The Ben Shapiro Show - How The Radical Left Created The Horseshoe Theory Right

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Oct. 30, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:09:43

How The Radical Left Created The Horseshoe Theory Right

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	Well, it's pretty clear that the Democratic Party has now been engaging in a campaign against white Christian men, but that's had some pretty dire consequences on the other side of the aisle as well.
	We're going to get into all of that.
	Plus, we're going to be talking about the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates and President Trump making a tariff deal, kind of, with the Chinese first.
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	Well, folks, we are watching a tremendous political radicalization take place in the United States.
	That radicalization has been most obvious on the left.
	There is a concomitant movement that is happening on the right.
	It is a splinter movement on the right that's being massaged by some of the people who have some sway in the conservative movement, at least in the commentariat.
	And I think it's important to point out how one is leading to the other, because that is the sort of pattern in American politics.
	Politics generally is incredibly reactionary.
	People tend not to respond reasonably to provocations that are unreasonable, and they tend to swivel into their own unreasonable positions.
	And the pendulum swings ever back and forth.
	It is a rarity to find a moment of sort of clarity and reasonableness in American politics, even if the people who constitute the vast majority of the American body populace are, in fact, a sort of normy middle.
	If you look at the polls, Americans are normie middle on pretty much every issue.
	They are normie middle.
	Americans want a strong national defense, but they don't want tremendous interventionism.
	Americans want a traditional value system, but not one that has the government snooping in their bedrooms.
	Americans want a system of laws that makes sure that there is some basic level of social safety net, but they do not want the government taking tremendous amounts of money away from them and regulating their businesses out of existence.
	That's what the polls show.
	It's what the polls show every single time.
	America is a very politically normy country.
	A center-right country is basically where you would place America on the map if you're creating a sort of spectrum of countries from far right to far left.
	And yet, our politics right now seems to be revolving around the polls.
	And the reason it is revolving around the polls is because you do have one party in the Democratic Party that has increasingly made it clear that there is a population they do not like.
	And that population that they apparently do not like is white Christian males.
	That is the population that must be targeted.
	Now, this didn't used to be the case inside the Democratic Party, not at all.
	If you go back just about 20 years, if you go back to, say, the John Edwards campaign in 2004, the Edwards campaign was a very socialistic leaning campaign in terms of its economic policies, but it certainly didn't suggest that white Christian males were somehow bad.
	In fact, Edwards would openly campaign as a person who apparently was religious.
	Now, of course, in his personal life, it turned out the man had many, many foibles.
	And again, I was a very strong opponent of John Edwards, but to point out that the Democratic Party has moved pretty dramatically on whom it is they are targeting is just a reflection of reality.
	And it's coming out in so many ways.
	I mean, it's so evident.
	It's so self-evident in everything from sort of the Mamdani candidacy, which is oriented against white Christian male, to the kind of mainstream politicians in the Democratic Party.
	A clip, I think, yesterday really signified for me what the Democratic Party is doing and how this is triggering so much sort of reactionary right-wing polarization.
	So, Nancy Pelosi yesterday was doing a speech at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics.
	And at this speech, she started talking about Republicans and Christianity, and she broke into a southern accent while she was doing it.
	And the scorn that Nancy Pelosi has for sort of traditional biblical values, she considers herself a Catholic, but the reality is she really does not hold any values in common with Catholicism, certainly not on the social side.
	She's a radical advocate for abortion and transgenderism and same-sex marriage, all of which the church decries.
	But here she was mocking Republicans and their relationship with religion.
	You're people of faith.
	You go to church on Sunday and pray on church on Sunday and pray on people the rest of the week.
	What is this?
	What is this?
	You hear her breaking into that Southern accent?
	You go to church on Sunday and then you pray in church on Sunday and then you pray on people the rest of the week.
	The kind of scorn that Nancy Pelosi has for religious people, religious conservatives who go to church on Sunday and disagree with her on politics.
	Well, that has led to a massive backlash.
	And the same thing is true in terms of race.
	Obviously, the entire Democratic Party swiveling in favor of DEI, which was this basic idea that America is a systemically evil country that benefits white people and that any racial disparities in outcome must be attributable to a system that benefits white people at the expense of black and brown people.
	That led to a response in terms of policy that essentially disadvantaged white people and targeted white people.
	It also targeted, by the way, minorities that were too successful, like Jews and Asians.
	But the basic idea was that meritocracy was a guise for power.
	Meritocracy was a lie.
	And that actually meritocracy was a system that benefited white people at the expense of all others.
	And the Democratic Party repeated this ad nauseum.
	This is what the entire Black Lives Matter movement was really about: obfuscating the relationship between actions and consequences in favor of the idea that all shortcomings in life had to be due to a white supremacist system, and therefore white people had to be punished by the system.
	And that triggered a response, an identity-based response from a lot of young white men, particularly.
	And of course, the way the Democrats talk about the Trump administration continues to be along these lines.
	Yesterday, for example, the Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott suggested the Trump administration was coming for black Americans.
	I mean, I don't know what the evidence is that the Trump administration is, quote unquote, coming for black Americans.
	But the idea here is, of course, that the Trump administration, which is not a white supremacist administration, it's an absurd contention.
	Trump won a larger share of the black vote than any Republican in recent memory and a much larger share of the Hispanic vote than any Republican in recent memory.
	But again, this is the language of the Democratic Party now: is that people of color are being targeted by white people, that Christians are predators.
	Here we go.
	For my black brothers and sisters in the room, be reminded, they might not always start with us, but they will come home and end with us.
	We know that Malcolm X warned us that if you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.
	Now, more than ever, we have to know what we stand for and who we stand with.
	Senator Hayes, there is no play in the 50.
	You are either with us or you are against us.
	Again, you're either with us or against us.
	There are the oppressors and the oppressed.
	People of color are the oppressed.
	People who are white are the oppressors.
	That is the basic matrix through which Democratic politics has been refracted in the United States.
	And so basically that means that the coalition for the Democratic Party has been minorities, young people, and in particular, young liberal white women.
	Why young liberal white women?
	Well, because they're not young white Christian men.
	Because it's not just anti-Christian and anti-white.
	It also tends toward the anti-male.
	All righty, folks, coming up, we have a lot coming up.
	We're going to get into more on Mamdani in New York.
	We have Andrew Ross Sorkin, who's going to stop by from CNBC and the New York Times to talk about the Federal Reserve rate cuts.
	We're going to be talking with Congressman August Fluger about the government shutdown, Mary Margaret Olihan.
	She's going to join us from the White House.
	Lots coming up.
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	There's a reason the Democratic Party has been losing young males hand over fist.
	And the reason is not actually because of their policy preferences on taxes or on Obamacare or anything.
	Barack Obama did fine with young males.
	The reason that they lost it is because they decided to feminize their party by attacking men as part of this evil superstructure.
	The final sort of peculiar outgrowth of the anti-male movement, of course, was transgenderism, which was the idea that there is no such thing as manhood.
