| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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Democrats Ramp Up Pressure
00:06:35
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| The Trump administration moderates its rhetoric on Minneapolis while Democrats ramp up their own plus. | ||
| Are Democrats looking to just fully undermine federal immigration law? | ||
| Are they putting pedal to the metal? | ||
| We'll get into that first. | ||
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| While the Trump administration seems to be conciliating its views with regard to ICE's use in Minneapolis, President Trump is making some pretty strong PR moves in order to regain political capital that has been lost in the aftermath of a couple of very controversial and disputed circumstances, shootings in Minneapolis by ICE and Border Patrol of American citizens who are out obstructing federal law enforcement. | ||
| Democrats, by contrast, seem to be consolidating their position and not only that, going absolutely extreme, which seems to be the pattern. | ||
| The minute that one political side believes that it has the upper hand, it proceeds to put the pedal to the metal and then alienate the American population. | ||
| That seems to be what Democrats are intent on doing right now. | ||
| So, President Trump recognizes that the polls right now don't look good for him with regard to ICE operations. | ||
| Now, that's not true with regard to overall views on what ICE should be doing. | ||
| Americans do support the mass deportation of particularly criminal illegal immigrants. | ||
| And there's been no controversy whatsoever in the vast majority of jurisdictions across the United States wherein ICE has been working with local state authorities in order to go into jails and get people who are arrested for crimes and then deporting those people. | ||
| It is only in places like Minneapolis where there has been resistance to this sort of activity that ICE is then forced to go in with boots on the ground into areas that are not, for example, jails. | ||
| And presumably, in order to increase deportation numbers, there's been talk by, for example, Stephen Miller over at the White House about looking for broader swaths of illegal immigrants to deport. | ||
| That means the percentage of illegal immigrants who have committed a separate criminal offense or who are alleged to have committed a separate criminal offense and are therefore in jail, being deported as a percentage of all illegal immigrants being deported, has dropped pretty precipitously from January until now. | ||
| And that, on a PR level, is a problem. | ||
| President Trump recognizes that's a problem. | ||
| He also recognizes that it is a problem when the lead spokespeople on behalf of these policies seem to make terrible public relations blunders on a regular basis, which is why he effectively demoted Gregory Bovino, who is the Border Patrol officer who is essentially heading up operations in the Minneapolis area on behalf of Border Patrol. | ||
| Bovino, of course, had suggested in the aftermath of the killing of Alex Predi that Predi was attempting to massacre law enforcement. | ||
| The evidence is very scanty that that was true, and President Trump knows that. | ||
| So yesterday, the president announced that they're going to de-escalate a little bit. | ||
| Here he was on Fox News. | ||
| So they had good crime numbers, believe it or not. | ||
| And that's all working out. | ||
| You know, we have Tom Homan there now. | ||
| We put him in there. | ||
| He's great. | ||
| And they met with the governor, the mayor, everybody else, and we're going to de-escalate a little bit. | ||
| He's sending Tom Homan, who is a significantly more professional person, into this area in an attempt to negotiate out what happens next. | ||
| Trump also advocated for an honest investigation into what happened with regard to Renee Good and Alex Predty. | ||
| But you know, we're doing a big investigation. | ||
| I want to see the investigation. | ||
| I'm going to be watching over it. | ||
| I want a very honorable and honest investigation. | ||
| I have to see it myself. | ||
| Now, Trump was asked specifically about Alex Predty and the description of Predi as a domestic terrorist or an assassin. | ||
| And here was President Trump's response. | ||
| Certainly he shouldn't have been carrying a gun, but all of, hey, look, bottom line, everybody in this room, we view that as a very unfortunate incident. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Everyone, unless you're a stupid person. | ||
| A very, very unfortunate incident. | ||
| I don't like that he had a gun. | ||
| I don't like that he had two fully loaded magazines. | ||
| That's a lot of bad stuff. | ||
| And despite that, I say that's a very unfortunate thing. | ||
| What do you think of the problem? | ||
| And again, he's not criticizing people who are protesting with a gun. | ||
| He is criticizing people who obstruct law enforcement while carrying weapons, which, of course, raises the risk of deadly violence in a pretty significant way. | ||
| And as it turns out, Alex Predi has a history of physical confrontations with federal law enforcement, according to CNN. | ||
| Federal immigration officers have been collecting personal information about protesters and agitators in Minneapolis, sources told CNN, and they had documented details about Predi before he was shot to death on Saturday. | ||
| Apparently, sources told CNN about a week before his death, he suffered a broken rib when a group of federal officers tackled him while he was protesting their attempt to detain other individuals. | ||
| And again, these protests are not spontaneous protests. | ||
| Some of them are not protests at all. | ||
| Some of them are actual obstruction of federal law enforcement. | ||
| If you're Renee Good and you take your car and you obstruct federal law enforcement vehicles from being able to move down the road, that is not a protest. | ||
| That is obstruction of federal law. | ||
| If you're Alex Predty and you're getting in the way of ICE being able to do its job, that is not a protest. | ||
| That is an obstruction of federal law, obviously. | ||
| The Department of Homeland Security says that DHS law enforcement has no record of that incident. | ||
| With that said, if it turns out that Predi is a person, was a person who is repeatedly getting into confrontations with law enforcement, that does change a little bit the sort of circumstances surrounding his death. | ||
| Regardless, President Trump, again, understands he has an excellent weather vein for where the American people are. | ||
| And that means that if somebody is not representing him well, he is very likely to put them aside. | ||
| That's exactly what happened, as I say, with Gregory Bovino. | ||
| Here he was yesterday, blaming Bovino and essentially suggesting that Bovino's characterization of events was not right. | ||
| I don't think it's a pullback. | ||
| It's a little bit of a change. | ||
| Everybody in this room that has a business, you know, you make little changes. | ||
| You know, Bovino is very good, but he's a pretty out there kind of a guy. | ||
| And in some cases, that's good. | ||
| Maybe it wasn't good here. | ||
| Now, he is out there still defending Christy Noam. | ||
| Already coming up, the president may be out of love with Greg Bovino, but he's still defending Christy Noam over at the Department of Homeland Security. | ||
| We'll have to examine why first. | ||
|
Spare Moments Matter
00:02:25
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|
Judicial Warrant Controversy
00:15:21
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| So, Christy Noam, of course, of the Department of Homeland Security, she's come under extraordinary fire. | ||
| And frankly, I think a lot of it is justified. | ||
| I think that she has not done a good job of representing the president publicly. | ||
| The president, however, is still defending Christy Noam, who has become the center of this firestorm. | ||
| With the shift in Minneapolis and Tom Holman going to Minnesota, do you still have confidence in DHS Secretary Christy Noam? | ||
