The Ben Shapiro Show - How White Men Became The Targets Of America’s Most Powerful Institutions

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Dec. 17, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show

59:18

How White Men Became The Targets Of America’s Most Powerful Institutions

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ben shapiro

dailywire 47:33

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cabot phillips

04:31

chip roy

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jd vance

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tom sharp

01:07

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ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		A huge piece in Compact magazine exposes how white men were discriminated against in the job market from 2014 on, the wages of DEI plus healthcare imbroglios for Republicans, and of course, a profile of Susie Wiles at Vanity Fair that's creating waves on the Hill First.
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		So, one of the big questions that has plagued American politics for the last decade and a half is what the hell is going on.
		And in order to understand what the hell is going on, I think we need to understand the transformation that happened around the year 2014.
		Between 2012 and 2014, something radically changed in American politics.
		Now, some of that is the rise of social media.
		Obviously, this is something that the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of NYU has discussed ad nauseum: the idea that because we're all addicted to our phones, because we are able to find our own little clicks of people on the internet and then zoom around headlines, both true and untrue, this means that we have sort of poisoned our own brains.
		And there's a lot of truth to that.
		I mean, I've talked at length about how algorithms are feeding you information that may not be true and generally is going to confirm your pre-existing biases.
		But there's something else that happened too, and that's a real world thing.
		That real-world thing is the rise of DEI.
		So, in 2012, which again, I still consider 2012 to be the most important election of my lifetime, the one that everybody forgets.
		That's the one that I think was really important.
		Why?
		Well, because in 2008, Barack Obama, America's first black president, was elected on the platform of unifying Americans around race.
		And racial optimism in the country was at an all-time high by the polling data.
		And then in 2012, Barack Obama, who had been a very left-wing president, a very progressive president, of course, he had pushed Obamacare through with the skin of his teeth, and he was unpopular.
		And so he decided that the best way to win re-election was not to broadcast a unifying message, but to divide Americans by race, and then to cobble together enough racial coalitions in order to win a victory.
		And he defeated Mitt Romney, the most milquetoast candidate in the history of American politics, in what was a fairly solid victory.
		And that seemed to change everything because by 2014, race relations in the United States were on the decline.
		And they were on the decline because Barack Obama, who'd made a lot of promises to a lot of people, needed to fulfill those promises, particularly on issues of race.
		The claim that Barack Obama made with regard to, for example, Trayvon Martin, is that Trayvon could have been his son.
		That was a racial claim because what he was claiming, of course, is that any black person would have been subjected to the same treatment as Trayvon Martin, that circumstances did not matter.
		He said the same thing with regard to Ferguson, Missouri, where he claimed that nobody would make up the kinds of experiences that Michael Brown had undergone.
		And it turned out that in Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown's acolytes, people who are pseudo-witnesses, actually did, in fact, make up the story about Michael Brown claiming that he had raised his hands, hands up, don't shoot, and all of the rest.
		And so race relations by 2014 were on a steep decline in the United States, and they have never recovered.
		And that is because so much of this attitude, this racially divisive attitude, was then baked into American politics.
		There's a fascinating and important piece today in Compact Magazine by a person named Jacob Savage talking about the realities of hiring and firing in the sort of elite institutions of the United States, which became explicitly race-based around 2014.
		He points out, quote, the doors seem to close everywhere and all at once.
		In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48% of lower-level TV writers.
		By 2024, they accounted for just 11.9%.
		The Atlantic's editorial staff went from 53% male and 89% white in 2013 to 36% male and 66% white in 2024.
		White men fell from 39% of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18% in 2023.
		Now, again, there are people who are DEI advocates who will claim that this is the natural state of things.
		The natural state of things is that white people were being artificially elevated.
		And then when that ended, thanks to DEI, of course, white people fell out of positions of power.
		But the reality is sort of the reverse.
		That if you believe that America has been for at least a couple of generations generally a meritocracy, particularly on issues of race, that when you go back to sort of how hiring was done in TV studios, for example, some of the most left-leaning areas in American life in 2011, it wasn't that the heads of the writer's room were selecting for white people.
		It was that they were selecting for the funniest people.
		And then they decided to radically shift how they did hiring and firing, thus to dispossess people of the positions that they had earned in favor of other people based on group characteristics.
		You can see what happened here.
		As Jacob Savage writes, in retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.
		In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn't a white man and then provided just that.
		A former management consultant recalled, quote, with every announcement of promotions, there was a desire to put extra emphasis on gender or race.
		And when you don't fall into those groups, that message gets louder and louder and gains more and more emphasis.
		On the one hand, you want to celebrate people who have been at a disadvantage.
		On the other hand, you look and you say, wow, the world is not rooting for you.
		In fact, it's deliberately rooting against you.
		As the Trump administration takes a chainsaw to diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there's a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules.
		But that's not real.
		This may be how Boomer and Gen X white men experienced DEI, but for white male millennials, DEI was not a gentle rebalancing.
		It was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed.
		Jacob Savage says this isn't a story about all white men.
		It's a story about white male millennials in professional America.
		He points out, it may be hard to remember now, but a decade ago, the prevailing critique of American journalism was that it was woefully lacking in racial and gender diversity.
		Gawker, as of 2014, was still 57% male and 79% white.
		Weiss was majority male and 70% white.
		At 538, Nate Silver complained about a gender gap so severe that only 15% of applications were from women.
	However, this was all about to change.
	There was a move that was about to be made because there was a move by the upper levels of management to try to diversify.
	And what that meant is that people who are white male millennials were going to be basically pushed out of these institutions.
	Institutions pursuing diversity decided there would be no backsliding.
