Dec. 3, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:32
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| President Trump in hot water after some spicy comments about Somali immigrants to the United States. | ||
| But should the United States be taking in mass migration from Somalia? | ||
| Plus, Democrats continue to maintain that our Secretary of War is in fact a war criminal. | ||
| We'll get to all of that first. | ||
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| So the President of the United States is now activating immigrations and customs enforcement to go after Somali illegal immigrants in Minneapolis. | ||
| This, of course, follows hard on these large-scale reports about Somali welfare fraud, the attempt by members of the Somali community, many members of the Somali community to defraud the federal and state governments during the pandemic. | ||
| A lot of that money ended up going in remittances back to Somalia. | ||
| The president of the United States yesterday got himself in some hot water by slamming Somalis in the United States. | ||
| In his typical colorful language, I will say that the language that he used to describe Somalis is not what is typically in the purview of the president of the United States, but his overall take, which is that the United States needs to radically limit immigration from places like Somalia. | ||
| That, of course, is correct because not all countries are going to be equally useful as sources of migrants to the United States. | ||
| The people who come from many of these countries do not have any sort of cultural habits that mesh well with the United States. | ||
| Here's the president of the United States going after Representative Ilhan Omar as well as other members of the Somali community in Minneapolis yesterday. | ||
| We could go bad. | ||
| We're at a tipping point. | ||
| I don't know if people mind me saying that, but I'm saying that we could go one way or the other. | ||
| And we're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. | ||
| Ilan Omar is garbage. | ||
| She's garbage. | ||
|
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Her friends are garbage. | |
| Well, I mean, I agree with his assessment of Ilhan Omar as a person. | ||
| I think that she's a pretty terrible person. | ||
| And I think that her own personal support for people who were recruited by actual terrorist groups in the past, her support of ongoing terrorist activities in, for example, the Gaza Strip, rhetorically, I think that in and of itself speaks to whether she should be in the United States, whether we should have taken her in in the first place. | ||
| She is now an American citizen. | ||
| Getting rid of her, denaturalizing her, of course, is a bit of a different story. | ||
| The president went on to say that he doesn't want Somalis in the United States. | ||
| I hear they ripped off Somalians, ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions every year, billions of dollars, and they contribute nothing. | ||
| The welfare is like 88%. | ||
| They contribute nothing. | ||
| I don't want them in our country, I'll be honest with you. | ||
| Somebody would say, oh, that's not politically correct. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I don't want them in our country. | ||
| Their country is no good for a reason. | ||
| Okay, so I should separate out two comments that President Trump here is making and that are, I think, deliberately being conflated a little bit by the media. | ||
| One is he says that he doesn't want Ilhan Omar, who is garbage, and her friends who are garbage in the country. | ||
| That does not mean every Somali in America is garbage. | ||
| What the media are trying to do today is claim that President Trump is claiming every single Somali in the country is garbage. | ||
| He did not actually say that. | ||
| What he said is that Ilhan Omar is garbage and her friends are garbage. | ||
| Well, I mean, there he could be talking about Rashida Taliban AOC. | ||
| And again, this is the sort of language the president of the United States, not historically the president uses, but this particular president has used this sort of language. | ||
| And so the outrage is, in my own opinion, somewhat miscalibrated. | ||
| If you're not used to President Trump's use of insult at this point, after fully a decade of it, I'm going to have to ask whether you have adapted to the Trump era for good or for ill. | ||
| When he says that he does not want Somalis in the country as a general point, when he says that they're coming from a culture that does not mesh well with the United States, is he wrong about that? | ||
| As a general rule, is that wrong? | ||
| On Tuesday, the administration unveiled a new regulation that would prevent immigration applications from citizens of 19 countries already covered by President Trump's travel bans. | ||
| Right now, there's a travel ban that says that you're not going to get a travel visa if you're coming from Iran, Venezuela, Haiti. | ||
| Now he's extending that into a pause on all immigration applications from those 19 countries. | ||
| And a new operation in Minnesota is going to expand on those moves, according to the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| Last month, the president said he would revoke temporary protected status for Somalis only in Minnesota. | ||
| The TPS program, of course, is designed to prevent deportation of people who are seeking asylum. | ||
| So President Trump focusing on Nilhanoma, again, I think that is well taken. | ||
| I think that she truly is quite the horror show in terms of Congress. | ||
| And it does speak to the people who are electing her, because of course we are responsible for our representatives. | ||
| If you elect a person who obviously does not like her own country, and here I mean the United States, or maybe she likes her own country, but her own country is Somalia, which seems to be the sort of thing that she says fairly routinely. | ||
| I'm not sure why the president is supposed to like that. | ||
| All of this raises the question as to whether the United States ought to block immigration from third world countries, which, of course, is a point the president has been making over and over and over again. | ||
| Well, according to the Migration Policy Institute, from 2015 to 2019, Somalis of all sub-Saharan African immigrants had the lowest levels of educational attainment. | ||
| Only 14% held a bachelor's degree or higher. | ||
| Somali-headed households of all immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, which is to say, mostly the poorest immigrants who come into the United States, Somali-headed households had the lowest median income at $32,000. | ||
| Somalis in the United States had a 37% poverty rate, extremely poor, extremely uneducated. | ||
| Somalis had the highest rates of being uninsured in terms of health insurance. | ||
| That'd be 18% uninsured via health insurance. | ||
| Somalis had the highest naturalization rate of any of these groups. | ||
| So they come here extremely poor, extremely uneducated, with a not tremendous income and wealth trajectory. | ||
| And then they get naturalized at a super high rate because they want to stay, which, of course, anyone would want to stay. | ||
| This is an amazing country. | ||
| That does not mean we have an obligation to take everybody in. | ||
