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Feb. 5, 2026 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:51
Left-Wing "Journalists" PANIC As WaPo FIRES 300+
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Time Text
Amazon's Job Cuts Impact 00:12:26
The Washington Post fires 300-plus people, and the journalistic world is up in arms.
The latest on the immigration fiasco in Minnesota.
Plus, Scott Besend goes to Congress and shellacks a bunch of Democrats first.
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Well, tragedy occurred in the Bezos universe yesterday when 16,000 people were cut from Amazon.
This is what the media were very, very concerned about.
Amazon said that it was going to cut some 16,000 corporate employees.
The first round of cuts in October led to about 14,000 white-collar employees receiving pink slips.
And even at the time, Amazon was talking about 30,000 job cuts.
So, of course, people in the world of journalism were deeply affected.
They were really upset about the tens of thousands of people who are about to lose their jobs at Amazon, one of the most successful companies in America and in the world.
Oh, I'm just kidding.
They didn't care about that.
They barely covered that.
That lasted in the news for like five seconds.
What they are really, really upset about in the Bezos universe is that the Washington Post is going to lay off one-third of its staff.
Oh, no.
So, the Washington Post is cutting 300-plus jobs.
So, I'm just going to point out where the sympathies lie: 30,000 people lose their jobs at Amazon because Amazon is cost-cutting and reevaluating thanks to AI.
And the journalists are like, well, you know, those are people who work at Amazon.
Those might be factory workers, those might be middle management.
They're not us.
But at the Washington Post, they laid off the third-string journalist in Gaza who may or may not be a contractor for Hamas.
They laid off the race and ethnicity reporter for the Washington Post.
And my God, the American promise has been sullied and violated.
No, this cannot be.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post is cutting one-third of its staff, slashing hundreds of jobs across the newsroom and other departments in an effort to trim costs and reshape coverage.
The layoffs will affect journalists in nearly all news departments, including the sports, foreign technology, and breaking news teams, as well as business and technology staff.
The executive editor, Matt Murray, wrote in a note to newsroom staff on Wednesday: if we are to thrive, not just in Jew, we must reinvent our journalism and our business model with renewed ambition.
Unclear how many of these cuts are coming from the newsroom.
The Post is closing its sports department in its current form, but is going to retain some roles in that coverage area.
It's also shrinking its international coverage, and it will focus on national news and features, investigations, and advice on health and wellness topics.
The Post will continue to have some correspondence in about a dozen international locations, and they're going to focus on issues mostly related to national security because that's what readers actually want to hear.
The Post lost $77 million in 2023, $100 million in 2024.
It had significant traffic declines because digital media is a tough business.
We know we are in it.
In recent weeks, post journalists made public pleas asking Jeff Bezos to maintain their jobs.
Well, it turns out that the Washington Post, like the Daily Wire, like a lot of other for-profit institutions, is not a non-profit.
If journalists wish to start their own nonprofit and get a bunch of left-wing funders to put millions of dollars behind their jobs, they are free to do that.
And there are, in fact, organizations that operate as charitable organizations that do acts of journalism on occasion.
But the idea that Jeff Bezos owes it to the employees of the Washington Post to maintain their jobs when they are losing money is crazy and it's stupid.
Nonetheless, the response from the media ecosystem is absolute shock and horror.
Emmanuel Felton, the race and ethnicity reporter at the Washington Post.
I don't even know how are you the race and ethnicity?
Is there breaking news in the race and ethnicity area?
Is evolution occurring?
Like, what is happening that you need like a reporter on race and ethnicity?
Why is that?
What is it?
How is that a coverage area?
By the way, if on the right there was a race and ethnicity reporter, we would recognize just how kind of a little racist that is.
If there was like a race and ethnicity reporter over at Breitbart or here at the Daily Wire, I think that the left would read that in a very different way than they read the race and ethnicity reporter over at the Washington Post.
So Emmanuel Felton put out a statement: quote, I'm among the hundreds of people laid off by the Post.
This comes six months after hearing in a national meeting that race coverage drives subscriptions.
This wasn't a financial decision, it was an ideological one.
He says the other reporter on my team covering race was also laid off, as well as the editor in charge of race coverage across national.
The team covering America Beyond DC is now 90% white.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
You mean, you mean that people covering issues, they're going to be covering issues without regard to the race of the reporter?
That sounds terribly not racist.
We can't have that.
Obviously, this was a decision driven by Jeff Bezos' inherent evil, white racism, says the guy who gets paid to talk about racism all day long.
Robert McCartney, a retired Washington Post editor, correspondent, and columnist, quote, 39 years at paper before Bezos began gutting it.
He says, Reader asks, Is democracy dies in darkness now the mission statement?
Okay, do you remember when the Washington Post decided after Donald Trump was elected?
This is before Bezos bought the paper that they were going to retitle, they were going to put it on their masthead, the statement, Democracy Dies in Darkness.
The idea being that Donald Trump was an inherent threat to all things Democratic and the Washington Post would hold him responsible.
Yeah, that worked.
Great job, guys.
Breonna Tucker, the National Politics Breaking News reporter and the National Association of Black Journalists Political Task Force Chair, put out a statement: quote, I'm affected by layoffs at the Washington Post today.
There aren't enough words to describe the immense privilege and profound responsibility I've felt since hired at 25 as an editor.
As a black woman covering politics, a dwindling cohort today, that feeling is magnified.