	If a position was vacated by a woman or a person of color, the expectation was that it would be filled by another woman or person of color.
	The hope was always that you were going to hire a diverse candidate, a senior hiring editor at a major outlet told me.
	If there was a black woman at the beginning of her career you wanted to hire, you could find someone.
	But if she was any good, you knew she'd get accelerated to the New York Times or the Washington Post in short order.
	By 2019, the newsrooms of ProPublica, The Washington Post, and the New York Times were majority female, as were new media upstarts Weiss, Vox, BuzzFeed, and the Huffington Post.
	And then 2020 happened and the wheels came off.
	In the aftermath of George Floyd's death, writes Savage newsrooms tripped over themselves to stage a reckoning.
	The New York Times solemnly promised sweeping reforms on top of the sweeping reforms it had already promised.
	The Washington Post declared it would become the most diverse and inclusive newsroom in the country.
	CNN pledged a sustained commitment to race coverage.
	Bone Apetit confessed, quote, our mastheads have been far too white for far too long.
	NPR said diversity was nothing less than its North Star.
	And this resulted in differential hiring practices, unsurprisingly.
	In 2021, new hires at Condon Apps were just 25% male and 49% white.
	At the California Times, parent company of the LA Times and the San Diego Union Tribune, they were 39% male and 31% white.
	That same year, ProPublica hired 66% women and 58% people of color at NPR.
	78% of new hires were people of color.
	At the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg had described his hiring philosophy: quote, by opening the possibilities of younger people, women, and people of color, by imagining their rise in a deliberate way, I've just widened the pool of potential leadership.
	There's no quota system here.
	But he said, quote, it's really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story.
	There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it.
	The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males.
	And yet, the Atlantic succeeded in hiring fewer and fewer of these white males.
	Since 2020, nearly two-thirds of the Atlantic's hires have been women, along with nearly 50% people of color.
	So what you see is a deliberate attempt to force white millennials out.
	This is also true with regard to the universities, not just in legacy media.
	All right, coming up more on America's DEI episode.
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	There is a push to quote-unquote diversify all of the institutions of higher education.
	As Savage points out, white men may still be 55% of Harvard's arts and sciences faculty, down from 63% a decade ago, but this is a legacy of Boomer and Gen X employment patterns.
	For tenure track positions, the pipeline for future faculty, white men have gone from 49% in 2014 to 27% in 2024, and in the humanities from 39% to 21%.
	The white men who do get hired are often older and more established or foreign.
	Meanwhile, Yale's history department, with 10 white male professors over the age of 70, provides a striking illustration of the generational divide in hiring.
	Since 2018, Yale has hired four older white men as full professors.
	But among the 16 tenured or tenure-track millennials, just one is a white man.
	The remedial action takes many forms.
	Berkeley commissioned regression analyses to identify which quasi-legal strategies would produce the fewest number of white male job offers.
	At Dartmouth, the Mellon to Postdoc program provided 10 tenure-track positions for new hires with a demonstrated commitment to addressing racial underrepresentation in their disciplines, and none were white men.
	So, again, this has become deregor across the university system.
	At Berkeley, as recently as 2015, white male hires were 52.7% of new tenure-track faculty.
	In 2023, they were 21.5%.
	This is true in the preserve of television as well.
	A whistleblower sent Jacob Savage a document from early 2017, an internal needs sheet compiled by major talent agency that shows how steep the headwinds were for white males across the grid, which tracks staffing needs for TV writers' rooms.
	The same shorthand appears dozens of times: diverse, female, women, and diverse only.
	These mandates came from some of the most powerful names in television: Noah Howley, Dean Devlin, Ryan Murphy.
	This was systematic discrimination documented in writing, implemented without consequence.
	It's striking how casual it all was.
	For example, Chicago Fire, the upper level can be anyone, but we need diverse staff writers.
	As in other industries, the upper level positions were filled by people with gigantic resumes, very often of whom they were older white males.
	But the entry-level jobs, the way that people actually got ahead, there was a glass ceiling put in place.
	Every fellowship grant and hiring incentive was suddenly skewed toward changing who got in the door.
	So you're looking at the media, you're looking at institutions of higher education, you're looking at Hollywood and everywhere else.
	So as Jacob Savage puts it, for a decade it kept going faster and faster without any actual quotas to achieve, only the constant exhortation to do better.
	The diversity complex became self-radicalizing, a strange confluence of top-down and bottom-up pressure.
	No one ever said what the right number of white men would be, but it was always fewer than you currently had.
	Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines.
	Seven white male Gen Xers won the MacArthur Genius Fellowship in 2013 alone, the same as the total number of white male millennials who have won since.
	In 2014, two white male millennials were National Book Award finalists, including one winner.
	That year, nine white male American artists under 40 appeared at the Whitney Biennial.
	But of the 70 millennial writers nominated for national book awards in the decade that followed, three were white men.
	The big four galleries represent 47 millennial artists.
	Three are white men.
	At the 2024 Whitney Biennial, which featured 45 millennial artists, zero were white American men.
	The shift has happened everywhere, including in medicine.
	In 2014, white men were 31% of American medical students.
	By 2025, they were 20.5%.
	That's true in tech as well.
	At Google, white men went from nearly half the workforce in 2014 to less than a third by 2024, a 34% decline.
	In 2014, at Amazon, entry-level professionals were 42.3% white male.
	Mid-level managers fell from 55.8% white male in 2014 to 33.8% in 2024.
	So refuges were formed, crypto, podcasting, substack.
	But the bottom line is that when you're talking about one job and one person is going to get that one job, you've created a zero-sum game.
	And if that zero-sum game is being weighted in favor of particular races, that is unfair and wrong.
