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Jan. 20, 2026 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:51
The Left Says Opposing Illegal Immigration Is WHITE SUPREMACY
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New Civil Rights Movement? 00:13:47
The left is now claiming that policing illegal immigration, well, that is basically like white supremacy.
Plus, we bring you the latest on whether the United States is going to grab Greenland.
Why exactly are we focusing there so much?
We'll get to all of that first.
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Well, yesterday, of course, was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a day celebrating the legacy of a man who is famous in the United States for saying that we ought to judge people based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
Because so many Democrats were deeply involved in the civil rights movement here, I speak mostly about LBJ and some Northern Democrats, because, of course, the story of the Civil Rights Act is one of Southern Democrats largely opposing the civil rights movement.
All of the main actors opposing the civil rights movement were, in fact, Southern Democrats.
Despite that, Democrats have been searching ever since the Civil Rights Movement for the next civil rights movement.
And we've seen many iterations of this over the course of the subsequent decades.
We saw a quasi-civil rights movement, for example, pushed by the left with regard to gender and sexuality, the idea that women had to be freed from the predations of the patriarchy the same way that black people required freeing from the predations of Jim Crow.
That, of course, was a bad analogy.
And then we heard the same thing with regard to LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign, that this was the new civil rights movement.
Well, now Democrats seem to have hit upon the idea that the new civil rights movement is, in fact, illegal immigration, that illegal immigrants must be allowed to stay in the United States, and that enforcement of the law with regard to illegal immigration is itself a form of white supremacy.
The reason that Democrats are stretching on this one is because in other areas, they're sort of running out of examples of widespread American racism, like true policy-driven American racism.
They're running out of those examples.
The demand is higher than the supply.
So, just to take a quick example, Eric Holder, the former Attorney General of the United States on Martin Luther King Day, suggested that the Voting Rights Act is under deep and abiding threat.
And not only that, that there is the threat that America was about to be re-segregated by the Trump administration.
We are experiencing unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering attempts to design to disproportionately disenfranchise black and brown voters as the president desperately clings to power like an insecure dictator.
There is a concerted effort to re-segregate America.
Okay, there is not, in fact, a concerted effort to resegregate America, and no one who is sentient in America believes that there is.
No one is worried that black Americans are now going to be forced to drink out of different water fountains or be forced to go to different schools or that we are going to re-segregate restaurants or anything like that.
This is a wild overstatement.
The reality is that the story of the post-Jim Crow racial situation in America was one of increasing good relations between the races.
And this was true all the way up to 2013 by the polling data.
A vast majority of both black Americans and white Americans up until about 2013 thought that American race relations were improving steadily and that they had improved markedly since the 1960s.
And then, of course, we slipped into the BLM era and the late stages of the Obama presidency.
And that sort of sunk Americans' perceptions of race relations.
But that does not suggest in reality that black Americans are being held underfoot by white Americans, that white supremacy is really what rules the roost these days.
So Democrats are looking for their new civil rights movement because if, in fact, you want to make a moral case for heavy government involvement in something, well, you can make a very good moral case for heavy government involvement to prevent unjustifiable discrimination.
Right?
You can.
That case exists.
Now, if you go back to the 1960s and you want to relitigate the effects of the Civil Rights Act and talk about the fact that the Civil Rights Act in certain areas stepped on constitutional norms, that's a case made by Christopher Caldwell.
I think that case can be made.
But if you want to make the case that today black Americans are victims of a white supremacist system, that is a very difficult case to make.
And so Democrats need another excuse for why they ought to be in charge, why they have the moral high ground.
And that's a hard case to make.
Again, the Democratic Party has lost the moral high ground on a wide variety of issues.
The Democratic Party has become not only the abortion on demand party, but the celebrate your abortion party.
The Democratic Party has become a party that cannot exactly explain to you why a woman isn't a man and a man isn't a woman.
The Democratic Party has become the party of full-scale open borders.
And so now they are going to attempt to cram the illegal immigration issue into the missized hole that is the civil rights discussion.
You could see this all throughout yesterday.
Just tons of discussion about the idea that ICE was actually a new white supremacist force in America, cracking down on illegal immigrants on the basis of race.
So, for example, Jennifer Welch, who for some odd reason has now become the podcast pro.
So, it was very funny.
You remember that time that Democrats were looking for their own Joe Rogan?
You remember this?
They said that they somehow they couldn't speak to young males.
And so they needed their own version of Joe Rogan.
Well, what they came up with was a middle-aged white liberal lady who tends to screech at you in terms of her rhetorical radicalism.
And here she was over MLK Day suggesting that the administration is filled with white supremacists because they wish to enforce the law into poor people who are in the country illegally.
So that is one of those white evangelical churches that turn out to vote for Donald Trump 80 plus percent of that sect of Christianity.
These are the don't tread on me, folks.
These are the people who feel like America is for Americans and Americans only.
These are white nationalists.
And the DOJ got their panties in a wad because these protesters went straight to them and addressed their hypocrisy.
You, a gay black journalist, are, I mean, prime bait for them to drum up these charges.
But so that's one issue.
You went right into the most entitled white nationalists there are, and they feel that ICE is 100% justified.
Okay, so I'm just going to point out this is insane.
