Dec. 4, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:06
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Bad science when it comes to transgender medicine, bad science when it comes to climate change. | ||
| The Trump administration has been fighting all of it. | ||
| We'll get to all that in a moment. | ||
| First, this is it. | ||
| The biggest sale we do all year guaranteed. | ||
| Dailyware Plus is half off for a limited time. | ||
| Get access to every show, movie, and the Pendragon cycle rise of the Merlin. | ||
| Head on over to dailyware.com/slash cyberweek. | ||
| One of the big problems we have in the West, and this has been true for many years at this point, is the perversion of science. | ||
| There is a fascinating piece out of the free press today by a columnist named Lior Sapir talking about gender doctors and what they say in private. | ||
| Now, remember, for fully a decade in the United States, there was a grand delusion that was promoted by nearly every member of the legacy media. | ||
| It was promoted by every legacy media outlet. | ||
| It was promoted by universities. | ||
| It was promoted by Hollywood. | ||
| And the basic idea was simple: a boy could be a girl, a girl could be a boy, there could be a female brain inside a male body, and vice versa. | ||
| Sex was not, in fact, defined by biology. | ||
| It was defined by the soul hovering inside you that might be differently sexed than your actual physical body. | ||
| And this was treated as a fundamental, eternal truth by pretty much everybody in a position of authority. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| Well, because the scientific community decided that they were going to back the insanity of the gender theorists. | ||
| Well, now it turns out that virtually all of that was just based on absolute nonsense. | ||
| According to the free press, at their conferences, closed to outsiders in the press, the gender clinicians allowed themselves to speak freely. | ||
| They spoke about the boys who they say wanted to be girls and the girls who felt they were meant to be boys and the medical and surgical interventions that would make them appear as the opposite sex. | ||
| The clinicians also discussed new procedures for a new type of patient, some of them adolescents, who wanted to make to look as if they had no sex at all. | ||
| In one of the videos obtained exclusively by the free press from the 2021 conference of the U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health, Amy Penkin, a social worker with the Transgender Health Program at the Oregon Health and Science University, spoke about one such case. | ||
| Penkin told the audience about Skye, whom she described as an 18-year-old recent high school graduate who's living on his own for the first time. | ||
| Penkin explained that Skye expressed a desire to look like a Barbie down there. | ||
| Skye, said Penkin, reported being asexual, never having had sex, having no desire to have sex in the future. | ||
| Indeed, Skye did not want to feel any pleasurable sensation and hoped removal of all erogenous tissue would be possible, according to Penkin. | ||
| Now, historically, that person would have been given psychological counseling because what you're talking about is mutilation. | ||
| Instead, clinicians want to help young people like Sky achieve their gender goals. | ||
| Penkin explained to fellow professionals that requests for procedures that are non-binary were growing in number, but the field was still wetted. | ||
| Unfortunately, said Penkin, to binary assumptions. | ||
| This means procedures such as nullification, which is to, you know, get rid of literally all external genitals, or penile-preserving vagina plasty, which is surgically crafting a pseudo-vagina underneath the penis, are not as accessible as they should be. | ||
| And in fact, Penkin added that existing research and standards of care can't help patients. | ||
| You have to go beyond what the research actually shows. | ||
| You have to go beyond the science. | ||
| Here is Amy Penkin, a social worker, speaking at a gathering of a major professional association for transgender health U.S. PATH. | ||
| This is Skye, who's 18 years old. | ||
| They recently graduated from high school and reports living on their own for the first time. | ||
| At Consult, they express a desire to look like, quote, a Barbie down there. | ||
| They report being asexual, never having had sex, and having no desire to have sex in the future. | ||
| Skye does not want to feel any pleasurable sensation and hopes removal of all erogenous tissue will be possible. | ||
| And they come to our clinic with a referral and two letters of support for vulvoplasty surgery. | ||
| We came to deliver this presentation because we recognize that the tools in our system, such as what is the evidence-based practice and the research tell us, what do the standards of care tell us, that is not enough to meet the needs of our patients. | ||
| And we need to take it to the next level to really think about how we evolve and match the needs of our patients as their needs are being expressed to us. | ||
| Now, that is an amazing statement. | ||
| The last part of that, that patients express their needs to doctors as though they're simply going into the store and buying a cup of coffee and the doctors are then designated with fulfilling the needs of their patients is precisely the opposite of how medical science is supposed to work. | ||
| It is the job of the doctor to diagnose. | ||
| It is the job of the doctor to tell you about your own biology and what is true and what is false, but not so in the world of trans so-called medicine. | ||
| A psychologist, Amir Marsiglio, agreed and described doing just that. | ||
| Here's Mare Marsiglio, a psychologist, talking about the idea that even people with multiple personality disorder or psychosis should not be barred from mutilating surgery. | ||
| And for example, if the surgeon isn't able to meet their requests, that may mimic some other ways in which the system has impacted them, dismissed their requests or dismissed their identity or erased them in some way. | ||
| And so helping a patient think through why the surgeon is saying we may have to alter a treatment plan is a big part of my role. | ||
| I also work to advocate for folks who have comorbid mental health symptoms that in other contexts may just be excluded from receiving care at all. | ||
| So for example, patients who have multiple personalities or psychosis or other things that may make the surgical team uncomfortable. | ||
| I also, given that I am on the surgical team and part of the hospital context, I can help the patient very specifically navigate care, especially within a surgery that has not been performed before or is of higher risk. | ||
| I can round, be part of the care team in that way. | ||
| I mean, again, this is insane. | ||
| I mean, this is truly insane. | ||
| What you are talking about is people who have clinical problems who are being told that we should perform surgeries on them because they think a thing. | ||