Again, if your first take about being fired by a paper that is bleeding money is that you were fired because of your race, perhaps that betrays the style of coverage that you were doing, which might be one of the reasons the paper was suffering.
I don't know, I'm just going to put it out there that if you see everything through a racial lens and your paper, for whom you are reporting, keeps losing money, and then you get fired and in your firing statement, you talk about your specific race.
Maybe you were part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Maybe.
Peter Baker over at the New York Times, the chief White House correspondent, put out a tweet: quote, Jeff Bezos' wealth in 2024, $194 billion.
Jeff Bezos' wealth in 2025, $215 billion.
Jeff Bezos' wealth today, $249.4 billion.
Net increase in Bezos' wealth since 2024, $55.4 billion.
Cost of Bezos is 417-foot super yacht, $500 million.
Amazon investment in Melania, $75 million.
Original Bezos purchase price of the Washington Post in 2013, $250 million.
Bezos' net worth in 2013, $25.2 billion.
Net increase in Bezos' wealth since buying the post, $224.2 billion.
Last reported annual losses of post, $100 million.
Number of years Bezos could absorb those losses with what he makes in a single week, five.
Okay.
I love the premise of this tweet, which is that somehow it's a charity, that he bought it as a charity operation.
The only number that matters there, that's a lot of numbers.
The only number that matters in that tweet is last reported annual losses of post, $100 million.
Maybe one of the reasons that Jeff Bezos is worth $250 billion is because he does not hold on to declining assets.
He does not allow his businesses to be run like a charity.
Maybe that would be the reason.
Maybe that's why he is extraordinarily wealthy and most of the reporters working for him are not, because maybe they think they're in the charity business.
But this is crazy.
Okay, the approach here is nuts.
Again, as someone who's the co-founder of a major media organization in the same business as the Washington Post, let me just say that when you lose money and you can see where you're losing money, you have to lay people off.
That is how business works.
And Jeff Bezos is not doing anything wrong by doing all of that.
The view of journalists that somehow they are owed their position because the person who hires them is rich is extraordinary, especially when many of these same journalists are asking that the federal government step in and make the owners of their own businesses not rich anymore.
Do you understand?
They are living off the charitable giving they think of the rich people while ripping into the rich people and declaring that they are the ones who are very, very important.
And the people who hire them, they're just supposed to absorb the losses.
That's an insane tweet.
It really is crazy.
Bernie Sanders, complete leech on the ass of American society for the last eight decades, a useless human being in the extreme, put out a statement, quote, if Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie and $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don't tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff.
Democracy dies in oligarchy.
What is this?
He doesn't need to.
He doesn't need.
I wasn't aware that every decision that you make in economic life is dictated by need.
This is why Bernie Sanders, by the way, thinks that you should not have shampoo choices.
He has literally said stuff like this, that he, I go to the supermarket and I don't understand why I got 11 choices for the other end.
I don't want any.
Like, dude, it's not about what you need in America.
It's about what you want.
That's why this country kicks ass.
And that's why your version of the country sucks.
It is not about what people need.
It is about what they want to do and what they have the freedom to do.
And if Bernie Sanders wants to get together a bunch of his left-wing friends to put together a 501c3 and rehire all the race reporters at the Washington Post, he is free to do that.
In fact, if Bernie wants it, he could sell his lake house and he could hire several of these journalists and they could work for him and they could gallivant into the utopian socialist sunset together and enjoy their time.
But he's not going to do any of that.
By the way, when it comes to Bernie Sanders himself, he spent over 550 grand in 2025 campaign funds on private jets.
How many Washington Post salaries could that pay?
And the notion that business owners somehow owe it to their employees to keep employing them as the business loses money is crazy towns.
It is crazy towns.
It is stupid.
And it is driven again by this bizarre ideology that you are somehow owed a job if your boss is rich, even if the company that you work for is losing money and you are unproductive in helping to drive the business's turnaround.
Go start a business yourself if you want to absorb that risk.
The beauty of being a salaried employee is that the check comes in the mail every week.
The beauty of being an investor is that you receive the benefit of the decisions that you make at the top level.
But it also means you absorb the losses.
And so that means if you don't wish to absorb losses, you cut costs.
That is how business works.
If people want to go start their own, they can.
They are free to do so.
And these sort of yelling that Jeff Bezos is really, really rich, therefore he should just subsidize all of these journalists or pseudo-journalists.
I think many of them are pseudo-journalists in what they do, is ridiculous.
Why Startups Bundle Subscriptions 00:07:40
In a second, we'll get to why the Washington Post is actually in trouble, why they've been failing.
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Now, I know there's some on the right today who are suggesting the reason that the Washington Post is failing is because it went so left-wing.
I don't think that's actually true.
I think that the reason the Washington Post is failing is because it failed to adjust to the sort of underlying trends in media.
The reality is the New York Times is every bit as left-wing as it ever was, and the New York Times has been killing it.
The New York Times went from something like a million paid subscribers 10 years ago to 10 million paid subscribers today.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post is stuck in the dull drums at 2 million paid subscribers.
And that is less to do with the politics of those various outlets than it has to do with their choices in business.
This is why it's so funny when people say, why is the New York Times so successful?
It must be because of their amazing news coverage.
No, wrong.
The reason the New York Times is successful is because it made a series of purchases of nearly unrelated businesses and then drove all of those businesses toward a subscriber-based model that is almost like bundling.
It's basically a bundling strategy.
