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Aug. 25, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:49
Mamdani Can't LIFT...Plus Democrats Unleash Their 2028 CONTENDER?
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Zoromon Dani apparently cannot lift like one of those shake weights.
And we now have a video of it and it's pretty impressive.
Democrats are starting to retail the person who they think is their front runner for 2028.
And all updates from Russia, Ukraine.
First, we've been rolling out a lot of new content over the Daily Wire Plus Journey to the UFC, Dr. Jordan Peterson's Answer the Call, Michael Molles' new documentary series The Pope and the Führer, the Isabelle Brown Show premiering September 8.
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We're bringing back the whole crew for a brand new show.
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September 10.
We celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Daily Wire, 10 years of leftist tears, new shows, big moves, bigger targets.
And first up is our newest show, Friendly Fire.
We're on the show.
This is it.
No shape words, no moderator.
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We're celebrating our first decade and kicking off the next 10 years by doing what we do best.
It's really true.
Picking arguments, starting fights, and filming the whole thing.
This is enough small talk, I think.
I'm getting a little hungry.
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Oh my god.
I think we do need a moderator, just a programming note.
September 10th on Daily Wire.
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Well, perhaps Democrats are learning that soy is actually not an amazing nutritional base for all things.
They might be learning this from Zoran Mombani, who is of course the likely next mayor of New York City.
Now, Democrats have been claiming that he's the hot new thing in the Democratic Party that Zoran Mombani is going to lead the way to a bright new socialist future for America, starting with the most powerful financial capital on planet Earth.
But if we're talking about power, we're talking about socialist strong men.
Zorin Mamdani, it's going to be, it's going to be hard pressed, no pun intended to actually be a strong man, pun intended.
Zorin Mamdani yesterday showed up at the annual Men's Day Open Streets event in Brooklyn on Saturday where a bunch of dudes were lifting apparently and the 33-year-old socialist, again, he's 33, which is like young in the prime of life.
He tried to bench.
Now, my dude, my dude, let me just say that if you're going to do something like this and you're a public figure, you have to know your limitations.
Like Zorin Mamdani must have at some point been in a gym.
I mean, I assume maybe not given how this video.
went.
But if you don't know how much you can bench, this is not a great time to try it out.
It's like in front of a giant crowd of people in the middle of a mayoral race.
So he shows up and he takes a couple of 45s, like two plates, and he stacks them on the bar.
So this is maybe 135 pounds total.
And now let's just be clear.
A decent bench for a man is his own body weight.
And that's like a decent bench for a man.
Zar Mandani, I assume weighs more than 135 pounds.
Maybe not, but I assume that he does.
135 pounds is not a lot of weight, like not a lot of weight at all.
I'm not a bench press enthusiast.
For the record, I maxed out at around 200 pounds.
I'm not like an amazing bench press connoisseur.
Even I can lift 135 pounds probably 15 times because that's not a lot of weight.
Zorin Mandani, it doesn't go well.
Here's how it went in Brooklyn.
He has to have this guy.
cheering him.
He gets, uh, he gets two very assisted, very, very assisted bench presses at 135 pounds.
So, um, that that's not, that's not great.
Well, Mayor Eric Adams and ex Governor Andrew Cuomo, both of whom lift pounced on the opportunity.
According to the New York Post, Mayor Adams went to the same exact event and then proceeded to just knock out a bunch of 135 pound lifts.
He then called him mom scrawny as opposed to mom Donnie.
The only thing he can lift is your taxes.
Andrew Cuomo said it's easy to talk.
It's hard to carry the burden.
He provided no evidence of his own bench press prowess in his expos, but you know, I assume that Andrew Cuomo can lift a little bit.
His brother Chris Cuomo is very big into into lifting.
Also, Mom Dani literally had to take off his designer boots to kick a stranger's soccer ball at an inflatable target.
So here, here's the thing.
Yeah, I think that for the vast majority of normal men, this is very, very embarrassing.
But the left has decided that they are done with male normality, like really done with it, that the future of the Democratic Party is apparently going to be an extraordinarily feminized party, not just because.
an outsized share of Democrats are now single women, but also because the kinds of men the Democratic Party wants to attract are not the kinds of men who lift heavyweights.
This is why you've seen over the course of the last several years a spate of articles talking about how lifting going to the gym has become Republican coded.
Well, there's no reason it should be Republican coded, except if you just mean that testosterone is Republican coded.
That the idea that you should stay healthy and that you should lift is Republican coded.
And that goes to why do you want a sort of weak and feminized America?
Why do you?
I mean, the media clearly do.
There's a piece from Axios that is kind of fascinating about the supposed redefinition of identity under President Trump.
And there's something very telling about it, how they see identity.
Cite, through immigration crackdowns and cultural purges, President Trump is wielding government power to enforce a more rigid, exclusionary definition of what it means to be American.
The MAGA movement's obsession with American identity and Western civilization is shaping federal policy far more than in Trump's first term, fueling a reckoning over who belongs and what history should be remembered.
So first of all, why shouldn't we all be a little obsessed with American identity and Western civilization?
I thought that's what America is about, like what it means to be American an American.
And a huge part of that is being the apoteosis of Western civilization.
And what are we supposed to represent?
Non-Western civilizations, third world civilizations, other civilizations, like what?
What is the implication?
According to Axios, however, in MAGA's telling, America is the heir to ancient European civilizations built on a Judeo Christian foundation of white identity, meritocracy, traditional gender roles and the nuclear family.
Notice how they just slide in white identity.
