The Ben Shapiro Show - STILL WINNING: Trump’s DC Crime Triumph PLUS Court Kills $500M Anti-Trump Judgment

Aug. 22, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:16:39

STILL WINNING: Trump’s DC Crime Triumph PLUS Court Kills $500M Anti-Trump Judgment

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	President Trump meets with the National Guard because he is winning the war against crime in Washington, DC.
	New statistics come out about immigration that show that his program to stop illegal immigration is working as well.
	And a huge judgment from a New York Appellate Court striking down that ridiculous $500 million judgment against him.
	So a lot of victories for President Trump.
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	All right.
	So President Trump has won a signal victory in this anti-crime fight in Washington, DC.
	The man has a gift for pickinging vulnerable points for the Democrats attacking those vulnerable points and making the Democrats defend the vulnerability.
	It really is kind of an amazing thing.
	According to Breitbart, violent crime in Washington, DC has fallen twenty two percent over the last week following President Trump's crackdown in the city.
	According to Fox News Digitals, David Marcus, there were no murders in the city over the last seven days.
	That is a feat that has not been seen for months, since actually March.
	Apparently, there are other statistics available from the local police union revealing that since Trump's federal takeover, car jackings have fallen an astonishing eighty three percent.
	Robbery has fallen forty six percent, which is indeed pretty amazing.
	And again, it's not all that amazing when you realize that the way to stop crime is just to put people on the ground who police crime.
	I know this is like crazy to Democrats, but after you label the police the problem, crime goes up.
	After you bring people in to do law enforcement, crime goes down.
	And yet Democrats are still fulminating over this, claiming it's a fascist takeover of the United States in toto, even though President Trump did choose the area where the federal government has the most plenary power.
	Washington, DC is not an independent state.
	It is not an independent polity.
	It is a federal district.
	It is run by Congress and by the president.
	And if they delegate power to the mayor, that power still exists under the authority of the federal government of the United States.
	Well, yesterday, President Trump met with police and military in Washington, DC.
	He visited US Park Police and Acostia Operations facility in southeastern DC, which is seen as the gathering point for all the agencies involved in the operation.
	According to ABC News, he delivered hamburgers from the White House and pizza, which is again very Trumpy.
	He has a fondness for bringing people fast food and good news.
	People like fast food.
	President Trump at this event, he said, listen, we're not going to stop this at Washington, DC.
	We are going to try to enforce the law in all the places, in other places as well.
	We're not playing games.
	We're going to make it safe.
	And we're going to go on to other places, but we're going to stay here for a while.
	We want to make this absolutely perfect.
	It's our capital.
	And I guess it used to be many years ago safe, but it certainly not had a very good run.
	President Trump also did his usual sort of outreach to people.
	President Trump is an amazing retail politician.
	I've seen the man work.
	I've seen him deal with people on a day to day level.
	And he is tremendous in person, like really, really good.
	And you see this in all of his sort of tet a tets with various members of the public, public officials, public servants.
	He's really good one-on-one.
	And so he goes to this group and he starts praising them as being healthy and attractive looking, which is high praise in Trump world.
	It's a healthy, attractive looking group of people.
	Well, I just want to thank everybody very much for being here.
	I wanted to do this.
	We've had some incredible results and results have come out and it's like a different place.
	It's like a different city.
	It's the capital.
	It's going to be the best in the world.
	You know, Trump, again, when it comes to the retail of this, he's amazing.
	Remember back during the campaign, when he went to New York City and went into bodegas, was talking with people, this is Trump's.
	bread and butter.
	He mentioned during his visit that The federal government and law enforcement have been cleaning up the parks in Washington, DC, which is, of course, true.
	One of the things we're going to be redoing is your parks.
	I'm very good at grass because I have a lot of golf courses all over the place.
	I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world.
	And we're going to be regressing all of your parks, all brand new sprinkler systems, the best that you can buy, just like Augusta.
	It will look like Augusta.
	It will look like, more importantly, Trump National Golf Club.
	That's even better.
	But we're going to look, we're going to have all brand new, beautiful grass.
	You know, like everything else, grass has a life.
	Do you know that?
	Grass has a life.
	and grass is a life.
	And the grass here died about forty years ago.
	So we're going to be rebuilding all of your parks and it's going to happen fast.
	It's going to go up like a miracle.
	The Free Association about grass is pretty great.
	I mean, again, he does own a lot of golf courses.
	That is definitely true.
	I will say, I've been to Trump Doral and the grass there looks great.
	He is not wrong about the grass at his clubs.
	Very, very nice grass.
	He also added that he's been receiving lots of phone calls thanking him for what he's been doing.
	I've never received so many phone calls thanking me for what we've done in Washington, DC from people that haven't gone to a restaurant in literally in four years.
	And they said, you know what you've done is it's unprecedented because what they they said it was just unsafe.
	We couldn't do it.
	We'd go out and you'd see the stories.
	You'd read the stories.
	You'd see all of the things that are happening.
	And they said we just we couldn't we couldn't stand it, sir.
	And now I take my wife and my kids to dinner.
	One of them said he's gone out four nights in a row and he hadn't gone out for four years.
	So President Trump, again, this is a big win for him.
	The crime issue is a big winner for Republicans because Democrats are weak on crime, it is indeed that simple.
	The immigration issue is, of course, another major win for President Trump.
	So an astonishing report that apparently, you remember back in 2012, Mitt Romney suggested to the consternation of the entire left wing media that if you enforce the border, you will end up with an enormous amount of self deportation.
	So this is part of his plan that if you enforce the immigration laws, people will not want to be picked up by ICE.
	They will instead just leave.
	Well, that is a thing that has been happening under President Trump.
	According to Axios, the White House crackdown appears to have driven 1.5 million immigrants out of the country.
	According to a new tally from Pew Research, it is the first time the immigrant population has has fallen in decades, a clear win for the Trump administration.
	In January, the foreign born population hit an all-time high of 53.3 million, driven by a gigantic surge during the Biden administration.
	Since then, data from the census current population survey analyzed by Pew shows a decline.
	By June, the immigrant population had dropped to 51.9 million.
	19% of the labor force were immigrants as of June, down from 20% last year, which is a decrease of more than 750,000 workers.
	The decline is mostly due to deportations and also immigrants voluntarily leaving the country fearing the crackdown.
	So the self-deportation that Mitt Romney suggested, it actually is happening under President Trump and he is up the ante is President Trump apparently.
	According to the New York Post, the Trump administration will begin reviewing all 55 million US visa holders to see if they have committed any deportable offenses.
	So the idea here is that if you're here on a visa and you're overstepping the visa or if you're here on a visa and you've committed a crime, you need to go.
	Any immigrants holding US visas found with indicators of overstepping criminal activity, threats to public safety, engaging in any form of terrorist activity or providing support to a terrorist organization will have their permits to live in the United States revoked and deported.
	According to the State Department under Secretary of State Marco Rubia, State Department representatives told the AP all US visa holders are subject to continuous vetting intending to identify deportable offenses.
	So it's not as though you get in once and now you can do whatever you damn well please.
	You still have to abide by the laws of the United States.
	According to the New York Post, since President Trump took office in January, six thousand student visas have been revoked, about four thousand were taken from international students who broke the law.
	So again, President Trump is taking his task with crime and immigration very, very seriously.
	And these are big wins for President Trump.
	And by the way, it is also counteracting one of the things that happened under Joe Biden, which is the vast influx of illegal immigration that then proceeded to go to purpleish states or blue states stacking their congressional representation.
	As Breitbart points out, in just two years of his one term presidency, President Joe Biden's border policies helped welcome more than a million illegal aliens to the nation's electoral swing states, which is pretty astonishing.
	And again, drives up the congressional representation in those particular areas.
	So an attempt to get that under control will have good upside for American citizens who vote.
	Already coming up, we'll speak to Mark Recorian from the Center on Immigration Studies as well as a young man named Matt Nuclear, who is eighteen years old and he dominated a woman named Amanda Seals on Jubilee.