In the same way, you are now seeing major media corporations in the entertainment space buy one another and then drive all of the subscription revenue toward one hub.
That is what the New York Times did to become successful.
It's not because they hired a bunch of stellar White House reporters.
It ain't Peter Baker who's driving the subscription model of the New York Times.
He's certainly a reporter who is doing his job.
He's not hurting the New York Times.
And it's a very profitable enterprise, the New York Times.
But the idea that the New York Times chiefly is making bank right now because of their stellar Middle East reporting or because they hired a stringer in Ukraine is nonsense.
It's just not true.
And all these journalists who are proclaiming that it is so are foolish.
They don't understand how business works and they are self-glorifying, patting themselves on the back.
The reason the New York Times grew is because they shelled out a bunch of money in 2022 to buy, for example, The Athletic, which is a sports outlet.
And then subscriptions are driven back toward the New York Times company.
They bought Wordle in 2022.
What does Wordle have to do with the New York Times?
The answer is nothing.
It raises engagement.
There's a free game played by a lot of people, and it means a lot of people are on the New York Times app, and a certain percentage of those people will be upsold into the subscription.
They bought Wirecutter, which is a product recommendation site.
They expanded massively.
You want to know where the expansion occurred in the New York Times staff?
It did not occur in their Middle East reporting.
It occurred in their cooking section because they realized that high engagement in their cooking section would get people to subscribe for the cooking section and then stick around for everything else.
It is fair to say that the growing components of the New York Times business subsidized the newsroom.
It's why New York Times expanded its games section.
It's why they expanded their audio and podcast section.
They changed their strategy with regard to their registration wall.
In other words, they made a bunch of business decisions at the New York Times that have not been imitated by the Washington Post in any real way.
And that is why the Washington Post was in trouble, not because the New York Times is more committed to journalism than Jeff Bezos over at the Washington Post.
Kara Swisher, who again is a left-wing journalist in the tech space, who is very warm toward the Bernie Sanders view of the world, Kara apparently led Washington Post alumni by donating a staggering $10,000.
I don't know why that's called staggering by media, but okay.
A staggering $10,000 to a rapidly growing fundraiser for journalists laid off from the newspaper on Wednesday.
She made the donation to a GoFundMe organized by the newsroom union and reporter Rachel Siegel.
Apparently, they have about $322,000 raised.
So Swisher had floated a bid to buy the paper from Bezos in 2024.
She wrote, quote, The Washington Post, where I started in the mailroom, is the place that made me everything I am now.
Skin Flint, billionaire, and failed fashion model, Jeff Bezos, has decimated it.
But I have the means now because of what this legendary institution gave me to donate a decent chunk of dough to these hardworking employees.
I urge you to give whatever you can.
What a hero.
Heroic work.
There.
That's just great.
How about you create a business model that can hire those people?
How about that?
That's going to do a lot more than 10 grand.
A successful business model means that you can keep a lot of people employed.
A failing business model means that people get fired.
That is how the world works.
It is how the world has always worked.
Unless you have somebody subsidizing your pet interest and being angry at Jeff Bezos that he's decided not to subsidize your favorite reporters on race and ethnicity.
That is your problem, not Jeff Bezos'.
It's silly.
And again, I think there is a fundamental disconnect happening in the media between what actually works and what people wish worked.
So Jim Vandahey over at Axios.
And Axios is a nice company.
Like it's a nice sized company.
I believe that they do a couple hundred million dollars a year in business, largely based on advertising.
They have some subscription revenue.
So Jim Vandehey, he says, quote, still baffled, why would a disinterested, disengaged, distracted Washington Post owner hire a seemingly disinterested, disengaged, distracted CEO, suffer perpetual criticism and money loss?
Lots of rich people would buy it.
Even more execs would gladly run it.
Show me a single entity at anywhere doing anything that worked without a strong engaged leadership kind of matters.
I bet Don Graham or Kara Swisher would pull together a group to take it over.
Bloomberg could easily swoop it up himself, just sell it.
So if Jeff Bezos wants to sell it and somebody makes him an offer, I'm sure he would consider it.
But Jake Sherman over at Punch Bowl News, who again has a very successful newsletter, sort of a DC Beltway insider newsletter that's that's really well done.
So Jake tweeted back at Vandahey, quote, okay, hot shot, what would you do to turn the post around?
And Vanda Hey then tweeted out a list of things that he would do.
Two reporters on every federal agency.
Oh, yeah, that's going to do it.
Two reporters on the EPA.
That's going to turn around your subscription model.
Entice post stars who left to return as service to their city, profession, and nation.
They talk a big game on X. Call their bluff.
Who are these post stars of whom you speak?
If they were stars, they wouldn't have been fired.
Do you mean people that no one has heard of, but who have 100,000 followers on Twitter?
Is that who we're talking about right now?
Those are the people.
Two reporters on each of the top local biz sectors, defense tech, lobbying influence, buy punchbowl, bonus thought, buy the information, poach Peter Baker, work with philanthropists or ProPublica to fund investigative public trust with stories made available to other Alex upon public.
Yes, go to ProPublica, the left-wing organization that is dedicated to half-misinformation.
Warrants and Immigration Enforcement 00:15:27
Ask Marty Barron and Bob Woodward to train a new generation of diggers and like this is such old-style thinking.
This is not the thing that is going to turn around the Washington Post.
It is not.
But again, it's not about that for so many of these journalists.
