Nov. 13, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:47
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| More Epstein emails drop and the media go insane, but is there any there? | ||
| Plus, we'll get to the government shutdown, President Trump's affordability pitch, and much more first. | ||
| We had 10,000 lifetime memberships when we launched. | ||
| Fewer than 2,000 remain. | ||
| One payment, all access for life. | ||
| And just a reminder, lifetime memberships will never go on sale. | ||
| Go to dailywire.com/slash lifetime to lock yours in today. | ||
| Also, our new live show, Friendly Fire, returns next Wednesday night, 7 p.m. Eastern on Daily Wire Plus. | ||
| Join Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Andrew Claven, and me as we do what we do best. | ||
| Debate, discuss, disagree on the biggest stories in politics and culture. | ||
| Plus, we are world premiering the first official trailer for the Penn Dragon cycle, Rise of the Merlin. | ||
| Don't miss it. | ||
| Friendly Fire next Wednesday, November 19th at 7 p.m. Eastern only on Daily Wire Plus. | ||
| All righty, folks. | ||
| Well, it is a brand new day, and that means it's time for more Epstein revelations. | ||
| Now, the reason these Epstein revelations are happening is really because there was a discharge petition that was put forward late last night in the House of Representatives, signed on to by several stray Republicans, rogue Republicans, some of whom are very much oriented against the Trump administration, in order to shame President Trump by saying that there ought to be a widespread release of more documents. | ||
| And in a little while, we will get to what exactly this discharge petition would do, even if it were passed in the House and then passed again in the Senate, which, again, is likely to die in the Senate. | ||
| But Democrats had to chum the waters. | ||
| They had to make everybody interested in Epstein again. | ||
| So they decided to do this in their usual fashion, which is to selectively release three emails. | ||
| Three. | ||
| Now, Republicans then responded by releasing 20,000 emails, but Democrats released three. | ||
| And this was supposed to be a shame tactic directed at President Trump that was going to demonstrate full scale that he was in Jeffrey Epstein's pocket or that Jeffrey Epstein was blackmailing Donald Trump or that Jeffrey Epstein had untoward material about Trump, which is why Trump has been so reluctant to allow for the release of more materials. | ||
| Now, the reason that President Trump has said that he is not into the release of more materials is he says there are already tens of thousands of pages of materials out there. | ||
| And courts have already barred the release of an enormous number of these materials on the basis of victim protection. | ||
| And the FBI is doing the same. | ||
| And so you can yell and scream about it as much as you want, but these discharge petitions, these attempts to pry more documents out, they are likely to fail even on the court level. | ||
| So really what this is, is, according to President Trump, an attempt to, by implication, humiliate him. | ||
| And it really does feel like that based on what Democrats did yesterday. | ||
| So Democrats dropped three emails. | ||
| These three emails were, shall we say, less than edifying with regard to the broad conspiracy theories that have been put out there about Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| Now, as I've said a thousand times, there are true, open, honest questions to be asked about Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| How did he make all of his money? | ||
| Where'd all that money come from? | ||
| Why was one media mogul paying him something like $158 million to do his taxes and look for tax breaks? | ||
| Why was another mogul giving him access to a $70 million home in Manhattan? | ||
| These are very real questions that require very real answers. | ||
| Instead, the entire realm has been filled with the most outlandish speculation. | ||
| The sort of full case that you have heard retailed in public by many prominent figures is the idea that Jeffrey Epstein was running a child sex trafficking ring, not on behalf of himself, in which he prayed on underage girls. | ||
| That was the thing that Ghelaine Maxwell is in jail for. | ||
| The thing she's in jail for is that she helped Jeffrey Epstein procure underage girls for him to violate, for him to violate. | ||
| And not for Bill Clinton to violate or Donald Trump to violate or random public figures to violate for Jeffrey Epstein to violate. | ||
| That is why Ghelene Maxwell is in prison. | ||
| That's what she was convicted of. | ||
| That's what the accusations were. | ||
| That has been blown into a broader conspiracy involving the idea that Jeffrey Epstein brought in a bunch of underage girls and a bunch of prominent people and then blackmailed them after taking tapes of them and pictures of them. | ||
| There is no evidence to this effect. | ||
| Michael Tracy, who's been all over this for years, a journalist with whom I frequently disagree, has done a very good job digging into the details here. | ||
| And there's not evidence to the effect that that was happening, that he was trafficking on behalf of third parties as opposed to on behalf of himself. | ||
| Now, again, that doesn't answer the question as to where all this money was coming from from a couple of figures in particular. | ||
| Was he blackmailing those guys? | ||
| Sure, that could be. | ||
| But as far as Donald Trump or Bill Clinton, or any of the other wide variety of figures who have been mentioned in connection with this, unless you have evidence, it's very difficult to make claims about them. | ||
| And then that has been blown into an even bigger conspiracy theory that basically Jeffrey Epstein was a foreign agent acting on behalf of a foreign power, honeytrapping these guys in order to blackmail them to change policy. | ||
| And again, the evidence of that just doesn't exist. | ||
| If it did, Dan Bongino, Kash Patel, the president, the vice president, they would have an obligation to tell you that, but they're telling you the opposite. | ||
| And so, again, I ask, where is the evidence? | ||
| Speculation, you know, it's a free country. | ||
| You can speculate, but stop pretending that speculation is evidence. | ||
| Okay, so that's the backdrop of all of this. | ||
| So Democrats are trying to underscore allegations that basically Donald Trump was being blackmailed by Jeffrey Epstein by releasing three emails, three. | ||
| Republicans then responded by dumping 20,000 emails into the public view, some of which are embarrassing for people like Larry Summers, who had a weird relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, just kind of on a personal level. | ||
| But the supposedly embarrassing emails involving Donald Trump, there's no there there. | ||
| All right, we'll get into the exact content of the emails that have been released in just a moment. | ||
| First, here's the irony: our military fights for our overseas freedom. | ||
| Well, over here at home, some of those freedoms are going away. | ||
| Your phones listening, tech companies are tracking every click you make. | ||
| They're profiting off your private data, all perfectly legally, by the way. | ||
| Fighting for freedom isn't just a military job. | ||
| We have to protect ourselves as well, which is why I use ExpressVPN every day. | ||
| ExpressVPN routes all your online activity through secure encrypted servers. | ||
| So data brokers, tech companies, and government agencies can't even see what you're doing. | ||
| And here is the proof. | ||
| In the last year alone, ExpressVPN received over 400,000 data requests from governments and corporations wanting user data. | ||
| They handed over exactly zero. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Well, they have a strict zero logs policy. | ||
| They literally don't have your data to share. | ||
| It takes one click to turn on, works on everything from your phone to your smart TV, and you can protect up to 14 devices all at once, which means your whole family gets protected with one account. | ||
| And whenever I'm traveling, I'm using public Wi-Fi. | ||
| That means that I need to be protected because listen, my data is my business. | ||
| Sometimes the best defense is just taking back control of your privacy. | ||
| And that starts with ExpressVPN. | ||
