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Feb. 13, 2025 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr
01:06:04
DOGE Keeps Digging as Dems Keep Deceiving, Live with Lawyer Paul Moore & Entrepreneur Barry Habib | Triggered Ep. 216
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Thank you.
Things are moving as fast as ever, myself included.
Every day the news is happening so rapidly it can be hard to even keep up.
But that's why we're here, to tell you all you need to know and break down all of the biggest stories.
And today we actually have two first-time guests.
First, we'll get into all things DOJ, DOJ, Department of Education, with former chief of investigations for the Education Department and former senior counsel at the Justice Department, Paul Moore.
We'll also reveal even more explosive revelations about how our universities are selling out to adversaries like China.
Then we'll get into all things DOJ, DOJ, Department of Education, We'll have CEO of MBS Highway, entrepreneur and housing expert Barry Habib, to give you an inside look at the economy and what to expect next.
So make sure you guys are liking, sharing, subscribing, so you never miss one of these major episodes.
Remember, you can get Triggered on Spotify, you can get it on Apple Podcasts.
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Make sure they know about it.
And for all of the top headlines that we'll spotlight here on the show, go over to my news app, MXM News, where you can get the mainstream news without the mainstream bias.
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And now let's take a look at the top headlines.
Yesterday, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that DOJ is filing a lawsuit against the state of New York, Governor Kathy Hochul and the state attorney general Letitia James for harboring illegal aliens, protecting violent criminals and defying federal protecting violent criminals and defying federal immigration law.
Obviously, that's what's happening.
We've seen it.
This is nothing new.
But finally, someone's doing something about it.
Here's a clip from the announcement yesterday where Attorney General Bondi made it clear that if you violate the laws, it ain't going to work out so well for you.
And that's why President Trump has directed this to stop.
And if you don't comply with federal law, we will hold you accountable.
We did it to Illinois.
Strike one.
Strike two is New York.
And if you are a state not complying with federal law, you're next.
Get ready.
And the great men and women of law enforcement are standing behind me today.
We have FBI, DEA, ATF agents.
They put their lives on the line every single day to protect us.
And what New York has, they have green light laws.
Meaning they're giving a green light to any illegal alien in New York where law enforcement officers cannot check their identity if they pull them over.
Law enforcement officers do not have access to their background.
And if these great men and women...
Pull over someone and don't have access to their background.
They have no idea who they're dealing with.
And it puts their lives on the line every single day.
Violent criminals, gang members, drug traffickers, human smugglers will no longer terrorize the American people.
And that is why we are here today.
You will be held accountable if you do not follow federal law.
It's over, it ends, and we're coming after you.
And those remarks came around the same time that we learned that, yes, we were right all along.
As usual, every conspiracy theory ends up being fact.
It's just a matter of how long it takes to get there.
FEMA was, in fact, dishing out funds to house illegal aliens, even as residents in North Carolina were being left behind after the hurricane back in October.
Remember, they got that $700 check.
According to DHS, $59 million was sent under Biden to New York City to put illegals in luxury hotels while Americans were suffering.
$59 million for illegals if you lost your home, a loved one, your business.
In North Carolina, you got like a $700 check.
Okay, just so we're clear where you stand relative to the Democrat mentality and their prior administration.
Here's my father reacting to the findings yesterday.
This is a massive fraud that's taken place.
And then you have judges that are activists, and they sit there and they say, oh, as an example, $59 million going to a little small group in New York City.
You get nothing going to North Carolina to help.
Nothing.
They say, we don't have any money because they've given it away on the border.
But you have nothing.
What they did to North Carolina is a shame.
And then they sent $59 million to New York City for a hotel for a little bit of what they've done.
A hotel that was not luxury, that's getting luxury rates for migrants, where they're making a fortune.
And we catch them.
We catch them.
But a judge says, well, even though it may be a fraud, you have to send the money in anyway.
Send the money.
I said, wait a minute.
We have money that shouldn't go because we caught it before it was sent out.
But they want the money to go anyway.
And I think you're going to have a lot of things to look at, Pam.
I really do.
What's going on with this whole thing?
And this is just one group.
Now, under the Trump DHS, that 59 million has been clawed back.