The reason they are so upset today is because what the Washington Post just said is that journalists are subject to the rules of the market, just like everybody else.
They have, in the journalistic world, thought that they were immune from this stuff for legitimately decades.
They are not, and they never were.
All right, meanwhile, on the immigration front, Tom Homan says that some immigration agents are going to leave Minnesota.
According to the Wall Street Journal, in a press conference Wednesday morning, Homan said he would be pulling 700 officers and agents out of Minnesota.
There are still 2,000 were going to continue to operate.
Homan is, of course, trying to reset the table.
He is trying to make clear that this is just the efficient and effective use of law enforcement, that ICE is not there to quote unquote cause trouble.
And he is trying to negotiate deals with the locals in Minnesota, Mayor Jacob Fry, who's terrible, and the Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who's trying to make bank off of this political crisis in order to continue effectuating the law.
Homan has repeatedly indicated that he hoped to move the officers under his command away from large roving street sweeps toward more targeted arrests of known criminals.
He said the changes he was implementing would, quote, help ensure accountability and that targeted enforcement operations have a focus on national security threats and public safety threats, and they are conducted effectively, safely, and appropriately.
He calls this smarter enforcement, not less, enforcement.
President Trump, for his part, again, President Trump has very good political instincts, which is why he has been president twice.
He says, you know, that he learned, he said this to NBC News, that we could use a softer touch.
Speaking of Minneapolis, what did you learn?
I learned that maybe we can use a little bit of a softer touch, but you still have to be tough.
These are criminals.
We're dealing with really hard criminals.
But look, I've called the people.
I've called the governor.
I've called the mayor, spoke to him, had great conversations with him.
And then I see them ranting and raving out there, literally as though a call wasn't made.
He is right about all of that.
He says, listen, we got to enforce the law, and we're trying to do it.
It's Democrats who are standing in the way.
This is why I say I think the Democrats maybe are winning the battle on immigration, but they're going to lose the war because as we'll talk about in a moment, they are also going completely radical.
Now that they believe they have an advantage, again, political parties tend to do this.
They think they have an advantage on an issue, and then they go pedal to the metal and proceed to ram right through all the guardrails.
A journalist also spent the day trying to get JD Vance, the vice president, to apologize to Alex Predty's family.
That did not go particularly well for him.
Did you plan to apologize to the family of Alex Predty?
For what?
For, you know, labeling him an assassin with ill intent.
Well, again, I just described to you what I said about Alex Predty, which is that he's a guy who showed up with ill intent to an ICE protest.
But if it is a guy, it's determined that his civil rights were violated by this FBI investigation.
Will you apologize?
So if this hypothetical leads to that hypothetical leads to another hypothesis, it's a real case.
Will I do a thing?
Okay, and the vice president, you know, basically saying, when the evidence, you know, shows what you're saying that it shows, then maybe.
The reality is that the full investigation has not yet been done.
If, as the evidence appears to show, Alex Predty did not show up to massacre law enforcement, who's there to obstruct law enforcement, but not massacre them.
Does that mean that Greg Bovino used some overwrought language and so did Christy Noam?
Sure.
Did the vice president say that?
I'm not sure the vice president said that.
Christy Noam, for her part, points out correctly that chaos is not compassion.
She was speaking in Ogallus, Arizona.
And while the left tries to tell us many times that it's somehow compassionate to allow that kind of chaos, it isn't.
It was dangerous, not just on this side of the border, but on the Mexican side of the border as well.
We saw many of those illegal migrants not be able to survive the brutal terrain.
They didn't survive the river crossing.
Those causes of death, of heat, and water were dangerous.
And the left behind so many bodies that in some counties along the border, they had to install migrant morgues just to pick up the dead bodies that were passing away on their way to try to get into the United States.
In fact, during the Biden administration and those open border policies, we saw even the UN declare that the United States and Mexico border was the deadliest land route in the world.
Countless people were sexually abused and trafficked over and over again and exploited.
Of course, she is right about all of this.
Now, again, I think the Trump administration is course correcting.
I will tell you what is not helpful is when Steve Bannon, I will say once again, a person all over the Epstein files and who did 15 hours of sit-down interviews with Jeffrey Epstein acting as a quasi-PR flak for the child molester.
Steve Bannon, who desperately wants to run for president, apparently in 2028, right now, he's playing this game where he says he wants Trump to run in 2028.
He knows that's not possible.
Then he will reluctantly step into the fray.
Steve has no chance of becoming president, of course, but he would like to maximize his profile by doing so and saying obnoxious things on stage because that is what Steve Bannon does.
He came out yesterday and suggested, quote, we're going to have ICE surround the polls come November.
We're not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again.
And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.
He says President Trump has to nationalize the election.
You've got to put not just, I think, ICE, you've got to call it the 82nd and 101st airborne on the Insurrection Act.
You've got to get around every poll and make sure only people with IDs, people actually register to vote and people in the United States as citizens vote in this election.
Now, I'm in favor of voter ID.
I'm very much against voter fraud.
But what Bannon is trying to do here is actually play into the Democrats' hands.
That's actually what he wants to do.
Steve's a clever character, but again, what he's doing here is fairly obvious.
What he would like to do is say the most outrageous thing to get the bays to cheer and rally around him and then have the left attack him in order to maximize his own profile.
The Trump administration is moderating its rhetoric for a smart reason because they would like to see their mission actually effectuated.