| Right now, get an extra four months when you use my special link. | ||
| Go to expressvpn.com/slash ben, get four extra months of expressvpn. | ||
| That's exp-r-e-s-s-v-p-n.com/slash ben. | ||
| Also, a recent Danish study found something deeply concerning. | ||
| Just one year after an abortion, women were 50% more likely to need psychiatric treatment and 87% more likely to experience personality or behavioral disorders. | ||
| Those aren't just stats. | ||
| They represent real women facing real struggles. | ||
| That's why pre-born takes a different approach. | ||
| When a woman walks through their doors, uncertain and afraid, she finds something she may not have expected: genuine support. | ||
| Through an ultrasound, she meets her baby for the first time, and suddenly what felt like an impossible situation begins to look like something different. | ||
| But pre-born doesn't stop there. | ||
| When a woman chooses life, they walk alongside her for up to two years, providing practical help like maternity clothes and diapers, as well as ongoing counseling and emotional support. | ||
| It's care for the whole person, addressing her physical needs, her mental health, and her future. | ||
| As you think about your year-end giving, consider the greatest investment you could ever make, the gift of life. | ||
| Dial Pound250, say the keyword baby. | ||
| That's pound250 baby or visit preborn.com/slash ben. | ||
| All gifts are tax deductible. | ||
| Pre-born is a five-star rated charity. | ||
| That's preborn.com/slash ben to make a difference for generations to come. | ||
| So, email number one was an email from Jeffrey Epstein, Apparently, to his lawyer, saying, I want you to realize that the dog that hasn't barked is Trump. | ||
| This is April 2nd, 2011. | ||
| So long before Donald Trump was even a gleam in the eye of American presidential politics in a serious way. | ||
| I want you to realize that the dog that hasn't barked is Trump. | ||
| Redaction, and then it says victim, spent hours at my house with him. | ||
| He has never once been mentioned, police chief, et cetera. | ||
| I'm 75% there. | ||
| Okay, so there is one major problem with this particular revelation. | ||
| What the Democrats did here is they redacted the name of the person because supposedly it was protection for the victim. | ||
| I mean, it literally says in the document, it's a redaction, so it's a piece of black marking. | ||
| And over it is printed victim. | ||
| Who's the victim? | ||
| The victim here is apparently Virginia Giufrey. | ||
| Virginia Giufrey was a very unstable person. | ||
| She passed away recently. | ||
| She was considered such an unstable personality, the prosecutors could not use her in the case against Jeffrey Epstein or Ghulane Maxwell. | ||
| Not only that, but in a sworn deposition, Virginia Giufre literally said that she was never mistreated by Donald Trump. | ||
| So if you just read that email out of context, it would sound as though Virginia Giufrey was trafficked to Donald Trump. | ||
| If you wanted to read that totally out of context, but that's not what the email says, and that's not what the email means. | ||
| And we have counter evidence with regard to this particular person. | ||
| And again, very cynical move by Democrats to redact the name there and then put victim. | ||
| Not because Virginia Giufrey wasn't a victim of someone. | ||
| She may very well have been victimized by Prince Andrew. | ||
| But because we know who she is publicly, also, she's dead. | ||
| So there's no more victim protection. | ||
| So according to, again, a deposition, this is a deposition with Virginia Giufre. | ||
| She said, Donald Trump was also a good friend of Jeffrey's. | ||
| That part is true. | ||
| He didn't partake in any of any sex with us, but he flirted with me. | ||
| It's true he didn't partake in any sex with us, but it's not true that he flirted with me. | ||
| Donald Trump never flirted with me. | ||
| This is Virginia Giufrey, the purported victim from this email with Epstein. | ||
| Okay, so again, like the basic idea here, which is that Donald Trump was somehow victimizing Geoffrey, that's not true. | ||
| Democrats put out the email cynically and then redacted the name of the victim to make it look like there was a victim here who is not Virginia Geoffrey, victimized by President Trump. | ||
| Not true. | ||
| Okay, second email is an email from Jeffrey Epstein to the execrable Michael Wolf, who, by the way, it should be noted, was basically doing PR on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| Michael Wolf is the author who is constantly writing these extremely sleazy and half-accurate tomes about what's going on in the Trump administration or the White House or whatever. | ||
| And you can never believe what he has to say because he does make things up on a fairly routine basis, it appears. | ||
| Well, he was doing defense for Jeffrey Epstein, which shows you what kind of a human he is because Jeffrey Epstein was a piece of shit. | ||
| Well, Jeffrey Epstein apparently wrote to Michael Wolf, victim, Mar-a-Lago, redaction. | ||
| So redaction, Mar-a-Lago, redaction. | ||
| Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever. | ||
| Of course, he knew about the girls as he asked Ghelan to stop. | ||
| So if he asked Ghelane to stop, I don't understand why that's bad for Trump. | ||
| So they released this email to make it sound like Trump knew about the girls. | ||
| He knew about, well, I mean, this email is 2019, January 2019. | ||
| So Donald Trump, according to Trump, threw Epstein out of his club because he knew that he was acting in nefarious ways. | ||
| Now, Donald Trump was not a criminal prosecutor, so I'm not sure what exactly that proves precisely because he cut off his relationship with Epstein. | ||
| So is that supposed to be indicting of Trump? | ||
| If so, in what way? | ||
| Okay, then there was an email from Michael Wolfe. | ||
| This is December 15th, 2015. | ||
| These are the only three emails the Democrats released. | ||
| And again, they released them in order to sort of imply things about Trump without actually saying them. | ||
| And this is one of the things that's deeply annoying about our current politics is that people are never asked to actually say the thing they appear to be saying. | ||
| Instead, they just sort of imply and then they back away and then they imply some more and then they back away. | ||
| If you want to say it, just say it. | ||
| Seriously, it's a free country. | ||
| You can say it. | ||
| And then we can all judge you by what you are actually claiming. | ||
| So Democrats put out this third email from December 15th, 2015. | ||
| Michael Wolf wrote, I hear CNN planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you, either on air or in scrum afterward. | ||
| And Epstein wrote back: if we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be? | ||
| And Wolf wrote back, I think you should let him hang himself. | ||
| If he says he hasn't been on the plane or to the House, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. | ||
| You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you. | ||
| Or if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt. | ||
| Of course, it is possible that when asked, he'll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime. | ||
| Okay, so the proof here, supposedly, is that Michael Wolf, who is a purveyor of many untruths, said to Jeffrey Epstein, not the other way around, said to Jeffrey Epstein, that you should hold over Trump's head the idea that maybe he's been on the plane or to the House. | ||
| So you should blackmail Trump, basically. | ||
| Again, I'm not sure what this is supposed to prove. | ||
| Like, what exactly does this prove? | ||
| Okay, so Democrats released these three emails and it was supposed to be terrible for Trump. | ||
| Oh, my gosh. | ||
| And then you read them, you're like, I don't see it, man. | ||
| I just don't. | ||
| So Republicans on the House Oversight Committee then decided to swamp Democrats by saying, listen, you want to release three or at least 20,000. | ||
| So the emails released by the Republicans include an exchange in which Epstein wrote, I know how dirty Donald is, but what he is saying in that email has to do not with Virginia Giufrey or any of the other purported victims. | ||
| It has to do with what Donald Trump did with regard to Stormy Daniels. | ||
| That's the context. | ||
| So what? | ||