| And when they do earn money, Somalis, a huge percentage of that money gets sent back to Somalia. | ||
| And some of that money goes to terrorist groups like al-Shabaab. | ||
| According to the Migration Policy Institute, from 2015 to 2019, remittances constituted 35% of the entire GDP of the country of Somalia. | ||
| Remittances are where a Somali American sends their money back to Somalia as a form of financial support. | ||
| Okay, that is what President Trump is railing against. | ||
| Now, again, you may not like his language. | ||
| You may think that it's colorful or purple or whatever. | ||
| And that's fine. | ||
| Anyone can be critiqued for the language that they use. | ||
| But his general point, which is that the United States cannot afford to take in waves of extremely poor immigrants who do not cohere to the American system, that we cannot afford to bring in hundreds of thousands of people with actual allegiances to war-torn countries like Somalia, who then take disproportionate shares of our welfare dollars. | ||
| That, of course, is true. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| And this is why when you hear the argument, it's made so often, well, this is a country of immigrants. | ||
| Okay, it is certainly true that this was a country of settlers, and then it was also a country of immigrants. | ||
| But the kinds of immigrants you take in help define your country. | ||
| And the systems that they meet here help define your immigrants. | ||
| Alrighty, coming up more on America's immigration policy and what's changed over time. | ||
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| The reason that so many people have left their home countries over the course of centuries to come to the United States is because the United States was a place that guaranteed opportunity, but it did not guarantee a gigantic welfare system that actively prevented assimilation. | ||
| We changed our own immigration system, we changed our own incentive structure, and then we were surprised when different people came, which is crazy. | ||
| The argument that's being made is as though we are welcoming people from Eastern Europe or Italy or Ireland or Germany circa 1903 when there were no robust federal welfare systems in the United States. | ||
| Hell, the income tax wasn't even constitutional at that point. | ||
| There were no robust welfare systems even at the state level. | ||
| There was no attempt really by the government to get involved in propping up people who are wildly poor to the tune of not having to assimilate or get a job. | ||
| And so that drew a different kind of person. | ||
| Yes, it drew people who were desperate, but the people who were desperate recognized that their path forward lay in embracing Anglo-American legal ideas, lay in embracing biblical values, lay in embracing and assimilating to American rights and responsibilities because that was the social safety net. | ||
| The social safety net was you join a community, you come here, you join a church, your friends and your family help you out. | ||
| But then it is your job to learn English. | ||
| It is your job to go out and get a job. | ||
| It is your job to put your kids in the local public school and make sure that they get educated the way Americans ought to be educated. | ||
| That is why the assimilative project in the United States was extremely, extremely successful up until really the welfare era. | ||
| And then the welfare era begins and everything changes. | ||
| And it doesn't mean that we didn't have extreme, really, really extreme conflict over immigration prior to the welfare system. | ||
| Obviously, we did. | ||
| Huge controversy over the levels of Chinese and Jewish immigration in the early part of the 20th century. | ||
| Before that, huge levels of ire over Irish immigration in the 1840s, 1850s. | ||
| So immigration has always been a real hot point in American politics forever, because when new people come to a country, the question is, are they going to become part of the system or are they going to tear down the system from within? | ||
| However, the great guarantor that people were going to assimilate is the fact that they didn't have a choice. | ||
| The incentive structure drove them toward assimilation. | ||
| It drove them toward participation in the American dream. | ||
| And then comes the welfare system. | ||
| And then comes an incentive structure that says, come here and we give you free stuff and we demand nothing of you. | ||
| And we say that you can do basically whatever you want in terms of employment. | ||
| And we say that you can send all your money back home. | ||
| And we say that you don't have to actually try to get involved in the Anglo-American project, even in legal terms. | ||
| And then we're surprised when you draw a different type of immigrant. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| It's totally ridiculous. | ||
| It's the same thing as saying that, you know, I have a donut shop and my donut shop is a prestige donut shop. | ||
| You come in here, you can get like the best of the best donuts. | ||
| Like we go and we go in the back every morning and we handcraft our donuts. | ||
| They're amazing. | ||
| The constituency that is drawn to that donut shop is going to be of one particular sort of clientele. | ||
| And then you decide that you're going to change your policy and you just hang a sign in the front window that says free donuts. | ||
| Who do you think is going to show up? | ||
| It's going to be a very, very different constituency. | ||
| And pretending otherwise is silly. | ||
| And again, this is not the fault of the people attempting to come to the United States. | ||
| This is not their fault. | ||
| This is the fault of our authorities. | ||
| This is the fault of the elite in our society who claimed that you could change the entire incentive structure, take in people from cultures that have nothing in common with the United States. | ||
| And somehow those two things could logically coexist with an assimilative project. | ||
| It's silly. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| And then the claim is that if you point this out, that somehow you are bigoted or racist. | ||
| No, it's not bigoted or racist to say that if people come from a place that does not have anything in common with the United States and there is no actual incentivization of assimilation, that they're not going to assimilate. | ||
| And clearly that is true. | ||
| Clearly, that is just the case. | ||
| That is particularly true when you have politicians whose job apparently it is to help people violate the law. | ||
| It is incredible to me that the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, who apparently presided over over a billion dollars in fraud from the Somali community. | ||
| I guess not every Somali in Minnesota, but from subsets of the Somali community in Minnesota. | ||
| He presided over that. | ||
| The media found that totally uninteresting for years on end, by the way. | ||
| He was the vice presidential nominee, and this only breaks the year after he was the vice presidential nominee, which is ridiculous. | ||
| People were investigating this going back over a year, well over a year. | ||
| The fact is that you do have a political class that is actively attempting to subvert the assimilative project. | ||
