Dec. 10, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
56:31
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Democrats win the mayoralty in Miami, which has been a Republican stronghold for 30 years. | ||
| What does that mean for Republicans? | ||
| Plus, we get into the affordability debate first. | ||
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| All righty, folks. | ||
| So, some flags are going up. | ||
| Some red warning sirens are beginning to sound about Republican hopes in 2026, and yes, in 2028, because American politics is like a pendulum. | ||
| If it swings one direction one moment, then wait a minute, it'll probably swing back the other direction naturally. | ||
| Right now, Miami has been Republican for decades. | ||
| It's been Republican for decades, specifically because there's a large Cuban Republican population, very anti-communist. | ||
| Well, for the first time in 30 years, Democrats have now taken control of Miami. | ||
| That's after candidate Eileen Higgins clinched the city's mayoral election. | ||
| Higgins beat out Trump-backed Republican Emilio Gonzalez in the Florida City's runoff Tuesday night. | ||
| She becomes the first Democratic mayor in the city since 1998, according to the New York Post. | ||
| The victory is an upset for GOP lawmakers around the country who rallied behind Gonzalez because, of course, South Florida has turned into a very red area over the course of the last 10 years or so. | ||
| Florida itself was a very competitive area for Democrats up until about 2018 when Governor Ron DeSantis won an extremely narrow election against a man, Andrew Gillum, who would later be caught up in flagrante de lite with some awkward situations involving drugs in a hotel room, male prostitutes, perhaps. | ||
| Anyway, that was relevant. | ||
| That happened after the election. | ||
| That was a narrow election in 2018. | ||
| In 2022, DeSantis blew out his political opposition. | ||
| And in 2024, Florida went to President Trump by a very heavy margin. | ||
| Well, Miami has been Republican for a very long time. | ||
| Apparently, now it has turned blue, despite the fact that Republicans rallied in favor of the Republican candidate. | ||
| President Trump threw his weight behind the Republican candidate. | ||
| He was joined by Ted Cruz, Rick Scott, and Governor DeSantis, but it didn't matter very much. | ||
| Apparently, Higgins, the Democrat, had led Gonzalez 36 to 19 during the first round of voting amid a crowded field in November. | ||
| She was the favorite to win this time. | ||
| But this is a ding in the Republican armor for sure. | ||
| Again, some of the early bellwethers are not moving in Republican directions right now. | ||
| It is also a warning bell for Republicans with regard to the Hispanic vote in the United States. | ||
| President Trump won an outsized share of Hispanics in the last election cycle. | ||
| The polling shows that many, many Hispanics are falling off the Republican bandwagon right now because Trump solved some of the big issues like closing the southern border, but he has alienated an awful lot of Hispanic Republicans with some of the, shall we say, more public-facing ICE actions. | ||
| He has also alienated some Hispanic Republicans because a lot of Hispanic Republicans were driven away from the Democratic Party by their social radicalism and DEI. | ||
| Democrats have been smartly on a national level, sort of moving away from those discussions and back toward wait for it, affordability. | ||
| So this is the issue of the day, affordability. | ||
| Now, President Trump has labeled affordability a Democratic hoax. | ||
| And I totally understand where he is coming from because affordability is a broad buzzword that encompasses many things. | ||
| Does it encompass the inflation rate? | ||
| If we're talking inflation rate, Trump has brought down inflation to manageable levels. | ||
| It's still higher than it should be, but it's not riding at 9, 10, 11% like it was under Joe Biden. | ||
| If we're talking about energy prices, energy prices actually are norming out under President Trump. | ||
| When people say affordability, it is fair to say that very few people ever think that things are quote unquote affordable. | ||
| Nothing is affordable, right? | ||
| If you are struggling economically at any time in your life, this means inherently you're going to think things are unaffordable. | ||
| But really, when people talk about affordability, what do they mean? | ||
| They mean that things are less affordable for them now than they were back in 2019. | ||
| And that is what the polling data shows. | ||
| That is what Americans think today. | ||
| A new poll from Politico shows that nearly half of Americans said they find groceries, utility bills, healthcare, housing, and transportation difficult to afford. | ||
| More than a quarter, 27%, said they have skipped a medical checkup because of costs within the last two years. | ||
| 23% said they've skipped a prescription dose for the same reason. | ||
| More than a third of Americans say they could not afford to attend a professional sporting event with family or friends. | ||
| 46% said they could not pay for a vacation that involves air travel. | ||
| Now, it is worthwhile noting, all of those numbers are minority numbers. | ||
| Those are not broad majority numbers. | ||
| A quarter of Americans saying that they have to skip a medical appointment or less than half of Americans saying they can't pay for a vacation involving air travel. | ||
| With that said, overall, Americans are dissatisfied with how far their money is going right now. | ||
| According to Politico, only 22% of voters who cast their ballots for President Trump in 2024 said that tariffs are helping the U.S. economy both now and in the long term. | ||
| Meanwhile, when it comes to things like college costs, 62% of Americans say college isn't worth it because it costs too much or doesn't provide enough benefits. | ||
| When it comes to food prices, half of those surveyed say they find it difficult to pay for food. | ||
| A majority, 55%, blame the Trump administration for the high prices. | ||
| Again, some of that is based on tariff concerns. | ||
| When it comes to housing costs, a huge percentage of Americans are worried about housing costs and home buying. | ||
| Only 10% of those who identify as MAGA Republicans believe the Trump administration is responsible for housing costs they see as unfavorable, but that figure is three times higher for non-MAGA Republican respondents. | ||
| Nearly half of Americans find it difficult to afford health care, according to that Politico poll as well. | ||
| And this isn't rooted in nothing. | ||
| I asked our friends and sponsors over at Comet, a project of perplexity, how much have rental costs escalated since 2019 in the United States? | ||
| Health insurance costs, food prices, college costs. | ||
| And here is what Comet says. | ||
| Rental, housing, health insurance, food, college have all risen substantially since 2019, with food and rent up roughly 20 to 25% or more, health insurance premiums up about 25%, average college tuition up around 8% to 12%, depending on the sector. | ||