Right now, the idea of a Judeo Christian foundation of white identity is a bizarre amalgam of two exclusive beliefs.
A Judeo Christian identity is absolutely by definition not white identity.
By definition it is not.
Look at the history of the church.
Look at the history of the Catholic Church.
Look at the history of Protestantism.
Look at the billions of Christians all over the planet Earth.
And you tell me, are they all white?
Are they?
Because I don't think so.
Judaism is a Middle Eastern religion.
It began in Israel.
Like what, what, what are you, what are you talking about?
How is a Judeo Christian foundation white identity?
Monoteistic religion is by its very nature non racially based.
It is bizarre to suggest that Judeo Christian religion is biblical values are somehow about racial identity, about whiteness or something like that is Axios fundamentally making a gigantic category error.
But in order to throw the baby out with the bathwater, they basically have to call all this racist.
Meritocracy also apparently is about racism.
You cannot simultaneously hold two beliefs, a belief one in meritocracy and two a belief in white identitarism.
Those two things are not compatible because if you are for a meritocracy that by definition means that the person who is most meritorious regardless of color is the person who should get the job, who should advance in society.
Meritocracy and white identity.
These two things mutually exclusive, biblical values, white identitarianism, mutually exclusive.
Now, traditional gender roles, that is a part of Judeo Christian foundations.
That is a true part of biblical belief.
It's also traditional gender roles, a foundational part of science, because it happens to be the case that men and women are different, which is why dudes this morning are making fun of Zoran Mamdani for not being able to lift as much as the pregnant lady would.
It's kind of funny, right?
There is something bizarrely effeminate about Mamdani's performance in.
governments in the New York mayoral primaries.
There just is and it's strange and it's weird and maybe democrats love it.
Maybe they're very into the sort of androgyny of the Zorn Mom Dani candidacy, but okay, that is a violation of traditional gender norms in many different ways.
And the nuclear family, I I was unaware that somehow this is bad.
Why, why is, why are, why is the nuclear family somehow bad?
American identity, you're telling me, has nothing to do with biblical values, meritocracy, traditional gender roles and the nuclear family.
That comes as a shock to literally every one of the founders, all of them.
These tenets, according to Axios, are cast as universal truths and mantras such as America is an idea or diversity is our strengths are dismissed as liberal fictions.
Well, hope up a second.
America is an idea is not mutually exclusive with biblical values, traditional gender roles, meritocracy and the nuclear family.
Those are all ideals.
Those are all ideas.
Those are things that we enact in our daily life, but look how Axios has to throw all of it to the wind, right?
That Axios is expressing the traditional left wing view of what it means to be an American.
Because the reverse apparently is what it means.
Apparently, no Judeo Christian foundations to our civilization.
No Western civilization at the foundation of America.
No meritocracy, no traditional gender roles and no nuclear family, which is kind of saying the quiet part out loud.
I mean, I did write an entire book on this.
Okay.
Lions and Scavengers is legitimately about the desire by so many to tear away at the fundamental foundations of a successful civilization.
And it is about tearing away traditional gender roles and the nuclear family and the meritocracy and biblical values.
That is what the book is about.
Okay.
So not that I was pressured, but like it's all in the book.
But this does speak to the Democratic Party and the move to the left that is being fostered by, again, this sort of a feat set of liberals at places like Axios or apparently in the New York City primary.
But by the way, the results of this are very clear.
If you get rid of things like biblical values, traditional masculinity, the nuclear family, what do you end up with?
You end up with a bunch of rootless and useless young adults already coming up.
Young American adults apparently are not getting married, they're not having kids, things are not going amazing.
Plus, Wes Moore, is he going to be the Democrats' 2028 nominee and President Trump is going to send troops into Chicago?
How's that going to work?
Get to all that in a minute.
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Axios, not apparently spoting the irony, same day has a piece titled America's Young People Are Delaying Adulthood Milestones.
Why, I can't imagine why young adults are pushing back the big milestones Americans have historically associated with growing up, moving out of your parents' house, getting a job, getting married and having kids.
Now, again, all of those things are associated with precisely the American values that Axios is condemning the Trump administration for promoting.
Biblical values involve, like as in the book of Genesis, you will leave your mother and your father and you will cling to your wife.
That is one of the fundamental hallmarks of becoming a man is you leave your parents and you leave their house.
and then you get married and you cling to your wife and you form your own family unit.
That's a biblical value.
It is also a traditional stepping stone of the meritocracy because it turns out that moving out of the house, getting a job, getting married, these are the ways that you elevate yourself in any free society.
Married people tend to make more money than single people.
For example, having kids is the way that you mature.
The nuclear family is the way that you build a next generation.
So when you tear away at the fundamental values of all of your institutions, of all of your ideas and ideals, what you end up with is a bunch of young adults who are completely absent atomized and useless.
You might say like Zoran Mumdani, who's a 33-year-old socialist who's never held a real job but soon will be the mayor of the financial capital of planet Earth.
According to Axios in 1975, about half of America's 25 to 34-year-olds had done all of those things, moved out of their parents' house, gotten a job, got married, and had kids.
Fifty years later, less than a quarter have, according to a census working paper out this month.
The way young people think about marriage and family is changing.
It used to be the first step of adulthood with financial security and an established career potentially coming after a wedding.
Now it's commonly the last step.
Young people want to find work, pay off debt, and live alone before looking for a partner.
And these goals are harder to hit than they were for previous generations.
Findings suggest young adults today prioritize economic security over starting a family, reflecting the rising burden of housing, food, gas and other costs.