	Now, people have focused on the fact that transgenderism makes the case there's no such thing as womanhood, right?
	What is a woman, as my friend Matt Walsh likes to say.
	But it also means there's no such thing as manhood.
	There's been an overt attack on masculinity from the left for several decades at this point.
	The idea that masculinity is in and of itself toxic, bad, that it's all about testosterone-based machismo, that if you let the men be men, then somehow that will just end with a discriminatory society that puts women underfoot.
	That men have nothing to offer to women at all, actually.
	That the best types of men are the men who leave their masculinity behind.
	That lies behind so much of the sort of transgender contagion that has infused the last several years in American politics.
	So it turns out that when you target Christians as Christians, not just in terms of rhetoric, which of course you see from Pelosi, but in terms of actual policy, I mean, Barack Obama targeted the little sisters of the poor to make them be involved in abortion care services.
	That when you say that Christianity is inherently anti-LGBTQ, that it's just a guise for discrimination.
	And when you say that churches are bad, and when you say that white people are the cause of a white supremacist system, and that any disparate outcome is just evidence of innate white supremacy and innate white racism, when you say that maleness is driving America into the gutter and that we need to wipe away male supremacy, even as males begin to underperform in college, commit suicide at higher and higher rates, fall into deaths of despair.
	When you do all of that, what you end up doing is provoking a response.
	And when you provoke responses, many of them tend to be untethered.
	Now, add on top of the anti-Christian, anti-white, anti-male agenda that the left has increasingly pushed.
	Add on top of that, a pro-censorship agenda.
	The idea being that if you speak out against this stuff, you're outside the Overton window, which was the way that we did politics in this country for fully a decade.
	You're at risk of being kicked out of every public space, kicked off of every public space for the great sin of saying that men are not women, for example, or that the system is not white supremacist, and that maybe certain people are underperforming because they're making bad decisions in their life.
	Or if you said that actually there fine, moral reasons why the LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign movement is damaging to individuals.
	If you said any of that, you were at risk of being kicked out of the conversation and having your career ruined and being targeted and all the rest.
	And this is still a mainstay of many parts of the Democratic Party.
	So here is Barack Obama, for example, talking about experimenting with government-regulated journalism.
	Part of what we're going to have to do is to start experimenting with new forms of journalism and how do we use social media in ways that reaffirm facts, separate facts from opinion.
	We want diversity of opinion.
	We don't want diversity of facts.
	That, I think, is one of the big tasks of social media.
	By the way, it will require some government, I believe, some government regulatory constraints around some of these business models.
	Well, you know, again, this sort of thing is what the left has been saying they want is a sort of restricted informational sphere so as to ensure that their way of viewing the world is the way that the world is viewed by everyone.
	And then the left added one more thing on top of that, and that is an extraordinary amount of gaslighting, an extraordinary amount of gaslighting, where they say they're doing this, but don't worry, they're not doing it.
	They're doing it and they're saying it, but if you say it, it's bad.
	So if they say DEI is great and we should absolutely advantage people on the basis of their sex and their race, and then you say, hey, you're advantaging people on the basis of their sex and race, maybe they're not qualified.
	And the way I can tell is because you're advantaging them based on their sex and their race.
	Then they would call you a racist, right?
	That's the gaslighting.
	They say a thing.
	You repeat it back to them and then they tell you the thing you're saying is actually racist or bad.
	That sort of gaslighting is just typical now of an extraordinary part of the Democratic Party.
	So, for example, Elizabeth Warren, just yesterday, she says that Donald Trump wants to politicize everything.
	There is no one in modern American history more political than Elizabeth Warren.
	Everything she does is politicized, everything.
	But it's Trump who's politicizing.
	They turned an attempt to build a ballroom on the White House into a referendum on autocracy in America.
	They can turn any anodyne issue into a massive, world-breaking political issue and then claim that they're not doing it at all.
	And you're the one who's politicizing.
	They make the claim on the left that men are women and women are men.
	If you say no, you're politicizing sex.
	The gaslighting drives people up a wall.
	It untethers them.
	Here's Elizabeth Warren doing some of that.
	The fact that Donald Trump has been trying to politicize by threatening to fire first the chairman of the Fed and then another governor of the Fed and now concealing data from the Fed is one more sign that Donald Trump wants to politicize everything in America because he thinks he's the king in charge.
	And again, this kind of pitch toward he's an autocrat.
	Joe Biden was just as autocratic as anything Trump is doing.
	Barack Obama, Captain Penn in a phone, was incredibly autocratic, but it only crops up the minute that somebody they don't like is in power.
	And when I listen to Al Sharpton talk about autocracy coming, I mean, the fact that Al Sharpton is even on MSNBC is an act of gaslighting.
	This is a man who's most famous for lying about the Tawana Browley pseudo case and hoping to provoke riots in Crown Heights in the early 90s and then provoke partially an arson at Freddie's fashion mark in New York City.
	And he's on MSNBC and Democrats still go on Ben Didney to pay homage to him.
	But here's Al Sharpton talking about autocracy.
	I think what is the clear thread here is do we allow a president to fabricate something and then send in National Guard and in his speech to troops in Japan said he'll even send in the military.
	I mean, if we're not getting very close to a real autocracy here where the president just does what he wants, I think that that's the problem.
	Again, this sort of stuff drives people nuts and provokes a reaction.
	Now, the crystallization of this entire network of thinking, this sort of anti-Christian, anti-white, anti-male, pro-censorship, pro-gaslighting ideology, it finds its apotheosis in Zoran Mamdani, who does all of these things, who does all of these things.
	Zorin Mamdani, his campaign is being run on the basis of opposition to, let's be real, white Christian males.
	That is the basic premise of his campaign, that there's a superstructure of capitalism-backed white Christian males, and they must be opposed.
	That's his coalition.
	I mean, if you look at the statistics, Zora Mamdani's coalition is atheists and people who are immigrants, largely Muslim.
	That is his coalition.
	According to the new Quinnipiac poll, Momdani is struggling with Protestants, 36%, Catholics, 28%, and Jews, 16%.
	If he wins, it will be thanks to a coalition of the others, predominantly Muslims, where he receives 50% of the vote, and those of no religion with 71% of the vote.
	That is not a coincidence.
	That is not a coincidence.
	He campaigns on the basis of his own pseudo-victimhood.
	And he's not a victim, of course.
	He's not a victim in any way, shape, or form.
	This is a man who's taken advantage of all the wealth and the magic that America has to offer and then turned around and spit in America's face and said that America is a white supremacist system and said that America is a colonialist capitalist system.
	This is what Zor Mamdani's campaign is all about, is the crystallization of all of these values.
	And then when you call him on it, then he gaslights you.
	Okay, there's a reason that Zora Mamdani, his entire campaign is based on these viral videos where he is doing things that appeal to diverse audiences, right?
	He's eating rice with his hands in order to show that he somehow has solidarity with people who are not from Western cultures.
