Nov. 11, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:11:02
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The British Broadcasting Corporation is in real trouble melting down after serious allegations of lying, misconduct, and all the rest. | ||
| We'll get into it. | ||
| Plus, the government shutdown is coming to an end. | ||
| Who won? | ||
| Who lost first? | ||
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| Well, folks, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC is in dire straits. | ||
| This is a state-funded enterprise in much the same way that NPR is a state-funded enterprise. | ||
| And the BBC has been the dominant broadcast platform in the United Kingdom for legitimately decades, going all the way back to World War II. | ||
| And for the last several decades, they have just been a left-wing agitprop organization. | ||
| Well, now they are absolutely falling apart. | ||
| And they are falling apart thanks to their extraordinary, dishonest attacks on President Trump. | ||
| According to the Wall Street Journal, President Trump has now threatened to file a $1 billion lawsuit against the BBC over the way the UK state broadcaster edited one of his speeches in a documentary last year. | ||
| The BBC chairman, a person named Samir Shah, had to apologize on Monday for the controversy, which has plunged the broadcaster into crisis. | ||
| That apology came one day after BBC Director General Tim Davey and BBC News chief executive Deborah Turnitz said they were leaving the organization following criticism from the White House. | ||
| Now, what exactly happened here? | ||
| Well, there was a news program. | ||
| It's their flagship investigative news program over at the BBC. | ||
| It's called Panorama, and it ran one week before the 2024 United States election. | ||
| Now, you can say to yourself, did that affect the election? | ||
| President Trump won. | ||
| Doesn't matter. | ||
| The job of the BBC is to actually cover the news, not make the news up. | ||
| So what did they do? | ||
| Well, one week before the election, they ran a piece in which they spliced together things that President Trump said on January 6th, 2021, to make it look as though he himself personally was leading an armed insurrection at the Capitol building. | ||
| And that, of course, was not true. | ||
| In order to achieve this effect, they had to cut out full-on 24 pages of material. | ||
| They cut from one part of the speech and then they fast-forwarded 50 minutes, five zero minutes, and cut together the last part of the speech and clipped those together and then basically put an ellipses in order to make it seem as though President Trump himself was personally calling on people to follow him to the Capitol building and then to assault the Capitol building. | ||
| Here is the BBC panorama edit compared with the original clip. | ||
| We're going to walk down to the Capitol and I'll be there with you. | ||
| And we fight. | ||
| We fight like hell. | ||
| And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore. | ||
| We're going to walk down to the Capitol and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. | ||
| Fast forward for five zero minutes. | ||
| We fight like hell. | ||
| And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore. | ||
| Okay, well, again, that is insane. | ||
| And if you watch that original clip, as you can see, they did it in edit. | ||
| It looks as though Trump said those things directly, one after another, and they had a music bed underneath, which connects the first part of the statement to the last part of the statement. | ||
| It is not as though they had some sort of interpolation from a narrator explaining that much later in the speech, President Trump said this. | ||
| They didn't do any of that. | ||
| Well, in a letter from Trump's lawyers, they are asking for $1 billion unless the documentary is retracted, an apology published, and compensation paid to the president. | ||
| The broadcaster said in a statement, it would respond in due course. | ||
| This followed hard on a 19-page memo that was put out by a top staffer at the BBC. | ||
| His name was Michael Prescott. | ||
| He was an independent advisor to the BBC's editorial guidelines and standards board. | ||
| And he wrote a 19-page memo pushing the idea that the BBC had become a biased and ridiculous organization. | ||
| And here's what he wrote: Dear board members, you may know that I have been one of the two independent external advisors working alongside the EGSC. | ||
| I held this role for three years and stood down in the summer. | ||
| I departed with profound and unresolved concerns about the BBC since leaving. | ||
| I thought long and hard about what, if anything, to do about this. | ||
| My conclusion is that these concerns are serious enough for me to draw them to your attention in your oversight role of the BBC. | ||
| What follows is a summary of what were, in my view, some of the most troubling matters to come before the EGSC during my term. | ||
| My view is that the executive repeatedly failed to implement measures to resolve highlighted problems and, in many cases, simply refused to acknowledge there was an issue at all. | ||
| So he points out that there has been tremendous bias with regard to the U.S. election. | ||
| He specifically points out that edit in the Panorama program. | ||
| He said, quote, this was one of the most shocking sets of issues uncovered during my time with the EGSC. | ||
| If BBC journalists are allowed to edit video in order to make people say things they never actually said, then what value are the corporation's guidelines? | ||
| Why should the BBC be trusted? | ||
| Where will all this end? | ||
| And yet, top members of the staff said, quote, there was no attempt to mislead the audience about the content or nature of Mr. Trump's speech before the riot at the Capitol. | ||
| It is a normal practice to add speeches into short-form clips. | ||
| Now, again, this was a repeated thing. | ||
| So they did this with comments that President Trump made about Liz Cheney. | ||
| There are reports in which the BBC routinely ignored its own guidelines, giving excessive coverage, for example, to that rogue Iowa poll. | ||
| You remember right before the election, Anne Seltzer suggested that Kamala Harris was going to win the state by 97 points. | ||
| And of course, President Trump won the state pretty easily. | ||
| The coverage was ridiculous. | ||
| This whistleblower said, quote, during my time as an advisor to the EGSC, it became clear the BBC fell too easily for putting out ill-research material that suggested issues of racism when there were none. | ||
| And then he just lists chapter and verse across the BBC in which they basically manufactured a bunch of racial issues where no racial issue existed. | ||
| They went out of their way to promote idiocies about biological sex and gender, for example. | ||
| Quote, the desk had been captured by a small group of people promoting the stonewall view of the debate and keeping other perspectives off the air. | ||
| Individual programs had come to lack their own reporters as a counterweight. | ||
| There was a constant drip feed of one-sided stories, usually news features, celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity. | ||
| One example of this, by the way, might be a report that happened in 2024 from the BBC, in which the BBC reported that actually male breast milk was just as nutritious for babies as female breast milk. | ||
| Now, you may be asking yourself, what is male breast milk? | ||
| And the answer is that if you pump men full of estrogen, then you will get some secretions from the nipples. | ||
| That is not actually like female breast milk. | ||
| But the BBC had an interest in pretending that males can become females. | ||
| And so they ran with this report. | ||
| Now, a transgender woman's milk is just as good for babies as breast milk. | ||
| That's according to a letter from the medical director at University Hospital Sussex NHS Foundation Trust. | ||
| The claim was made as part of a response against campaign groups. | ||
| The trust referred to studies and the World Health Organization guidance, including one case which found what it called no observable effects in babies fed by induced lactation. | ||
| Well, to discuss this in a bit more detail, I'm joined now by Kate Loxian, who is a research fellow in creative global health at the University College London and a lactation consultant trainee. | ||
| I wanted to begin by getting your reaction to what we've heard from the hospital about this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course, and it's actually not very new in terms of a concept or an idea. | |
| It's something as someone who works in LGBT pregnancy and reproduction that we've known for quite a while. | ||
| There's studies back in the 90s that talk about the sameness of milk from the birth mother and then the co-lactating mother in terms of 10 days after birth. | ||
| There's no dissonance seen there. | ||
| Now, again, this was then passed around all over the media: the Sunday Times, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail. | ||