Okay, this is such a horse.
It's horse manure.
This notion that young people today are wildly poor and that is the reason why they're not getting married and having children is a lie.
It is not true.
Your grandparents were much poorer than you and they got married at twenty and then they had a bunch of kids and then they ended up paving the way for a better America.
If you are twenty five years old and unmarried living in a five thousand dollar a month apartment in New York City, that is a you problem.
That is your fault.
Okay, the rent is not your fault..
The rent is the fault of New York, which refuses to build any more housing because of all their crazy regulations.
But your life decisions are your fault.
I mean, this should be just baseline, rudimentary morality.
The decisions you make in your life are your problem.
That's not mean there can't be systemic change in ways that make your decisions easier.
But the vast majority of problems in your life in the freest country in the history of the world where you have the most wealth in the history of the world, stop blaming other people for that.
But again, when you tear away things like Judeo Christian morality and expectations of traditional gender roles like get married., being a husband, being a father.
What you end up with are useless young people.
And then those useless young people vote for other useless young people.
Again, like Zoran Momzani in 2024, 28% of young adults lived on their own with jobs.
But the combination of moving out, marrying and having kids no longer ranks among the top five most common milestone patterns.
By the way, that is a priority issue.
Because if you ask young people what they want out of life, they are not prioritizing these important things.
Why?
Well, because you on the left decided that somehow it was white identitarian to talk about biblical values, meritocracy, traditional.
family units and traditional gender roles, somehow that was white supremacy.
Well, the result of that is precisely what we are seeing today.
Well, I do think, I do think that at some point, Democrats are going to have to steer back towards sanity because they can't do this.
I mean, they can do it in fits and starts.
They can elect a Zoran Mandani in New York or they can elect a Brandon Johnson in Chicago, the least popular mayor in America.
You can elect an AOC in a borough of Brooklyn or something.
You can do those things.
But on a national level, do most Americans want that?
Is that a thing most Americans want?
I think the answer is no.
And so it's fascinating to see as Democrats start looking for their legitimate 2028 candidate.
Now I know that Gavin Newsom's been making a big splash, so I asked our sponsors over at Comet, Perplexity's new web browser.
I asked what is the order of the Democratic primaries in 2028, because it makes a very big difference in terms of who the 2028 Democratic nominee is.
So if you recall back in 2024, Joe Biden in an attempt to stack the primaries so he would have no real competition, he was afraid that if he allowed Iowa and New Hampshire to be first in the nation for the Democrats, he might get some sort of insurgent candidacy from Bernie Sanders again or some other left wing member of the Democratic Party.
And so he stacked it.
He put South Carolina first.
That of course was a call back to his 2020 race where he lost Iowa and New Hampshire, but then won South Carolina and basically swept the rest of the primaries.
While the current order still retains South Carolina at the head of the primaries, however, the DNC is currently debating the calendar.
Strong competition is emerging among states like South Carolina, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Nevada to obtain or reclaim early voting status.
The DNC's rules and by laws committee will determine the order.
A decision is not expected until at least late 2025, possibly 2026.
New Hampshire is fighting very hard to restore its long held first in the nation status.
But the bottom line is this.
The most important state for the Democratic Party primaries is South Carolina.
So if I ask, comment then, what percentage of the 2024 South Carolina Democratic Party primary electorate was black in 2024.
The answer was 56 percent of 2024 South Carolina Democratic Party primary voters were black in 2016.
By the way, that number was 61 percent.
So how do you think Gavin Newsom is going to do with that crowd?
I mean, maybe he will do somewhat better than Bernie Sanders or Pete Buttigieg would do, but he's not going to blow it out of the park, which means the Democrats are looking to another face.
Who is that other face?
That face is Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland.
So Wes Moore has been the person who I'm hearing a lot about from my friends in the Democratic Party.
I hear his name come up a lot that a lot of people were very hot on Wes Moore.
He, of course, is the governor of Maryland.
Here was George Clooney talking up Westmore recently with Jake Tapper on CNN.
But who I think is who I think is levitating above that is Westmore.
I think he is the guy that has handled this tragedy in Baltimore beautifully.
He's two tours of duty in Afghanistan, active duty.
He speaks sort of beautifully.
He's smart.
He ran a hedge fund.
He ran the Robin Hood Foundation.
He's a proper leader.
And Democrats, you know, the thing is we say Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line, although I think Republicans have fallen in love a little bit.
I like him a lot.
I think he could be someone we could all join in behind.
We have to find somebody rather soon.
Now, again, his background, Westmoore, is pretty interesting.
Westmoore is very young, right?
Westmoore is 46 years old right now, which for the Democratic Party is, again, very, very young.
He was born in Maryland.
His dad died when he was very young.
His mom moved him to the Bronx.
He got involved apparently in petty crime as a youngster, and he ended up enrolled in Valley Forge Military Academy..
And then he completed requirements for the U.S. Army's early commissioning program.
He became a second lieutenant to military intelligence in the Army Reserve.
He went to Johns Hopkins University.
He's got his BA from there.
He played wide receiver for their football team for a couple of seasons.
And then he interned at the Department of Homeland Security under Tom Ridge.
He ended up going to Wolfson College in Oxford as Rhodes Scholar.
And then served in the 82nd Airborne Division and was in Afghanistan 2005 to 2006.
And he ended up leaving as captain.
He was a White House Fellow in February 26 under Under Secretary of State Connolly to Rice, he worked at Deutsche Bank in Manhattan, Citibank from 2007 to 2012.
And then he ended up, of course, running for office.
