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Feb. 13, 2026 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:37
It’s BERNIE’s Party, You Can Cry If You Want To

Bernie Sanders reshapes the Democratic Party, pushing candidates like Brad Lander while proposing a moratorium on data centers to curb AI, contrasting Trump’s 2.4% wage-friendly inflation. Trump’s EPA rescinds a 17-year-old Obama-era climate rule, slashing $1.3T in auto costs, but faces backlash over windmill dismissals and EU carbon market claims. Meanwhile, ICE’s Minnesota crackdown ends after public outrage and funding blocks, with 62% opposing enforcement, while Nancy Guthrie’s kidnapping stalls due to FBI-Pima County tensions—$100K reward offered amid Bitcoin demands. Sanders’ influence clashes with Trump’s economic wins, exposing deep divides over immigration, climate policy, and law enforcement coordination. [Automatically generated summary]

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Season Two Premieres 00:02:09
President Trump ends the ice surge in Minnesota.
Is that a win or a loss for Republicans?
Democrats, of course, see blood in the water and now are going totally radical Bernie Sanders making insane proposals, but also taking over his party.
First, it's not often the Daily Wire gives you a Valentine's weekend watch recommendation.
Tonight, you're about to see just why that is.
Ben After Dark is back.
Season two premieres tonight, 6 p.m. Eastern on Daily Wire Plus.
All week on the Ben Shapiro show.
We make sense of the news.
Tonight, we make fun of it.
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This season, it is way better than last season.
So if you thought that last season was mediocre, let me tell you, this one is even better than mediocre.
And Savi is living her dream this season.
This is the season of Savvy.
Savvy did her lifelong dream of meeting B. Rad G from Malibu's Most Wanted.
That is only one of the myriad surprises that Savvy has experienced this season and you will experience with us together.
Join us for the season two premiere, Ben After Dark tonight, 6 p.m. Eastern, streaming on Daily Wire Plus.
So yesterday, the president of the United States announced that the ice surge to Minnesota would be ending.
According to the Wall Street Journal, President Trump's Borders Are said the administration is ending its crackdown in Minnesota, wrapping up an operation that sparked outrage after the fatal shooting of two U.S. citizens and prompted Democrats in Congress to block funding for the DHS.
Tom Homan, the responsible adult in the room, spoke about this yesterday.
Here's what it sounded like: the QRF deployments have dropped dramatically because we have less of that occurring, less of the agitator that crossed that line.
That is a good thing.
That is a win for everybody, not just for the safety of law enforcement officers, it's a win for this community.
With that, and success that has been made arresting public safety threats and other priorities since this surge operation began, as well as the unprecedented levels of coordination we have obtained from state officials and local law enforcement, I have proposed, and President Trump has concurred, that this surge operation conclude.
Okay, now, on a factual level, was the surge a success?
Corey Liandowski's Role 00:15:41
Well, it sort of depends on what you're looking at.
If you're looking at the statistics in terms of arrests, then sure, it was a success.
If you're looking at maybe some concessions obtained, as Homan says, sure, it was a success.
In a PR way, was it a success?
The answer, of course, is not really.
In a PR way, it was pretty bad for the Trump administration.
According to the Associated Press, brand new poll from APNORC, about six in 10 American adults say President Trump has gone too far in sending federal immigration agents into American cities.
So the views of Trump's handling of immigration remain steady over the past month.
About four in 10 say they approve.
But apparently, the Republican Party advantage on immigration has shrunk pretty significantly since October.
About three in 10 U.S. adults now trust Republicans to do a better job handling immigration.
About a similar share say the same about Democrats.
And about three in 10 say both parties do a terrible job.
Now, that is a really bad statistic for the Trump administration.
This has always been a strength for the Trump administration.
Remember, if three in 10 Americans are saying that the party they trust on immigration more is the one that left the border wide open for four years under Joe Biden, that is a referendum on the handling of immigration by, in particular, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Christy Noam, who has been, I will say it, disastrous.
Again, I think that the strength of the Trump administration when they came in is they came in with a hard-nosed plan to do things on executive orders.
They moved fast.
And yes, they broke some things, but it was concerted action.
The first three months of the Trump administration was one of the most effective administrations I have ever seen in action.
And then it turns out that if you take people who are good on TV and you just put them in cabinet positions, sometimes it works out okay.
And sometimes it really, really does not.
And the polling data suggests that based on the ICE operations in Minnesota, that has undercut Trump's popularity on an issue where Republicans ought to have extraordinarily high approval.
According to this brand new APNORC poll, 62% of Americans say that President Trump has gone too far in sending federal immigration agents into U.S. cities.
61% say that the administration has gone too far in using federal law enforcement at public protests in U.S. cities.
54% say that the administration has gone too far in restricting legal immigration.
And 52% say that the administration has gone too far in deporting immigrants living in the United States illegally.
There is no excuse for this other than bad rollout, because this was the issue that, number one, promoted Trump to the presidency in 2016 and then did it again in 2024.
And this is where, I will say it again, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Christine Noam, has been very bad at her job.
Just as I said yesterday, that Attorney General Pam Bondi has not been a credit to the administration.
Quiet, solid implementation of mainstream policy.
That is the way that administrations maintain popularity, not by going on TV in full makeup in order to promote the most radical version of the policy.