	Or he just cut an ad speaking Spanish, which again, I don't have a problem with candidates speaking Spanish.
	I really don't.
	I mean, frankly, I think that if you want to appeal to an audience, speaking to them in their home language, it's a smart thing to do.
	But the entire undertone of everything Momdani does is, I am one of you, right?
	I am an immigrant.
	I am not of Western culture.
	This is why he pronounces Haiti ajiti, right?
	As we noted yesterday, because he studied Africana studies over at Bodouin, over in Maine.
	Here is his ad in Spanish.
	Okay, with the music underneath and everything.
	And again, there's a reason he's running this particular campaign.
	And then when he is called on his lies, which he does, I mean, he lies.
	He said that his dad's, he said his dad's sister was actually his father's cousin, who was his aunt.
	He relayed a whole story about how the real victims of 9-11 were people like his aunt, who was victimized on the subway by somebody who gave her a dirty look when she was wearing a hijab.
	Then he couldn't identify the person, and apparently now she's dead.
	Here he was trying to explain this away.
	And it turns out the only reason we even care, obviously, is because we are all the racists, right?
	This is the gaslighting.
	I was at the press conference yesterday.
	They said, can you tell us who your aunt is, who you were referring to?
	I said, yes, this is my aunt.
	This is my Zara Fuyi.
	This is my father's cousin.
	And this was her story.
	So how can you convince New Yorkers if that is the type of person that you are?
	In other words, that you don't tell the truth.
	Well, it's not a lie.
	My father's cousin is my aunt.
	That's how I referred to her growing up my whole life, Zara Fuy.
	Well, that's it.
	I mean, wow, amazing.
	And you would know that if you weren't such a white-bigoted, racist American with your, you know, calling aunts aunts and all the rest of that sort of thing.
	I mean, the fact is that, again, it's all even kind of more traditional Democrats are sort of taken aback at the wild dishonesty of Zora Mamdani, right?
	Andrew Cuomo, who again is no great chase.
	Andrew Cuomo pointed out quite correctly that Mamdani campaigned with Hassan Piker.
	Hassan Piker is a radical, pro-violence, pro-jihadi host who apparently allegedly shocks his dog with shot collars.
	And Andrew Cuomo is like, well, he's campaigning with him.
	And then we were told, well, no, no, no, no.
	He's actually just, but he hasn't dissociated.
	Hassan Piker showed up at that latest rally with Kathy Hochl in a position of prominence.
	Here's Andrew Cuomo explaining.
	He came out of the pro-Gaza movement, right?
	The college protest movement.
	That's really who he is.
	He came out of the anti-Israel movement.
	At that rally, you saw he was with a fellow named Hassan Piker, who is the person who said America deserved 9-11.
	America deserved 9-11.
	Unbelievable.
	And he campaigns with him.
	I mean, he is, I think he's not only anti-New York, he's anti-American.
	Again, he's right about this, but the problem is the Democratic Party has been playing with these forces for so long.
	It's now too late for them to dissociate from those forces.
	Now, all of this scares the hell out of a lot of Americans, and it should.
	And it should, because it is indeed radical stuff.
	Alrighty, coming up, we'll get to the radical left and how it has radicalized a splinter part of the right.
	We'll also be talking with a sitting congressperson about the shutdown.
	We'll be talking with Mary Margaret Olihan about what's going on at the White House.
	Plus, Andrew Ross Sorkin stops by to talk about the state of the markets first.
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	There's a good piece in the New York Times today talking about fear of Zoran Mamdani and what it means.
	According to Bernard Henri Levy, writing for the Wall Street Journal, I've just returned from a brief stay in the U.S. On every European's lips in conversations on the news on social networks, there's only one subject: next Tuesday's election, which may make 34-year-old Zoran Mamdani New York's mayor.
	Mr. Mamdani has no substantial political past.
	Apart from a few demagogic populist resolutions that are unworkable without the cooperation of the state legislature, he has no program.
	Nothing indicates that he is capable of managing a $110 billion budget, of steering 300,000 municipal employees.
	In short, of running the state within a state that is the city of Fiorella, LaGuardia, Ed Koch, and Michael Bloomberg.
	Last but not least, he has made statements of unheard of violence about Israelis and Jews, similar to those of France's extreme leftist politicians, Rima Hassan and Jean-Luc Melichon.
	The man the polls say is the likely next mayor is a resolute supporter of boycotting the only Jewish state on the planet.
	He denies that the country the survivors of the pogroms and the Shoah have built over the past 77 years has the right to exist as a Jewish state.
	He doesn't hide that he came to politics through the Palestinian cause and thanks to it.
	He adopts as his own without qualms the lies that Israel has engaged in organized famine and genocide.
	He has said he would order the prime minister of Israel arrested if he comes to the city for the United Nations General Assembly.
	Subscribing to the theme that Jews are the source of the world's problem and pulling strings everywhere, he's able to make this moronic statement about the New York City Police Department and the IDF.
	Quote, when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it's been laced by the IDF.
	When he commemorates the anti-American atrocity of September 11th, there's only one victim who seems to provoke a tear from him.
	Not the thousands murdered in the burning Twin Towers, but his aunt, or maybe it was a cousin, who, because she wore a hijab, no longer felt safe on the subway in the weeks after the terrorist attack.
	And then he buckled down to insist that this brouhaha around his comments only proved that Islamophobia runs wild in New York.
	And again, that's not wrong.
	People can see the manifestation of his policies.
	And by the way, the manifestation of these ideologies.
	It was just yesterday that a Jewish man was attacked in one of the more populous cities or areas of New York City.
	He was in front of a very famous kosher restaurant in New York City called Mr. Broadway.
	It's a very large kosher restaurant that is like dead center of Midtown Manhattan.
	And here's a video of this Jewish man being assaulted on the street for the great crime of wearing a yarmulke.
	He can see he's just walking down the street.
	A man comes up behind him, takes his kippah, throws his yarmulke, throws it on the ground, stomps on it, and then comes back in order to punch this Jewish man in the face.
	That attack came only days before the city's mayoral election, according to the Daily Wire.
	Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sleewa told the Daily Wire: seeing someone punched for wearing a yarmulke makes my blood boil.
	In New York, you should be able to walk in your faith without fear.
	It has no place in this city.
	I will stand against it every day by empowering the NYPD to hunt down these attackers, protecting our communities, and ensuring biased crimes are prosecuted to the fullest.
	Now, does anyone truly believe that Zoran Mamdani is going to crack down on this sort of stuff in any serious way?
	Truly, I mean, he doesn't like the police.
	He believes in an oppressor-oppressed matrix whereby we can judge by the color of your skin and by your ethnic heritage whether you're a victim or not.
	Does anyone believe that he's going to make the city safer for Jews or for anyone for that matter?
	People can see the results of this sort of governance and this sort of ideology.
	And they can also see the gaslighting that takes place around it.
	There's a fascinating piece in the Wall Street Journal about Johannesburg, South Africa.