What she is talking about here is, as we played on the show a couple of days ago, a situation in which anti-ICE protesters descended upon a church where they were claiming that the pastor was some sort of ICE agent, and they proceeded to disrupt the services, which is in all likelihood a violation of federal law, a violation of the so-called FACE Act.
On Sunday, Don Lemon, this is the person she's talking to in that clip, entered the city's church during a service along with anti-ICE agitators, according to Fox News, and began filming, telling viewers the freedom to protest is what the First Amendment is all about.
Now, the reality is that you do not actually have the First Amendment right to walk into private property and just start protesting.
That's not a real thing.
You can't just walk into a church and start disrupting its services.
Not a federal right by any stretch of the imagination.
And so her excuse for this is that it's the new civil rights movement.
That the real reason why people are angry at Don Lemon for having done that is because he's black.
And the real reason that this church deserved it is because they're a white supremacist church.
Now, does she have any proof that the church is a white supremacist church?
Is there any proof of that whatsoever?
The answer, of course, is no.
She has no proof of that whatsoever.
But it's enough to say that they are apparently right-tinged, and this makes them white supremacists.
Now, again, when you watch that film, it looks as though there are a bunch of people there, not all of whom are white.
City's church lists eight pastors of varying roles, including David Easterwood, who shares the same name as the acting director of ICE St. Paul office.
The fact that this is now considered, according to Jennifer Welch, a form of white supremacy, to say you can't disrupt services or to support deporting criminal illegal immigrants is insane.
But it's part and parcel, again, of a broader, self-referential, self-righteous program on the part of Democrats to claim that whatever they are doing is the political corollary of what was happening in the 1960s in Selma, which is really quite pathetic.
Jennifer Welch went on, by the way, to attack what she called MAGA men like Jesse Waters, which, again, this is the way you're going to win over dudes in the next election cycle is somebody like Jennifer Welch.
Good luck to you, Democrats.
We have to go after these MAGA men.
One example would be Jesse Waters.
This man talks incessantly about masculinity.
Joe Biden is not masculine because he sucks on soup.
What kind of man sucks on a straw?
He goes on and on and on so much about the idealized man.
And that's a part of fascism, this, you know, propelling this form of toxic masculinity.
Why are you so obsessed with men, Jesse Waters?
What's all that about?
Okay, so he is a fascist, apparently.
Jesse Waters is a fascist, and this church is filled with white supremacists.
And the casual way that Democrats throw this kind of language around is pretty astonishing.
It really is.
Jesse Waters is a fascist because he made fun of Joe Biden for not being masculine enough.
So he's now a fascist.
And if you, again, are a church-going person who believes that illegal immigrants ought to generally be deported and that criminal, illegal immigrants in particular ought to be deported, this makes you a white supremacist.
Don Lemon was doing the same routine.
Don Lemon called the parishioners white supremacists himself.
Here was Don Lemon after having, again, it's hard to believe he wasn't part of this actual protest itself, that he wasn't part of the organizing of the protest.
I mean, there's supplementary footage showing him kissing some of the organizers and all the rest of this.
Here was Don Lemon talking with Jennifer Welch.
And I think people who are, you know, in religious groups like that, it's not the type of Christianity that I practice, but I think that they're entitled and that that entitlement comes from a supremacy, a white supremacy.
And they think that this country was built for them, that it is a Christian country when actually we left England because we wanted religious freedom.
It's religious freedom, but only if you're a Christian and only if you're a white male, pretty much.
And so, yeah, absolutely 100%.
But it's an intimidation tactic.
And, you know, I said, I don't understand how I become the face of it when I was a journalist.
I do understand that I'm the biggest name there.
And I'm also, as I was on with my producers this morning, you know, you and Kylie talk all the time.
My producers were saying, I said, how did I become the face of this?
And my producer said, Don, you're a gay black man in America.
Oh, give me a break.
Give me a break.
He's a gay black man in America, and that's why he's the face of this.
He's the face of it because he literally showed up in the middle of a protest that people really didn't know much about prior.
And he just happened to be there.
And then he ended up grilling the pastor, suggesting he was a bad Christian for doing what it is that he was doing, apparently.
And now he's out there suggesting the congregation is filled with white supremacists for no reason.
I mean, that would be the reason that you're the center of the story, Don Lemon.
By the way, Nicki Minaj came out and suggested that Don Lemon had done something wrong.
Maybe he might ought to be arrested.
And Tom Lemon then came back at Nikki Minaj.
I guess she's a white supremacist too, the black lady.
And he said that she needs to sit the F down.
Why are you supporting this homophobic, bigot, bigoted, ignorant woman?
You should not be supporting her.
Nikki Minaj, this is clearly out of her depth.
She doesn't understand politics.
She doesn't understand journalism.
And I'm not surprised that she is weighing in on something that is beyond her capacity.
What I will say to her is because she put a doll, I think she put the Chucky doll in there.
A better symbol that should have been represented in that picture is a pick-me doll because Nikki Minaj is a pick-me.
She will do anything that is expedient for her politically.
And again, she's ignorant.
She doesn't know what she's talking about.
She's always weighing in on things that she doesn't know about.
Nikki Minaj should just sit the down.
Okay, so again, he's apparently allowed to say that about a black woman, but if somebody says that about Don Lemon, it's because he's gay and black.