But we need a full investigation into just what possible criminal conduct occurred and who all benefited from it.
It's, of course, yet another reason why we need Doge to root out all of this corruption, all of the waste, all of the fraud, and all of the abuse.
It's why the Democrats are losing their mind.
Who wouldn't want to know what's going on?
Unless, of course, you're indirectly benefiting it when you're not supposed to.
But rogue judges, shockingly all Democrat appointees, in liberal places, are doing everything they can to try to stand in the way.
The judge who issued an injunction to block the spending freeze, Judge John McConnell Jr., is basically a far-left activist.
He's on tape claiming that a middle-class, white-privileged male person needs to understand criminals who are women, black, or transgender.
Again, I gotta put it all in quotes so that it doesn't get mixed up.
And claims that the trans community needs special sentencing treatment.
Again, like all things trans, they don't want to be equal.
They want to be a lot more.
Certainly the activists.
Don't believe me?
Here's the tape, folks.
Government actions, when you're sentencing someone, when we talk about sentencing, that you have to take a moment and realize that this, you know, middle-class, white, male, privileged person needs to understand the human being that comes before us, that may be a woman, it may be Black, it may be transgender, it may be poor, it may be rich, it may be whatever, may have experiences that aren't yours, and you have to...
You have to walk in their shoes and understand that the law applies to them where they are, and then you have to apply the law accordingly.
Now, when issuing the injunction, the judge did admit that the administration has the right to limit access to federal funds on the basis of the applicable authorizing statutes, regulation, and terms.
I'm shocked he believes any of the law, which, you know, again, they've been known to totally ignore.
But that sets the stage for further litigation, maybe at the appellate level and maybe even at the Supreme Court.
The good news is, on the issue of the deferred resignation program for federal workers, a different federal judge yesterday did rule in favor of the Trump administration, clearing the way to clean out the rot in the federal bureaucracy, at least for now.
And if you're wondering just how bad the waste...
An inefficiency really is.
Just look what Elon posted yesterday.
Federal employee retirements are processed using paper files by hand in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania.
Literally 700 mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process 10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes.
The retirement process takes multiple months.
You can't make it up.
I mean, they don't want us mining anything else, but, you know, if we can use it to store retirement papers in possibly the most inefficient way imaginable, that's obviously OK, folks.
But like I've been saying, this is yet another reason why we need Congress to actually pass legislation to codify some of these executive actions into law.
We don't.
We can't have anti-Trump federal judges doing everything.
We can't have that.
They're doing everything in their power to stand in the way.
We need to put it into law, and we need Congress to help do that, and we can fully clean house.
And now Doge is now setting its sights on overhauling the Department of Education.
We spend more per pupil than any other country in the world, but we're ranked...
40th.
Think of that.
America.
Like, America, with everything we've done, we're 40th in the world, spending more per capita than any other country.
It's ridiculous.
Here's my father discussing the next steps from the Oval Office.
Look, the Department of Education is a big con job.
We're ranked, so they rank the top 40 countries in the world.
We're ranked number 40th.
But we're ranked number one in one department, cost per pupil.
So we spend more per pupil than any other country in the world, but we're ranked number 40. We've been between 38 and 40. The last time I looked, it was 38, and then I looked two days ago, it came out the new list.
It came out at number 40, so we're ranked 40. Norway, Denmark, Sweden, I hate to say it, China, as big as it is, it's ranked in the top five, and that's a primary competitor.
We're ranked number 40. So if we're ranked number 40, that means something's really wrong, right?
And I say send it back to Iowa, to Idaho, to Colorado.
Send it back to places that, and there are a lot of Indiana.
You have a great new governor.
You have a great senator that Jim Banks just got elected.
You got great people.
I'll tell you what, Indiana's going to be fantastic.
We probably have 35, maybe 37 states that will do as well as...
Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden.
They'll be just as good.
Then you have the ones that we all know about.
It'll be the same story.
But you know what?
Even they will be good.
Because you look at New York.
You give it to Westchester County.
You give it to Long Island.
You give it to Nassau County.
You give it to Suffolk County.
Same thing.
You go out to and you give it to upstate New York.
So you'd have four or five sections.
You give it to Manhattan.