| Hey, the evidence, shall we say, that male quote-unquote milk, which are just secretions produced by pumping men filled with estrogen, that this is somehow comparable to female milk, is based on one study of one man who pumped himself full of hormones. | ||
| And the BBC just ran with that. | ||
| It's ridiculous, but this is what the BBC was, and that's what it is. | ||
| And that's what so much of legacy media across the water and in the United States is that that's true on a wide variety of issues. | ||
| It's particularly true about the Hamas-Israel war. | ||
| Already coming up more on the BBC, plus the government shutdown and all the rest. | ||
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| According to the UK Telegraph, the BBC was forced to correct two stories every single week about the Gaza conflict since the October 7th attacks on Israel. | ||
| Two stories a week, okay, which is insane. | ||
| It's like, how many stories can you retract before you finally lose all credibility? | ||
| BBC Arabic had to make 215 corrections and clarifications over the past two years on stories that were found to be biased, inaccurate, or misleading. | ||
| According to the UK Telegraph, the figures follow a week of revelations by the Telegraph of one-sided reporting at the BBC disclosing in an 8,000-word dossier compiled by a whistleblower that BBC Arabic was choosing to minimize Israeli suffering in the war in Gaza to paint Israel as the aggressor. | ||
| I mean, why did this happen? | ||
| Well, the answer is because the BBC despises Israel, despises Israel. | ||
| And they can't make this any clear. | ||
| It's not possible for them to make it any clearer. | ||
| For example, here is the BBC editor, Jeremy Bowen. | ||
| This is in November 2023. | ||
| He falsely reported that Israel had blown up the Al-Akhli hospital in the Gaza Strip. | ||
| And it was just not true. | ||
| It was not true at all. | ||
| He admits he got it wrong, but says he doesn't feel bad at all that he got it wrong. | ||
| Like at all. | ||
| He did a great job. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tell us what happened that night. | |
| And, you know, bluntly, where were you getting your information? | ||
| And do you regret anything that you said that night? | ||
| So it broke in, I suppose, mid-evening. | ||
| And to answer your question, no, I don't regret one thing in my reporting because I think I was measured throughout. | ||
| I didn't raise the judgment. | ||
| But you said that building had been flattened. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Well, I got that wrong because I was looking at the pictures and what I could see was a square that appeared to be flaming on all sides. | ||
| And there was a, you know, sort of a void in the middle. | ||
| And it was, I think it was a picture taken from a drone. | ||
| And so, you know, we have to piece together what we see. | ||
| And I thought, well, that looks like the whole building's gone. | ||
| And that was my conclusion from looking at the pictures. | ||
| And I was wrong on that. | ||
| But I don't feel particularly bad about that. | ||
| He doesn't feel bad. | ||
| It doesn't feel bad at all because this is the way the BBC operates. | ||
| They start with the conclusion and then they backfill the news in order to reach that particular conclusion. | ||
| So is it any surprise that the BBC is a disaster area or that they're in serious trouble now? | ||
| No, it is not. | ||
| And it is long past time for the BBC to admit what it is, which is an agitprop organization on behalf of the political left. | ||
| They have been for decades. | ||
| Nothing has changed. | ||
| And this latest brouhaha is just more evidence that actually, actually, the government should not be subsidizing media organizations like an NPR or like a PBS or in Britain, like the BBC, because you just end up with left-wing media sponsored by taxpayers. | ||
| Okay, meanwhile, closer to home, it appears that the shutdown is basically done. | ||
| According to the Washington Post, the Senate passed a bill to reopen the federal government on Monday evening, taking the next step toward ending the longest shutdown in American history. | ||
| The chamber had already agreed to speed up the process to pass a bipartisan agreement struck over the weekend. | ||
| Senate Majority Leader Thune said, I could spend an hour talking about all the problems we've seen, which have snowballed the longer the shutdown has gone on. | ||
| But all of us, Democrat and Republican who voted for last night's bill are well aware of the facts. | ||
| I'm grateful that an end is in sight. | ||
| The bill passed 60-40, with seven Democrats plus Angus King, who's an independent, who caucuses with the Democrats from Maine, joining Republicans to pass it. | ||
| Senator Rand Paul, who votes no on literally everything, also voted no. | ||
| President Trump is expected to sign the bill into law. | ||
| It will not extend the ACA subsidies, the Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year. | ||
| And let's be clear: the Obamacare subsidies are the only thing, basically, that keeps Obamacare solvent. | ||
| Obamacare relies on these subsidies because Obamacare itself is kind of a bleep show. | ||
| Very few people are ever going to reach their full deductible under Obamacare. | ||
| They're just going to pay in tens of thousands of dollars to these Obamacare systems. | ||
| Many doctors don't even take Obamacare, so you don't get the doctor that you want. | ||
| You're paying too much money unless you have the federal government subsidizing you. | ||
| It was always a backdoor nationalization of the health care system scheme, Obamacare. | ||
| And when Republicans say no, Democrats complain. | ||
| They created the system, but somehow it's Republicans who are to blame. | ||
| Well, President Trump celebrated the end of the shutdown yesterday. | ||
| Here he was approving of the deal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you personally approve of the deal that's happening right now, Capitol Mill, to end the Republican? | |
| Well, it depends what deal we're talking about. | ||
| But if it's a deal I heard about, that's certainly, you know, they want to change the deal a little bit, but I would say so. | ||
| I think based on everything I'm hearing, they haven't changed anything. | ||
| And we have support from enough Democrats, and we're going to be opening up our country. | ||
| It's too bad it was closed, but we'll be opening up our country very quickly. | ||
| Yesterday, the president put out a statement about air traffic controllers who are not showing up to work because presumably they're not being paid. | ||
| Maybe they're afraid they won't get paid. | ||
| He said all air traffic controllers must get back to work now. | ||
| Anyone who doesn't will be substantially docked. | ||
| He said that he would recommend air traffic controllers who didn't take off time during the shutdown receive a $10,000 per person bonus, according to the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| When he was asked where the money would come from by Fox News's Laura Ingram, he said, I don't know. | ||
| I'll get it someplace, which, you know, not my favorite answer when it comes to funding of government-based programs. | ||
| By the way, just another case that we actually should privatize our airports. | ||
| I see no reason why the taxpayer should be on the dime for airports, which are eminently privatizable. | ||
| You could absolutely privatize the airports, could have airlines chip in for their own security and work with a system together to ensure the planes don't hit each other in the sky. | ||
| In any case, that's another issue. | ||
| The bottom line is that the Democrats caved here pretty clearly, and President Trump wins. | ||
| And you can see that President Trump wins because Democrats are really ticked at each other. | ||
| Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, he applauded Democrats voting to end the shutdown yesterday. | ||
| Here he was. | ||
| This is genuine. | ||
| I mean this sincerely. | ||
| We applaud the seven Senate Democrats and one independent senator who did the right thing. | ||
| They decided to put principle over their personal politics. | ||
| And my urgent plea of all my colleagues in the House, and that means every Democrat in the House, is to think carefully, pray, and finally do the right thing and help us to bring an end to the pain of the American people. | ||
| So, yeah, again, he's right about all of that. | ||
| Democrats are stuck between a rock and a hard place because basically the only concession they got from Republicans was a commitment to do a vote on Obamacare subsidies. | ||
| They will lose that vote, by the way. | ||
| And that was offered by John Thune very early on in the shutdown, actually. | ||
| So now Dick Durbin, Senate Minority Leader's Deputy, is the number two in the Senate for the Democrats. | ||
| He's out there saying the GOP must keep their word. | ||
| Well, the GOP can keep their word and they can still win. | ||
| I've served in the Senate for 29 years, and I've never seen that kind of offer from a Senate majority. | ||