| People who are fully delusional. | ||
| But when it comes to their desire to mutilate themselves, suddenly those delusions don't matter. | ||
| Alrighty, in the meantime, speaking of bad science, climate change, a big study is now being removed. | ||
| First, do you trust your internet service provider? | ||
| You probably shouldn't, depending on where you live. | ||
| ISPs can log your activity for the government or even sell your browsing history to the highest bidder. | ||
| The solution, our sponsor, ExpressVPN, is an app that reroutes your online traffic through encrypted servers, keeping it away from your ISP, data brokers, and other third parties. | ||
| Of course, this only works if you trust your VPN provider. | ||
| They're essentially transferring that trust from your ISP to them. | ||
| So why do I trust ExpressVPN? | ||
| Well, they received over 300 data requests from law enforcement and government entities in the past year alone. | ||
| Not a single one resulted in customer data being exposed. | ||
| You can read their transparency report on their website. | ||
| It's actually fascinating. | ||
| It's not that they refuse to comply with legal requests. | ||
| They can cooperate, but here's the thing. | ||
| You cannot hand over what you don't have in the first place. | ||
| ExpressVPN does not even have activity logs thanks to their specially engineered server architecture that runs on volatile memory, meaning nothing ever actually gets saved to the disk. | ||
| It's privacy by design. | ||
| I use ExpressVPN all the time. | ||
| You can see I'm on the road. | ||
| That means I'm using ExpressVPN because I'm on public Wi-Fi. | ||
| Plus, it works seamlessly across all your devices, phones, laptops, tablets. | ||
| It's genuinely easy to use. | ||
| Just tap one button and you are now connected. | ||
| So if you want the VPN I trust to protect my online privacy, get ExpressVPN. | ||
| In fact, you can get four extra months of ExpressVPN with my special link. | ||
| Go to expressvpn.com slash ben. | ||
| That's E-X-P-R-E-S-V-PN.com slash Ben to get four extra months. | ||
| Also, I've been with our ad partner PierTalk for a long time. | ||
| Honestly, I've never seen them quite do anything like this before. | ||
| So here's the deal: they're offering unlimited talk, unlimited text, unlimited data, plus a 30-gig hotspot for just $29.95 a month. | ||
| And that price is locked in for the rest of your life. | ||
| This is normally their premium plan. | ||
| It goes for $65 a month. | ||
| But if you switch before December 7th, you get it for $29.95 every single month from here on out. | ||
| That's more than half off permanently. | ||
| And yeah, it's all on their 5G networks. | ||
| You're not sacrificing speed or coverage. | ||
| Look, I know these kinds of offers don't stick around long. | ||
| If you've been thinking about switching carriers, now's probably the time. | ||
| Head on over to puretalk.com/slash Shapiro to grab this deal. | ||
| And honestly, it's worth telling your friends or family about as well. | ||
| If you have kids and you're thinking about getting any of them a first phone this Christmas or you're just looking to cut some unnecessary costs, the Pure Talk deal is truly worth checking out. | ||
| Great coverage, lower price, a company that shares your values. | ||
| Make the switch. | ||
| In as little as 10 minutes, you got nothing to lose. | ||
| Keep your phone, keep your number, start saving with Unlimited for Life for just $29.95 a month. | ||
| Again, that's PureTalk.com/slash Shapiro to switch to my wireless company, PureTalk. | ||
| Tax and fees not included, some restrictions apply. | ||
| See PureTalk.com for details. | ||
| Offer ends 12725. | ||
| One of the most important things about this free press piece, the revelations in the free press piece, are the revelations with regard to groupthink. | ||
| As the free press says, one of the biggest revelations from the recordings is how clinicians acknowledge performing unproven, seemingly experimental treatments. | ||
| Only it appears there's often no protocol being followed, no formal research being conducted, no ethics board approval being sought. | ||
| These practitioners say their goal is to fulfill the embodiment desires of their patient, whatever those may be. | ||
| And doing this may require deviating from guidelines. | ||
| And so people get together at conferences and then they change the guidelines, the standards of care, in order to match what the quote-unquote patients would like from these particular quote-unquote medical practitioners. | ||
| So, for example, the standards of care for WPATH, which was for a long time considered the sort of gold standard in terms of scientific groups on trans medicine, it was widely cited all the time by the legacy media. | ||
| Their standards of care explain: to be non-binary, one needs only have an internal sense of gender that is at odds with social expectations and associated with one's assigned sex. | ||
| This includes indigenous and non-Western genders, as well as people whose genders are comprised of more than one gender identity simultaneously or at different times, who do not have a gender identity or who have a neutral gender identity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| One case involved a teen who said he realized Frank N. Furter from the Rocky Horror Picture Show was his gender identity. | ||
| Now, in order to get all this done, what was required was groupthink. | ||
| Here, for example, is a recording of British endocrinology consultant Leighton Seal explaining that the best way to avoid criticism was to make the decisions as a group. | ||
| And therefore, when you're doing operations, that we have to accept at some point somebody will regret the surgery they've done. | ||
| So, to allow people to move the field forward, you need to have a support network around you as a clinician so that if that decision is made and that decision is regretted, how did you make that decision process? | ||
| So, as an individual practitioner, if you make that in isolation, you could be vulnerable to being criticized for doing something that is outside of the norm. | ||
| Whereas, if you have a network around you where a clinical team in concert with the individual has made a decision, you then have a framework to say, well, the ethics of this were explored. | ||
| Because you have a situation where you can explore the ethics of that. | ||
| Because this is, we are doing procedures here where we don't have outcome data. | ||
| So, for a vaginoplasty, for a phanoplasty, there is long-term outcome data of what the pros, the cons, the psychological impact, the sexual functioning impact is. | ||
| For these newer procedures, we don't have that outcome. | ||
| So unless you want to go to individual ethics boards in each hospital to get ethics permission to do those surgeries because they're on the edge of the field of medicine, you need to have a mechanism around you to support you. | ||