	Now, again, it has become taboo to discuss the problems in South Africa post-apartheid.
	Apartheid was a bad and wrong system.
	That does not mean that South Africa is now governed well.
	It is not.
	We've talked about this on the show.
	We've had guests from South Africa who describe the systems of laws that essentially are DEI, they're discriminatory laws against white citizens of South Africa, the complete unworkability of the major parties over in South Africa that are rife with corruption.
	But we're all supposed to ignore that sort of stuff because, after all, apartheid ended and now we just ignore it.
	It's a happily ever after story, except that it isn't.
	And again, that is not a defense of apartheid in any way, shape, or form.
	That is a recognition that two things can be true at once.
	Apartheid was terrible.
	And the current government in South Africa and the government since apartheid has done a pretty poor job of governing the country.
	Both of those things can simultaneously be true.
	But we're told that those things can't be true.
	And so we're supposed to ignore facts right in front of our faces.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, what does it look like when a city stops trying?
	Visit Johannesburg, where instead of providing basic public services, the government just warns residents not to expect them.
	Signs tell you what crime you're most likely to fall victim to at highway exits and intersections.
	Beware hijacking hotspot or smash and grab hotspot.
	Homeless people routinely direct traffic when the stoplights don't work.
	Minibus taxis that ferry workers around the city often drive on the wrong side of the road to avoid rush hour traffic.
	Johannesburg, South Africa's biggest metropolis, markets itself as a world-class African city.
	It's home to some of the continent's biggest companies and its largest stock exchange.
	But private firms have gradually taken over public services from security to healthcare to mail delivery.
	Insurance companies fix potholes and sponsor fire brigades to reduce claims.
	The South African government is set to host the G20 in November.
	In March, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa tided Johannesburg officials for what he called a not pleasing environment and told them to address a slew of issues ahead of the meeting, but it's not going to be addressed, obviously, because it turns out that governance is the opposite of many of the things that the left actually is in favor of.
	Good governance is not possible in a system that is rooted in hatred and that is rooted in bad policy and discriminatory policy.
	I mean, it's not a coincidence that Cyril Ramaphosa and the South African government have been sponsoring charges at the ICC against Israel while simultaneously being unable to fill potholes in Johannesburg.
	That is not a coincidence.
	Okay, so I said at the top, this has provoked a response and it has because as the left and globally, but as the left has moved further to the left, embraced further radicalization, as that has happened, you've seen an identitarian movement arise on the right.
	So to go back for a moment, according to the left, the hierarchy of victimhood means the people at the very bottom, the people who are not victimized at all and who typically are in charge of the systems and are thus to blame for all the problems in the systems, are white Christian males.
	And in order to maintain that fiction, censorship should be used.
	Cancellation should be used in order to maintain that fiction.
	And people should be gaslit that it's happening at all.
	It's not happening and it's good that it is, as the line goes.
	Now, people with reason and values should respond to this radicalization in a normy way.
	The normy way of responding to all of this is the way that most Americans actually think.
	That normie way is, if you are opposed to Christianity and Christians, because they're bad and terrible and all this, the normal response is to live biblically because the best disproof of that sort of slander is to live a biblical lifestyle, live biblical values, go to church, be good to your family, be good to your community, take care of people.
	If people are opposed to Christians, qua Christians, then the best revenge is to live well as a Christian.
	That would be like the normie response, and it is the response of most Americans.
	If people are opposed to whites, then don't be a person who is racist in response.
	What instead you say is meritocracy.
	Why are you even, why is race the issue?
	Why are you making race the issue?
	And this was, when I was growing up, the response in America.
	The claim that America was a white supremacist country was countered by the fact that America was a meritocracy.
	And meritocracy is good because meritocracy benefits everybody.
	And that would be the normal response.
	That's the normie response.
	The normie response to DEI is meritocracy.
	The normie response to censorship is the Constitution.
	That's the normie response.
	You want to censor what I have to say?
	Well, you can't actually censor what I have to say thanks to the government.
	Now, does that mean that there aren't social consequences for particularly egregious views?
	Of course not.
	That's called normal life.
	You don't have over the homeless schizophrenic for dinner who is screaming about the moon people.
	Because, you know, you have rules in your life.
	Now, the neo-Nazi who lives down the street, you don't invite him over to have a nice chat with your kids because those are views you don't want in your home.
	And that's sort of normal.
	That's not cancellation.
	That's normal.
	And it's not censorship.
	Censorship is a different thing.
	That is the normie response.
	The normie response to being gaslit, people lying to you, is honesty.
	That's the normie response.
	But in politics, the normie response is too mild very often.
	And people get frustrated.
	And because people are frustrated, what they tend to do is respond, quote unquote, in kind.
	And this is how you end up with a horseshoe theory right.
	The way you end up with a horseshoe theory right is the response is the direct mirror of the left's actual offense.
	So if the left says that white Christian males are the problem, the way that you respond is instead a DEI for precisely the people who are said to be the problem.
	And now the idea is that the systems should only benefit white Christian males, not meritocracy, right?
	Not the best man wins.
	Meritocracy goes by the wayside because after all, somebody has to win and somebody has to lose.
	And if you're going to think of the world in that way, then I'm going to respond in kind, fire with fire.
	And so you've seen the rise of a white identitarian right.
	Again, this is a fragment of the right.
	This is not nearly the whole right.
	It is not the mainstream on the right.
	It is gaining increased traction on the right, thanks to the apparently total inability of anybody on the right to speak morally on these issues in a serious way.
	And instead, the attempt to massage this burgeoning feeling into a normality or legitimacy.
	And the normal response to the left's hatred of white Christian males, which should be meritocracy, freedom of religion, and better biblical practice, is not that.
	Instead, it's the idea that if the left is going to practice gaslighting and dishonesty, well, then we too should practice gaslighting and dishonesty.
	It doesn't matter what we say, so long as we achieve victory.
	Power is the only thing.
	And thus, calling other people out is now considered a form of censorship, or criticizing a view is considered a form of censorship, which of course is really stupid.
	Criticism is not censorship.
	Stopping criticism, in fact, is a form of censorship.
	But the idea is, this is where the Carl Schmidtian friend-enemy distinction comes in, that as long as you are on quote unquote, my side, it doesn't matter what predations and idiocies you are spouting, as long as you are quote unquote on my side.
	Now, the question becomes, what is my side?
	Again, if I'm a person who responds with sort of traditional Americanism to the idiocies, excesses, and evils of the left, if I respond with, hey, you know what we should do?
	Biblical values, meritocracy, and the Constitution.
	And if you say instead, what we should respond with is a sort of pagan dishonesty, a DEI for white Christian males, discarding the Constitution in favor of a bizarre feeling of authoritarian tyranny.
	The Constitution is hackneyed, that what has the Constitution ever done for us?
	If I say, well, you're not on my side, clearly, I mean, we disagree about all the key issues, then it's accused of quote unquote breaking the unity against the left.
