McDonald’s Germany removes food imagery from Ramadan billboards, sparking debates over cultural pandering vs. respect, while Wilfred Riley critiques DEI as a "racial grift," citing 245 U.S. colleges still maintaining DEI offices in 2025 and exposing Smollett’s hate crime hoax. He warns Democrats lead in 2026/2028 polling (Emerson: +8, YouGov: +4), urging Republicans to back strong candidates like Cornyn over divisive figures amid scandals like Gonzalez’s alleged misconduct. Meanwhile, Trump halts $260M in Minnesota Medicaid fraud cases, highlighting systemic welfare abuse, and Iran rejects U.S. Geneva demands—no dismantling nuclear sites or zero enrichment—while negotiations hint at potential Israeli strikes. The episode frames DEI and progressive policies as threats to meritocracy and national stability, demanding conservative vigilance. [Automatically generated summary]
McDonald's just launched the world's most insane ad campaign in Germany.
It's aimed at Muslims observing Ramadan.
And we'll talk about what that means for the rise of DEI.
Also, is DEI going to make a comeback in the post-Trump era in the United States?
Wilford Riley, the host of a new series over at Dailywire Plus, joins us to discuss and State of the Union fallout and Iran negotiations updates.
A lot going on.
First, the Daily Wire, we are celebrating Black History Month.
I mean, it's almost over, but don't worry, we didn't just let it slide.
Here's why.
Streaming right now on Daily Wire Plus, the brand new three-part original series, Black Lives Matter, hosted by Professor Wilfred Riley, the breakout voice the world met in one of the biggest documentaries of the decade, Am I Racist?
Watch as he dismantles the mythology of systemic racism as it is sold today, separating fact from fiction, data from grievance, and history from hustle.
If we're going to have the conversation, we need to have the whole conversation.
You know, people wanted Black History Month content, so here it is.
We're giving it to you.
All the facts, none of the feelings.
Watch.
Black lives matter right now only on Daily Wire Plus.
The West is in a whole lot of trouble.
And one of the reasons that the left is in a whole lot of trouble, there are a bunch of reasons.
One is that we have fundamentally failed to distinguish between tolerance of one another's traditions and lifestyles and the sort of bizarre bend over backwards celebration that accompanies an undermining of traditions that are unique to the West.
I want to take as an example what's going on in Germany.
Now, it seems like a small story, but it is indicative of a broader mindset that has now been setting in throughout the West for generations.
So over in Germany, McDonald's has decided on an ad campaign.
The German population is something like 6.5% Muslim at this point.
And obviously, Muslims, religious Muslims, celebrate Ramadan around this time of year.
That means that they are fasting from sunup to sundown.
Fine.
That is the Muslim tradition.
There are a lot of Muslims who live in the West who are perfectly fine Western citizens.
So McDonald's, which is not halal.
So halal is kosher for Muslims.
Halal means that it's food that religious Muslims can eat.
If you are a Muslim who is celebrating Ramadan or commemorating Ramadan, then the chances are that you are eating halal in your non-Ramadan hours and in your non-fasting hours, because if you're religious enough to actually not eat all day, you probably then don't go at sunset and find a rasher of bacon and just start downing it.
In any case, McDonald's in Germany, McDonald's, which is not halal, has decided to put up an ad campaign.
This ad campaign removes the food from the billboards during Ramadan hours out of respect for Islam.
That's weird and self-defeating and bespeaks something that lies at the heart of the cowardice of a lot of both corporations and also people in the West.
Here you can see what it looks like.
The food appears on the billboard after sunset, but it disappears during the day, presumably so as not to tempt Muslims to feel hunger pangs.
So that is bizarre a world.
Again, it's bizarre a world because McDonald's is not halal.
The people who are presumably going to be very moved by these billboards are not going to head over to McDonald's after dusk and start chomping down on the cheeseburgers.
So what is McDonald's doing?
According to Newsweek, the campaign was created by German agency Scholz and Friends, whose concept centers on removing McDonald's most recognizable visual element as a gesture of respect for those observing Ramadan.
This is strange.
It'd be the equivalent of a non-kosher restaurant like McDonald's deciding to do this on Yom Kippur for Jews.
It'd be really, really weird.
Okay, because if I'm keeping Yom Kippur, first of all, there are many more Jews who keep Yom Kippur who don't eat kosher, I'm sure, as a percentage, than Muslims who keep Ramadan, who then don't keep halal in any way and head on over to the local Mickey D's.
It would be weird anyway, because the reality is you are a food company that sells food, and the vast majority of the food that you sell is not to the people who you're presumably appealing to.
So, who is McDonald's appealing to?
Who's their target audience?
And the answer is the dullards in the West who believe that it is a mark of virtue to subsume your own values beneath the values of other cultures.
That is the part that's strange.
That is the part that's weird, and that is the part that is problematic.