	And the reaction to that on parts of the political right has been a reverse identitarianism.
	See, people of my generation, and I am a millennial, I believe, I'm 41.
	People of my generation, we were brought up in the 1990s, early 2000s, and we were taught from a very, very early age that Martin Luther King Jr.'s exhortation to judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, was morally correct, because it is, in fact, morally correct.
	And then an entire cadre of elite institutional professionals decided not to do that anymore.
	And not only not to do that, they decided that the majority, in many cases, of potential employees in a potential applicant pool were bad because of the immutable characteristics, the color of their skin, because of their maleness.
	The idea was that these people were somehow lesser, that they had participated in systemic discrimination.
	And even if they themselves were not racist, the system was racist.
	And thus, these people had to be dispossessed.
	They took the most tolerant cohort of people, people who had been trained in the idea of a colorblind meritocracy, and then they told them that colorblind meritocracy was for them, but it wasn't for anyone else.
	They were told that they should continue to adhere to an idea of colorblind meritocracy because it was morally correct, but they were the beneficiaries of racialist systems and therefore they had to pay.
	That is unsustainable.
	There's one system for everyone.
	And if you are told that colorblind meritocracy is something that you should morally accept, which is true, and then you are told it doesn't apply to you.
	It only applies to everyone else.
	Well, you are likely to get a generation of people who start to reject a colorblind meritocracy and start to look at race relations as a zero-sum game rather than an additive bonus, who start to see everything as a question of who gets the job and why is it based on immutable characteristics and who start to see themselves as a put-upon identity group because in fact, they are a put-upon identity group.
	If a group is determined to be lesser than on the basis of immutable characteristics, of course they're going to start seeing themselves in identitarian ways.
	Now, it doesn't mean that they are right to do so.
	It does mean, however, that the only way to destroy all of this, this new identitarian moment we are living in, and an identitarianism of the left that adheres to the idea that group identity is really, really good, except if you're talking about white Christian men, and an identitarian right that has formed in counter response that says, fine, you want to play that game, we'll play that game too.
	The only way out of that is to go back to a system that we were all taught as kids and that was natural to us, colorblind meritocracy.
	Colorblind meritocracy is good.
	It is right.
	Why?
	Because meritocracy is the only system of human relations ever devised that has positive externalities.
	Meaning that when the most meritorious people, the people who are best at the job, get jobs, you get greater efficiency.
	You get better job performance.
	You get better innovation, better products.
	People are able to expend their best abilities to the benefit of everyone else.
	Every other system, every other anti-meritocratic system, has negative externalities.
	It helps the people who are inside the system and hurts the people who are outside the system.
	Meritocracy benefits everyone.
	Because even if you didn't get the job, let's say you lost the job to a person who is better qualified than you, better at the job than you.
	Well, number one, that means that the person who filled the job is going to perform the job better than you would have.
	And so that company will do better.
	They will perform better.
	The prices will be better.
	The products will be better.
	And second, you will end up in a job where you are most meritorious.
	If you want a happier human society, meritocracy is the way.
	And yet we were told that meritocracy is inherently bad.
	Why?
	Because people looked at the outcome numbers and they judged for themselves that if outcomes were not equal, therefore the system was unequal and bad.
	If you don't use a meritocracy, then you have to prejudge.
	Either you are going to judge a system based on the effects of the system or you're going to pre-judge a system based on your perception of fairness between groups.
	Cosmic justice, as Thomas Sowell would put it.
	And there is nothing just about the idea that a person should be hampered in their capacity to succeed because of their immutable characteristics.
	That is just wrong.
	That's why this article is really important.
	It explains an awful lot about our current political moment.
	And it does say that we need to end grievance-based politics.
	Grievance-based politics need to end.
	Yes, white male American millennials, Christians have reason for grievance.
	The solution to that grievance is meritocracy.
	It is not, in fact, reverse grievance.
	Because otherwise we're just going to ping pong between grievances.
	And it's just a question of who grabs the government gun and crams down their preferred solution today.
	That is not what America was built on.
	It is not what is going to cause America to succeed.
	And again, the negative externalities of the DEI system have been felt everywhere, from the social sphere to the job sphere to the governmental sphere.
	And that spiral will keep on swirling the drain unless we reverse it and go back to, again, the thing that we all taught our kids, the thing that we were taught as kids, to treat every individual human being as an individual and not on the basis of some sort of immutable characteristic.
	It was a sin against America what happened over the course of the last decade.
	A sin against decency.
	And the fact that so many people are still invested in that sin or who now want to pursue the same sin, but with a different color at the top, all of that does not speak to a successful America.
	All righty, coming up, we are going to get to Susie Wiles.
	She is profiled in Vanity Fair and has some things to say about the administration that are kind of fascinating.
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	Okay, meanwhile, the other big controversy of the day is an interview series that Susie Wiles, the president's chief of staff, did with Vanity Fair.
	So I just have a question number one.
	Why are you doing big interviews with Vanity Fair?
	It seems to me that at this point, if you're a member of the Trump administration, you should well know at this point that Vanity Fair is probably going to take the spiciest things that you say about your colleagues and put them in print.
	I mean, Vanity Fair was apparently taping the interviews.
	And so Susie Wiles said some pretty spicy things about the administration.
	So there are kind of two issues.
	One is why Susie Wiles would do that.
	That's less interesting to me, frankly, than what Susie Wiles actually said.
	Because whenever you get a window into a room that is typically closed, it's interesting to see what the people inside the room are saying.
	Why Susie Wiles would do that?
	I mean, I assume that the president knew about it.
	I assume that she wasn't freelancing it.