There is an extraordinary piece in the Wall Street Journal breaking down Christy Noam's tenure over at DHS.
Suffice it to say, it has been problematic.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Christy Noam has basically used DHS as a platform for her own political gratification.
Given the incoming fire that she was taking politically, apparently, two days after federal agents shot and killed Alex Predi, Noam's top advisor and alleged lover, Corey Lewandowski.
And that is important because that has been widely alleged.
Apparently, it's not even being very well hidden.
Lewandowski, both of them are married, by the way.
Corey Lewandowski is married.
Christy Noam is married.
It has long been rumored in South Dakota politics.
It's been long rumored since she became DHS secretary that they live together, essentially.
Corey Liandowski is not just her top advisor.
He may be her paramour.
And I say may very advisedly there.
Apparently, Lewandowski messaged Tony Fabrizio, which is one of Trump's pollsters, with a request to cut an ad to help Christy Noam.
Fabrizio ignored the entreaty.
According to the Wall Street Journal, throughout her tenure as Secretary of Homeland Security, a sprawling agency charged with carrying out Trump's central campaign promise of a mass deportation.
Noam has attempted to burnish her personal stardom at every turn.
With Lewandowski, Trump's former campaign manager at her side just staged a headline-grabbing immigration crackdown while sidelining rivals and dissenters.
She's carried out confrontational operations over the objections of longtime immigration officials who warned that such flashy displays would discredit the department's ultimate mission.
She's been in constant fights with Tom Homan, again, the adult in the room.
Apparently, within DHS, Noam and Lewandowski frequently berate senior-level staff, give polygraph tests to employees they don't trust, and have fired employees.
In one incident, Lewandowski fired a U.S. Coast Guard pilot after Noam's blanket was left behind on a plane, according to people familiar with the incident.
This would not surprise anybody who's familiar with the work of Corey Lewandowski historically.
By the way, I'm not even sure why Lewandowski has the power to fire people working with Christy Noam.
He has sort of a temp position.
When you read down in the article, what you find is that days after Predty's shooting, Lewandowski and Noam were spotted sitting together at the Mar-a-Lago wedding of Dan Scavino.
A DHS spokeswoman said Noam serves at the pleasure of the president and has successfully clamped down on inefficiencies to save billions of dollars.
She said that all the officials are on the same page.
But apparently, Noam and Lewandowski's close relationship had already made Trump and his top advisors uncomfortable.
Lewandowski had initially wanted to formally serve as Noam's chief of staff.
Trump rejected the idea due to reports of a romantic relationship between the two.
After tabloid photos of Lewandowski showed him going back and forth between his apartment and Noam's across the street last year, the secretary moved into a government-owned waterfront house on a military base in Washington that is provided to the leader of the U.S. Coast Guard.
The Coast Guard falls under Noam's purview at DHS during peacetime.
Apparently, the DHS spokeswoman said Noam moved to the house for increased security and pays rent as well.
And Lewandowski spends time at the house.
Lewandowski and Noam are both married, publicly denied reports that they are sleeping together.
But again, let's just say the rumors are extremely strong.
The pair have been using a luxury 737 MAX jet with a private cabin and back for their travel around the country.
DHS is currently leasing the plane.
They want to buy the plane, but the purchase would be double the cost of each of seven other commercial planes the department is also buying at the pair's discretion to carry out deportations.
Apparently, behind the scenes, Noam and Lewandowski have been attempting to box out Tom Holman, who again is the responsible person, L State of Bank.
You need responsible people in the room working for the president of the United States.
That's how success is achieved.
More than a week after Pretty's shooting, apparently Noam and Lewandowski berated Todd Lyons, the acting ICE director, for videos that emerged in Minnesota showing federal officers continuing to tangle with protesters.
They said the president hated the continued stream of videos and they pinned the blame on Lions.
And then they demanded that Lions draw up a new plan for ICE to carry out targeted enforcement, which is the approach Lions wanted, but apparently Noam had rejected.
Lewandowski took Noam to functions with Republican Kingmakers starting in 2019, introducing her as a rising star in the party.
He suggested her as a possible VP candidate in 2024, and then he pushed her for DHS.
Again, the spending inside the department is fascinating.
Lewandowski, for one, who is working under a sort of Gen Temp contract because he has taken a position that allows him to maintain pay in the private sector, he has urged officials to move away from continuing long-term contracts with companies toward new ones.
Some say allies of Noam and Lewandowski instructed high-level staff to meet with particular companies for services that other contractors have previously carried out.
DHS says that Lewandowski is in full compliance with the Office of Government Ethics forms.
We will have to find out because, again, all of this is suspicious to say the least.
And the bottom line is, does it help Trump?
Does it help the administration?
Does it help immigration enforcement?
I think the answer is no.
Now, Republicans doing a terrible job typically leads to Democrats stepping too far.
And that is what is happening right now.
Well, Christy Noam has been taking very expensive jets with, you know, like private bedrooms all over the country.
So traveling isn't that stressful for her, but it is for pretty much everybody else, especially because when you're going all over the world, the real stress comes when you go online.
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So it is, in fact, the right political move.
Whether it is in fact the right policy move, it is the right political move for the administration to go back to status quo ante in Minnesota because it takes the bat out of the hands of Democrats.