This is the game.
This is the game.
And it's a really stupid game.
And the prize that is won is more demonstrations, more chaos.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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I said yesterday on the show that the Trump administration with some of these ICE operations risks the ire of Americans if the images get ugly.
But I also said that if Democrats really continue to up the ante, if they continue to get more and more chaotic, the backlash to Democrats will be stronger than the backlash to ICE.
If they end up in abolish ICE territory, that is terrible territory to be in.
And it seems like Democrats are courting this sort of electoral disaster and political disaster.
Yesterday, anti-ICE demonstrators occupied the local target.
What the hell does the target have to do with illegal immigration and ice?
They're just trying to sell t-shirts, man.
Like, what are you doing at the Target?
What the hell?
We are one.
We won't stop fighting.
Love is why we are one.
We won't stop fighting.
We won't stop.
You're not fighting.
You're sitting in a target, my dude.
That's beautiful.
I mean, that's talent right there.
They won't stop fighting till ICE is gone.
They're literally sitting in a target, like in the makeup section of a Target.
And this is apparently going to get ICE removed from the streets of Minneapolis, sitting in a Target.
Was Target about to be raided by ICE?
Did I miss something here?
And also, it seems like all you're doing is really obstructing mothers from being able to buy the orange juice that they require for their children.
You're in a target, people.
Like, this is a Wendy's, Madam.
What are you doing?
What are you like, this is the way you think that you're going to win on an immajestic level, truly?
Joining us on the line to discuss what's going on in Minneapolis is, of course, Mary Margaret Olahan.
She's our Daily Wire White House correspondent.
Mary Margaret, thanks so much for the time.
Thanks, Ben.
Great to be here.
So you recently penned a piece talking about a Minnesota prosecutor's aide who ended up as part of this church service that was disrupted.
Can you give us some more details on that?
Yeah.
So Luke Roziak with Daily Wire has done a really good job finding a lot of the details on this.
Basically, we keep hearing all these stories that, you know, these protesters are grassroots and they're very organically funded.
Well, no, in this case, we found out that this prosecutor has ties to the protests and is literally going a family member, send a family member to these protests and is engaged with all of these activities in the church itself.
And so, Ben, something that I always think of is, you know, we recently saw this attack at the church where a trans-identifying shooter went into this church in Minneapolis, actually, and shot children as they were worshiping.
And it is not a thing to be taken lightly to be going into a church and disrupting, let alone over a political protest like this.
So incredibly disturbing, incredibly damaging for all these people who are there.
It's something that I think about and I'm sure you think about every time we're in a house of worship as we're worshiping God and hoping that everyone stays safe in this place that is supposed to be peaceful and safe.
And so in this story that Luke wrote, I thought it was really fascinating how these protesters are literally being exposed for not being organic and they're being accompanied by lawmakers, people affiliated with lawmakers, people affiliated with the prosecutors, unlike what the media is trying to say about them.
I mean, it really is Astroturf and it really is astonishing.
Well, I would also be remiss, Mary Margaret, if I did not ask you about a conversation that you had with the president of the United States on another topic, actually, on Friday night.
So the president's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, and again, I still maintain that the single best tweet that Donald Trump ever wrote, and there's a long list of them, is the tweet where he suggested if you ever need a great lawyer, may I recommend not hiring Michael Cohen?
That apparently Michael Cohen recently came out and suggested that he was pressured and coerced to only provide information and testimony that would satisfy the government's desire to build cases to secure a judgment and conviction against President Trump.
That's something that he put up on his Substack post.
And you ended up on the phone talking with the president about all of this.
What did he have to say?
Yeah, so we got a tip ahead of time that that Substack post was coming.
So, you know, we wrote that story quickly.
We were ready to go.
I wanted to make sure I understood it.
And then I circled up with Brent Sherrow, our editor-in-chief, and we thought we should call the president about this and see what he has to say.
So I did call him, and he told me that it was an incredibly corrupt investigation.
He said the story was a really big story, and I thought it was kind of funny.
He was like, Is that good, darling?
You got everything you need?
I was like, Yes, Mr. President, thank you.
And I'm going to have to check in with him the next time we have another story because he's so savvy with the media.
He loves to hop on the phone with them.
And, you know, he's always said that Michael Cohen was a corrupt lawyer.
He's always had plenty of critical things to say about him.
And that story in particular really took off that night because this is something the president and his team have been saying for a long time.
And Michael Cohen finally admitting that he was pressured and coerced after not admitting to that after all this time was just too much for the president to resist.
This is just one of his favorite stories to talk about.
And now Michael Cohen's out here admitting it.
Mary Margaret, it is kind of an astonishing thing that you can just pick up the phone and call the president.
He picks up and just gives you a comment on things.
Pretty wild times out there.
Well, that is our White House correspondent over at Daily Wire, Mary Margaret Olihan.
Mary Margaret, thanks so much for the time.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Ben.
Now, obviously, this is bleeding up into the politics of the Democratic Party.
We've mentioned the fact that pretty much every Democratic leader now feels the necessity to pretend that something horrifying is happening when ICE goes and does its baseline job.
Well, that translates over to lack of actual law enforcement capacity to do what it needs to do.