| During the historic roll call last night, I walked across the aisle and met with Senator John Thune, the Republican leader. | ||
| I told him that I was counting on him to keep his word on this agreement. | ||
| He assured me he would. | ||
| Okay, now, again, that's not a big win. | ||
| They're going to try and play it as a big win for their constituents. | ||
| It probably won't work. | ||
| Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who voted also to end the shutdown, he's trying to claim that now they'll really be able to put the screws to the Republicans on more Obamacare subsidies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So now we're going to pay federal workers. | |
| We're going to untangle the chaos in air traffic. | ||
| We're going to make sure SNAP beneficiaries get what they desperately need every day. | ||
| And then we'll have a fight, Katie, about health care on the main stage in the spotlight without the background noise of all the shutdown effects and consequences drowning out the high stakes of the health care fight. | ||
| I think it's a fight we could win. | ||
| Now, again, Democrats don't even believe this. | ||
| So they are ticked. | ||
| They are really ticked, especially those who have 2028 aspirations. | ||
| According to Axios, many congressional Democrats are not on board with that Senate deal. | ||
| Democrats are once again divided. | ||
| The shutdown deal didn't extend health care subsidies, of course. | ||
| The Senate ultimately settled for nothing more than a promise of a vote. | ||
| They got an extension of government funding through January 30th, funding for food stamps through fiscal year 2026, and the reversal of those federal worker layoffs that President Trump had done during the shutdown. | ||
| Democrats are ticked. | ||
| House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffrey is against the deal. | ||
| Many are calling for Schumer to step down. | ||
| Here's Bernie Sanders, who, again, has the luxury of being able to be wrong about everything because he's never been in power to implement his garbage policies. | ||
| And basically, his popularity rests on his policies never being dried. | ||
| Here's Bernie Sanders yelling at the shutdown being ended. | ||
| Look, I think it was a terrible, terrible vote at a time when we have a broken healthcare system. | ||
| This is going to make our health care system even worse. | ||
| And that vote last night paves the way for 15 million people to be thrown off Medicaid. | ||
| What are they going to do? | ||
| Many of them are going to die. | ||
| So that was a really bad vote that took place last night. | ||
| Speaking of Medicaid and healthcare outcomes, I asked our sponsors at Comet, a new web browser by Perplexity, aren't there studies suggesting Medicaid has not actually improved healthcare outcomes? | ||
| And what Comet says is mixed findings from research. | ||
| The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment found Medicaid improved self-reported health and reduced depression, but did not show statistically significant improvements in key clinical outcomes like blood pressure, blood sugar control, or cholesterol levels. | ||
| Some long-term analyses suggest Medicaid expansion produced temporary gains in self-reported and mental health, but these improvements diminished over several years, leading to little durable difference in direct health metrics between recipients and non-recipients. | ||
| So, again, the question of whether Medicaid has actually translated into sustained improvement in physical health, that is a very hot topic. | ||
| There is no clear evidence that it does. | ||
| Yeah, this is not an argument Medicaid shouldn't exist, but the idea that Medicaid as a general proposition has been wildly beneficial to the health of Americans is unsubstantiated by the actual data. | ||
| When Bernie Sanders keeps saying things like tens of thousands will die, that is precisely the sort of catastrophic language that leads to people, you know, chanting Bernie Sanders slogan while they shoot up congressional baseball games in Virginia. | ||
| That happened just a few years ago. | ||
| Bernie hasn't stopped one moment to think about that. | ||
| Meanwhile, Pete Buttigej, who continues to try to make himself a thing, he failed Secretary of Transportation, who's mostly famous for, you know, doing nothing about a train crash in East Palestine, Ohio, as well as, you know, planes having their wings fall off and such. | ||
| Well, now he's back because he wants to run for president. | ||
| Quote, it's a bad deal. | ||
| Everyday life, making it better and more affordable must always be our bottom line. | ||
| For months, I've been hearing from people bracing for their health insurance bills to skyrocket so much that some will lose coverage altogether. | ||
| Some say they simply haven't even opened their letter yet, dreading the bad news. | ||
| Any deal that fails to address this directly is a bad deal. | ||
| Now, again, this was Democrats holding up the government, not running on this basis. | ||
| By the way, this would be probably a solid political line for them to run on. | ||
| But that's not what they did. | ||
| They decided to hold up the government and make people suffer in order to achieve absolutely nothing to elevate a talking point. | ||
| That's what actually just happened over the course of the last six weeks or so. | ||
| All righty, coming up, Chuck Schumer under fire for caving to the Republicans. | ||
| What does that mean for the future of the Democratic Party? | ||
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| Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer under Sirius Fire Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona was asked directly about Chuck Schumer's handling of all of this, and he bobbed and weaved like Ali in his prime. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wonder if, as a result, you believe Chuck Schumer's leadership is in jeopardy and should it be? | |
| Well, as I've said, Chris, we are dealing with an irrational president. | ||
| I know people are frustrated. | ||
| You know, people could be frustrated with leadership in the Senate and the House. | ||
| I'm frustrated with the White House. | ||
| Okay, well, congrats, dude. | ||
| Meanwhile, Hakeem Jeffries, who opposes the deal, still says that Chuck Schumer is effective. | ||
| And again, here is the problem: Democrats are in the unenviable position of having to pander to their extremely radical base, while at the same time, trying to fend off that radical base from taking control of the party. | ||
| And that's where Hakeem Jeffries is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Some Democrats in your own caucus are suggesting Schumer is ineffective as a Democratic leader and should be replaced. | |
| You, of course, are great love of this deal. | ||
| Do you view him as effective and should he keep it? | ||
| Yes, and yes. | ||
| Meanwhile, Congressman Seth Moulton, who's attempting to outflank Senator Ed Markey in Massachusetts, he's been moving pretty steadily to the left, Seth, in order to presumably garner the love of progressive base. | ||
| He says it's time for Chuck Schumer to move on. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm not going to run for it on a new generation of leadership platform here in Massachusetts and then go down to Washington and vote for the status quo. | |
| And so I've been very public about that. | ||
| Again, you know, respect his service, but time to move on. | ||
| And, you know, my opponent has not. | ||
| He keeps dodging the question. | ||
| So, you know, again, I think that this is the battle inside the Democratic Party pretty clearly, pretty clearly. | ||
| And it's being egged on from outside by geniuses like Whoopi Goldberg and the Ladies of the View. | ||
| Here was Whoopi Goldberg crashing the compromise last night. | ||
| Of course, it doesn't matter to her. | ||
| She's not a person who's reliant on food stamps. | ||
| She's not a person who's reliant on being paid as a member of the TSA. | ||
| She has really generous health care, I would assume, from ABC's The View. | ||
| And of course, she has millions and millions of dollars in the bank. | ||
| Here's Whoopi Goldberg doing the virtue signaling thing. | ||
| 50-50 chance of negotiating health care subsidies. | ||
| I just remember all of the people who are coming in and hoping that people would vote them in and say, Yes, you can be this person or you can be a judge or you can be this. | ||
| And they all said, No, we're not going to mess with anything. | ||
| No, we're going to leave everything as it was. | ||
| I have no faith that they're going to negotiate and come back to the table. | ||
| And, you know, I'm glad that folks may be because, again, we have seen you say this is going to happen and then it doesn't happen. | ||
| And, you know, people will get rehired, supposedly, federal workers and reinstate snap benefits, but a 50-50 chance of extending the subsidies. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't believe it. | |
| So, you know, again, we will see whether the Democratic Party decides to cave to all of this. | ||