| Again, there's this game that's being played that is bad for you to mention that people are not assimilating at the same rates, depending on where they are coming from, and that maybe the United States doesn't have as much of an interest in Somali Americans arriving dirt poor as they do in, say, highly educated Indian immigrants joining an H-1B visa program. | ||
| There are people who have an incentive to say that in the political sphere and who actively facilitate lawbreaking in order to make that point, I suppose. | ||
| That's what Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is doing. | ||
| He, of course, was recently re-elected mayor of Minnesota with some support of his Somali constituents. | ||
| There's basically a full-on tribal electoral war that happened in Minneapolis between various sort of factions of the Somali community, literal like familial tribal conflicts leading people to vote for either Jacob Fry or to Omar Fateh, who is the Somali candidate for mayor of Minnesota. | ||
| Well, here he was warning his constituents of reports that DHS is planning to flood the city and deport people. | ||
| Well, hold up. | ||
| If people are violating the law, why are you actively facilitating their avoidance of the law? | ||
| We are here to respond to a number of credible reports from several media outlets relaying that there are as many as 100 federal agents that will be deployed to the Twin Cities with a specific focus on targeting our Somali community. | ||
| To our Somali community, we love you and we stand with you. | ||
| Okay, now, again, I just have a question. | ||
| How are you simultaneously claiming that the project is successful and also facilitating law breaking? | ||
| If the project were successful, you wouldn't have to facilitate the law breaking, would you? | ||
| It's pretty incredible. | ||
| It is also worth noting here that part of the left-wing project, which apparently is to excuse all of this, excuse the fraud, excuse the mass migration, excuse the lack of cohesion, excuse the breakdown of the social fabric, part of that is to call anyone who opposes it, regardless of whether they're using colorful language like Trump or not using colorful language like Trump, to basically suggest that anyone who objects is a racist, bigot, xenophobe, Islamophobe, or whatever. | ||
| And bigotry is the idea that there is no reason for your belief about a group of people or about a particular culture. | ||
| There's no reason for it. | ||
| It's completely specious. | ||
| It is based wholly in rootless vitriol. | ||
| That is the idea here. | ||
| So saying Somali Americans are not assimilating at the same rate as people coming in from other countries. | ||
| That Somali Americans, on average, are coming in poorer, less educated, remitting more back to their home country. | ||
| They're a disproportionate draw on the welfare system. | ||
| None of that is bigotry. | ||
| All of that is just statistical reality. | ||
| But again, the goal here is to claim that statistical reality or even a well-made case must be replete with some form of bigotry. | ||
| That was the case made by Jamal Osman yesterday standing alongside Jacob Fry as he was again warning people in Minneapolis to avoid federal agents who are attempting to enforce the law. | ||
| Here was Jamal Osman, city council member from Minneapolis saying all saying Trump is a racist, a xenophobe, Islamophobic. | ||
| You have to love the litany. | ||
| Okay, racism, again, is a belief that people are inferior based on their race. | ||
| Not that their culture is inferior, that based on their actual race, they are, as a human being, worth less. | ||
| No one is making that case. | ||
| Okay, the idea of xenophobia is the idea that you, for an irrational reason, are fearful of people who come from another place. | ||
| Not that you are concerned about assimilation, not that you are concerned about the welfare draw, not that you are concerned about law breaking or terrorism support. | ||
| None of that is xenophobia. | ||
| All of that is a rational reaction to circumstances on the ground. | ||
| And Islamophobia, of course, is the bizarre idea that if you oppose radical Islam, then this is a form of irrational hatred against Muslims. | ||
| I mean, the answer there is no. | ||
| That is not correct. | ||
| But again, if you use these tools, this is the left's idea. | ||
| They've been using it for legitimately decades at this point. | ||
| If you don't agree with their policy prescriptions, which involve the fraying of the social fabric, that means that you are some crazed bigot. | ||
|
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One of the Thing I do want to say, and obviously everyone knows that our president is racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and we are going to fight that. | |
| America has a history of fighting and starving those kind of individuals who continue to divide people and divide communities. | ||
| Again, using those sorts of names, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, just throwing out that litany as though that is going to end the conversation with regard to whether the United States ought to take in almost 200,000 Somali immigrants since 1990? | ||
| No. | ||
| The answer there is no. | ||
| And again, this sort of bizarre attempt to gaslight through what is clearly a major issue in American political life, I don't think that it's going to work. | ||
| In fact, it remains the place where President Trump is the most popular. | ||
| Because it becomes a forbidden truth to say that not everybody from every country is equally assimilative and that not everybody from every country is necessarily going to make the best immigrant. | ||
| If that becomes the status, most Americans are going to reject that and they're going to reject the people who make that argument. | ||
| Are you coming up? | ||
| The Democrats keep claiming that our Secretary of War is a war criminal. | ||
| Do they have any evidence to this effect? | ||
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| Okay, meanwhile, the left continues to make the argument that Pete Hegseth is some sort of war criminal. | ||
| Again, all this is based on a single-sourced Washington Post report that suggested that Pete Hegseth gave an order to kill everyone on a narco-terrorist boat. | ||
| And then there was a second strike blowing people out of the water after the boat had basically already been sunk. | ||
| And that this was a form of murder because you're not supposed to kill people under international and domestic law or to combat would be the term of legal art. | ||
| There's only one problem. | ||
| Every follow-up report says that's not what happened. | ||
| Every follow-up report, there's one from the New York Times, there's one from the Wall Street Journal today. | ||
| Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday he did not see two survivors after an initial U.S. strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean, but praised a top military commander for making the correct decision to sink the vessel. | ||
| Speaking at a cabinet meeting, Hegseth told reporters he had authorized Admiral Frank Mitch Bradley, a commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, to execute the operation to destroy a suspected drug trafficking boat on September 2nd. | ||
| That initial attack killed nine people on board. | ||