| You brought up the success of the film. | ||
| I do. | ||
|
unidentified
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Look. | |
| You do. | ||
| She was there with the border. | ||
| Who closed up the border? | ||
| She did with Tom Holman, with the whole group. | ||
| I mean, they closed up the border. | ||
| The border is a tremendous success, one of the most secure borders in the entire world. | ||
| We had a great first term. | ||
| This term seems to be blowing it away. | ||
| I mean, the only thing we have is a Minnesota situation, and that is, I believe, easily resolved. | ||
| Now, when it comes to Christy Noam and the characterization of events, perhaps one of the reasons that the president is defending Noam where he wasn't defending Bovino is because Noam is saying that she got instruction, apparently, from Stephen Miller, a close advisor to the president. | ||
| According to MediaIte, Noam is chalking up her actions in office to the direction of President Trump and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller. | ||
| So immediately upon Predty's death, Miller had gone on Twitter and he had put out a statement: quote, an assassin tried to murder federal agents, and this is your response. | ||
| That was in response to Chris Murphy suggesting that ICE has to leave Minneapolis. | ||
| And of course, Miller is very close to the president. | ||
| There's been a lot of talk about whether Miller and Noam are splitting, whether there's been some sort of problems between the two of them. | ||
| But White House Press Secretary Caroline Lovitt called Miller one of the president's closest aides. | ||
| Quote, Stephen Miller is one of President Trump's most trusted and longest-serving aides. | ||
| The president loves Stephen. | ||
| Noam apparently said to somebody who then related to Axios, which means that she leaked it out. | ||
| You would imagine that might be Corey Lewandowski: everything I've done, I've done at the direction of the president and Stephen. | ||
| So maybe the idea here is that the president is being told by Christy Noam that if I go under the bus, I'm taking you with me. | ||
| That is quite possibly a sort of linkage that is forcing the president or his advisors to defend Noam where they weren't willing to defend Bavino. | ||
| The bottom line, however, is that I have yet to see a headline emerging specifically regarding Christy Noam that has been a positive for the administration thus far. | ||
| Now, President Trump, as part of his reorientation toward ICE operations in Minneapolis, he's been talking with Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, who, again, has been a nefarious character in all of this. | ||
| He has fomented the chaos in Minnesota. | ||
| He has created incentive structures for that chaos. | ||
| He has praised the people who are participating in that chaos. | ||
| Nonetheless, the president reached out to Walls, and this is sort of the president's personal style, obviously. | ||
| President Trump likes to reach out to people he perceives to be political enemies, maybe make friends with them, treat them with good grace. | ||
| He obviously did this to Zormam Donny in New York. | ||
| Now, apparently he's doing the Tim Walz. | ||
| He explained a recent phone call that he had with Tim Walz to Will Kaine over on Fox News. | ||
| It couldn't have been a nicer conversation. | ||
| And in fact, I said to my people, I said, it's hard to believe that's the same guy I watch on television or I watch in a debate not doing so well or because we had a very reasonable conversation, very good conversation. | ||
| If you believe the conversation, he'd like to get this thing over with. | ||
| So, again, he seems to be optimistic about what he can get Tim Walz to do. | ||
| Now, Tim Walz seems to have a different viewpoint. | ||
| And this is where things can shift pretty easily for Democrats. | ||
| So right now, Democrats believe that they have the upper hand. | ||
| Democrats believe that they have gotten President Trump to cave on policy. | ||
| Now, realistically, they've not. | ||
| Nothing has actually changed in terms of the operations that ICE is slated to perform in Minneapolis. | ||
| The president has shifted around some faces. | ||
| He's brought in people who are probably calmer personages in order to implement his policy preferences. | ||
| Tom Homan is extraordinarily professional. | ||
| Again, from the very beginning, when Renee Good was shot, Tom Homan said there will be a full investigation. | ||
| Law enforcement has to do its job. | ||
| That is the proper response when there is a disputed shooting. | ||
| And he said the same thing about Alex Predty, who is not out front making absurdly overreaching statements about what happened in these cases where there was full-scale video available. | ||
| So Tom Homan being there makes a big difference. | ||
| Democrats, however, seem to believe that now there is a bit of political blood in the water and they can go all the way. | ||
| So Tim Walz is using this as an opportunity. | ||
| Again, remember, Tim Walz was so disgraced six weeks ago that he had to drop out of his gubernatorial race. | ||
| He's running again for governor, a third term in Minnesota, and he had to drop it specifically because of all the fraud allegations swirling around his administration. | ||
| Politically, there is no one happier than Tim Walz about what's going on in Minnesota, which is presumably why he is helping to foment all of the problems in Minnesota, talking about how ICE agents are Gestapo-like and how you need to go out there and cause good trouble and how nonviolent resistance, wink-wink, is the way. | ||
| Tim Walz has been an instigator in this entire process. | ||
| So has the Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fry. | ||
| Well, now Tim Walz believes that he's won some sort of cheap political victory here. | ||
| He's using the opportunity to slam various members of the Trump administration, even after Trump reached out to him. | ||
| Here he was yesterday slamming the vice president, JD Vance. | ||
| I would beat the shit out of him now if I could, and I would call that out. | ||
| I mean, that's just different. | ||
| In verbally going at it, my argument is much better. | ||
| In making the case that housing prices are up because of immigration and that we should build on federal lands, it was such a crazy thing. | ||
| But then when I watched him, I got sucked into that. | ||
| And if you remember, this was right in that moment of eating dogs and cats. | ||
| I took that bait and thought that that was the argument of how outrageous it was. | ||
| That was not the argument. | ||
|
unidentified
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And he said that your cops are liars. | |
| He said that the ICE agents are. | ||
| They all did. | ||
| That's exactly right, that this is the problem with them. | ||
| And well, the president said it, that we told him to stand down. | ||
| Do you think they would do that? | ||
| Do you think that police would not protect citizens no matter if I'm like, oh, don't do this? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, this is the whole paradox with these guys. | ||
| They don't back the blue. | ||
| They don't back police. | ||
| January 6th proved that. | ||
| Fanon and the rest of those guys will tell you that. | ||
| Again, the idea that Democrats have backed the blue is insane. | ||
| The fact that the idea that Tim Walz has backed the blue is crazy. | ||
| One of the big problems you have in major blue city police departments is that the political leadership of the police departments have to work hand in glove with the state officials, people like Tim Walz. | ||
| Or if you're in California, you have to work with the mayor if you're in Los Angeles or with the governor. | ||
| And what that tends to mean is that the people who are actually on the ground holding the line have pretty significant disagreements with the people who are the heads of their departments, which is why you have seen in major police forces across the United States real trouble recruiting and retaining police officers. | ||
| Tim Walz went out of his way to slam Christy Noam as well. | ||