| Otherwise, you could be vulnerable. | ||
| And so, yeah, again, this is all insanity. | ||
| And this was the way that people did quote-unquote medicine for a decade in this country at the cost of thousands of possible happy lives. | ||
| Because the way that you make somebody, actually fulfilled and happy is not by mutilating them at their own behest, particularly not if they are minors. | ||
| Now, why am I bringing this up? | ||
| Because let's be real. | ||
| Conservatives won on this issue because reality was always going to win on this issue, even when it was unpopular. | ||
| We here at the Daily Wire refused all the time, like from the outside of the company to use so-called gendered pronouns. | ||
| We refused to use people's chosen pronouns. | ||
| Your pronoun was your sex, period. | ||
| We never varied on this. | ||
| This is a strong position of the company. | ||
| And we knew, or at least we figured, that eventually truth would prevail. | ||
| Why does this matter? | ||
| Because it's not just that there are consequences in the field of trans for bad science. | ||
| There are consequences for everyone. | ||
| And this is also true in the world of the economy. | ||
| So there is a major study that has now emerged to be false. | ||
| There's a climate change study that was published in Nature. | ||
| This is the Wall Street Journal reporting today. | ||
| And apparently, that widely cited study on economic damage from climate change. | ||
| And apparently that widely cited study on economic damage from climate change was retracted following criticism from peers. | ||
| That research, published last year in the prestigious journal Nature, projected the world's economic output would decline 62% by 2100 under a high carbon emission scenario, which is crazy. | ||
| That is saying that, again, just by the statistics, the entire world economic output thanks to global warming would drop by 62%, by well over half. | ||
| The estimate was much more severe than other forecasts. | ||
| That prompted scrutiny of the underlying data. | ||
| The study author, Leonie Wens from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said, we broadly agree with the issues raised. | ||
| You made corrections to the underlying economic data and to our methodology to address them. | ||
| The changes are too substantial for a correction of the original article in Nature. | ||
| In other words, they pulled the whole thing. | ||
| The study had examined historical data from some 1,600 regions worldwide over the past four decades to project how changes in temperature and precipitation would affect economic growth, how it would affect agricultural yields, labor productivity, infrastructure. | ||
| But after the study was published, other researchers found the economic data from one country, Uzbekistan, during a short time from 1995 to 1999 had skewed the results. | ||
| Without Uzbekistan, the 2100 damage forecast fell to 23%, not 62%. | ||
| And so they had to pull the study. | ||
| Now, here's what's amazing. | ||
| The study had already been cited by the time it was polled by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, the World Bank, and the Network for Greening the Financial System. | ||
| That is a coalition of central banks that the Federal Reserve was a part of under Joe Biden. | ||
| The coalition, which has members in about 90 countries, incorporated the damage forecast in risk tools banks could use to stress test portfolios to meet European regulations. | ||
| So this horrible study was used in order to determine whether, in fact, banks could invest in certain things. | ||
| Central bank models of the economic impacts of climate change have far-reaching implications. | ||
| If the models show impacts are going to be much worse than previously thought, regulators could make banks set aside more capital to buffer against potential losses associated with those assets, meaning that banks would have to hold more cash back and not lend it out to other businesses because of the potential risk from climate change. | ||
| So this study was just wrong. | ||
| I mean, like overtly wrong, and they had to pull it. | ||
| But it is on the basis of bad science that many, many decisions are made. | ||
| And this is why it is a very good thing that the president of the United States has decided not to bow to the climate change extremists. | ||
| And he announced yesterday that the administration would be lowering fuel economy rules for car makers. | ||
| So, in a time where cars are increasingly unaffordable, that's just a reality thanks to CAFE standards, so-called CAFE standards. | ||
| Those are corporate average fuel economy rules. | ||
| The president is reversing that because he's saying, listen, global warming is not going to be sufficiently alleviated by the sorts of CAFE standards that you're putting in place to actually pay for the economic damage done to Americans by the regulations. | ||
| Coming up, we're going to get to some more economic news first. | ||
| If you owe the IRS more than $5,000 in back taxes, I'm going to tell you about our sponsor, Priority Tax Relief. | ||
| Look, I get it. | ||
| Dealing with tax debt, stressful. | ||
| Maybe you fell behind on filing. | ||
| Maybe you had a pull from your 401k or just you hit a rough patch. | ||
| Whatever has happened, priority tax relief can help. | ||
| There are a team of experienced tax attorneys, CPAs, and enrolled agents who've been doing this for over 15 years. | ||
| These folks negotiate directly with the IRS on your behalf, and they are good at it. | ||
| They've handled thousands of cases. | ||
| They've helped clients reduce their tax debt significantly. | ||
| Some people who owed 25 or even 50 grand were able to get that reduced to a fraction of the amount. | ||
| They completely understand how overwhelming this situation can be. | ||
| Their team walks you right through the process step by step so you're never in the dark about what's happening. | ||
| And they move fast to stop or prevent things like liens, wage garnishments, and those penalties that just keep piling up. | ||
| The IRS has stepped up their collection efforts lately, but priority tax relief can step in before things escalate. | ||
| They're offering a free consultation, no upfront fees, no obligation. | ||
| Just go to prioritytaxrelief.com/slash ben. | ||
| That's prioritytaxrelief.com slash ben. | ||
| See how they can help you get this resolved. | ||
| Also, this Christmas season, you could help change your life. | ||
| Actually, two lives. | ||
| Picture a young woman who just found out she's pregnant and was not expecting it. | ||
| She's scared. | ||
| Maybe she doesn't have much support. | ||
| She isn't sure what her options are. | ||
| That's exactly who our sponsor, Pre-Born Ministries, is there for. | ||
| They offer free ultrasounds and counseling to women facing tough decisions. | ||
| Sometimes just seeing that ultrasound and talking to somebody who cares makes all the difference. | ||