| You're seeing this battle break out into the open in New York, of course, where Kathy Hochul has been slamming the brakes on Zorhan Mamdani's insane proposals. | ||
| So, again, she is in a neck and neck battle with Elise Stefanic for governorship of New York. | ||
| And she is very much afraid that if she does what Zorhan Mamdani wants, it'll absolutely crater her gubernatorial chances in her re-elect effort. | ||
| So, yesterday, she tried to slam the brakes on Zorhan Mamdani's nonsense. | ||
| According to the New York Post, Hochul, speaking during a press conference at the Somos political retreat in Puerto Rico on Saturday, argued she's already put vast sums of money into the perpetually cash-strapped MTA for major projects. | ||
| She said, We're spending a lot of money, so I can't set forth a plan right now that takes money out of the busing system that relies on the fares of the buses and the subways. | ||
| Can we find a path to make it more affordable for people who need help? | ||
| Of course, we can. | ||
| Meanwhile, Zorhan Mamdani tried to avoid direct conflict with Hochul because he's going to lose. | ||
| He said, I continue to be excited at the work of making the slowest buses in America fast and free, and I appreciate the governor's continued partnership in delivering on that agenda of affordability. | ||
| Again, one of my bugaboos here is that in our politics, if you just say the problem over and over and over, people then give you credibility, which is ridiculous. | ||
| If you have bad solutions, you labeling the problem does not help in any way, shape, or form. | ||
| Meanwhile, by the way, the downstream effects of the Mamdani election are being felt, according to the Daily Wire. | ||
| Immigration and Customs Enforcement is now recruiting NYPD officers disgruntled by the election of Zorhan Mamdani. | ||
| With a flood of cash from President Trump's one big beautiful bill, the agency has set a goal to recruit 10,000 new officers to turbocharge the historic deportation campaign. | ||
| New York City officers, already hamstrung by local sanctuary policies, are expected to face new hurdles with Mamdani in charge. | ||
| So ICE put out a tweet yesterday, and it said, NYPD officers, defend your family, defend your city, defend the homeland, join ICE. | ||
| ICE is already offering retired law enforcement officers up to $50,000 in recruitment bonuses, and they've received, apparently, at the DHS more than 200,000 applications already. | ||
| It'll be interesting to see what happens as the New York City Police Department empties out in favor of greener pastures. | ||
| Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, again, there is no too radical for the Democratic Party. | ||
| One of the hilarious internacine wars that is currently happening inside the Democratic Party is a war that happened in Minneapolis between Jacob Frey, who is the insanely left-wing mayor of Minneapolis. | ||
| You remember him from kneeling in front of the George Floyd casket. | ||
| You remember the masking and the riots and all that from 2020. | ||
| And he was taking on Omar Fateh. | ||
| Omar Fateh, of course, is Somali in origin and came very close to beating Jacob Frey. | ||
| Apparently, one of the reasons that Jacob Frey won is that he actually identified inside the Somali community Klans that didn't like other Kansas and then proceeded to target them for voting, which led Ilhan Omar, another person elected by the Somali community, to suggest that Somalis who didn't support her or Fateh should be expelled. | ||
| I mean, you want to talk about tribal politics happening inside the Democratic Party? | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| She says when a Somalian person becomes an enemy, they become a serious one. | ||
|
unidentified
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There are people like that living right here in our city. | |
| We all see them. | ||
| Some of us try to dismiss it, saying, oh, that person just talked too much. | ||
| It doesn't mean anything. | ||
| Or leave them alone. | ||
| That's my relative. | ||
| You probably met them in coffee shops. | ||
| You know exactly the kind of people I'm talking about. | ||
| We sat with them at Starbucks. | ||
| Maybe you've seen them once in a while at the mosque. | ||
| Maybe you've gone to parties together. | ||
| You know who I mean. | ||
| You've seen them. | ||
| We need to get rid of these people. | ||
| Man, politics here in the United States is going so well. | ||
| I'm glad that we imported vast populations of people who are so tribal that Ilhan Omar is able on the basis of tribal identity alone, not even some sort of broader religious or ideological rubric, to sort of separate them out. | ||
| Pretty impressive stuff right there happening in Minnesota. | ||
| Meanwhile, it's not as though the infighting is not happening on the right as well. | ||
| Marjorie Taylor Greene is attempting to lead an insurgency to take away control of MAGA from President Trump. | ||
| Good luck with that to the congresswoman from Georgia, who would be a complete unknown were it not for President Trump and some media figures who have touted her beyond all intellectual capacity. | ||
| President Trump yesterday went after MTG, who has spent the last several weeks on a slam Trump tour with mainstream media voices. | ||
| So when somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's now catering to the other side, I don't know what, you know, I guess she's, you know, got some kind of vernacular, but I'm surprised at her. | ||
| But when somebody like Marjorie goes over and starts making statements like that, it shows she doesn't know. | ||
| I don't devote a lot of my time. | ||
| Okay, so, you know, again, the president is right about this. | ||
| The only thing the president is missing is that it is obviously planned and it is also malign. | ||
| The reason that Marjorie Taylor Greene is doing this is not because she has lost her way. | ||
| It's because she has found her way and her way is to undermine President Trump's coalition on behalf of her own parochial interests. | ||
| That is what she is doing. | ||
| She's been doing it for literally months. | ||
| There's already a game that is being played by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene to try and seize control of the MAGA movement away from President Trump and redefine it in a direction that she chooses. | ||
| It is a thing that is clearly going on. | ||
| And the president should know that because that is what is happening here. | ||
| Marjorie Taylor Greene then responded by telling Caitlin Collins of CNN, I haven't lost my way. | ||
| I'm 100% America first and only. | ||
| Again, there are rumors that she wants to run for president, to which I say absolutely she should. | ||
| And we will find out how popular her program is. | ||
| I would suggest not all that popular. | ||
| Meanwhile, the president continues to be battered around on issues of affordability because affordability, of course, is the word of the day. | ||
| And yes, Americans are deeply concerned about affordability. | ||
| As the New York Times points out, President Trump has mentioned the word affordability as much in the last week as he has in the past nine months. | ||
| His renewed attention to the issue comes after weeks in which he faced mounting criticism for appearing out of touch with everyday Americans. | ||
| So Democrats have been trying to make the case that President Trump is not paying attention to affordability. | ||
| President Trump has fought back by claiming that inflation is way down under his presidency, which of course is true, is way up under Joe Biden. | ||
| It is reduced, but it is not ended by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
| A Washington Post ABC News Ipsos poll recently found that a majority of Americans say they are currently spending more on groceries and utilities than they were a year ago. | ||
| Only 30% of voters believe President Trump has lived up to their expectations for tackling inflation and the cost of living. | ||
| And of course, it is Marjorie Taylor Greene who's leading the charge, not because she cares about affordability, but because she wishes, again, to attack the president. | ||
| She said, I go to the grocery store myself. | ||
| Groceries prices remain high. | ||
| Energy prices are high. | ||
| My electricity bills are higher here at Washington, D.C., at my apartment. | ||
| They're also higher at my house in Rome, Georgia, higher than they were a year ago. | ||
| Now, again, the ways that you actually bring affordability into view for your trade, less regulation, lower taxes, that makes things more affordable. | ||
| But the president, again, seems very wedded to his tariff regimen. | ||
| And the tariffs are not particularly hitting tech. | ||
| Tech, because tech is transnational and it is less wedded to location than many other businesses in the United States. | ||
| The tariffs just don't hit NVIDIA in the same way. | ||
| They don't hit Tesla in the same way because Tesla's valuation is not as much predicated on the number of cars that it sells as it is on the expectation that Elon Musk is using all the data that he's gathering to build new types of robotics and new types of AI. | ||