| I also asked Comet, how much have incomes risen in that same period non-inflation adjusted? | ||
| And the reason that I'm not adjusting for inflation there is if you're talking about the increase in food prices, some of that is the inflationary increase in food prices brought about by the Biden administration. | ||
| So you have to use the same ruler. | ||
| According to Comet, non-inflation adjusted nominal household incomes are up by roughly 10 to 15% since 2019, which is less than the increase in rents, food, and health insurance costs over the same period. | ||
| So yes, you're making more dollars than you were in 2019, but those dollars aren't going quite as far. | ||
| So both things can be true. | ||
| Things are less affordable than they were five years ago, six years ago. | ||
| And also, when Democrats talk about the problems of affordability, they're neglecting the fact that most of those problems emerged under Joe Biden. | ||
| That is what Trump means when he says that the affordability argument is a hoax. | ||
| He means they created an inflationary spiral that jacked up prices, and then they handed him a bad situation. | ||
| And then he has brought inflation down to manageable levels, and now they're shouting about affordability. | ||
| They can't shout about inflation because if they say inflation, everyone's going to look at Joe Biden and look at Trump and realize Trump brought the inflation rates down. | ||
| So if they talk about affordability as a catch-all basket, that is a much more lucrative political line for them to pursue. | ||
| All right, coming up, we'll get to President Trump talking about affordability. | ||
| Is this narrative going to play first? | ||
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| Here was President Trump yesterday in Pennsylvania. | ||
| They have a new word. | ||
| You know, there was ever hoax. | ||
| The new word is affordability. | ||
| So they look at the camera and they say, this election is all about affordability. | ||
| So again, the reason he is doing that is because he is looking at the stats and he is saying, I did a better job than Biden. | ||
| And he is right. | ||
| He is doing a better job than Joe Biden. | ||
| But Democrats are smart. | ||
| If they just say affordability over and over, then they never have to come up with a solution, even if they created the problem in the first place. | ||
| That is true with regard to healthcare, for example, where they keep talking about unaffordability in healthcare. | ||
| And you and I may say to ourselves, wait, hold up. | ||
| You're talking about unaffordability in healthcare. | ||
| I thought Obamacare was supposed to solve all of this. | ||
| Wasn't that your program? | ||
| And the answer is yes. | ||
| But if they talk about healthcare unaffordability, then they get to blame Republicans for the fact that they made it unaffordable in the first place. | ||
| Because affordability is a present tense question. | ||
| Are things affordable? | ||
| Inflation looks back at history and says, are things going up, going down, or pretty steady? | ||
| Affordability is not comparative. | ||
| Affordability is just about what you feel in the moment. | ||
| This is why Democrats right now are getting away with the fact that they radically expanded Obamacare subsidies under Joe Biden during COVID, generating artificial funding for a program that is non-feasible on a monetary level. | ||
| And now they're leaving Republicans holding the bag, trying to say Republicans need to fill in the gap. | ||
| This is the game that Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, is playing. | ||
| He's railing at Republicans for not expanding health care subsidies back to the sort of Joe Biden levels. | ||
| Time has run out. | ||
| Democrats have been pressing our Republican colleagues for months to deal with the health care crisis that they have created. | ||
| And in a matter of just a few weeks, tens of millions of Americans who live in every single state across this country are about to experience dramatically increased health care costs. | ||
| In some instances, premiums are going to increase by $1,000 or $2,000 per month. | ||
| How is that acceptable? | ||
| So, again, the game that he is playing here is they make it unaffordable. | ||
| They destroy the mechanism for funding health insurance programs. | ||
| And then they ask you to fill in the gap based on the current unaffordability. | ||
| This is the beauty of being a Democrat. | ||
| You can run a program into the ground, cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars with these welfare programs. | ||
| And then, because people are dependent on them, you have to give them their fix or they blame you for their current suffering. | ||
| The Senate is about to propose a bill put forward by the Republicans that would allow those ACA tax credits, which are just Obamacare subsidies. | ||
| Again, tax credits really are just checks because it's not as though it's credited against taxes you are paying. | ||
| They're just subsidies. | ||
| They would allow the ACA tax credits to expire and instead approve new funds to boost health savings accounts or HSAs, which Americans up to 700% of the poverty level can use to buy bronze or catastrophic plans, the lowest tiers of insurance available under the ACA. | ||
| It would also create the option for more people to buy those cheaper and less comprehensive plans. | ||
| It would fund cost-sharing reduction payments under the Senate plan put forward by Republicans. | ||
| Eligible adults under 50 years old would get $1,000 per year deposited into that HSA. | ||
| Those 50 to 64 would get $1,500 per year. | ||
| That legislation would block using the money for abortion or gender transition procedures. | ||
| Democrats are saying it's not enough. | ||
| That if the Congress allows the ACA subsidies to expire, premiums will double for more than 20 million Americans who use them. | ||
| So the $1,000 is not going to pay for the subsidies that Democrats have put into place when those subsidies expire. | ||
| Sabrina Corlette points out the finances here. | ||
| She says the average deductible for a bronze plan is $7,500, double that for a family plan. | ||
| The HSA contribution doesn't extend to kids under 18. | ||
| It's only $1,000 for an adult under 50. | ||
| There's no adjustment for income, meaning that the proposal favors people who are wealthier and healthier. | ||
| Senator Chuck Schumer is angry at the bill. | ||
| He just wants more funding for Obamacare, which again, this was supposed to solve the problem of Obamacare. | ||
| It obviously didn't. | ||
| Here's Schumer ripping Republicans. | ||
| The bill not only fails to extend the tax credits, it increases costs, adds tons of new abortion restrictions for women, expands junk fees, and permanently funds cost-sharing reductions. | ||
| Their bill is junk insurance. | ||
| It's been repudiated in the past. | ||
| The American people will repudiate it once again because it is junk insurance that puts the burden on people. | ||