| If you're looking for a meaningful way to give this year, it might be worth considering. | ||
| Steve Jobs, Lynn Zion, Steph Curry, these were all unplanned pregnancies. | ||
| Maybe you were too. | ||
| Maybe someone you love was. | ||
| Life has a way of working out differently than we expect. | ||
| When a woman is facing that difficult decision, pre-born is there to help. | ||
| When a woman sees that baby on the ultrasound or pre-born, everything changes. | ||
| The moment often gives her the courage to choose life. | ||
| This Christmas, just $28 can sponsor an ultrasound. | ||
| And right now, your gift is doubled through a matching grant to donate to a pound250 and say baby or visit preborn.com/slash ben. | ||
| That's pound250 keyword baby or pre-born.com slash Ben. | ||
| You won't do anything more important this Christmas. | ||
| So he said yesterday that he plans to roll back federal fuel economy rules for passenger vehicles. | ||
| The administration's move comes months after Congress and the Trump administration essentially nullified those mandates by eliminating fines for violating them. | ||
| Under the changes, the federal government would require an average of 34 and a half miles a gallon for vehicles by model year 2031, down from 50.4 miles a gallon set by the Biden administration. | ||
| Well, that makes a huge difference because, of course, cars that go 34 and a half miles a gallon are much more plentiful and cheaper than cars that go 50.4 miles per gallon. | ||
| The new regulatory system also does away with a system in which automakers can buy credits from competitors to offset fines, which is one of the ways that Tesla was making some money because basically people were going to get a fined for selling their non-CAFE standards compliant cars. | ||
| And so they would pay Tesla in order to essentially compensate Tesla for making green vehicles. | ||
| Here's President Trump announcing all of this yesterday. | ||
| Today, my administration has taken historic action to lower costs for American consumers, protect American auto jobs, and make buying a car much more affordable for countless American families and also safer. | ||
| We're officially terminating Joe Biden's ridiculously burdensome, horrible, actually, cafe standards that imposed expensive restrictions and all sorts of problems, gave all sorts of problems to automakers. | ||
| And we're not only talking about here, we're talking about outside of our country, because nobody could do it. | ||
| Nobody wanted to do it, and it was ridiculous, very expensive. | ||
| It put tremendous upward pressure on car prices. | ||
| Combined with the insane electric vehicle mandate, Biden's burdensome regulations helped cause the price of cars to soar more than 25%. | ||
| And in one case, they went up 18% in one year. | ||
| Today, we're taking one more step to kill the Green News scam as part of the greatest scam, probably, well, other than Russia, Russia, Russia, and a few others I could name. | ||
| The greatest scam in American history, the Green News scam. | ||
| And it's a quest to end the gasoline-powered car. | ||
| This is what they wanted to do, even though we have more gasoline than any other country by far. | ||
| And people want the gasoline car. | ||
| They want everything. | ||
| They want electric. | ||
| They want any. | ||
| They want to have lots of alternatives. | ||
| But they do want the gasoline car. | ||
| Right now, it's leading away by a lot. | ||
| The car business is a very interesting business, but we want to keep it that way. | ||
| So the president happens to be right about all of this. | ||
| And if you are worried about jobs, if you are worried about a supply of cars for cheaper, then you do have to do away with these bad standards. | ||
| This is an unequivocally good economic measure taken by President Trump. | ||
| The chief executives of Ford and JeepMaker Stellantis joined President Trump in making the announcement. | ||
| A GM plant manager was also in attendance. | ||
| The Trump administration dubbed the plan, Freedom Means Affordable Cars proposal, said it would save Americans $109 billion over the next five years. | ||
| Again, this is a way to achieve affordability. | ||
| People keep saying affordability over and over and over. | ||
| And as I've said many, many times, the only way to achieve affordability, which means cheaper prices, is to reduce demand or to increase supply. | ||
| Those are the only two alternatives. | ||
| One of the ways you increase supply of cheaper goods is to remove the regulatory burdens in making those goods good for President Trump for not following the insanity of, for example, the Europeans, who basically destroyed their own economy on the basis of their insane green agenda. | ||
| I mean, it truly is unbelievable what the Europeans actually did. | ||
| The Europeans made the decision that they were going to cripple their own economy on the basis of things like climate change. | ||
| I mean, just a few days ago, there was a large-scale report in the Wall Street Journal about how Europe did this. | ||
| And we were not going to follow that path under President Trump. | ||
| Just a couple of days ago, the Wall Street Journal wrote, European politicians pitched the continent's green transition to voters as a win-win. | ||
| Citizens would benefit from green jobs and cheap, abundant solar and wind energy alongside a sharp reduction in carbon emissions. | ||
| Nearly two decades on, the promise has largely proved costly for consumers and damaging for the economy. | ||
| Europe succeeded in slashing its carbon emissions more than any other region by 30% from 2005 levels compared with a 17% drop in the United States. | ||
| But the rushed renewables drove up electricity prices in much of the continent. | ||
| In fact, what you see is in terms of cents per kilowatt hour, the electricity prices in the UK for cents per kilowatt hour, 33.8 cents per kilowatt hour. | ||
| In the United States, 8.1 cents per kilowatt hour. | ||
| Because it turns out that when you decide to go green, you also decide to make your economy significantly less effective. | ||
| According to the Wall Street Journal, this is crippling industry. | ||
| It is hobbling Europe's ability to attract key economic drivers like AI, which requires cheap and abundant electricity. | ||
| The shift is also adding to a cost of living shock for consumers that is fueling support for anti-establishment parties, which correctly portray the green transition as an elite project that harms workers, consumers, and regions. | ||
| This is correct. | ||
| So President Trump is doing the reverse. | ||
| This is an unalloyed good from President Trump right here. | ||
| Now, meanwhile, what the Trump administration should do, aside from these sort of broad regulatory cuts, what they should do is they should stop engaging in a sort of pick and choose economy. | ||
| All of the messing around with the economy, everything from the tariffs to the sort of subsidization and regulation schemes that have been fostered by parts of the Trump administration, that stuff doesn't help. | ||