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	Well, speaking of President Trump's successes on immigration, joining me online is Mark Ricorian, nationally recognized expert on immigration issues.
	He has served as the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies since 1995.
	Mark, thank you so much for taking the time.
	Really appreciate it.
	Glad to be here.
	So there are a couple of really stellar reports for the Trump administration on immigration.
	There was one that came out just yesterday.
	Axios reported on this that essentially there's been an enormous amount of self deportation since the Trump administration started actually enforcing the law with regard to immigration.
	What do you make of the report?
	Well, we actually released the same.
	report a week ago, uh, before, and it we found a reduction both in the illegal and legal population.
	The illegal population seems to have gone down by 1.6 million people.
	Now, you know, it's preliminary numbers.
	Uh, we'll see later whether it's right, but the all the indications are that it is going down.
	And that's not just deportations, obviously.
	That's mostly going to be people leaving on their own.
	Now, every year there's always churn anyway in the illegal population or the immigrant population.
	Some illegals just go home for their own reasons without being, you know, self deported.
	But the key, and this is the key to success, is fewer illegal immigrants coming in and more illegal going out.
	I mean, it's, you know, it's sort of simple.
	It's like dieting, fewer calories in, you know, more calories out.
	And that seems to be working.
	And, you know, we'll see.
	It's only been, what, eight months or something, seven months, but it's definitely going in the right direction.
	So there have been two aspects of Trump's immigration policy with regard to illegal immigration.
	One is shutting the border, which he did legitimately day one.
	And it's an astonishing thing that we were told by the media, by the Biden administration, they needed more congressional power, they needed more funding in order to shut the border.
	Trump comes in first day, says the border's closed, the border remains closed and we basically have no illegal immigration since then without any substantive legal changes really on that order.
	I mean, we have new funding for the border wall and all the rest thanks to the big, beautiful bill.
	But I mean, that stuff really hasn't even started to happen yet and still illegal immigration dropped to zero.
	So we've had that, which has been great.
	On the other hand, we also have the deportation policies themselves.
	And there's a bit of confusion about how thorough the deportation policies currently are, how many people are being deported, what is ICE being told to do.
	We've been told by some people in the administration they're targeting people who have the most egregious criminal records, by some others that pretty much everybody is going to go.
	What do you think of the Trump administration's deportation policy?
	Well, they always said from the beginning, Tom Homan, the borders are.
	The Border Zar has said they're going to prioritize the worst of the worst.
	The thing is that if you're going to go look for people that have warrants that are, you know, child molesters, what have you, you're going to run into a lot of other illegal aliens.
	And so this is a point that Homan has made is that if sanctuary cities just let people into their jails, ICE into their jails, so that when people are arrested for the normal things people are arrested for, they check their status and they take them off their hands.
	ICE would have so much work on its hands it wouldn't be able to wander around neighborhoods looking looking for people, but that's what they're doing because sanctuary cities keep them out of their jails.
	The other thing though is that work site enforcement by definition is not targeted towards criminals.
	I mean, if you're raiding some warehouse or something that you have intelligence there's a lot of illegals there, some of those people are going to be criminals because a lot of criminals have day jobs too.
	But most of them are just going to be ordinary working stiffs.
	Everyone who's here illegally is deportable at all times.
	So the analogy I draw is like to speeding.
	If a car is driving through a school zone, firing a machine gun out the window.
	Everybody's going after that.
	That's top priority.
	But that doesn't mean that the cops don't bother doing regular traffic enforcement.
	People whose inspection stickers have expired and all that stuff.
	You need to do both, routine enforcement against people who aren't anyone, and high priority enforcement against real lowlies.
	So let's talk for a second about what would be a realistic number that you'd be looking for as an advocate for deporting illegal immigrants that that seems like something that would be doable because there's been a lot of talk about there are twenty million illegal immigrants in the country, at least there's probably more.
	And so the talk about how many are going to be deporported?
	Obviously, during the campaign, President Trump basically said all of them.
	That would require, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars presumably in law enforcement resources in order to actually effectuate.
	What would be a realistic number that you would be looking for the Trump administration?
	Not with regard to turnarounds at the border, but like people who are actually in the country, whom we have to find and then deport.
	The, first of all, our estimate is probably 14, 15 million illegal, maybe 16.
	The higher numbers, I think, are people kind of getting over enthusiastic and then they kind of outbid each other on how big is your number, you know, that sort of thing.
	I don't want to come up with numbers because the point is, let's start.
	squeezing the illegal population as much as we can.
	Maybe if it gets down to half its size, we can then talk about what else we do.
	But I don't, that's not a productive discussion now.
	The point is you want to get as many people to leave as possible, some deported, most leaving on their own.
	Only in the second term of the JD Vance administration should we even be talking about, okay, now what do we do about the illegals who are still here?
	So meanwhile, the Trump administration has also been cracking down on the ways in which legal immigration has been done.
	Obviously, they are now reviewing for criminality and for overtime visas.
	People who came here with visas, an enormous number of people are here illegally, actually got in legally through visas and then just overtime their visas.
	But not just that, when people are now coming in, the Trump administration is looking at their social media history, trying to determine whether there's anti American sentiment, whether these are people we actually want to be immigrants to the country at all.
	The left is going nuts about this.
	I'm again, I think confused would be an understatement at the left's willingness to say the quiet part out loud, which is that they want people in the country who don't actually like the country.
	But that seems to be the tack that they are taking, is that they are fine with importing people without any ideological screening whatsoever, that somehow America owes citizenship to people who come here from abroad, no matter how much they hate the country or don't have anything in common with our principles.
	I mean, some of the people on the left, they I mean, they do see this as let's import more people who hate America like we do.
	But I think there is a kind of broader ideological view there that many of the libertarians also share, which is that the American people have no right to keep anyone out.
	In other words, that mobility is a right.
	You not only have a right to leave your country, which I think pretty much everyone agrees is something that you have, but you also have a right to go into anyone else's country you want.
	And if that's your point of view, there's nothing to debate.
	You're not, we're not debating immigration policy anymore.
	It used to be that democrats would say, Okay, well, we want a little more of this or a little less of that, or let's turn the dial a little different way.
	That's normal political debate.
	What we're in the stage we're now at is that the left and the libertarians reject the concept of borders as such, and on the left that's becoming a litmus test issue like abortion or something.
	And so what is there to debate with folks if that's their perspective?
	That's Mark Krecorian.
	He, of course, is the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies doing wonderful work there.
	You can go check all of his work over at CIS.
	Mark, thank you so much for the time.
	Thank you.
	Already coming up, the FBI just raided John Bolton.
	We'll talk about that.
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	Meanwhile, another big win for President Trump yesterday.
	A New York appellate court threw out the ridiculous $500 million civil fraud penalty against President Trump.
	So you will recall that last.
	That last year, there was a decision that came down from a New York court.
	A trial judge found that Trump was liable for fraud.
	Why?
	Because supposedly when he was getting loans, he had made statements about his, his properties and the value of his properties and then he had gotten loans based on the value of the properties and then none of those loans were in default, right?
	He ended up paying back all of those loans.
	It wasn't any of the lenders who were complaining about all of this.
	New York State Attorney General Letitia James decided that she was going to go after him.
	And so she kind of jerry rigged an entire case that violated the actual essence of the law because the law was not designed for anything of this.
	And then you'll recall.
	that Letitia James had actually put out a tweet celebrating the amount that he was fined is 464 million 576 230 dollars and 62 cents.
	That was back in February of 2024.
	According to the court, it's insane that this pseudo crime should come with a 500 million dollar fine.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, a New York appellate court threw out a more than 500 million dollar penalty against President Trump and his business empire in a sharply splintered ruling that paves the way for further proceedings before the state's highest court.
	The decision on Thursday from a five judge panel of the New York Appellate Division's First Department is a significant legal boost for Trump, freeing him for now from a massive penalty that caused him financial headaches last year.
	Last year, Justice Peter Moulton wrote, quote, while harm certainly occurred, it was not the cataclysmic harm that can justify a nearly half billion dollar award to the state.