| Now, what's hilarious about him saying that it's junk insurance is that he's talking about bronze plans available under Obamacare. | ||
| You created that program. | ||
| You created those catastrophic plans for people to purchase, right? | ||
| It was you guys. | ||
| This was your program, purely Democrat lines, not a bipartisan proposal. | ||
| And now you're calling it junk insurance. | ||
| Okay, so again, the goal for Democrats when it comes to affordability is to create subsidization schemes that make things unaffordable and then deceive the American people that subsidies are going to make them cheaper. | ||
| And then when Republicans say no, blame the Republicans for it. | ||
| Now, this does put Republicans in purple states in a difficult position. | ||
| Senator Josh Halley of Missouri is warning that Americans will blame Republicans if their premiums do skyrocket at the end of the month. | ||
| He says, I just don't know how Republicans would explain that to 24 million Americans whose premiums are going to double. | ||
| People at home are going to say, you're hurting me. | ||
| You're making my premiums go up. | ||
| You're not helping me. | ||
| Why are you doing that to me? | ||
| Senator Tom Tillis of North Carolina, who is stepping down from his seat, he said that people are currently paying $800 a month for health insurance. | ||
| For a couple and three kids, they just communicated to me. | ||
| It's going to be twice. | ||
| It'll be $1,600 a month. | ||
| So $1,000 is not going to make up for that, obviously. | ||
| You're talking about a $7,200 increase over the course of the year. | ||
| The reality is that Republicans have never had a comprehensive plan to replace Obamacare because every time we get into a comprehensive plan, the devil is in the details. | ||
| And the attempt politically to avoid blowback by providing very small HSA boosts, that is not going to work. | ||
| Politically speaking, listen, on an ideological level, I believe that the federal government should get entirely out of the business of funding health insurance. | ||
| This should be a state and local governmental issue. | ||
| It should be the social networks that we all exist in that help all of our friends who are sick and elderly pay for the health insurance bills. | ||
| Like, I think, I don't know why the federal government is involved in this sort of stuff in the first place. | ||
| None of this is in the Constitution. | ||
| With that said, on a political level, if Republicans are going to try to do a solve, what they actually should do is they should probably boost those ACA subsidies for another couple of years, but include a bunch of riders that transition it out and make way for larger HSAs. | ||
| In other words, provide people some sort of glide path toward a new future as opposed to a hard stop. | ||
| Hard stops in American politics typically create massive political blowback, and 2026 looks like it's going to be pretty ugly for Republicans anyway. | ||
| So on a principle level, I totally understand why Republicans are saying don't continue the ACA subsidies. | ||
| But I also understand that the political blowback is going to lead to Democrats in power in 2028. | ||
| And Republicans who are pretending away the vulnerability that they have electorally here are missing the point. | ||
| All right, coming up, President Trump continues to push his tariff policy. | ||
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| By the way, the same thing is true on tariff policy. | ||
| The reality is that the president's tariff policy is widely unpopular. | ||
| The argument that President Trump has been making with regards to tariffs is not a particularly successful one. | ||
| So, yesterday, he was speaking in Pennsylvania, for example, and he was again repeating this line: that you don't need $37 for your daughter, you need steel. | ||
| Okay, let's just be clear: there are a lot of Americans who would like to buy toys for their kids. | ||
| And also, it turns out that tariffs on steel make steel more expensive. | ||
| That is literally the purpose of a tariff on steel. | ||
| Also, we do not actually have steel shortages from foundries in the United States. | ||
| The reality is that steel is no longer a sort of core American industry the way that it was in 1955. | ||
| Here's the president: The one thing you need, you need steel. | ||
| You know, you can give up certain products, you can give up pencils because under the China policy, you know, every child can get 37 pencils, they only need one or two. | ||
| You know, they don't need that many, but you always need, you always need steel. | ||
| You don't need 37 dollars for your daughter, two or three is nice. | ||
| Okay, I mean, we should point out at this point that again, according to our sponsors over at Comet Project of Perplexity, the United States currently produces 90 million metric tons of crude raw steel per year and consumes on the order of 92, 95 million tons of steel per year. | ||
| Any gap is covered by small amounts of net imports. | ||
| But I don't understand why these are mutually exclusive. | ||
| It turns out that we can have both steel and also dolls for our kids. | ||
| Americans being told they need to make trade-offs have to have it explained to them why it is that you are asking for the trade-off. | ||
| And if China, by the way, is a geopolitical enemy, then maybe we ought to treat it as such and not allow NVIDIA to ship its chips over there. | ||
| All this is discombobulated and feels discombobulated to people. | ||
| The same thing is true when it comes to President Trump's tariffs on the farmers. | ||
| So, the truth is, American farmers are suffering right now because many of the export markets to which we ship are goods from the agricultural industry. | ||
| Those export markets have had tariff rates increased. | ||
| Here, for example, is the head of the American Soybean Association slamming President Trump's tariffs. | ||
| Well, this is a band-aid on an open wound. | ||
| And again, we're thankful that there's something that this will help keep some farms in business. | ||
| But what we truly need are market-based solutions, those are sustainable long-term. | ||
| Here domestically, we have opportunities for the administration to finalize the renewable volume obligations for biofuels here before the end of the year, the 45Z tax credit. | ||
| We have numerous opportunities to expand markets worldwide, and we truly need demand because without demand, we're not able to receive a price that is economically sustainable for our crop. | ||
| So, again, farmers are not feeling great about all of this, but President Trump is saying the tariffs are making them rich. | ||
| One of the rules of politics is that when people are feeling bad about their own personal economic situation, you can't tell them that they are actually doing great. | ||
| Now, again, it may be true that they are doing better than they would have been under an alternative system. | ||
| But just as an elected politician, right, the idea here is that you have to provide them some answer as to why things are worse or what you're going to do to make them better. | ||