But Democrats, apparently, are not letting the pedal off the metal, even though they already seem to have achieved what they wanted to achieve, which is ICE no longer doing massive raid operations in Minnesota.
Even Politico, which is far from a right-wing outlet, is recognizing pretty openly that this undercuts Democrats' messaging that the administration is being overweening in its pursuit of illegal immigrants.
Quote, by pulling out of Minneapolis, says Politico, the epicenter of the left's fight to overhaul federal immigration enforcement after federal agents killed two American citizens.
Administration officials and allies argue that Democrats will lose political steam as attention gradually fades from the administration's aggressive enforcement actions.
By the way, this is one of the rules of politics.
You know when you can get things done when people aren't generally talking about it, when it's on the front pages, very difficult to get things done.
Nevertheless, Democrats continue to pursue a DHS shutdown.
According to Axios, lawmakers are departing Washington as of yesterday without a deal to fund the DHS, all but ensuring a partial government shutdown at the end of Day Friday.
This would be the third shutdown of President Trump's second term.
Despite two weeks of negotiations, Democrats said on Thursday they were no closer to a deal with Republicans to avert that shutdown.
Democrats continue to tout the idea that DHS needs to be defunded or major changes need to happen inside of DHS.
They are stepping too far.
They saw political blood in the water with the mishandling of people like Chris Steenome and Corey Lewandowski.
And now, predictably, they are moving too far in the opposite direction.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, says that they will cut funding to ICE.
The Republican bill on the floor allows ICE to smash indoors without warrants, to wear masks and not be identified, to use children as bait for their parents.
No oversight.
We are keeping our word.
No funding for ICE until it is rained in, until the violence ends.
Okay, well, here is the thing.
Again, Trump, by putting a professional in charge, is already on the path toward a more professional implementation of policy.
And now I think Americans are going to turn and say, okay, well, why don't you just work with the responsible agents to go after criminal illegal immigrants?
That is the policy everyone wants to see implemented.
But as always, Democrats can't stop themselves.
Alex Padilla, who is the senator from California, is out there on point defending sanctuary cities.
I mean, good luck with this proposal.
As I was listening to my colleague, he's tried to paint a picture of sanctuary states or sanctuary cities as nothing but lawless.
And I get that's maybe a favorite soundbite for right-wing media, but the fact of the matter is it's not true.
Sanctuary policies do not mean that there are no laws or that the federal government can no longer enforce federal law in those jurisdictions.
What sanctuary policies are is simply an affirmation that immigration enforcement is the job of the federal government and that state and local authorities cannot be co-opted or forced into performing inherently federal responsibilities.
Well, I mean, that is not exactly what sanctuary cities and jurisdictions are.
What they are instructions for state and local officials not to cooperate with federal law enforcement, meaning that they could voluntarily help out ICE by, for example, calling in jail detainees to ICE for immigration violations, and they won't do that.
No one is saying that the feds can force states to do that, but states can voluntarily do it.
And of course, when they don't, what do you think is the natural result?
The natural result, of course, is to put more ICE agents in the streets.
This, by the way, is the Democrats game.
What Democrats want is more chaos in the streets because they think that it's a political winner for them.
Now, it doesn't have to be a political winner for Democrats.
The reason this turned into a political winner, at least in the moment, the reason the Democrats won the battle in the moment in Minnesota and the left won the battle in the moment, again, is because of the bad PR rollout done by top members of the Trump administration, by people like Greg Bovino, by people like Christine Ohm.
You just don't see this kind of mess being made in other parts of the administration.
In a little while, we'll get to the EPA under Lee Zeldon.
Lee Zeldon is a professional.
And so the EPA and President Trump can make one of the most signal changes in American regulatory policy of the last five decades.
Democrats Game of Chaos 00:10:30
And it won't generate the kind of heat and light that have been put around what happened in Minnesota.
Because competence actually matters.
Okay, but as I say, Democrats can go too far here.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who is a disgrace to his profession, he was testifying in front of Congress yesterday, and he was asked a question by Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio.
And Ellison said, I'm not sure that if you're in the country illegally, you should be deported.
If you enter the country illegally or you overstay a visa, should you be deported?
My simple answer is, sir, it depends.
Okay.
So if somebody breaks into your home, should they be arrested for breaking entering or does it depend?
It's an entirely different scenario.
How's that?
Because immigration is essentially civil and breaking into my home is a criminal matter.
Oh, okay, gotcha.
So if there's so there's laws that should be enforced, so we shouldn't enforce civil violations?
We absolutely should enforce them.
But you just said that it's a civil matter, so it's different.
So if somebody commits a civil infraction, it shouldn't be enforced.
It should be.
Okay, so they should be deported.
No, they should have due process that is associated with their petition.
So for example, the act of entering the country illegally, you think we should say, well, did you really do it or not do it?
It's pretty obvious that they did, right?
Well, I mean, it would depend on the facts of the situation.
Again, it should not depend on the facts of the situation.
You can say that every illegal immigrant in the country should be deported, but you have to prioritize because of resource shortages.
You can talk about extenuating circumstances, people who have natural-born American citizen children, for example, but they themselves are illegal immigrants.
You can talk about all that.
That's not what Keith Ellison is doing.
He is setting up a roadblock to actual implementation of law.
This is a point that Senator Ron Johnson made to the Minnesota AG.
He says that you and people in the Democratic Party facilitated tragedy in Minnesota.