	And again, it was a sort of bizarre award in the first place given the fact that the supposed crime was not committed against the state of New York.
	It was a misread of the law.
	Judge David Friedman said that the law that originally enabled Letitia James to sue President Trump was designed to protect consumers and the public marketplace from deception in consumer transactions.
	It was not designed to protect lenders who were not the ones who were, no one was damaged for it was not designed to protect them from people fibbing to them with regard to the value of the collateral that they were putting up.
	As the court says, AG James's suit turns section 6312 on its head.
	The leniency with which the courts have construed the requirements for pleading and proving fraud under that section, a leniency that has been extended for the purposes of facilitating the use of the provision to prevent the exploitation of unsophisticated consumers, investors and small businesses is here being used by Attorney General Letitia James to apply section 6312 to a scenario to which that provision has never before been applied or even thought to apply.
	Judge Moulton writing for the court said, Presiding Judge Renwick and I find the Supreme Court correctly found the defendants liable.
	We agree with the Supreme Court that the Attorney General acted within her legal power.
	We find the Supreme Court properly ruled on claims that are timely.
	However, we would modify the remedy ordered by the Supreme Court.
	While the injunctive relief ordered by the court is well-crafted to curb the defendant's business culture, the court's disgorgement order, which directs defendants to pay nearly half a billion dollars to the state of New York, is an excessive fine that violates the eighth amendment to the United States Constitution.
	So the court didn't go as far as the dissenting judge David Friedman in pointing out that this whole case was a sham, but it did say, you gotta be kidding me.
	500 million dollar fine.
	Are you kidding me?
	Are you kidding me?
	So Letitia James issued a statement, quote, The First Department today affirmed the well-supported finding of the trial court.
	Donald Trump, his company and two of his children are liable for fraud.
	The court upheld the injunctive relief we won, limiting Donald Trump and the Trump organization's officers' ability to do business in New York.
	It should not be lost to history.
	Yet another court has ruled that the president violated the law and that our case has merit.
	We'll seek to appeal to the court of appeals.
	Okay.
	So she's saying that the part of the decision saying that the actual filing wasn't illegal, that that is a vindication for her.
	But I'm sorry if the thing that you were bragging about went away, namely a 500 billion dollar penalty, then you kind of lost.
	And that's the point that President Trump was making over a truth social quote, total victory in the fake New York State Attorney General Letitia James case.
	I greatly respect the fact that the court had the courage to throw out this unlawful and dis and disgraceful decision that was hurting businesses all over New York State.
	Others were afraid to do business there.
	The amount including interest and penalties was over 550 million dollars.
	It was a political witch hunt in a business sense, like any one has ever seen before.
	This was a case of election interference by the city and state, trying to show illegally that I did things that were wrong when in fact everything I did was absolutely correct and even perfect.
	Every single dollar was thrown out.
	Even the penalties imposed on us by the corrupt judge were the most overturned in history.
	Arthur Engron.
	I wasn't given a jury during the course of the trial, says President Trump, which lasted a long time, was not given one ruling in my favor by this political hack.
	But worse than him, if that's possible, was Letitia James, a corrupt and incompetent Attorney General, who only brought this case in order to hurt me politically.
	She's a Trump-dranged lunatic.
	I mean, so far, you can't really argue.
	They made me bond the outrageous sum, which never happened before and which cost me millions of dollars a month.
	It should never have been allowed to happen.
	And everyone knew it.
	Importantly, that vote was five to zero.
	I'm so honored by Justice David Friedman's great words of wisdom, which should be read by everyone.
	I'd also like to thank the court for having the courage to make this decision, which is already going to go down as one of the worst business persecutions in the history of our country.
	Sadly, there are other cases against me that are equally disgraceful.
	And here he points out the judge Juan Marchan, whose daughter collected millions of dollars in fees from crooked Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, that presumably with regard to the ruling on E. Jean Carroll and the suggestion that that President Trump was liable for some form of assault.
	And then he points out other judges that he doesn't like and all the rest.
	But the bottom line is a big victory for Trump.
	And every time you shoot at President Trump legally and you miss, it makes him stronger.
	I think there's a solid case to be made that the turning point in the 2024 election wasn't even the assassination attempt or even Joe Biden dropping out.
	It was the Mar a Lago raid.
	That Mar a Lago raid really turned the entire election on its head because people rightly believe that Trump was being politically persecuted.
	Eli Honig, who is the CNN legal analyst, certainly no ally of President Trump, he says this is clearly a big, big victory for Trump.
	This is a huge victory for Donald Trump, any way you cut it.
	And this is a stinging rebuke to the attorney General Letitia James.
	The finding here, it's a very long, complicated ruling, but the bottom line is while the finding of liability against Donald Trump can stand for now at least, the damages award, which started at $350 million with interest gets up close to $500 million, that is thrown out.
	And the core reason for that ruling, according to the judges, is essentially that there was not enough of a showing here that there were actual victims.
	And of course, that is right.
	That is correct.
	Well, while all of that is going on, and one of the things that the President Trump is, is he punches back always, always, always, always.
	And if you give him a tool, he's going to use it against you.
	There's no question about this.
	And so it is not a surprise, but I do not think it is a good thing that President Trump has now unleashed the FBI to raid the home of former Trump national security adviser, John Bolton, who's been, of course, quite critical of President Trump since he left working for his first administration.
	Now, again, perhaps there will be material to justify the raid.
	Maybe, maybe there will be.
	And if there is, then obviously the raid was well founded.
	If, however, this is basically the Mar-a-Lago raid, but against John Bolton that President Trump believes and the Trump administration believed that Trump was wrongly targeted by law enforcement.
	Therefore, he's going to turn around.
	He's going to target people who have been critical to him on TV.
	That, of course, is a major problem.
	Law enforcement should not be weaponized in this way by right or left.
	According to the New York Post, FBI agents raided the DC area home of President Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton, on Friday morning in a high profile national security probe.
	Federal agents went to Bolton's house in Bethesda, Maryland from 7 a.m. in an investigation ordered by FBI director Cash Patel.
	Cash Patel then put out a tweet saying, No one is above the law.
	FBI agents on a mission.
	The probe, which is said to involve classified documents, was first launched years ago.
	The Biden administration shut it down for political reasons, according to a senior US official.
	Bolton's ex account blast out a message at 7:32 a.m. criticizing Trump's approach to Russia's war on Ukraine as the FBI agents were inside his home.
	It's unclear whether that post was originally scheduled.
	That post said Russia has not changed its goal to drag Ukraine into a new Russian empire.
	Moscow has demanded that Ukraine see territory it already holds and the remainder of Donetsk, which it has been unable to conquer.
	Zelenskyy will never do so.
	Meanwhile, meetings will continue because Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, but I don't see these talks making any progress.
	Now Bolton was accused by the Trump administration, number one, of including classified information in his 2020 book called The Room Where It Happened.
	President Trump had fought to quash the publication over the inclusion of national secrets, saying that Bolton had signed an NDA as a condition of employment.
	Ultimately, he was unsuccessful and his own DOJ opened an inquiry into that book in September of 2020.
	And then apparently the Biden administration, when they came in, they basically said enough of that.
	This is one day after Cash Patel revealed that former FBI director James Comey had authorized leaks of classified documents while misleading Congress just before the 2016 elections.
	Now, again, some of these investigations I would assume are going to be well predicated.
	Some are not.
	I will say that the can of worms opened by the Biden administration in repeatedly targeting President Trump legally, the can of worms opened by the Obama administration in Russia Gate going after the Trump campaign., it weighs far worse than what happened with Watergate.
	That is open to can of worms.
	It's very hard to get that can of worms closed again once it has been opened.
	That does not mean that if this is not well founded, that if this is just a raid directed at political opponents, raids directed at political opponents are bad, point.
	They are bad whether it's a Republican targeting enemies or whether it's a Democrat targeting enemies.
	Now, I'm going to hold off judgment on whether that's happening right now because I don't know exactly what they are raiding yet.
