were raised by both of their birth parents, rich kids and poor kids alike.
	And if you fast forward to 2005, for affluent kids from upper middle class families, so roughly the top 20% of the income scale, that dropped from 95% in 1960 to 85% by 2005.
	Whereas for poor and working class kids, roughly in the bottom 30% of the income scale, 95% of those children are raised by both of their birth parents in 1960, and it dropped to 30% by 2005, which is roughly the period where I was a teenager and witnessing a lot of the breakdown in working class neighborhoods.
	And look, there were poor people in 1960 as well.
	So when people chalk this up to poverty, it doesn't make any sense because poor families were intact in 1960 and increasingly they're not today.
	And so a lot of that has to do with the cultural values and the attitudes of the elites.
	People have a difficulty understanding that the cultural messaging, the ideas, pop culture, everything that we're surrounded by and immersed in, that has an effect on behavior.
	And so this denigration of every time you open up a glossy magazine or read elite media outlets who talk about throubles and swinging and polyamory and open relationships, all of that has an effect on how families decide to form.
	And it has especially detrimental consequences for people who don't have access to education, to income, who are not necessarily inclined to committing long term unless they consistently have reinforcements and cultural guardrails.
	You have a piece that just came out from City Journal about why men and women are diverging politically.
	And it really is striking when you look at the numbers, how young women are becoming very much left and young men are swinging pretty significantly to the right.
	To what do you attribute that sort of split happening?
	Yeah, well, what's interesting is that it depends on what survey you look at.
	So every single survey that I've seen, women are veering dramatically to the left.
	Some surveys indicate that men are tilting to the right.
	Some surveys actually show there's not much movement at all, at least in terms of self-identified political orientation.
	Are you a liberal?
	Are you a conservative?
	But when you look at the voting data, a lot of men, even men who don't necessarily identify as conservative, turned out in support for Trump.
	And I think you saw that pattern maybe with like the kind of people who listen to the podcast, bros, fans of that whole sort of independent media scene, they don't necessarily think of themselves as conservative, but they were very much against what they saw as sort of the progressive overreach.
	So in that piece in City Journal, I talk about what's going on here because increasingly, women are converging with men in terms of education.
	So, they're outperforming men in terms of earning bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, PhDs.
	A lot of people are familiar with those statistics.
	It's also the case that in a lot of major metropolitan areas in the United States, young women under 30 are either matching or exceeding the earnings of their male counterparts, also under 30.
	So, under 30s, women are actually doing as well or better than men in a lot of cases.
	So, you might expect that as their education and their income and their professional achievements converge with men's, that they might become more similar in terms of their cultural outlooks, in terms of their political values.
	But you're actually seeing the opposite.
	They're increasingly diverging.
	And I suggest that this is something that I learned in grad school: this idea of what's called the gender equality paradox.
	And this is a very interesting finding, which shows that if you look at societies across the world, you'll see that the most prosperous and socio-politically equal societies show the largest differences between men and women.
	So, if you compare the gender gaps in, say, Denmark or Sweden, they're actually larger between men and women than if you look at more traditional societies like Vietnam or Botswana.
	And one hypothesis for why this is the case is that in richer and more prosperous societies where people are treated fairly, they're treated equally, this actually allows our underlying differences to emerge to manifest.
	If you live in a poor society with very rigid cultural values, there's a limit to how much you can express your underlying preferences and desires and personality and so on.
	And so, I'm suggesting that this is the case.
	This is what's happening in a lot of Western, modern, developed first world countries.
	And you even see this on college campuses, which I find fascinating: that the higher up you go in university ranking, the larger the political gender gap is.
	So, if you look at the Ivy Leagues and sort of Ivy Plus schools, you'll see that the gender gap between men and women is larger than if you look at sort of mid-tier and lower-tier universities.
	So, even here, just within the university systems, you'll see that kind of the richer and more the universities that emphasize cultural equality, you'll see that even within the university system, you see this gender gap widening.
	One of the things that's sort of fascinating about that is that obviously, when you're talking about places like Denmark, those studies typically, I believe, are done with regard to sort of job choice, where if you look at the Nordic countries, women are choosing to go into education.
	If you go to a poorer country, women become engineers and doctors because that's how you need to actually make the money.
	So, if you're in a richer country, you don't have to do that.
	You get to select kind of what you want to do.
	What's fascinating about the sort of political angle of it is that it's so personal that it's not just about what kind of job you're seeking, it's also about lifestyle choices.
	Like, do you want to remain single?
	Do you ever want to get married and have children?
	Because one of the things that we're seeing among young women is not only delay of marriage and children, but many people just opting out of the system entirely and saying they never want to get married, never want to have children.
	And meanwhile, men who seem to have been left behind sort of falling into a sort of bizarre gray area in American society, feeling alienated from their traditional roles.