| There were apparently two survivors. | ||
| Hegseth, who on September 3rd said he watched the operation live, said Tuesday he witnessed the first strike, but then left the room ahead of the second attack for another meeting, and he only learned about it an hour or two later. | ||
| Here is Hegseth defending his commander. | ||
| And I will just end by saying, as President Trump always has our back, we always have the back of our commanders who are making decisions in difficult situations, and we do in this case and all these strikes. | ||
|
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They're making judgment calls and ensuring that they defend the American people. | |
| They've done the right things. | ||
| We'll keep doing that. | ||
| And we have their backs, Mr. President. | ||
| Good job. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Okay, the Secretary of War then went on to blame the fog of war for the operations that took place. | ||
| I did not personally see survivors, but I stand because the thing was on fire. | ||
| It was exploded in fire and smoke. | ||
| You can't see anything. | ||
| You got digital. | ||
| This is called the fog of war. | ||
|
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This is what you and the press don't understand. | |
| You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nitpick and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post about kill everybody phrases on anonymous sources not based in anything, not based in any truth at all. | ||
|
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And then you want to throw up really irresponsible terms about American heroes, about the judgment that they made. | |
| I wrote a whole book on this topic. | ||
| Okay, so Hegseth did write a book on this topic. | ||
| We had him on the program before he was Secretary of Defense. | ||
| You can go back and watch that old episode where we talked about the rules of engagement for soldiers, the difficulty of making decisions in the fog of war and then being held accountable by civilians who have no idea what actual war is like. | ||
| So what are Democrats doing? | ||
| Well, their first line of attack is to pretend that they actually have full, clear-cut information that Hegseth ordered a strike on people who are basically floating on driftwood in the water. | ||
| This is the case that they are making. | ||
| So Hakeem Jeffries is already threatening political prosecutions. | ||
| He's saying that when the Democrats take control, then they are going to be able to politically prosecute whomever. | ||
| And again, this should apply theoretically to members of the military who follow what they believe to be legal orders at the time. | ||
| One thing that should be clear to all of these Republican extremists and sycophants and the people who are either actively involved in corruption, violating the law, engaged in extrajudicial activity, is that the statute of limitations for any crimes being committed now is five years. | ||
| It will extend well beyond the end of the Trump administration. | ||
| Okay, I should just point out right now that what he is basically laying the groundwork for is that everyone gets pardoned every four years. | ||
| That that is the new mode. | ||
| Joe Biden, by the way, actually started that. | ||
| Joe Biden, by pardoning his son Hunter and by pardoning everybody else who is associated with his administration and who is an ally of his administration, he now set the predicate for this and by sicking his FBI and DOJ on President Trump. | ||
| The basic idea now for the foreseeable future is going to be that every party on its way out the door pardons everybody. | ||
| And then everyone feels as though no one is held legally accountable. | ||
| So I'm glad that we now live in this sort of terrible legal world. | ||
| But again, Democrats, when it comes to this particular situation, the narco-terrorist boat that got blown out of the water and then the follow-on strike, they are trying to make the case that there is a cover-up going on. | ||
| Senator Mark Kelly, who clearly would like to run for president in 2028, he says the Department of Defense is currently being evasive. | ||
| We asked a bunch of questions. | ||
| They seem to me to be sort of evasive. | ||
| Their legal analysis about this entire operation has a bunch of holes in it. | ||
| So I want to see the video. | ||
| I want to see whatever transcript they have about what was said in the room, you know, at the time. | ||
| Now, again, all of this based on a single Washington Post report that was actually rather debunked by a New York Times report that we quoted yesterday on the air and that is now denied by pretty much everybody in the Defense Department. | ||
| But Mark Kelly thinks that this is going to be a lever to push him into power. | ||
| Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, he says there's a cover-up. | ||
| I mean, again, based on what? | ||
| Based on what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that they have video of the entire operation of all these strikes? | |
| Then they could essentially and effectively dispute the allegations that have already been made. | ||
| So I'm very suspicious that they've never shared that tape with us and that they are consciously trying to cover up what took place. | ||
| Okay, this sounds like it's made up out of holecloth. | ||
| That's what it sounds like. | ||
| It sounds as though a bunch of Democrats came out several weeks ago and made the claim that members of the military need to ignore illegal orders without defining an illegal order. | ||
| And then the media just went and hunted around for a quote-unquote illegal order. | ||
| And it turns out that it's not really true. | ||
| But Democrats ain't going to let it go. | ||
| Republicans, for their part, are saying, listen, we're perfectly willing to do an investigation. | ||
| We'll find out what happened. | ||
| This, by the way, would be the actual responsible thing for Democrats to say. | ||
| They'd say, we're troubled by that Washington Post report. | ||
| We don't know whether it's true or not. | ||
| We require a full investigation to get to the bottom of it. | ||
| If it's true, there should be consequences. | ||
| If not, then, you know, we don't know if the story is true or not. | ||
| Instead, Democrats are going whole hog on this thing. | ||
| Here's Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi saying, we'll find out the facts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't worry. | |
| Were there survivors who were killed at Second Turn? | ||
| I don't have that information. | ||
| Do you worry? | ||
| But I do think we'll get that information, and we're certainly going to have available to us all of the audio and all of the video. | ||
| And at that point, I'll be able to have a more informed conversation with the press. | ||
| We're going to find out what the true facts are, and then there'll be a determination about that. | ||
| Okay, so again, Republicans are not ignoring this. | ||
| They're just saying we would like to get to the bottom of this. | ||
| Now, Democrats in the end are going to be forced to rely on a different argument because I don't think the facts are going to be there to support this outsized allegation. | ||
| They're going to be forced to rely on the argument that this entire operation is illegal. | ||