	I assume that there is some rationale for why she wanted to go talk to the people at Vanity Fair, presumably because she figured, okay, if they write a hit piece about the administration, then the administration will survive it.
	The administration always survives hit pieces.
	And maybe, just maybe, Vanity Fair will actually do some sort of decent coverage.
	Maybe that was the logic.
	Maybe on a personal political level, Susie Wiles is looking beyond this term and she's figuring, okay, maybe I'm not inside the JD Vance team.
	I'm sort of auditioning for another role.
	You know, it's unclear what is driving Susie Wiles to do that interview.
	What's much more interesting to me is what Susie Wiles actually said.
	So first of all, we should point out that she appears to be in no danger of losing her job over this.
	According to the New York Post, President Trump defended White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
	So apparently in this interview, she said that Trump has an alcoholics personality, meaning that he is, you know, hyperactive and obsessive.
	And Trump said, no, she meant that I mean, see, I don't drink alcohol.
	Everybody knows that.
	I've often said that if I did, I'd have a very good chance of being an alcoholic.
	I've said that many times about myself.
	I do.
	It's a very possessive personality.
	I said that many times about myself.
	I'm fortunate I'm not a drinker.
	If I did, I could very well, because I've said, what's the word not possessive, possessive and addictive type of personality?
	Oh, I've said it many times, many times before.
	In the profile, Wiles told author Chris Whipple that high-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, that personalities are exaggerated when they drink, and that the president has an alcoholics personality because he operates with a view that there's nothing he can't do.
	And so the president defended her.
	He said, I didn't read it, but I don't read Vanity Fair, but she's done a fantastic job.
	I think from what I hear, the facts were wrong.
	It was a very misguided interviewer, purposefully misguided.
	And he said that she is fantastic.
	He said he thought Whipple may have deceived Wiles regarding his focus.
	Yeah, deceived.
	He didn't have great access, a couple of very short interviews, and Susie generally doesn't do interviews.
	If anybody knows the interviewer, if they know Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair is a totally, it's lost its way.
	It's also lost its readers, as you know, know she's fantastic.
	Well, Susie Wiles also had some words about, for example, the vice president of the United States.
	She said that JD Vance was a conspiracy theorist for a decade, which is sort of fascinating because obviously the vice president of the United States has fairly warm relations with people who are themselves warm on conspiracies.
	She also said that Attorney General Pam Bondi whiffed in her handling of the Epstein files, which of course is perfectly true.
	And so again, there's sort of two issues.
	Why she talked to Vanity Fair and if she said what she said was true.
	So apparently, Vance then went out and defended her.
	He claimed the only conspiracies he believes are the true ones, which, you know, maybe.
jd vance ▲ ● ▼		And I've seen so many people who will say one thing to the president's face, Democrats and Republicans, and then will do the exact opposite behind the scenes.
		You know why I really love.
		And you know why I really love Susie Wiles?
		Because Susie is who she is in the president's presence.
		She's the same exact person when the president isn't around.
		I've never seen Susie Wiles say something to the president and then go and counteract him or subvert his will behind the scenes.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so Susie Wiles herself put out a statement saying that the Vanity Fair series was a disingenuously framed head piece, quote, significant context was disregarded, and much of what I and others said about the team and the president was left out of the story.
		I assume after reading it that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the president and our team.
		White House Press Secretary Caroline Lovitt came out and dismissed the article.
		Here's what she had to say.
karoline leavitt ▲ ● ▼		This was unfortunately another attempt at fake news by a reporter who was acting disingenuously and really did take the chief's words out of context.
		But I think most importantly, the bias of omission was ever present throughout this story.
		The reporter omitted all of the positive things that Susie and our team said about the president and the inner workings of the White House.
		And as Susie said today, it's deeply unfortunate that happened, but it won't distract us from making America great again.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Is this going to have any lasting impact?
		The answer is no, but it's sort of a fascinating thing.
		Apparently, Wiles said the president believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin won't be satisfied with getting part of Ukraine.
		Quote, Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country.
		So once again, demonstrating that President Trump's instincts are very often better than his staff's.
		President Trump is correct about all of this.
		Apparently, in April, when Trump announced the Liberation Day tariffs, Wiles said the White House struggled to agree on an approach.
		Wiles tried to convince the president to wait to roll out his sweeping tariffs until there was more unity among his advisors, but Trump forged ahead anyway.
		So, you know, will there be internal fallout?
		Probably not.
		The president does a good job of keeping a lid on sort of internal dissension inside his team.
		However, do I believe that Susie Wiles and the team at the White House had no idea that Vanity Fair was going to pursue some sort of hit piece?
		I find that very, very difficult to believe.
		Okay, meanwhile, the president obviously is having a tough time in the approval ratings right now.
		A huge part of that is based on concerns about affordability.
		And as I've said before, affordability is sort of a weasel word.
		It encompasses a lot of different things.
		Right now, the focus on affordability is reverting back to the focus on Obamacare.
		So I asked our sponsors over at Comet, a project of perplexity, how much are the Obamacare premiums expected to rise if Obamacare subsidies expire at the end of 2025?
		According to Comet, if an enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expire at the end of 2025, average out-of-pocket premiums for people now receiving subsidies are projected to more than double in 2026, increasing by roughly 110 to 115%.
		In dollar terms, KFF estimates that the average annual payments would rise from about $900 in 2025 to about $1,900 in 2026 for subsidized enrollees.
		KFF's October 22.5 analysis estimates that subsidized marketplace enrollees would see their annual premiums jump from an average of $888 to $1,904 if enhanced premium tax credits lapse.
		Separate from those subsidies, insurers are proposing significant 2026 rate increases with a median premium hike of about 18 to 26 percent for ACA plans.