	Yeah, yeah, you're seeing a lot of that.
	And I think that that too fuels this political divide, sort of lower rates of marriage formation, interest in meeting other people of the opposite sex, dating.
	You know, there's the whole idea of the sex recession.
	And I think that men and women have this tendency to depolarize one another.
	So, if you're a man and you're only surrounded by other men, especially young men, and especially if you spend most of your time online, exposed to the most sort of extreme and provocative political views, those views tend to harden.
	But if you meet a girl and she has different political views than you, and you can converse and you can communicate, and you tend to, you know, it takes the edge off of some of those more radical views that you might have.
	And then, same for the woman as well.
	If she's around other women and they're reinforcing one another's opinions repeatedly, then those views tend to harden and become more extreme.
	But if she meets a guy who has more conservative views, then they kind of moderate one another.
	But because we're living increasingly apart, people aren't dating one another, they're not meeting, they're not marrying, they're not forming families.
	I think that this too is fueling this growing gender divide.
	So, there's kind of the one angle of the gender equality paradox of societies becoming more equal and more prosperous, and that this actually ironically fuels the growing divide in terms of, like you mentioned, career choice preferences, those kinds of things, but also in terms of personality and political outlook.
	But then, also, we also react to our social environment.
	There are sort of socio-cultural factors as well.
	And those can moderate or magnify those differences.
	You know, when we're looking At both of these issues, the issue of luxury beliefs generally, and then things like gender divides in politics.
	The thing that really comes to mind is the fact that we are a very luxurious country.
	We're a country that is extremely rich, unprecedentedly rich, despite all the complaints about how difficult it is to be a young person in America today, literally drop a young person in America any other place on earth today or in all of human history.
	And it would be very difficult to suggest that that person is somehow disadvantaged in America today.
	And yet we've somehow convinced ourselves that the more that we signal that people are having it very, very difficult in the United States, the better it is.
	If that were to change, if there were to be an economic recession, if things were to go the other way, if luxury beliefs end up being self-defeating in a certain way, because you end up pursuing policies that actually damage the society in which you live.
	Do you believe that politics will depolarize, that we will stop with the virtue signaling and there will be sort of a movement back toward reality and moderation, ironically?
	You know, Ben, that was my hope with, you know, if there were anything good to come out of what was happening during COVID, as soon as it struck, as you mentioned, you know, I started writing about luxury beliefs in 2019, and then February, March of 2020 happens, and suddenly there's this global pandemic.
	And in my mind, I was thinking, oh, luxury beliefs are dead.
	Like we have like a serious issue here.
	We all have to concentrate on this deadly virus and so on.
	And then by the summertime, you know, luxury beliefs were in full force and we reached like peak woke during that period.
	So it's really disappointing for me.
	I don't know.
	I think that if we had some serious catastrophe, real sort of economic recession or depression, some kind of wartime scenario, then perhaps, and that is kind of part of the luxury beliefs idea.
	You mentioned how prosperous we are as a society.
	In the past, back when there were sort of more rigid material divides between the social classes, I was drawing on Thorsten Veblen and Pierbord and all of these sort of classic sociologists of class where the elites back in the day would exhibit their social status with delicate and restrictive clothing, tuxedos, evening gowns, top hats, monocles, pocket watches.
	And today it's much more difficult if you just go out into the street and say, you know, that person is rich, that person's middle class, that person's poor, because generally everyone has become more wealthy and making those fine-tuned distinctions has become more difficult.
	So how do you exhibit your class?
	You do it through these bizarre, wild, counterintuitive and provocative opinions, which I call luxury beliefs.
	And when you express a luxury belief, you're essentially signaling, I went to an expensive university.
	I spend time with all the right people.
	I consume the right kinds of media.
	This is like an expression of what Pierre Bordeaux called cultural capital.
	So to your question, I think that, yes, once people experience sort of real struggle in their lives, then those luxury beliefs will probably go underground.
	But yeah, people will still find ways to express status, even in those cases.
	I wonder if you think that luxury beliefs are also a sort of whole society thing, meaning that we're talking here about certain strata of American society having luxury beliefs.
	But increasingly, I'm coming to believe that actually this applies to maybe nearly all of the West, that the West has taken upon itself gigantic luxury beliefs in relation to the rest of the world.
	The luxury belief that comes to mind because it's top of the news is the war in Gaza, where suddenly the West is signaling that, you know, is Hamas all that bad?
	Maybe terrorism is actually driven by Western imperialism and colonialism.
	And that seems to be a sentiment that is spreading very widely, not just on the left, but also now increasingly on the right in the United States and in the West more generally.
	And again, is that sort of a luxury belief?
	Because we are a safe society that has not experienced significant war on our shores for legitimately 80 years.
	And so the belief is: okay, well, you know, it's happening far away.
	That's suffering.
	That's terrible.