	It's possible that all this is well predicated.
	We'll have to find out.
	But at the very least, it is not out of the realm of possibility that what we're watching here is a reactivity by the Trump administration that will not redound to its benefit.
	Political targeting is not something I think anyone in the country should be in favor of.
	And again, we'll have to see whether that's what's happening here or whether it's not.
	Well, one of the reasons I think that the Trump administration should not get itself enmeshed in anything that is questionable with regard to things like going after John Bolton, if there is nothing there.
	And again, there may very well be something there.
	I don't know.
	If there is nothing there, it's a distraction.
	This administration cannot afford distractions because again, the Democrats, they're going crazy right now and there is no reason to get in the way of your enemy hanging himself.
	When your enemy is in the middle of hanging himself, the first thing to do is not interrupt.
	And right now, Democrats seem to be going totally crazy.
	Gavin Newsom over in the state of California signed a bunch of bills on Thursday, according to the Washington Post, aimed at redrawing California's Congress.
	We are now destroying California's congressional maps as Democrats try to counter Republican driven efforts in Texas to remake its maps.
	Gavin Newsom said they fired the first shot.
	We wouldn't be here if Texas had not done what they did.
	Well, I mean, still, by the way, the population of in California that is Republican is underrepresented to a greater degree than the population of Texas that is Democrat that is underrepresented congressionally speaking.
	But this is all part and parcel of a broader left wing narrative that President Trump is Hitlerian, that we are living in nascent Nazi Germany and and all the rest.
	JB Pritzker, who again has to be lowered into the Capitol building by Crane in Illinois, he says that America is now like Nazi Germany or increasingly like Nazi Germany?
	I built a Holocaust Museum.
	And one thing about that experience that I can tell you, and I worked with Holocaust survivors for more than a decade to build this museum.
	One thing I learned in the process of that is that it doesn't take very long to tear apart a constitutional republic.
	Indeed, the Nazis did it in 53 days.
	And our democracy is almost as fragile.
	And we're seeing it right that right now.
	We're not even seeing anything remotely like that right now.
	First of all, it's ignorant of German history.
	The consolidation of extraordinary powers in the central government preceded Hitler.
	Actually, it went back to Bruning and Hitler.
	If you want to get more specific, the death of the Weimar Republic started years before Hitler actually took power, there was a gradual and then very, very quick erosion of the powers of the various principalities inside Germany.
	Not to get too abstruse about German history here, but that that is just a bad historical analogy.
	So here's the thing about redistricting and various states and how they work.
	Districts, congressional districts can be drawn in a wide variety of ways.
	And the imbalance is almost solely due to state legislatures that actually don't count the minority votes in a presidential election in a proportional way with their congressional seats.
	This is not rare at all.
	So I asked our friends and sponsors over a comment, please list the percentage of voters who voted for President Trump and the percentage of Republican congressional districts in the following states California, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Illinois, Delaware, and Maryland.
	In California, about 38.33 percent of voters voted for President Trump in the last congressional cycle.
	Only 21 percent of their districts, 11, are apparently Republican at this point in time.
	Believe it's lower now.
	I believe it's 9 in New York., 43% of voters voted for President Trump.
	Only 31% of their districts are Republican.
	In Connecticut, 42% of the vote went to President Trump.
	0% of their districts of their five districts are Republican.
	In New Jersey, 46% voted for Trump.
	33% of the districts are Republican.
	In Illinois, 44% voted for Trump.
	18% of the districts are Republican.
	Only three districts out of 17.
	And in Delaware, 42% voted for President Trump.
	Only zero districts are Republican.
	There's one district.
	It's totally Democratic, of course.
	In Maryland, 34% voted for President Trump.
	12.5% are Republican.
	So again, this idea that gerrymandering is unique Texas thing.
	How dare they?
	How dare Texas?
	Now, if you look at Texas, by the way, 42.4% of voters voted for Kamala Harris in Texas.
	And about 30% of the districts are Democrat in Texas right now.
	And after the adjustment, then that number will probably be about 25%, 23%, something like that.
	Meanwhile, Texas State Representative Nicole Collier is comparing Democrats fleeing Texas to black people fleeing slavery and Jews fleeing Nazis, which I can give you a couple of examples why that's not right.
	Number one, the Texas Democrats came back.
	So slaves who were fleeingeing Nazis did not head back into Berlin.
	So no on this.
	Chairman, are you aware that during slavery blacks fled?
	Are you aware that during the slavery times blacks fled?
	They ran away.
	I can't hear you very well.
	Are you aware that when there was slavery times, blacks fled.
	During the Nazi times, Jewish people fled.
	They fled their oppressor.
	Hmm.
	Well, um, I mean, keep going with this, I suppose.
	Yeah, Gavin Newsom wants to be the leader of the resistance.
	He's out there saying that we have to all wake up, wake up, be intense with hand motions, hand motions and wide eyes.
	Go, Gavin Newsom, go.
	It's all at stake.
	It's happening in real time.
	People need to wake up, need to open their eyes.
	He's rigging the 26 election before one vote is even cast.
	He's going after redistricting, not just mid-decade, but he's also talking about who should be included in the next census.
	Across the spectrum, these are acts of authoritarianism.
	Oh, my God.
	First of all, please clear your throat.
	For the love of God, if I have to listen to years of Gavin Newsom down.
	Seriously, dude, drink a cup of tea, grab a lozenge.
	The verbal grind is just too much for me.
	I can't.
	I cannot.
	But if this is the way the Democrats want to play it, I guess I suppose that they can.
	And the Democrats are in fact going crazier and crazier.
	There is a woman with a sign outside of a rally that was being held for Virginia for Virginia's lieutenant governor Winsome Sears, who is in fact black.
	She's running for governor of Virginia right now.
	And some crazy person held a sign outside her latest event saying, hey Winsome, if trans can't share your bathroom, then blacks can't.
	share my water fountain.
	So first of all, why are you threatening segregation?
	That seems bad.
	That seems kind of bad.
	I'm not sure why one follows the other.
	If, if men who believe they are women cannot enter women's bathrooms, then blacks should not be able to drink at your water fountain.
	It feels to me like you really just don't want black people drinking at your water fountain, is what it kind of sounds like right there.
	Well, joining me on the line is a young man named Matt Nuclear.
	You may know him from a clip that I played on the show just the other day in which he was going against Amanda Seals on this kind of crazy show that I've done before on YouTube called Jubilee.
	He was sitting ac opposite Mandiceals.
	He made her look pretty foolish because he was saying things that were true and she legitimately had no response.
	Matt happens to be eighteen years old.
	It was very impressive.
	Matt, thank you so much for taking the time.
	Really appreciate it.
	I I I am honored to be here, Ben.
	I am honored to be here.
	So first of all, I have to say, very impressive.
	What did you know going into the Jubilee debate and how had you kind of prepared for the moment with Mandiceals?
	Well, I've always been kind of interested in these conversations about black on black crime, gang violence, reparations and all these sorts of things that are a big topic, a big subject in the black community in general and in politics.
	I kind of had my kind of arguments already, um, you know, worked out.
	I already knew certain things that I wanted to go in there and say and make points of.
	Um, and so I kind of went in with the flow with those types of, uh, arguments.
	So you're eighteen, obviously, uh, you're black.
	And so there are a lot of questions that I think people have, you know, when, when there's a racial or ethnic minority who votes Republican, and this is happening a lot now.
	I mean, there's been a big movement in the black community, particularly among young men, towards the Republican Party, towards President Trump.
	It's happening with Hispanic young men.
	Obviously, I'm Jewish.
	Even the Jewish vote has been moving towards the Republicans and President Trump.
	You know, when this happens, people start asking the question, so what, what exactly is going on?
	Right.
	There's no generational difference between me and you.
	I remember when I was the eighteen year old Fiona, I'm now forty one.
	So tell me what exactly is happening among your peer group that is leading young men in particular and also young black men in particular to move toward President Trump?
	I think just the truth.