It is, in fact, a strange form of cultural reparation.
That somehow the West owes it to other cultures to participate in their religious activities to the extent that they're going to subsume their own interests.
Now, again, I don't think that McDonald's cares all that much in Germany about whether or not Muslims like McDonald's.
I think what German McDonald's cares about is that there are a lot of people in Germany who see this as a form of left-wing social virtue signaling.
That's what this is.
In the same way that in the United States, you have major corporations that every year decide that they're going to signal for Black History Month or for Gay Pride Month or whatever.
The basic idea is not that you are going to earn vast oodles of cash from doing that.
The idea is you're appealing to left-wing people in the United States who are going to give you more money because they believe that you share their values.
The reason that you see all these companies doing DEI in the United States is not because they think it's going to be good for their balance sheet.
It absolutely is not.
Hiring on the basis of non-merit is always bad for the balance sheet.
The reason these companies do it is because there is an entire group of consumers they believe they can appeal to who will have warm feelings toward them if they take their own corporate business interests and throw those to the side and start signaling their politics.
And this is why, you know, this is a problem.
It's a problem.
It's a problem in American politics as well.
It's not unique to Germany.
It is a widespread symptom of a disease that has spread across the West where you are supposed to be overtly apologetic about apparently not celebrating Ramadan.
It's strange.
It's not a sign of cultural respect.
It's a sign of cultural disintegration to do this sort of stuff.
It'd be the same thing as if companies in the UK decided that they were suddenly going to take female models and suddenly cover up their faces out of respect for radical Islam.
It's saying something, but it's not the thing they think they're saying.
The reason I bring this up is because I think that there is an assumption that in the Trump era, DEI is basically dead, that we're never going back to a time when corporations were virtue signaling like this, when policy did not reflect this idea that the dominant American culture ought to be put under the foot of splinter cultures.
But the reality is that can very easily come back.
It doesn't take a lot for it to come back.
All it takes is a group of people who see it as a mark of virtue to yell at their own culture and pretend that it is somehow inferior and owes it to other cultures to demonstrate its own inferiority.
There's a piece over at Time magazine today, long piece, by Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow titled Why Donald Trump Can't Kill DEI.
And the point they make is that the anti-DEI era, which is a backlash to the DEI, Barack Obama, Joe Biden era, that there will be a backlash to the backlash and that all this stuff will come back with a vengeance.
As they point out, ideas of inclusion and diversity also permeate everyday institutions, including schools, universities, foundations, nonprofits, and corporations.
Many companies have retreated from DEI under legal and political pressure.
What makes fewer headlines is that most companies that have sidled away from the acronym continue to affirm the values of DEI under a different name.
Boeing stated it will maintain, quote, procedures aimed at encouraging an equality of opportunity.
Lowe's has proclaimed that it remained, quote, committed to fostering an environment where individuals are treated fairly, valued, respected, safe, and inspired to serve customers and communities where we live and work.
These statements sure sound like DEI to us.
The education sector remains even more committed, according to Time magazine.
A 2025 review of 262 colleges and universities found that 245 of them still maintained DEI offices and programs.
Well, it means it'll come back if Republicans lose the forward momentum.
And again, I know that we're also riding high on the horse right now because Donald Trump won and because Republicans are in charge of the legislative branches of the government.
But if you think this stuff can't come back, that's just incorrect.
Well, the West is apparently not interested in many ways in preserving its own lifespan.
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Joining us on the line is Wilfred Riley.
Wilfred is the host of a brand new Daily Wire Plus series.
You can only get it at Dailywire Plus called Black Lives Matter, all about what DEI means in the United States, the lies that are told on behalf of the DEI regimen and regime, the dangers of it coming back.
Well, this is something that I've actually been working on professionally.
I, along with Brooks Crenshaw, who was an Intel guy for the Navy SEAL teams, and Kevin Jackson, formerly of Fox News, actually started what's sort of the first large anti-woke consulting firm, Unified Solutions America.
And our focus is sort of, without going into the full pitch, going into companies and ripping out the DEI nonsense that's come in since about 2010.
But what we find when we pitch clients is that, yeah, there's been a lot of rebranding so that when people try to get compliant with some of the things that have been pitched by the Trump administration, you have the VP of diversity, for example, being rebuilt as the VP or the senior lead of belonging.
So it's going to be a long fight.
I mean, in conservative intellectual circles, we sometimes hear the phrase, you know, left-wing ratchet only turns one way.
So there'll be a big move.
You see political correctness in the 90s where a whole series of policies, I mean, at that time, you had radical feminism, you had the first wave of critical theory.
They'll kind of come in to intellectual salons.
And more importantly, I think they'll come into serious business.
They'll come into academia and they'll be pushed only so far and there'll be a reaction.
I mean, there actually was a big budget movie called PCU and people got kind of disgusted with the whole thing.