The DHS assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, she said, you know, there are like hundreds and hundreds, over a thousand arrest detainers not being honored at this point.
But if you look at who is in those jails, currently sitting in those jails, Bill, 1,370 criminal illegal aliens in Minneapolis' custody.
Murders.
Those people should serve their time and then they should be turned over to ICE.
We have not seen that.
We've seen no cooperation.
We have not been allowed or have those detainers be honored.
That is exactly what we're asking for today.
Mayor Walls and excuse me, Governor Walls and Mayor Fry should come out today and agree to that.
They should also agree to allowing their local law enforcement officers to give our law enforcement officers backup.
Now, again, what are Democrats doing here?
Like this is their winning strategy.
There is a winning strategy here for Democrats on this issue, and that is, you know, we agree that the law must be enforced, but not this way.
But that's not what they're doing.
Instead, they're sitting around at the local target or they're invading churches.
And then they are calling churches places of white supremacy for no reason at all.
Like none of this makes any sense.
We do have a reporter on the ground in Minneapolis who has been actually traveling with ICE, did a ride along with ICE.
Here is some of the trailer for Jenny's mini doc where she rode along with ICE agents in Minneapolis.
We are running a tail to Silver Volvo.
These numbers keep increasing, right?
Like over 1,000% increases in assaults against us.
Like death threats have increased like 8,000%.
I really can't even fathom those numbers.
Okay.
How many hours?
Okay.
Oscar?
We're forever back here.
Hey, someone hit the moment.
We're still getting followed in that Volkswagen.
Who do you think ICE is arresting?
Innocent citizens.
Joining me on the line to discuss is Jenny Terror.
She's our Daily Wire immigration reporter.
Jenny, thanks so much for the time.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
So let's just begin with the obvious.
What was your experience like during this ICE ride along?
It's obviously a contentious time.
Absolutely.
I mean, like you said, it's a contentious time.
And we really wanted to go into the belly of the beast into Minneapolis and show things from the ICE officers' perspective.
They're really facing the brunt of this.
These rioters, these agitators who are trying to get into their way and obstruct their arrests.
So they're going out there.
And from what we saw, they're facing hurdles every step of the way as they're trying to make an arrest.
So the second we rolled out of the ICE office there, there was someone that they tagged as a spotter watching the car, talking to other people.
I mean, it seems very coordinated because once we rolled up to any apartment house, anywhere where the target was known to be, the illegal immigrant target, there was already dozens of rioters there with whistles, honking their horns, yelling at the agents, saying really nasty things, and then trying to really get in their way.
Those ICE officers are there to arrest illegal immigrants.
The ones who we were going after that day had rap sheets.
I mean, one of them was even let go by sanctuary authorities there.
They had asked them to let them hand them over to ICE from the local jails, and they just flouted the ICE detainer in that case.
That guy ended up back on the streets, and now ICE has gone multiple times to try to arrest these people because those agitators are getting in the way.
At the same time, they're not really stopping.
They want to continue to go after these people, but they're definitely up against some really organized chaos.
And Jenny, you mentioned the people they're going after and their rap sheets.
The broad-scale perception by a lot of Americans, the polling data shows, is that ICE is not focusing on criminal illegal immigrants.
What are you seeing on the ground when you're talking with ICE agents?
What kind of targets is ICE focusing in on here?
Right.
So the ones that we were focused on that day had drug charges, had pretty violent crimes that they'd committed, assaults.
These were people that normally, and your listeners, I'm sure, would want to get off the streets, wouldn't want in their neighborhoods.
There's this narrative going around right now is that ICE is going after targeting U.S. citizens.
They don't want to be arresting U.S. citizens, but they do have authority to go after them if they're trying to impede their arrests that they're trying to make of these people.
And what we saw on our ride along was exactly that: someone actually got hit in our vehicle convoy because we went with multiple cars with multiple officers because they need added protection from each other now because of what they're up against.
So agitators were blocking the roads.
This was after that fatal shooting.
So these agitators haven't learned their lesson.
They're just doubling down.
They're trying to get in the way, even more so now.
We had to pull over at one point because we thought some of our vehicles had had their tires slashed because that's a very normal occurrence now.
So they're not only having to calculate the risks of going out and catching someone maybe in their element who's a violent, hardened criminal, but they're also up against these organized agitators who are communicating with each other somewhere on radios, following us in their cars, talking to other people in their groups.
We know that these ICE watch groups are extremely savvy and communicate really well online and have trainings that they've held.
So it's a really scary time for ICE right now.
So Jenny, obviously you're sitting with ICE agents while they're attempting to do their job.
What is the sentiment among the ICE agents right now who really are under assault by both the media and by, in some cases, literally people on the streets?
It's interesting because obviously they know what they're signing up for.
This is a law enforcement job.
They know that they're going to face hurdles.
They're going to face threats.
But right now, these threats and these assaults up against them are up exponentially.
We've never seen anything like this before.
I mean, death threats are up like 8,000%.
That's just unheard of.
So they're still doing the job.
It's pretty amazing because they're keeping their heads down.
They're trying to really de-escalate these situations so that they don't end up becoming part of these statistics.
They don't want more assaults.
They don't want to be using lethal force.