	I think going over data, going over the facts, understanding what is going on in America, understanding that the Democratic Party has been consistently lying to us in not giving us the truth on how to fix the issues within the black community.
	I'm continuously telling us that it's external oppression that we can't find.
	We can't find the laws that are systemically oppressing black people.
	We elected a black president, right?
	Barack Obama.
	The majority of Americans that were white voted for him.
	This country is not a majority racist country whatsoever.
	So when we see all of those facts and we see these disparities that still exist, we have to say that there's some other reason for these disparities other than just discrimination, because this is kind of like a presupposition that I think the left has a lot of the time is which if you see disparities between these ethnic groups, there must be some sort of discrimination.
	And so what I really wanted to ask her as well, what I did mention the median household income of East Asians, I wanted to ask her, are the East Asians oppressing the white people?
	Is that how they make more?
	Like, because that's the kind of thing.
	They make more.
	Or if you make less or whatever, you must be getting suppressed or oppressed or something like that, which I don't just buy into, right?
	So, I mean, that attitude, I think, obviously is a better attitude for the country generally.
	I think one of the worst things that's been happening, I do think it's happening on the left predominantly, but you're even seeing hints of it on the right are this sort of victim mentality where America is an oppressor country and it's somehow oppressing your particular identity group and therefore nobody can get ahead in America.
	It seems like more and more young people are rejecting that message, particularly young men, because the alternative is really, really enervating.
	It's basically saying to young people, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you work, you can't get ahead because there's some sort of shadowy conspiratorial force that is keeping you down.
	And what that shadowy conspiratorial force is may differ from sort of the left, broadly speaking, and a small segment of the right.
	But that it is a very enervating feeling for people.
	I think young people are rebelling against that.
	No, yeah, for sure.
	I think young people are rebelling against it.
	I think they should be rebelling against it because you can only hold up that lie for so long.
	You can only tell black Americans that the reason why they make less than white people or Hispanic people is because of the historical injustices for so long.
	I did mention to her as well that Chinese people went through the Rock Spring massacre in Wyoming in, I believe, was it 1861?
	They went through the Chinese Exclusion Act.
	They were only able to gain citizenship here in the country in 1943, yet they make the most amount of money, median household income.
	They don't commit a significant level of crime at all.
	Right?
	So I group actions and in group priorities, I also wanted to mention her gang crime.
	I mentioned her a prominent rapper who gained hundreds of millions of views talking about unaliving other black men.
	The BLM didn't come out for that.
	I mentioned KTS3, he was a black man who was unalived by other black men.
	No BLM came out for that.
	BLM relies on this narrative of white oppressor versus black slash brown victim.
	If that doesn't happen, then they don't come out.
	And they like to play this game where like, oh, it's only if cops do it.
	Well, Daniel Penney, when he, you know, unalived what's called Jordan Ely at the subway train where other people felt threatened, they called the cops as well and people helped him.
	BLM New York came out for that as well.
	And they were threatening white people, saying, you know, we need to protect ourselves from these weird white people.
	We just want to come attack us.
	You know what I mean?
	So yeah, I think this victim narrative is going to fade away.
	And of course, how she presented herself or responded to the arguments shows that she really doesn't know how to respond to these arguments.
	And she's really not answering the questions we want to ask.
	So Matt, you're 18 years old.
	What do you do next?
	I mean, are you planning on going to college?
	If so, where?
	What's the story?
	Yeah, I am thinking about going to college for sure.
	I've not truly made up my mind around that.
	But I have been, you know, doing these podcasts ever since this You Believe video released.
	I'm getting more and more into politics.
	I've been debating really for about three years.
	Like, I've had these discussions online with people for a decent amount of time, but I've only recently in the last, I believe, six months been doing TikTok debates where I have people come up and just debate me on like subjects like Israel and Palestine and a lot of these different subjects on the person who's very interested in politics.
	And yeah, I'm just interested in politics and just trying to get into the political sphere.
	I think one of the things that's changed for people of your generation as opposed to people of my generation, when I was growing up, there still was, although the internet was starting to blossom, a sort of legacy media domination that has totally ended.
	What is your typical news diet?
	How do you gather information?
	Well, I gather information by looking at all of the different sources online.
	I don't just look at one.
	If I'm looking at Reuters, I'll look at NPR, I'll look at AP News, I'll look at everyone and what they're saying.
	And it's not even just a source, it's what is the evidence for that source, which is also important.
	What is the primary information, what is the primary data that we can gather and we can look at?
	And I think this is what individuals should be focused on, is understanding the facts, not just reading headlines, but reading past the headlines, getting into the context and actually making their opinion, because I believe the majority of Americans don't really get that deep into understanding what goes on.
	The majority of Americans don't know the three branches of government and so many of these different things.
	So I think getting more involved and understanding context, understanding what is going on.
	and primary sources is a good way to go about research.
	So meanwhile, I saw that you got into a bit of a tet-a-tet with Rob Smith, who attacked you for the great crime of apparently your parents are from Angola, you grew up in Maine.
	Apparently, this means that your opinions are somehow not as relevant as a black American because you're of African extraction more recently.
	So what did you make of the criticism?
	Well, I thought it was pretty humorous.
	I thought it was pretty silly.
	I don't, I mean, I did used to watch, you know, Rob Smith as well.
	I thought he was a decent, you know, black Republican I used to look up to.
	But yeah, I didn't understand the attack.
	Like I was, I started, you know, I moved here when I was six years old and I was raised here.
	I've been here since I was six years old.
	I don't think my experience has been that much different from other black Americans because I was, you know, born in a state that is 90% white.
	And is that supposed to be a crime?
	I don't know why he why he mentioned that I was raised in Maine as if that's supposed to be a crime.
	Was I supposed to be raised in the south side of Chicago where there's a lot of gang crime because I happen to be black?
	Is that like the the thing here that he's trying to mention?
	Where was he raised?
	So it's I think it's pretty silly.
	I don't I don't I didn't like that.
	It kind of disappointed me a little bit that he said that, but yeah, it's just humorous.
	I think.
	Well, that is Matt Nuclear.
	You can go check out all of his work on X at Matt Nuclear.
	It's MAT one T nuclear.
	Go check it out right now.
	Again, I'm really impressed.
	I wouldn't have brought you on the show.
	It's pretty rare that I bring on someone of your age range on the show at all, Matt.
	So, you know, again, well done.
	I am so honored.
	I have to tell you, I am a big fan of you, Ben.
	I've been watching you for a very long time.
	I've always been a fan of your debates and the way that you articulate yourself.
	I believe you're the greatest political commentator we've seen in the last ten years, especially a conservative one.
	So I applaud you so much for bringing me on your show and I am very much honored.
	That's very kind of you.
	Thank you.
	But again, the insanity of the left knows very few boundaries and it is now extending to full scale speculation about President Trump's health.
	Lawrence O'Donnell, the long forgotten.
	man over at MSNBC.
	Yeah, he still has a show over there, believe it or not.
	Lawrence O'Donnell, who is beginning to, I have to say, he looks more and more like a character from one of the Lego movies.
	Like he just, in terms of head shape and all this.
	Anyway, he says that there is a gigantic Trump health cover-up that is happening before our eyes.
	Donald Trump did nothing today.
	He wasn't publicly seen anywhere today.
	Perhaps because his 79-year-old swollen ankles are bothering him, or maybe he just couldn't really walk or stand up very long today, something like that.
	Who knows?
	We don't know.
	Maybe he couldn't speak coherently today.
	Maybe it was one of those days.
	Actually, we do know about that.
	Donald Trump has never had a single day in his life as a politician when he could speak coherently about anything.
	That is a cognitive test that Donald Trump began publicly failing 14 years ago at age 65 in 2011 when he started lying about President Obama's birth certificate.
	So I'm noticing your attempts to sort of launder the Biden actuality into a narrative about Trump is going to fail, particularly because we just keep finding out more details like the fact that apparently everybody who is close to President Biden was not all that close.
	Like they kept him at arm's length because he was senile in the backroom drooling into a cup.