This is true.
And again, a more competent DHS secretary would have been able to highlight this with more alacrity.
I, as a government official, would have said, back off.
Let us work with ICE.
Let's cooperate with them.
Let's see if we can't de-escalate this.
But, Attorney General, you did the exact opposite.
And two people are dead because you encouraged them to put themselves in harm's way.
And now you're exploiting those two martyrs.
That was a tragedy.
It never should have happened.
Now we can investigate, but I can't imagine being a law enforcement official where I know my colleagues have been shot at, their vehicles rammed, that they're trained activists deployed.
And by the way, we know at least one of those activists had a semi-automatic pistol with extra clips.
So now you're an ICE officer.
You're doing enforcement action.
You've got a team behind you trying to protect you.
You've got all these trained activists behind you.
Is it any wonder they're at hair trigger alert?
A tragedy was going to happen and you encouraged it.
And you ought to feel damn guilty about it.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Obviously, again, when it comes to these hearings, it is televised moments, but he is obviously correct on the merits here.
And again, you're seeing this bleed across the entire Democratic Party.
So one Georgia state representative named Marvin Lim appeared in an anti-ICE rally where he appealed specifically to illegal immigrants.
Immigrants and families of immigrants, we see you.
Whether you are a citizen, whether you have no documentation on an asylee, TPS, any of those, we see you, we hear you, and that's why we are speaking out for you who cannot be here today because we love you and we are fighting for you.
Thank you.
And Cardi B, a much more popular figure at her concert the other night, suggested that if ICE agents were in the crowd, they should be physically assaulted.
If ICE come in here, we're going to joke that.
I got some bear mace in the back.
They took the muffins.
Let's go.
She seems like a sane and rational human being.
Maybe ICE should deploy some robots to just be near her.
If you have not seen the video yet of Cardi B being knocked over by a robot, Robo ICE.
Robo ICE is obviously the solution.
But this speaks to the radicalism of Democrats.
So CNN's Harry Enton points out that Americans may not be in love with all the things that President Trump is doing, but you know what they really hate?
The radicalism of Democrats.
And this is why it is amazing.
It is truly an amazing thing how reactionary American politics is.
People believe, for example, that because Joe Biden was a bad president, this means that you can now run up the score on every extraordinary wish list item you have on the reactionary right.
And then similarly, if Democrats smell any blood in the water with regard to Minnesota, for example, they can now swing as radically to the left as they could possibly want.
And it turns out most Americans are not into any of this.
Most Americans just want responsible governance.
It's not that difficult.
It really isn't.
Here's Harry Enton pointing out that whatever you think of the Republicans, Americans think Democrats are way off the reservation.
So if the ideology of the Democratic Party is shifting or changing, how are people feeling about it?
Okay, so we're talking about the Democratic base, right?
But what about all that?
What about all Americans, right?
How about all voters?
Voters who say the Democrats are now too liberal.
Look at this percentage.
It was 42% in 96, 48% in 2013.
Now, 58% in 2025 of all Democrats, of all voters, say that the Democratic Party is too liberal.
The Democrats are moving to the left.
The far left is gaining power.
And there could be some electoral repercussions because what we see right now is voters, the clear majority, say that they are too liberal.
And this is really the story of what Democrats are doing.
They continue to swivel ever out to the left.
It's truly insane.
After Donald Trump shelled Joe Biden, their decision is maybe we should move further to the left than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
That's their move.
Totally crazy.
Bernie Sanders, according to Axios, who, again, it will never stop amazing me that Bernie Sanders, a career useless person, a leech on the ass of American society for all of his eight decades, that that human somehow has become the ideological thought leader of an entire major party in the United States.
It is totally psychotic, totally crazy.
The dude has produced zero things of value.
He has the political mentality of a seven-year-old, literally a seven-year-old.
You know, there are a lot of bad things in the world.
Some bad things happen to people, and those bad things can only be cured.
They can only be cured by the government.
You know, some people are rich and some people are poor, and that's bad.
I wish some people were not rich.
That would be good.
Everything he says is along the lines of a fortune cookie idiocy that is only replicated in small children, truly.
And somehow this has gained all sorts of credibility inside the Democratic Party base.
Well, now, according to Axios, Senator Sanders is feeling emboldened by the progressives' shock victory in a New Jersey special House primary last week.
He is now sizing up his next targets.
He has endorsed over a dozen progressive House and Senate candidates who are aiming to reshape the Democratic Party.
Asked in a phone interview where Elsie thinks the lefts can win upside victories, Sanders pointed to a fighting oligarchy rally he is doing on Friday with a person called Nita Alam, who is challenging Representative Valerie Fouchy, is in North Carolina.
Brad Lander, who is challenging Representative Dan Goldman, and Lander is a nut job.
He is a nutcase.
He is a full-on Zorin Mantani socialist.
He also has a strong chance to win, says Bernie Sanders.
All of this is following the victory of progressive Analilia Mejia in a special primary election last week to succeed now Governor Mikey Sherrill.
She finished narrowly ahead of former Representative Tom Malinowski.
Majia will have to win in April general election to get seated, and then another primary in June to keep her seat for another two years.
But naturally, the Democrats have decided to coalesce around her because this is the way that it works.
Neither party apparently has the stomach to simply say to its most extreme actors, no, you don't get to hang out with us.