Democrats are looking for precisely that sort of rhetoric in order to jump on it.
Meanwhile, the Democrats, again, continue to go too far on their side of the aisle.
Representative Ayanna Presley, the Ringo star of the squad, she says that this is fascism and now is the time to fight fascism.
Each of you have shown immense courage, and it is time for Democrats to show that same courage and fight against fascism.
As we negotiate funding for DHS, we have a real opportunity to do more than express concern.
We have the chance to reject this campaign of terror, and we have a responsibility to do so.
So, again, this is going to be the take by Democrats.
Minnesota, it does result in some fairly funny things, how crazy the left is being on this issue.
My favorite clip yesterday was a clip of a woman who identifies as a member of Minnesota Ice Watch setting up a checkpoint.
I believe it was Melissa Chen who pointed out that this lady is actually rationalizing her way to borders from first principles, which is pretty hysterical.
We are literally creating a place that we know who's coming and going in and out of our neighborhoods.
In the middle of the road at 32nd and Cedar Avenue, a makeshift roadblock turned this intersection into a roundabout.
Cars slowed as drivers noticed.
Some honked.
Others asked questions.
And one man brought food for the people standing watch.
They're knowing who goes in and out.
I mean, that sounds very much like a border right there.
Good job.
And the media, of course, are fostering all of this.
This is the thing they want, all of which is leading to a new Democratic push for yet another possible shutdown.
They want to curb ICE's power by apparently pressing for judicial warrants to be used in arrest of illegal immigrants as opposed to administrative warrants.
Some of the things that they are looking to do.
Joining us on the line to discuss the legality of what Democrats are now pushing in the House and the Senate is Gene Hamilton.
He's president of America First Legal and former Deputy White House Counsel.
Gene, thanks so much for the time.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me on.
So one of the things that we've been hearing is the Democrats are pushing for the possibility of yet another partial government shutdown with regard to the Department of Homeland Security.
And we've heard rumors that they are pushing the idea that every arrest must be accompanied by a judicial warrant for ICE to effectuate it.
What does that mean?
What are we talking about?
What is the legal basis for administrative warrants, which is typically what ICE uses when they're effectuating an arrest for illegal immigration?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a great question.
And thanks for asking it.
Civil immigration enforcement is the standard routine immigration enforcement that ICE has engaged in for decades.
Immigration to the United States and immigration out of the United States tends to be a civil matter.
Now, there are criminal penalties associated with violating those civil matters.
So if you come into the United States illegally, you've committed a crime.
If you come into the United States after being deported again, you have committed a crime.
There are lots of other crimes that are associated with it.
But generally speaking, immigration is a civil function of the federal government.
And so what happens is that you have a system that's built in the executive branch to handle this, where you have ICE within the Department of Homeland Security.
They conduct arrests.
They detain aliens in the United States and they handle deportations.
Their cases, if they have a case that's being heard in immigration court, people have heard about the immigration court backlog, all kinds of different things.
Those are actually Department of Justice lawyers who are functioning as judges who are adjudicating the cases.
There's no involvement of Article III of the federal court system.
There's no involvement, and it's never been that way.
And it's for good reason.
It's because these are cut and dry civil offenses.
This goes to the ultimate authority of any national government anywhere across the world.
We're not talking about really complicated legal trials that are at issue that need to be heard before an Article III judge, and it's going to go to the Court of Appeals and then the Supreme Court.
And there's going to be some massive precedent-setting case that's going to arise that had to arise in an Article III district court context.
Everybody knows anytime you get involved in litigation in federal court, it's going to take time.
It's going to take years to adjudicate a civil claim.
It often takes a lot.
It can take, depending on the complexity, a long time to adjudicate criminal cases.
So with that background and that table setting, imagine if ICE, every time that they wanted to go arrest an alien, instead of being able to do it on their own, like Congress directed in the immigration laws, ICE has authority to conduct warrantless arrests in many different circumstances.
And the warrants that they do use are administrative civil warrants.
But now imagine if they had to go to a federal judge every single time that they wanted to go arrest an illegal alien, they wanted to engage in some kind of action, it would crush the federal court system.
The volume would be absolutely crushing.
There's already 1 point something million cases pending in the immigration courts today.
There are millions of illegal aliens who are here today.
It would suck up every resource that's present in the federal government now to be able to adjudicate these matters.
And so it's for good reason that they're not currently done that way.
The Democrats in Congress, they know this and they want this to come to a crushing halt.
I mean, they just don't want anybody to be deported.
And so they know that if they toss this thing on, that if you're an average American and you're just kind of sitting there thinking, oh, well, that doesn't sound so bad.
Why couldn't they go get a judicial warrant?
They know that the end game is the complete slowdown and stoppage of the immigration enforcement in the United States, which means that they would achieve their objectives while Donald Trump's in office that they were trying to do while Joe Biden was here, which is, of course, bring in as many people as they can.
Don't deport anybody and see what happens to the electorate.
I think one of the things Democrats are relying upon is that when people hear warrant, the first thing they think of is law and order.
They think of a judge granting a warrant.
They don't know that there are these things called administrative warrants.
And I think people really don't sort of engage with the law enforcement system this way frequently.
So they don't think about the idea that if you're arrested, for example, for going 100 miles an hour in a school zone, it's not as though the cop is pulling you over, calling up a judge and asking for a warrant to arrest you.
They're just arresting you.