| There is a report out yesterday from ADP that says that hiring by American businesses actually dropped last month. | ||
| Private employers should 32,000 jobs in November, according to ADP. | ||
| That is a swing from 47,000 private sector jobs ADP estimated were added in October. | ||
| ADP's numbers, again, they're kind of the only numbers we have right now because the Bureau of Labor Statistics has not released any of its stats for September or October and won't release its look at November until December 16th. | ||
| It's two and a half weeks behind schedule. | ||
| Weaker hiring is a concern for the Federal Reserve, obviously. | ||
| The Trump administration would like to see the Federal Reserve lower interest rates again to inject more liquidity into the economy. | ||
| That, of course, may spur more investment, but it will also increase prices because it is just more money flowing into the economy. | ||
| Now, what will not work is this attempt to play around with the economy in terms of tariffs and then cut people a check on the back end. | ||
| That's just helicopter money. | ||
| Mark Meadows, President Trump's former chief of staff, was making the case that Trump should do that come next year. | ||
| To me, this is no different than a Biden stimulus plan. | ||
| I think the other thing that should be coming out that actually will make things, if you want to use the word affordable, I think the Trump checks, I'm in favor of that. | ||
| As a conservative member, some of my colleagues and friends are not for that. | ||
| But I think these $2,000 Trump tariff checks need to go out next year. | ||
| That will be something that actually others can spend the money and maybe reduce some of the pain of the higher inflationary prices they're seeing at the grocery store. | ||
| So, again, this to me is a bad policy. | ||
| Broad economic deregulation, more innovation, higher productivity. | ||
| These are the things that are going to generate affordability. | ||
| They're going to generate economic growth. | ||
| Good for the president with regard to the CAFE standards. | ||
| That is a big move. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Meanwhile, controversy, for some reason, continues to roil around the Pete Hegseth issue. | ||
| When I say the issue, there are really two. | ||
| So issue number one continues to be the allegation that he authorized the secondary strike on a Venezuelan drug boat in international waters after the first strike basically incapacitated the boat. | ||
| The evidence on this, extremely, extremely scanty. | ||
| By this, I mean there is one Washington Post story that makes this claim, and there's a New York Times story that basically rejects the claim. | ||
| That's not stopping Democrats and liberals in the media, who of course are their adjunct, from continuing to go after Hegseth on this here. | ||
| Sonny Hostin, great legal luminary making the case. | ||
| I just want to make it very clear. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| If this second strike, I feel like I'm in a few good men. | ||
| Who ordered the cord reds? | ||
| Do you order the code red? | ||
| I think that Pete Hegseth clearly ordered the code red here. | ||
| And I also think that that would be a war crime. | ||
| And it's very clear. | ||
| You speak to anybody from JAG. | ||
| You speak to Senator California Representative Ted Liu, who's a former JAG officer. | ||
| He has said this is a war crime. | ||
| And the sad thing about it is if you do follow an unlawful order and you're in the military, you can be court-martialed and you can be prosecuted and you can be put in jail. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just like in a Chief Woodman. | |
| They set you up. | ||
| He set up the military. | ||
| He set it up. | ||
| I'm sorry, the buck stops with him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It's his job, whatever it's called, Department of Defense, war, booty, whatever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can I tell you something is a department of lies? | |
| Because I don't know why they don't just tell us that they want regime change in Venezuela instead of fabricating all of this because this is a better distribution. | ||
| Because, yes, that's exactly right. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Okay, this dog is not going to hunt. | ||
| If Democrats really believed that Americans are deeply upset about an allegation that probably is not true, and again, we lack evidence to suggest that it is true, that is not going to work. | ||
| So they're now dredging up another report from the Pentagon. | ||
| According to the Wall Street Journal, a Pentagon watchdog, his family, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseph, violated some of the department's regulations when he shared sensitive information from his cell phone on Signal earlier this year, according to Senator Mark Kelly. | ||
| And again, Mark Kelly is trying to set himself up for a potential 2028 run. | ||
| He's trying to claim that he's essentially a moderate with a military and NASA background, and therefore he's the one who can restore America to glory as opposed to these crazy, crazy people over at the Heg Seth Department of War. | ||
| The Defense Department Inspector General concluded that as Pentagon Chief, Heg Seth has the authority to declassify Defense Department information, which suggests the Defense Secretary didn't break the law. | ||
| So just to be straight, Democrats are now claiming that Hegseth violated departmental regulations when he was on a signal chat with now U.N. Ambassador Mike Walls and some others, including the vice president. | ||
| But the same report said he didn't violate the law. | ||
| So I'm not sure why exactly Democrats are trying to make hay out of this one. | ||
| It's not stopping them. | ||
| And again, this all plays into a sort of resistance-minded left that is going pretty far out on a limb here to suggest that President Trump and company are in violation of military law. | ||
| In fact, Senator Mark Warner is now arguing that the uniformed military may have to save us from President Trump. | ||
| I want to get the truth, and I'm not sure we've had the truth from Hegseth yet. | ||
| Remember, this is an administration that has treated the uniformed military with unprecedented disrespect when they were all brought to get a pep rally in front of Hegseth and Trump. | ||
| This is an administration that's fired uniform generals from the head of the NSA, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. | ||
| And I think in many ways, the uniformed military may help save us from this president and his lame people like Hegseph, because I think their commitment is to the Constitution and obviously not to Trump. | ||
| And I expect Bradley to adhere to that. | ||
| Okay, so again, the underlying tone here is that the military is going to save us from civilian rule, which is a pretty wild move here from Democrats. | ||