He became sort of a TV producer for a while.
He was CEO of a charitable organization that was designed to alleviate childhood poverty.
So again, this is the guy who has sort of the classic political resume.
And so Democrats are very into this.
And the big thing right now for Westmoore is that as he's watching Gavin Newsom garner all the attention, he wants to jump in.
He understands the primaries now start earlier than ever and he's starting to jump in already coming up.
President Trump talking about sending federal troops to Chic Chicago, Democrats going nuts, plus a lot more.
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President Trump has said that he was interested in sending the National Guard into Baltimore to quickly clean up crime.
This is a follow on to his use of the National Guard in order to quash crime in Washington, DC.
Now, legally speaking, the President of the United States has awfully much more authority in Washington, DC, which of course is a federal district than he does in a city like Baltimore, which is just a city in the state of Maryland, right?
States typically have police power.
It is not the federal government that enforces state law.
He has to either cite state law or basic criminal law in the states.
That is the job of the state.
It is the job of the locality.
Typically, legally, in order for the president of the United States to utilize the National Guard in these particular areas, he has to either cite the insurrection act, right?
He has to say that there's some sort of riot that's taking place or he has to send in the National Guard to help federal forces effectuate federal laws.
That's what he did in Los Angeles.
He said that the federal government was unable to effectuate immigration law and the National Guard was brought in in a support capacity for ICE.
So it's not clear what legal authority President Trump would be citing in sending the National Guard to a place like Baltimore.
Now, Baltimore has been a high crime area for a very, very long time, obviously.
And the reason that The Wire took place, the HBO show, terrific show, took place in Baltimore is because Baltimore has been sort of the epicenter of American crime for decades and decades and decades, going all the way back to when David Simon was writing about it in his book Homicide.
But President Trump threatened, he said, if Wes Moore needs help like Gavin Newscomb did in LA, I will send in the troops, which is being done in nearby DC, and quickly clean up the crime.
Well, this is nothing excites a Democrat more than being attacked by President Trump at this point.
Now, this is a difference.
Very early on in President Trump's presidency, Democrats seem to kind of want to make nice with him.
You saw this from Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan.
You also did see this from West Moore last December after President Trump became president, elect Trump again.
West Moore greeted him in the basement of the Army Navy game.
Here's what that looked like.
President, welcome back to Maryland, sir.
Welcome back to Maryland.
It's good to see you.
It's a good person, too.
Thank you, sir.
Great to see you.
Great to have you back here.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you.
So this is a great moment for West Moore to finally declare war on the president of the United States because, of course, if you wish to run for that 2028 Democratic nomination, you have to basically run against Trump first before you get to whoever the Republican nominee will be, whether it's JD Vance or Marco Rubio or, or someone else.
So here was Westmore jumping on the opportunity talking about how President Trump needs to get the name of Baltimore out of his mouth.
I do want to be very clear.
If you are not willing to be part of a solution, keep our names out of your mouth.
Specifically, Donald Trump, if you are not willing to walk our communities, keep our name out of your mouth.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, again, that that sort of, you know, ridiculous notion that President Trump, if you're not, I mean, he is willing to be part of the solution.
That's why he's talking about sending the National Guard there.
But it's not about that the performative.
The Democrats have to first pass the bar of the performative before they can get to the substantive.
On CNN on Friday, he said it's because they haven't walked our streets.
He said many of the comments that are being made from the White House come off as so, so toned off and so ignorant about fighting crime.
They haven't been in our communities.
They're more than happy just making these repeated tropes about us, but not actually working with us to be able to make sure that our streets are safe and that people can have a real opportunity to feel safe in their own neighborhoods.
Now, to be fair, it is pretty clear that the democratic rule in Maryland has not been particularly beneficial for people wishing to avoid crime in Baltimore.
remains extremely, extremely high.
Homicide has down over the course of the last year or two.
With that said, it remains significantly higher than the rest of the country.
President Trump responded as president, I would much prefer he clean up this crime disaster before I go there for a walk.
Well, yeah, I mean, again, the crime rates in Baltimore are extremely bad.
It is the fourth most dangerous city in America according to some recent studies.
It has consistently high crime rates.
There's significant problems with drugs.
President Trump targeting it on the basis of it being incredibly criminal.
He's not wrong to do that.
But again, this does give Westmoore the opening to basically now run against Trump, which is the thing that he wants to do more than anything else.
Westmoore then sent a letter to President Trump basically inviting him to walk the streets.
And President Trump said, I'll walk the streets after I clean up the crime.
That seems safer for me.
But Westmoore said, Dear President Trump, last week you responded to my concerns about the deployment of National Guard personnel for municipal police in Washington, DC by insulting me personally from the Oval Office.
So I wanted to write in order to clarify the root of my frustration and extend an invitation to you to visit Maryland where we can discuss strategies for effective public safety policy.
There is no higher priority for me as the governor of my state than the safety of my people.
This is an issue of both professional and personal significance.
I grew up in and around communities left behind by people in power who sought to weaponize the pain of their constituents through hollow talking points that never changed the reality on the ground.
From the day I became Maryland's chief executive, I've sought a different path.
We've taken an all of the above approach to public safety that addresses the root causes of crime, mobilizing state resources, building strong partnerships with local jurisdictions, prosecutors, public defenders, police officers and advocates, and ensuring greater coordination and data sharing to deliver staggering drops in violent crime.
His homicides in Maryland are down statewide by twenty percent since my inauguration two and a half years ago in the first six months of 2025.