| Is this a revelation that Donald Trump was doing catch and kill stories with the National Inquirer with regard to people like Strong? | ||
| Like, what's the revelation? | ||
| We've known all of this. | ||
| Is there anything new here? | ||
| The answer is no. | ||
| This is an email exchange between one Kathy Rumler and Epstein, in which Epstein wrote, quote, I think he makes the argument it was Trump's money making it not illegal, though he also said he only found out afterwards. | ||
| And the fact, according to the indictment, was billed as services rendered and grossed up. | ||
| I'm sure his account has flipped anyway. | ||
| I did talk in detail to Ken Starr yesterday, re-indictments, how Trump can make a deal, special counsel, Clinton's trash can. | ||
| Yes, Starr gave me more. | ||
| Yuck. | ||
| And then he replied to Kathy Rumler saying, You see, I know how dirty Donald is. | ||
| My guess is that non-lawyers, New York business people, have no idea what it means to have your fixer flip. | ||
| So he's talking just about the fact that Michael Epstein was basically Trump's fixer, which we already knew, of course. | ||
| So again, I'm not sure where is the there? | ||
| Where is the there? | ||
| Okay, then there's another exchange that, again, was released by the Republicans. | ||
| There's another exchange here in which Epstein revealed that he had photos of Trump with bikini-clad young women in his kitchen and named a couple of them. | ||
| The couple of them that he named are overage, meaning they're adult women. | ||
| So is the revelation that Donald Trump likes to be around adult women in bathing suits in the 1990s? | ||
| What is the revelation here? | ||
| We know all of this. | ||
| There is nothing new here. | ||
| So, again, all of this is much ado about nothing, at least the stuff that has been released thus far. | ||
| But the idea here was to sort of chum the waters in order to generate support for the idea that hiding behind the next documentary corner, the next tranche, the next trench will be the thing. | ||
| It's starting to feel a lot like Russia Gate, where CNN was running a breaking Russia Gate story every single day. | ||
| The next thing that happens, well, you will get the smoking gun that Donald Trump was paid by Vladimir Putin. | ||
| And so now Democrats and some rogue Republicans who do not like Trump and want to hurt his administration, they are joining forces in order to try and drive down his approval ratings with the suggestion unevidenced that Donald Trump engaged in illegal activities with Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| And that's the reason why Trump doesn't want these documents released. | ||
| Now, again, there could be nefarious reasons why Trump doesn't want the documents released. | ||
| Could be that there's something in there that he knows is bad or embarrassing for him or embarrassing to a friend. | ||
| Maybe that's the reason. | ||
| Okay, but you have provided zero evidence. | ||
| Again, there are tens of thousands of documents here. | ||
| You have provided zero evidence to the effect that Donald Trump did anything illegal here. | ||
| And in fact, you've provided some evidence that he and Epstein had a falling out. | ||
| And yet somehow this was the big headline yesterday. | ||
| The big, big headline. | ||
| Epstein, by the way, was trying to find any way that he could to basically monetize his one-time relationship with Trump. | ||
| Apparently, he wrote in a June 24th, 2018 email to a former prime minister of Norway, quote, I think you might suggest to Putin that Lavrov can get insight on talking to me. | ||
| That if you want to understand Trump, you can talk to me. | ||
| But that does not mean that he was going to offer them some sort of compromat on Trump. | ||
| Again, there's just no they're there so far. | ||
| Caroline Levitt, she was at the White House yesterday. | ||
| She said, again, there's no evidence Trump did anything wrong. | ||
| She's not wrong. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| These emails prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong. | ||
| And what President Trump has always said is that he was from Palm Beach and so was Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| Jeffrey Epstein was a member at Mar-a-Lago until President Trump kicked him out because Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile and he was a creep. | ||
| Okay, so again, that is true. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| President Trump responded on Truth Social. | ||
| He put out a statement saying, quote, the Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein hoax again because they'll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they've done on the shutdown and so many other subjects. | ||
| Only a very bad or stupid Republican would fall into that trap. | ||
| The Democrats cost our country $1.5 trillion with their recent antics of viciously closing our country while at the same time putting many at risk and they should pay a fair price. | ||
| There should be no deflections to Epstein or anything else. | ||
| And any Republicans involved should be focused only on opening up our country and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats. | ||
| Alrighty, coming up, who exactly is targeting President Trump and why on all of this? | ||
| Why are some Republicans going after President Trump? | ||
| Well, there's a reason. | ||
| You know what's funny? | ||
| When I started Daily Wire, we thought the hard part would be creating great content. | ||
| It turns out that dealing with all that behind the scenes stuff, the hiring, HR policies, employee issues, that's the stuff that really eats up your time. | ||
| I know I'm not alone. | ||
| When you're a business owner, every second of your time is incredibly valuable. | ||
| So don't waste your energy and risk losing money dealing with time-sucking payroll issues, office politics, and HR infractions. | ||
| Focus on the stuff that matters most, running your business with help from Bambi. | ||
| Here's what makes Bambi different. | ||
| They give you access to your very own dedicated HR manager at a fraction of what it costs to employ somebody full-time. | ||
| And get this. | ||
| Bambi costs just 29 bucks a month, whether you have 10, 75, even 100 employees. | ||
| If I had Bambi when I was first building my team, it would have saved me countless hours and headaches. | ||
| Instead of getting bogged down with paperwork, compliance issues, I could have focused on growing my show and connecting with my audience. | ||
| With Bambi's HR autopilot, you'll never have to waste your valuable time getting into the weeds of HR policies, onboarding, terminations plus. | ||
| Bambi is month to month, no hidden fees. | ||
| You can cancel anytime. | ||
| Right now, get one month of Bambi for just $1. | ||
| Go to Bambi.com, type in Ben Shapiro under podcast to schedule your first call with an HR manager right now. | ||
| That's one month of Bambi for just $1 at B-A-M-B-E-E.com, Ben Shapiro, podcast. | ||
| Also, recently I learned that over 4 billion pounds of meat were imported into the United States last year. | ||
| They can still be labeled product of the USA. | ||
| If labels can be misleading about something as basic as where the meat comes from, what else don't you know about what you're buying? | ||
| That's why Good Ranchers is taking over the game with quality meat you can trust, all born and raised right here on American soil. | ||
| Half my staff is basically living off of Good Ranchers at this point and their children. | ||
| And I got to say, we're growing like big kids here in the office. | ||
| My kids are like shrimps compared to some of the kids in this office because my kids eat kosher, but Good Ranchers apparently grow linebackers, locally sourced from American family farms and ranches, 100% American meat, delivered straight to your door. | ||
| You can also pause or delay boxes anytime. | ||
| It is super flexible. | ||
| So here's the deal: all new subscribers to any Good Ranchers box using Code Ben will get an additional $100 off your first three orders, $40 off your first, $30 off your second, $30 off your third, and free meat for life when you subscribe. | ||
| So hit up goodranchers.com this holiday season full of delicious meals. | ||
| Again, use code Ben. | ||
| That's goodranchers.com. | ||
| Let's get back to the table. | ||