	But here's the problem.
	If you agree with the left, you just want a different class of people to benefit.
	I don't really see how that aligns with the thing that most Americans want and that conservatism has historically stood for.
	But this is the nature of our politics.
	It is a reactionary politics.
	And the answer is, I've been saying it for a while, there needs to be in this country a normie revolution where people speak out in normal ways about the things that most Americans want.
	These are 80-20 issues.
	What's amazing about all of this, the vast majority of Americans believe in freedom of religion.
	The vast majority of Americans, even if they themselves do not go to church, believe that, for example, going to church is a generally good thing.
	The vast majority of Americans do not believe in governmental censorship, but they do believe in certain sort of social standards whereby bizarre, outlandish, and evil views don't necessarily receive a place at your dinner table.
	Most Americans are very much in favor of a meritocracy because that is a path forward for the entire civilization.
	And in fact, a path forward for those who work hard.
	And if no one is going to articulate those principles, what you will end up with is a debate between the worst of the excesses on all sides.
	And people will just keep ping-ponging off each other.
	That pendulum will keep swinging wildly from side to side.
	And at no point will that 80% in the middle ever be receiving what they are asking for, which is just normality.
	Americans have been begging for normality for probably 25 years in this country, begging for normality, begging for some semblance of just basic normal life.
	And it's not being given to them.
	It is not.
	I think President Trump is trying to.
	I think some of his followers are not.
	I think one of the things that's happened with Trump, and I mentioned this about the last election cycle, President Trump campaigned as a normie candidate.
	He was in the middle on nearly every issue.
	And even when President Trump is rhetorically excessive, people have learned to sort of dismiss that because that's how he talks.
	President Trump is as close to a normie president as we have had in the last several decades, which is bizarre considering, again, his sort of personality, but that is the reality.
	But people seem to be missing this in favor of the excesses, in favor of the polarization, in favor of the extremes.
	And if we keep going down this path, if we keep radicalizing and counter-radicalizing and radicalizing and counter-radicalizing, if this keeps going down this path, there won't be a middle left in America.
	And at that point, the things that I think most Americans care about, the things that I care about, the Constitution and meritocracy and freedom of religion and checks and balances of power and freedom of markets, all those things go by the wayside.
	Because when the radicals predominate, it's the normies who lose.
	So the normies at some point are going to have to stand up and say no.
	Cooler heads and wiser heads are going to have to prevail.
	And they're going to have to find a representative.
	Alrighty, coming up, we'll get to President Trump making a trade deal with China.
	We'll be talking with Andrew Ross Sorkin about the status of the markets and much more.
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	All righty, folks, time for some fast facts.
	Well, the president was over in South Korea and he had a much ballyhood meeting for the first time in a few years with the dictator of China, Xi Jinping.
	They made an agreement to lower immediate tensions, and they are apparently going to include a reduction in U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods in exchange for a pledge by China to crack down on the trade in the chemicals used to produce fentanyl.
	Now, again, I'm very much in favor of higher tariffs on China.
	My big critique of the Trump trade war with China is that we didn't get all of our ducks in a row.
	We should have ensured that we had the flow of rare earth minerals that we actually needed to compete with China.
	We should have cut better trade deals with all of the countries opposing China in Southeast Asia before going after China.
	China, in fact, used reverse leverage.
	They came after us by restricting the export of rare earth minerals.
	And then they also proceeded to basically reverse opium or us.
	I mean, essentially send fentanyl to the United States or the precursor of chemicals.
	And then we had to bargain in order to get them to stop doing that.
	Now, when I say that the president of the United States should have tried to shore up our rare earth mineral supply before going after China, there's a reason for that.
	I asked our friends and sponsors over at Comet, a project of perplexity, what percentage of rare earth minerals used in the United States come from China?
	What are our next biggest suppliers by country?
	The answer, China supplies about 70% of rare earth minerals used in the United States, making it by far the top supplier for American imports of these critical materials.
	The next largest suppliers are Malaysia, which provides 13%, followed by Japan at 6 and Estonia at 5%.
	Other countries collectively account for the remaining 6% of imports.
	Well, that is a problem, especially because China also apparently controls a large share of not just mining, but refining and processing of rare earth elements, often cited as 90% or more of global production.
	That was an obvious point of leverage for the Chinese.
	So before you go after China, you want to make sure they can't hurt you as well.
	This is not going to address the underlying issues between the superpowers.
	It is going to provide some solidity to the markets.
	The U.S. is cutting tariffs on China by 10%, President Trump said.
	After the reduction, U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports will still be some 47%.
	And China will promise to ease some of the controls it imposed on exports of processed rare earth minerals for just one year.
	It's unclear if there are any discussions over the so-called black well chips from NVIDIA, which are these very, very powerful AI chips.
	Our friend Matt Pottinger, who used to do China policy for the first Trump administration, points out that sending black well chips or allowing NVIDIA to send black well chips to China would essentially give them a leg up in the AI race, which would mean possible domination of the next century in the economy.
	Unclear the president talked about that with the Chinese.
	He did say that Xi Jinping is a tough negotiator.
	Here was the president yesterday.
	But he's a very tough negotiator.
	That's not good.
	We know each other well.
	Well, again, you can see Xi Jinping is not even making a face, as President Trump says, all of that.
	China is a dangerous opponent.
	Joining us on the line to give us all the updates.
	Mary Margaret Olihan from the White House.
	Mary Margaret, thanks so much for taking the time.
	Hey, Ben.
	It's great to be with you.
	So the President of the United States has been out there in South Korea, and he had a meeting with President G, a lot of news making happening over there.
	What's the latest that you're hearing?
	Yes.
	Well, the President is actually headed back to Washington, D.C. right now from a very long trip to Asia.
	He's made multiple stops along the way, and he's touting the successes of a lot of these meetings.
	Most recently, he had his meeting with the president of China.
	He's coming out of this with a number of trade deals, some that he talked about on soybeans, on farm products.
	He's very excited about that.
	He says there's a rare earth minerals deal that they'll be talking about down the line as well.
	So he's very triumphant returning home right now, and he'll be coming back to much more talk about the government shutdown.
	And actually, the vice president of the United States will be holding a roundtable at the White House on the government shutdown, specifically its impact on our air traffic controllers and the aviation systems.
	He'll be joined by Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy here at the White House, and we're hoping to talk to them afterwards and get a little more clarity on how they're going to be pushing Democrats to end the shutdown and how they're going to be using these aviation talking points to do so as we head into the Thanksgiving holidays.
	So the president is very excited about his trip to Asia.
	He's very triumphant in a lot of the interactions he had, the praise he received from these leaders in Asia, and as well as these deals he's emerging from the trip with.
	I'm hoping that they'll come back and be able to get some sleep because that is a very serious time change and they will be arriving back here at the White House around 3 o'clock today.
	Meanwhile, the vice president, J.D. Vance, was over at Ole Miss.
	He did a big event with Erica Kirk for TPUSA.