| So what does that mean? | ||
| It means all the gains are going to the tech companies at the top of the market and all these sort of mainstream American companies that actually rely on inputs and then being able to export. | ||
| Those are the ones that are being hurt. | ||
| Nonetheless, President Trump is out there warning of a national security disaster if the Supreme Court should stay on the tariffs. | ||
| Here he was yesterday. | ||
| We have AI factories. | ||
| We're leading China by a lot. | ||
| We have cars and car plants coming in by more than we've ever had built before. | ||
| All of that would go away if we lose the tariff case. | ||
| So all of it would go away. | ||
| So they're not giving the right numbers. | ||
| It would be an economic disaster. | ||
| It would be a national security disaster if we lost the case in the Supreme Court. | ||
| Okay, now I think the markets would react a very different way than President Trump suggests. | ||
| If the Supreme Court were to strike down the tariffs, yeah, there would be another round of uncertainty, but at least the president wouldn't be able to sort of just blanket tariff the entire world. | ||
| So my guess is the economy would actually rebound in the face of such a decision by the Supreme Court. | ||
| All righty, time for some fast facts. | ||
| We begin with more on the Supreme Court. | ||
| So the Supreme Court has now rejected a call to overturn Oberzfeld. | ||
| Oberzfeld, of course, is the Supreme Court case that established essentially a national right to same-sex marriage. | ||
| That case is wrongly decided. | ||
| It is an egregious violation of the constitutional text, but the Supreme Court did not want to take it up. | ||
| That is not a surprise. | ||
| Even in the Dobbs case, which overthrew Roe versus Wade, there was a footnote from Justice Kavanaugh in which he explicitly said, basically, we're not going to take up Oberjfeld. | ||
| The reason those two cases were supposedly linked is because the right to abortion that theoretically existed under Roe versus Wade was predicated on a broader right to privacy and that same right to privacy, which was, again, based in a notion known as substantive due process, which, again, is a nonsensical notion. | ||
| That entire concept is also the basis for the idea that there is a right to same-sex marriage implicit in the Constitution of the United States, which is totally insane. | ||
| There is no such right implicit in the Constitution of the United States. | ||
| Now, that does not mean that on a public policy level, that there should be laws against gay people living together or people doing what they want in the privacy of their own homes. | ||
| That is a pragmatic and moral consideration that each state should go through at its own behest. | ||
| But the idea that there's a federal right, a federal right for a man to marry a man is, of course, ridiculous and violates the Constitution. | ||
| The Supreme Court, however, does not want to touch it. | ||
| That is not a particular shock since same-sex marriage has been embedded into the fabric of the society for 10 years and probably 20 if you go back to Massachusetts starting to perform these sorts of marriages. | ||
| Her lawyers, the lawyers for Kim Davis, are the ones who sued. | ||
| She, of course, was the former Kentucky court clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after that 2015 ruling in Obergefell. | ||
| She'd been trying to get the court to overturn a lower court order for her to pay $360,000 in damages and attorneys fees to a couple denied a marriage license. | ||
| Her lawyers repeatedly invoked the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, who has called for erasing the same-sex marriage ruling on the basis of, you know, the thing called the Constitution. | ||
| So, again, there's probably some support on the court for overthrowing Oberzfeldt, but certainly not enough. | ||
| For example, Justice Amy Coney Barrett has said that same-sex marriage might not be in the same sort of category with regard to right to privacy as abortion because people have relied on the decision when they married and then had kids. | ||
| And the bottom line here is that, again, the chances the Supreme Court was going to touch this were always extremely, extremely low. | ||
| Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is poised to hear a major challenge to mail-in ballot laws, according to the New York Times. | ||
| They will hear a challenge to Mississippi's counting of mail-in ballots received after Election Day. | ||
| So, first of all, if you mail in your ballot and it is received after Election Day, tough luck. | ||
| This is ridiculous. | ||
| This notion, first of all, that we should be doing vast mail-in balloting in the United States weeks in advance of an election is totally crazy. | ||
| It used to be called Election Day. | ||
| It is now election season. | ||
| And if you waited until Election Day to mail your ballot because you were too lazy to go to a polling place and then it's received three days later, tough luck. | ||
| There are lots of reasons we invalidate ballots in this country. | ||
| You marked them improperly. | ||
| You wrote your name down wrong. | ||
| Like, there are lots of reasons why your ballot might not count. | ||
| If you don't abide by the rules, then that is what it is. | ||
| If you don't abide by the rules, I'm not sure why the rules have to change to accommodate you. | ||
| That's silly. | ||
| Because otherwise, you are opening the door to widespread voter intimidation and voter fraud. | ||
| The case is a potential blockbuster, according to the New York Times, that asks the justices to determine the meaning of Election Day. | ||
| The challenge to the Mississippi law reflects political fights over the increased use of mail-in ballots, which exploded during the COVID pandemic. | ||
| In 2024, the RNC, along with the Mississippi Republican Party and individual voters, challenged Mississippi's mail-in ballot rules. | ||
| The challengers argued Congress had intended voting take place on a single election day and allowing ballots to arrive days later and still be counted undermined election integrity and the public's trust in the vote. | ||
| I mean, obviously, that's true. | ||
| Obviously, that's true. | ||
| Now, again, they're claiming that as long as the ballot was postmarked by election day, you should be okay. | ||
| That is the counterclaim. | ||
| The problem is, do you want your elections to carry on for days on end? | ||
| Is that a thing that we want to incentivize? | ||
| And the answer is pretty clearly no. | ||
| And meanwhile, on the foreign policy front, we have now been treated to the bizarre spectacle of a terrorist who put on a suit. | ||
| And now we're supposed to pretend that he's no longer a terrorist in any way. | ||
| I understand that relations with Syria are complex. | ||
| After the fall of Bashar Assad, which again, I said at the time was going to open a huge number of problems, as well as the possibility of future opportunities. | ||
| Well, both those things have been true. | ||
| The person who ended up taking over was a former al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorist. | ||
| That person, whose name is Ahmed Al-Shara, he decided to visit the White House yesterday. | ||
| Syria, the United States is trying to broker some sort of deal between Syria and Israel. | ||
| The Turks basically run Syria at this point. | ||
| It's a great unmentioned elephant in the room in the Middle East right now is not Iran. | ||
| It's not Israel. | ||
| It's not Saudi. | ||
| It's Turkey. | ||
| Turkey has been spreading its wings, attempting to extend the range of its neo-Ottoman empire through Syria. | ||
| There's no question that's what Turkey has been doing. | ||
| Erdogan is, in fact, a radical Islamist who supports terrorism throughout the region. | ||
| The fact that Turkey is a member of NATO is insane, totally insane. | ||
| And so the matter in Syria has become complicated because militias, largely backed by the Syrian government, or at least with the Syrian government looking the other way, those militias have been going in and slaughtering Druze in the south of Syria. | ||
| The state of Israel, which of course has a large Druze population, has been attempting to defend the Druze because the Druze, again, being quite tribal, are willing to literally walk over the border to Syria and just start fighting on behalf of their brothers. | ||
| And so things are pretty complicated over in Syria. | ||
| With that said, there are possible openings in Syria if the United States is willing to tell the Turks to back down. | ||
| According to the Wall Street Journal, Syria has now joined the U.S.-led mission to defeat ISIS. | ||
| They move marks a significant turnaround in the U.S. relationship with Syria. | ||
| The decision is a sign of Syria's transition from a driver of Middle East instability as a result of former President Bashar al-Assad's violent crackdown on his own people, which allowed ISIS to flourish into an ally aiding an American-led military operation to keep ISIS at bay. | ||