People were walking around with shirts showing spotted owls on barbecues and so on.
And it'll stop.
It'll go away for a little bit.
But the core individuals involved don't go anywhere.
The people that were on those tenure and hiring committees never left.
And that is the risk now.
And so from, I mean, unified solutions on my corporate side to the serious academic debates we're having, the question has to be, how do you actually get rid of them?
I mean, yeah, and I will say, I think there are ways to do that.
Elon Musk and the Donald and his administration seem to feel that one way is just to fire large blocks of people.
I mean, there are areas where this is concentrated.
And if you get rid of them, the concentration is gone to some extent.
I mean, the deep state in politics, last line, but the deep state is just those people that are in an administration over administrative cycles.
So in DC, you've got guys that weren't just hired under Mr. Biden.
You've got guys that were hired under Mr. Carter.
And they're there and they're opposing you if you are president.
And they're often not very useful.
These are brandy bottle in the desk kind of guys.
What do you do?
I mean, you can say, well, a whole sector of jobs isn't really needed.
It often isn't.
You can cut that out.
And that's one way to fight DEI.
Do you need 240 HR people if you have 2,000 employees?
So I think one of the big questions that a lot of people have, Wilfred, is why corporations don't take advantage of this moment to just really get rid of this.
Because obviously it is anti-meritocracy.
It is anti-market performance to embrace DEI in these ways.
But as you say, a lot of this has sort of gone undercover and will probably re-emerge from the chrysalis if Democrats retake power.
Why are corporations doing this?
Because some of it has to be pandering, but I think a lot of it is pandering to a broad spectrum of people on the left, mainly white liberals actually, who seem to think that companies are better if DEI is attached to the company.
I mean, first of all, one of the problems is that you now have an entrenched base within the company.
So, again, when myself or Kevin goes into a company, you find that there is opposition there.
You have HR, you have diversity, you have, again, those people that have come in since the PCU era.
So, I mean, I'm an Illinois man in terms of college, I-L-L, I-N-I.
And at the University of Michigan, our friendly rival, the department of whatever they called it, I think it was diversity, at one point employed 240 people.
And this, this became a joke across the Big Ten.
People started making fun of it in the Ivy League.
It became known.
But that's ridiculous.
I didn't have a witty line there, just sort of all these people had six-figure salaries.
All of them were looking around the campus in pleasant Ann Arbor for hate offenses, so on.
And the problem is that when you have a base like that, people start looking for something to do.
So I would imagine that very often racial tensions and so on are going to get much worse in that kind of environment.
And that's where you tend to have staff privilege walking, for example, people being set down for endless seminars on how America hasn't improved since 1904, you know, the pronouns in the bio line, because you're employing people that are there to put that stuff in.
So when you ask, why doesn't the C-level just get them out?
Because there's inherent bite, there are people in the company that are fighting for those jobs because they hold those jobs.
And second thing, quickly, there also is kind of a literature that argues this works.
So there's what's known as the McKinsey report, which found a correlation between DEI and profitability.
And when we looked at that for unified solutions, what we found is that I think it cuts the other way, right?
So if you're a big player and you make a lot of money, you can afford to do a lot of, let's say, BS on a family show.
So like the bigger you are, the more money you can give to charity on the side, so on down the line.
And I think other companies kind of pursuing a second mover advantage try to do what the big guys do.
The issue is that none of that actually is why they're making money.
So as Mr. Michael Jordan of Chicago once said, if you're a shoe company, you ought to remember that your business is selling shoes.
It's not actually outreach to the black community or something like that.
You can do a little of that.
You can tithe is how I would think of it.
But if you start thinking of diversity as your number one priority on Nike sales team, you're probably going to struggle.
Your sales team is probably going to be a lot of white and African-American pros for Nike.
And the more you move beyond that, the fewer shoes you're going to sell, which is an issue because that's what your business is.
And I mean, actually, thanks for letting me talk more about some of the things I'm doing in writing and business.
Yeah, Black Lives Matter is the thing I'm working on with the Daily Wire right now.
And I had great fun doing this.
I came down to Florida.
I got to experience the joy of Florida driving, interestingly enough, which I talked about on Twitter.
Drew kind of a mob.
People were telling me that it's wonderful down there.
But yeah, Black Lives Matter is a breakdown of some of the things that are said in race relations discourse, which is what I write about professionally.
And I'm sort of saying that a lot of this is absolutely nonsensical.
There's not a wave of police officers killing African-American men.
For those of you that don't know the stats by this point, I think most on the intellectual right do, but that's not 10,000 a year.
That number's about 12.
There's not a wave of interracial crime, certainly from whites against blacks.
Interracial violent crime is in a typical year, it's about 3% of total index crime, 3 to 5.
It's also about 80 to 90% black on white, by the way.