| It's very disheartening to me to see the president say Christy Noam's doing a great job. | ||
| I'm not sure there's been anybody more incompetent or cruel that's ever served in a cabinet position than her, and this is on her. | ||
| Okay, so again, this is going to be the shtick. | ||
| Now, this is going to culminate an attempt to totally undermine law enforcement. | ||
| So, Jacob Fry, now remember, the president reached out to Fry and had a conversation with him and then put out a statement on Truth Social about how well the conversation went. | ||
| Well, Fry is now digging in, saying that he is not going to facilitate the performance of immigration law. | ||
| Quote, today, Chief O'Hara and I met with Borders Homan and had a productive conversation. | ||
| I reiterated that my main ask is for Operation Metro Surge to end as quickly as possible. | ||
| Public safety works best when it's built on community trust, not tactics that create fear or division. | ||
| I shared with Mr. Homan the serious negative impacts this operation has had on Minneapolis and surrounding communities, as well as the strain it has placed on our local police officers. | ||
| I also made it clear that Minneapolis does not and will not enforce federal immigration laws and that we will remain focused on keeping our neighbors and streets safe. | ||
| City leaders will continue to stay in conversation with Mr. Homan and his team. | ||
| So in other words, he is not going to change one iota of what he has been doing. | ||
| He is going to demand that the federal government stop performing federal immigration law. | ||
| And when he says that he wants to keep people safe, but they're not going to perform federal immigration law, understand what that means. | ||
| What he means when he says that is that if there are local law enforcement agencies, if Minneapolis PD picks up a person and that person goes to jail and they know that person is an illegal immigrant and that person makes bail, for example, that will never be reported to ICE. | ||
| That is what they mean. | ||
| That is what they mean. | ||
| They mean that you will require a full-scale conviction and prison term for the person at the other end. | ||
| Maybe State Department of Corrections hands that person over to ICE. | ||
| But at first encounter, criminals will not be interfacing with ICE. | ||
| That is what he means, which means the continual undermining of federal law, obviously. | ||
| Meanwhile, Keith Ellison, the terrible attorney general of the state of Minnesota, he's out there suggesting that perhaps he is going to prosecute ICE officers. | ||
| Our hope is that the order will continue to preserve, protect, prohibit altering, and gain access so that we can investigate this case ourselves. | ||
| As you know in your audience, I want them to know that there is no legal bar to the state prosecuting anyone who commits a crime in our state, including a federal official. | ||
| There are certain qualified immunities that apply, but we believe that they can be overcome. | ||
| Meanwhile, Governor Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, who of course would like to run for president, it is now becoming, it's amazing how quickly the Democratic Party higher echelons are captured by the radicals in their base, believing they need them in order to win presidential primary. | ||
| Shapiro wants to run for president of the United States. | ||
| And he is out there saying ICE's mission needs to be terminated. | ||
| Again, terminating ICE's mission without explaining how you're going to effectuate immigration law being enforced means nullification of federal law on behalf of local and state concerns, which has a very bad history in the United States. | ||
| To me, it is very clear that the mission the president and Christy Noam and Stephen Miller and JD Vance and all of them sent these federal officials on is a mission to violate people's constitutional rights. | ||
| And it is clear that the mission needs to be terminated immediately. | ||
| Period. | ||
| Hard stop. | ||
| And while police want to have tools in their hands to be able to do their good work in the community, the most important tool they need is to have trust with the community. | ||
| And the other thing that this administration has done is violated that trust with the American people and law enforcement. | ||
| And collectively, all of that makes us less safe. | ||
| The mission needs to be terminated. | ||
| It needs to end right now. | ||
| Okay, now again, this has become the going talking point for Democratic candidates and apparently for Democratic law enforcement officers around the country. | ||
| Philadelphia's awful district attorney Larry Krasner, who's done just a terrible job of ensuring that the law is enforced in his city, he is vowing to utilize law enforcement resources to hunt down ICE agents. | ||
| If we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities. | ||
| We will find you. | ||
| We will achieve justice. | ||
| Okay, again, this is kind of insane stuff. | ||
| And it culminates in what Democrats are now declaring they want on the federal level. | ||
| So according to Bill Malugan reporting for Fox, Democrats are now demanding judicial warrants for all ICE arrests. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Well, as he says, that will take a massive number of targets off the board for ICE. | ||
| They would only be able to go after illegal immigrants who have committed a new federal crime after entering the United States illegally. | ||
| State and local crimes would not apply because the feds don't enforce state and local crimes. | ||
| Remember, if ICE comes and arrests somebody, detains somebody based on a state level, they are not prosecuting that person. | ||
| They're looking to deport that person. | ||
| It's the state that is supposed to prosecute on the basis. | ||
| So if you require a judicial warrant on the federal level, that judicial warrant presumably has to be for a separate crime. | ||
| On the federal level, that would have to be a federal crime. | ||
| For example, says Bill Malugan, if an illegal immigrant gets arrested in Minnesota for a DUI crash causing great bodily injury, a state crime, and then bonds out of jail, ICE would not be able to target him for arrest because there would be no judicial warrant. | ||
| It's not a federal crime. | ||
| ICE would not be able to target anyone for just being in the U.S. illegally. | ||
| They would have to wait for a federal crime to be committed. | ||
| Then a federal judge would have to sign off on probable cause for arrest. | ||
| It would cripple any hopes of mass deportations or widespread immigration enforcement. | ||
| Warrants are not required for ICE arrests under U.S. law right now. | ||
| They simply need probable cause that the target is detainable and deportable on immigration grounds. | ||
| And then they use an I-200 and I-205 civil administrative warrant. | ||
| The most common judicial warrant ICE uses to target aliens right now is for illegal re-entry. | ||
| A federal felony when a deported alien has re-entered the United States after deportation. | ||
| But that's a limited population because a huge number of illegal immigrants, most of them actually, have not been repeat deportees. | ||
| ICE does need a judicial warrant to enter homes. | ||
| That's a different question. | ||
| We had this conversation earlier this week. | ||
| The administration is trying to claim that an administrative warrant plus probable cause means they can bust into a home. | ||
| That is hotly contested in the courts of law. | ||
| But for an arrest, you don't need a judicial warrant. | ||
| An administrative warrant for illegal immigration is enough to effectuate a deportation based on an arrest. | ||
| One ICE contact in a sanctuary city told Malugan, quote, if we need a judicial warrant for every arrest, we would have maybe 15 arrests in a year in his city. | ||
| Apparently, this is what Democrats are pushing for. | ||
| Meredith Lee Hill, congressional reporter for Politico, says the Democrats are coalescing around a number of DHS bill changes, including requiring judicial warrants for immigration arrests, mandating the federal agents identify themselves, requiring DHS to cooperate with state and local investigations, and limiting the mission creep of federal agencies. | ||