And this sort of attempt to jerry rig a rationale for not arresting people is pretty astonishing, which goes to the sort of Democrats' new attempt.
And it really is, it's not new, but it's certainly ramped up to obstruct federal law enforcement in general.
So Tom Holman, I believe, the Borders Art, he's done a much better job of laying out exactly what the Trump administration is trying to do than the DHS Secretary, Christy Noam.
But the things that the DHS has been doing, that ICE and Border Patrol have been doing in Minneapolis, these are well within the purview of ICE and Border Patrol.
And they always have been going back through the Clinton or Obama administrations, the Biden administration.
Yeah, look, we are talking about immigration enforcement that used to be routine, bipartisan matter that people agreed upon.
Hey, if you're an illegal alien, you need to go home.
You need to be deported.
Now, especially if they say you're an illegal alien who's committed additional crimes in the United States, it used to be universal consensus that even that population needed to go.
You can look at old quotes and clips from Hillary Clinton, from Barack Obama, from Joe Biden, from every Democrat that has been on the national scene over the last several decades.
And they used to say these things.
But of course, now where the rubber is actually meeting the road in Minneapolis, where ICE and CBP have been engaging in targeted operations going after these convicted criminals who either have removal orders or who, because of the Sanctuary City policies in Minnesota, don't, ICE doesn't have the ability to detain after they've been encountered by law enforcement.
And so these guys, these guys and gals are engaging in things that everybody used to agree was good and it was good for society and it was necessary.
It's a necessary function of any sovereign government.
But yet what we see now through the agitators present in Minneapolis, present across other cities across the United States, well-funded, well-organized, being pushed from all kinds of different folks behind the scenes, all kinds of different Marxist networks behind the scenes that are trying to create this image of resistance, of overreach by the Trump administration.
And they're trying to do this because they want to convince the average American that they have more in common with the struggles of some illegal alien who came here and committed multiple DUIs and that somehow it's the modern civil rights fight of the day.
Backlash Against Immigration Policies 00:07:56
This is just like Rosa Parks in, you know, during the civil rights movement.
And so if you're not aligned with Rosa Parks, then my God, you must be a fascist.
You must be a Nazi.
You must be all these kinds of different things.
And it's because this is, I mean, this is just the Marxist worldview time and time again coming out in different ways in different manners where they have to create this constant clash, right, between classes.
They have to create this illusion of this constant fight so they can maintain their fundamental ideology, which at the at the root of which leads to the destruction of our society.
So when we of our of our constitutional republic, and so when we see what they're doing on the streets of Minneapolis, when these are things that were routine, these are things that happened under administrations of both parties years in the past, maybe not to the number that we're seeing today because they didn't have the same types of personnel.
They didn't have the same types of resources, but things that were done.
And now they're trying to turn it into the modern civil rights fight of the day.
I think you can kind of understand what's happening here and what their ultimate objective is.
Yeah, Gene, I think that the point that you're making here also underscores why the Trump administration really needs to retail the best version of its PR, because this obviously is a chaos operation with a massive PR angle.
It is not an attempt to prevent law enforcement from committing some sort of crime.
It's an attempt to obstruct law enforcement through the mechanism of bad press, essentially.
And so that's why, you know, I'm critical of Christine Noam in the way that, for example, she characterizes situations like Renee Good or Alex Preddy in the immediate aftermath.
And that creates a backlash that is unnecessary.
The sort of low-key, let's go enforce the law approach of a Tom Holman seems significantly better calibrated to achieve the goals of the administration than the sort of colorful chaos that sometimes seems to attend some of the people who have now been actually put out of camera view in the Trump administration, people like Greg Bavino.
Yeah, I mean, look, there are lots of folks with lots of different views on the PR angle here.
And look, again, this is immigration enforcement is not anything new per se.
Now, we might have forgotten about it for the last four years as a society because Joe Biden didn't engage in any of it.
But immigration enforcement arrests of illegal aliens or of aliens who have committed offenses in the United States is a very routine thing.
It's a routine part of life.
It's something that every nation with the means across the world does every single day.
Try to go violate the immigration laws in China.
Try to go violate the immigration laws in anywhere else in the world as an American, and you will face The enforcement of those immigration laws against you.
You'll be deported.
You'll be put in jail.
You'll be any number of things potentially done to you.
And so we're not unique in our need, in our desire to engage in this type of law enforcement operation.
It doesn't do anything to make us less of a country or less of a people to actually deport folks who have violated our laws.
In fact, quite the opposite.
And, you know, it's very upset.
What's most upsetting to me is that when you look at a lot of the ties and connections that are being laid out, kind of in public discourse about what these groups were involved in, especially in Minneapolis, you look at their signal chats, you look at who was in those groups, people who aren't just agitators, but people allegedly who appear to be members of government, members of other non-governmental organizations,
members of all kinds of aspects of society who are conspiring, appear to be conspiring together to impede the enforcement of our laws.
And what they want is they want to draw out this kind of backlash.
They want to draw out this kind of conflict for the reasons we've discussed earlier, because then they can say, oh, look, these fascists are overreaching.
They're doing too much.
They're running around on the streets.
Now, you, as an American citizen, you're at risk of being detained by ICE, which is just garbage.
Statistically speaking, it's complete and absolute garbage.
But it is their end goal.
And of course, PR does have an aspect here that is important for the American people to pay attention to.
Well, that's Gene Hamilton.
He's president of America, first legal format deputy White House Counsel.
Gene, thanks so much for the time and insight.