		You can see why, for example, Mike Lawler, who is a congressman from New York, is freaking out.
		Mike Lawler is suggesting that fellow Republicans are screwing this thing up.
		Quote, I am pissed for the American people.
		This is BS.
		That is because if the ACA subsidies expire, he maybe loses his seat.
		He called it idiotic not to have an upper-down vote on extending the subsidies.
		It's political malpractice.
		He said Lawler is not aligned with the leadership on the other side of the aisle.
		He says that Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer want the subsidies to expire so they can run on it, which is probably right.
		Lawler said he's open to supporting a Democratic-led discharge petition, which would force a vote on extending the subsidies, which are set to expire on December 31st.
		House Majority Leader, Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, confirmed to reporters on Thursday that there would be no vote on ACA subsidies.
		He responded to Lawler by praising the lawmaker, calling him a dear friend and close colleague.
		The Republicans have put forward their own plan.
		That plan would lower the cost of health care something like 11%.
		The problem is that lowering premiums by 11% from the otherwise gigantic jump of 125% probably is not going to be enough to save Republicans some seats.
		The lower healthcare premiums for all Americans act that House Republicans are pushing would increase transparency for pharmacy benefit managers, appropriate cost-sharing reduction plans that would lower premiums, expand access to health association plans that would allow self-employed workers and other membership-based organizations like Costco, Amazon, and Sam's Club to create their own health insurance pools and ensure small and mid-sized employers can protect themselves from catastrophic claims.
		According to the Congressional Budget Office, this would lower the benchmark health insurance premiums by 11% and save $35.6 billion through 2035, which is a little bit of money.
		But again, that's really not the question.
		Is it better than what Democrats are proposing on a pure policy level?
		Sure.
		Because continuing to subsidize these gigantic insurance schemes fostered by the Obama administration and then expanded by Joe Biden, that obviously is bad for the country and bad for the American taxpayer.
		But if what you are worried about is a gigantic rise in premiums that is not going to be paid for by increases in wages or by compensatory changes to regulatory structures, then of course you do have a political problem.
		Chip Roy, for his part, is very upset with this bill.
		He says that they should go further.
		Here is the Republican representative from Texas.
		Of course, he is extremely fiscally conservative.
chip roy ▲ ● ▼		And now we're sitting here and we're listening to nonsense about health care where my colleagues on the other side of the aisle sit here saying, well, you guys aren't doing anything about the massive expensive cost of health care.
		Why do you think it's expensive?
		Because you literally cut a deal with insurance companies to run health care.
		You think that's going to run wild?
unidentified		Yeah.
chip roy ▲ ● ▼		That's why they have 2,000% profit increases and the American people can't afford to go to the doctor of their choice while we enrich insurance companies.
		And yet Republicans will complain about it, and then they'll offer milquetoast garbage like we're offering this week, and then go home at Christmas and say, look at what we're doing.
		We're campaigning on reducing health care.
		Well, congrats your friggin Latin.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So, again, he is not wrong on the merits.
		The question is politically, are Republicans going to survive a gigantic Obamacare expansion in costs that fall on subsidized plans?
		The reality is that Republicans ought to create a transitional plan that probably extends the subsidies for not three years, for a year or two years.
		And in the meantime, puts in place the sorts of changes to the regulatory structure that would allow for a massive decrease in costs or flattening of the cost curve.
		This, by the way, should be the Republican plan for a lot of necessary fiscal changes.
		The American people are not willing.
		Listen, I wish they were.
		I wish the American people were willing to accept a Javier-Mele-style economic reset when it comes to regulatory structures, but they're not.
		And so the question is, do you wish to embrace a program that is likely to lose you the House majority and therefore destroy the rest of the Trump term?
		Or do you wish to make a pragmatic compromise that is ugly and terrible and a result of Republican failures to provide an alternative plan over the course of the last 10 years, but also preserves a Republican majority and the possibility of a real change in the regulatory structure?
		That's the real question here.
		There really is no third choice where you get to do all the things you want and there's no political fallout.
		It seems that Democrats know this, which is why they are pursuing yet another government shutdown at the end of January.
		Chuck Schumer is saying as much.
		He was asked three times whether there will be another government shutdown in January over Obamacare subsidies.
		And here's what he had to say.
chuck schumer ▲ ● ▼		As I said, the bottom line is very simple, and that is that the way to solve this problem, because the toothpaste is already out of the tube, is get it done by January 1st.
chuck schumer ▲ ● ▼		The Republicans, if they care so much and feel the heat, they should make sure they pass our bill.
unidentified		Yes, that doesn't sound like you've arrived on a strategy for how to handle January 3rd.
		So is that in play?
		Yes or no?
		The health care issue the same as it was when the government shutdown this fall?
chuck schumer ▲ ● ▼		I answered the question.
unidentified		But that doesn't sound clear, though.
chuck schumer ▲ ● ▼		The bottom line is very clear.
chuck schumer ▲ ● ▼		You can't do it after January 1st.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So, yeah, again, I think that Schumer and the rest of the Democrats are begging for this.
		They want it.
		They're going to run on it.
		That is their whole idea.
		All right.
		Meanwhile, again, the president of the United States, he is facing down some pretty significant 2026 losses if the perception of the economy goes the wrong way.
		Unemployment did, in fact, rise in November to 4.6%.
		Of course, that's not a historically high unemployment rate, but it is an increase in the unemployment rate.
		A long-delayed government report, according to the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, showed 64,000 jobs were gained in November.
		105,000 jobs were lost in October.
		Job losses in June, August, and October mean the U.S. economy has actually shed jobs in three out of the past six months.
		Taken together, the data point to one of the weakest American labor markets in years.