	What are you hearing from the White House about how that went?
	Yeah, so this was a big deal.
	Erica Kirk asked the vice president to join her at Ole Miss and to speak to these students.
	You know, we've seen footage, Ben, of Erica backstage preparing to come out and speak to these students.
	And this is, you know, one of the first events that she has done following in her husband's footsteps since this new leg of the Charlie H. Kirk tour began in the wake of his assassination.
	JD Vance talked a lot about faith.
	He talked a lot about the importance of combating a lot of these things on the left.
	He talked about how if there are not people on the right who are aggressively combating leftism, then there won't be anything left to defend.
	He also notably talked about his faith, and he said, and I believe this is the first time he said this publicly, that he hopes that his wife will convert to the Christian faith, Catholicism specifically.
	You know, she is a practicing Hindu and she goes to mass with him, as he said, but she's not a Christian.
	And so he said, maybe for the first time ever, that he hopes that she will one day become one.
	He also took questions from a lot of these students.
	And honestly, Ben, I was kind of jealous.
	They were very frank.
	They were getting some questions from him that I think the White House Press Corps would have loved to ask.
	For example, they talked about Thomas Massey.
	They talked about his personal faith.
	They talked about a lot of different factions on the left and the right.
	When it comes to Thomas Massey, he said that Thomas Massey is not in line with the president.
	He hasn't voted yes on a number of these issues that the president explicitly needed him to vote on.
	And so they think he'd be better off out of the United States Senate.
	These are just a sampling of some of the questions that these kids were able to ask the vice president.
	So a very unique opportunity.
	I think the reporters who traveled with the vice president yesterday were not actually able to ask him any questions.
	So I know they were probably really interested in what these kids were asking as well.
	So they all got back to Washington, D.C. at midnight last night, and they're ready for the president to arrive as well.
	And I think we're going to head into the next chapter of this pre-holiday rush to end the shutdown.
	And we're going to hear a lot from both the vice president and the president on that point.
	Well, that's Mary Margaret Olihan, our White House correspondent, Mary Margaret.
	Thanks so much for stopping by.
	I appreciate the insight.
	Thank you, Ben.
	Good to be here.
	Meanwhile, the government shutdown continues apace.
	Democrats keep saying the quiet part out loud, which is that they are using the American people as leverage.
	Here, for example, is California.
	Democratic Congressman Josh Harter, once again, saying that the shutdown is leverage to get Republicans to give them more of what they want.
	Why not take that route?
	I think the idea that you would give up all of your leverage and then hopefully get some sort of great deal coming down the pike is just a fool's errand.
	So, you know, again, the fact they'll say it out loud is pretty astonishing.
	Senator Jon Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, he went off on Democrats over food stamps, which are set to expire November 1st, and their continued shutdown.
	So are they making plans to end the shutdown and reopen the government?
	Nope.
	They're going to propose a bill to fund food stamps during their shutdown.
	Mr. President, this request is a transparent admission that Democrats want to keep the shutdown for what?
	Another month?
	Longer?
	This bill is a cynical attempt to provide political cover for Democrats to allow them to carry on their government shutdown for the long term.
	So, he ain't wrong about that.
	Chuck Schumer in response losing it as well.
	Here was Chuck Schumer attempting to yell about this.
	It is not, wait a minute, excuse me.
	It is not a dispute.
	It is fact they can use it, and the Republicans say it.
	Okay, but there's only five or six billion.
	If that costs $8 billion monthly just to administer, I mean, if anything, it'll only last.
	It does not cost $5 or $6 billion to administer.
	There's enough money to start feeding people right away.
	$6 billion is a lot of money, and they're using it for other things.
	20 billion for Argentina, hundreds of millions for Christy Noam's plane.
	Who are we kidding here?
	So, yeah, again, this is ridiculous.
	Everybody knows it's ridiculous at this point.
	Joining us on the line to discuss Congressman August Fluger.
	Congressman, thanks so much for taking the time.
	Really appreciate it.
	Thanks for having me.
	So obviously, you have a military background.
	You're a 20-year fighter pilot.
	You're now a reservist.
	What is the impact on our military readiness of the current government shutdown?
	Well, it's so detrimental.
	You know, I've been there before as a fighter pilot having to go through these types of shutdowns.
	And I'll say just on the readiness side of it, the exercise that are canceled, the readiness that has decreased, the stress that commanders now face, because instead of focusing on the mission, now really what they're focused on is trying to make sure that their families can put food on the table.
	So it takes all of their attention away from the job that we need them to be doing.
	But, you know, let's just kind of break it down to the most basic level.
	I mean, you have families who are currently on food stamps, which by the way, is a crime in our military to have that happen.
	So now, let's say a soldier's deployed somewhere around the world and they have a new baby at home and their spouse is asking, are we going to get a paycheck?
	How am I going to pay for rent?
	How are we going to put gas in the tank?
	How are we going to just put food on the table this month?
	That is so stressful.
	Imagine that situation wherever they're deployed, they can't focus on the mission.
	They're having to focus on making sure that they can have some sort of other means to support them.
	It's just, it's tragic.
	I've called on my veteran colleagues on the other side of the aisle to stand up to do the right thing, to actually show some leadership, and they refuse.
	And Congressman, one of the things that's kind of astonishing about the current Democratic strategy is that there has been a bill proposed by Republicans that would continue to pay members of the military while the shutdown goes on.
	And they won't even pass that bills.
	They won't pass a clean CR.
	And they also will not continue, even in the absence of a clean CR, to ensure that our troops are getting paid.
	No, they won't.
	And the reason they won't, Ben, is because they look at families, the American family and military families and all of the families throughout the United States as leverage.
	Catherine Clark said the quiet part out loud that she knows that families are struggling and yet this is their only time of leverage.
	So it's disgusting to think about that.
	And they won't even come to their senses to take care of families.
	We've known for a long time the Democrat Party has an undertone of an anti-family sentiment and now they're saying it out loud.
	You know, Congressman, behind the scenes, I'm wondering if any of your Democratic colleagues will admit that this is a bad strategy and they're just essentially too bullied by their leadership or too afraid of their Marxist wing to do anything about it.
	Because I obviously know members of Congress who are on the Democratic side of the aisle.
	They disagree, some of them, with how the leadership conducts itself.
	I wonder if you're hearing any of that sort of stuff.
	I'm hearing a little bit of it.
	You know, talking to some senators, Republican senators, I think it's probably more prevalent in the Senate right now that they feel like Chuck Schumer is selfish, that he has done this for his own political future.
	That's obvious.
	I mean, we can see that.
	So it seems to be very prevalent in the Senate.
	But when you hear Democrat House members get up and talk, I mean, their talking points are so weak.
	They're trying to concoct some sort of story of why they didn't vote in the first place.
	I mean, the House Republicans did our job.
	By the way, Ben, I was there under Pelosi and Biden.
	We were there when we had to pass multiple CRs.