| Now, again, the real problem for President Trump here is that most people, I think, when they look at this sort of stuff, their immediate response is, why didn't you just let them release everything? | ||
| Just let them release everything. | ||
| And the response of the DOJ and the FBI has been, we have released pretty much everything. | ||
| There's not much more to release. | ||
| And the stuff that has not been released is under court seal, which again is true. | ||
| And here is where we get into the vagaries of the discharge petition. | ||
| So yesterday, after the House of Representatives reopened, Representative Adelita Grijova of Arizona became the 218th and final signature on the discharge petition. | ||
| She joined all the other Democrats, as well as four Republicans, including two who hate President Trump and would like to destroy his presidency. | ||
| That would be Thomas Massey and Marjorie Taylor Greene, as well as Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mays. | ||
| Grahova signed the petition on the House floor immediately, and two Epstein survivors looked on from the gallery. | ||
| Later on Wednesday, Speaker Johnson said he would bring the Epstein bill for a vote in the House next week. | ||
| Without cooperation from GOP leadership, the earliest vote would have happened under the discharge petition process was early December due to waiting periods under the process. | ||
| So he's basically saying we know it's going to pass. | ||
| We may as well just bring it up right now. | ||
| And then it will go to the Senate. | ||
| And very likely in the Senate, it will die. | ||
| Because, again, the Senate has no interest. | ||
| The Republicans in the Senate have no interest in playing this kind of dumb game. | ||
| So the reason I say it's a dumb game is because we have to ask what this just discharge petition would actually do. | ||
| Would it actually free up documents? | ||
| Would anything happen if, in fact, the bill being pushed by Rokana and Thomas Massey of Kentucky actually got their way? | ||
| According to Rokana, he's the hero of the story, Rocana, the California congressman. | ||
| Here he was yesterday saying, we have the votes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, look, we're going to get the 218th signature today. | |
| That means by early December, we're going to get a full vote on the Epstein files. | ||
| And today there were bombshell emails that came out showing that Jeffrey Epstein and Glenn Maxwell had emails about Donald Trump's knowledge of what was going on. | ||
| So we need a full release of the files. | ||
| Finally, that's going to happen. | ||
| Okay, so this is cynical crap. | ||
| The reality, when he says that we now know that he had knowledge of what was going on, okay, of course he did. | ||
| He literally kicked him out of his club. | ||
| He said that himself. | ||
| So here I refer to Michael Tracy, who again, Michael Tracy and I have significant disagreements on a wide variety of policies. | ||
| But Michael Tracy has been in the guts of this story for literally years. | ||
| He is not a latecomer to the story. | ||
| And one of the points that he makes is that this bill doesn't actually do anything. | ||
| He says, for example, that their bill will fail to satisfy the legions of internet commenters clamoring for further investigation of Epstein's purported intelligence ties. | ||
| The bill permits certain records to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy if Pam Bondi determines that is what must be done. | ||
| This means any records which bear on the involvement of intelligence agencies could be perpetually hidden per even the criteria set forth by Rocana and Thomas Massey. | ||
| It's silly. | ||
| This bill would not give people the disclosure they want. | ||
| In fact, it would provide additional justification for the government to continue thwarting disclosure. | ||
| He says to learn how to actually achieve the disclosure, people say they want, you have to actually dig into the details. | ||
| You have to understand a huge portion of relevant materials are being concealed by order of federal judges in New York and Florida on the grounds of preserving the privacy rights of purported victims, as well as the privacy rights of people whom these victims, mainly GUFRI, have accused of sexual misconduct almost certainly falsely. | ||
| In other words, should certain of these materials be made public, it would wrongfully impugn certain individuals as perpetrators of sex crimes against minors. | ||
| Now, Michael Tracy says, I would argue the extreme public interest in this matter, as well as the attendant political implications, override whatever privacy interests the wrongfully accused individuals might have to keep the records hidden in perpetuity, but it's still an ethically fraught calculation. | ||
| As to records in the possession of the executive branch rather than the judiciary, similar issues apply. | ||
| Grand jury materials, by dint of statute, can't be released willy-nilly. | ||
| I wish this weren't the case, but it is. | ||
| So what is the ultimate purpose of the Conamasse legislation, says Michael Tracy, if it won't compel the release of records that could be intertwined with information relating to the purported victims? | ||
| And it will continue to allow the government to conceal records, which could illuminate any ties Epstein might have had to intelligence agencies. | ||
| Unfortunately, it looks like the purpose of the legislation is mostly to give RoConna and Thomas Massey a salient political issue to portray themselves as bold crusaders. | ||
| I say this is unfortunate because Conn and Massey are rare members of Congress I have any respect for whatsoever. | ||
| Here's where he part ways. | ||
| I have very little respect for either of those Congress people. | ||
| But the reality is that this is an attention grab. | ||
| It is yet another over-promise and underdeliver. | ||
| That is what this discharge petition is. | ||
| Now, again, the Trump administration is in fact engaging in what we used to call the Streisand effect. | ||
| And there's a very famous story where Barbara Streisand, a photographer, took a picture of the California coastline. | ||
| It included Barbara Streisand's house. | ||
| She didn't want that picture in the public. | ||
| So she tried to get it taken down. | ||
| And the fact that she tried to get it taken down put more attention on it. | ||
| I think there's some Streisand effect going on in the Trump administration trying to, for example, kill the discharge petition. | ||
| So yesterday, it was reported that the Trump administration had called Representative Lauren Boebert to go to the White House situation room and talk with Pam Bondi, among others, about her attempt to pass the discharge petition. | ||
| According to the New York Times, Boebert went to the White House situation room with Attorney General Bondi and the FBI director Kash Patel to discuss her demand to release the files. | ||
| Caroline Lovitt confirmed the meeting took place. | ||
| Here she was explaining. | ||
| Doesn't it show transparency that members of the Trump administration are willing to brief members of Congress whenever they please? | ||
| Doesn't that show our level of transparency? | ||
| Doesn't that show the level of transparency when we are willing to sit down with members of Congress and address their concerns? | ||
| That is the defining factor of transparency. | ||
| Now, again, there is a bit of a bit of a Streisand effect going on here. | ||
| Now that it's passing in the House, there'll be a big fight in the Senate. | ||
| Presumably it'll get killed in the Senate. | ||
| And then people will say that Trump is trying to kill it because he doesn't want the documents released. | ||
| It seems to me that as a piece of political strategy, President Trump should probably just say, fine, release everything. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| And whatever the courts say we can't release, we won't. | ||
| And whatever the FBI says we can't release, we won't. | ||
| That basically holding by the law here for legal purposes is not exactly a political move of genius. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's where this is probably going to go in the end anyway. | ||
| Listen, I'm for as many documents being out in public as humanly possible. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I think that we ought to see everything. | ||