They want to give orders verbally first, which is what we saw, for people that were blocking them in traffic, saying, please move out of the way, telling them multiple times before they needed to escalate, which thankfully they didn't need to, but they did, you know, look to pursue an arrest against the person who had hit them that day.
But they are really, you know, trying to just continue to do the jobs because they're dedicated to that goal of getting these millions of illegal immigrants that were led into the country, many who have committed crimes out.
And they want to clean up the mess also of the sanctuary cities.
You know, you mentioned the kinds of resistance people are facing on the streets and enforcing the law.
Obviously, the president has considered the possibility of using the Insurrection Act to deal with this sort of activity on the streets.
Given what you've seen, do you think that it would rise to the level of the president calling in further federal forces here?
Well, it certainly seems like a ticking time bomb there.
And we saw just after the first fatal shooting, just a couple weeks ago, that another one did happen because the illegal immigrant targets in that case were so brazen and so emboldened by what's going on that they wanted to attack law enforcement, that they wanted to go after them and assault them.
Mexican Consulate Expansion 00:15:21
They felt like they could operate with impunity there.
And the environment is very much like that because you have people around you during these arrests who are supporting those illegal immigrants.
So it's almost like they have cheering squads for them.
And this is only getting more and more organized, larger in numbers.
I mean, we saw what happened in that church.
That wasn't even involving an arrest.
That was just involving allegations that a pastor was part of ICE.
So these people are very motivated and are doing everything they can to get out there.
Well, again, amazing reporting.
You can see it all in the mini doc that we are releasing over at Daily Wire Plus from Jenny Taylor.
She is, of course, our Daily Wire immigration reporter.
Jenny, thanks so much for the time and stay safe out there.
Thank you.
Well, if you're wondering what's going on with this sort of immigration snafu for the United States, one factor here, one major factor when it comes to immigration is the fact that there are foreign countries taking advantage of our systems.
It's one of the reasons why it's quite important that the Trump administration is doing what it's doing.
There is a book that is out right now, big bestseller from Peter Schweitzer, all about this.
Peter joins us on the line.
His new book is titled The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon.
Peter, thanks so much for the time.
Really appreciate it.
Oh, glad to be with you, Ben, as always.
Thanks for having me.
So, obviously, immigration is the number one issue in the country right now.
The president of the United States has directed ICE to go after criminally legal immigrants and to broad scale go after a wide swath of illegal immigrants and deport them.
But a huge number of Americans probably don't understand how foreign powers have actually activated our immigration programs against us.
So your book is really about this, about how our immigration systems have been turned against us.
We think of ourselves as the shining city on the hill, as the country of the Statue of Liberty.
Bring us your tired and your poor and your huddled masses.
You're going to be free.
And people take advantage of that.
So explain exactly how that's happening.
Yeah, you know, I'm the son of immigrants.
I think immigration is great.
The problem is it's not the immigration of 100 years ago or even 50 years ago.
It's been weaponized by foreign governments.
So what do I mean?
I talk in the book about China.
I talk about Mexico.
I talk about what the Muslim Brotherhood, what they're doing.
Let's just take a look at Mexico.
I quote extensively in the book from Mexican leaders, including President Scheinbaum, that they view mass migration to the United States as a reconquista, which sounds like a crazy theory, but they talk about it repeatedly, and they also back it up.
They create an infrastructure in the United States that allows them to activate Mexican and Mexican Americans for political benefits.
So what does that mean?
Look at the consulate infrastructure.
The UK and China have six and seven, respectively, consulates in the United States.
Mexico has 53.
And as I lay out in the book, consular officials, these are Mexican diplomats in the United States, Ben, are engaged in not only organizing violent anti-ICE protests and other political activity, they're also actively trying to elect Democrats and defeat Republicans.
You have Mexican diplomats involved in political activity inside the United States.
That's a clear example, and I have lots of details.
China has a different methodology.
So does the Muslim Brotherhood.
But they see this as an opportunity to effectively wage war on the United States by changing us through mass migration and by political direct action within our borders.
So I want to go through each one of those sources in a moment, Mexico and China and the Muslim Brotherhood, the ones that you just mentioned.
Let's start with Mexico.
You talk about Reconquista.
I mean, is the actual goal that they are going to be able to take back American territory, or is this really about flooding America's borders and ensuring, for example, that jobs move to Mexico, the remittances move back to Mexico?
What is their actual hard-nosed goal here?
Well, what they say, Ben, explicitly, and I have dozens of quotes in the book, is that they want to exert sovereignty over portions of the United States that they say were stolen from them in the 19th century at the U.S.-Mexican war.
So you have prominent, powerful senators that sit on the National Defense Committee that says we are taking it back and mass migration is the way of doing it.
One of Scheinbaum's top aides in December of 2024 said, and I quote, there are 39.9 million Mexicans in the United States.
We are quietly reconquering the territory that was taken from us, end quote.
Now, does that mean they think California and Texas are actually going to become Mexican states?
Maybe, but I think what they really mean and what there's plenty of evidence for is they start exerting sovereign control on territories inside the United States.
And I'll give you a very clear, direct answer, Ben.
A lot of people don't realize this.
There are Mexican senators and members of their chambers of deputy, their parliament, who sit in the United States, live in the United States, and their job is to represent Mexicans living inside the United States inside the Mexican government.
That's literally what they do, which is a massive violation of our sovereignty.