Sanders told Axios that she ran on a strong progressive agenda and she's going to stand up to oligarchs.
And then he compared her to Zoran Mandani.
Sanders has also endorsed House candidates in Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania, California, Utah, and Montana.
And he is backing radical Senate candidates Abdul El-Syed in Michigan, Graham Plattner in Maine.
That's the dude who had the SS logo carved into his chest and then had to pretend that's not what it was.
And Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, as well as Maine gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson.
The Democratic Party is swiveling out to the Bernie Sanders left.
And let us never forget Bernie Sanders' ideas have been tried and they fail everywhere they've ever been tried.
They are garbage ideas, true trash ideas.
His latest trash idea, by the way, is that he wants a moratorium on data center construction.
Okay, cool.
Let's just destroy economic growth in the country.
Sounds great.
Sounds great.
His chosen protégés, by the way, have already destroyed tens of thousands of jobs across the country.
You'll recall that AOC, bartender, turned congresswoman, turned media sensation because of her fresh-facedness.
You'll remember that when Amazon was thinking of relocating to her district, she killed that, thus thrusting tens of thousands of jobs out of her own district, a major win for her constituents, clearly.
Well, now Sanders wants to destroy data center construction.
On MS Now, he said, we have not a clue.
We are totally unprepared for what is coming.
We've got to slow this thing down.
What is he talking about?
He's talking about we need to slow down AI because obviously redistributing misery is better than redistributing prosperity.
Sanders says that AI is bad because it alienates workers from their labor.
Slowing Down AI? 00:08:45
The real thing, of course, is that businesses might do well and the stock market might do well.
And that is the thing that he wants to oppose.
So if Democrats want to side with the let's destroy the economy wing of the party, good luck to you.
Here is the reality.
President Trump's economy is working and it is working really well right now.
Brand new CPI report out this morning.
Consumer prices rose 2.4% in January from one year earlier.
That is cooler than the 2.7% recorded in December.
That is lower than expected inflation.
Again, it's higher than 2%, but it is way down from the 9%, 10% we were seeing on an annualized basis, some quarters from the Biden administration.
Core prices rose 2.5% in January from a year earlier.
The latest annual number had some help since a high inflation reading from January 2025, according to the journal, has now dropped out of the past 12 months of data.
Month over month from December, consumer prices in January rose a seasonally adjusted 0.2%.
Core prices rose at 0.3%, but wages are now outpacing inflation.
Wage increases are outpacing inflation under the Trump economy.
That is a reality.
And economic growth is the thing that President Trump is doing exactly right.
So as I mentioned before, competence is a very useful thing.
President Trump's work with the EPA is competent.
It is low-key and it is competent.
And it is not going to upset the apple cart or be unpopular.
So according to the Washington Post, nearly 17 years after the EPA declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten the public health and welfare, the agency on Thursday rescinded the landmark legal opinion underpinning a wave of federal policies aimed at climate change.
Under Barack Obama, the agency issued a so-called endangerment finding suggesting that greenhouse gases could be regulated without congressional legislation.
Like the Clean Air Act, which was passed in the 1970s, somehow covered greenhouse gases, which, of course, is ridiculous.
And the question here isn't whether greenhouse gases should be legislated, it is whether you should unilaterally be able to regulate those from the executive branch of the government.
If Congress wants to pass a big bill putting caps on greenhouse gases, they have the power to do that, presumably.
But that's not what happened.
Basically, the Obama administration created a fake legal finding that the Clean Air Act, which never contemplated carbon dioxide being actually covered by the Clean Air Act, they said that somehow the Clean Air Act covered that.
It was evolving in its meaning or something.
And therefore, the EPA could simply regulate every company in America under its auspices.
That, of course, was false.
At an event at the White House on Thursday afternoon, President Trump suggested that this was the biggest deregulatory action in American history.
Here he was announcing it yesterday.
Under the process just completed by the EPA, we are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry and massively drove up prices for American consumers.
Prices went up incredibly for a worse product.
This action will eliminate over $1.3 trillion of regulatory costs and help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically.
And then he added, he hopes that we build no more windmills in the United States because, in his opinion, they are useless.
He is fact-checked mostly right.
Basically, he stopped all windmills in this country.
It's the most expensive energy you can get.
They're all made in China, a little bit in Germany, but mostly in China.
And we're putting them all over our fields and ruining the fields and killing the birds and all of this.
And the environmentalists say they like them, but they really are a tremendous eyesore.
They've ruined.
Europe has gone.
As you know, it's gone to Europe isn't even recognizable anymore between immigration and because of environmental things like the windmills, which are taking over.
The people hate them.
The energy is by far the most expensive.
And we're fighting very hard to make sure that they don't get built.
I hope we don't have one built during my administration.
Now, of course, the New York Times is fighting mad about all of this.
A piece of reporting that really is just opinion masquerading is reporting by Lisa Friedman says, led by a president who refers to climate change as a hoax, the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be.
It's a rejection of fact that has been accepted for decades by presidents of both parties, including Richard Nixon, whose top advisor warned of the dangers of climate change and the first president George Bush, who signs an international climate treaty.
And it is a knockout punch in the years-long fight by a small group of conservative activists, as well as oil, gas, and coal interests to stop the country from transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind, and other non-polluting energy.
Believe it or not, that is not an opinion piece.