| Here's President Trump saying the tariffs are making farmers rich. | ||
| Farmers don't really believe this, by the way. | ||
| And we just gave them right out of a tariff money, cost us nothing, right out of the billion, hundreds of billions that we've taken in, we gave the farmers a little help, $12 billion, and they are so happy. | ||
| And all they want is a level playing field. | ||
| And now it's happening. | ||
| And the tariffs are making them rich. | ||
| It's going to be, you're going to see, you're going to see what happens over the next two years. | ||
| Again, according to the Joyer Institute, one analysis of the prior trade war that the Trump administration engaged in between 2018 and 2024 estimated U.S. farm export losses of about $27 billion. | ||
| So it turns out the government interventionism is actually not a great plan when it comes to a lot of this sort of stuff. | ||
| What you actually need, as always, is more deregulation, lower taxes, better incentive structures for businesses to create new goods, product, and services. | ||
| And this is why the American economy, it feels discombobulated. | ||
| It feels sort of schizophrenic. | ||
| It feels on the upper hand on AI, like we're doing just amazing business. | ||
| And it feels everywhere else like we're sort of hovering around. | ||
| It's a little turbulent. | ||
| We don't know quite what is going on. | ||
| And that's fine. | ||
| AI is going to pay off. | ||
| AI will be great. | ||
| I'm a big AI guy. | ||
| I think AI is incredible. | ||
| I think attempts to restrict the development of AI are likely to fail. | ||
| I think that there will be transitional jobs. | ||
| I think there will be temporary job dislocations and then new industries will be founded. | ||
| Life will actually get better. | ||
| I think that case needs to be made by many of the AI tech bros who seem to sort of assume that people are fine with AI when in a time of transition, people are doubtful. | ||
| But the reality is that there probably will be some winnowing in the AI field. | ||
| That is very likely to happen. | ||
| But I don't think that that winnowing is necessarily going to be as egregious as, for example, the dot-com bust of late 1990s. | ||
| There's a sort of robust debate happening in the tech and economics field about whether there will be a bust up. | ||
| And if so, how deep is it? | ||
| According to the New York Times, the dot-com boom, a period of wild exuberance and extreme hype that began in the mid-90s, built the foundations for the contemporary wired world. | ||
| When the internet media turned to bust in March 2000, it made a bit of a mess. | ||
| The trouble spread from Silicon Valley to the larger economy, which went into recession. | ||
| More than $5 trillion in stock market value was destroyed. | ||
| The unemployment rate rose to 6% from 4%. | ||
| Well, now Silicon Valley is in the middle of an artificial intelligence boom that bears some obvious resemblances to the dot-com boom. | ||
| For all the similarities, though, there are differences that could lead to distinctly different outcomes. | ||
| The main one is that AI is being financed and controlled by multi-trillion dollar companies like Microsoft, Google, and Meta that are not in danger of going bust, right? | ||
| It's not pets.com. | ||
| Amazon is not selling less toothpaste while it shells out billions on AI data center. | ||
| Google is still profitable while it is developing foundational AI models. | ||
| Another difference, there are not very many regulatory barriers standing in the way of AI. | ||
| Also, if people are already sort of hedging their bets and the economy on the AI level continues to grow, well, that suggests, again, that there's some underlying productivity increase. | ||
| The New York Times reports that the dot-com boom and the AI boom were both narrowly focused. | ||
| 80% of venture investments in 2000 went to internet companies. | ||
| This year, 64% went to AI startups. | ||
| But otherwise, the two booms have diverged in scale. | ||
| The three most highly valued companies of the dot-com era were Cisco, Microsoft, and Intel, all of which supplied the technology that made internet startups possible. | ||
| Each was valued around $500 billion at its peak. | ||
| Today, NVIDIA is valued at $4.5 trillion. | ||
| It and the other AI companies, Google, Meta, Amazon, and privately held OpenAI, probably worth $17 trillion in capitalization. | ||
| So there is some insularity to the industry, and it means that probably these companies will not go bankrupt, or if one does, the others will pick up the sort of pieces. | ||
| So maybe we're protected from the severe downsides of an AI bus stop. | ||
| With that said, will there likely be some winnowing? | ||
| There will likely be some winnowing that happens here. | ||
| Right now, OpenAI is in a massive battle with Google. | ||
| Gemini 3, which is the latest Google model, is incredible. | ||
| It really is great. | ||
| If you spend a lot of time with it, it far outpaces ChatGPT 5.1. | ||
| I've spent time with both of them. | ||
| Frankly, I think that Gemini is really outpacing its competition in a lot of these areas. | ||
| Well, now Sam Altman over at OpenAI has made the dramatic call for a code red to beat back a rising threat from Google, according to the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| The world's most valuable startup should pause its side projects like its Sora video generator for eight weeks and focus on improving chat GPT, according to Sam Altman. | ||
| In doing so, Altman was making a major strategic course correction and taking sides in a broader philosophical divide inside the company between its pursuit of popularity among everyday consumers and its quest for research greatness. | ||
| OpenAI was founded to pursue artificial generative intelligence, but for the company to survive, Altman says it may have to pause that quest and give the people what they want, which is fascinating. | ||
| So, again, this competition is going to have some winners. | ||
| It's going to have some losers, but a lot of chips are in that AI basket. | ||
| Maybe it works out fine. | ||
| But this is why people are feeling a disconnect. | ||
| They're looking at the debt-fueled deals that are generating these outsized returns on AI companies that are publicly traded right now. | ||
| And they're feeling a little skittish at the same time that they're having affordability issues in their daily life that have, again, emerged over the course of the last five or six years. | ||
| So you can see why people are feeling a little bit schizophrenic. | ||
| So later today, the Federal Reserve is going to announce whether it is dropping the interest rates again. | ||
| The high likelihood, of course, is that it probably will drop those interest rates. | ||
| When you take a look at the Calci markets, Calci is one of our sponsors. | ||
| When you look at the Calci markets, what you see is a 98% shot, apparently, that there is a 25-basis point cut. | ||
| So it's very, very likely, in other words, that you're going to get that interest rate cut. | ||