One of those, Senator Ruiz, she sits in the Mexican Senate.
She lives in Arizona, has actually introduced legislation to turn California into the 33rd state of Mexico.
But more importantly, these elected officials, Ben, are not only representing Mexico's interests in the United States, I have numerous examples of them organizing violent protests in this country.
And they say, for example, that Los Angeles is, in their term, occupied territory.
That Los Angeles is, in their terminology, like the West Bank.
They're obviously pro-PLO and Palestinian movement as well.
But the point is, they see the United States exerting sovereign control over portions of the American Southwest as illegitimate.
And they have various ways in which they want to see that change.
And in fact, I would argue that they are seeing some of that change already.
So let's turn to China for a second, because obviously, in terms of geopolitical opponents, China is top of the list.
You've written extensively about the threat that China represents in your past books.
China is utilizing immigration against the United States as well.
What is their goal?
What mechanisms are they mostly utilizing?
Well, they see mass migration as subversion.
And when people think of China, they don't think of mass migration the same way we think of Mexico and Latin America.
But they have created an industrial scale use of birthright citizenship.
So birthright citizenship is obviously being heard by the Supreme Court.
It's the idea if you happen to be in the United States and you're foreign national and your child is born here, that child automatically is granted citizenship.
The federal government, by the way, our government has no idea, no idea how many people are born this way in the country because when you get a birth certificate, they don't list the nationality of the parents.
So the federal government is completely clueless.
The Chinese government has done assessments and their determination is mind-boggling.
The Chinese government believes that over the last 13 years, every year, roughly 100,000 Chinese nationals have done this in the United States, meaning we're looking at roughly 1 million U.S. citizens, I'm going to put that in air quotes, U.S. citizens that were born here, but they're Chinese parents and they're mostly part of the Chinese elite, go back to China and raise them in China.
So they are U.S. citizens.
When they turn 18, they're going to be able to vote in elections.
They're going to be able to make political campaign donations.
They're going to be able to get U.S. government jobs.
But they've never lived here.
They've never been educated here.
They've had very little exposure to the United States.
And that wave is going to start to crest in the late 2020s because this started in 2011 and 2012.
That is a massive threat, I would argue, because you've got one million, again, quote-unquote, American citizens who are being raised in China.
They're going to be entering the American mainstream here shortly.
And then meanwhile, you have the Muslim Brotherhood as well.
Obviously, the thing that comes to mind there is the Muslim Brotherhood possibly exporting terrorists to American soil using America's lax border policies.
I mean, this happened during the Biden administration.
There were a number of people who are on the terror watch list who just escaped into the interior of the United States.
But if you flood America's borders with people who cannot be vetted from countries that have exorbitant anti-American belief systems, you shouldn't be particularly surprised if you're increasing the risk of terrorism.
What is the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood here?
Yeah, the Muslim Brotherhood views this as a civilizational warfare, and they view immigration as a key component of it.
They look back at the experience of Muhammad and how he preached the use of migration as a form of colonization and taking over territories.
And they speak openly about the fact they don't need to reach sort of critical mass in certain numbers.
They're quite confident by controlling certain areas, even if they are a minority, but because they are politically active and they intimidate people around them, that they can gain relative examples of political power.
And one of the examples I cite in the book, of course, is Mamdani in New York.
Hezbollah, the newspapers of Hezbollah in Lebanon, were cheering him on.
These overseas networks involving the Muslim Brotherhood and their ancillary groups in the United States were funding his campaign.
And the Iranian government even ran an article speculating that Mamdani has a political future.
He could even become, he's not American born, so he can't be president, but he could become the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Now, why would they want that?
I think we know the obvious answer.
But the other thing I think we have to recognize, Ben, is that a lot of the fraud that we're seeing in Minnesota and elsewhere involving the Somali community, for example, is not just, in my mind, random fraud.
There are actually a lot of these Islamist leaders that preach how this kind of fraud on public assistance is something that's good and righteous because it's effectively a tax on non-Muslims that are paid to Muslims.
So they're actually encouraging Muslims in the United States to engage in this kind of behavior.
So I think we have to stop using our experience and our view of what's going on and understand what our adversaries are, what they're saying and what they believe.
And if we listen to what they say, and I quote them extensively in the book, I think it's pretty shocking what their plans are on these fronts.
And it's no way consistent with sort of our traditional view of what immigration should be, assimilation and embracing the American dream.
None of these groups want any of that.
Well, the book, again, is The Invisible Coup, How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon.
And the author is Peter Schweitzer of the Government Accountability Institute.
Peter, thanks so much for your time and your insight.
Thanks for having me, Ben.
In other news, the Davos summit is kicking off, and President Trump is planning to head to Davos this year with an entourage of U.S. officials, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Last year, he video conferenced into the World Economic Forum this time.
He's there presumably to knock some heads together.
According to the Wall Street Journal, he is expected to address the confab in person for the first time in six years.
Secretary of State Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff are also going to show up as well.
Now, again, big elephant in the room is going to be what's going on with regard to Greenland.
This has now jumped to sort of the top of the issue list because of the sort of pressure that President Trump is exerting on the Europeans and on NATO in particular.
Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, is already at Davos.
He says that the message is going to be that America first doesn't mean America alone.