| Also, end roving patrols and profiling and end arrest quotas. | ||
| So basically, hamstring federal law, make sure that illegal immigration can never be stopped. | ||
| That is the Democrat call. | ||
| And that is a massive overreach. | ||
| Because here's what Americans want. | ||
| Americans would like as a first step. | ||
| They wanted the border to close. | ||
| Trump did that. | ||
| They want criminal illegal immigrants deported. | ||
| The Trump administration has been doing that very successfully in virtually all jurisdictions outside of places like Minneapolis, places where you have Democratic officials and law enforcement attempting to gin up chaos. | ||
| And Democrats, on the other hand, apparently would like for none of that to happen. | ||
| Apparently, they're pushing for processes that make even the arrest of criminal, illegal immigrants, people arrested for state-level crimes, nearly impossible. | ||
| Well, if that's their goal, then they're going to snatch political defeat from the jaws of victory. | ||
| If they believe, like right now, they should simply claim victory on a political level. | ||
| They should say, we got the Trump administration to moderate. | ||
| We've gotten Greg Bavino out. | ||
| Tom Homan is a more responsible actor. | ||
| We thank the Trump administration for replacing an incompetent person with a more competent person. | ||
| We're looking forward to working with Tom Holman. | ||
|
Claiming Victory Amid Chaos
00:06:37
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| Everything calms down. | ||
| Everything goes back to status quo ante. | ||
| They claim a victory. | ||
| That's what they should do. | ||
| Instead, again, the minute right now that either party senses momentum, they put pedal to the metal and then they proceed to overreach so dramatically that the American people are repulsed and react and disgust to that agenda. | ||
| Now, listen, the Democratic politicians, I get it. | ||
| Some of them are being driven by a media and celebrity culture that has decided that this is the new gigantic outrage of the day and everyone must speak out. | ||
| This is our new civil rights movement. | ||
| As we've discussed before, the Democratic base is constantly in search of an animating principle. | ||
| And that animating principle is supposed to be a pale mockoff of the civil rights movement of the 60s. | ||
| And so we've had that with regard to gay rights. | ||
| And then we had that with regard to transgenderism. | ||
| And now we're getting that with regard to illegal immigration. | ||
| The jackbooted Dougs, they're enforcing laws that are discriminating against wide classes of people. | ||
| They're always looking for their moment to do a Selma bridge. | ||
| Well, the problem is that those moments are rare because thank God in America, that sort of stuff, that sort of policy has been rather otra for, you know, half a century, meaning that just in terms of generic public policy, every country has to enforce its border and every country has to make sure that illegal immigrants are deported. | ||
| There's nothing new about that. | ||
| But Democrats, and particularly radical activist class Democrats, are looking always for their new moment to be involved in a civil rights movement. | ||
| And what that means is that they push very hard. | ||
| The minute that they see anything that even remotely resembles that thing, they go for it, whole scale. | ||
| And this is how you end up with, for example, Scott Galloway suggesting that Democrats should conduct Nuremberg trials against law enforcement, federal law enforcement. | ||
| The difference between being right and being effective, and we're angry, and I get it, protesting is powerful. | ||
| Promising them that there will be an accountability. | ||
| And I've said this, I think there should be something equivalent to the Nuremberg trials. | ||
| Actually, this is all over. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And to make it clear that once we're back in power, which we will be, this is going to happen. | ||
| And the statute of limitations on murder is never. | ||
| Okay, so, yeah, again, this sort of language is unhelpful. | ||
| I actually think Scott Galloway has a lot of interesting things to say. | ||
| This is not one of them. | ||
| Tara Swisher on the same podcast suggested that Stephen Miller has blood on his hands and should be put in jail. | ||
| And I would last like to call out Stephen Miller, who is in the center of this. | ||
| We always focus on Trump as we often focus on the top people. | ||
| But Stephen Miller, like a man named Ben Detsen, he was the one who created the internment cancer Japanese Heinrich Himmler in the Nazi regime. | ||
| This is what he is. | ||
| And of course, Trump gets the most of the blame being at the top. | ||
| But people like Stephen Miller will go down in history as evil that has blood on his hands and should be jailed at the very end of this. | ||
| And you're absolutely right. | ||
| Again, comparing Steven Miller to Heinrich Himmler is a pretty astonishing leap. | ||
| It's a pretty astonishing leap from Kara Swisher. | ||
| And you have the entire celebrity class who, of course, have now been reanimated. | ||
| They found their new cause. | ||
| A year ago, it was wearing the Hamas pins at the Oscars. | ||
| This year, presumably, it will all be about ICE. | ||
| Katy Perry, who is now dating Justin Trudeau, the handsome Bernie Sanders of the North. | ||
| Katy Perry was out there commenting on ICE. | ||
| She said, call your senator. | ||
| She put this up on Instagram. | ||
| We have until Friday, January 30th to block $10 billion from going through to ICE. | ||
| This is her Instagram, and then she put up a phone number and all the rest of it because it's time to turn anger into action. | ||
| Okay, meanwhile, Natalie Portman, again, I'm not sure why we should treat the musings of actors as particularly important, but they clearly do. | ||
| Natalie Portman suggested that she's never been sadder to be an American. | ||
| Now, last I checked, I'm not even sure that Natalie Portman chiefly resides in the United States. | ||
| I could not be prouder to be American right now by the way the Americans are acting. | ||
| And I could not be sadder to be American right now with the way the government is behaving. | ||
| Now, again, the musings of actors mean very little, but they do mean a lot in sort of Democratic upper echelon circles. | ||
| By the way, Natalie Portman does primarily reside in France, not in the United States. | ||
| Olivia Wilde was doing the same routine. | ||
| Here she was suggesting that ICE is a criminal organization. | ||
| We can't go another day just sort of accepting this as our new norm. | ||
| It's outrageous. | ||
| People are being murdered. | ||
| And I don't want to normalize seeing people being murdered on the internet on film. | ||
| It's hideous. | ||
| And so if we can do anything out here to support the movement to cast ICE out to delegitimize this unbelievably criminal organization, then that's what we should be doing. | ||
| The celebrity class doesn't mean a lot, but when they speak with one voice, the people who tend to hear that are the people they go to cocktail parties with. | ||
| And that would be the Democratic frontrunners. | ||
| That'd be people like Wes Moore in Maryland or people like Josh Hapiro in Pennsylvania or people like Gavin Newsom in California. | ||
| Ethan Hawk, who is currently nominated for best actor for a movie called Blue Moon, he says there's fear in the air. | ||
| I do. | ||
| Again, I'm sorry. | ||
| There isn't. | ||
| There just isn't. | ||
| There's this notion that there is an evanescent fear in the air. | ||
| That you're just walking around and you can feel the, I promise you, Ethan Hawk is not walking around in fear. | ||
| He isn't. | ||
| I never felt scared about what I was going to say until the last couple of years. | ||
| Where you feel like, oh, I have to be careful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or what? | |