The Baltimore PD continued to see a double digit reduction in gun violence, including a 22% decrease in homicides and a 19% decrease in non-fatal shootings the year before.
This is basically a press release.
I mean, Westmoore sends President Trump a press release and he says, if there's anything Maryland has proven over the last two years, it's that we can achieve performance without being performative.
I'd like to invite you formally to attend our next public safety walk in September at a date of your choice.
So again, I think that this is all about Westmoore trying to wrest control of the microphone away from Gavin Newsom.
And frankly, he does have an advantage.
And Westmoore is black.
So that's going to make a awfully big difference in South Carolina in 2028.
If South Carolina is the first primary state, Westmoore has a heavy advantage going in.
He just does.
That is just a reality.
And pretending it is not so is foolish right now.
If you had to draw odds on favorite for the nomination for the Democratic Party right now, Westmore is probably it.
Again, it's not going to be hard for him to get money from people like George Clooney.
He does have a moderate effect, even though his policies are not particularly moderate in the state of Maryland.
He's obviously well spoken.
He seems to be politically adept.
Now, can he fall into radicalism?
Absolutely.
So for example, he doesn't need to do this.
Once Trump has attacked him over Baltimore, he should just stick to that.
Westmore instead is attacking Trump for sending troops to DC.
That's foolish.
It's unconstitutional.
It's a direct violation of the Tenth Amendment.
And for a party that talks about state rights, it's amazing how they're having such a big government approach in the way they're conducting public safety.
Again, it is not unconstitutional for the president to send troops to Washington, DC.
That is fully in line with the Constitution of the United States.
President Trump responded to Governor Wes Moore, who invited him to walk the city.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump criticized the Maryland Governor's record on crime.
He said if Baltimore needs assistance, he will send in the National Guard, like he did to LA and Washington, DC.
He also noted he had given Moore a lot of money to repair his demolished bridge, adding he might have to rethink the decision.
Governor Westmore of Maryland, he said, has asked in a rather nasty and provocative tone that I walk the streets of Maryland with him.
I assume he's talking about out of control crime in Baltimore.
As president, I'd much prefer he clean up this crime disaster before I go there for a walk.
He says Westmore's crime record is a very bad one unless he fudges his figures on crime like many of the other blue states are doing.
But if Westmore needs help like Gavin Newscomb did in LA, I will send in the troops, which is being done in nearby DC, and quickly clean up the crime.
Now, again, it seems to me that the reactionary nature of our politics is leading everybody into some box canyons politically.
Hey, the reality is that the president of the United States does not have the unilateral authority.
again, unless he somehow declares that an insurrection is taking place to simply send in the National Guard to local cities to clean up the crime.
And there's a reason for that.
We do not want the federal government in the business of enforcing local law.
At that point, states cease to exist.
That is a problem.
If you're on the right side of the aisle, that is a problem for you.
Imagine Westmoore as president of the United States.
Imagine Joe Biden just a couple of years ago as president of the United States sending in troops to enforce local law in places like Florida or Texas picking which laws to enforce.
You'd be upset about that.
And you'd have a right to be upset about that.
That is not how the constitution.
This is why I am less than enthused about the idea of now deploying troops to Chicago.
Again, there is a difference between deploying troops to LA to enforce immigration law, federal immigration law, and deploying troops to Washington, DC, which is in fact a federal district.
Now apparently the Pentagon is planning a military deployment in Chicago.
According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon has for weeks been planning a military deployment to Chicago as President Trump says he wants to crack down on crime, homelessness and undocumented immigration in a model that could later be used in other major cities.
Officials familiar with the planning said.
The planning, which has not been previously disclosed, involves several options, including mobilizing at least a few thousand members of the National Guard as soon as September.
It's what is the third most populous city in the United States.
The mission, if approved, would have parallels to the polarizing and legally contested operation Trump ordered in LA in June.
The Chicago effort would further expand Trump's use of military force domestically, even when state and local authorities call the idea unwelcome and unwarranted.
Now, again, it is quite possible that a state or local authority can say they don't want to enforce federal immigration law and they obstruct federal immigration law.
Then you have a good excuse to send in the National Guard to help actually enforce the law.
But if what you're talking about is there are too many murders in the city of Chicago, so you're sending in the National Guard.
Again, unless you have some sort of legal basis for it.
This is a problem.
President Trump is not wrong about Chicago.
He said, Chicago's a mess.
You have an incompetent mayor, grossly incompetent.
We'll straighten that one out probably next.
That'll be our next one after this and it won't even be tough.
Now, as they say, they probably will use ICE as sort of a bootstrap for putting troops on the ground in Chicago.
However, it seems to me that if Chicago wishes to keep voting for awful, awful people for their politicians, that they do in fact have the right to vote for terrible politicians and live with the consequences of those terrible politicians.
The way that people learn not to elect bad people is by having twenty years, thirty years of crime like they did in New York City before they got the Rudy Giuliani treatment.
And it seems like New Yorkers don't learn.
And so they'll go right back to the well on that one.
Mayor Brandon Johnson, in response to President Trump's threats to send National Guard into Chicago, he put out a statement.
He says, quote, we take President Trump's statement seriously, but to be clear, the city has not received any formal communication from the Trump administration regarding additional federal law enforcement or military deployments to Chicago.
Certainly, we have grave concerns about the impact of any unlawful deployment of National Guard troops to the city of Chicago.
The problem with the President's approach is that it is uncoordinated, uncalled for, and unsound.
Unlawfully deploying the National Guard to Chicago has the potential to inflame tensions between.
residents and law enforcement when we know that trust between police and residents is foundational to building safer communities.