That isn't a reported piece from the New York Times.
Total trash.
You can hold that opinion for sure, but that is not the reason.
You could totally hold that climate change is happening and even is anthropogenic and still believe that the EPA should not have the unilateral ability to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act, that that is a legal abomination, and that the administration is right to stop that.
You can also hold that there are mitigation measures and adaptation measures that are significantly better than simply restricting usage of carbon when it comes to, for example, car emissions.
And also that cars have gotten significantly more effective at using fossil fuels, which is true.
Your miles per gallon have gone way, way, way up since they were back in the 1970s, for example.
But of course, the New York Times is a gigantic opinion page masquerading as a reporting outlet.
This is why, whenever people say, you know, the Trump administration, they violate legality all the time.
The Trump administration, when they violate things legally, they usually do so in the most blatant fashion.
It's clear to everybody.
The thing Democrats have done for decades is simply twisted and turned and violated the law by gutting the law and wearing it around.
That's what happened again with the Clean Air Act.
If you want Congress to pass this thing, if you want Congress to regulate greenhouse gases, Democrats, why don't you get elected to a majority in the House, Senate, and presidency, and then you can pass some sort of legislation?
But the very notion that a regulatory agency should have this level of control over the economy based on something that no law ever gave them authority to do is totally insane.
We should also mention here that Europe has made its entire economy subservient to the whims of environmental activists, which is why they've been one reason they've been under a state of heavy stagnation for legitimately decades at this point, and they will never let go.
Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the EU, here she was claiming that actually the EU's carbon market, which regulates the building of power plants and prevents the dissemination of energy and has made the EU essentially irrelevant in the pursuit of AI, for example, it has cut them out of the next generation of economic growth.
Here she was saying it's actually wonderful.
It's actually great.
The emission trading system has clear benefits.
It's always important that we look at the effects.
It is a market-based system.
It is technology completely neutral.
It says basically, if you want to pollute, you pay.
If you don't want to pay, innovate.
And this is what happened.
It has been introduced in 2005.
And since then, the emissions have gone down by 39%.
The sectors covered by ETS-1 have grown by 71%.
So decarbonization and growth can go hand in hand.
And there were revenues of 260 billion euros generated.
Partially for the European level, it's a smaller part, mostly 78% for the member states themselves.
If the EU wishes to make itself subservient to the idiocies of the green movement, that's their problem.
But President Trump isn't doing that.
And if the Democratic Party decides to mirror all of that, in the long term, that is not going to go well for them.
Again, Democrats are unable to divide off from their most radical ideas, and it is a disaster area for them.
That is true on illegal immigration.
It is true on economics.
And it is true, obviously, on social issues.
Every Democratic major candidate refuses to divide off from the craziest idea of the last 50 years, and maybe of all time, that boys are girls or can become girls.
And the damage has been catastrophic.
What I Suffered Being Transgender 00:02:53
You've seen it in everything from mass shootings to the actual damage that young people are doing to their own bodies.
There's a fascinating and horrifying piece in today's Wall Street Journal from a Soren Aldaco called What I Suffered Being Transgender.
Quote, when I was 11, I began identifying as transgender.
I had gone down a rabbit hole of websites and niche online forums.
There, I met a friend, an artist who was 14, whom I admired and looked up to.
We both felt different, out of place in society.
Born 10 years earlier, we would have been called tomboys.
Instead, we writhed under the pressure of the female role.
The internet told us the logical conclusion of that struggle was to identify as boys.
This person writes, I come from a broken home.
While my mother and stepfather always loved me, my stepfather became severely disabled when I was three, leaving me feeling as though I had to raise myself.
I eventually reached out to my biological father around a decade later.
When he and my stepmother saw my distress and were told by a psychiatrist that this distress was related to my transgender identity, they began to consider the benefits of affirming me in my transition.
Too young to vote or drink, I became immersed in the idea that hormones and surgeries would fix me.
At the transgender support group I attended, most of the focus was on who was starting hormones and how it was going for them.
I was envious.
I wanted the same feelings of affirmation they had.
Most of them were on hormones prescribed by a nurse practitioner who attended the group.
When I was 17, says this person, I went with my stepmother to see that nurse practitioner who prescribed testosterone and estrogen blockers 30 minutes later.
These hormones were one of the many medical interventions I pursued in my teens.
At 19, I had top surgery, a euphemism for elective double mastectomy.
My surgeon made sure to facilitate my physical transition as much as possible, spoon feeding me talking points for insurance coverage.
I donned rainbow hair, medical knee braces, and prescription compression socks to my surgery date.
I was on more than 10 different medications when I went under the knife.
After the surgery, I suffered major complications.
I had severe bruising all down my rib cage, along my sides and on my chest.
My surgeons repeatedly dismissed me when I came to them with these problems.
Eventually, I sought care at a local emergency room where hospital personnel told me only breast oncology would see me.
These doctors were kind, used to working with vulnerable women.
The realization I had been gaslit sunk in as I watched them cut my scars back open, empty out nearly three cups of blood, and sew in Penrose drains.
I made the decision to face who I really was without the medicine, without the hormones or additional surgery six months after this experience.
While taking classes at the University of Texas at Austin, I began to make sense of my transgender identity through the lens of human development.
Piecing together my turbulent family life in adolescent internet habits, among other things, it dawned on me.