| But with that said, is there a lot more room to cut? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| And this brings up the question of what happens in the future with the Federal Reserve. | ||
| Because Jerome Powell will be gone. | ||
| Jerome Powell, his term is to end in very short order. | ||
| The question is who replaces him? | ||
| The frontrunner right now is Kevin Hassett, who's a loyalist to the president for sure. | ||
| Here is Kevin Hassett talking about rate cuts, interest rate cuts, and he's saying that there's more room for interest rate cuts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you do become the Fed chair, Kevin, and he pressures you both privately but publicly on true social or says it, and your economic judgment is rates should not be cut now. | |
| What do you do? | ||
| Dude, you just do the right thing. | ||
| What's the right thing? | ||
| Well, the right thing is if you think, like, what is the judgment? | ||
| So suppose that inflation has gone from, say, two and a half to four. | ||
| You can't cut rates then. | ||
| Okay, so it'll be interesting to see whether he holds to that. | ||
| You want an economy that is not fueled by just injecting liquidity from the Federal Reserve every five seconds, that for sure. | ||
| And it'll be interesting to see how the AI investment bubble goes. | ||
| If there's a winnowing, when will it happen? | ||
| Right now, it seems as though that market is going to remain fairly hot for the foreseeable future. | ||
| The next move by the Trump administration, if it worked for AI, it should work for everything else. | ||
| Deregulate, get out of the way, let the markets generate more productivity. | ||
| That's true everywhere from agriculture to heavy industry. | ||
| Let them do their work. | ||
| And the president has done a lot of this already, right? | ||
| Did this with regard to deregulating the car industry, getting rid of those CAFE standards that were forcing everybody toward electric vehicles? | ||
| He has done this with regard to government regulations on the environment, which has prevented businesses from being able to pursue efficiencies that really don't damage the economy very much. | ||
| So he's gotten rid of a lot of those regulations. | ||
| We need more of that and less of the interventionism. | ||
| All righty, coming up, we'll be joined by Senator Joni Ernst, as well as our own investigative reporter, Luke Roziak, talking about the problems of fraud in the U.S. government first. | ||
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| Well, something else that President Trump can do is crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| That's something that he tried to do with Doge, but it's going to require more than that for the future. | ||
| It requires some legislative fixes. | ||
| Joining us online is Senator Joni Ernst, as well as Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Roziak to discuss. | ||
| Senator Ernst, why don't we start with you? | ||
| You are holding a Senate hearing on a massive DEI scheme that has been created by the federal government, apparently small business administration program expanded under Joe Biden. | ||
| Why don't you explain what exactly is going on? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And thanks so much for having us on today, Ben. | ||
| This afternoon, I will be chairing the Small Business Committee hearing on various types of fraud through small business programs and the Small Business Administration. | ||
| And the one in particular, and we're so glad to have Luke Roziak joining us as a witness today, the one that we will focus on is the 8A program, which was meant to assist small businesses that were supposedly socially and economically disadvantaged. | ||
| But we have found a boatload of fraud in this program. | ||
| So typically we will find when fraud is associated with this program, you may have a minority business owner who will then get these contracts and then subcontract out that work to a small business or even a large business that's not really socially or economically disabled. | ||
| So that's just one example. | ||
| But we're exposing the 8A program fraud. | ||
| We're exposing COVID fraud that has happened. | ||
| Look at Minnesota. | ||
| And we will also be exposing fraud that happened in the USAID program as well. | ||
| So again, it's going to be a great hearing this afternoon talking about the failures of these programs in safeguarding taxpayer dollars. | ||
| So Luke, obviously, you've been covering a lot of this for Daily Wire. | ||
| What are some of the issues you're going to be talking about at this hearing? | ||
| So I'm so glad they're having a hearing about 8A contracting. | ||
| I've been saying for many years it's the most corrupt program in Washington. | ||
| And if you do think about the Somali fraud in Minneapolis, think that times a thousand and then just repeat that for half a century. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Because it's giving benefits oftentimes to non-Americans over Americans. | ||
| This was a program that gives preference and government contracting to minorities. | ||
| And it was created in 1978 mostly to help black people. | ||
| But now we have this whole mix of different ethnicities in the country. | ||
| So you could be fresh off the boat from India and they'll give you preference on an IT contract for the U.S. government over an American. | ||
| Even though you were born here and an Indian person is there, that's actually a member of the most wealthy ethnicity in America. | ||
| And obviously, Indians are not underrepresented in IT. | ||
| And then the other element that reminds me of Minnesota is the widespread fraud that everybody kind of knew about, but nobody was willing to say anything. | ||
| And so we're all pretending that they're actually doing this work and not subcontracting it out to other people. | ||
| And you have these defense contractors that are getting contracts and they don't actually have to bid them out. | ||
| They don't have to compete them. | ||
| They can just get a contract, like to build a tank. | ||
| And the reason they have that exemption to do something so corrupt and give a contract directly to one company instead of competing it is because we pretend that they're native Alaskans. | ||
| And I think it's time now to kind of drain the swamp and be honest. | ||
| We all know, we all always knew there weren't Eskimos working at these defense contractors. | ||
| The whole thing has been sort of a fraud that skims off about 5% of all federal contracting dollars for this fake DEI scheme that actually doesn't do anything to help anybody. | ||
| So Senator Ernst, obviously you are the chair of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, and you've introduced the Stop 8A Contracting Fraud Act. | ||
| How much of this fraud could be undone by better action through the actual small business administration? | ||
| Obviously, the Trump administration is in charge of the executive branch. | ||
| And how much are you just trying to kill these programs now? | ||