| I think this drove out pretty much all of these supposedly politically secret areas. | ||
| With that said, I think that the president, I understand the president's frustration with this. | ||
| I do, because he's saying, I'm busy being president and you're bringing me this Epstein crap in order to distract from the things I'm trying to do. | ||
| And the people who are trying to do it are, in fact, the people who are attempting to destroy his presidency. | ||
| And that includes people inside the House. | ||
| Okay, that includes people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has spent the last two months going out and campaigning against President Trump every way she can. | ||
| So after President Trump, for example, had this much ballyhood interaction with Laura Ingram over high-skilled foreign workers, which we talked about at length yesterday on the show, Marjorie Taylor Greene then put out a tweet that was absolutely directed at Trump. | ||
| Quote, I'm solidly against you being replaced by foreign labor, like with H-1Bs. | ||
| I am solidly against allowing foreign students into our colleges and universities. | ||
| I'm against foreign aid, foreign wars, sending a single dollar to foreign countries. | ||
| I'm against bringing any foreign leader that is a terrorist or overseas killing innocent people into our country and into the Oval Office. | ||
| I'm elected to represent my district and the American people. | ||
| So she, Marjorie Taylor Greene has 20, 28 aspirations. | ||
| She is now trying to claim she is more America first than Donald Trump. | ||
| At some point, President Trump probably should make it publicly clear that she's a clown backbencher Republican who is out there on the view only in order to tear him down. | ||
| She is a ridiculous figure. | ||
| She has flipped many of her political opinions. | ||
| She will say many things to many different crowds. | ||
| And there, I think, is a reason why she is signing on to this discharge petition. | ||
| I do not think it is because of her deep and abiding interest in the Epstein case. | ||
| Thomas Massey, very similar, because it's not just that Massey is attacking the Trump administration over the Epstein stuff. | ||
| Yesterday, he was attacking the FBI over supposed unwillingness to go after January 6th information. | ||
| Massey put out a letter on Twitter suggesting that the FBI was covering up the J6 pipe bomb investigation. | ||
| Dan Bongino then took to X to respond. | ||
| Quote, Congressman Massey, when Director Patel and I entered on duty in our leadership positions in the FBI, we had our hands full, but we were happy to be part of the president's team and we still are. | ||
| Despite the multitude of challenges we faced, one of our first initiatives was to aggressively pursue a new strategy to investigate the January 6th pipe bomb terror attack. | ||
| We brought in new personnel to take a look at the case. | ||
| We flew in police officers and detectives working as task force officers to review FBI work. | ||
| We conducted multiple internal reviews, held countless in-person and SVTC meetings with investigative team members. | ||
| We dramatically increased investigative resources. | ||
| We increased the public award for information in the case to utilize crowdsourcing leads. | ||
| When I spoke with you yesterday, a little after 8 a.m. Eastern, I offered you an in-person brief on our work. | ||
| We spoke for 10 minutes. | ||
| I called you back a bit after 7.30 p.m. Eastern to make that offer. | ||
| You didn't answer and have yet to call me back. | ||
| Despite this, you continue to imply the director and I are targeting investigators in the case. | ||
| This is disgusting, even by the low standards many have for politicians. | ||
| You know my number. | ||
| You're free to call me anytime, but it's easier to tweet and throw BS bombs. | ||
| Yes, our leadership team will be meeting with FBI team members today. | ||
| We will avail them of all whistleblower resources they need to disclose any evidence of malfeasance in the prior administration. | ||
| But a week of near 24-hour work on recent open leads in the case has yet to produce a breakthrough. | ||
| And some of the media reported regarding prior persons of interest is grossly inaccurate and serves only to mislead the public. | ||
| So what is Mongino saying? | ||
| He's saying, listen, I called Thomas Massey to try and clear this up. | ||
| I offered him a private briefing and he ghosted me and then went online to yell about it. | ||
| Because again, there are people who just want to smear the Trump administration. | ||
| And yes, many of them are really not looking what the Trump administration is doing right now. | ||
| They don't like what the Trump administration is doing. | ||
| What they're trying to do is undermine the Trump administration so as to create a new direction away from Trump for MAGA. | ||
| That is, in fact, the goal. | ||
| Again, when I see MTG and Thomas Massey joining with people like Jasmine Crockett, you have to wonder whose side they're on. | ||
| Here, for example, is Jasmine Crockett yesterday attacking President Trump over the Epstein stuff. | ||
| Listen, they will do and say anything to cover themselves. | ||
| You know, I will admit that Donald Trump has been investigated more than the normal, but he just happens to be more corrupt and more criminal than any other president than we've had. | ||
| I will point out he is the only president who has been convicted of 34 felony convictions that we've ever had in the Oval Office. | ||
| So while we don't know exactly what crimes he may or may not have committed, just think of it this way. | ||
| If you know that you didn't do anything, then why is it that you would be twisting members of your own party's arms, trying to get them not to release it? | ||
| This would be exonerating. | ||
| If you know that you are free and clear, then why not say, you know what, release the files? | ||
| Now, again, Thomas Massey and Jasmine Crockett are saying the same thing. | ||
| So you have to start wondering like whose side people are on at this point. | ||
| Now, there's some collateral damage in some of the Epstein file release. | ||
| So according to some of the Epstein emails, Jeffrey Epstein, this is the New York Post reporting, ended his friendship with Bill Clinton because he believed the former president was a liar, according to new emails that disgraced financiers estate handed over to Congress on Wednesday. | ||
| The emails also show a chummy relationship between Epstein and Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary and Harvard president. | ||
| That is awkward to say the least. | ||
| But bottom line here, is there anything new about Trump that has emerged? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Is there likely to be anything new about Trump that emerges? | ||
| No. | ||
| Is the bill that is now going to pass the House, is that bill going to end with the release of revelatory new documents? | ||
| No. | ||
| Is there any evidence that the revelatory new documents even exist? | ||
| No. | ||
| So what I ask is, what is happening here? | ||
| And that's where you have to wonder if President Trump isn't in fact right and that the outsized focus on Epstein is really a distraction created by political opponents in order to harm his presidency. | ||
| All righty, it's time for some fast facts. | ||
| So President Trump has now signed a spending bill ending the longest U.S. shutdown in American history, a shutdown that happened for literally no reason other than Democrats wanted some sort of campaign issue going into some special elections. | ||
| According to the Wall Street Journal, the GOP-led House passed a spending package reopening the government. | ||
| President Trump signed it into law late on Wednesday, drawing to a close a record-long 43-day shutdown driven by Democrats' demands to extend expiring health care subsidies. | ||
| The House approved the measure 222 to 209, largely along party lines a couple of days after the bill cleared the Senate. | ||
| So the package will extend funding for the federal government through January 30th. | ||
| It also includes full-year funding for the Ag Department, military construction, and the legislative branch. | ||
| Presumably that includes SNAP because the Agriculture Department oversees SNAP. | ||
| The bill also includes language guaranteeing the reversal of federal layoffs that the Trump administration had initiated during the shutdown, as well as a moratorium on future cuts. | ||