But you go beyond that.
Many hate crimes.
I wouldn't say all or anything like that, but many of these high-profile crimes, maybe most, Jossie Smollett, Yasmin Saweed, they're fakes.
They're immediate, not immediately, but within months to years, they're exposed to just completely untrue.
That story, unlike the original, runs in agate type in the, you know, ladies' garden and pet cat section of the paper, but it is, it is a reality.
And beyond that, is America particularly racist?
Well, certainly against black middle-class people.
You could argue in the other direction, but no.
I mean, we've had institutional affirmative action in place since the Philadelphia plan, I'd argue fully implemented in 1967.
So a lot of these things that the average stable black or Latino taxpayer believes, no, they're just not true.
And the focus of the series is, why has it become almost taboo to say these things that are just obviously true?
Last slide, but if you see a pregnant nurse scuffling with eight black men, why are we supposed to pretend that she stole a bicycle from them?
It could be nothing happened.
It could be the young men were at fault, but why is the default that Karen is abusing them?
When you're expected to believe nonsense, there's a reason behind that.
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All righty, folks.
Well, we're going to do something new on the show today, a new segment sponsored by our friends over at PeerTalk, where I answer some listener questions.
So let's hear them.
unidentified
My question is on school choice.
What is taking Republicans so long to build a national platform around school choice, around charter schools, around vouchers?
Schools in this country, public schools spend $20,000 or $30,000 failing to educate children.
I'm wondering why Republicans haven't built a large platform around school choice yet.
The real answer here is that Republicans have built a lot of state policy around school choice.
Obviously, Florida has spent an enormous amount of time and money promoting school choice because the vast majority of education spending is done at the state and local level.
The federal government usually covers like 10%, 15% through subsidies of school monies across the nation.
The Department of Education has been trying to promote school choice.
It would require a big piece of federal legislation, I would imagine, at pretty significant cost in order to subsidize this from the federal governmental level.
But it is one of the reasons you are seeing population movement from people with young kids from blue states to red states is because, again, this really is a sort of state thing.
And listen, as a big fan of federalism, I think the federal government should be involved in fewer things generally.
I think that the federal government, the Department of Education should be eliminated.
I don't think it should be paying for school choice.
I think it shouldn't exist.
And all of this should be kicked down to the state and local level.
All righty, who's next?
unidentified
Lately, I've seen you on a bunch of more left-leaning podcasts.
And while obviously I agree with talking to those with opposing views, sometimes it seems like those shows are just trying to focus on the areas where you differ with Trump and or other conservatives rather than your full set of views.
So I think each one of these conversations has a different audience.
Whenever you're determining whether to do a show or how to do a show, you have to consider who you're talking to.
So of course, when I go on a left-wing show, the left-wingers are trying to get me to rip into Trump.
And I'm always going to give my honest opinions.
I mean, that's what I do for a living.
I have no problem criticizing the president where I think that it is worthwhile doing that.
However, it provides me a unique opportunity to not only provide, I think, a reasonable conservative viewpoint to people who may not love President Trump, but also to hold some of these hosts accountable for their own failures.
So, for example, when I was on Gavin Newsom's podcast, that turned pretty quickly from me criticizing some aspects of things that Trump has done to me pushing Gavin Newsom pretty hard on a wide variety of issues.
And he started to cave on those issues.
Well, if I can get him to do that, then maybe a more moderate politics can be found on the left.
So it depends who you're talking to.
What is the goal of the conversation?
And of course, everybody comes in with an agenda.
But the reality is that I never feel the necessity on this show or any other show to defend every single thing the president of the United States does.
And if they push me on a thing where I disagree with Trump, I'm happy to say, listen, I disagree with Trump on that.
Now, do you disagree with your own party on these set of radical policies?
Because that's what they don't want to talk about.
That's the thing they really don't want to talk about.
And I can't have that conversation with them unless I'm talking with them.
So how great is the danger at this point that Democrats end up taking over Congress and that the era of DEI, the era of transgender ideology, that all of that comes back?
The answer is that the danger is relatively high.
And pretending that away is not going to make it go away.
According to the 2006 generic congressional polling, right now, Democrats have about a five-point lead in the generic congressional polling.
Latest Emerson poll has Democrats up eight.
The Economist YouGov has him up four.
Gavin Newsom correctly says that if the Democrats win the midterm elections, then President Trump's presidency is effectively stymied.
And the presidency, as we know, it will de facto end this November when we get the gavel back and Speaker Jeffries becomes the next speaker, as long as we remain vigilant.
The chances that Democrats take the House are very, very high right now.
And we'll discuss in a little while what Republicans can do to lower those chances.
But that is just the reality.
Now, the biggest problem for Republicans would occur if the Democrats were to somehow take the Senate.
If Democrats were to take the Senate, that sets them up for what the kids call a generational run.