		While the economy has added jobs so far this year, mostly on the back of gains in healthcare and education, the shock of shifting trade policies and an immigration crackdown has restrained labor demand and supply, making for tepid hiring overall.
		Some economists and investors were putting less stock in Tuesday's job numbers because of likely distortions from the government closure, which prevented the Labor Department from collecting some data that it normally would have.
		We're not falling off the table by any means, but this is not a sort of booming jobs market, for sure.
		Now, wages are in fact rising, which is interesting.
		So the wages continue to rise, but the job market is roiling.
		And this has been sort of the mood for the Trump administration for a while, is this feeling that even while things are generally going kind of pretty well, that things could fall down at any second?
		And I think a lot of people are feeling that right now.
		Meanwhile, the president of the United States is set to interview the feds, Christopher Waller, for chair.
		The two frontrunners are former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh and Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council.
		Hassett is widely considered the frontrunner.
		Christopher Waller was named to the Feds board by Trump and confirmed by the Senate at the end of Trump's term in 2020, according to the Wall Street Journal.
		He's a leading internal advocate for rate cuts this year.
		He is widely considered sort of an institutionalist.
		So a lot of people on Wall Street would be much more comfortable with Waller than they would with, for example, Kevin Hassett, but he doesn't have the sort of personal relationship with Trump that Hassett and Warsh enjoy, which is probably why he is unlikely to be the final pick.
		President Trump is programming for loyalty at this point, which you understand after the amount of staff turnover that he had in the last administration.
		A lot of people in the administration are not super happy with the Kevin Hassett of it.
		According to Politico, Hassett's detractors believe he has not been effective as head of the National Economic Council other than as a public messenger for the president's agenda.
		He hasn't really done much in driving policy that is causing concern.
		He's ill-suited to take the helm of the central bank, but that's not how Trump's going to pick.
		Trump does focus a lot on the messaging.
		It is the one thing that President Trump is a greater expert on than pretty much anything else is his focus on messaging.
		And so it would not be a surprise if Kevin Hassett indeed ended up at the head of the Federal Reserve, assuming, of course, that he can get past the Senate.
		Okay, meanwhile, the president is pursuing policies at this point.
		Some of the policies the president is pursuing seem to be, shall we say, short-termism.
		For example, President Trump is now expected to sign an executive order reclassifying marijuana.
		I think this is a horrible move.
		I think that marijuana is, in fact, a massive detriment to young people all across America.
		I've held this view pretty consistently for a couple of decades because it seemed to me that all of the talk about how marijuana was completely harmless, non-addictive, and all the rest of it was just not borne out by the science.
		Nor did it seem to me to be borne out by the anecdotal evidence, considering that I know a number of young people who have essentially gotten addicted to pot, especially because the pot strains that are currently available have much higher THC content than the pot strains, even when I was a teenager.
		The president, though, knows that it is a popular idea to reclassify marijuana because the sort of myth-making around the non-harmfulness of marijuana has become so strong.
		The order would reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I drug, which the DEA defines as having no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse, to a Schedule III drug, which the DEA defines as having a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.
		I do not see the evidence that marijuana has a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.
		That reclassification could have implications for research of marijuana or use for medical purposes.
		President Trump said that he was considering reclassification very strongly.
		He said, we're considering that because a lot of people want to see it.
		The reclassification because it leads to tremendous amounts of research that can't be done unless you reclassify it.
		So we're looking at that very strongly.
		Okay, if we really believe that reclassification of marijuana in order to do research on marijuana is the thing, I am skeptical that that is what this is about.
		I've yet to see a major medical issue other than perhaps stem cell research that has broken into the public view with regard to should we do more research on it or not.
		Certainly not with regard to marijuana.
		A year ago, President Trump had suggested his return to the White House would usher in a new era for marijuana, making it easier for adults to access safe products and giving states greater leeway to pursue legalization.
		He had started talking about this in 2024, of course, when he was running for reelection.
		This seems to me a bad move.
		According to the Calci Markets, it is now a near certainty that there will be a rescheduling of marijuana before 2028.
		Unlikely, according to the Calci Markets, their sponsor of the show, that marijuana will be rescheduled this year.
		But before the end of 2026, 82% shot in the prediction markets.
		Before 2028, 89% shot in the prediction.
		That's what we need.
		We mean more young people enervated by pot.
		I can't see how that would go wrong in any possible way.
		And the sort of short-term thinking, temporary payoffs to motivated constituencies.
		Well, I mean, there is a downside, which is that people high on pot don't tend to vote in massive numbers.
	Well, at the same time, over in Los Angeles, we do have news with regard to the Rob Reiner and Michelle Singer-Reiner murders at the hands, allegedly, of their son, Nick.
	Prosecutors have now charged Nick Reiner with two counts of first-degree murder.
	He also faces a special allegation of using a dangerous and deadly weapon, a knife.
	Here's the Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hockman talking about it.
unidentified		Today, I'm here to announce that our office will be filing charges against Nick Reiner, who is accused of killing his parents, actor-director Rob Reiner, and photographer-producer Michelle Singer-Reiner.
		These charges will be two counts of first-degree murder with the special circumstance of multiple murders.
		He also faces a special allegation that he personally used a dangerous and deadly weapon, that being a knife.
		These charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole or the death penalty.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So, obviously, this person should go to prison for life, but we also have so many red flags.
		And this, again, I think that the biggest takeaway for an enormous number of Americans is if you have members of your family who are in serious need of professional help, do not gloss it over out of love for your family members.
		That sort of empathy leads to terrible consequences in too many cases.