| The House passed it quite quickly. | ||
| Democrats, of course, are very upset about this shutdown having ended. | ||
| Here was Alexander Ocasio-Cortez very angry at Chuck Schumer for allowing the shutdown to end. | ||
| Democrats love people. | ||
| They love people so much they want them to be deprived of their SNAP benefits so that, and then just fill in the blank because nobody knows what they were actually attempting to achieve. | ||
| They were never going to achieve that which they sought. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's important that we understand that this is not just about Senator Schumer, but that this is about the Democratic Party. | |
| Senator Schumer, there's no one vote that ended this shutdown. | ||
| We are talking about a coordinated effort of eight senators with the knowledge of leader Schumer voting to break with the entire Democratic Party in exchange for nothing. | ||
| Of course, she's attempting to promote herself as a possible presidential candidate. | ||
| Attacking Schumer is a great way to do that. | ||
| She might want to run against Schumer in a Senate primary in New York. | ||
| Attacking Schumer is a smart way to do that as well. | ||
| One of the tropes of politics that has become ever more common is that if you actually wish to be president of the United States, you must first attack your own party and then go on to attack the other party. | ||
| This seems to be the strategy on both sides of the aisle these days. | ||
| Hakeem Jeffries, he agreed that he's disgusted by the Republican spending bill. | ||
| Now, again, it is just a continuing resolution, guys. | ||
| This was just continuing to fund the government at the levels already funded. | ||
| This is nothing new. | ||
| He can be disgusted by the one big, beautiful bill. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| It's his prerogative. | ||
| But the idea that anything new and magical happened yesterday is silly. | ||
| House Democrats are strongly opposed to this partisan Republican spending bill that continues to gut the health care of the American people. | ||
| We've said from the very beginning that we want to find a bipartisan path forward, that of course we want to reopen the government, but that we need to decisively address the Republican health care crisis. | ||
| And that begins with extending the Affordable Care Act tax credits. | ||
| Okay, now, again, maybe they'll have that fight and maybe they will have some impact politically, but they're not going to win that fight. | ||
| The ACA tax credits are a massive, massive government spending boondoggle. | ||
| That's what they are. | ||
| That's why Democrats put them in place. | ||
| The entire goal of the ACA eventually was for it to fail and then lead to nationalized health care. | ||
| That was the entire goal, was to get people so dependent on the government dime that eventually people threw up their hands and said the government should just nationalize the entire system. | ||
| That was Obama's original goal that has really not changed in any significant way. | ||
| Meanwhile, GOP Representative Tom Emmer points out that it's kind of gross that Democrats are lamenting the end of the shutdown, and they talk about how the shutdown was worth it. | ||
| In what way? | ||
| Nothing was achieved. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow, they know it wasn't worth it. | |
| Frankly, the answers are disgusting. | ||
| The behavior is even more disgusting. | ||
| Literally, we're going to be voting on a CR that came over from the Senate. | ||
| Martha, it's the exact same CR that House Republicans sent to the Senate back on September 19th with only one change. | ||
| Well, I mean, he is right about all of that. | ||
| Now, does any of this solve the looming economic problems for the Trump administration? | ||
| The answer is no. | ||
| The stock market continues to just churn. | ||
| People want to invest. | ||
| The Dow Jones Industrial Average is currently above 48,000. | ||
| The S ⁇ P 500 is currently at approximately 6,800. | ||
| I mean, these are historically high numbers. | ||
| These are very, very good numbers. | ||
| Most of it is accruing to the top end of the spectrum. | ||
| And this leads some people to be a little bit concerned about the possibility that this is an AI boom and that it's going to turn into an AI bust. | ||
| According to the Wall Street Journal, perfect isn't good enough. | ||
| Any sign of weakness is a disaster. | ||
| Justified or not, that's the current mood in the markets about the AI boom. | ||
| Recent history suggests the gloom won't last, but the shakeup serves as a strong reminder that the early years of AI pose a challenge for investors accustomed to measuring returns on a 12-month time horizon. | ||
| Generative AI services require massive data centers and state-of-the-art chips and server racks that don't come together quickly. | ||
| The companies at the heart of AI are now talking about years of major investments still ahead, which means that probably the stock market will continue to rise because they're going to continue to churn more money into AI. | ||
| And if the returns don't pay off right away, well, they'll just churn more money into AI. | ||
| One of the things that's happening here is that many of these big companies are investing in each other. | ||
| So Oracle will toss a bunch of money at OpenAI, which will toss a bunch of money at Meta. | ||
| And you will see the money kind of swirl around the system because, again, everybody is trying to invest at the top end of the market because they think that the real growth in productivity and tech development is going to be at the AI end. | ||
| According to the Wall Street Journal, the latest episode of fragility started last week when shares of some of the sector's leading lights lost ground. | ||
| After a broad-based recovery Monday on news of a possible end of the government shutdown, AI exposed stocks fell again on Tuesday. | ||
| NVIDIA lost 7% last week and slipped another 3% on Tuesday, leaving it well shy of its $5 trillion market cap milestone last month. | ||
| Meta has shed nearly 17% since its solid third quarter report two weeks ago. | ||
| Palantir is down about 8% since its respectable earnings last Monday. | ||
| Now, again, that's because right now the price of the stock is not connected to the earnings. | ||
| You can have a good earnings quarter, but that doesn't actually change what people think about the upward trajectory of the company. | ||
| If Tesla has a really, really good quarter in terms of sales, their PE ratio is totally disconnected. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The price of the stock on Tesla is like 300 plus times the earnings. | ||
| So even if the earnings go up a little bit, that's not going to change that. | ||
| When people invest in Tesla, they're not investing in the self-driving car business. | ||
| They're investing in the AI business. | ||
| That is what's happening. | ||
| Open AI says it's planning to spend $1.4 trillion in the next eight years, but currently it's only pulling in around $20 billion of annual revenue today. | ||
| And it's unclear how exactly they're going to reach the hundreds of billions of dollars it needs within the next few years to keep that spending growth going. | ||
| Open AI projects losses that will swell to $74 billion in 2028. | ||
| So again, people are freaking out a little bit, but they also are not feeling as though they have a tremendous choice but to invest in the top of the market if they wish to invest at all. | ||
| So there's a lot of uneasiness. | ||
| And some of that uneasiness is connected to jobs because, of course, AI will cause jobs dislocations. | ||
| There's no question that will happen. | ||
| AI is going to replace a bunch of predominantly white-collar jobs. | ||
| And there will be transitional moments in the economy. | ||
| Jobs will come back in other areas. | ||
| But that's what happens when you have a major tech change, obviously. | ||
| It makes it harder to tell what's going on when you don't have data. | ||
| According to the Wall Street Journal, two major government reports on inflation and the labor market for October are likely never to be released, according to the White House press secretary. | ||
| Caroline Levitt told reporters on Wednesday regarding the Federal Reserve: all of that economic data will be permanently impaired, leaving our policymakers of the Fed flying blind at a critical period. | ||