Because right now, the map in 2026, the Senate map is stacked in favor of Republicans.
2028, not the same thing.
Plus, 2028, you could actually see a shift in the party of the presidency.
I know right now that everybody is sort of taking for granted the idea on the right that JD Vance will be not only the nominee, but the next president.
That is not what the polling totally suggests right now.
They have been taking polls of, for example, Gavin Newsom versus JD Vance.
There are two polls that were taken in the last two weeks, a big data poll with a margin of error of 2% that has Newsom up 4439 over Vance and a Yahoo News poll that has Newsom up 4943 over Vance.
Those are the two most recent polls.
So, before Republicans get a little bit ahead of their skis, win the next election and then the election after that.
Right now, Republican turnout numbers are looking low.
Harry Enton over at CNN points out that Democrats actually lead in the Texas primary polls in terms of their numbers for the first time since 2002, which is a very bad indicator for Republicans.
Okay, and the reality is, actually, that if you go all the way back to 2002, how do those elections go in Texas in 2002?
Well, the 2002 U.S. House of Representative elections in Texas, believe it or not, Democrats won 17 seats and Republicans won 15 in that election cycle.
So not great is the answer.
This is presumably why it would be smart for Republicans to run better candidates rather than worse candidates.
That Texas Senate primary features a three-way battle between Wesley Hunt, John Cornyn, and Ken Paxton.
Cornyn is the sitting senator.
I think politicos believe that Cornyn would be the heavy favorite in a Senate race against, say, James Tallarico.
They're a lot more sketchy when it comes to Ken Paxton, who has an enormous amount of baggage.
I mean, that dude is basically an entire train car filled with baggage, Ken Paxton.
And I understand people like that he's quite militant in his affect.
But the reality is that if you wish to secure the seat, then you probably want to, you know, nominate the person most likely to win the seat when it comes to the election in the fall.
John Thun, the Senate majority leader, is saying as much.
Well, we've had multiple conversations about that, and I'm hopeful at some point that he will weigh in.
We believe that John Cornyn is the best person to win that general election to make sure that Texas stays red in the United States Senate and to save a lot of money that we could invest in other places where we have really good opportunities to win some seats, places like Michigan and New Hampshire.
And we're defending seats this year as well, Aisha.
So we need to take Texas off the map.
The best way to do that is for John Cornyn to be the nominee, and we need to have the president hopefully in his corner before this is all said and done.
Speaking of which, I've said before that there are certain election cycles where one scandal can turn into the driving force behind the entire election cycle.
I do not think that we have seen the end of the story surrounding Tony Gonzalez, the Texas representative whose former staffer committed suicide by dousing herself in gasoline and setting herself on fire.
I know that the House majority wants Gonzalez to stick around until he is somehow prosecuted or some investigation is done.
The reality is the longer you wait on this sort of stuff, the more it's going to be fodder for Democrats.
Democrats would be engaging in political malpractice not to jump on this, obviously.
Here is the husband of the woman who doused herself in gasoline and set herself on fire after apparently she had an affair with Tony Gonzalez.
Actually, it makes me even angrier because, again, he's deflecting and, you know, he just he has the man has no values.
You know, he runs his whole campaign on family values and he runs everything, you know, saying that he's some family man.
You know, he's, he's actually quite of a sick man.
You know, I have all the messages that shared between them two.
And, you know, the things that, you know, I just released a tip of the iceberg of the things that this man was telling her.
I released just what was, you know, enough information for the people to understand who this person and who they were dealing with.
If I were to release everything, you know, again, my biggest thing is protecting my son.
I will not release, you know, the salacious messages that went back and forth much deeper than what, and much more graphic than what I presented to the American people.
Okay, now, again, the danger for the Republicans is that Tony Gonzalez's district, the Texas 23rd, that is a very hard-fought district.
It has become increasingly tight.
In 2024, for example, Ted Cruz won that district 53 to 45.
Historically speaking, that district has sort of switched hands a few times.
The district was represented by Pete Gallego, if you go back to 2013, 2015, and then by Will Heard, and now by Tony Gonzalez.
So it's sort of a checkered district.
There's the possibility that if Republicans give up that seat and there's a special election, they lose the seat.
And right now, the Republican majority is basically razor thin.
However, I will say that there is some short-term pain that could lead to long-term gain if you actually get rid of people who are nailing their staffers and their ugly texts to show it.
And there might be some short-term gain, but long-term pain if you do not do all of that.
Now, with all that said, is it possible for Democrats to blow this thing?
Sure.
President Trump, as I said yesterday on the program, his State of the Union address was a masterclass in getting Democrats to decline themselves.
The Democrats made fools of themselves.
They looked terrible.
The Republicans are already cutting campaign ads showing what Democrats were sitting down for, showing them jeering the president.
Here is an ad that was already cut by the Republicans.