| I don't know, but there's a kind of fear in the air that I've never felt before. | ||
| And it's not America. | ||
| To get to be an artist in a free country, that's that I've had enough of an education to know what a privilege that is. | ||
| And I don't feel that way anymore. | ||
| Yes, you do. | ||
| Yes, you do. | ||
| You're out there making movies every day. | ||
| My favorite thing about modern America is where people who have all the rights and privileges of being a modern American suggest that they are living in deep fear when they clearly, clearly are not. | ||
| He's speaking into a microphone on camera. | ||
| You know what people in totalitarian regimes don't do? | ||
| That thing, because they know what comes next and it ain't good. | ||
|
Democrats Obstruct Voter Role Inquiry
00:15:26
|
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| Democrats are, meanwhile, attempting to obstruct federal attempts to look into Minnesota state voter roles. | ||
| Now, I've never understood the controversy over transparency when it comes to voter roles. | ||
| Obviously, we all have a very strong interest in ensuring that people who are not registered to vote should not be on voter rolls, that we don't have duplications on voter roll, that we don't have people who are capable even of voting more than once. | ||
| And so the pushback has never made any sense to me at all. | ||
| According to the New York Times, after federal immigration agents shot and killed an American citizen in Minneapolis for the second time this month, Attorney General Pambondi sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz in Minnesota that outlined what she described as three simple steps to bring back law and order. | ||
| The third step there was to allow the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to access voter rolls to confirm that Minnesota's voter registration practices comply with federal law. | ||
| Minnesota's Secretary of State, Steve Simon, a Democrat swiftly rejected the demand, calling it an outrageous attempt to coerce Minnesota into giving the federal government private data on millions of U.S. citizens in violation of state and federal law. | ||
| Now, I'm not sure why, presumably, that is violation of state and federal law. | ||
| I mean, there are addresses. | ||
| Those addresses are publicly available virtually all over the United States. | ||
| The complete unredacted voter files include personal identifying information like driver's license numbers and social security numbers. | ||
| The Justice Department presumably wants those files because they are attempting to clean up the voter rolls. | ||
| At least 11 states have already complied on all this. | ||
| Democrats are rejecting this. | ||
| Many of them are suggesting that they are worried about the laws preventing the transfer of private information. | ||
| By the way, I will note at this point that these same Democrats have no problem at all with the idea of a gigantic gun registry in which every gun that you buy goes on a gun registry, no matter if you buy it from a friend or buy it from a private seller or anything. | ||
| They're perfectly happy to register everyone's private information federally in terms of your gun ownership in violation of the Second Amendment, in all likelihood. | ||
| But when it comes to voting, this is where they're going to draw the line. | ||
| So do states have a right to withhold the data? | ||
| Totally unclear at this point, but they are very upset about it. | ||
| Tim Walz, for his part, is saying that he's not going to comply. | ||
| And one of the things we're always very proud of, we're either first or second in the country for voter turnout. | ||
| And we have the safest, most secure, most well-attended elections in the country, and we like to talk about that. | ||
| And what I can assure everyone in this country is we will break that record in November at this midterm. | ||
| Again, he is suggesting that this is all going to turn into a big vote for Democrats, obviously. | ||
| Ilhan Omar, for her part, representative from Minnesota, put out a statement, quote, ICE will leave Minnesota if you hand over your voter rolls, tells you everything you need to know. | ||
| This was never about immigration or fraud. | ||
| It was always about rigging elections. | ||
| I have a question. | ||
| How precisely would transparency in the voter rolls allow for the rigging of elections? | ||
| I'm going to need like an explainer. | ||
| How do you get from point A, voter rolls, to point B, rigging elections? | ||
| The answer is you don't. | ||
| It's all political nonsense. | ||
| Ilhan Omar, however, has been in a fair bit of political trouble because, of course, there are a bunch of investigations facing Ilhan Omar. | ||
| According to the Wall Street Journal, President Trump suggested in a social media post on Monday that Omar profited from the state's massive welfare fraud scandal and said that the Justice Department is currently scrutinizing her. | ||
| Representative James Comer of Kentucky, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has also suggested that he might subpoena Omar's husband after the pair disclosed a significant increase in financial assets. | ||
| So Ilhan Omar, obviously, you know, listen, she's got a bunch of sketchy, sketchy circumstances surrounding her. | ||
| Omar's most recent financial disclosure from May 2025 showed that she and her husband have assets between $6 and $30 million, which are up from one year earlier when they reported between $37,000 and $208,000. | ||
| What now? | ||
| What? | ||
| I mean, that's NBA star-level pay for Ilhan Omar and her husband. | ||
| Omar's husband, the political consultant Tim Minott, is involved with a variety of businesses, including a venture capital management firm in Washington, D.C. and a winery in Santa Rosa, California. | ||
| Well, unless that is the most successful winery in history, I'm having a hard time seeing this. | ||
| It was the significant increase in the valuation of the capital management firm and winery that were the drivers of the couple's jump in assets. | ||
| Jacqueline Rogers, an Omar spokeswoman, said, quote, she does not have millions in the bank. | ||
| The value range listed for the assets reflects the full cost assessment of the businesses, in which her husband is one of several partners and does not reflect her husband's individual share. | ||
| Obviously, Ilhan Omar has been involved, again, in a wide variety of suspicious circumstances regarding her district. | ||
| The Washington Free Beacon, by the way, reports that the House Ethics Committee requires reporting only her husband's stake, not the full value of the LLCs. | ||
| That appears not to be true. | ||
| At the same time, apparently, there are more investigations coming. | ||
| According to Fox News's Elizabeth McDonald, it would be reasonable for the media to ask what is going on with Ilhan Omar's husband's winery. | ||
| Omar valued it at up to $5 million on her 2025 financial disclosures. | ||
| All we can find is that ESTECRU LLC was registered as an LLC in Santa Rosa, California. | ||
| We can't find a physical winery. | ||
| It had promoted wine products, but there's little evidence of a functioning winery today. | ||
| The business's website for purchasing wine doesn't work. | ||
| The listed phone number is disconnected. | ||
| Its social media has been inactive since early 2023. | ||
| The winery has also been tied to at least one investor lawsuit against her husband, his partner, and the winery, alleging misrepresentation of the business as a legitimate company, and that was reportedly settled. | ||
| One investor named Naeem Mode alleged they persuaded him to invest 300 grand in the winery based on promises and money would be tripled within 18 months with 10% monthly interest if it wasn't paid back on time. | ||
| Apparently, the $300,000 investment was returned about a month late. | ||
| None of the promised profits were delivered. | ||
| His complaint sought at least $780,000 in damages. | ||
| That is a massive jump in valuation. | ||
| So something is going on pretty clearly. | ||