| Because there will be a Democrat at some point in the future, you have to assume, who's going to use the legislative capacity here in order to expand these programs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly, Ben. | ||
| And actually, there is a lawsuit that is ongoing right now, which kind of undercuts the premise of the 8A program. | ||
| And Luke is absolutely right. | ||
| We have all kinds of minorities that will qualify for the program. | ||
| There is no rhyme or reason. | ||
| There's no data behind this. | ||
| There's no science behind this. | ||
| They, being the federal government and small business administration, have through the years just continually added different ethnic groups to be considered racial minorities. | ||
| And again, no rhyme or reason. | ||
| We have Pakistanis that will fall into this program and yet Afghans won't. | ||
| And nobody knows why or how that happened. | ||
| But again, the lawsuit is out there. | ||
| We think it'll undercut a lot of these programs already, making these programs unconstitutional for the federal government to engage in. | ||
| But what I want to do, though, is uncover the fraud and make sure that, yes, we are putting appropriate measures into place to audit programs, whether it's the 8A program, whether it was the money that went out the door during COVID, any of our federal government programs. | ||
| I have purview and oversight of small business by virtue of being the small business committee chair. | ||
| And so that's what I'm focusing on today with this hearing. | ||
| There is so much fraud, waste, and abuse out there just in that 8A program. | ||
| There was one case that was $550 million of bribery that went into moving some of these contracts around, getting contracts, subcontracting them. | ||
| It's just egregious the dollars that are pouring out that my folks in Iowa have had to work really hard in their jobs to pay taxes that then get handed out to these fraudsters. | ||
| Minnesota, that's a billion dollars worth of fraud that happened. | ||
| And Luke has uncovered so much of this in his investigative journalism. | ||
| We could go on and on and on for days on the fraud that has occurred. | ||
| Well, the hearing this afternoon, very important hearing. | ||
| Senator Ernst, Luke, great to see both of you. | ||
| And thanks so much for the hard work you're doing to ferret out this sort of fraud. | ||
| Thank you, Ben. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Meanwhile, I think that Republicans, you know, we noted at the top of the show, Republicans did not do well in Miami in this mayoral election, and that comes on the heels of Zorn Mamdani winning in New York and Abigail Spanberger winning in Virginia and the loss of a few special elections around the country. | ||
| When a party wins a national election as Republicans did in 2024, the general tendency is to believe that now you have a mandate and that you are in the ascendancy. | ||
| That may not, in fact, be true. | ||
| It may be. that a lot of people voted for you just because they didn't like the other guy. | ||
| When we live in a binary election system, in fact, that is the most common answer as to why people vote. | ||
| They're not necessarily voting for a thing. | ||
| They're voting against a thing. | ||
| And this is where I think that Republicans have to be very careful because Republicans can tell themselves a story where we are now in the ascendancy culturally. | ||
| We are in the ascendancy religiously. | ||
| But what may actually be happening is that the most visible anecdotal evidence is in our favor, but the general statistical trend is not in our favor. | ||
| And that's something we need to keep an eye on if we want to be accurate about the solutions that we actually posit. | ||
| So there's a fascinating article in the Washington Post about religious practice in the United States. | ||
| And what it finds is two things. | ||
| One, general religious practice among young people is actually in the decline. | ||
| It is not on the incline. | ||
| It's on the decline. | ||
| It's been on the decline for a long time. | ||
| But the people who are religious are getting more religious. | ||
| If you misread those trends, you tend to think either that all Americans are going secularist or that Americans, broadly speaking, are becoming more religious. | ||
| The first trend is being noted by Democrats who are ignoring a growing number of young people who are becoming more religious. | ||
| But that growing number of young people who are becoming more religious does exist in a context in which fewer young people, generally speaking, are becoming religious. | ||
| So in other words, if seven out of 10 young people used to consider themselves religious and now it's five out of 10, but of those five, three are now very, very, very religious. | ||
| Republicans are reading those three who are now very, very religious as bigger than they are. | ||
| And Democrats are pretending they don't exist. | ||
| And that is the divide. | ||
| But on an electoral statistical level, Democrats may be more likely to be right than Republicans are. | ||
| This is a very important divide because if you're trying to game for the future, what the Republican Party looks like, who the Republican Party is appealing to, how you build a coalition, you do need to be accurate about the state of play. | ||
| So according to the Washington Post, even as fewer and fewer young people consider themselves religious, a small percentage of young adults are practicing their faiths with unusual avidity. | ||
| This cohort of people in their early 20s are rejecting both religion by habit, just doing whatever your parents did, as well as secularism, skepticism, and agnosticism that grew among their parents' generations, religious experts say. | ||
| And the examples of this surge, albeit anecdotal, are visible across faiths, including traditional brick-and-mortar worship of Catholicism, more Jewish students attending the growing number of Chabad centers, and more esoteric spiritual practices, even including Wicca-based full moon rituals and the West African system of divination called Ifa. | ||
| So in other words, in a time of chaos, people are looking for something to belong to. | ||
| And that can be something great, like engaging more deeply in biblical faith, or it can mean that you're going to go out and howl at the moon. | ||
| According to a campus chaplain, he said, in the past, it was more that you went to mass out of obligation. | ||
| But despite the religious indifference of parents, there's now a line at the campus center because more and more people are interested in engaging more deeply. | ||
| But that, again, comes amid a climate of less religious practice over time. | ||
| According to an analysis of 2023-2024 Pew data released on Monday, 56% of 18 to 24-year-olds identified with any religion. | ||
| That is down from 74% in 2007. | ||
| So if you're somebody who believes in the importance of religious practice and adherence in America, that is a terrible statistic. | ||
| It means, again, that just more than a bare majority of 18 to 24-year-olds even identify with a religion. | ||