	And instead of leveraging like they're doing in the American family, we did the right thing.
	And that was hard.
	I had to come back to the district and tell my district why, even though we terribly disagreed with Biden's spending plans, we made adult decisions and now they refuse to do the same thing.
	So let's talk for a second about the sort of Marxist radicalization of the Democratic Party.
	There used to be a time when there were blue dog Democrats over the course of the last 20 years, 25 years.
	Basically, that has been wiped out of the Democratic Party.
	There's still some ideological diversity inside the Republican Party on issues ranging from trade to same-sex marriage.
	There's no diversity, apparently, inside the Democratic Party.
	And increasingly, the Democratic Party seems to be swiveling to its left.
	The sort of commonplace explanation of what they're doing with the shutdown is that the leadership is very much afraid of the left flank of the party of being outflanked by that left flank, as being evidenced by the Democrats, all falling in line behind the insane Marxist, pro-jihadi Zarnmamdani in New York City.
	What do you make of the moves the Democratic Party is making right now?
	It's very sad.
	Like you said, there are no blue dogs.
	I mean, maybe one, maybe Henry Cueyar could fall into that category, but there's no diversity of thought.
	You're absolutely right.
	Madame and the radical side, because AOC runs the Senate now, apparently, has really taken root and has pulled the rest of the Democrat Party over to that side.
	So it's sad for our country.
	I mean, you know, as a Republican, I think that our policy is the only policy right now that strengthens our economy, strengthens the family, strengthens the military, strengthens national defense.
	And they have no alternative.
	They're not even competing on any sort of level because it's so radical.
	I mean, just take men and women's sports, for example.
	I mean, that isn't even a 1% issue.
	It's less than that.
	And yet, that's the token of their social platform.
	So it's sad.
	I think New York City is about to go through a very, very tough time to have, as you said, an openly jihadist socialist Marxist that's going to be elected who is anti-Semitic, which is very scary in New York City, and anti-capitalist, which is this.
	New York City should be the crown jewel of capitalism throughout the world.
	And they're about to go through a very tough time.
	Well, that is Congressman August Fluger, representing the 11th congressional district in Texas.
	Congressman, thanks so much for your time.
	Really appreciate the insight.
	Thank you, Ben.
	Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has now cut rates.
	Future Fed rate cuts, unclear at this point.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates at its second consecutive meeting, but Chair Jerome Powell cast out on expectations of a further rate cut this year.
	Powell made an unusually pointed intervention at a news conference following the meeting Wednesday to push back against market expectations that there was another rate cut coming in December.
	Far from it, he said to reporters.
	And honestly, I think we've had enough rate cuts.
	I'm just, you know, I know this is not what Republicans want to hear, but we do not have a lack of liquidity in the economy.
	We have a lack of certainty in the economy.
	These are not the same thing.
	Joining us on the line to discuss that and his brand new book is Andrew Ross Storkin of the New York Times and CNBC.
	Of course, he has a brand new book.
	It is a fabulous read.
	It's called 1929, Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How It Shattered a Nation.
	And it may have some lessons for us here today.
	Andrew, thanks so much for joining us.
	I really appreciate it.
	Ben, it's great to see you.
	Great to see you.
	How are you doing?
	You know, I'm hanging in.
	It's always fun here in politics land.
	It's a good time.
	So why don't we talk about, you know, we'll start with your book and then I want to segue into where we are economically in the country right now.
	So there are a couple of theories just on a broader macroeconomic level about what exactly happened in 1929 that led to the Great Depression.
	Because obviously we had had stock market crashes before.
	We had one in the early 20th century where actually a bunch of rich bankers came together and essentially bailed out the American economy.
	We had one in 1920 and the government's policy was basically sit and do nothing.
	And then the economy recovered by 1921.
	1929, the stock market collapses.
	In the early stages, people don't actually know how bad things are going to be.
	This turns into the Great Depression.
	And there are a couple of sort of theories on the right as to why this happened.
	There's the Milton Friedman theory that there wasn't enough liquidity in the economy.
	The Fed should have stepped in and injected a bunch of liquidity into the economy, which seems to be the sort of going theory now.
	And then there's the Vienna school theory, which is it was all the inflation of the currency in the 20s that led to the bubble that burst in the first place.
	And actually, it was the government's involvement that led to the Great Depression being lengthened tremendously.
	You've studied all of this.
	Where do you come down on this particular front?
	Because it does have ramifications for where we are today.
	Look, I'm more in the Milton Friedman camp, though.
	I think the currency issue is a real one.
	So maybe I'm maybe somewhere in the middle if that's boring.
	I think it was a crisis that was induced effectively by a period of remarkable euphoria and frankly, debt that people took on in the context of margin loans.
	That's what it really was.
	It was people, it was, to me, it was a period of time where the American dream actually fundamentally changed, where, you know, prior to 1920, nobody wanted to take out, take debt, take on debt.
	It was a moral sin in this country to take on debt.
	And things really changed in the 20s where people were buying stock on margin and it became a get-rich-quick American dream.
	Meaning, prior to that, I think it was really a Horatio Alger dream of sort of rags to riches.
	And I think people saw you were coming to cities all across the country and they saw what the elites were doing.
	They wanted in on that action.
	And so when things broke, the big problem goes back to Milton Friedman, which is when things broke, instead of throwing money at the problem, which is probably what you need to do.
	And I think as evidenced by how we reacted in the context of, frankly, 2008 and some of the other crises, you know, that is the way to arrest a crisis as politically unpopular as that typically is.
	So when we look at, you know, the current state of the American economy, because when you look back to 29, it's not just 29, obviously.
	Your book is about 29, but the Great Depression lasts all the way really until the beginning of World War II.
	And you can make the case that it's unfair to even say the Depression ended with World War II because half of the manpower in the United States was occupied overseas in the middle of a very long and bloody war.
	You can make the case that basically the Depression lasts all the way from 1929 until after World War II, until essentially 1946.
	And so the government policies that were pursued were obviously incredibly heavy-handed, very interventionist.
	FDR was a big government guy, and it didn't lead to a sort of tremendous V-shaped recovery, which is what you'd want.
	It was at best a very slow recovery.
	What lessons does that hold for us?
	Well, what I think you're speaking to, which is actually quite fascinating, is in the immediate aftermath of the crash, and this is now President Hoover before we even get to Roosevelt, there was a both sitting on the hands, doing nothing.
	The Fed did very little.
	You, by the way, had policies like raising taxes.
	I mean, Hoover tried to raise taxes in the middle of all of this, which made no sense.
	Then on top of that, you had the Smoot Hawley tariffs, which upended things as well and made things more complicated.
	You know, you then have unemployment in the country at 25% by 1932.
	The stock market's down 90%.
	Roosevelt gets in office and people think that somehow the New Deal somehow, there's a view that that took us out of the Great Depression.
	That's not true because by 1936, things had actually turned around the opposite way.
	And so then you had World War II, of course, and all the spending that was required then.