	Apparently, according to Representative James Comer, who runs the House Oversight Committee, Ian Sams, who is a supposed close advisor to President Biden and who vouched for his health many, many times, apparently he only met Joe Biden in person two times during his entire presidency.
	Ian Sams, who was the White House spokesperson.
	For a significant amount of Joe Biden's time as president interacted with him two times.
	Two times.
	So, you know, we're going to continue to bring people in.
	And again, this person, Ian Sams, is the one that would counter everything.
	Robert Herr, or anytime anyone would suggest that Joe Biden wasn't mentally fit, he would say, no, he's at the top of his game.
	He tweeted out several times.
	He gave interviews on MSNBC.
	Every time I've interacted with the president, he was sharp.
	He asked great questions.
	In there, under oath, he interacted with the president two times the entire time.
	Yeah, well, that's not a good look at all.
	It's Representative James Comer from Kentucky.
	So again, Democrats are in real trouble.
	So what could save them, as always has always, the possibility of an economic downturn.
	I can keep saying this until I go blue in the face.
	Bad economic policy does have downstream ramifications.
	I understand that a lot of people are currently trying to talk themselves into the proposition that a radical increase, a radical escalation in tariff activities will have no impact whatsoever.
	I have yet to see a situation where a radical escalation in tariff policy did not have downstream effects.
	Now, maybe this will be the exception.
	Maybe somehow because of all the various cross current investment in AI and the interest rates possibly being lowered by the Fed, maybe it turns out that this is the exception.
	But it's an awful risk, Vader.
	Right now, the United States is about to dump a 50% tariff on India.
	Now, to be fair, we actually the amount of product trade with India is somewhat limited.
	According to the New York Times, there's about $46 billion that we have as a deficit in goods that we ran with Indian companies in 2024.
	Most of the stuff that we do with India at this point is in the services industry.
	Presumably that will not be hit by tariffs at this point, at least not yet.
	And that is the great fear is that eventually these tariffs move over to the services industry.
	But if you are seeking to box in China and you want to make the iPhone somewhere else, it's not going to get made in the United States.
	It was going to be made in India, but if you tariff everything coming in from India at 50%, it won't get made there either.
	And you're going to raise the prices on American consumers.
	Here is Peter Navarro, the president's trade advisor, who again is just, oh, yeah, yeah, not good, not good at all, talking about the magic of tariffs on India.
	The doubling of tariffs at 50% is supposed to take place August 27, just six days from now.
	Yeah.
	You see that taking place?
	I see that taking place.
	India doesn't appear to want to recognize its role in the blockade.
	The bloodshed, it simply doesn't.
	Okay, now let's be clear about this.
	Navarro would be in favor of these tariffs whether or not India were buying oil from Russia.
	And it makes very little sense to me to go after India with regard to Russian oil, unless we're going to offer them carrots like American LNG on the other end of that.
	What we really ought to be doing is using our massive advantage in natural resources in order to undercut the Russian market.
	Even if that causes a loss to us, we should be doing that because getting the world off the addiction to Russian oil would be excellent.
	That would be excellent foreign policy.
	That is a better move than effectively alienating the Indians who right now are or could at least be a bulwark against Chinese predaceans.
	Again, things are very complicated.
	China happens to be pretty close to Pakistan.
	We fund Pakistan.
	We happen to have some counter terrorism operations with Pakistan.
	Pakistan is a fairly radical state to say the very least.
	We also have a relationship with India.
	And so there are a lot of sort of trilateral arrangements happening in that area of the world.
	But alienating India doesn't seem like smart foreign policy to me.
	Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pledged to protect his domestic producers no matter the cost.
	Apparently, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, President Trump tends to approach issues with other countries primarily with a bilateral focus and largely in the context of a particular set of concerns.
	He is concerned about India's high barriers to trade and the significant US trade deficit with India.
	So what exactly is going to happen here?
	Well, it's possible that he reacts back down.
	The reaction in India apparently has been multifaceted initially because the government of India felt the parties were close to announcing a trade deal.
	The reaction was one of surprise.
	There were additional issues to address.
	More recently, when the president announced the threatened imposition of a 25% additional tariff on august 27, India's Ministry of External Affairs called it unfair, unjustified and unreasonable and asserted that India will take all necessary steps to protect its own national interests.
	But the United States is India's largest and most important trading partner.
	So maybe we can leverage them.
	With that said, can there be a win-win here?
	A win-win would be better than simply leveraging India at this point because India is a growing economy.
	India is the most populous nation on Earth.
	India is or could be a bulwark against China as well as against Islamic fascism.
	Now wooing India with carrots rather than sticks if possible seems to me a better policy.
	Now, meanwhile, apparently, Boeing is in talks to sell China hundreds of planes as part of a US trade deal.
	This according to the Wall Street Journal, US passenger jet orders are becoming a favorite concession for countries looking to improve tariff terms from American authorities and this sort of trade corporatism.
	Again, this is just mercantilism.
	I'm not a huge fan.
	And it seems to me that selling, you know, high-tech airplanes to China, I'm not sure why we are doing that.
	If we wish to box them in, then we should just box them in.
	That should be the move that we are attempting.
	And the reason all of this matters, of course, is because on the other end of any sort of economic downturn stands the Democratic Party of Zoran Mamdani.
	And believe you me, the...
	And again, I don't think everything they're doing is corporatist.
	A lot is free market oriented, but the part that is corporatist is going to be trumped by the full scale socialist slash communistic policies of the Democratic Party moving in Zorin Mamdani's direction.
	Zorin Mamdani spent this week trying to rail at hotel workers for refusing to use union labor.
	When they reopened this hotel last October, they did it without the union workers.
	And we know what that is.
	It's two words.
	Union busting.
	And it may go unnoticed in another city, but this city right here is a union town.
	I don't care if you bring a garbage truck to drown ourselves.
	You will still hear our calls no matter what floor of this hotel you are on.
	Shame on Missouri.
	Let every worker come back to continue to serve this hotel in the ways they did for years.
	Okay, so good luck to New Yorkers and good luck to the United States.
	If there's an economic downturn, it's going to be this guy's party that rises, which is indeed.
	quite scary.
	Well, one of the other things that could cause the Democratic Party to rise is just generalized Republican stupidity.
	So there has always been a problem with the Republican Party.
	There has been a belief among traditional conservativesives that the Democratic Party could be termed in many cases the evil party and the Republican Party could be termed the stupid party.
	And the problem is that when you say dumb things and when you elevate dumb people, what you end up doing is creating fodder for your opposition.
	What the American people want is a policy moderation that is incrementalist in its implementation from the federal level.
	They may want to be more conservative on their state level or local level.
	Or maybe you're in California and you want to be a lib, but on a federal level, what Americans really want is predictability, stability, incrementalism.
	That is the thing generally that they want.
	Now, there may be some serious moves that have to be made.
	The Trump administration is making them to reverse decades of actual radicalism by the Democratic Party.
	But what nobody wants, you can see this in the Democratic Party, what people do not want is wild insanity.
	The Democratic Party was damaged by the trans issue because they took a full scale insane position, a full scale insane position, which is that boys can be girls, and everyone looked at that, moderates, even some Democrats, and said, Anyone who says that is crazy, association with that position is nuts.
	And so we're not going to do that.
	We're just not interested in anything of that.
	Well, the same thing can be true on the Republican side of the aisle.
	If Republicans elevat figures who are in fact unintelligent, who say crazy things who make claims that are untrue on a repeated basis.
	If they do that, there will be a reaction to that by the general body politics, which is why we have started here at the Ben Shapiro Show something that we are calling the Billy Madison Award.
	It doesn't apply just to people on the right.
	We're going to be using this repeatedly.
	The Billy Madison Award goes to politicians, political figures, commentators who say some of the most insanely idiotic things that we have ever heard, in which at no point in their rambling incoherent responses were they even close to anything that could have been considered irrational thought.
	Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it.
	The Billy Madison Award is designed So that you can know, the audience can know, everyone can see that there are certain people who might not actually be worth listening to because they say dumb things on the regular.