Thanks for having me on.
Meanwhile, Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, was on the Hill yesterday speaking with the House Financial Services Committee, and it got pretty feisty.
Democrats tried to go up against the Treasury Secretary.
It seems there was a pretty significant IQ gap between many of the Democrats and the Treasury Secretary, who is one of the more intelligent people in American politics.
Whatever you say about Scott Besson's actual perspectives on things like tariffs, and I have some quibbles.
There's no question that Scott Bessant is a brilliant human.
Anyway, Scott Besant was appearing before the House Financial Services Committee, and he was asked about inflation in housing.
And he started talking about the fact that you need to deport people.
And if you deport people, then that is going to reduce the demand for housing because you're reducing the demand for housing by deporting, I mean, just definitionally.
Maxine Waters had a problem with this.
Again, one of the great hilarities of the U.S. Congress is that Maxine Waters, who is as corrupt as the day is long, has been sitting on the Financial Services Committee for decades.
I believe the ranking member does not understand the definition of generalized inflation versus one-time price increases.
I would also note that housing, especially for working Americans, a Wharton study has shown that the mass unfettered immigration, adding 10 to 20 million new people demanding housing, Congresswoman, is what caused a great deal of housing inflation for working Americans.
So you and the Biden administration should be ashamed.
Which is also why we are seeing rents.
There was just a recent media story on this.
Rents are going down partially because of that enforcement.
So, Mr. Secretary.
Supply and demand continues to work.
10 and 20 million immigrants shut the housing stock of working Americans.
So that was Maxine Waters telling Besson to shut up because she wanted to seize back her time.
Having participated in some of these hearings, I truly believe that not televising hearings would be better for the country because all it is mainly are Congresspeople who are posing for the cameras.
Maxine Waters being a key representative of that particular view on how hearings ought to be used.
Scott Bessant was also quizzed by Representative Gregory Meeks on committing to investigate alleged corruption in the Trump administration.
Here's how that went.
All you have to ask is yes or no.
No, Congressman, all you have to ask is the OCC is an independent entity.
And I would know, Congressman, you traveled to Venezuela.
I take that as a no.
On behalf of the question, I take that as a note.
I do not want to answer that question.
I take that as a note.
For a $7 billion.
I'm asking you to do your responsibility as Secretary of the Treasury.
You do not.
You cannot arrange what you're doing.
He's the one that went past your time, Mr. Chairman.
No, and he did not answer my question or not.
He had six seconds left to try to answer your question.
It was a yes or no.
It was a yes or no answer.
I asked him, Willie?
No, gentlemen, yes or no.
OCC is covering for the president.
Well, stop being hip-hop.
Yeah, these hearings are so these hearings are so useful.
Debt Crisis Dragging on Economy 00:09:25
They're so useful.
Representative Stephen Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts, he also went up against Besant.
Again, did not go amazing for him.
This question and a serious issue for the financial services industry, especially as the Secretary of the Treasury.
Well, that's an important question.
No, this is my time.
I haven't asked you any more questions.
I haven't asked you any more questions.
The gentleman from Massachusetts.
I'm trying to get to my next question.
Could you speak a little louder?
I can't hear you.
Yeah, okay.
I might.
I might.
Okay, so good times.
Good times over in the House.
Now, on a more substantive level, Scott Besson cited 4.1% growth under the Trump administration as a big highlight for the Trump administration.
Obviously, the perception of the economy is going to have a massive impact on the 2026 elections.
And looking forward on the 2028 presidential election, here is Besson citing solid growth under President Trump, particularly in the last half of last year.
The U.S. will have reported, likely, despite the government shutdown, despite the longest government shutdown in history, 4.1% growth for the past three quarters.
And so we have been successful at that.
Europe last week celebrated 0.3% growth.
So it's no comparison.
And I think we are beginning to accelerate.
And importantly, everything we are doing is to fix this terrible Biden inflation from the past four years, 21.5%, much more for working families.
And we are bringing that down.
And there's no question that the economy has been chugging forward at a very rapid rate at this point.
That is particularly, again, because of the tech industry that is now being decried by the entire left and populists on the right.
It is the supposedly terrible big companies that are driving economic growth in the country right now.
Even though, for example, software companies have been taking it on the chin because AI is now substituting itself for some of the big software companies.
Google, for example, is now doubling its spend.
Alphabet reported an 18% jump in fourth quarter revenue and revealed plans to roughly double its spend on data centers and other capital projects.
Sales exceeded analysts' expectations and nearly $114 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, driven by growth in the company's digital advertising and cloud computing units.
Net income was $34.5 billion.
That is a 30% increase compared with the same period a year earlier.
Google is using all of that money to develop AI models and build the data centers needed to train and run them.
Again, Google is an extraordinarily well-run business, obviously, which is why they have such a high valuation.
Now, there are some problems that the Trump administration needs to move on if it does wish to shore up the growth numbers that it is currently pursuing.
In my opinion, the tariff uneasiness is leading to an unnecessary dampening of economic growth.
Now, Scott Besson did go up against Maxime Waters on tariffs and inflation, and here's what he had to say: quote, tariffs are inflationary.
Did you say that at that time?
Yes or no?
No.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, again, I want to be clear.
So just let me ask, are tariffs inflationary?
Yes or no?
According to the San Francisco Federal Reserve with 150 years of data, tariffs do not cause inflation.
San Francisco Federal Reserve.