| Now, what's amazing about this is that the Democratic desperation seems to me somewhat unjustified. | ||
| The current trend lines suggest that Democrats will do pretty well in 2026. | ||
| That is what the polling suggests. | ||
| Harry Enton at CNN analyzed the polling in the aftermath of Republicans winning the 7th congressional district, but by a far narrower margin than they probably should have. | ||
| And he says, listen, Republicans better watch out for 2026. | ||
| Republicans should be running for the Hills this morning because the blue wave is building, my dear friend, Mr. Berman. | ||
| What are we talking about here? | ||
| Well, Van Epps, Matt Van Epps, the Republican candidate, he won it by nine, but this is a district that Donald Trump won by 22 points, 15 points, 17 points. | ||
| This is a 13-point gain for the Democrats in terms of the margin. | ||
| And excuse time for Republicans is over because I hear all about these special elections. | ||
| Oh, the turnout's so low. | ||
| It's not representative of what happened in the midterm election. | ||
| The turnout last night in Tennessee's 7th District was equal to the turnout in the 2022 midterm election. | ||
| So that blue wave, it seems to be building right out of center of Tennessee. | ||
| Okay, now, again, one of the facts about that Tennessee special election is that every single county in the 7th congressional district swung to the left, all of them, including Nashville. | ||
| So Democrats did not win the seat, but they are outperforming expectations at this point. | ||
| And it seems that Democrats are learning some lessons, and this means that Republicans have to stop being stupid. | ||
| They have to not make dumb mistakes because Democrats seem to be moving away from some of their dumber errors. | ||
| So for example, this is Gavin Newsom. | ||
| I'm not a Gavin Newsome fan, as everyone knows. | ||
| The California governor and I, we have had our differences and continue to have our differences because I think that he is one of the more lizard-like humans in American politics. | ||
| With that said, Gavin Newsom is now trying to play to the middle by telling his own party that they need to be more normal. | ||
| Now, that may be an unnatural position for somebody like Gavin Newsom or for a very radical Democratic Party. | ||
| But the fact that Gavin Newsom, who again is a bellwether, he puts his finger in the wind and then he moves in the direction of the wind, the fact that he consents that Democrats need to normalize, that should scare Republicans. | ||
| Republicans can't count on Democrats just being bad at this to win. | ||
| But I think there's a broader narrative that we have to address. | ||
| That is we have to be more culturally normal. | ||
| We have to be a little less judgmental. | ||
| We have to be a party that understands the importance and power of the border substantively and politically. | ||
| We have a party that I think needs to design and develop a compelling economic vision for the future where people feel included to reconcile the fact that if we don't democratize our economy, we're not going to save democracy. | ||
| And I don't think it's healthy that we have 10% of people that own two-thirds of the wealth in this country. | ||
| I don't think it's sustainable practice. | ||
| The folks watching Mr. Beast disproportionately 30-year-olds, the first generation in history not doing better than their parents. | ||
| There's some underlying issues here. | ||
| Okay, again, listen to Newsom try to tack toward the middle. | ||
| There are a bunch of issues that Democrats seem to be leaving behind. | ||
| We open the show by talking about the trans issue. | ||
| Democrats are not talking about this issue anymore, even when they are asked about the issue, even when they take the wrong side of the issue. | ||
| Instead, they're punting. | ||
| That's what Abigail Spanberger did in running for Virginia governor, because she was on the wrong side of the issue, but she knew enough to keep her mouth shut. | ||
| When it comes to immigration, Democrats are sounding off a lot about ICE internally. | ||
| They're talking about ICE tracking down people internally and deporting them. | ||
| But there are no Democrats of whom I'm aware who are coming out regularly and talking about the evil Trump administration shutting down the southern border. | ||
| Even Democrats have acknowledged that this is a win for the Trump administration. | ||
| Why are they acknowledging it? | ||
| Because it takes the issue completely off the table. | ||
| If Democrats are not going to reopen the border Biden style, then why ought you fear Democrats with regard to new waves of illegal immigration? | ||
| So Democrats are taking trans off the table by not talking about it. | ||
| They're taking the southern border off the table because Trump largely solved the problem and they're not campaigning to reopen the southern border. | ||
| DEI, you've noticed the word equity, seems not to be the word of the day or this year. | ||
| Democrats are not talking about equity like Kamala Harris talked about equity. | ||
| They're no longer talking about racial set-asides. | ||
| They're no longer talking about the 1619 project. | ||
| And this is the pattern, by the way, in American politics, is that one side gets high in its own supply after victory and decides to move pretty far to either the right or the left based on their victory. | ||
| And the other side tacks away from whatever tactics drove it to lose. | ||
| And so the only point I'm making here is that Democrats may be learning their lesson and Republicans should be careful of that. | ||
| You cannot always count on your opponents to suck at this. | ||
| You cannot. | ||
| Democrats, their big mistake, by the way, in Tennessee 7 is that they ran somebody who was really, really far to the left. | ||
| If they had run a moderate in Tennessee 7, that margin is not nine points. | ||
| That margin is maybe two points or three points. | ||
| They ran a bad candidate and they kind of came close to pulling it off. | ||
| Why does this matter for Republicans? | ||
| Because it means Republicans need to find an issue set that is popular with the American people. | ||
| We'll get to more on Democrats. | ||
| Are they going to have a big wave? | ||
| In just a second. | ||
| First, our biggest deal of the year is here. | ||
| Right now, you can join Daily Wire Plus for half the price. | ||
| Get every show, every investigation, every film, every series, all for 50% off. | ||
| That includes your access to the Penn Dragon cycle Rise of the Merlin premiering January 22nd, exclusively on Daily Wire Plus. | ||
| All access members get early access to episodes one and two on Christmas Day. | ||
| 50% off all annual Daily Wire Plus memberships. | ||
| Join now at dailywire.com/slash cyberweek. | ||
| All right, it's time for some fast facts. | ||
| Speaking of immigration, Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, when I say Democrats may be catching on, they may be jettisoning some of their less popular views. | ||