| Now, obviously, Ilhan Omar is one of the more controversial political figures in the country, and for good reason, given her statements in support of a wide variety of enemies of the United States, up to and including an attempt before she was in Congress to write a letter, a sympathetic letter to a person on behalf of a person who tries to join ISIS. | ||
| Well, yesterday, there is a terrible circumstance at a town hall in Minneapolis where a man apparently got up. | ||
| This person appears to be a right-winger who obviously is, shall we say, less than hinged. | ||
| And he got up and he sprayed a substance at her. | ||
| Now, this stuff is really, really dangerous. | ||
| Again, it doesn't matter whether it's right or whether it's left. | ||
| Physical altercations with people on the basis of politics is not an American thing. | ||
| It is not. | ||
| Do not do this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And frankly, we're quite lucky as a country that this person was spraying a substance and not bullets. | ||
| The fact that we have politicians who are in close proximity with the population on a widespread level means that there is the opportunity in many open circumstances like this to do physical violence. | ||
| And this is a reminder of that. | ||
| It's dangerous stuff. | ||
| Here's some of the video. | ||
| And DHS Secretary Kristi Noem must resign or face impeachment. | ||
| Security tackled this person. | ||
| Apparently he was sitting up near the front. | ||
| For those who can't see, he sprayed something on her and then he was tackled. | ||
| He gets in very close proximity to her. | ||
| There's another angle. | ||
| And he appears to be spraying her and then he starts yelling at her. | ||
| By the way, piss poor job by security there. | ||
| Really, really bad job by security. | ||
| They only get him afterward. | ||
| As soon as the man gets up and starts walking toward Ilhanoma, they need to tackle him. | ||
| That is a bad job by the security team right there. | ||
| But again, we're living in a very fraught time. | ||
| A lot of dangerous people out there. | ||
| The suspect here sprayed something. | ||
| We don't know what that was, but again, we live in a world where it could have been an asset, it could have been a gun. | ||
| I mean, this is dangerous stuff. | ||
| It needs to stop. | ||
| It needs to stop. | ||
| I don't care about the politics. | ||
| It needs to stop. | ||
| It really does. | ||
| This is why we have voting in this country. | ||
| This is why we have checks and balances in this country. | ||
| This is why we have a free press in this country. | ||
| And we've had too many circumstances over the course of the past 15 years in which what was sprayed was not, in fact, a substance, a chemical substance or something, but was bullets, whether it is the congressional baseball shooting, which again has a kind of memory hold, or whether it is the murder of Charlie Kirk. | ||
| This stuff is unbelievably dangerous. | ||
| Okay, meanwhile, the president of the United States is signaling the possibility of action in Iran, given the fact that Iran appears to have mowed down some tens of thousands of protesters. | ||
| There are kind of widely varying estimates as to how many people the Iranian regime killed over the course of a couple of days amidst those gigantic protests across the country. | ||
| The low-end estimates put it in the thousands. | ||
| The high-end estimates are putting it well over 30,000. | ||
| There is footage of gigantic rooms of body bags. | ||
| There are reports that are coming out that are really ugly. | ||
| Obviously, full information is not available because Iran is a dictatorship and because they've shut down the internet for the past several weeks and plan on shutting it down for the next couple of months minimum. | ||
| Well, President Trump put up a post on Truth Social yesterday warning Iran that they were playing with fire. | ||
| Quote, a massive armada is heading to Iran. | ||
| It is moving quickly with great power, enthusiasm, and purpose. | ||
| It is a larger fleet headed by the great aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln than that since Venezuela. | ||
| Like with Venezuela, it is ready, willing, and able to rapidly fulfill its mission with speed and violence if necessary. | ||
| Hopefully, Iran will quickly come to the table and negotiate a fair and equitable deal. | ||
| No nuclear weapons. | ||
| That is good for all parties. | ||
| Time is running out. | ||
| It's truly of the essence. | ||
| As I told Imran once before, make a deal. | ||
| They didn't. | ||
| And there was Operation Midnight Hammer, a major destruction of Iran. | ||
| The next attack will be far worse. | ||
| Don't make that happen again. | ||
| Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. | ||
| Now, there are some people out there who are suggesting this is quote unquote wag the dog, that the president is having domestic troubles and therefore he is attempting to launch a war action against Iran. | ||
| That's stupid. | ||
| I'm sorry, that's dumb. | ||
| He literally drew a red line. | ||
| The red line was don't kill protesters. | ||
| They proceeded to mow down protesters in the streets. | ||
| He said, stay in the streets. | ||
| Help is on the way. | ||
| That happened before the shootings in Minneapolis. | ||
| No, this is not a wag the dog scenario. | ||
| This is the president paying off the promise that he made to the Iranian people if he decides to act in any coherent and cohesive way here. | ||
| Now, as for the call for negotiations, frankly, I think that that is going to be unsuccessful. | ||
| The Iranians have demonstrated time and again, they have no intention of giving up their nuclear program, which is the thing that they need to do. | ||
| And by the way, even giving up their nuclear program wouldn't solve the problem of you just mowed down tens of thousands of your own citizens. | ||
| Those people aren't going to become alive again after the president promised them that help was on the way. | ||
| So it seems that action in Iran could quite possibly be imminent. | ||
| Again, you're going to hear the usual caterwauling from the usual Suspect about how America is about to be drawn into an Iraq-like war. | ||
| No, that's not going to happen. | ||
| Please stop with the horseshit. | ||
| Truthfully, it is an amazing thing to watch critics on the isolationist right keep characterizing Donald J. Trump as George W. Bush circa 2003. | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| It's just stupid. | ||
| You were wrong about the first Iran strike last year. | ||
| You were wrong about the killing of Qassem Solemani, the Iranian terror master. | ||
| You're wrong about the taking of Nicolas Maduro. | ||
| In fact, I'm hard-pressed to see where you have been right about President Trump's foreign policy a single time. | ||
| So, yeah, I'm going to take it with a bit of a grain of salt when you guys suggest that if the president chooses to deploy air power in order to do serious harm to the top levels of the regime, this is somehow going to descend the United States into hundreds of thousands of American troops standing around in Tehran. | ||
| Obviously, Iran is attempting to reconstitute some sort of regional power. | ||
| President Trump on Truth Social warned Iraq against the reinstallation of their former prime minister, who was effectively an Iranian cat's baw. | ||
| Obviously, Iraq is a very fractured country. | ||
| The Iraqi population is majority Shia, just like Iran. | ||
| It's about 60 to 65% of the population. | ||
| So Iran is closely aligned with Iraq. | ||
| That was one of the problems with the deposing of Saddam Hussein and the non-replacement of that regime by some sort of functioning government in the short term is the Shia uprising. | ||
| That was a huge problem. | ||
| Well, the president put out a statement the other day. | ||
| I'm hearing that the great country of Iraq might make a very bad choice by reinstalling Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister. | ||
| Last time Maliki was in power, the country descended into poverty and total chaos. | ||
| That should not be allowed to happen again because of his insane policies and ideologies. | ||