Manhattan's a little bit tougher for some reason.
I don't know why it would be tougher, but it is.
You give to California and you go to various areas outside of Los Angeles, and you might have six or seven different subgroups.
But generally, like if you go to Iowa, you give it to Iowa.
You don't have subgroups.
You have Iowa and other places that do a good job.
If they do a good job, they're going to do a great job in education.
And meanwhile, yesterday...
Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed as the next director of national intelligence, getting us one more confirmation closer to getting the cabinet that you all voted for confirmed.
But who did McConnell side with?
Cocaine Mitch, who did he side with?
He sided with the Democrats.
He voted with them as always, opposing yet another Trump pick.
The swamp runs deep.
But we're still winning bigger and better anyway.
I think when Mitch is up in two years and he's out of there, anyone he's endorsing, you should probably vote against, Kentucky.
No more of this crap in the Senate.
Enough is enough.
With Republicans like Mitch McConnell, you might as well have Democrats.
And if you're wondering if the media has learned anything since January 20th, the answer is clearly no.
But on CNN, Scott Jennings just keeps delivering one reality check after another.
Check this out.
That you have these partisan hack Democrat attorney generals.
They get together.
And the only thing they know how to do is try to nullify the results of the last election by venue shopping these district court judges.
They find the most lunatic liberals they can.
They file lawsuits knowing full well they're going to try to usurp the president's authority, tie this up in court for years.
That stuff is sacrosanct.
And you've got people going in there who don't know anything about that system.
But these are also just restraining orders.
He knows nothing about it.
What you just said is so profound.
You said these people don't know anything and they don't know what they're doing.
That's right.
I understand.
But they are appointees of the duly elected president.
So your view, you're here as our legal expert, but your view is because you don't personally believe they know enough that the duly elected president who appointed a treasury secretary and will appoint special appointees like Elon Musk shouldn't be able to act as the president because...
You don't personally believe they know enough?
Is that how it works?
Or do elections mean anything to you?
Well, it's got nothing to do with elections.
Of course it does.
He's doing exactly what we thought.
The truth was told.
And perhaps the only ones more out of touch than the media are the Democrats themselves.
Here's Congressional Democrat John C. Lashowski suggesting that the word manufacturing, manufacturing, folks, is, wait for it, Drumroll.
Manufacturing, the word, is sexist because it has the word man in it.
Honestly, guys, every time I think the Democrats can't get any more freaking stupid, they do this.
And, like, literally, I have no words.
It's literally hard to believe how dumb these people are.
You know, how many words do you know?
Can you come up with the top of your head that have man in it?
Are we just going to ban all of those?
Are we going to get rid of any of those?
I mean, it's nuts.
What about Manhattan?
I mean, you know, that's a pretty liberal stronghold.
Are we going to change the name of Manhattan because it has the word man in it?
Does it mean that there's no women in Manhattan?
You know, New York City?
I mean, I can't believe this is real.
But it is.
Yesterday, I met with a manufacturing company, but they also are engaged in getting young people more engaged in manufacturing.
So I asked them, so how many of those students that are signing up and want to do this, how many are women?
And they said, well...
I know there's at least 13% or something.
It was a low number.
And you had mentioned trying to engage more women in manufacturing.
I'm just wondering if just the name, manufacturing, sounds like a guy.
Guys.
These are the same people claiming your country is in crisis because we want to root out government waste.
Think about it.
The geniuses that gave you manufacturing is sexist because it has the word man in it.
Want to make sure we don't look at government waste.
We don't do anything about it, and we certainly can't expose it to the American public, the taxpayer, the people who pay for everything.
Because it's not a government-funded program.
There are no government-funded programs.
There are only taxpayer-funded programs, and they want to make sure you don't know where your money is going.
And lastly, guys, this week, we brought home...
Yet another American-held prisoner abroad.
Mark Vogel was a Pennsylvania teacher locked up in a Russian prison since 2021 for carrying medical marijuana.
His mother met my father at a rally and he promised he'd bring him back home.
Yet another promise made and a promise kept.
Guys, one more thing to point out.
Mark Vogel, we didn't have to trade the merchant of death to get him back.
We just got him back.
Because strength and resolve in America gets people to do things that we want.