| Now, there's a case to be made that the operation in international waters is somehow illegal. | ||
| It's a case that has been made by some conservatives as well as pretty much all of the left. | ||
| The basic argument is that there is no such thing as a narco-terrorist, that basically that designation is a rhetorical designation, but it is not, in fact, a legal designation. | ||
| That if you wish to have authority to strike, for example, a boat that is filled with drugs in the middle of the Caribbean, you do have to make the argument that it is either an armed attack or an imminent threat. | ||
| You have to make the case that it is an act of self-defense to strike these boats. | ||
| Now, I think you can make a very strong case. | ||
| It is an act of self-defense. | ||
| If they are shipping fentanyl up to the United States or attempting to do so, and that's killing 100,000 Americans a year, seems to me that that should fall under the imminent threat issue. | ||
| And then there's the question of whether you need some sort of military authorization to go after what President Trump has now designated as a foreign terrorist operation. | ||
| Drug cartels historically have been treated as transnational criminal organizations, not terrorist organizations. | ||
| The definition of a terrorist organization is relatively unspecific. | ||
| It's a little vague. | ||
| It basically says that if you participate in particular acts, then you could theoretically be qualified as a terrorist organization. | ||
| So under the U.S. Code, if you participate in, say, hijackings, bombings, assassinations, hostage taking, if you do any of that, then theoretically you could be a terrorist organization. | ||
| Now we know that drug cartels engage in a lot of that sort of stuff. | ||
| The question is whether that is quote-unquote terrorist activity or criminal activity. | ||
| Maybe a distinction without a difference in the law. | ||
| The bottom line, however, though, is that if Democrats are forced to now make the backup argument that actually blowing drug boats out of the water is bad, good luck for them on this one. | ||
| Here is one Democrat having the audacity to make the case, Representative Adam Smith from Washington. | ||
| This is not self-defense. | ||
| And no matter where you do the strike, if it's not self-defense, then it's illegal. | ||
| And look, I have a lot of sympathy for the general idea that when we send our service members out into combat, they got some very difficult decisions to make. | ||
| When you look at what was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan and you're stopping someone, do they have a gun? | ||
| Do they have a suicide vest? | ||
| Are they a threat? | ||
| When you are in the middle of an insurgency with roadside bombs and car bombs and all of that, even in the aftermath of the Afghanistan pullout when we had that suicide bomber kill 13 service members and hundreds of people in Kabul, and we did that strike against a car that we thought was a threat that turned out not to be a threat. | ||
| I have some sympathy for that. | ||
| But people on a boat in the middle of the Caribbean carrying cocaine are not a direct threat to the lives of our service members or Americans. | ||
| Okay, I just have a question as to why people on drug boats who are carrying fentanyl into the United States allegedly, why they would not, in fact, be a threat to Americans. | ||
| That's a hard case to make, and we'll find out whether Democrats are able to make that case effectively on an electoral level. | ||
| Already coming up, will the United States be pursuing regime change in Venezuela? | ||
| What's happening over there first? | ||
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| All righty, time for some fast facts. | ||
| Okay, so we begin with the situation in Venezuela. | ||
| Right now, it appears the United States is gearing up for some sort of operation in Venezuela. | ||
| It is not particularly clear what that operation is going to look like. | ||
| Yesterday, the president warned that he will attack on land in Venezuela to go after narco-terrorists. | ||
| So the designation of drug cartels as narco-terrorists does not just mean that we're going to blow up boats in the Caribbean. | ||
| It also means that once they're a terrorist organization, then we're going to treat them like we would al-Qaeda, presumably. | ||
| Here's the president talking about this yesterday. | ||
| If they come into a certain country or any country, or if we think they're building mills for whether it's fentanyl or cocaine, I hear Colombia, the country of Colombia, is making cocaine. | ||
| They have cocaine manufacturing plants, okay? | ||
| And then they sell us their cocaine. | ||
| We appreciate that very much. | ||
| But yeah, anybody that's doing that and selling it into our country is subject to attack. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, not necessarily just Venezuela. | |
| No, not just Venezuela. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Okay, so again, now he's making the case that the war on drugs is actually a war on drug traffickers. | ||
| And I'm fine with this, frankly. | ||
| I think this is totally fine. | ||
| Whenever you're talking about the possibility of using military force, the question is risk and reward. | ||
| And so the question here is: what is the risk and what is the reward? | ||
| So is the United States talking about landing 200,000 troops in Venezuela to topple Nicolas Maduro? | ||
| Not by anything the president has said. | ||
| And one thing about President Trump, you know, is that he does not like the idea of being bogged down in gigantic foreign conflicts, not his favorite thing. | ||
| That is why all of the specious and ridiculous talk about how a single B2 sortie over the Fordo nuclear facility in Iran was going to lead to World War III and a vast loss of American lives. | ||
| That was all bunk. | ||
| It was all nonsense from the beginning. | ||
| Clearly nonsense. | ||
| And the same thing I think is true here. | ||
| This sort of bizarre idea that Donald Trump is going to send the 101st airborne en masse into Venezuela. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure. | ||
| Sure, he is. | ||
| No, he certainly is not. | ||
| With that said, the U.S. is attempting to ratchet up the pressure. | ||
| Again, this is why my hope is that they've identified some rival to Maduro with actual support in the military who is going to defenestrate Maduro. | ||
| That would be the best possible solution here. | ||
| That is typically how coups are done in the Latin American and South American part of the world. | ||
| According to the New York Post, U.S. officials are discussing allowing Venezuela's socialist strongman Nicolas Maduro to live out his days in luxury in one of the world's richest countries. | ||
| Apparently, Secretary of State Rubio has floated allowing Maduro to relocate to Qatar. | ||
| I mean, that seems like a good place for him since Qatar is, you know, another oil-rich dictatorship that is anti-American in nature. | ||
| Three current and former administration officials describe the scenario as somewhat plausible: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, they love to do stuff like this. | ||
| It helps build chips with the U.S. at a source close to the administration. | ||