	And so now I'm going to signal about all that without actually having to suffer with any of the consequences of it.
	Yeah.
	And that kind of moral signaling, you saw that initially on Ivy League campuses, the Hamas encampments, all of these students, upper and upper middle class students demonstrating against Israel or in support of Palestine or Hamas or what have you.
	And yeah, it is interesting to see that it's spreading on the right as well that if you're removed from violence, you're removed from conflict, it becomes a game.
	It becomes an abstraction.
	Sort of the criticisms that academics get, you know, you're in your ivory tower, removed from the world.
	Well, you could apply that same kind of logic, I think, to a lot of sort of comfortable, very online young Americans today.
	Well, that's Rob Henderson.
	You should go check out all of his work over on his sub stack, which is available at robkhenderson.com.
	His work is also over at the Manhattan Institute.
	And check out his book, which is fabulous, Troubled, a memoir of foster care, family, and social class.
	Rob, thanks so much for the time.
	really appreciate it.
	Thank you, Ben.
	Meanwhile, in other news, speaking of the sort of luxury beliefs of the left, they're very, very upset today that Israel has said that it is now going to finish off Hamas in Gaza City.
	Now, you remember they did this routine maybe a year ago about Rafah.
	All eyes on Rafah.
	It was going to be just a catastrophe, a disaster.
	How dare the IDF try to clear a terrorist hotbed and save hostages?
	No, no, no.
	Well, now they're doing the same exact thing.
	Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel says that the goal is to go in, clear out the Gaza Strip, ensure security, but not to actually annex the place.
	Now, the reason he is saying that is because annexation under Israeli law then requires essentially a supermajority of the internet, Knesset II, to un-annex.
	So he is saying he's not interested in owning the Gaza Strip or in taking control of the Gaza Strip, which would make him similar to every other world leader, all of them.
	The funny thing to me is all of these morons out there who are saying things like, this was always a land play.
	Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
	They handed the whole thing over to Hamas.
	Hamas spent 20 years building terror tunnels and destroying every possibility of actual governance and economic success in the Gaza Strip and then launched the worst attack on Jews since World War II.
	And so this is about an Israeli land grab, is your theory, is your idiot theory.
	By the way, Israel has tried to get Egypt to take control of the Gaza Strip many, many times.
	Egypt says no, because they don't want to deal with the Palestinian population, which is hugely radicalized, not just, by the way, against Israel, but against every regime in the region.
	There's a reason that Jordan, which is 60% ethnically Palestinian, has expelled tens of thousands of Palestinians.
	It's why Lebanon got wrecked.
	It's why Egypt won't take in any Palestinian refugees today, even into the northern Sinai.
	Anyway, here was Netanyahu explaining the plan.
	We intend to, in order to assure our security, remove Hamas there, enable the population to be free of Gaza and to pass it to civilian governance.
	That is not Hamas and not anyone advocating the destruction of Israel.
	That's what we want to do.
	We want to liberate ourselves and liberate the people of Gaza from the awful terror of Hamas.
	Okay, again, if anybody's got an alternative plan, everybody's all ears here.
	There was a ceasefire on the table two weeks ago, and the international community killed it in order to parrot the propaganda that was being put out by Hamas.
	Here is Netanyahu explaining that the journalists who are being, who are covering this stuff in Gaza are largely manipulated by Hamas or are tools of Al Jazeera or of the Turkish government, which of course is true.
	He says one of the goals here is to give honest journalists the ability to see the truth.
	Those who are lying are going to continue lying, but give honest journalists the ability to see the truth.
	A, the fact that we're trying to get civilian aid, humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, the efforts that we're making there.
	B, to understand and explain why those buildings are destroyed because they're booby-trapped and we clear the population.
	And I'm glad you were in.
	I'm glad you did this thing.
	I'm glad, in fact, you're, I would say, you're blazing the trail.
	But there have been others, and we have the same result.
	Every time people see it, they see it in a more realistic way, in a more honest way than the way that it's presented.
	So he is right about that, obviously.
	And it is Hamas that is intriciting the aid.
	It is Hamas that is stealing the aid.
	All of that is true.
	And for all of Israel's critics, the question is, what is your proposed alternative?
	Do you think that Israel wishes to send a bunch of 18-year-old draftees and 45-year-old reservists into the Gaza Strip interminably for literally at this point, years on end?
	Israel wanted to avoid this so badly.
	They literally handed the place over to Hamas 20 years ago, and it worked out really, really poorly.
	So any other choices?
	Anybody?
	Bueller, Buehler?
	Again, it remains ridiculous that the media continue to do the work of Hamas.
	If it were not for the media, Hamas would have lost this war already.
	Alrighty, as the show continues, we're going to jump into that vaunted Ben Shapiro show mailbag because, of course, it is a Friday.
	Remember, in order to have your question answered, you do have to become a member.

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