	They say unintelligent things on the regular, uninformed things.
	And when those things are promoted as sort of factually based or intelligent, then the world gets dumber as a result.
	Well, today's inaugural Billy Madison Award goes to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
	Now, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene originally became famous because she said a bunch of dumb crap and Democrats decided that they were going to target her specifically for this.
	And because we live in an incredibly reactionary political moment.
	The right immediately said, well, if the Democrats hate her, then she must be awesome.
	And it turns out that two things can be true at once.
	One, the Democrats hate her.
	And two, she's not particularly bright.
	And not only is she not particularly bright, she is wildly disinformed at best.
	I'm not going to go to motivations or why she says what she says.
	All I'm going to point out is that if you use Marjorie Taylor Greene as your source of verifiable or verified information, that is a category error.
	This is not a person who is reliable when it comes to the fact.
	And let's just say that many of her political positions are at best disinformed.
	And so when people treat her with a great deal of seriousness, I'm just wondering why, like truly why, to understand what I mean by this.
	And she's appeared, I know, in a number of podcasts, including people with whom I'm, I'm friends.
	I'm just going to say that, you know, taking her at face value, you would not allow this person to be your child's fifth grade social studies teacher.
	You wouldn't because at least if you want your kid no social studies or history or anything.
	Just a few brief indicators before we get into why she's being named the inaugural Billy Madison Award Award winner this week.
	You will recall that she is a person who literally did not know the difference between the Gestapo meaning like the German secret police and gazpacho, like the cold vegetable soup often served in Spain and Portugal during the summer months.
	This is from 2022.
	This is the person who we are supposed to believe is a leading light.
	By the way, a massive critic of President Trump.
	It should be noted that she is constantly attempting to claim her loyalty to President Trump.
	She spent nothing but the last six months basically ripping on many of Trump's policy moves ranging from the bombing of Iran to Epstein.
	Anyway, here she was in 2022 talking about, you know, Nazi soup or something.
	Not only do we have the DC jail, which is the DC gulag, but now we have Nancy Pelosi's Gazpacho police spying on members of Congress, spying on the legislative work that we do, spying on our staff and spying on American citizens that want to come talk to their representatives.
	I'm only pointing that out because this is the kind of error that she makes fairly routinely.
	And that says something.
	I mean, first of all, Gazpacho police, do they provide the gazpacho or do they take away the gazpacho?
	Nobody actually really knows.
	And of course, she has a long history of foolish commentary ranging from 2018 where she made a wide variety.
	This is before she was in Congress.
	Of course, she's been in Congress since 2021 where she has co-sponsored zero pieces of actual legislation that have passed zero.
	So very useful.
	And, um, and you know, her commentary includes things like in 2018.
	Sort of bizarre notions about Jewish space lasers and such in which she said, quote, as there are now over seventy people confirmed dead and over one thousand missing.
	The fires in California are a horrific tragedy.
	I'm praying for all involved.
	And, um, then she goes on a long rant about various solar projects.
	And she says.
	At some point, I'm posting this in speculation because there are too many coincidences to ignore and just putting it out there from some research I've done stemming from my curiosity over PG and E stocks, which tanked all week, then rallied Thursday night after California officials announced they would not let PG and E fail.
	I find it very interesting.
	Roger Kimmel on the board of directors of PG and E is also vice chairman of Rothschild Inc., international investment banking firm.
	I also find interesting the long history of financial contributions PG and E has made to Jerry Brown over the years.
	It must be a coincidence that the fires are burning in the same projected area that the 77 billion dollar high-speed rail project is to be built, which happens to be Governor Brown's pet project.
	And then she says, the idea is clean energy to replace coal and oil.
	If they are beaming the sun's energy back to Earth, I'm sure they would never miss a transmitter, receiving station, right?
	I mean, mistakes are never made when anything new is invented.
	What would that look like anyway?
	A laser beam or light beam coming down to Earth, I guess.
	Could that cause a fire?
	Hmm, I don't know.
	So, um, yeah, solid take there.
	Obviously, that one was pretty famous, the Jewish space laser stuff.
	Of course, she was a backer of QAnon conspiracy theories.
	She has made comments about 911 truthing.
	That is not a gigantic shock, of course.
	Here she was in 2018 at the American Priority Conference.
	But we had witnessed 911, right?
	We had witnessed 911, the terrorist attack in New York and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania and the so-called plane that crashed into the Pentagon.
	It's odd.
	There's never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon.
	But anyways, I won't, I'm not going to dive into the 911 conspiracy.
	Okay.
	So this is a very highly respected person.
	She has also suggested that school shootings have been false flags for gun control.
	She said this in 2018.
	And of course, in 2022, she spoke at an event with Nick Fuentes at AFPAC, the American First PAC, which is of course a white nationalist group.
	And then she suggested just a few months ago, actually, that Israel assassinated JFK.
	So that's who we're talking about here.
	Now, the reason this comes up is because she was on Megan Kelly show.
	Again, I think Megan's great.
	Megan is a tremendous broadcaster.
	She made a bunch of comments in Marjorie Taylor Greene that are truly ridiculous and they sort of went unchallenged, but they ought to be called out because they're quite stupid.
	And I make this point because, again, she's getting an awful lot of attention recently.
	And we should just point out when Billy Madison like politicians are making the rounds.
	So here she was claiming that in America it is illegal to burn an American flag, which is not only untrue, it is ridiculously untrue.
	In fact, you can burn an American flag, you can burn Israeli flag, you can burn Mexican flag, you can burn any flag you want in the United States.
	What you can't actually do, and the thing that she is apparently referring to, is a judgment from Washington, DC, in which someone tried to strangle someone using an Israeli flag, which is illegal because you can't strangle people.
	That's it, but but here she was saying silly things.
	Just like the same exception that Israel has that this just came from Judge McFadden.
	He just had a ruling that you can burn any flag in the United States of America, including our own American flag, except you can't burn the Israeli flag of America.
	Who said that?
	Judge McFadden.
	In what context?
	In his court.
	It just happened.
	Well, that's not going to be upheld.
	It shouldn't be.
	That's a violation of the First Amendment, blatant, and it will be struck down as soon as it goes up in appeal.
	What a ridiculous notion.
	Should be.
	He said, and what he wrote is that the Israeli flag, it's an identity erase, and it would be a heavy crime.
	Wrong.
	Yes.
	Wrong.
	That's getting struck down.
	Okay, so that's not what the judge said.
	What the judge actually said is that if you purposely tank an Israeli flag around a Jewish person's neck, that that is indeed a evidence of discrimination.
	Now, you can make the claim that judge is wrong and overstepping, that's fine.
	But the claim that it is somehow weirdly illegal to burn an Israeli flag in the United States is not true.
	By the way, I'm in favor of a flag burning amendment, but only about the American flag.
	I think you should not be allowed to burn an American flag in the United States.
	I think it's ridiculous.
	So she claims that APAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, controls Congress.
	This claim is frequently made by people who have conspiratorial feelings about shadowy figures influencing the American Congress.
	It can't be that many Republicans just are pro-Israel.
	It has to be that Jew money.
	It has to be that APAC money that's making it happen.
	So we have tons of lobbyists and that foreign countries lobbyists that come to Washington, DC.
	Pretty much every country has.
	some sort of representative.
	They have an ambassador they send to Washington.
	It's naturally in their interest.
	We can understand that.
	They also are required to register under FARA.
	It's a law.
	They have to register as a foreign agent, a foreign lobbyist.
	That is required.
	It's extremely important.
	Here's the difference with APAC.
	APAC is not registered under FARA, under this law that requires anyone coming to lobby a member of Congress or a senator or department of the government and the federal government on behalf of another country.
	So APAC argues, oh, but we're Americans.
	Yes, they are Americans, but they are coming to Congress and to the federal government asking on behalf of the country of Israel.
	Okay, first of all, that is not remotely true, actually.
	That is just factually false.