I had never been born in the wrong body.
There was no way to be born in the wrong body at all.
And this person sued the medical providers.
As a seventh generation Texas, going before the Supreme Court of Texas was never something I saw myself doing, says this person, let alone doing because I listened to my doctors.
Yet, here I am.
Now, again, this person doesn't exist, according to the Democrats, people who detransition.
They've been basically erased.
Not only that, we've been informed by the Democratic Party that to even discuss such issues demonstrates hatred of trans people, transphobia.
FBI's Bewildered Response 00:10:59
If Democrats continue to pursue this insanity, they will reap the electoral worldwide.
Meanwhile, abroad, Democrats continue to push their own bizarre world version of how politics ought to work.
According to the Washington Post, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Representative Alexander Ocasio-Cortez are going to the Munich Security Conference.
Rubio is widely seen as the good cop in the Trump administration's ever-widening conflict with Europe.
Ocasio-Cortez is expected to decry the influence of billionaires and corporate interests on international policies she views as hostile to the working class.
She's expected, of course, to rip into Israel.
So her perspective is going to be that America's role in the world should be joining left-wing agitators all around the world to appeal to Hamasniks and their allies.
We'll see how that works out for, again, Democrats.
If they decide to go radical and if their foreign policy is side with the worst people on planet Earth, then we will see how that works for them.
Hamas is not exactly a potential ally.
Meanwhile, if Republicans continue to pursue a realist interventionism, then that will be the style of politics that does work.
This is what I say.
When Democrats sense blood in the water, they always make the mistake of going all the way all the time.
And Democrats are also pursuing a bizarre world version of reality that's being rejected across Europe itself.
As the New York Times now reports, Switzerland is about to hold a referendum in June on whether to cap its population at 10 million until 2050 by limiting immigration.
Supporters of the initiative say measures should include making it harder for foreigners to gain permanent residency once the population passes 9.5 million and revising the country's agreement with the EU that allows for free movement between Switzerland and the rest of the continent.
Switzerland is not part of the EU.
Both the government and parliament voted to oppose the initiative, but the referendum was triggered automatically because over 100,000 citizens signed a petition in support of the vote.
The petition was promoted by the Swiss People's Party, a right-wing party that currently holds roughly a third of seats in the Swiss parliament.
Amazing, amazing that this is happening all across Europe, but predicted by the writer Mark Stein many years ago, that eventually Europe would wake up and have to face reality.
I think that that is a reality that many in the left in the United States have refused to acknowledge.
The migration patterns that the West has undertaken over the course of the last 60 years have not exactly been a gigantic boon culturally.
And the left wanting to continue to promote that is going to backfire.
All right, the other big story, of course, in the United States continues to unfold.
That is the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie.
We are now almost two weeks into the kidnapping.
Harvey Levin over at TMZ apparently received a new email from a tipster suggesting a bleak picture for Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old woman who's the mother of Savannah Guthrie and was kidnapped nearly two weeks ago.
Again, this is the same person who sent us something yesterday.
And this one, well, it is more ominous, and we can talk about that in a minute.
But this person says, you got to take me seriously.
And he's saying the reason he wants this Bitcoin is because he is going to have to go underground because he says he fears retaliation.
He knows who the kidnapper is.
And he's going to be kind of tarred and feathered, as he puts it, a national rat.
But he also mentions the delivery man.
He said, I also don't want, you know, I could end up with, you know, being implicated the way this delivery man was.
And he was, you know, detained but released.
And he doesn't want that either.
So he said basically he needs this Bitcoin so he can just, you know, just disappear for a while and not work.
Okay, that's ridiculous.
That, of course, is a ridiculous excuse.
If you know about somebody who was kidnapped and your excuse is, I need Bitcoin to take care of me, just in case people get mad at me for having show of hands in America.
How many people believe that a person who tells the cops where Nancy Guthrie is will be seen as a rat?
Show of hands.
That is ridiculous contention.
The FBI, however, seems bewildered.
The FBI's Phoenix office posted on X yesterday, quote, today the FBI is increasing its reward up to $100,000 for information leading to the location of Nancy Guthrie and or the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in her disappearance.
The description of the attacker, the kidnapper, is a male approximately 5'9 to 5'10 with an average build.
Well, I mean, good luck with that description.
You just described half of America.
He was also wearing a black 25-liter Ozark trail hiker pack backpack in the doorbell video, according to authorities.
The FBI has collected over 13,000 tips from the public related to the case.
It just shows how much the FBI has to track down in every case that they have to handle.
So again, the FBI is now grasping at straws.
Apparently, according to the New York Post, investigators erected a white tent over the entryway of Nancy Guthrie's house yesterday, and they removed the remaining doorbell camera equipment from her door.
It's unclear what else they recovered.
In a statement, authorities confirmed they'd recovered several potentially key pieces of evidence, including a pair of black gloves, one of which the post saw the feds recover from the side of a nearby road on Wednesday.
Again, unclear whether those gloves have been linked to the attacker.
Our Dailyware investigative reporter Lyndon Blake joins us on the line right now.
Episode nine comes out today in her series, Finding Nancy Guthrie.
Lyndon, thanks so much for the time.
Of course, Ben, thanks for having me.
So we are now nearly two weeks into the saga.
It feels as though very little progress has been made.