Well, last November, as the Trump administration finally began to realize that affordability issues in America are not a hoax.
Now, again, Scott Besson is suggesting there that tariffs do not cause inflation.
Well, when it comes to inflation as a generalized phenomenon, as he has pointed out, as opposed to one-time price increases or temporary price increases, it's not tariffs generally that cause inflation.
It is bad monetary policy, loose monetary policy.
As Milton Friedman famously suggested, inflation is anywhere and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
With that said, the study that he is citing does not claim that tariffs aren't inflationary.
The study that he is citing says, quote, our results suggest that immediately following an increase in tariff rates, the unemployment rate tends to increase and inflation tends to fall.
This pattern suggests that at first, the effects of tariffs more closely resemble a negative demand shock.
That is, consumers and businesses pull back their spending, which slows economic activity and also slows down inflation.
Over time, however, economic activity picks back up and inflation then increases to a higher rate than it would have been without the tariff increase.
In other words, there's an immediate pullback in spending.
That creates deflation because people aren't spending as much, so the prices go down.
Then people come back, they start spending again, but the prices, because supply is restricted, the prices are a little bit higher than they would have been.
So have the tariffs been this gigantic boon to America's economy?
The evidence has yet to show that they have been a gigantic boon to America's economy.
The other area where the Trump administration, again, I think that they, like this is not unique to Trump.
This is every single politician in America with very few exceptions.
The willingness to simply ignore our massive debt crisis is going to cause a problem.
It won't cause a problem in the moment.
It is going to become a bigger and bigger drag on the economy.
Yesterday, President Trump suggested that we shouldn't have to worry about the national debt because our growth will make the debt look small.
We have now, with me, and with all the money, I've always been good at money.
And with all the money coming into our country, we're a rich country again.
We have debt, but we also have growth.
And the growth will soon make the debt look very small.
Okay, I wish that were true.
I wish that you could simply grow your way out of a $39 trillion debt.
But no, that is not the case, actually.
Our current debt growth, if you annualize it, is almost 7%.
The current deficit is 5.9% of GDP, which means that if you wanted to make up the deficit alone, you would have to grow at a massive rate.
To make up our annual deficit this year, for example, we would have to grow at a 12 to 15% rate, which, of course, is not going to happen.
If you wanted to reach what's called a primary surplus, which means more is collected in taxes every year than is spent on everything except the interest, with the current tax rates and with the current economic growth rates, you require 3.2% GDP growth continuously for the next 30 years.
And that would not solve the debt.
That would just solve sort of the deficit.
So growth alone isn't going to do it.
At some point, we're going to have to look as a country at all of the measures that we don't want to look at, namely our spending.
We have a spending problem.
We do not have a tax revenue problem.
Our tax revenue is at all-time highs.
We have a spending problem.
And that spending problem grows worse and worse as every single party in American life pledges to spend more on more things.
George Will makes what used to be a fairly rote conservative point.
It's kind of amazing that this is, you know, I mean, I'm old enough to remember the Tea Party when we worried about these sorts of things.
That wasn't that long ago.
That was 2010.
George Will says, as the national debt is a few months from reaching $39 trillion and perhaps $40 trillion by the end of the year, it is puzzling how unperturbed the political class is.
Or perhaps not.
Writer and political agitator Upton Sinclair said it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it or pretending not to, says George Will.
A bipartisan congressional consensus more alarming than partisan rancor is.
There are no long-term fiscal gains without intense short-term political pain.
So because today's congressional careers do not yet seem likely to coincide with coming dire consequences, let them come.
He points out that according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, there are six possible crises scenarios.
Five are dramatic.
The sixth is less so, but most alarming and also most likely.
First, you could have a financial crisis where investors look at how fast the debt is accruing and say, we're not going to invest in bonds anymore.
Second, you could have an inflation crisis because if you have a financial crisis, then you have to inflate the currency in order to deal with that.
Inflation would then become baked into the expectations of investors who would demand higher interest rates.
And if that happens, then says George Will, when interest rates paid on debt exceed the rate of economic growth, a crisis intensifies because rising interest rates depress economic growth.
Then you would have an austerity crisis where you have to have massive cutbacks.
You could have a currency crisis where because of inflation, an appreciating dollar means that people diversify away from U.S. debt.
The most unlikely is a default crisis, but the most probable and most ominous outcome is a gradual crisis where we kind of just descend into economic sluggishness.
Now, maybe AI creates massive productivity gains.
But even if AI creates massive productivity gains, which I believe is something that's going to happen, until and unless we have a political class and an American people, because we're the ones who elect them, who are willing to talk about the kinds of cuts necessary to make America fiscally responsible again, nothing is going to change.
The trajectory will maintain for a while, and then it will suddenly get much, much worse.
Right now, we're still the best bet on the block because other countries are acting in even more fiscally irresponsible ways than the United States.
But if we continue along the pathway that we have created with our gigantic welfare state, particularly our means-tested welfare state, if we continue to do that sort of stuff, then we are going to run into a brick wall at some point.
The Fiscal Irresponsible Pathway 00:00:54
All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now.
We'll get to scandal in New York as Zorhan Mamdani visited a dude who got shot charging a cop with a knife.
What's he doing?
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Okay, no not even close Two, three.
Whatever.
You know what?
Two, three, four.
I cannot believe we're back here again, Ben.
If the Ben Shapiro shows mom, then Ben After Dark is a cool mom.
James.
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