| Also, among 18 to 24-year-olds, a separate Pew survey finds about five times as many people have left Christianity since childhood as have converted to the faith. | ||
| However, Gallup polls find worship attendance among adults under 30 is up from 19% in 2020 to 25% this year. | ||
| And anecdotes abound that a subset of young people is collectively pursuing spirituality in a highly individualistic era. | ||
| So looking at those countervailing trends is really important and noticing what's actually happening is important because what it means is that you will get a rise in radical socialistic atheism. | ||
| You will, because that is the natural outgrowth of fewer and fewer people who are even culturally Christian. | ||
| But at the same time, you're going to get a very right-wing traditionalist response that is convinced that because the church pews are swelling in those churches, that that is a majoritarian movement, when in fact it may not be. | ||
| And that's really important to keep in mind as we consider electoral blocks and how things are going. | ||
| Now, of course, this season, Christmas season, is a time when many Christians engage with their religious faith. | ||
| Joining us on the line to discuss is Matt Fratt of Pines with Aquinas. | ||
| And so Matt knows much more about this than I do. | ||
| So Matt, tell me about why this season is so important. | ||
| First of all, I need to say I'm so thrilled that I'm gradually edging Michael Knowles out of the Daily Wire in regards to his Catholic commentary. | ||
| That's something we can do. | ||
| Oh, it took five seconds. | ||
| The minute that that option was available, Matt, you were there. | ||
| You were on the spot. | ||
| We may have hired you in order to edge Knowles out of this particular spot. | ||
| That is definitely a reality. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm really pumped to be here. | ||
| First of all, I'm just thrilled about everything. | ||
| And on Saturday, I sat down with Dr. Scott Hahn, who's a biblical scholar, convert from Presbyterianism. | ||
| And we recorded a beautiful Christmas episode for Daily Wire that comes out today on Daily Wire Plus. | ||
| And then next week, we'll go out to the public. | ||
| And so we talked about Christ as the long-awaited Messiah and even just this like bizarre idea that Christians have, hey, like in 1 Corinthians chapter 1, St. Paul talks about the scandal of the cross. | ||
| I mean, it's such a scandal that the Mohammedans reject it outright. | ||
| And I kind of get it superficially. | ||
| I see why you would do that. | ||
| We talked about the scandal of the manger. | ||
| This idea that God became a zygote. | ||
| It's pretty wild. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Becomes a fetus, like breastfed. | ||
| That's bananas. | ||
| But we think it's true. | ||
| And so we spent a good deal of time talking about that. | ||
| And it was a great time. | ||
| So one of the things that is worth noting is that this week was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. | ||
| So tell me about that, because honestly, I think that people have the wrong idea of what exactly that means. | ||
| What does that mean, actually? | ||
| First of all, the very fact that you think that a lot of people get it wrong shows that you know more than most Catholics who are convinced that it has to do with Christ's conception in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. | ||
| It doesn't. | ||
| The idea is that we would say that we have been redeemed by Christ medicinally, you might say, after the fact. | ||
| But the Blessed Virgin Mary, because of her special role in being the mother of God, was preserved free from original sin and actual sin from the moment of her conception. | ||
| This is the idea. | ||
| So it doesn't mean that Christians don't believe that Christ could not have been born of a sinful woman, say. | ||
| He could have. | ||
| He's God and could have been born of a prostitute and it wouldn't have affected his dignity at all. | ||
| The idea is that it was so fitting that, again, the mother of God, because of her role, would be preserved from all sin. | ||
| There's a lovely line from St. Augustine that really drives this home. | ||
| He says, no, let's start again. | ||
| He whom the heavens cannot contain the womb of one woman bore. | ||
| She ruled our ruler. | ||
| She carried him in whom we are. | ||
| She gave milk to our bread. | ||
| And so from the earliest days of the church, you have people talking about the Blessed Virgin Mary as being sinless, spotless, without stain. | ||
| And so on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, we celebrate that. | ||
| So obviously, Christmas is coming up. | ||
| There's always a big debate every single year in conservative communities about the commercialization of Christmas, the turning of Christmas into a sort of season. | ||
| And listen, as a Jew, I really enjoy it. | ||
| Obviously, I love the lights. | ||
| Half the Christmas music that's great was written by Jews. | ||
| But what should Christians be thinking about as Christmas approaches to get more out of the holiday spiritually and out of the season spiritually? | ||
| Yeah, it's a good question. | ||
| I think when I was a younger man early on in marriage, I tended to be like really legalistic and upset about the fact that people were celebrating Christmas too early. | ||
| I've kind of chilled out a little bit and I really enjoy watching Christmas movies with my kids and drinking eggnog and all of that. | ||
| But I do think it's probably important to distinguish between the Advent season and the season of Christmas. | ||
| And so Advent is a time of preparation for Christmas. | ||
| It's kind of like a mini Lent in which we maybe fast, pray more, go to confession if we can as Catholics, and then just prepare our hearts for the Christmas season, which actually hasn't begun yet, right? | ||
| So according to the Catholic Church, the Christmas season will begin on Christmas Day. | ||
| So it's nice to keep those in mind. | ||
| But now I'm like you. | ||
| I'm thrilled about watching ELF with my kids and drinking eggnog and enjoying the lights. | ||
| I mean, we can all just kind of calm down and not everything has to be a war. | ||
| And even if it is a war, sometimes there's some benefits from the commercialization of it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I kind of like it. | ||
| Hey, listen, it's a Wonderful Life is one of the great movies ever made. | ||
| And so if you have a chance, you absolutely should watch. | ||
| It's a Wonderful Life in this Christmas season. | ||
| So go check out Matt's brand new episode with Dr. Scott Hahn. | ||
| It's a DW Christmas episode. | ||
| It comes out this afternoon on DW as well as locals. | ||
| It's out to the public December 15th. | ||
| Matt, it's great to see you. | ||
| And Merry Christmas, man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All righty. | ||
| Meanwhile, Democrats are also misinterpreting the movement. | ||
| They are seeing that they are winning elections in some interesting places, and they have decided apparently to go whole hog. | ||