| She blamed the government shutdown. | ||
| The BLS, Bureau of Labor Statistics, hasn't yet said when it is likely to start catching up on the backlog of important economic reports or which ones might be compromised by a shutdown. | ||
| So that data, I guess, is just in the wind, and we really don't even know what's going on. | ||
| Meanwhile, President Trump's approval ratings on the economy have begun to slide. | ||
| According to the most recent poll from YouGov and The Economist, Trump has a 33% unfavorable rating. | ||
| Joe Biden, at kind of the last days of his term, was down to 31%. | ||
| So, again, 40% of Americans now approve of Trump's job performance, according to the CNN aggregate. | ||
| 59% disapprove. | ||
| And when it comes to the economy, that is where things are really dicey for President Trump. | ||
| Only 39% of Americans approve of Trump's handling of the economy. | ||
| 38% approve of his handling of trade. | ||
| 34% approve of his handling of immigration. | ||
| So, again, his handling of immigration has been fine. | ||
| It's just that when you get dragged down on the economy, it drags everything else down too, which means that now the administration is swiveling to talk affordability. | ||
| That's not a surprise. | ||
| After Zorn Mamdani's win in New York, affordability is the word of the day. | ||
| And as we discussed at length yesterday and yes, the day before, the way that you actually increase affordability, the way to make products cheaper is to make them more plentiful. | ||
| If you go to a store and there's one stake and there are 100 customers, that stake will be very expensive. | ||
| If there are 200 stakes and 100 customers, the stake will be very cheap. | ||
| Increase the supply, retain the same demand, the price goes down. | ||
| It's a very simple formula. | ||
| If you wish for affordability, you must increase supply. | ||
| And if you wish for cheaper products, that means also increasing the supply of the inputs into making the product. | ||
| So if you're making a car and it costs a lot of money to make the engine, the overall car will be more expensive. | ||
| If you lower the cost of the inputs, meaning the cost to make the engine, then the car will be less expensive. | ||
| All this is very, very basic stuff. | ||
| But for some reason, politicians have a very difficult time with understanding this because it mostly means get the hell out of the way. | ||
| And politicians are constantly called on to take their hands and shove them in the economic pie and start moving them around all weird. | ||
| And what that does is it creates uncertainty and it doesn't actually end with broader-based economic growth. | ||
| So it seems that the Trump administration is kind of, they're trying to retail policies that are designed to appeal to specific economic groups. | ||
| So President Trump the other day, he kind of threw up against the wall the idea that there would be a tariff rebate because he understands that actually the tariffs are not great for everybody. | ||
| That tariffs actually in certain industries have increased the prices, that it's made it harder to do business, and that the tariffs haven't even felt their full impact yet in the economy because of all of the vacillation around what they are, what the rates are, who's going to pay it. | ||
| Will the Supreme Court strike them down? | ||
| Yesterday, the Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Besant, he said not everybody will get that tariff rebate that President Trump had suggested, a $2,000 tariff rebate. | ||
| Which, again, if everybody got a $2,000 tariff rebate, that's inflationary. | ||
| That's just a stimulus package. | ||
| So if you want to lower prices, that's actually the wrong way to do it. | ||
| Well, there are a lot of options here. | ||
| The president's talking about a $2,000 rebate. | ||
| And that would be for families making less than, say, $100,000. | ||
| Have you decided on that yet? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We haven't. | |
| Okay, so, you know, again, is that going to solve the problem? | ||
| The answer is no. | ||
| Meanwhile, will the Federal Reserve lower the interest rates? | ||
| So there's a lot of talk about we need more affordability. | ||
| Affordability will come in the form of the Federal Reserve lowering the interest rates. | ||
| Well, the problem is that will make more affordable mortgages, but it will also increase the price of everything because that's just injecting more money into the economy. | ||
| That's all that is doing. | ||
| Over on Calci, Calci is a sponsor of the program. | ||
| If you go back to late October, there's about an 85% shot on Calci that the Fed would cut by 25 basis points, 0.25%, the overnight rates, the overnight Fed rates. | ||
| Now, that is all the way down to almost at even. | ||
| We are now down to approximately 55%, 56% of people saying that they'll cut and 40% of people saying not. | ||
| So things are evening out very, very quickly over there because, again, there's a feeling like the inflationary economy is continuing and the Federal Reserve does not want to be an additional factor in that. | ||
| Meanwhile, there's talk now about, again, these sort of sporadic attempts to just throw policy against the wall and see what sticks. | ||
| I do not think that they are doing, I do not think that they are going to be beneficial to the economy broad scale. | ||
| The Trump administration is now, they promoted the idea of 50-year mortgages. | ||
| We talked about this yesterday. | ||
| We talked about the fact that 50-year mortgages have never been taken up by the private market because they're kind of insane. | ||
| Because that is a bet that someone will never default for 50 years. | ||
| And for consumers, if I have the choice between taking a low-interest mortgage for 15 years or a slightly lower interest mortgage for 50 years, I'm going to take the 15-year mortgage because otherwise I'm paying interest until I die. | ||
| So 50-year mortgages, not the solution. | ||
| Other solutions that are not the solution, portability of mortgages. | ||
| They're talking about mortgage portability. | ||
| On Wednesday, the Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte said the administration is actively evaluating so-called portable mortgages. | ||
| So I asked our sponsors over at Comet, a project of perplexity: what is a portable mortgage? | ||
| Why are they uncommon in the free market? | ||
| And Comet explains a portable mortgage is a type of loan that allows borrowers to transfer their existing mortgage and its terms, like the interest rate, to a new property when they move, instead of closing out their mortgage and applying for a new one. | ||
| So normally, let's say that you wanted to sell your house and buy a new house. | ||
| Let's say you have a $500,000 mortgage still remaining on your million dollar house. | ||
| And so you sell your house for a million dollars. | ||
| You pay off the $500,000 mortgage. | ||
| You take your $500,000 in profit, and then you go and apply for a new mortgage for a $1.3 million house. | ||
| You pay whatever you have to pay down. | ||
| You take a new mortgage at the current rate. | ||
| That's normally how it works in the United States and pretty much everywhere else. | ||
| A portable mortgage would be that instead of you doing that, you would simply go to the bank and say, I want the new house. | ||
| Take that same $500,000 loan. | ||
| Instead of me paying it off to you right now, I want you to take that loan and just apply it to the new mortgage. | ||
| Just move it right on over. | ||
| Now, why exactly has that not happened? | ||
| Why don't banks typically do this? | ||
| There are a bunch of reasons banks don't typically do this. | ||
| One, the U.S. market generally relies on long-term fixed rate mortgages that lack prepayment penalties. | ||
| So there's very little pressure on borrowers to keep their current mortgage because refinancing historically has been pretty easy and attractive, particularly when the rates drop. | ||
| So if the rates drop, you don't want to port your mortgage over. | ||
| You got a 5% interest rate on your old mortgage, and now you can get a 3% interest rate. | ||
| You want to pay off the 5% and get a new 3%. | ||
| But the real reason is because if you are a lender, and let's say that I want to buy a more expensive house now, right? | ||