	And so I think it's really the confluence of all those things from a policy perspective to think about why this took so long to get back from.
	I do believe not only could have you possibly arrested the crash and the crisis, the first domino in 1929 from ever even happening, but then it was the series of dominoes after that was mistake after mistake after mistake that led to this prolonged period of challenge.
	So the reason this is so relevant, obviously, is because I'm looking at the economy right now.
	I'm an advocate of the view that we are in a bubble.
	I know that there are a lot of people who believe that it's not a bubble, that actually the fundamentals are solid, that we're going to continue to grow.
	I cannot help feeling as though the situation you're describing, the sort of get rich quick aspect has reared its head once again.
	You see it certainly in the world of crypto.
	I think you're seeing it in the world of stocks where people are looking for vast multiples, which means that basically the Magnificent Seven are the big leaders on the board.
	But if you take them out of the stock market growth, you don't actually see a tremendous amount of stock market growth, except in these sort of top line industries that are now very heavily reliant on the build out for AI.
	And it seems like essentially the entire market is laying a bet that AI is going to pay off in the tens of billions, if not trillions of dollars in the very near future.
	It seems to me that that at the very least is overstated, that there's going to be a gap between the investment that's being made in AI and the actual payoff from AI that is going to justify.
	There was even with the internet, which completely transformed the economy.
	And the amount of building that's going on right now, where NVIDIA is now worth the entire economy of Germany on the stock market, it seems to me that this is a bubble situation into which the Fed is now reducing interest rates, presumably in the hope of keeping unemployment down.
	But one of the benefits of AI supposedly is it's going to allow for there to be more unemployment because it's going to kill a bunch of white-collar jobs.
	So I don't understand, number one, what we expect the Fed to do, why the Fed has become, as our friend Mohamed Elarian has said, sort of the place of first resort.
	It's sort of the policymaker of first resort.
	Do you feel as though we are on the precipice of something here?
	I do.
	And, you know, to your point, Jason Fuhrman of Harvard just wrote a paper where he mathed out if you were to remove all of the money that's being spent today on AI, growth in this country would be literally 0.1%.
	So it speaks to just sort of how concentrated everything now is and the big bet that's being placed on AI.
	And clearly there is almost indiscriminate spending going on in that space.
	It's almost impossible to believe that that's not happening.
	It's very hard to do the ROI in this moment.
	It's almost like a religion in terms of that spending.
	And so you have to think, not to say that we're in 1929, but we could be in 1999.
	You know, the internet, as you mentioned, was a powerful force then, is even more powerful force now.
	I imagine AI is a powerful force now.
	It will be even more powerful force in the future.
	And yet, could we have a hiccup or worse along the way?
	I'd be surprised if we didn't have a hiccup or more along the way.
	It'd almost be impossible not to because of how complicated the math is.
	But what makes to me the AI piece even more complicated is that even in success, if AI is as successful as we want it to be, it means that we have to have extraordinary productivity to make the math make any sense.
	And what does productivity mean?
	Well, that's a euphemism oftentimes for removing cost.
	How do you remove costs?
	Well, now we're talking about you and me and everybody else from an employment perspective.
	So to the extent people always say, is this time different?
	That's the one piece that could be different, actually.
	And if you're looking at government policy right now, obviously we are now in the middle of a series of tariff wars.
	Those don't seem to have driven down the economy in a serious way.
	I think because of all the kind of weird cross currents in the economy right now, on the one hand, you have the Trump administration radically cutting regulation and lowering taxes or at least maintaining lower tax rates.
	On the other hand, you have these tariff fights.
	It feels like the market basically has shrugged the tariffs because it's unclear from day to day what the tariffs are going to be, what the Supreme Court is going to remove them, what the sort of long-term effects of the tariffs are going to be, if any, because the president is legitimately like kind of putting them on and taking them off again.
	And so the markets are kind of saying, you know what?
	I'm just going to leave my money where it is.
	I'm not pulling out.
	I'm not putting more money in.
	There's a lot of money on the sidelines.
	And again, this is where I get to, I know there are a lot of people on the right who are calling for the Fed to lower the interest rates even more.
	And I keep thinking to myself, I mean, I know business people, there is not a shortage of liquidity.
	There is plenty of liquidity.
	The reason the liquidity is not being injected is because nobody knows what the hell is about to happen next.
	I think there's two things going on.
	One is the issue that you're speaking to, but the other is AI.
	So I think the tariff piece, people don't really know where the tariffs are going to land, but I think they're almost okay with that.
	But because in large part the economy is being so almost superpowered by AI, it's almost papering over just about everything else in the system.
	And so there's almost a sort of don't look at that kind of thing.
	I think the question, and you keep asking it, and it's the right question, is what does the Fed do about all of this?
	You know, I think they're worried about lowering interest rates because by the way, they think there's almost too much speculation in the markets right now about all of this.
	But at the same time, they're worried about what do you do about employment?
	But in this day and age, given that there's a worry that the reason why employments can get pulled out of the system is a function of AI, it's not so clear that just if you lower interest rates, the businesses are going to start hiring people again.
	And so you're really sort of stuck in a very unusual place.
	Right.
	I mean, this is the thing about the Fed that has always sort of astonished me is it's, first of all, I don't believe in agencies with dual purposes.
	I think every agency ought to have a singular purpose.
	If the goal of the Fed is to keep the inflation low, then the goal of the Fed should be to keep inflation low.
	But the idea that their job is to both keep inflation low and also keep unemployment low puts them at the center of a matrix that is unworkable, particularly in an AI scenario where, as you say, the more that gets invested in AI, the better the chance possibly that you're going to see an elevation of the unemployment rate.
	So you could simultaneously be having them attempting to boost employment by inflating.
	And at the same time, you're going to get both inflation and also job loss.
	Look, this is the conundrum that the Federal Reserve faces.
	This is the conundrum that I think policymakers are going to face for the next decade plus.
	How are we going to deal with the employment piece of this at the same time that we are going through this boom?
	And by the way, if there's a hiccup along the way, what do you do?
	And by the way, layer on top of that, forget about just debt and leverage that's being used right now in AI to finance all of this.
	We, the United States, have so much more debt than we ever did.
	Back in 1929, by the way, for what it's worth, we had a budget surplus.
	We hardly had any debt.
	And so the next time that the Fed and the government have to spend even more money, it could get more complicated.
	I'm surprised that bondholders at this point or at some point aren't going to raise their hand and say, you know what, America, we love you.
	We're going to continue loaning you money, but you're going to have to pay us a lot more for the privilege because the risk is now higher.
	Well, the book is 1929, Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How It Shattered a Nation, the author Andrew Rossarken.
	Andrew, it's a great book.
	Thanks so much for your time.
	Really appreciate it.
	Hey, Ben, thank you so much for having me.
	All righty, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.
	And I want to get into the sort of question of AI and job loss, which seems to be rearing its ugly head.
	Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.
	If you're not a member, become a member, use code Shapiro.

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