| There's talk about opening embassies in the capital of Damascus or Syria reopening its embassy in Washington, D.C. | ||
| The president met with this person who, again, was a terrorist and has terrorist sympathies. | ||
| Can he be turned around? | ||
| We're going to find out in very, very short order. | ||
| Trump's special envoy for Syria, Tom Barrick, has traveled to Damascus twice in the past six weeks. | ||
| Andrew Tabler, an expert on Syria at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Trump went all in with Shara. | ||
| They see it as an opportunity to reorient Syria away from U.S. adversaries like Iran and toward Washington, the Arab Gulf, and Turkey. | ||
| This is big stuff. | ||
| Well, I mean, again, that is treating Turkey, I think, with a little more respect than Turkey deserves at this point, given its support for, again, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and its openly Islamist attempts to turn its regime from a secularist regime into a Sharia regime under Erdogan. | ||
| This is complicated stuff. | ||
| I do not envy the president attempting to work things out in Syria. | ||
| We'll have to see, again, whether Syria turns into yet another failed terrorist state or whether they're held to account by the West. | ||
| And meanwhile, in a piece of salutary news, the IOC has now decided to ban transgender women, meaning men, from all female Olympic events. | ||
| That would be the International Olympic Committee. | ||
| This has become, of course, a very hot issue given the fact that last time at the Olympics, men were fighting women in boxing. | ||
| According to the New York Post, the International Olympic Committee is reportedly set to ban trans women from competing in all female categories. | ||
| The change is set to be officially announced early next year. | ||
| The decision to overhaul the current policy was made after the sporting committee carried out a science-based review of a biologically born male's physical advantages. | ||
| The report claimed there were clear advantages with the athletes who had disorders of sexual development, which is essentially people who have intersex conditions, for example. | ||
| So now the idea is that women will be competing with women, which, of course, is a good thing. | ||
| It is unbelievable that it took an entire cultural revolution in the United States in order to say what is perfectly obvious. | ||
| Again, that's sort of the way that things work here in the United States these days, is that saying the perfectly obvious has now become a matter of serious controversy. | ||
| Meanwhile, Michelle Obama is out there and she is complaining about life. | ||
| It is amazing. | ||
| Again, the number of people in this country who complain about the United States, like Kwa United States, lives the most privileged lives imaginable, is really an amazing, amazing thing. | ||
| Whether it is Zara Mamdani, who has lived a life of tremendous privilege here in the United States, or whether it is Michelle Obama, the capacity of the left to be utterly ungrateful about the virtues of America is pretty incredible. | ||
| So, Michelle Obama, she has been complaining about a couple of things. | ||
| One, she's complaining about the tearing down of the East Wing, which, again, like the fact that Democrats keep trying to make this an issue is beyond me. | ||
| There were a whole standard of norms and rules that we followed to a T that we painstakingly tried to uphold because it was bigger than us. | ||
| That East Wing, that's not my feelings about that. | ||
| It's not mine. | ||
| It is ours. | ||
| But we have to get, as a country, decide what rules are we following and who is to abide by them and who isn't. | ||
| I am lost. | ||
| And I hope that more Americans feel lost in a way that they want to be found. | ||
| Okay, I mean, like, really, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Man. | ||
| Mom, if she wasn't complaining about the East Wing, she's just complaining generally about how hard her life is. | ||
| Because if you think of a person who's had a hard life in America, Michelle Obama definitely comes to mind if you're an insane person. | ||
| I didn't really have that choice this first thing. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Every day, every time I was up, as we called it, you know, I was up for the public. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And the days were long. | ||
| So as you mentioned, to save time, you know, I know having a glam team, a trifecta, it feels like a luxury, but it was a time necessity. | ||
| There was absolutely no way that I would be able to do my hair and makeup and have clothes ready that fit, you know, because rare is the woman that can live off the rack. | ||
| Well, probably we need socialism then. | ||
| I mean, I guess that's simultaneously socialism good. | ||
| And also, I need my glam team. | ||
| That is definitely, again, the sort of limousine liberalism we used to condemn. | ||
| It is very much alive and well. | ||
| Apparently, the Kimmel family is now going around complaining about their life as well. | ||
| Jimmy Kimmel's wife, Molly McNearney, she appeared on a podcast recently with Jimmy Kimmel talking about how hard it was to be temporarily fired. | ||
| And he was temporarily fired again, as you recall, because he made a really stupid and terrible reference about Charlie Kirk suggesting, of course, that the right had been responsible for Charlie's murder. | ||
| And then places like Sinclair Broadcasting said that they didn't want any part of it. | ||
| And then eventually he came back after a quasi apology. | ||
| Well, apparently they had to talk a lot to this podcaster about how rough it was. | ||
| There's helicopters over our house and madness outside. | ||
| And Jimmy said, well, we're going to have to tell them because our daughter's in fifth grade and kids talk. | ||
| And so we sat them down on the couch and we told them. | ||
| We said, I believe Jimmy started the conversation. | ||
| And we realized in that moment that any other time we've sat them down to talk about something, I guess it's been good because Jimmy said, we want to talk to you guys about something. | ||
| And Jane, our 11-year-old, went, oh, oh my gosh, Julie, they have to talk to us about something. | ||
| And she's like, get in here, get in here. | ||
| And I think the last time we had done that, we surprised them with Disneyland or something. | ||
| So they seemed like it was going to be good. | ||
| And it occurred to me, oh boy, this is not going to be good. | ||
| And Jimmy let them know. | ||
| He said, our show has, my show has been suspended. | ||
| And our daughter immediately burst into tears. | ||
| And she said, I'll sell my laboo boos. | ||
| And we told her, yeah, you should. | ||
| No, we did not. | ||
| We told her, no, you don't need to do that. | ||
| You don't need to sell laboo boos. | ||
| And our son asked if the president had done this. | ||
| And we looked at each other and we didn't quite know how to answer that question. | ||
| So I have a general rule, okay? | ||
| As a politically active person, shall we say, who comes under a lot of fire, don't do this to your kids. | ||
| Like, really, don't do this to your kids. | ||
| It sounds like their kids. | ||
| If your kid is young enough to ask whether the Laboo Boos should be sold, you should not be having these conversations with your kids. | ||
| Here's a piece of parental advice. | ||
| As someone with 24-7 security all the time, with an enormous amount of this kind of stuff going on in my life, just don't, your kids don't need to know this is for you and your spouse. | ||
| Again, because the reality is we all have vicissitudes in our life, but people in my place, people in Jimmy's place, you know, we're some of the most privileged people on the planet in history of humanity. | ||
| And so, trying to, you know, create angst with your kids is a mistake, shall we say, or giving the ability for your kid, creating angst in your kids this way, I would say, I would suggest that that's not the proper way of handling this sort of stuff. | ||
| Okay, I do want to take a moment to note, of course, that it is Veterans Day. | ||
| We are so grateful to everyone who is serving and who has served in the United States Armed Forces. | ||
| An unbelievable sacrifice made by so many and continuing to be made by so many people. | ||
| And in honor of Veterans Day, I want to make a cultural recommendation. | ||
| It is my favorite series of all time, probably the best thing that has ever aired on television or on movie screen for that matter. | ||
| Go watch Band of Brothers. | ||
| If you've never seen Band of Brothers, which is the story of the 101st Airborne, it's available on HBO, starring Damian Lewis and a bunch of other character actors who you will recognize when you see their faces. | ||
| It is the best thing that's ever been on TV. | ||
| It follows the 101st Airborne all the way from training through the liberation of Germany. | ||
| It is a fabulous piece of work. | ||
| It is absolutely spectacular. | ||