| If elected, the United States of America will no longer help Iraq. | ||
| And if we are not there to help, Iraq has zero chance of success, prosperity, or freedom, make Iraq great again. | ||
| And again, that seems to be, you know, a well-calibrated shot across the bow with regard to Iraq. | ||
| Not that we are going to take military action in Iraq, but that if Iraq is reliant on American resources or defense, them allying with Iran is a bad idea. | ||
| Now, all of this is part of a Middle East-wide recalibration that has happened in the aftermath of the 12-day war and the utter destruction of Iran's terror arms across the Middle East. | ||
| Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi regime seem to be completely realigning away, actually, from the Abraham Accords, away from UAE, away from many of the interests of the United States, and toward a new sort of Sunni triangle that would essentially be Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. | ||
| In other words, the reason that Saudi was approaching Israel about the Abraham Accords a couple of years ago is because they were afraid of Iran. | ||
| Then Israel proceeded to wreck Iran and make clear that it was a paper tiger. | ||
| And now, apparently, what the Saudis are most afraid of, what they are most afraid of, is actual regime change in Iran, which is astonishing. | ||
| What they would prefer is a failed state in Iran led by a weakened malocracy that is incapable of threatening Saudi Arabia, but also is not a threat to become a functioning country. | ||
| That seems to be what the Saudis want. | ||
| What they are deeply afraid of is a secularist, pro-American, pro-Israel regime in Iran, or at least Israel-friendly regime in Iran that would recalibrate the math in the Middle East and make Saudi a secondary power because Iran, of course, has massive oil and natural gas resources. | ||
| Iran has a young population, a fairly secularized population. | ||
| And if it had a different leadership, a real chance at being a regional heavyweight. | ||
| Saudi doesn't like that. | ||
| So Saudi didn't like that Iran was a threat to it on the military level. | ||
| And so they liked it when the United States and Israel struck at Iran. | ||
| But now that Iran has been laid flat, what they would really prefer is for Iran to remain there rather than being able to recover as a functioning solidified state. | ||
| And so Saudi instead seems to be making time with the Turks. | ||
|
Saudi's Shift to Turks
00:02:04
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| The Turkish government, by the way, again, one of the major blunders, I believe, of the Trump administration and Tom Barak, the U.S. ambassadors to Turkey, is the attempt to treat Turkey as an erstwhile ally of the United States. | ||
| They absolutely 100% are not. | ||
| There is no evidence that the Islamist government of Rasiptayb Erdogan, who, again, has supported Hamas terrorists in thoroughgoing fashion, that they have the best interests of the West at heart. | ||
| The fact is that Turkey never should have been brought alongside NATO. | ||
| The only reason it was is a counterweight to Russia. | ||
| And it is for that reason, with regard to Saudi Arabia, that yesterday, Mohammed bin Salman actually told Iran he will not allow the use of Saudi airspace for any strike against Iran. | ||
| Well, I mean, let's be real about this. | ||
| He ain't stopping no one. | ||
| Okay, Mohammed bin Salman may have to say that for public relations purposes. | ||
| If the United States chooses to use Saudi airspace, the Saudis ain't exactly going to be trying to shoot down American F-16s. | ||
| That's silly talk. | ||
| But, and he's trying to counter signal. | ||
| He's trying to signal at his young and very, very unemployed population that he is not taking sides with the United States against the malocracy. | ||
| That is what is happening with regard to Saudi Arabia. | ||
| It's kind of tragic because Saudi, I thought, had a shot at modernization, but the more they draw into the orbit of Turkey, the more they alienate the West, the more they try to stop the burgeoning peace that could be happening in the Middle East, the worse things are going to get for the Saudi regime in the short term and in the midterm. | ||
| Meanwhile, on the economic front, the big news of the day is that Amazon is prepared to lay off around 16,000 corporate employees. | ||
| According to the Wall Street Journal, the first round of cuts in October led to around 14,000 white-collar employees receiving ping slips. | ||
| At the time, people familiar with Amazon's plans said the company was targeting around 30,000 job cuts. | ||
| That's 10% of the corporate workforce. | ||
| One of the reasons for this is the effectiveness of AI. | ||
| On Tuesday, Amazon said it was shutting down its fresh and go grocery stores after deciding to expand its focus on whole foods and same-day deliveries of fresh food from warehouses. | ||
| So everybody who's working for the fresh and go businesses will be laid off. | ||
|
High Long-Term Rates Mystery
00:06:56
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| There was sort of a recalibration of how the company was working during the pandemic when there was rapid expansion and everybody was ordering to their house. | ||
| And now, obviously, the market has changed again. | ||
| But AI obviously means that a lot of employees become expendable. | ||
| And this is one of the temporary hiccups that is going to emerge from AI. | ||
| AI will make the economy significantly more productive. | ||
| Productivity is going to go up radically, but you're going to require fewer employees to do the same work. | ||
| And it's going to take a little while for the job market to adjust to all of that, which presumably is one reason why there is a piece today in the Wall Street Journal by David Malpass. | ||
| Malpass is the, he was the Undersecretary of the Treasury under President Trump and president of the World Bank. | ||
| And Malpass points out that the Federal Reserve should really have one mandate and one mandate only. | ||
| So the Federal Reserve has a dual mandate to keep unemployment low and to keep inflation low. | ||
| I've been arguing for literally years that this is stupid. | ||
| Those two mandates are very often in conflict with one another. | ||
| Because sometimes in order to keep the inflation low, you actually have to worry less about job creation. | ||
| You have to worry more about monetary policy. | ||
| Malpass says in his Davos speech last week, President Trump asked why the interest rate is so much higher on U.S. Treasury debt than on bonds of weaker countries. | ||
| Good question. | ||
| The U.S. economy is strong. | ||
| The default risk is low, so why the higher yield? | ||
| For 10-year debt, we are paying 4.2%. | ||
| Japan pays 2.3%. | ||
| One reason for the high long-term rates is the still high short-term interest rate. | ||
| The Federal Reserve sets the short-term rate, but its models use backward-looking inflation data and treat growth as inflationary, leaving rates too high. | ||
| But cutting short-term rates without reforming the Fed's economic models risks higher long-term rates and a sell-off in the dollar. | ||
| After the Fed cut rates by half a percentage point in September 2024, long-term yields went up by 0.5 points, not down. | ||
| Markets were agassed at the political timing of the rate cut. | ||
| Sweeping reforms in the Fed's economic models to defend the dollar offer a straightforward path to lower interest rates across the yield curve, short-term and long-term. | ||
| The Fed's models ignore the effects of dollar weakness on inflation and interest rates and treat faster growth as a cause of inflation, says Malpass. | ||
| Already, many at the Fed argue U.S. growth is too fast and unemployment too low for the Fed to cut rates. | ||
| In Davos, the president trashed this illogic. | ||
| If a country is doing well, why is it bad news for financial markets? | ||
| And why does the Fed set its rate higher, not lower? | ||
| Sound money and a stable dollar are at the core of the supply-side model of booming economic growth. | ||