Unlawful deployment would be unsustainable and would threaten to undermine the historic progress we have made in the past year alone.
We have reduced homicides by more than thirty percent robberies by thirty five percent shootings by almost forty percent.
We continue to invest in what is working.
Okay.
So I mean, first of all, this is the wrong tack for Brandon Johnson to take and for any of these blue state democrats to take.
The answer is not we're doing an amazing job on crime.
The answer is the president doesn't have the authority to do this, right?
Sure, we can do a better job on crime.
Everybody can do a better job on crime in a city in America that can't do a better job on crime.
But the National Guard being deployed to the city is a violation of the constitutional order would actually be.
the argument that should be made by Brandon Johnson, but he doesn't really care much about that, of course, because he is very much in favor of the crime on sort of a general level.
Senator Tammy Duckworth, she also issued a statement condemning the president of the United States.
She said it comes as no surprise Donald Trump is once again attacking Chicago, but that doesn't change the Trump's continuing pattern of politicizing and misusing our nation's military for his own partisan gain and to crush dissent is deeply disturbing as unamerican and has no place in any of our cities.
We know this isn't about law and order because Trump is once again refusing to coordinate with state and local officials.
Now again, President Trump would say, listen, if I coordinate with you, you're just going to thwart the actual.
ability to police crime.
That's what happened in Los Angeles.
Again, the Democrats, the Democrats have a unique way, a truly unique way of taking the wrong side of any argument, even when they might be constitutionally correct.
It's kind of amazing.
What they should be arguing is the president does not have legal authority under the constitution of the United States to enforce local law by the military.
That is not, that is not what the military is for.
Instead, they take the perspective that actually crime is okay and it's racist of Trump to offer this and it's misuse of our military and all the rest of this kind of stuff.
And so it looks like they're pro crime, which is a really dumb way to do this.
Well, here was governor, governor JB Pritzker.
He also put out a tweet suggesting that Trump was trying to manufacture a crisis.
Cite, Donald Trump is trying to manufacture a crisis, politicize Americans who serve in uniform and continue to abuse his power to distract from the pain he's causing families will continue to follow the law, stand up for the sovereignty of our state and protect Illinoisans.
Okay, so the the last line there is closer to correct from from JB Pritzker.
But again, this kind of notion that Trump is manufacturing a crime crisis when again crime in Chicago, there are shootings pretty much every weekend in Chicago that obviously is untrue.
Here was Brandon Johnson trying to rebut claims that his city is basically run like trash.
This is who Chicago really is.
What's being painted by the federal government is false.
We love one another.
We support one another.
We put our arms around one another.
Okay, and then he continued by suggesting that actually the people of Chicago would participate in a uprising against President.
So what, you're going to riot to show that crime is bad?
That would be a really stupid move, Mayor John, but then again, he is a very stupid man.
So, you know, look, the city of Chicago, one of the most diverse economies in the world.
Again, you know, a city that has been, you know, founded and established on the values of working people.
We're not going to surrender our humanity to this tyrant.
I can tell you this.
The city of Chicago has a long history of standing up against tyranny, resisting those who wish to undermine the interests of working people.
We're not going to back down.
We're not going to cower.
We're not going to bend.
We're not going to break.
We are Chicago.
We are the soul of America.
And we will maintain that posture from now until.
Yeah, I don't even know what he means by that.
What does he mean?
That we're not going to we're going to resist.
What is that resistance like look like?
Seriously, it is amazing how many of these people are playing directly into President Trump's hands on the radical left.
With that said, President Trump moving federal troops into Chicago that is a very fraught constitutional move at the very best.
Now, there are moves that President Trump can make on crime that are pretty fascinating.
So one of the ones that he is making, according to an exclusive for the New York Post, is that he's going to sign an executive order today ending cashless bail across the country, essentially attaching strings to federal funding for jurisdictions that continue to do cashless bail, which is essentially the idea that we'll just release criminals on their own recognizance around the country.
Attorney General Pambandi will provide Trump with a list of no cash bail jurisdictions that could end up targeting states like New York, cities like Washington, DC, or other localities with lax bail policies.
A White House memo on the executive action says, Cit, cash bail policies allow dangerous individuals to immediately return to the streets and further endanger law-abiding hard-working Americans because they know our laws will not be enforced.
Arresting repeat offenders for new crimes after they've already been freed without bail is a waste of public resources and an obvious threat to public safety.
The memo also notes.
And so the president does have the ability to attach strings to federal funding in many ways.
This has been done for decades.
There's nothing new about that.
Now going after jurisdictions that are releasing criminals onto the streets.
That is within his view.
So again, I have no problem with the president fighting crime.
I just want to make sure that he does it in the most legally bulletproof way so it doesn't get shot down by a court at the first available opportunity.
Now speaking of matters legal, on Friday, the DOJ released the testimony of Ghislaine Maxwell, the transcript of her interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
It's about 300 pages.
The audio is about six hours or so.
Not a lot of big takeaways.
The big takeaway is that according to Ghislaine Maxwell, there were people who were clamoring for her to talk.
She was going to name the names.
She was going to spill the beans.
She was going to break this thing wide open where it turns out that suddenly the Trump administration was covering for a gigantic child sex trafficking ring on behalf of foreign intelligence agencies, specifically according to many of the Jews.
In any case, all of that seems to not be true.
So either she's lying, in which case there's no evidence that that allegation is true, or she's telling the truth, in which case there's no evidence that that allegation is true.