| All three compete against each other in the region and for the ultimate affection of the United States. | ||
| Apparently, Maduro is not currently mansion shopping in Doha, but obviously, this would be a fine solution. | ||
| I mean, moving Maduro to some third-party country where he cannot impact Venezuela would be a good thing. | ||
| Consolidating a more pro-American regime in Venezuela would be positive. | ||
| And by the way, freeing tens of millions of Venezuelans of the predations of a communist dictatorship would also be a very good thing. | ||
| 28 million people are currently living under Nicolas Maduro's tender mercies. | ||
| Well, the Pope, for one, is upset about this. | ||
| Apparently, Pope Leo is now urging President Trump not to try to oust Nicolas Maduro using military force. | ||
| He said it would be better to attempt dialogue or impose economic pressure on Venezuela. | ||
| I mean, sure, cool. | ||
| I mean, like, me too. | ||
| Also, I'm very much in favor of dialogue if dialogue works. | ||
| Economic pressure is already imposed on Venezuela. | ||
| I don't think anyone is talking about a mass invasion of Venezuela. | ||
| Asked during a news conference about Trump's threat to remove Maduro by force, Pope Leo said it is better to search for ways of dialogue or perhaps pressure, including economic pressure. | ||
| He said they should search for other ways to achieve change. | ||
| Now, again, also, yes, no one is in favor of large-scale war. | ||
| No one would like that. | ||
| Diplomacy is war by other means, just as war is diplomacy by other means. | ||
| The Pope said, on the one hand, it seems there was a call between the two presidents. | ||
| On the other hand, there is the danger, there's the possibility there will be some activity, some military operation. | ||
| Okay, now, again, military operations against drug traffickers seems like a good thing. | ||
| I think that some of the exaggerated headlines coming out here about what Pope Leo actually said to a disservice probably to Pope Leo, he is not claiming that there shouldn't be any pressure to make Maduro go. | ||
| He is, I think, arguing against a straw man that doesn't really exist, that the United States is about to, again, drop hundreds of thousands of people into Venezuela to fight a full-scale war. | ||
| However, it seems to me that the Pope putting additional pressure on Maduro and less pressure on the United States would probably be a good thing. | ||
| The great popes of the past, including John Paul II, were, of course, extraordinary advocates against communism. | ||
| Pope John Paul II was one of three people who essentially brought down the Soviet Union along with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. | ||
| And so it seems to me that something similar from Pope Leo would go a long way here or could go a long way. | ||
| Meanwhile, Democrats are very upset with the idea that we're going to attack drug cartels in Venezuela or in Colombia. | ||
| Chuck Schumer said that Congress would invoke the War Powers Act if President Trump initiates an attack on land. | ||
| So first of all, he could initiate the War Powers Act right now. | ||
| He could say that President Trump's war on narco-terrorists in the Caribbean is a violation of the Article I authority of Congress. | ||
| The War Powers Act, by the way, may be unconstitutional. | ||
| It's always been vaguely treated. | ||
| Basically, the War Powers Act says that if you initiate a military conflict within 60 days, you have to go to Congress and Congress has to greenlight it or they can defund it. | ||
| That's how the war, in practice, it never works that way. | ||
| Again, specious threats here from the Senate minority leader. | ||
| He said, I want those votes taken out. | ||
| And if we have to, we will attack on land also. | ||
| Let me be clear. | ||
| If Trump were to order an attack on land, that would be an act of war. | ||
| And Congress would invoke the War Powers Act. | ||
| It's Congress's prerogative to go to war. | ||
| And I hope Republicans will defend that role. | ||
| Again, it's always fun when the parties switch places and suddenly the advocates of broad presidential powers and foreign policy, see Joe Biden or Barack Obama, suddenly become constitutionalists again. | ||
| It's always very, very entertaining. | ||
| Okay, meanwhile, on the electoral front, Democrats are cheering that they lost last night in the Tennessee congressional elections. | ||
| So there's a special election in Tennessee 7. | ||
| We had on Matt Van Epps, who was the Republican candidate yesterday. | ||
| He won by apparently nine points. | ||
| Now, that is a downshift from the margin of victory for Republicans in 2024. | ||
| In 2024, Republicans won that seat by something like 20 points. | ||
| And so some Republicans are very concerned about this. | ||
| Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, he said, I'm glad we won. | ||
| The GOP should not ignore the Virginia, New Jersey, and Tennessee elections. | ||
| We must reach swing voters. | ||
| America wants some normalcy. | ||
| I don't think Don Bacon is wrong about all of this. | ||
| It was too close, said one House GOP leadership aide to Politico. | ||
| President Trump is saying that basically this is an indicator that Republicans are still doing fine over here. | ||
| He had said yesterday before the election, the whole world is watching. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go get them and get out tomorrow morning, get out and vote, and let's make it a sweeping victory. | |
| The whole world is watching Tennessee right now, and they're watching your district. | ||
| The whole world is a big vote, and it's going to show something. | ||
| Now, again, the reality is it was an off-year election. | ||
| In an off-year election, you're not going to have kind of the looky loo voters who show up for the presidential. | ||
| President Trump is famous for being able to bring low-propensity voters into the fold. | ||
| And so the fact that he wasn't on the ballot this time, well, that means that fewer low-propensity voters are going to show up. | ||
| Republicans have become the party of low-propensity voters, which is kind of amazing. | ||
| In other words, when more people vote, Republicans do better. | ||
| That's the reverse of how the Republican Party was, say, 15 years ago. | ||
| With that said, was this an amazing election cycle for Republicans? | ||
| No. | ||
| Mark Green, during the last off-year election, won by 22 points in that same district. | ||
| He won by more than 40 points in 2020. | ||
| If you go all the way back to 2018, he won again by something like 34 points. | ||
| So obviously the margin is shrinking. | ||
| And that could be a problem. | ||
| It doesn't bode particularly well for Republicans in the midterms. | ||
| And pretending that a way isn't going to solve the problem. | ||
| Now, in order to solve the problem, we have to figure out what the problem is. | ||
| On immigration, the Trump administration has done a good job. | ||
| And in some ways, solving the immigration issue has actually taken the issue off the table for the Republicans. | ||
| President Trump yesterday pointed out that for six months, there have been no illegal immigrants coming into the United States. | ||
| That's a hell of an accomplishment. | ||
| It also means you can't really run on illegal immigration as kind of your point of the spear. | ||