		Apparently, Reiner's troubled son, Nick, reportedly stormed off in a huff, according to the New York Post, after a tiff with comedy heavyweight Bill Hayter at Conan O'Brien's Christmas party, which preceded the murder by not very long.
		Nick, who was accused of slaughtering his filmmaker's dad and mom in their Brentwood home sometime between Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, interrupted Hayter at the holiday bash, according to an eyewitness.
		When the SNL alum told Nick, he was in the middle of a private conversation.
		The source said Nick just stood there and stared before storming off.
		The unsettling interaction concerned other partygoers.
		Apparently, he was not invited, but his parents tried to bring him, and the trio got into a very loud argument, possibly because Nick was back on drugs and refusing yet another go at treatment.
		So terrible, terrible story on every front possible.
		Just a horrifying story.
		Meanwhile, we still don't know who the shooter is in the Brown University case.
		There have been a lot of rumors online.
		I don't bring you rumors.
		So I'm going to wait until we actually have some confirmation from authorities as to who they believe committed this heinous act of violence.
		The police did release new videos of the suspected gunman responsible for Saturday's shooting at Brown University as the investigation entered a fourth day, according to the Wall Street Journal.
		The videos show a light-skinned man wearing dark clothing, a medical mask, beanie, and at times gloves and a crossbody bag.
		The man is seen pacing, walking, and running through residential streets near Brown in the two hours before the attack.
		Apparently, there's also footage of the potential suspect walking past a police cruiser with its lights on after the shooting.
		Providence Police Department Chief Oscar Perez said, we believe he was actually casing out this area to commit the crime.
		Now, there are cameras everywhere, but apparently no cameras in the area that he was.
		So that is why they're having a tough time identifying him, supposedly.
		Again, there are rumors that they've already identified him, but they've not released it yet.
		Here was the police chief asking the public for help in identifying the shooter.
unidentified		And the reason we have shown these videos, there's a purpose, right?
		So as you can see, they're enhanced photos, there's enhanced video footage.
		And so we're asking the public to ensure that they can see them.
		They can see here that you want to follow the body movements, the way the person moved their arms, the body posture, the way they carry their weight.
		I think those are important movement patterns that may help you identify this individual, which is extremely important.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		There's some suspicion that the targets of the shooting had to do with Jewishness.
		The professor who is leading this particular study group was the head of the Judaic Studies program over at Brown University.
		Whether or not this is linked to another murder that happened apparently in Brookline near Boston is unclear.
		According to the Jerusalem Post, Nunal Lorero, a nuclear scientist at MIT, was shot dead inside his home in the town of Brookline near Boston.
		He was found critically wounded by gunfire inside his residence and was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead in the early morning hours.
		The circumstances surrounding the shooting are still being examined.
		There's no possible suspect yet.
		There's no possible motive yet.
		A neighbor said that he heard three loud bangs.
		It appears to be a targeted killing.
		Various Jewish organizations have speculated online that the professor was targeted for his political affiliations as a pro-Israel advocate.
		Again, unclear whether that is the case or not.
		Over in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a 35-year-old Jewish man was stabbed on Kingston Avenue with the attacker reportedly shouting F these Jews and saying it would be all right if the Holocaust happened today.
		So it's been an interesting Hanukkah for the Jewish community globally.
		We'll bring you the latest on all of this.
		One of the fascinating aspects of so many of these incidents is that even when you know the motive full scale, there's still an attempt by legacy media to cover it up.
		This is particularly true when the motive happens to be radical Islam.
		Reporter Linda Kinkade reporting on the Bondi Beach shooting over in Sydney, Australia, she points out there were ISIS flags in the car of the shooters.
unidentified		Authorities are now investigating a possible link with extremists.
		They found Dash Can footage that showed an ISIS flag taped to the window of the suspect's car.
		Inside that car, there were also unexploded devices and another two homemade ISIS flags.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, at the same exact time that this is being reported, and we all know that this is a radical Islamic terror attack, ABC News' faith Abube downplayed the extremist motive entirely.
unidentified		As for the suspect, authorities say one of them was a licensed gun owner with six firearms, but they have not yet revealed a motive.
unidentified		Guys, we'll find that out.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I'm sorry.
		Like, this is just bad reporting.
		It's just bad reporting.
		Democrats are focused for all of their time and effort on taking your gun.
		So radical Muslims shoot up Jews in Sydney.
		Time to take your guns.
		Here is Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, who has presided over mass Muslim migration into Minnesota, which has resulted, among other things, in over a billion dollars in fraud.
		Here he is saying that it is BS that assault weapons being banned would somehow encroach upon our constitutional freedoms.
tim walz ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
tim walz ▲ ● ▼		Do you really think limiting them to less than 100 bullets is going to do anything?
unidentified		Yes.
tim walz ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it is.
		Yes, it is going to save lives.
		Just like the extreme risk protection orders, which I can pull quotes from many of these folks who said, this will do nothing.
		This will not protect lives.
		This will take away our freedoms.
		It's time to start reporting that that is all bullshit.
		It does do something.
		It does make a difference.
		And to stand here and have to look in the eyes of parents who lost their little ones, shame on them.
		And shame on us if we don't get this done.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Again, amazing that after there is a shooting at Brown University, motive unknown, and a shooting in Bondi Beach, motive very much known, the solution is for you to give up your AR-15, apparently.
		President Trump has a better solution.
		That would be to expand his travel ban to a wide variety of radicalized Muslim countries.
		The Trump administration has now instituted, according to Axios, full restrictions and entry limitations against Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan, and Syria, as well as people with travel documents issued by the Palestinian Authority.
		The White House said in an announcement, many of the restricted countries suffer from widespread corruption, fraudulent or unreliable civil documents and criminal records, and non-existent birth registration systems systematically preventing accurate vetting.