It says, Democrats are for illegal immigrants, Republicans are for you, which, of course, is an echo of the Democrats are for they, them, Donald Trump is for you.
So could that be an issue for Democrats?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
The Democratic leadership, for its part, continues to defend this sort of behavior.
Ilhan Omar, who, I mean, just the seething scorn she has for Americans, it flows off of her in waves.
It's really astonishing that this person is respected on the Democratic side of the aisle.
Anyway, here she was on CNN saying that there was no way for her to help screaming at the president.
The president talked about protecting Americans, and I just had to remind him that his administration was responsible for killing two of my constituents.
In Minneapolis, many members of your Democratic Party criticized their Republican counterparts when they interrupted President Biden's State of the Union address.
As a lot of us remember, do you have any regrets at all about the interaction we played between you and President Trump just last night?
And I think many people look at that moment when the president says it is our responsibility to protect Americans.
And he does not acknowledge the fact that two Americans, two of my constituents, two of our neighbors, were killed.
And it was important for me to just remind the American people that the president and his administration was responsible for killing two American citizens.
I mean, and that's so she was screaming at him when he made a very obvious statement that we should protect Americans, and that's the first job of the government and not illegal immigrants.
Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader who hopes to become Speaker in November, defended the outbursts yesterday.
But the average American was sitting there saying, I'm paying 6% more for electricity.
I'm paying 10% more for meat.
My health care bills are going up.
And Donald Trump isn't even talking about it.
In fact, he had so little good to say about what he's doing that he had to spend most, so much of the time talking about really true American heroes that he had nothing to do with.
He'd had nothing to do with the hockey team, for instance, winning, and they're great.
Donald Trump, this speech was an utter failure for Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, Al Green, the representative that you heard Hakeem Jeffries praising a moment ago, he says that President Trump wants to take us back to the days of saying the N-word.
And then he showed a picture of himself as resistance hero.
This is one of my favorite things about politics, about business.
You always know who is the rather douchey person in the room by whether they are flanked by a gigantic picture of themselves.
If there's that gigantic picture of you behind you, Anthony Fauci had one too.
The president should not portray persons of African ancestry as apes.
This is unacceptable given the history in this country of caricatures such as this being utilized against people of color at an earlier time.
And the president would take us back to those ugly days when you could call black people in words with impunity, when you could demand that black people show respect that was not deserved, when the black people were relegated to the back of the bus, they were relegated to the balcony of the movie and the bottom of the jails.
This is unacceptable.
Black people are not going back, Mr. President.
Black people are going to move forward with the rest of this country.
And I'm giving notice today that we will not tolerate this level of injustice emanating from the highest office in this country, from the presidency.
Then President Trump put out a statement on Truth Social about the response by Democrats to his State of the Union.
Quote, when you watch low IQ Ilhan Omar and Rashid Talib as they screamed uncontrollably last night at the very elegant State of the Union, such an important and beautiful event.
They had the bulging bloodshot eyes of crazy people, lunatics, mentally deranged and sick, who frankly look like they should be institutionalized.
When the man is cooking, he's cooking.
When people can behave like that, and knowing that they are crooked and corrupt politicians so bad for our country, we should send them back from where they came as fast as possible.
They can only damage the United States of America.
They can do nothing to help it.
They should actually get on a boat with Trump-deranged Robert De Niro, another sick and demented person with, I believe, an extremely low IQ, who has absolutely no idea what he is doing or saying, some of which is seriously criminal.
I don't know if what he's saying or doing is criminal.
And when I watched him break down in tears last night, much like a child would do, like a baby child, like a child, I realized he may be even sicker than crazy Rosie O'Donnell, who is right now in Ireland trying to figure out how to come back into our beautiful United States.
The only difference between De Niro and Rosie is that she is probably somewhat smarter than him, which isn't saying much.
The good news is that America is now bigger, better, richer, and stronger than ever before, and it's driving them absolutely crazy.
So, you know, listen, I'm a fan of letting Democrats be clowned themselves.
I'm not sure that that is the best form of the dunk, but you understand President Trump's annoyance for sure.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris will not go away.
It is amazing to me that she is still traipsing around the political landscape pretending that she is going to be the next Democratic presidential.
And, you know, when he wasn't lying, he was, it reminded me of our kids going to show and tell at school.
It was nothing that was true about really how the American people right now, so many are suffering under the weight of high prices, unaffordable health care, unaffordable housing.
And it was, you know, we've come to expect it.
And, you know, some people have said it was really quite boring and that there was nothing very interesting about it because it was the same old, same old.
The guy lying about what he intends to do, what he has done, and the state of our economy and the state of the world.
We've got momentum and we must be alert because there are powerful forces intentionally attempting to destroy our democracy and the voice of the people.
And as far as the Democratic push, I mean, they continue to not jettison their radicalism, which is truly insane.