We're kind of feeling drips and drops of information that have been coming out.
You know, a pair of black gloves that were apparently found.
They're moving the nest video camera from Nancy Guthrie's door.
Harry Lovin referenced somebody who says he knows where she is, but that person won't reveal it unless they're given Bitcoin.
Where are we in all this?
Are we closing in on anybody?
Or is this basically at this point a search for a body?
I mean, the longer this lasts, the closer, the more likely it is, it seems to me that she has passed away.
I mean, I think you can tell by the way the searches are kind of doing like the grid search and stuff and the places that they're searching.
I mean, there's that possibility that they're looking for a body.
I mean, it is day 13 since she's been missing.
But I must say when the video came out, the footage from Nancy Sorbal camera, you know, everything kind of went up a notch and you obviously get more leads, the 4,000 tips and stuff.
But Ben, I must say, knowing about what's going on between Pima County Sheriff and FBI and just the tension that's happening on the ground.
So this friction right now between Pima County Sheriff's Department and the FBI is bringing up an investigation that the FBI did back in 2016 with the Pima County Sheriff's Department.
At that time, Chris Nanos was the appointed sheriff, and they're being investigated for misuse of funds.
And Nanos is never indicted because of this, but the second in command, the second in command chief deputy was.
And so a lot of people are thinking that this current tension, this current just not willingness to work together goes back to Nanos and his feelings toward the FBI from a situation that happened a decade ago.
It makes you think that they're not close to zoning in on this thing because they're dealing with their own drama.
I mean, the latest report is Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos sent a glove, a glove off to a lab in Florida and said the FBI lab in Virginia.
And so that evidence could have to potentially be retested.
A federal source told us that they weren't really able to take hold of this case until a few days ago.
And I think that's where you started to see, you know, yesterday with this white tent going up.
And you're like, why wasn't that done days ago?
And we've had Amazon packages and pizza all being delivered to Nancy's front door since blood has been just on her front steps and she's been missing.
And but that's because the FBI was met with such pushback from local authorities.
And you can go down the rabbit hole and the FBI and Nanos have a pass from 10 years ago.
But it just has to be frustrating for the Guthrie family, especially seeing all these reports.
And you're like, can we just let the FBI help?
You have Trump saying full support.
We're sending in everything you need.
Let them help.
Instead of being prideful and being like, no, like we know this territory.
Yes, Pima County knows the local territory.
They have their strength too, but let the FBI use their technology.
But again, I mean, it just seems like with all this drama happening, no, it doesn't make me feel like there's someone that's going to be captured today.
But of course, you hope that.
And I've spoken to FBI agents and they all agree that doorbell camera footage greatly, just a plethora of things you can take from there.
We know what the backpack is.
Ozark Trail hiking backpack from Walmart.
They've recovered gloves on the side of the road.
Allegedly, there's been gloves recovered inside the house that's now in evidence.
So it's a good jump start, but it just makes you wonder the first week, not much was being done.
I mean, you mentioned the conflict between the sheriff's office and the FBI.
And this is bewildering to everybody who's watching this from the outside because, I mean, you have an unfolding kidnapping drama.
And meanwhile, you have infighting between these two branches, government, one local, one federal.
You mentioned that there had been some conflict between Nanyos, the sheriff, and the FBI 10 years ago.
Can you explicate, like, what is the conflict?
What's the holdup here?
Because as you say, it should be all hands on deck at this point.
He was, I'm pretty sure there was some type of investigation into how he ran things and where money was going or funds.
And this is, and I'm going off memory really quick, just 2016, we'll say allegedly around the 2016 mark.
He was never charged with anything.
Nothing ever came of it.
But that's where people are thinking that this current tension.
Now, of course, Sheriff Nanos has denied everything.
Like, no, we're working great with the FBI.
I mean, in one of the press conferences, he even was like, we would, we never turned down federal help.
We always welcome them in.
And, you know, it just made it seem like they were the best of friends.
And, but that's not the case when you have investigators on the ground walking around deputies and FBI and they're asking, we don't really know who's in charge.
People Thinking About Current Tension 00:01:36
That's not a good sign.
You don't want to be thinking about who's in charge when you're looking for a person, potentially looking for a body, and for sure, I mean, 100% trying to find out who did this.
Well, that's Lyndon Blake, Daily Wire Investigative Reporter.
Go check out episode nine of Finding Nancy Guthrie, available only at Daily Wire Plus.
Lyndon, thanks so much for the time.
I appreciate the updates as always.
Of course, Ben.
Thanks.
All righty, guys.
Coming up, we'll get into all the foreign policy talk, what's going on in Venezuela, and Iran.
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This Valentine's Day, there's a new home for romance.
I was told this was a segment on Milton Friedman and the economics of gift giving.
He technically isn't a bachelor, but he sure is a professor of love.
Find out what happens when 30 contestants looking for feelings run into the wall of facts.
I don't trust anyone who says love is love.
That is not an argument.
That is a tautology.
Yeah, he's a real catch.
Get ready for bad advice.
Real viewer questions.
Ben destroys.
And the world's most famous millionaire matchmaker, Patty Stanger, who stops by to help us find that special someone on the year's most intimate day.
Guys, did anyone even try to clear this with me?
Hey, look on the bright side.
Dinner reservations are going to be easier to make for one.
Ben, after dark, love hurts.
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