		Makes some sense, especially given the problems that we have had with vetting the immigrants coming to the United States.
		Joining me on the line is Cabot Phillips, the Morning Wire contributor.
		And he has a brand new report on something called Manhattan Project 2.0.
		Kavot, thanks so much for the time.
		I appreciate it.
cabot phillips ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely, Ben.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So why don't you tell me about Manhattan Project 2.0?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		What is this?
cabot phillips ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So over the last few years, as AI has burst on the scene nationwide, most of the development has actually been happening in the private sector in Silicon Valley companies we all know, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google.
		But the Trump administration is really big that this whole thing is a national security issue, similar to the nuclear arms race or the space race in the 50s and 60s.
		And they're adamant that, hey, if we fall behind here to China, to Russia, you know, any other country, it's going to have the same impact as if we had not been the first to create nuclear weapons in the 1940s.
		So they're calling this the New Manhattan Project basically to create this sense of urgency that, hey, we cannot let other countries get ahead of us here.
		So Trump wants the federal government to play a big role in helping these private sector companies get ahead, if nothing else, for national security.
		So he signed a number of executive orders.
		He's pushed billions, if not trillions of dollars into these industries over the next decade.
		And this most recent executive order that he signed last month, they're calling it the Genesis mission.
		It's going to connect 40,000 scientists at 17 nationwide labs.
		These are national labs.
		And it's also directing those national labs to create one single coordinated AI platform.
		I talked to a number of AI scientists for this mini documentary, and a lot of them said a big issue that they've been having is they're all working on separate platforms.
		So they might have similar data, but they're not actually collaborating here because they're all on separate platforms.
		So Trump administration is trying to create one centralized place for all this research to take place.
		Now, one of the biggest needs for the new AI software that's being developed is data.
		These projects require huge amounts of data to train their software on real-world applications.
		And the executive order is saying, hey, the government, if nothing else, has plenty of data.
		So they're going to provide these private companies access for the first time to huge government databases on everything from energy grids, weather patterns, geological surveys, healthcare, you name it.
		And then from there, the AI companies are being directed to use that data to focus their AI machines on what the government is calling challenges of national importance.
		That includes advanced manufacturing, robotics, biotechnology, and then nuclear fission.
		So basically, the Trump administration is telling the private sector, we have the data, we have the infrastructure and the money.
		You guys have the technology and the engineers.
		Let's work together here.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Has there been any blowback as far as the government involvement in the AI sector?
		Obviously, it's politically pretty volatile because there are a lot of major AI companies right now that are all competing with one another.
		And as soon as the government gets involved in the private sector, even though this is the private sector kind of helping out a government mission, you're going to run into some obstacles.
		What's the blowback been like?
cabot phillips ▲ ● ▼		It's interesting.
		The blowback has been more from the smaller and newer AI companies.
		So a lot of the bigger companies, for example, for the documentary, I interviewed Greg Brockman.
		He's the co-founder of OpenAI, probably the most influential one in the space.
		He was all for this.
		He said, hey, this is great.
		There's been this Wild West scenario for AI for years where no one has really known what government regulation was going to look like.
		And so, this regulation will actually be a good thing because we now know the set of rules we're playing with.
		There's more government support.
		But there are smaller emerging AI companies that say, yeah, of course, the big guys are fine with this because they have huge legal teams that can navigate these new regulations.
		They have a lot more money.
		They have a lot more lobbying influence and they have a lot more access to the White House.
		And so, of course, the big boys want this because it might stifle competition.
		That has been the big rub.
		And then the other part of this has been Trump trying to streamline AI regulations at the state level.
		So we know that there are a number of states, especially red states, that are concerned about these AI data centers popping up in their states for potential health reasons.
		And they're also concerned about what the implications are of having all this software at the state level for privacy, things of that nature.
		The Trump administration, they do not want this patchwork type of regulations for AI.
		So they've issued a new executive order basically giving Attorney General Bondi the right to overrule state-level regulations on AI.
		And they're now threatening these states, saying if you guys pass AI regulations that they said would enact onerous AI laws, whatever that means, then we can restrict federal funding and federal broadband grants to your states.
		So Trump is trying to keep each state from having their own regulations.
		He's saying if you have 50 different regulations in 50 different states, the U.S. will not have AI innovation.
		And so I think that is the other element of this where you're going to see a lot of back and forth tug of war, especially on the right, because a lot of MAGA folks are not happy about that executive order from the president.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's a fascinating controversy and a fascinating move by the Trump administration, recognizing a very real threat in the possible Chinese domination of AI.
		That's Cabot Phillips, Morning Wire contributor.
		You can go check out Morning Wire every day here at Daily Wire Plus.
		Cabot, appreciate the time.
cabot phillips ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		All righty, coming up for our subscribers, the New York Times has a long expose on just where Jeffrey Epstein got his money.
		It's pretty fascinating.
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tom sharp ▲ ● ▼		Oh, this is an illusion.
unidentified		An echo of a voice that has died.
unidentified		And soon that echo will cease.
tom sharp ▲ ● ▼		They say that Merlin is mad.
		They say he was a king in Dovid.
		The son of a princess of lost Atlantis.
		They say the future and the past are known to him.
		Let 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.
unidentified		The Merlin died long before you and I were born.
tom sharp ▲ ● ▼		Merlin Emirus has returned to the land of the living.
unidentified		Vortigan is gone.
		Rum is gone.
		The Saxon is here.
tom sharp ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		He would 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!
		You stand as one.
tom sharp ▲ ● ▼		Great darkness is falling upon this land.
unidentified		These brothers are our only hope to stand against it.
		Not our only hope.
		Esse 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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