The fact that Bernie Sanders, I will never get over the fact that Democrats decided to make a bloviating socialist, career-useless person who's in his 130s, the ideological thought leader there.
I will never get over it.
Yesterday, Senator Mark Wayne Mullen of Oklahoma and Senator Bernie Sanders went at it over the ACA, Bernie claiming that it's up to Republicans to fix the ACA and Mullen saying, dude, you've been here for longer than I have been alive.
When we start talking about healthcare not being affordable, Ranking Member and I actually agree on that.
The problem is you supported the same tools that got us to where healthcare is unaffordable because ACA affordable health care, which is completely unaffordable, has risen three times faster than inflation itself.
Yet we still support it.
Not we, you, the Democrats, I support a national health care program, which will cut the cost of the health care.
Obviously, Democrats are not in connection with normality.
Republicans need to keep pointing that out in calm and cohesive fashion.
Meanwhile, JD Vance has been deployed to fight fraud in the federal government.
This is something that the president of the United States announced at the State of the Union address yesterday.
The vice president gave a presser in which he explained that he is going to be cracking down on fraud, particularly in the Medicaid system while being flanked by Dr. Oz here was the vice president.
Far too many people have gotten rich by taking what is the best of the American spirit and getting rich off of it instead of providing services to kids who need it.
That is stopping today.
We're taking a whole of government approach in the Trump administration to take this fraud seriously.
What Mehmet Oz and his team at CMS have done is really remarkable.
As a lot of you know, there are way too many Americans who are being defrauded by very bad actors in our society.
People who take the goodwill and the trust of the American taxpayer and they decide to use it against us.
They decide to make themselves rich instead of allowing these programs that are set up to make it easier for people to take care of their families, to make it easier for Autistic Kids to get the after-school services they need, to make it easier for people to get the health care that they need.
And we are going to start very aggressively in the administration cracking down on the people and the organizations that are defrauding Americans.
So we're announcing today that we have decided to temporarily halt certain amounts of Medicaid funding that are going to the state of Minnesota in order to ensure that the state of Minnesota takes its obligations seriously to be good stewards of the American people's tax money.
That pause amounts to about $260 million in funds that would normally be essentially a credit from the state of Minnesota toward the federal government.
Vice President Van said that Minnesota, according to the Wall Street Journal, was the first state targeted because the fraud there was operating at industrial scale.
There have been investigations into Minnesota fraud starting in 2022.
That's when the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minneapolis actually charged 47 defendants with allegedly exploiting a federally funded child nutrition program during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, we should be real about the nature of fraud in public programs.
It is large.
It is extensive.
The biggest problem with these gigantic welfare programs, of course, is that you don't have to defraud them in order to take advantage of them.
There are people all over the United States of a wide variety of groups who are taking advantage of welfare programs, knowing that the taxpayers are subsidizing them.
This has always been a problem with the gigantic welfare system itself, which is why I have always opposed it and believe that welfare ought to start at the local level.
It should not predominantly be done at the federal level.
Because at least in your local community, if somebody wants to receive charity, they have to know the person from whom they are taking the charity and they have to answer to the local community for their own failures, economically speaking.
They have to show that they're trying to get a job or whatever.
The more you abstract this to the government level, the more people are going to abuse the system.
And there is a difference, by the way, between fraud and abuse.
Obviously, when you're talking about fraud, you're talking about people who overtly lie.
They say that they're running some sort of child learning center in Minneapolis.
And it turns out that maybe they're not, that actually there are no kids there.
That's actual fraud.
That's criminal fraud.
And then there is abuse.
People who, for example, could go get a job and then they don't get a job because they're receiving too much in welfare for them to want to get a job.
They just make the lifestyle decision that it's easier to take the public cash and do what they want to do in the time that they could be working.
That is abuse of the system.
We like to focus on fraud because criminality is prosecutable.
The reality is that abuse is the bigger problem because abuse is incentive driven.
It is a huge, enormous problem.
When you change the incentive structure for human beings, when you tell them you will give them free money to do a thing, they do more of the thing.
And then the programs grow and then they grow some more and they grow some more after that.
Neither party is willing to take on serious abuse of the system because to do so would be to recognize that the system itself is incapable of preventing abuse.
It is not possible because you can work perfectly within the limits of the law and still be abusing the system.
And Americans inherently sort of respond to the nastiness of that as they should, going all the way back to the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was talking about welfare queens, right?
People who are taking advantage of the system.
They were operating within the bounds of the law.
They weren't lying about their income.
They just weren't working.
They were receiving tremendous government benefits.
That is a problem with the system because human beings are incentive driven.
But both parties have basically decided that the era of small government is over.
And so we are going to maintain these gigantic systems and then pretend that by wiping out a couple hundred million dollars in payments, that's somehow going to fix our systemic debt problems and our welfare payment problem.