| It's just not as much of a concern as it was a year and a half ago against Joe Biden, who opened the border wide. | ||
| For six months in a row, zero illegal aliens have been admitted into the United States. | ||
| You believe that? | ||
| Zero. | ||
| We had millions of people coming in a year, millions. | ||
| Now we have zero. | ||
| Okay, so obviously solving the problem, good in terms of policy. | ||
| In terms of electoral politics, solving problems means that people aren't worried about them anymore. | ||
| So what are people worried about? | ||
| Well, the idea is affordability is the big problem. | ||
| Affordability. | ||
| Now, honestly, I think President Trump is right about this. | ||
| I know, unpopular view. | ||
| So President Trump says that when people are talking about affordability, basically it's too broad. | ||
| That affordability means that things are too expensive. | ||
| And sure, things are too expensive. | ||
| They got really expensive under Joe Biden, and now things are kind of evening out under Donald Trump. | ||
| It seems to me that many Americans are waiting for all the prices to drop back to 2020, 2019 levels. | ||
| They are not going to do that. | ||
| That is not how inflation typically works. | ||
| In order for prices to reverse, you have to now have deflation. | ||
| It is not enough to stop inflation. | ||
| You have to deflate the prices. | ||
| The only way, historically speaking, you get a serious deflation is with an extraordinary productivity growth. | ||
| That's hard to do in places like real estate and, for example, food prices. | ||
| Very difficult to get a massive deflation in those areas without kind of recession. | ||
| But I think what people are really calling for is for something that probably will not happen. | ||
| That's a point the president is making here. | ||
| When they say affordability, what is he supposed to do if the inflation rate is already down from 9, 10, 11% under Joe Biden all the way down to 2.5%, 3% under Donald Trump, and we hope headed back toward 2%? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are the American people, do you believe, getting impatient with the reforms that you're making? | |
| They've talked about it's about affordability is a hoax that was started by Democrats who caused the problem of pricing. | ||
| And they didn't end it. | ||
| You know, there's this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about, affordability. | ||
| They just say the word. | ||
| It doesn't mean anything to anybody. | ||
| Just say it. | ||
| Affordability. | ||
| I inherited the worst inflation in history. | ||
| There was no affordability. | ||
| Nobody could afford anything. | ||
| The prices were massively high. | ||
| Do you remember when we took over eggs? | ||
| You did a great job on that, Madam Secretary. | ||
| The word affordability is a con job by the Democrats. | ||
| They say affordable. | ||
| I watched the other day where some very low IQ congresswoman talked about affordability, affordability, affordability. | ||
| She had no idea that prices were much higher. | ||
| Okay, so he is right that the prices were somewhat higher in some areas last year. | ||
| The reality is that even the way the president talks about affordability, he should be saying, listen, we stabilize the prices. | ||
| That's the most we can really do other than massive productivity growth. | ||
| And this is where you require technological innovation. | ||
| And this is why the populist wing in the Republican Party with regards to economics is the enemy of affordability. | ||
| Affordability is not going to come through government subsidization. | ||
| It is not going to come through additional regulation or through Luddite opposition to technology. | ||
| Again, prices only go down if one of two things happen. | ||
| Supply increases dramatically or demand decreases dramatically. | ||
| If demand decreases dramatically, that is typically the result of a recession. | ||
| If supply increases dramatically, that is typically the result of technological innovation. | ||
| And this is why the kind of foolish economic populism that says, for example, get rid of self-driving cars. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bad. | |
| Self-driving cars, bad. | ||
| And you see this. | ||
| There are legitimately large-scale figures in the Republican commentarians who say this sort of stuff. | ||
| We have to ban AI, ban self-driving cars, ban all this stuff. | ||
| How do you think things are going to get more affordable? | ||
| By the way, there is also a conflict between some of the things that these folks say and other things that they say. | ||
| So they will say, we need affordability. | ||
| America is just unaffordable. | ||
| It's so difficult for young people right now. | ||
| Also, we need to stop dollar stores. | ||
| Dollar stores must be stopped. | ||
| They're ugly and they're bad. | ||
| Okay, that's an elitist point of view. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| That really is. | ||
| My wife and I were not nearly as wealthy. | ||
| We used to routinely shop at places like the dollar store because it was cheaper there. | ||
| And that was a good thing for us. | ||
| It made our life easier. | ||
| There's still lots of people who are reliant on those kinds of stores and ripping on those stores because you want the mom and pop shop that charges four times the price. | ||
| That is not a solution to affordability. | ||
| That is actually a driver of unaffordability. | ||
| Again, the laws of supply and demand are undefeated. | ||
| The only way for actual affordability to happen is an increase in supply or a decrease in demand. | ||
| There is no third choice. | ||
| And policies can drive both of those things. | ||
| This is why, again, one of the kind of main issues that you're seeing this come to a head on is, again, I mentioned briefly, self-driving cars. | ||
| So there's an interview that I did with Tucker Carlson, pretty fascinating, I think back in 2018, where we were talking about a book that he had recently brought out in which he made the argument, essentially a Luddite argument against technology. | ||
| And he cited self-driving cars as something that he would ban because he said it'll get rid of trucker jobs. | ||
| Okay, well, it is always true that when there is technological development, there is creative destruction, in the words of Joseph Schumpeter. | ||
| And that means some jobs go away and then they are replaced by other jobs. | ||
| But if you want your products to be cheaper, if you want affordability, one way to do that is things like self-driving trucks. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because now you don't actually have to pay the truckers a large-scale wage in order to move the product from place to place. | ||
| This brings down the inputs in the price that the grocery store charges you. | ||
| When you reduce the inputs to a product, the product becomes cheaper. | ||
| So these are mutually exclusive. | ||
| You can subsidize truck driver jobs by essentially forcing consumers to pay higher prices by banning technological innovation that makes things cheaper, but everybody's going to pay for that. | ||
| That is, in fact, the reality. | ||
| And again, this is not an argument. | ||