| Here was Hakeem Jeffries just yesterday saying that President Trump does get credit for shutting the southern border. | ||
| When do you hear Democrats ever given credit? | ||
| There is strategery at work, gang. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it is true that the poll show in terms of the tactics used that the majority, they don't like the tactics being used. | |
| But in terms of the border, securing the border, can you give President Trump any credit for securing the border? | ||
| Because as you know, that was a big issue under the Biden administration when you had record border crossings and those border crossings have gone down dramatically. | ||
| Can you give him credit for that? | ||
| The border is secure. | ||
| That's a good thing. | ||
| It's happened on his watch. | ||
| He wants to claim credit for it. | ||
| Of course, he'll get credit for that. | ||
| In terms of making sure that we actually deal with the issues that matter, including on immigration or beyond, there's a lot that is left to be desired. | ||
| Okay, so again, pretty astonishing that Democrats have to acknowledge that Trump shut the border. | ||
| They have to, and they should, because it takes the issue off the table for Republicans. | ||
| Republicans, however, are looking to not allow that issue to get away from them. | ||
| According to Breitbart, a bill to end federal benefits, including Medicaid, housing assistance, student financial aid, and food stamps for non-citizens, has now been introduced by Senator Tom Cotton in an effort to put American citizens first. | ||
| The proposal was released Wednesday morning with the third-ranking Senate Republican writing in an authorization to denaturalize naturalized citizens who undermine domestic tranquility by participating in unlawful protests involving violence or property destruction and to expand expedited removal authority. | ||
| The bill also addresses concerns regarding Afghan nationals living in the United States. | ||
| If passed, the legislation would require mandatory revetting of nationals of Afghanistan and provide for automatic termination of TPS, that's temporary protected status. | ||
| So, again, this is a strong anti-illegal immigration move and a strong move against naturalized citizens who are on welfare, you know, people who have come here and taken advantage of the system. | ||
| And this will be popular, right? | ||
| If Republicans are looking for an issue set, the issue that most unifies by every poll, the Republican base, is the immigration issue, particularly criminal illegal immigrants, immigrants from countries that are not generally friendly to the United States, or areas of the world that have significant terror backgrounds. | ||
| By the way, that's only going to be exacerbated by stories that seem to be emerging now every day of immigrants to the country from radical Muslim areas of the world who are importing that radicalism here. | ||
| According to the New York Post, a Pakistani immigrant and University of Delaware student was arrested with a cache of guns, ammo, and body armor, and a manifesto allegedly explaining plans to kill all and achieve martyrdom with a mass shooting on the school's campus. | ||
| The shooter was arrested just before midnight, November 24th, after cops found him in his pickup truck in a park after hours and decided to search the car when he began acting suspiciously. | ||
| Inside, they found a bunch of guns, a bunch of ammo. | ||
| There's a pistol that fit into a kit that converted it into a semi-automatic rifle. | ||
| They also found a notebook with handwritten notes detailing a plot to use the weapons to shoot up his former school's campus police department, including a map of the headquarters. | ||
| It included phrases like, kill all, martyrdom. | ||
| So, yeah, I think that this kind of immigration we probably don't need. | ||
| And Republicans understand that. | ||
| This is why, if Democrats are smart, they're going to move away from the anti-ICE position they've been taking. | ||
| So far, they're acknowledging that Trump is largely right on the southern border, but they're ripping on ICE. | ||
| I'm not sure how much they can continue to rip on immigration and customs enforcement while ICE targets possible criminal, illegal immigrants. | ||
| It's not going to help if you have people like Rashida Talib, the congresswoman from Michigan, claiming that we should stop investigating immigration after the National Guard shooting. | ||
| Instead, we should investigate CIA death squads or some such nonsense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you mind if I asked you about the Trump administration possibly banning traffic after what happened with the National Guard shooting? | |
| Everybody knows how I feel about, as a Muslim in America, blankedly blaming a whole nationality. | ||
| It's not how we should do it. | ||
| You feel the same way with the asylum applications if they pause those? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe investigate the death squad in the CIA for extension. | ||
| So, you know, again, this sort of perspective, it ain't going to help Democrats. | ||
| It's also not going to help Democrats to trot out Minneapolis City Council member Jamal Osman, who says that ICE asking people for their documentation is something like Nazi Germany, which, no. | ||
| I mean, just that's going to be a big no. | ||
| Yes, folks have done, you know, horrible things and people have committed crimes, but we should not be pointing the entire community in one brush and being singled out at fellow Americans. | ||
| There's a justice, there's a process of due process, and I believe those folks have been dealt with by the state leaders. | ||
| But now, President Donald Trump singling out and attacking one group of people and ICE being on our streets and asking people documentation. | ||
| It feels like we are in the 1930s, 1940s in Germany. | ||
| No, that's going to be a big no, actually. | ||
| One thing that was not happening in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany was people being targeted by the government trying to immigrate to Germany. | ||
| That was not an actual major problem, as it turns out. | ||
| It was people largely trying to escape and get out. | ||
| So there's that. | ||
| If Democrats continue to be radical on this issue, this is an issue Republicans can win on. | ||
| Republicans can also turn toward attacks on the media. | ||
| They're going by the tried and true. | ||
| Now, again, is all this going to be successful? | ||
| Republicans, I remember, tried this during the first Trump administration during the midterm elections in 2018. | ||
| In 2018, Donald Trump shifted the focus toward illegal immigration right before the midterms. | ||
| It did not work for them. | ||
| We'll see if he does better this time on that issue. | ||
| Obviously, attacks on the media will continue, as well, they should. | ||
| Here is Scott Besson going after the New York Times at the Deal Book Summit. | ||