| It is worth every moment. | ||
| Your kids probably need to be about 14 to watch it. | ||
| It's got the same level of carnage, maybe a little bit less than Saving Private Ryan, but it is beautifully shot. | ||
| It is beautifully written. | ||
| It is beautifully acted. | ||
| And it is an amazing window into what it was like to serve in World War II. | ||
| Again, probably the best thing in the history of television and a good way to remember our veterans on Veterans Day. | ||
| And speaking of Veterans Day, one of our sponsors here at the Bench Ferris show, of course, you've heard us talk about them before, is Legacy Box. | ||
| And they are doing something amazing. | ||
| They have been giving out for free their resources to veterans that veterans can actually preserve their legacies, preserve their memories. | ||
| We had the opportunity to sit down with a few veterans yesterday and talk about it. | ||
| Joining me online is Tina Kiprios. | ||
| She served in the Army for 10 years. | ||
| Tina, thanks so much for taking the time. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you very much for having me. | |
| So, how did you decide that you wanted to be in the military? | ||
| What inspired you to serve? | ||
| My dad had served in the Army, and I always thought that was very cool. | ||
| He was in right after the Korean War, so he missed combat there. | ||
| And then when I was getting to college and I learned that ROTC would cover my college, that was a pretty big inspiration. | ||
| And it was, you know, the idea of following in my dad's footsteps and having my education covered definitely sealed the deal for me. | ||
| So, what about serving in the military really changed you, changed your life? | ||
| My family wasn't typically very disciplined growing up at all. | ||
| And so, certainly, that was a first wake-up call for me: actually, being required to follow orders and meeting a particular standard. | ||
| And that's not the house that I grew up in. | ||
| So, it was a pretty big transformation in terms of not only the necessity, but the value of meeting higher standards at the get-go. | ||
| Were there any specific experiences that stick out to you from your time serving? | ||
| There's certainly plenty. | ||
| And I think probably one that sticks is really very early. | ||
| When I, right after my officer basic course, I was assigned to a unit in Germany. | ||
| And this it was sort of a U.S. Army customs unit. | ||
| And they're the folks that pack people out when they're going and when they're going anywhere, you know, whether they're going back to stateside or through combat missions or whatever. | ||
| And when it's one of the things that made this unit unique, this company unique, a company of about 200 soldiers, was there were actually only two officers. | ||
| And when I arrived in country at my unit, it turned out that my company commander, the other officer, was actually on emergency leave because his dad had just passed away. | ||
| So as a brand new second lieutenant, literally right off the bus, I was made a company commander. | ||
| So in this unit, the company commander was an 04 position, an officer of the fourth. | ||
| It was a captain major position. | ||
| I was a brand new second lieutenant. | ||
| And so what it taught me pretty quickly is you don't know what you're going to be asked or expected to do. | ||
| And so in this case, you know, I was in charge and my company commander was gone for just over a week. | ||
| But in that week, I was responsible for everything in that unit. | ||
| So when you look back now, when you look forward to the future, what does your legacy mean to you? | ||
| What's the legacy you hope to leave? | ||
| First is love of this country. | ||
| You know, I think one of the things that I learned, you know, in Germany, and I got to go to England and Spain in my service as well, plus throughout the U.S. | ||
| It's a special country. | ||
| And we operate differently, I think, than every other country throughout history. | ||
| And we take great care of not only taking care of our soldiers, but of fighting and winning wars in a way that we can be proud of ourselves for. | ||
| And so on the global level, that's probably the first thing. | ||
| And then, you know, just on an individual level, the idea of discipline, I think my girls, I think, would definitely affirm that I ran a much more disciplined house than I grew up in. | ||
| And I think that learning to work together, learning to be an individual as well as working together as a team. | ||
| I think those are probably the three top things for me that I take away. | ||
| Well, thank you so much for stopping by and sharing your story. | ||
| Thank you so much for your service as well. | ||
| Thank you for the privilege. | ||
| Have a great day. | ||
| Happy to welcome to the program Jake Huff, Sergeant Major. | ||
| Thanks so much for taking the time, Sergeant. | ||
| Oh, thank you for having me. | ||
| This was great. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| Let's talk about your background. | ||
| Where are you from? | ||
| How did you come to join the military? | ||
| So I was, my dad was in the military, so I was born in Germany, lived there for about eight years. | ||
| And then my dad was stationed in Wyoming, F.A. Warren Air Force Base. | ||
| And we stayed there for the rest of growing up. | ||
| I joined the military when I was 17 in the junior and high school. | ||
| I knew I needed a way to get to college, and the National Guard was a way to do it. | ||
| So I went to basic training between my junior and senior year of high school. | ||
| And then I graduated high school. | ||
| I left and went to Fort Rucker, Alabama to learn what my job was going to be. | ||
| I did six years in the National Guard to include a deployment to Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm. | ||
| And then I was a local sheriff's deputy, still hadn't finished all the education I wanted to get. | ||
| So I came to the active Army just to finish my degree off and I enjoyed it and stayed for the next 28 years. | ||
| And I retired in 2025. | ||
| Can you describe what you think of as maybe some of your defining moments while you were in uniform that really changed your life, changed you? | ||
| Yeah, so I think the biggest thing that changed me and had an effect not just only on me, but on our family, was assignment into special operations. | ||
| I was assigned to 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, assessed and was selected for that unit. | ||
| And that was an organization that just holistically took care of not only the soldier, but the family. | ||
| And it truly every day demonstrated what servant leadership is, which is what I thought I'd had. | ||
| I'd seen through my dad's career. | ||
| But this was the first time I'd seen it embraced wholly as a unit. | ||
| And that changed the way I looked at leadership, the way it took care of our family. | ||
| And even now, though we've been out of the regiment for quite some time and retired, we still have great ties back to that organization and great friends there and still have family members who serve in that organization. | ||
| So when you tell your story to your kids, your family, what do you hope your legacy is? | ||
| How do you want to be remembered? | ||
| What do you legacy to be? | ||
| I think when a lot of people look at legacy, they look at kind of tangibles, what you leave behind, businesses and money and things like that. | ||
| When I think of legacy, I think of how we impacted others, particularly my military career. | ||
| How did we help those around us, the organization do its mission, but those around us lift them up so that they can reach their goals? | ||
| It's not something that's tangible. | ||
| I can look at a picture and see soldiers I served with and then the opportunities we got them, the help that we did with them and where they're at in their careers today and seeing that type of servitude leadership continue. | ||
| And so for me, that's my legacy. | ||
| And that's what I hope my family sees and my family does is helping their community, helping those around. | ||
| Well, I really want to thank you for sharing your story and, of course, for your service. | ||
| And thanks to Legacy Box for helping us preserve those memories for you and your family as well. | ||
| Really appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And thank you for doing this. | ||
| Greatly appreciated. | ||
| Joining us online is Robert Hickish. | ||
| He served in the Navy for 20 years. | ||
| Robert, thanks so much for the time. | ||
| Really appreciate it. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Thank you so much for having us. | ||
| So, Robert, why don't you start by explaining what got you into the Navy in the first place? | ||
| Well, probably it was back in 1982. | ||
| I was just out of high school and looking for a job and actually went to go look into the Air Force first, walked into the recruiter's office. | ||
| This was in September of 82 and they said, yeah, I want you to come back in May. | ||
| So I walked out of the Air Force recruiter, straight in the Navy recruiter, and actually went in that night. | ||