| Let's say I sell my million dollar house and instead of me paying you the 500 grand, I take the 500 grand on top and I take that new, I take that old $500,000 loan at 2% and I move it over to a $2 million house. | ||
| How am I going to pay for that? | ||
| So I'll take some of the money I just made on my old house, sure, but I also am going to have to take a second mortgage. | ||
| I'm going to have to take supplemental mortgages in order to increase the amount that I can pay for a house. | ||
| And now my original lender is on the hook. | ||
| Now my original lender is signed up for a thing they didn't sign up for. | ||
| Maybe they don't think that I'm going to be able to pay off a mortgage on a $2 million house. | ||
| Maybe they wouldn't have signed off on a 2% mortgage on a $2 million house for me. | ||
| That's not what they said. | ||
| They signed up on a $500,000 mortgage on a million dollar house for me. | ||
| When you change the terms surrounding the loan, you change the nature of the loan, which is why banks haven't done this in the free market. | ||
| As pointed out by Comet, if the borrower's new home is more expensive, they must find additional financing for the difference, which adds to complexity and potential cost. | ||
| Also, transferring a mortgage from one property to another is a legal and logistical problem because when you take a mortgage, what is the security for your mortgage? | ||
| I take a mortgage on my house. | ||
| If I default, then the lender takes the home. | ||
| If I port the mortgage over, is it secured against the new house or against the borrower? | ||
| Legally speaking, how do you even do this? | ||
| So there are a bunch of problems with this. | ||
| In essence, what you will end up with is the same kind of problem of inflation in the prices of the housing market. | ||
| Just like every other government intervention, it will make things slightly more affordable in the very, very near term, and then it will make things much more expensive. | ||
| This, by the way, is also true about proposals that I have heard for banning corporations from buying single-family homes. | ||
| Okay, so you ban corporations from buying single-family homes. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| That removes a large competitor in the single-family home market. | ||
| And right now, in the very short term, there will be more inventory available to people who are not that corporation. | ||
| Clearly, I mean, you're getting rid of a class of possible consumer in the corporation. | ||
| Here's the question. | ||
| Who is going to build more houses? | ||
| Who's going to build more houses? | ||
| If Blackstone stops buying houses in Texas, yes, you will be able to get that same house for cheaper. | ||
| But also, it is because Blackstone is buying houses in Texas that people are selling their houses to Blackstone and then purchasing new homes. | ||
| And also, it is the reason why developers are developing new developments because the price is up because Blackstone also is buying, not out of the evil of their heart, but because they believe they will make a profit. | ||
| They believe that the demand will be maintained. | ||
| So if you take a chunk out of the market, what you will end up doing is temporarily lowering the price by removing a possible consumer because less competition in the market, less demand. | ||
| But you will also end up cratering the supply because with less demand, people generate less supply. | ||
| So that's a reality too. | ||
| Every government intervention has costs and has benefits, and pretending they don't is a bad way of doing economics and policy. | ||
| Speaking of which, socialists have now taken Seattle. | ||
| That's not a shock. | ||
| Seattle's been moving in this direction for a very long time. | ||
| According to Yahoo News, a progressive activist appears to be on the cusp of winning her bid for mayor of Seattle in a narrow victory that has echoes of the race to lead New York City. | ||
| Katie Wilson leads Mayor Bruce Harrell by just over 1,300 votes. | ||
| The incumbent led by more than 10,000 votes the day after the election, but then the mail-in ballots started and they're still counting over there. | ||
| Harrell has not conceded, but it's unlikely he'll make up the difference. | ||
| Wilson is a self-described socialist focused on affordability. | ||
| She wants a capital gains tax to raise revenue, meaning that more businesses will flee Seattle. | ||
| Seattle happens to be a market that is heavily dependent on a few very large corporations. | ||
| So, once again, the socialists will win and then they will drive these cities to the brink, presumably. | ||
| Zora Mamdani, for his part, says that he needs to call President Trump and he needs to get him on the hook for paying some of New York's bills. | ||
| Here was Zora Mamdani yesterday. | ||
| I will be reaching out to the White House as we prepare to actually take office because this is a relationship that will be critical to the success of the city. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it wasn't just a hypothetical scenario on our debate stage. | |
| We're actually going to call him. | ||
| What will you say? | ||
| Well, I'll say that I'm here to work for the benefit of everyone that calls the city home and that wherever there is a possibility for working together towards that end, I'm ready. | ||
| And if it's to the expense of those New Yorkers, I will fight him. | ||
| So he's going to fight President Trump, but he'll call President Trump. | ||
| He'll try to make friends with President Trump. | ||
| Good luck to you, sir. | ||
| Good luck to you. | ||
| Just like every other socialist, he's perfectly happy to spend other people's money and other people's political capital in the case of Governor Kathy Hochul, who is now stuck between the socialist rock and the electoral hard place. | ||
| We'll see how it works out for her. | ||
| And meanwhile, Michelle Obama, she has a brand new book, and it is a coffee table tome called The Look. | ||
| It is a glossy photo book full of fashion. | ||
| And according to the New York Times, it is the story of the expectations that were heaped upon the first black first lady. | ||
| It is the third installation of a trilogy of books by Mrs. Obama that focus on self-realization, including her memoir, her advice book on overcoming adversity, and this time, a meditation on the power of clothes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So exciting. | ||
| Here was Michelle Obama talking about her look book. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| And we have to start educating people about all kinds of beauty. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And our beauty is so powerful and so unique that it is worthy of the conversation and it's worthy of demanding the respect that we're owed for who we are and what we offer to the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, apparently she's a victim, as always, Michelle Obama. | ||
| And her book is really about the sufferings of a lady who was the first first lady, according to the New York Times ever, to have a stylist or valet on the East Wing payroll. | ||
| One employed to help define the visual strategy of the first lady for every occasion, from public hula hooping to major moments of pageantry. | ||
| So before the Obamas were there, then there were occasional designers who would come in for specific events, but she had like a full-time stylist. | ||
| And then that became the norm. | ||
| Melania and Joe Biden each employed a full-time stylist as well. | ||
| But according to the New York Times, her new book lays bare in an unprecedented way how a wardrobe was transformed into a vehicle of soft political power. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Soft political power. | ||
| How impressive. | ||
| Truly amazing. | ||
| Well, as always, Michelle Obama can do no wrong. | ||
| She's the Oprah Winfrey of our time who constantly talks about how terrible her life is while being one of the most privileged people ever to walk planet Earth. | ||
| All righty, coming up, we'll jump into controversy emerging around some moves by the Catholic Church. | ||
| First, remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member. | ||
| If you're not a member, become a member. | ||
| Use code Shapiro. | ||
| Check out for two months free on all annual plans. |
Export Selection