As I've been saying from the beginning, suspicions without evidence, maybe they're true, but at some point you do need to show, you know, the evidence.
Well, Ghislaine Maxwell did the six hour interview.
She testified that President Trump had never engaged in any inappropriate conduct that she saw with Jeffrey Epstein.
She added that she didn't believe that Epstein killed him.
that she didn't believe that Epstein killed himself.
And again, there is the best case here is probably Alan Dershowitz' case, who again was Maxwell's and was Epstein's lawyer.
Dershowitz says that there's a good shot that Epstein did kill himself, but basically he paid the prison guards to allow him to kill himself.
I mean, that is certainly a possibility.
She said that Bill Clinton was very close with her, but not with Jeffrey Epstein.
Todd Blanche had asked her repeatedly about her and Epstein's relationships with Bill Clinton.
By the way, we know how close Epstein and Glaine Maxwell were to Clinton, particularly Glaine Maxwell, because as it turns out, according to CNN, Glaine Maxwell was actually given an honor at a prestigious Clinton event years after abuse allegations actually surfaced, which is definitely weird.
It's a weird thing to do.
So for all those who are saying it's a cover up by Trump to protect Trump, maybe it's a cover up by Trump to protect Hillary Clinton.
I don't know.
Maxwell said President Clinton liked me, we got along terribly well.
I never saw that warmth or however you want to characterize it with mister Epstein.
Maxwell said there's no client list of people who associated with Epstein.
She said that there's no list that she was aware of.
She said also that there was no link to any intelligence agency.
Now again, maybe she's lying about all this.
That's that's certainly possible.
She is, of course, a criminal derelict who sexually abused minors.
So that is certainly a possibility.
However, the absence of evidence does not strengthen your case.
One of the amazing things about large-scale conspiracy theories is when no evidence emerges to support the theory, the lack of evidence is in itself evidence that conspiracy theory is true.
It's the magic of a conspiracy theory.
And it is the difference between a actual conspiracy and a conspiracy theory.
As I've said many times, a actual conspiracy involves evidence of conspiratorial activity to achieve a goal.
A conspiracy theory is based on speculation that such a thing is going on without any evidence.
And the beautiful thing about that is that you just keep getting to use the absence of evidence as evidence that your theory is true, which is always quite delicious.
Jim Jordan, representative from Ohio, he rightly points out that the Maxwell interview, again, confirms what most people were saying, which is that Trump was not involved in any way in Epstein Island shenanigans with minors.
What I know is they didn't release parts of the transcript.
They released the whole transcript.
And, and, you know, so you can go through the whole thing.
And of course, this confirms what we all knew.
If the Democrats, if President Trump had done something wrong, you don't think the Democrats would have released that?
I mean, it was their Justice Department who handled all this.
You don't think the Garland Justice Department and the Chris Ray FBI would have released information.
We knew President Trump didn't do anything wrong here.
He said that repeatedly.
This transcript is the whole transcript and it confirms that.
So I think this is, there's, there's nothing there.
It seems based on what we got from the interview of Miss Maxwell.
Right.
Again, he's not wrong about that.
And if...
That's fine.
You can do that.
You should just acknowledge that there's no evidence to actually back the conspiracy theory at this point.
And meanwhile, JD Vance did a sort of fascinating interview yesterday.
with Kristen Walker over at NBC on the situation with regard to Russia Ukraine.
Now the Trump administration, President Trump in particular, has been taking the correct line on this.
He got Putin to go to Anchorage, then he went to the Europeans and he said, listen, I'm willing to do some form of security guarantee.
Ukraine really has to be on board with making some territorial concessions.
They're the ones who are going to have to negotiate all that.
And then the president implied very late last week that offensive weaponry should actually be used by Ukraine against Russia.
That if Russia won't come to the table, you really have only one other choice and that's to ratchet things up.
Well, two things are happening that are sort of fat one russia has rejected everything russia continues to reject everything they're totally intransigent sergey laurow the foreign minister of russia the guy who again showed up in anchorage wearing a usr shirt just to demonstrate what his priorities were sergey laurow he also was on with kristen walker and he proceeded to say that there was in fact no meeting planned between vlodimir zelensky and vlodimir putin there is no meeting planned and
i am not challenging this but you you cannot uh cannot i think understand what i am saying putin is ready to meet with zelensky when the agenda would be ready for a summit and this agenda is not ready at all.
Okay, so again, he has no plans at this point.
So despite all of the talk about how we were moving on to the next step, trilateral meetings and all the rest, in the end, it was always going to be about what the Russians want from the negotiation.
We know what the Ukrainians want.
A end to the war, security guarantees, insurance that they're not going to be invaded again.
Full scale guarantee of their independence.
That's what they want.
What Russia wants is Ukraine.
They want to ingest Ukraine.
And so Lavrov continues to claim that Zelensky is illegitimate.
Well, that makes it kind of difficult to negotiate when you're saying that the leader of the person on the other side is illegitimate.
And by the way, the only quote-unquote legitimate leader that Russia would ever accept is somebody who's friendly to Moscow, of course.
Irrespective of when this meeting might take place, and it must be very well prepared, the issue of who is going to sign the deal.
on the Ukrainian side.
So you're saying you don't see President Zelensky as the legitimate leader of Ukraine.
President Putin doesn't recognize him as the legitimate leader of Ukraine.
No, we recognize him as de facto head of the regime.
And in this capacity, we are ready to meet with him.
But when it comes to signing legal documents, now you want to have the entire picture, just part of it, which suits you.