I think that the U.S.-Swiss relationship, after a rocky period over the past few months, is back on a very good track.
What do we want to achieve?
I think the message is America First does not mean America alone.
And I think President Trump will be talking about this is what American leadership in the world looks like.
Okay, well, I mean, obviously, this is music to my ears.
America First should not mean America alone because America alone is weak, at least a lot weaker than it would be with its network of allies.
An America that withdraws from the world is an America that is incapable of projecting power in ways that benefit the American people.
On the other hand, I have to say that I do not fully understand what President Trump is doing with regard to Greenland right now, because again, there are externalities to just threatening NATO.
Apparently, according to widespread reports, the president sent messages to the Europeans, basically telling them that they needed to allow him to take Greenland because they did not give him the Nobel Peace Prize.
According to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gallstor, he sent Trump a text message expressing opposition to the planned tariffs because President Trump threatened a bunch of countries in the EU with tariffs if they didn't allow him to basically just take Greenland.
Trump replied that the world would not be secure unless the United States had, quote, complete and total control of Greenland.
And he wrote in the message, quote, considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped eight wars plus, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.
What now?
Color me slightly confused.
I don't think that the president ever thought only of peace.
I always thought that his program was to think about what was good and proper for the United States of America.
And while I know the president covets the Nobel Peace Prize, and frankly, well, I think he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for what he did in the Middle East with regard to bombing the Iranian nuclear reactor and helping try to bring the Gaza conflict to an end while freeing the life hostages.
Again, I'm very sympathetic to that case for the president.
I'm not sure what that has to do with Greenland per se.
And again, the idea that you're rejected for a Nobel Peace Prize, therefore you are owed Greenland.
I mean, that seems like a strange trade.
By the way, it seems to me that the Europeans might consider a trade, and that trade would be help facilitate the United States taking Greenland in return for mass support by the United States of the Ukrainian government in the face of the Russians.
That seems like a fairer trade because what NATO really requires is protection on its eastern borders, not on its western borders from the United States.
And so if the case that the Europeans want to make is, we need you guys to actually fight the Russians, and the Americans are making the case we need Greenland to stave off the Russians.
Well, it seems like there's a gigantic war that has been currently happening in Eastern Europe for several years at this point in which the Russians are sending hundreds of thousands of troops into the field.
And it would be good for the United States to up the ante there, perhaps in exchange for more of a say in Greenland.
EU Takes Tariffs Seriously 00:05:49
Apparently, EU officials and diplomats, according to the Wall Street Journal, are taking the U.S. threats to use trade to extract concessions on Greenland extremely seriously.
And they see them as the latest evidence of a fundamental reshaping of transatlantic ties.
Again, it is unclear whether this is sort of a just kind of annoyance for President Trump.
This is just something that sticks in his craw, or whether it is part of a larger shift in terms of foreign policy away from American leadership in the world and more toward a sort of block-level leadership.
Like America will lead the Western hemisphere, and then they'll kind of take, will go hands off with regard to the Russians in Eastern Europe and go hands off with the Chinese in the Far East.
That is the big outstanding question.
Now, the reality is that I'm not sure that Americans feel like paying more in tariffs in order to assure that the president can grab Greenland.
New studies show, shock of shocks, that American citizens are the ones who basically end up paying the price for tariffs.
That, of course, is not a surprise at all.
The new research published Monday by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank, suggests the impact of tariffs is likely to show up over the time in the form of higher U.S. consumer prices.
That doesn't mean that the tariffs are a win for Europe, but it does mean that American consumers are the ones who are really paying for it.
According to the Wall Street Journal, by analyzing $4 trillion of shipments between January 2024 and November 2025, the Kiel Institute researchers found that foreign exporters absorbed only about 4% of the burden of the tariff increases by lowering their prices.
American consumers and importers absorbed 96%.
That, of course, makes sense since it is consumers who are the ones who are going to absorb any of the price changes at all.
All of which does raise questions as to how Americans perceive the economy.
Representative Mike Turner of Ohio, he says, people might prefer to focus on the economy, not on Greenland at this point.
I think people would prefer a focus on the economy instead of a focus on Greenland itself.
I think certainly in Congress, we're looking at trying to make certain we get the budget deal through and we don't have a shutdown.
And, you know, as we look to the president's proposal on national security, we look at his proposal on increasing our defense budget.
Now, again, I think there is some histrionic quality to people in Europe getting freaked out about tariffs, considering all of the non-trade tariff trade barriers that the Europeans have placed on American products for years.
So, for example, when the French finance minister, Amanda Roland Leskier, says that he doesn't like when tariffs are used as a geopolitical weapon, it's like, well, I mean, guys, you do kind of do it yourself a fair bit.
We're living through uncharted territories.
We've never seen this before.
An ally, a friend of 250 years, is considering using tariffs.
We don't like tariffs, but suddenly we don't like using tariffs as a geopolitical weapon.
And you get this from the UK's Kirstarmer as well, suggesting that use of tariffs against allies is wrong.
Again, the Europeans have been very happy to use regulatory methods in order to discriminate against American product in their continent for a very long time.
Alliances endure because they're built on respect and partnership, not pressure.
That is why I said the use of tariffs against allies is completely wrong.
It is not the right way to resolve differences within an alliance.