| While the Fed wants to focus attention on its independence, the problem is the Fed's anti-growth models undercut the dollar and keep interest rates and bond yields high. | ||
| So, essentially, the basic idea here should be monetary stability, not worries about job markets heating up or cooling down. | ||
| Defend the dollar, in other words. | ||
| So, he makes the case that the Fed's monetary policy, backward-looking inflation targeting, non-accelerating rate of unemployment limits to growth, they take direct aim at supply-side policies to boost energy production, cut tax rates, and improve regulation. | ||
| The models set a ceiling on the growth rate and a floor on the unemployment rate. | ||
| And this is exactly right. | ||
| This is exactly right because those two things are not always connected. | ||
| The idea that economic growth is inherently connected to job growth, that's true, kind of, over the long term, but they are not necessarily connected in the short term. | ||
| So, defending the dollar is a good thing, it is a necessary thing. | ||
| So, he says U.S. bond yields and mortgage rates could be substantially lower if U.S. policy defended the dollar and strengthened market confidence and trust. | ||
| The path is easily available to Mr. Trump by stating his administration wants the dollar to be stable, not weak. | ||
| That would cause more global investment in dollar-denominated assets, including stable coins, an economic home run. | ||
| It would also reverse the Biden administration's weakness, a political home run, and it would allow markets to help the Fed decide to lower the short-term rate. | ||
| That's right, because what the Fed is worried about right now is dollar instability. | ||
| The dollar is worth less on the open market, and they don't want to inflate the dollar. | ||
| So, again, that seems to be the right answer on all of this. | ||
| We'll see whether the Trump administration follows suit. | ||
| Well, today we also have a couple of Maha updates for you: the Make America Healthy again updates for you brought to you by our friends over at Balance of Nature. | ||
| Well, there are a couple of them. | ||
| One is that apparently the Trump administration has decided not to increase Medicare reimbursement rates to the insurers. | ||
| It'll be interesting to see how this plays in terms of coverage for older people who are reliant on Medicare. | ||
| One of the biggest problems, obviously, is that when you subsidize Medicare and you keep increasing the reimbursement rates, that costs the taxpayers. | ||
| On the other hand, when you don't increase those rates, then the insurers are unable to absorb the costs because it turns out that people who are older require a lot of medication and a lot of care. | ||
| And so, you may see some menu options drop off of Medicare because of the lower reimbursement rates. | ||
| This is presumably also why you saw shares drop for United Health Group and also Humana and CPS Health. | ||
| Apparently, $96 billion in market capitalization was wiped out on Tuesday. | ||
| According to the Wall Street Journal, the proposal dealt a blow to insurance companies that have been pushing to turn around a business that's central to their finances and hopes for growth. | ||
| Medicare Advantage, that is the private insurer version of the federal program for oldered and disabled Americans, generated an estimated $500 billion in revenue for the industry as a whole last year. | ||
| Such revenue was a long key driver of growth and profits until the fact that the Medicare reimbursement rates went down. | ||
| So the industry is likely to go to a playbook where they pull back some offerings, trim extra benefits like cash cards used for health expenses and offer plan designs with more cost controls. | ||
| So, again, fascinating to see how the administration is trying to bend the cost curve. | ||
| One of the realities of a government-run system, which is what Medicare effectively is, is that you can choose between a few things. | ||
| You can choose between quality, you can choose between universality, you can choose between cost. | ||
| You can't have all three of those things. | ||
| You can have low cost, universality, and quality. | ||
| It doesn't work that way. | ||
| In the free market, by the way, you can have near universality, low cost, and high quality. | ||
| That is the guarantee of the free market. | ||
| In the non-free market, you end up with universality, but typically higher cost and also poorer quality. | ||
| That is the typical. | ||
| And it seems that Medicare is moving in that direction. | ||
| The notion that insurance companies, by the way, are simply ripping off the federal government with regard to Medicare, that is generally untrue. | ||
| The profit margins for these insurance companies is not all of that high. | ||
| Well, in other maha news, apparently, Barry Weiss over at CBS News is planning to bring on board Andrew Huberman, who has a huge health podcast, which is really listenable. | ||
| This, of course, is driving some people absolutely up a wall. | ||
|
The Guarantee of the Free Market
00:03:14
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| Weiss apparently is going to announce a host of new contributors to the network. | ||
| That includes Andrew Huberman, who currently has 7.3 million subscribers on YouTube. | ||
| He pushes high protein consumption, among other things, and elevated cortisol levels in the mornings. | ||
| He obviously has this entire schedule where you get up in the morning, you go out and you spend 15 minutes in the sun, and all the rest. | ||
| Naturally, there are some people who are upset with Huberman because anytime you popularize science, you are very frequently going to make a mistake or you're going to simplify beyond the actual studies. | ||
| However, what Barry is attempting to do by bringing on board people who actually have some level of talent and followership is smart. | ||
| It is smart, what she is attempting to do. | ||
| And I know a lot of people are angry that Barry is even there, and that is clearly evident from the coverage. | ||
| How dare she upend all of the amazing systems at CBS News? | ||
| Well, I mean, you could hardly have done worse at CBS News, and Barry seems to be shaking things up in some pretty interesting ways. | ||
| This New Year's, by the way, lock in 50% off for one year when you subscribe to the whole health system supplements as a preferred customer at Balance of Nature. | ||
| Head on over to balanceofnature.com. | ||
| All righty, coming up, we'll get into an announcement from Yale that is quite fascinating, actually. | ||
| The show continues for our members right now. | ||
| Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member. | ||
| If you're not a member, become a member, use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans. | ||
| Click that link in the description and join us. | ||
| What was it like, Marlon, to be alone with God? | ||
| Is that who you think I was alone with? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Martin, I knew your father. | |
| I am yet convinced that he was not of this world. | ||
| All men know of the great Taliesi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You are my father. | |
| The gods should 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 part of work in the world. | ||
| I've seen it. | ||
| A god who sacrifices what he loves for us. | ||
| We are each given only one life, Singer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| We're given another. | ||
| I learned of Yazoo the Christ, and I have become his follower. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great light, great darkness. | |
| Such things mattered to me then. | ||
| What matters to you now, Mistress of Lies? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You, nephew. | |
| The sword of a high king. | ||
| How many lives must be lost before you accept the power you were born to wield? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So clinging to the promises of a god who has abandoned you. | |
| I cannot take up that sword again. | ||
| You know what you must do. | ||
| Greenlight, forgive me. | ||