| You shouldn't have local and state programs that help transition workforces from one area to another or a vibrant social fabric that helps that happen. | ||
| Of course, the economy does not work the way that it works sort of theoretically in Econ 101, where you move directly from a trucker job to a completely different job in a different line. | ||
| That's not how it works for individual human beings. | ||
| But the way that the economy broad scale works is that if you cut down the innovation, you're cutting off the affordability. | ||
| Not only that, you're making life unsafer for people. | ||
| Fascinating article by a guy named Jonathan Slotkin in the New York Times yesterday called the data on self-driving cars is clear. | ||
| We have to change course. | ||
| So what exactly is the data? | ||
| The data is that autonomous vehicles are way, way, way safer than non-autonomous vehicles. | ||
| So it's not just that you're sacrificing technological innovation and economic efficiency, which means, by the way, cheaper prices and better products in favor of maintaining the status quo. | ||
| When you're talking about cars, you know, to some extent, you are sacrificing a certain level of human life. | ||
| The risk factors for death are increased. | ||
| According to the New York Times, the results on Waymo's data are impressive. | ||
| When compared to human drivers on the same roads, Waymo's self-driving cars were involved in 91% fewer serious injury or worse crashes and 80% fewer crashes causing any injury. | ||
| It showed a 96% lower rate of injury causing crashes at intersections, which are some of the deadliest that this particular author encounters in the trauma bay. | ||
| If Waymo's results are indicative of the broader future of autonomous vehicles, we may be on the path to eliminating traffic deaths as a leading cause of mortality in the United States, which, by the way, is a good thing. | ||
| That is a good thing. | ||
| And go back and review that interview I did with Tuck again. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| He actually says, I say, on what basis would you ban self-driving cars? | ||
| And he said, on the basis of safety. | ||
| And I say, well, you know, they're safer than like normal people driving cars. | ||
| He says, you asked me on what basis I would ban it, not what's true. | ||
| It's a pretty wild statement. | ||
| Would you, Tucker Carlson, be in favor of restrictions on the ability of trucking companies to use this sort of technology specifically to, you know, sort of artificially maintain the number of jobs that are available in the trucking industry? | ||
| Are you joking? | ||
| In a second. | ||
| In a second. | ||
| In other words, if I were president, when I say the DOT, the Department of Transportation, we're not letting driverless trucks on the road, period. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Really simple. | ||
| Driving for a living is the single most common job for high school educated men in this country in all 50 states. | ||
| By the way, that's the same group whose wages have gone down by 11% over the past 30 years. | ||
| The social cost of eliminating their jobs in a 10-year span, five-year span, 30-year span, is so high that it's not sustainable. | ||
| So the greater good is protecting your citizens. | ||
| What I care about is living in a country where, you know, decent people can live happy lives, actually. | ||
| And so, no, I would say immediately. | ||
| No, are you joking? | ||
| And I maybe would make up some pretext for public consumption, like, oh, they're dangerous. | ||
| The technology is not quite finesse. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| But the truth would be, I don't want to put 10 million men out of work because you're going to have 10 million dead families and the cascading effect from that will wreck your country. | ||
| If we are going to move toward a more affordable economy, innovation is the way out. | ||
| Innovation is the way productivity increases. | ||
| These are the way out. | ||
| This is why, again, Republicans should stop engaging in the conversation about how government can provide affordability and should start engaging in the conversation about how government can provide opportunity by getting out of your way. | ||
| Free markets make things better and more affordable. | ||
| Government makes things worse and less affordable. | ||
| That is a general rule. | ||
| Every single major product, good or service subsidized by the government has gotten worse over time and has cost more. | ||
| Every single one. | ||
| And for the Republican Party to get caught up in this populist death spiral in which they're trying to outbid the Democrats on how much weight they can put on the free market economy in order to alleviate the kind of bizarrely vague line about affordability, that is not something. | ||
| You're not going to outbid Democrats on this. | ||
| You're not. | ||
| You're not. | ||
| Republicans ought to be talking about how opportunity is the name of the game in the United States. | ||
| And affordability is a result. of innovation and opportunity. | ||
| It is a byproduct of innovation and opportunity. | ||
| Okay, meanwhile, the president of the United States is looking at a new Fed chair. | ||
| Obviously, Jay Powell is coming up. | ||
| His term is going to be over fairly soon. | ||
| The Trump administration is looking as though they're going to settle on longtime Trump economic advisor Kevin Hassett, according to the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| There are other finalists for the job, they include Fed governor Kevin Warsh and the sitting Fed governor, Christopher Waller. | ||
| Apparently, there were some interviews that had been scheduled with Vice President JD Vance. | ||
| Unclear if the meetings are going to be rescheduled. | ||
| Trump told reporters during a cabinet meeting on Tuesday he had narrowed down the list of candidates to one. | ||
| Presumably, this would be Kevin Hassett. | ||
| Hassett, of course, is a Trump loyalist. | ||
| I do think that at this point, President Trump owns whatever the Federal Reserve is going to. | ||
| That would be particularly true after Kevin Hassett takes over. | ||
| I know that there are some economists like Mohamed El Aryan from Alianz who's made the case that Jay Powell should step down right now and just give Trump what he wants. | ||
| Just let Kevin Hassett, be the Fed chair, and then he owns whatever comes next. | ||
| Seems to me that that's actually not a horrible policy. | ||
| Again, I'm very much against the sort of manipulations the Federal Reserve undergoes on a regular basis. | ||
| I am an Austrian school of economics guy. | ||
| I think that the target inflation rate should not be 2%. | ||
| It should be zero. | ||
| And the manipulations by the Federal Reserve have made it the policymaker of first resort, not the sort of safety net of last resort. | ||
| I think that's a huge, huge problem. | ||
| Howard, Kevin Hassett for the Fed chair, I suppose, as good a pick as any, given that the Federal Reserve inherently is political and there is kind of no way around it. | ||
| All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now. | ||
| Fascinating essay in The Atlantic saying that legitimately millions and millions of students are apparently claiming disability now. | ||
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