	So whatever you think of APAC, and I've had many criticisms of APAC, including the fact that APAC in 2015, as a good rebuttal to everything she just said, in 2015, APAC had the opportunity to push against the Obama nuclear deal.
	And because they wanted to maintain friendly relations with the Democrats, they basically didn't.
	And by the way, Israel was very much opposed to the Iran nuclear deal at the time.
	So, by the way, is President Donald J. Trump.
	She, of course, has been very antagonistic toward President Trump.
	and his approach to Iran.
	APAC is an American funded group, meaning it's all American, meaning people who have an interest in American-Israeli relations sometimes give money to APAC.
	Full disclosure, I've never given money to APAC.
	I've never received money from APAC, contrary to a bunch of lies out there from, you know, people who like to claim that every Jew is somehow in the pay of APAC.
	APAC is actually historically a relatively ineffectual organization with a moderate size budget.
	By this, I mean that they are ranked in American political terms in terms of lobbying groups, 199th in America in terms of the size of the lobbying group.
	They're fully funded by Americans to the tune of about fifty million dollars.
	And there are other foreign interest lobbies, lobbies meaning, you know, other lobbies funded by Americans, seeking better relations with foreign nations, like for example the US India Business Council, which is funded to the tune of over two hundred million dollars a year, or the US Saudi councils, which represent hundreds of millions of dollars, or UK US parliamentary groups.
	Hey, by the way, worth noting that when it comes to quote unquote foreign lobbying money, Israel barely charts.
	China has spent since 2016, 460 million dollars on lobbying in the United States.
	Japan has spent 410 million dollars.
	Liberia has spent 353 million dollars.
	This according to Open Secrets.
	South Korea has spent 320 million dollars.
	Saudi Arabia has spent 310 million dollars.
	Qatar has spent 256 million dollars.
	The Marshall Islands has spent 286 million dollars.
	The AAE has spent 242 million dollars.
	APAC's total lobbying spend since 2016 is 134 million dollars, and they are domestically based.
	And then, of course, she claimed that people are being paid for visits to Israel.
	Oh, no, people are being paid.
	Okay, so first of all, untrue.
	Congress people all the time go on foreign junkets.
	It is a thing.
	In fact, Congress people just went on for a congressional delegation to visit Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in April of 2025.
	Senator Joni Ernst and Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz traveled to the United Arab Emirates that same month.
	Representative Stacey Plaskett visited Qatar in 2022.
	It's very, very common.
	But apparently it's some sort of nefarious payment buy off, what that people are going to flip their position on Israel because they got a plane trip to Israel.
	Strange.
	APAC takes every single that they can freshman member of Congress or first year in Congress, they take them on a very special trip to Israel in August.
	That's our August is our recess.
	It's our month-long district work period.
	Is it the Dems and Republicans or just Republicans?
	They take both of them.
	Yes.
	And they invite pretty much everyone, to my knowledge.
	So they take them on this trip to Israel.
	They I guess they go on tours.
	I'll run.
	I didn't go, so I don't know what they do there, but they take them on tours.
	Like the pictures we've seen recently of the Speaker and other members of Congress at the Wailing Wall.
	They've all gone.
	They've all gone.
	And they wear the kippa.
	And even though they're Christians, they're not, they're not Jewish attire and they're at these Jewish religious sites.
	Then they also meet with different members of the Israeli government.
	Now we got to recognize the Israeli government is secular.
	This is not the biblical Israel.
	It is the secular government of Israel.
	And so they meet with their members of, you know, all throughout their government and the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, meets with them.
	And so they've done that trip already this month.
	Oh my goodness.
	You mean that people go on a trip to a foreign country and they meet with the foreign leader there?
	Why, that's shocking, except that that happens all the time.
	As far as this notion, okay, can I speak to this?
	notion that everybody who goes to the Western Wall has to wear a kipa?
	First of all, it's dumb.
	If you're not Jewish, don't wear a kipa.
	Like you just shouldn't.
	It's like, I think it's a really, really dumb thing.
	However, I should point out here that there are many holy sites all around the world where when people visit, they wear particular attire.
	Now, the kipa is not mandated.
	It isn't.
	But when, when you go to the Golden Temple in India, people are supposed to wear modest attire.
	If you're going to a mosque, you're supposed to wear modest attire.
	When you go to the Vatican, you're supposed to wear modest attire.
	Right?
	This, this bizarre idea that if you go to Israel and then you go visit the Western Wall, no one is making these politicians wear a yamaka, by the way.
	Like no one.
	I know because I've been with politicians in that area and they've asked me, do I, do I need to wear a ki kipa?
	And I always say to them, of course not.
	You're not saying a bracha and you're not Jewish.
	So no, you don't.
	A bracha is Hebrew for a blessing.
	But the idea here is supposed to be that somehow the Jews are forcing the Jew hat on people.
	Just ridiculous, ridiculous stuff.
	And then finally, she suggested, of course, that America's economic problems are because of American aid to Israel.
	Now, I've made the case for years and years that Israel should get off American aid.
	I think it'd be better for America.
	I think it'd be better for Israel.
	The reason that I think it would be better for Israel is because that American aid comes with extraordinary strings.
	And when Democrats are in power, they use those strings against Israel, which is what Joe Biden actually did.
	If you take a look at what the.
	United States, what we get for that aid, we get military cooperation, we get intelligence cooperation.
	Now, maybe you get that in absence of that, but one of the things America does is we subsidize Israel to buy American military weaponry, and then we get the Israeli upgrades to that weaponry.
	So, for example, our F-35 pilots wear helmets, those helmets can see over the horizon.
	That is Israeli tech developed by the Israelis.
	America has access to that tech because of the aid package that we have with the state of Israel.
	We have the greatest intelligence sharing with Israel of any other country on Earth, as far as I know, largely because of that aid package.
	America, in other words, pays Israel also not to develop its own technology and then sell it abroad.
	Back in the 1980s, Israel was developing its own military jet.
	That military jet was called the Levi.
	There was concern in the American military complex that the Levi was actually a threat and a rival to the F-16.
	And so what did America do?
	We gave aid to Israel and then we made a deal with Israel where Israel could make upgrades to the F-16 and we would have access to the kind of technological upgrades available to the F-16, which means that both countries benefit.
	But it also means that Israel is locked out of international markets with regard to virtually all military developments except for some of the dronesone technology at this point.
	But according to Marjorie Taylor Greene, apparently it's just charity that's bankrupting the United States.
	That $3.3 billion that we allow Israel to buy military equipment from and then mandate it to be spent in the United States, it's bankrupting the United States.
	Despite the fact that we are spending on the order of seven trillion dollars, actually, and that $3.3 billion, again, you can make the case that we shouldn't be spending it, but the idea that that is what's bankrupting the United States is totally insane.
	What you are talking about here is 0.04 percent of the American budget every year.
	Anyway, here is Marjorie Taylor Greene saying silly things.
	If you look at Israel, you have to recognize in the context of these conversations, not only are they such a strong economic country, not only have they proven that their military can almost, they're annihilating their enemy almost completely.
	They're going to finish the job.
	And they're saying they're going to finish the job.
	They also have nuclear weapons.
	This is a nuclear-armed nation.
	So you're saying you agree with all that, but we, they got it.
	I'm saying America is a sinking ship.
	We're sinking so badly.
	Our children have no hope of ever buying a home in the future.
	We pass a budget that is overblown and ridiculous every single year and we are dragging our we're going to be 37 now.
	It'll be 40 trillion in a matter of who knows months or whatever.
	Okay, so bottom line here with Marjorie Taylor Greene.
	I'm only pointing this out because it got an outsized amount of attention on X, but this is not a person who has wildly intelligent things to say.
	This is not an authoritative source on pretty much anything.
	And if the Republican Party continues to elevate people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, my assumption is that there will be an electoral price to pay because if the Democratic Party pays an electoral price for elevating their most radical and kind of nutty members, I assume the same will happen with the Republican Party.
	All right.
	Coming up here on the Ben Shapiro Show, We will get to the latest in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin being rather intransigent.
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