| And when you served in the military, and obviously you were there for a very long time. | ||
| What were some of your defining moments, things that changed you as a human being? | ||
| Gosh, just the training, the, you know, just the discipline, the job discipline, camaraderie, the travel. | ||
| Had the opportunity just to live in all parts of the United States and as well as overseas in Japan. | ||
| Just all-around, just awesome experience to experience different cultures. | ||
| Were there any experiences that specifically stood out to you? | ||
| Like when you think back on your service, anything that sort of jumps out at you? | ||
| I had an awesome time in Japan. | ||
| The Japanese people were very welcoming and just couldn't wait to get off work and just get on our mountain bikes and travel around town in Ilakuni, Japan. | ||
| What do you think that your legacy should be? | ||
| What do you hope that your legacy is, you know, for your kids, for your grandkids? | ||
| You know, just raising the kids in the military with the good work discipline, living in different parts of the United States, as well as Puerto Rico as kids were growing up, getting them exposed to different parts of the country, different things going on. | ||
| Just give them an opportunity just to, you know, know themselves better. | ||
| And of course, I know that you have all those home videos, which are still on VHS tape. | ||
| So Legacy Box is going to help you get those transferred over so that we can make sure that those stories and that legacy can be preserved forever. | ||
| Really appreciate your time. | ||
| Thanks so much for stopping by. | ||
| Absolutely, Ben. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| I'm joined on the line by Emmanuel Morgado. | ||
| He served in the Navy during Vietnam. | ||
| Manuel, thanks so much for taking time. | ||
| Really appreciate it. | ||
| Welcome. | ||
| Thanks for asking us. | ||
| So why don't we start by talking about how you got in the military in the first place? | ||
| Well, it was during the draft. | ||
| This was 65. | ||
| I was in college and I was more interested in fooling around than I was going to college. | ||
| So at the time, they had the lottery and my lottery number came in and it was, I think, under 20. | ||
| So I knew that I was going to be drafted. | ||
| And my heritage is Portuguese. | ||
| So I figured they're seamen. | ||
| So I joined the Navy. | ||
| And what were some of the experiences, sort of the formative experiences that you think really changed your life and who you were? | ||
| Well, I mean, I'd never been on an airplane before. | ||
| So right away when I went to basic training, and they make a man out of you. | ||
| You have to do everything yourself. | ||
| You don't have anyone to fall back on. | ||
| And the experience, I think, changed my life. | ||
| I grew up on a farm and became, got to be a little more social because I got to meet a lot of people, people that were different than me. | ||
| And it was a great experience. | ||
| I think that was probably the biggest thing. | ||
| Well, when you look back now and you look at where your life has gone, what do you hope your legacy is moving forward? | ||
| Well, first of all, I would like to make sure that everybody knows that war is terrible. | ||
| And the thing is that the thing I'm most proud about is that, you know, my country asked me to go to war and I responded. | ||
| I didn't back out and I'm a better person for it. | ||
| Well, obviously, we are so grateful for your service. | ||
| Thank you so much for your time. | ||
| Thanks for stopping by. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Joining me on the line is Andrew Malafas. | ||
| He's a West Point graduate. | ||
| Andrew, thanks so much for taking the time. | ||
| Really appreciate it. | ||
| This is a great thing you're doing here. | ||
| Thank you very much for having me. | ||
| So let's talk about your military service and what you've been doing. | ||
| How did you get involved in this in the first place? | ||
| In the military? | ||
| Well, I had an opportunity presented to you. | ||
| I was 17 years old when I entered West Point. | ||
| Initially didn't want to go, but my mom kind of said, hey, this is an opportunity and what you should really consider it. | ||
| And I did. | ||
| I went for it. | ||
| And again, initially, I went in as the opportunity for laying out the rest of my life, which it did. | ||
| But, you know, after a year at West Point, you're not in it for the opportunity. | ||
| You're in it for the service. | ||
| And since then, you've joined the hospice industry. | ||
| You work especially with families that have unique needs because veterans often have unique needs at the end of their lives. | ||
| Talk a little bit about that. | ||
| Yeah, veterans always have unique needs at the end of life. | ||
| I don't think that the public knows the kinds of things that the VA offers to veterans that Medicare does not, even veterans who are not Medicare age. | ||
| So my last 14 years was primarily spent helping facilitate benefits for veterans and their families. | ||
| But also, I listened to a lot of veterans who have a lot of stories at end of life. | ||
| Andrew, you've done an amazing amount for veterans. | ||
| What do you think makes this country so special? | ||
| Well, the Constitution. | ||
| And we have to treat the Constitution as something sacred. | ||
| The last 10 years, I was very active in the veteran community in the Chicago area. | ||
| In my little town of St. Charles, where I was a member of three posts, we initiated Constitution Day. | ||
| And it happened right at the time when a lot of the riots were going on, the Summer of Love. | ||
| And we said we needed something else. | ||
| So I was a big part of facilitating that. | ||
| And it's been something that they've done every year since. | ||
| And I think that Constitution Day should be just as significant as Independence Day. | ||
| Well, Andrew, what would you want your legacy to be, you know, with your family, with your grandkids? | ||
| Well, legacy means leaving something for the future, sort of like planting a fruit tree and the people that come after you get to bear the fruit. | ||
| And you see that in industry, I was in food manufacturing for almost 20 years. | ||
| You want to put processes in place that live beyond you. | ||
| And so in the Army, you'd be like mentoring somebody and them being a good leader forever. | ||
| Me personally, I hope I'm remembered as a good father, a good husband. | ||
| I'm a Catholic. | ||
| I'd like to achieve salvation, and I would like to be known as someone who set the example for that. | ||
| Well, thank you so much for everything that you've done. | ||
| And really, thanks for taking the time. | ||
| Thank you, Ben. | ||
| It's a pleasure talking with you and meeting you. | ||
| Joining us on the line is George Aspel. | ||
| He's a U.S. Navy Vietnam veteran. | ||
| George, thanks so much for taking the time. | ||
| Really appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you, Ben. | ||
| So how did you end up in the military in the first place? | ||
| What drew you to it? | ||
| I had a fight with my girlfriend, who's currently my wife, and had a few extra drinks that night, and the next morning jumped up and went and joined the Navy. | ||
| And what were your experiences in the military? | ||
| How did that shape you as a human being? | ||
| It took me a long time to realize that the Navy did for me something that I never thought about. | ||
| It taught me how to be a leader. | ||
| It taught me how to treat people properly and to apply myself in a way that allowed me to end up with a good career. | ||
| Are there any experiences that you specifically recall that really kind of stick out in your memory? | ||
| I don't have a lot of just single experiences. | ||
| What the Navy did for me was to tell me or show me that if I wanted to do anything with my life, I was going to have to get an education. | ||
| So after my four years in the Navy, I got out in July, went back to school starting in September and graduated three years later and went on to have a reasonably good career. | ||
| So when you look back and you figure you define your legacy as a human being, what does your legacy mean to you? | ||
| A couple of things. | ||
| One, that I serve my country well. | ||
| Number two, I think the best legacy I could ever have is that my grandchildren would say he was a good granddaddy. | ||
| Well, I really want to thank you so much for your service and thank you so much for taking the time. | ||
| Thanks, Ben. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| Have a great day. | ||
| We want to thank all of our veterans. | ||
| And whether it's a loved one in uniform or your family's holiday mornings, preserve the stories that shaped you. | ||
| Head over to legacybox.com slash Shapiro today to preserve your family's history. | ||
| That's legacybox.com slash Shapiro. | ||
| Alrighty, folks, coming up, we'll jump into that vaunted Ben Shapiro show mailbag. | ||
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