When we come to a stage when you have to sign documents, we would need a very clear understanding by everybody that the person who is signing is legitimate.
And according to the Ukrainian constitution, Mr. Zelensky is not at the moment.
Okay, so what he's saying is, sure, we'll meet with Zelensky, but we'll call him illegitimate the whole time.
And then we won't allow him to actually sign the documents on the other side, which is a wild position to take given the fact that again if Russia wants a peace deal which they clearly do not at this point they feel they can continue to ratchet up the pressure if they wanted to do something they wouldn't be doing that okay meanwhile as I've said a thousand times the biggest barrier to an extra republican administration remains the economy so on Friday Jerome Powell signaled that he would in fact likely be lowering those interest rates come September that of course made investors pretty
happy investors were excited that finally the monetary supply would be loosened at least somewhat that there would be an ability to get to get easier loans that mortgage rates would go down and all of the rest.
However, the labour market continues to remain somewhat stagnant.
And there is ballast to the tariff policies that President Trump has been pushing.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the labour market has moved front and center for the Federal Reserve, highlighting its fragility and risks to the economy.
The good news is that employment unemployment remains low.
Employers have not been all that interested in laying people off.
The bad news is that companies have not been all that interested in hiring either.
This precarious situation means even a relatively small increase in layoffs could lead the economy to start shutting jobs, a process that can be difficult to reverse once it starts.
Worries about that possibility have come to the fore at the Fed, especially after revisions included in that July employment report showed much weaker job growth in recent months than previously thought.
So on Friday, Fed chair Jerome Powell signalled that they were going to cut rates because of the risk of a deteriorating jobs market.
He said if those risks materialize, they can do so quickly in the form of sharply higher layoffs and rising unemployment.
We've already seen the pace of hiring slowing markedly.
In June, the hiring rate was just three point three percent according to the Labor Department, that was below three point nine percent in February 2020.
And it was much less than the four point six percent registered in November 2021 when the job market was coming back from the pandemic.
Companies were already adding new employees at a slower pace when President Trump came back into office.
Then we were going to do deregulation and lower taxes and all the rest.
It turns out the tariffs have thrown a wrench into all that.
So the Federal Reserve is going to try to apparently jog the markets by lowering those interest rates.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has taken a $10 billion stake in Intel.
And again, I'm deeply uncomfortable with this.
This is not good laissez faire, free market policy.
It is not.
President Trump said Friday at the White House, I said, I think it would be good to have the United States as your partner.
The CEO of Intel agreed.
They've agreed to do it.
Commerce Secretary Harold Lutnick confirmed that deal in a post on Exxon Friday.
Cite, big news.
The United States of America now owns 10% of Intel, one of our great American technology companies.
Intel posted details of the pl plan soon after, saying the administration would make an $8.9 billion investment in Intel common stock paid for with Chip's grant money.
So basically the idea is that taxpayer money will be used to buy America a piece of Intel.
A bad investment.
I wouldn't be spending $9 billion to buy a piece of Intel, would you?
Because they've been in secular decline for quite a while because they've been mishandled.
The company said the stake would be funded with $5.7 billion in grants previously awarded but not yet paid and $3.2 billion from a separate Department of Defense program.
The CEO said we are grateful for the confidence the president and the administration have placed in Intel.
We look forward to working to advance US technology and manufacturing leadership.
So some Republicans are upset about this, including Senator Rand Paul.
He correctly points out that this is actually a violation of free market principles and that once you are a partner with the government, the government basically is in charge of your business and not only that, it's too big to fail.
So as Mike Schmidt and Todd Fisher write in the Wall Street Journal, the company's products business, which designs chips for computers and servers, is large and profitable, but not a national security priority.
That business underpins most of Intel's roughly $100 billion market cap.
What matters for national security is Intel'ss foundry, the manufacturing arm that could in theory produce chips for other companies as well as Intel's internal products.
And that foundry is struggling.
It lost more than $13 billion last year.
It has almost no external customers.
But a government equity stake does not solve that problem.
Intel can easily raise capital in public markets.
There is no need for taxpayer dollars to replace what private capital is already willing to do.
Unlike grants, equity comes at a steep cost to Intel.
Transferring grants into equity risks putting Intel at a cost disadvantage relative to other chip makers, which are manufacturing predominantly in low cost Asian countries and receiving direct incentives in the US and around the world.
And there are also practical risks because, of course, now it's polit politicized.
The biggest problem is that Intel's 18A process has failed to secure any meaningful external customers.
Intel CEO recently acknowledged that without external customers for its advanced 14A process technology, the company can't sustain leading edge manufacturing.
And again, this sort of thing here, not great.
It's just, it didn't.
Nationalization of American industries is a bad idea.
I understand that the Trump administration is trying to do as much as it can from the executive branch of the government.
They're doing it on crime.
They're doing it on immigration.
On immigration, they have plenary power on crime.
Not so much.
Doing it on the economy is not.
what the executive branch was designed to do.
It is not.
Congress should step in.
Congress is an independent branch of government.
The presidents of the United States should not unilaterally be making tariff policy.
That is not what the system was designed to do.
I don't like it happening, whether it is Democrat or Republican, and the grand centralization of nearly all power in the executive branch as a whole is a massive, massive institutional flaw in our Republic right now.
It also means that whenever we have a presidential election, it is tooth and nail because I guess if you grab the executive branch, then you basically run everything.
And that is a huge systemic problem that the founders never would have tolerated.
Already coming up, we'll get to.
Get to the raid on John Bolton's house plus Snoop Dogg speaking out against Disney.
Fascinating.
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