| The kind of brain capture that happens in victory is quite real. | ||
| Mayor-elect Zorn Mamdani, apparently, according to the New York Post, has now picked a controversial rapper who did seven years in state prison for armed robbery to advise him on the criminal justice system. | ||
| Slow clap for New Yorkers, guys. | ||
| You really outdate yourselves this time. | ||
| Myson Linen, 49, a Bronx convict turned activist who was found guilty of two felony heists in the late 90s, was appointed by the Democratic Socialists to sit on his mayoral transitions criminal legal system committee. | ||
| That's just one of many questionable picks for Zorhan Mamdani. | ||
| This person obviously has something important to contribute. | ||
| He had been part of a crew that robbed two cab drivers in the Bronx. | ||
| Apparently, they pulled off a robbery of a taxi driver in 1997 and then a gunpoint theft from another cabby in 1998. | ||
| And so it's great. | ||
| We've got criminals in New York trying to make jail policy. | ||
| That would be great. | ||
| Meanwhile, Mamdani is apparently telling illegal immigrants how to avoid ICE, which is a fascinating move for someone who supposedly wants to bring law and order to the streets in New York. | ||
| Last weekend, ICE attempted to raid Canal Street and detain our immigrant neighbors. | ||
| As mayor, I'll protect the rights of every single New Yorker, and that includes the more than 3 million immigrants who call this city their home. | ||
| But we can all stand up to ICE if you know your rights. | ||
| If you encounter ICE, these are the things that every New Yorker should know. | ||
| First, ICE cannot enter into private spaces like your home, school, or a private area of your workplace without a judicial warrant signed by a judge. | ||
| That looks like this. | ||
| If ICE does not have a judicial warrant signed by a judge, you have the right to say, I do not consent to entry, and the right to keep your door closed. | ||
| Sometimes ICE will show you paperwork that looks like this And tell you that they have the right to arrest you. | ||
| That is false. | ||
| ICE is legally allowed to lie to you, but you have the right to remain silent. | ||
| If you're being detained, you may always ask, Am I free to go? repeatedly until they answer you. | ||
| I mean, he's just a community organizer, and you guys elected this to your mayoralty. | ||
| Like genius level stuff there, New Yorkers. | ||
| And we'll see how this plays for New Yorkers as life gets markedly worse. | ||
| Okay, meanwhile, big controversy continues to swirl around the attempt to buy Warner Brothers. | ||
| So Netflix struck a deal to buy Warner Brothers. | ||
| Paramount is now launching a $77.9 billion hostile takeover offer for Warner Brothers Discovery. | ||
| Paramount, which is run by David Ellison, is arguing its all-cash 30 bucks a share offer for all of Warner, owner of networks like CNN, TBS, and HGTV, as well as HBO Max, is a better deal for shareholders and more likely to also pass regulatory muster. | ||
| Netflix had agreed to pay $72 billion or $27.75 a share from Warner's studio and the HBO Max streaming business after the company splits itself in two. | ||
| So this could set up a very fascinating public battle for the future of Warner's assets. | ||
| Paramount said that its offer is backstopped by the Ellison family and Redbird Capital, as well as $54 billion of debt commitments from Bank of America City and Apollo Global Management. | ||
| Paramount also says it has commitments from sovereign wealth funds of Saudi, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar, as well as Affinity Partners, the private equity firm of Jared Kushner. | ||
| And all those groups are agreeing to forego any voting rights, which could ease the deal's path in Washington. | ||
| Apparently, Netflix's CEO said that actually they're very happy with the offer that they made to Warner Brothers and they expect to consummate that offer. | ||
| The involvement of the government has been one of the questions here. | ||
| President Trump suggested over the weekend that Netflix's deal could be a problem and that he would be involved in deciding whether to bless that deal. | ||
| You know, this seems to me problematic. | ||
| I'd not like the government involved in private business transactions. | ||
| This is not a monopoly concern, frankly. | ||
| With that said, obviously, this is one of the biggest business transactions in the history of business transactions. | ||
| And it'll be interesting to see whether Paramount's gigantic offer, I mean, they're going right over the top of Netflix here, whether that gigantic offer is successful in court, because there are regulatory burdens that have to be overcome. | ||
| There are, in fact, questions about whether the shareholders can overcome the leadership of the Warner Brothers board. | ||
| Interesting stuff. | ||
| Alrighty, coming up, we'll get into the latest over Venezuela. | ||
| Some Republicans like Rand Paul, very, very critical of the presidents of the United States. | ||
| Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member. | ||
| If you're not a member, become a member. | ||
| Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans. | ||
| Click that link in the description and join us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, this is an illusion. | |
| An echo of a voice that has died. | ||
| And soon that echo will cease. | ||
| They say that Merlin is mad. | ||
| They say he was a king in David. | ||
| The son of a princess of lost Atlantis. | ||
| They say the future and the past are unknown to him. | ||
| But the fire and the wind tell him their secrets. | ||
| Let the magic of the hill folk and druids come forth at his easy command. | ||
| They say he slew hundreds. | ||
| Hundreds, do you hear? | ||
| That the world burned and trembled at his wrath. | ||
| The Merlin died long before you and I were born. | ||
| Merlin Emirus has returned to the land of the living. | ||
| Vortigen is gone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Rome is gone. | |
| The Saxon is here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Saxon Hengist has assembled the greatest war host ever seen in the Island of the Mighty. | |
| And before the summer is through, he means to take the throne. | ||
| And he will have it. | ||
| If we are too busy squabbling amongst ourselves to take up arms against him, here is your hope: a king will arise to hold all Britain in his hand. | ||
| A high king who will be the wonder of the world. | ||
| You to a future of peace. | ||
| There'll be no peace in these lands till we are all dust. | ||
| Men of the island of the mighty! | ||
| You stand together! | ||
| You stand as Britons! | ||
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You stand as one. | |
| Great darkness is falling upon this land. | ||
| These brothers are our only hope to stand against it. | ||
| Not our only hope. | ||
| Esay Merthyn slew 70 men with his own hands. | ||
| At Cathay, he slew 500. | ||
| No man is capable of such a thing. |
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