Okay, meanwhile, on the foreign policy front, very weird story near Cuba.
Unclear what exactly happened here.
The Cubans are saying that there were Americans on a U.S. speedboat who actually tried to infiltrate into Cuba and then were killed.
The Cuban embassy put out a statement on the morning of February 25th, 2026, a violating speedboat was detected within Cuban territorial waters.
The vessel, registered in Florida, approached up to one nautical mile northeast of the El Pino Channel in Cayofalcone's Correlillo municipality.
Forgive my pronunciation.
When a surface unit of the Border Guard troops of the Ministry of the Interior carrying five service members approached the vessel, the crew of the violating speedboat opened fire on the Cuban personnel.
As a consequence, four aggressors on the foreign vessel were killed and six were injured.
So, is that an international?
It kind of depends on what the speedboat was doing.
Was it somebody trying to run drugs?
Unclear what exactly was happening.
Secretary of State Rubio also said he basically has no idea what's happening.
He said that he's going to try and track down what exactly happened.
Obviously, tensions are very high with the Cuban regime right now because Cuba is no longer being supported by Venezuela, which means that they're basically on their last legs.
So again, it would make very little sense for the Cubans to provoke the United States at this point.
I'm going to assume that there is some sort of nefarious activity taking place on that speedboat rather than suggesting that the Cuban government is randomly targeting American speedboats in the general area.
Again, if you look at the map, this speedboat was very, very close to Cuban actual territory.
They were within one nautical mile of actual Cuban territory.
And meanwhile, the bigger international story, obviously, is the negotiations taking place in Geneva today between the United States and Iran.
The United States has put out a list of its demands, according to the Wall Street Journal.
That list of demands includes that Iran should dismantle its three main nuclear sites at Fort Onatans and Isfahan and deliver all its remaining enriched uranium to the United States.
Now, you'll remember that those facilities were largely destroyed by the United States military and the Israeli IAF.
It is also true, however, that the Iranians have been attempting to rebuild those facilities.
And also, it was true that certain amounts of enriched uranium were moved before the actual airstrikes.
And so people are concerned that that's still hanging out out there and that the Iranians won't just be able to spin up their centrifuges, but you can use some of that uranium for things like dirty bombs.
The demands also include that any nuclear deal must last forever and never sunset, not like the JCPOA, which was the Obama plan, which basically sunset it after 10 years and then said, hey, have fun building yourself a nuke.
There would be allowance for nuclear development to the extent necessary for medical purposes.
So, for example, radiation therapy for cancer and such.
Apparently, there has not been a demand with regard to ballistic missiles murdering their own citizens or spreading of terrorism, which, again, is weak.
That is weak.
These demands are stronger than what Barack Obama was pushing, but overall, is it everything that the United States requires in order to ensure the security of itself and its allies?
I think not.
According to the latest reports, the ballistic missile program was ruled off the table by the IRGC, speaking to the NUR News Agency.
Also, apparently, a senior Iranian official has also said in an Al Jazeera interview that they reject dismantling nuclear facilities, handing over uranium stockpiles, and the principle of zero enrichment forever.
So those would be like the core demands that it's completely rejected.
So the Iranians are clearly playing chicken with the Trump administration.
That historically does not go particularly well for Iran.
JD Vance, the vice president, says that they've seen evidence that Iran is trying to rebuild its nuclear program.
Hey, so the Secretary of State also added that Iran has refused to talk about its ballistic missiles, and that is not an acceptable position for the United States.
Now, again, there has been a bit of a gap in the administration's talk about this.
The negotiators seem not to be discussing ballistic missiles.
The Secretary of State very much is.
Obviously, I think that Secretary of State Rubio is correct.
There are some reports from Politico that the United States would like for Israel to strike first, believing that if Israel strikes and then Iran shoots off a bunch of missiles at Saudi Arabia and Israel in retaliation, that will justify domestically a retaliation from the United States against Iran.
And I'm fine with Israel doing whatever it needs to do to guarantee its own national security.
That seems separate and apart from the United States' own interests in the region, which include, by the way, not just protecting Israel, but also protecting Saudi Arabia, also protecting our assets in the region and beyond, and preventing the Iranian government from exporting terrorism all over the world.
These are all real interests of the United States.
The attempt to suggest that this is just the United States fighting Israel's war or some such.
First of all, Israel fought its own war back last year.
Second of all, it was the president of the United States who issued a statement to the Iranians saying they needed to stop slaughtering their people in the streets.
In fact, the early reports were that President Trump was considering some sort of minimalistic airstrike, and the Israelis said, no, don't do it.
Either go whole hog or go home.
Which, again, I think makes a lot of sense.
If you're going to do something, do it.
Don't hit a camel in the ass and then claim victory.
So it'll be interesting to see where things go over the course of the next 48 hours.