Now, the Europeans could cause some economic turmoil in the United States based on how they respond to President Trump's threats.
According to the Wall Street Journal, there are several different options on the table.
One would be to hold off on cutting tariffs to zero for many U.S. goods.
Remember, the president already cut a bit of a lopsided deal with the EU, wherein there would be a 15% duty on most EU goods shipped into the United States, and the tariffs on American goods going into European countries would be radically cut.
The European Parliament has not approved that deal yet.
That could theoretically go sideways.
There could also be new retaliatory tariffs on some U.S. products.
And there's also something called the bazooka.
This is an anti-coercion trade tool, apparently.
Apparently, it would give the bloc significant leeway to implement export controls, place tariffs on services, restrict intellectual property rights, and curb American companies' ability to bid on public contracts in Europe, among other measures.
That would be sort of the biggest thing that they could do.
They could also, of course, beef up on defense, close American bases, which would lead to the sort of multipolar world that may be something that some members of the Trump administration actually want.
The biggest thing that is a problem is the possibility that the EU and other countries start to look elsewhere for partnerships, namely toward Russia and toward China.
Russia, for its part, seems pretty excited about all of this.
The Russian economic negotiator was trolling the Europeans, a man named Kirill Dmitriev.
He said, you now miss Nordstream, don't you?
Because obviously they were using the Europeans an enormous amount of Russian oil.
And so the idea is: well, you know, you relied on the Americans.
Now the Americans are using their economic pressure in order to get you to give up territory.
So you miss Nordstream, don't you?
Meanwhile, the Chinese are saying, listen, this is just an aggressive American play.
It has nothing to do with China threatening Greenland.
This is China making overtures to the EU.
That's really what this is.
Clarified our positions on Greenland multiple times.
The international law based on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter is the foundation of the existing international order.
Russia's Demographic Crisis 00:03:08
It must be safeguarded.
We urge the US side to stop using the so-called China threat to use as a pretext to gain selfish gains.
Now, here's the thing: China and Russia are both on the ropes.
I do not see the rationale for why the United States should be targeting, for example, the Europeans as opposed to Russia and China.
Russia is in serious trouble.
Russia is upside down demographically.
They're a very old country.
They have a financially insecure country.
The entire GDP of Russia is lower than the GDP of the state of Florida, for example.
They are a giant petro-state with nuclear weapons.
That is all Russia is, and they've been bleeding manpower.
They're in serious financial trouble.
They're in serious demographic trouble, serious military trouble.
The same thing is true, by the way, for China.
China has advantages in certain areas like energy production, but in demographic terms, China's got a massive problem on its hands.
According to the New York Times, the government on Monday said 7.92 million babies were born last year.
That is down from 9.54 million in 2024.
The number of people who died in 2025, 11.31 million, continued to climb.
So again, if you do that math, way more people are dying in China than are being born.
The latest population figures were reported alongside economic data that show China's economy grew 5% in 2025.
The number of births per 1,000 people fell to 5.63.
That is the lowest level on record, according to certain data.
This means that China is facing the worst birth rate that it has had in literally hundreds of years.
That they were having more babies 250 years ago, like more just base increase in the population.
Forget about more babies per capita.
Like they had bigger increase in the population a couple hundred years ago than they currently have.
China is upside down.
They're heavily reliant, by the way, on AI because of this, because they need increases in productivity.
That means that there are fewer people necessary in order to pay off the bills.
But China also is upside down in terms of its financial status.
China has a low retirement age.
The government raised it for the first time since the 1950s last year.
They plan to gradually increase the official age by 2040 to 63 for men and 58 for women in office jobs, 55 for women in factories.
It remains among the lowest in the world.
They basically hide their debt problems in local and regional debt.
All of this is a gigantic mess.
It is a huge mess for the Chinese.
So why exactly would we be taking the pedal off the metal in order to pressure NATO on Greenland?
It just seems like a misallocation of resources, a fairly major misallocation of resources.
And if this is a lifeline to our geopolitical opponents, because they're now going to go to the EU or go to Canada and cut trade deals with those countries, countries that are moving away from the United States, why would we revivify a bipolar world by giving up our hegemon status for no reason that I can really see?
Marathon's Father 00:02:18
It doesn't make a lot of sense.
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What was it like, Marlon, to be alone with God?
Is that who you think I was alone with?
Marathon, I knew your father.
I am yet convinced that he was not of this world.
All men know of the great Talies.
You are my father.
Are the gods of war for my soul?
Princess Garris, savior of our people.
I know what the bull got offered you.
I was offered the same.
And there is a new pirate work in the world.
I've seen it.
A god who sacrifices what he loves for us.
We are each given only one lifestinger.
No.
We're given another.
I learned of Yezu the Christ, and I have become his follower.
He's waiting on a miracle.
And I think you can give him one.
Trust in Yezu.
He is the only hope for men like us.
Fate of Britain never rests in the hands of the Great Life.
Great light, great darkness.
Such things mattered to me then.
What matters to you now, Mistress of Lies?
You, nephew.
The sword of a high king.
How many lives must be lost before you accept the power you were born to wield?
Still clinging to the promises of a god who has abandoned you.
I cannot take up that sword again.
You know what you must do.
Great light, forgive me.
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