| How should this is like a new look? | ||
| Is this a new normal? | ||
| Andrew, there's no new normal. | ||
| And I can tell you that I actually don't read the New York Times anymore. | ||
| But sometimes I do watch CNBC, but occasionally people send me articles. | ||
| And there's just this fever swamp. | ||
| And you're now a pop historian with 1929. | ||
| And in 20, 30, 40, 50 years, the New York Times is no longer the paper of record. | ||
| You can't go. | ||
| I read this article. | ||
| President Trump is slowing down President Trump's mental capacity. | ||
| It is 100% fake. | ||
| That, like he only called me twice, at two in the morning last week, instead of three times. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're saying he called you. | |
| I I believe that he called you at two or three in the morning, like that. | ||
| That whole narrative okay, and of course, Besant is right about this. | ||
| You know, one of the funny things about members of the objective media is that all their errors tend to move in one direction as a general rule. | ||
| So Republicans, of course, are going to be able to target the media. | ||
| So immigration targeting the media. | ||
| You know, I would assume deregulation will have to be a part of this right, which is why, when it comes to things like healthcare, it is quite important for the Trump administration to come up with some sort of solution that bends the cost curve. | ||
| Now Democrats have set up a trap. | ||
| They always did. | ||
| Obamacare was a trap. | ||
| Obamacare was a lie. | ||
| It was predicated on the idea that massive government interventionism in the system burdensome red tape, huge new programs would suddenly lower the cost curve. | ||
| That didn't happen. | ||
| I asked our sponsors over at Comet, a project of perplexity, how much have health care costs risen since the advent of Obamacare? | ||
| How much additional funding will be required over the next 10 years to keep those costs to their original estimates. | ||
| Well, we're way beyond the original estimates at this point. | ||
| According to comet, national health spending per person rose from roughly the low $7,000 range in 2010 to about $14,500 per person by 2023. | ||
| That's in $2023 terms. | ||
| That's an increase of roughly 30% in real per capita terms over that period. | ||
| So per-enrollee spending and private insurance grew by more than 80% from 2008 to 2013, outpassing both Medicare and Medicaid. | ||
| By the way, that's not a statement on behalf of Medicare and Medicaid, both of which have been shifting people off their roles in bizarre ways. | ||
| Also, even if you're on Medicare, Medicaid, very often you can't see the doctor you want in the first place. | ||
| As far as future costs that will be required, hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies will be required just to maintain the current cost curve. | ||
| Democrats, of course, call this a win. | ||
| Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the Obamacare founders, says that Obamacare was a good first step, but it's 15 years old. | ||
| That's not the way that durable programs are supposed to work. | ||
| If you have to keep adjusting the thing every 15 years with $400 billion infusions, it's not working right. | ||
| The last two years, it's gone up and up and at a very high clip. | ||
| We need to do three steps. | ||
| One, extend the subsidies for two years. | ||
| Give Congress a six-month deadline to get a affordability package together, like the five points I've suggested, that they have to not just propose, but pass and enact, right? | ||
| And then we need to work on a more comprehensive solution. | ||
| Obamacare is, the Affordable Care Act was a very good step, but it's now 15 years old. | ||
| No company puts in place its strategic plan and works on it and doesn't look again for 15 years. | ||
| Okay, but the problem was that Obamacare was supposed to solve this. | ||
| This is what Obamacare was designed, or maybe it was never designed to solve this. | ||
| And this is the point that Republicans need to make. | ||
| The only way to start bending the cost curve with regard to healthcare is to rejigger the entire regulatory structure. | ||
| Do Republicans have the stomach for that? | ||
| I doubt it. | ||
| I doubt it. | ||
| Doing nothing is probably the more lucrative path politically for Republicans, which I assume is why Tony Fabrizio, the pollster for President Trump, advises House Republicans to stop talking about Obamacare tax credits and instead to start talking about reducing drug prices. | ||
| That's not the worst plan I've ever heard, but is this going to be a boon for Republicans? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I also think that it's not going to be a boon for Republicans if the war in Ukraine not only continues, but if Vladimir Putin continues to grow closer to winning that war. | ||
| According to the Washington Post, Vladimir Putin has refused every compromise in Moscow. | ||
| That continues a pace. | ||
| According to the Washington Post, five hours of talks in Moscow between the U.S. delegation and Russian President Putin over a U.S. plan to resolve the war in Ukraine ended without a compromise option, according to the Kremlin. | ||
| They said that their military victories were swaying the Americans. | ||
| They feel they have the upper hand right now. | ||
| So far, no compromise option has been found, but some American proposals appear more or less acceptable, said Putin's top foreign aide, Yuri Ushikov, who attended the meeting. | ||
| The president did not hide our critical or negative views of certain proposals. | ||
| Ushikov added that Russian successes on the front in recent weeks have had a positive impact on the course and nature of the talks and forced the U.S. and the West to make more adequate assessments of the situation in Ukraine. | ||
| So in other words, they think they're winning, so why compromise? | ||
| I know the American people don't tend to like losing to the Russians, just as a general rule. | ||
| There's a lot of talk constantly about withdrawals. | ||
| The reality is that Americans are okay with the general concept of withdrawal. | ||
| What they don't like is the ugliness that happens in its immediate aftermath. | ||
| And, you know, it's easy to talk about Ukraine and Russia as though America failing to remain involved has no cost. | ||
| The American people do not like ugly pictures on their TV of people falling from wheel wells or Russians marching through Kiev. | ||
| That is not something that they are going to like very much. | ||
| All righty, we have reached the end of today's show. | ||
| We'll be back here tomorrow with much more. | ||
| I'm Ben Shapiro. | ||
| This is the Bench Pierre Show. | ||
| Don't just get the news. | ||
| Understand what the news means on the Michael Knowles Show. | ||
| I will take you beneath the surface of daily political events to see their historical, philosophical, even religious roots. |
Export Selection