That's how it works.
Remember when Biden, for Brittany Griner, he had to trade the merchant of death, literally a terrorist arms dealer who's apparently back in action, probably using it against either our allies or Americans abroad, whatever it may be.
We just got people back with strength and resolve.
Isn't it nice to be strong again?
Isn't it nice to have America first again?
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That's 1775coffee.com, promo code TRIGGERED. Okay, guys, joining me now, former chief of investigations in the first Trump.
This is a big one, giving everything that's going on.
Former DOJ Senior Counsel Attorney Paul Moore.
Paul, how are you, man?
I'm good.
How are you, Don?
I'm doing okay.
It's been a long day.
Red eyes and no sleep and all of that, but we've got to keep fighting and keep working.
You were Chief of Investigations at the Education Department, so you've seen everything.
That Doge is talking about right now up close and personal.
What do you think stands out most to you about how the Democrats have weaponized that entire department to the detriment of students?
Well, there's so many things.
It's, you know, where do you begin?
You know, the first thing I would say is, at my age, I have to have a colonoscopy every five years.
And I kind of speak up close and personal.
And they don't.
And, you know, it was 1982 when Ronald Reagan had the Grace Commission look into ways to federal agencies.
And he was actually the first to kind of make popular drain the swamp.
And so we got to do it, folks.
And nothing happened.
All that happened was slowed the rate of growth for some of these agencies for a few years.
You know, what's going on?
we've got this department that's out of control that's been on the front line of of uh of uh using the nbi and doj to terrorize parents actually classify them as domestic terrorists if they dare to speak up in an unfortunate way at a pta meeting things like that oh yeah we talk about that one all it's disgusting.
No, it is.
They've redefined sex.
You know, they've given away $400 billion in taxpayer money from hardworking people to graduates who promise to pay off their student loans.
You know, they've quit investigating China's money at our universities, at our research universities.
I mean, there's so many things that they've done.
And in my opinion, they've disqualified themselves from continuing.
I mean, if you have a doctor that abuses their patients, you say you can't practice medicine anymore.
I mean, that's really where we are.
We found out where Cardona and Biden were going to go in the first year of the administration, December 2021. They had this thing called the Civil Rights Data Collection.
And so they actually ordered that elementary schools and secondary schools had to ask, one of the questions was, are you male, female, or non-binary?
You know, so you're asking kindergarteners, first graders, etc.
You know, if they're non-binary, you're introducing the whole thing, you know, it's the gender madness, we can't start too early.
And I'm sure they do it.
Let's make sure they start thinking about that right now, just to create confusion in already, you know, impressionable minds.
Yeah, totally.
Also, you've got all these teachers who, you know, really aren't trained or equipped to be addressing that matter.
Some people might be old-fashioned and say, hey, that's the parent's job, and, you know, let's just keep the, you know, education industry out of it, but not this department.
And they actually, they required, I mean, you know, if you're a tiny town in Missouri, you've got to, where I'm from, you've got to ask these questions.
You have no choice.
If you don't, you're going to lose your federal funding.
And so, you know, it's just...
There's been such an abuse of the authority that was granted to the department, and then the excessive use of that authority, which is just unconstitutional, illegal.
And they didn't rein themselves in.
They should have, and they need to go.
And beyond that, it's not like we're overperforming, right?
I mean, we spend more per capita on students than any nation in the world, and I believe we're like 28th or 29th in education.
I mean, there's literally third-world countries that are educating their children.
Four pennies on the dollar relative to what we spend and doing a better job of it than we have.
So it's not like they're banking on any kind of actual success, are they?
No, they're not.
And I mean, we've got, you know, we're in a situation, if money was the solution, we would be number one.
I mean, we have thrown so much money.
We're number one out of 40 in throwing money at the problem.
We're now 40. A couple of years ago, I think last year, actually, we were 38 out of 40. Now we're number 40 in terms of results.
I mean, here's the situation we've got.
Two-thirds of eighth graders in Detroit can't read at a basic level.
70% nationwide of fourth graders can't read at a basic level.
Baltimore, 71% of eighth graders can't read at a basic level.
They're basically illiterate.
You can't read, you can't learn.
We're setting these kids up for failure, and actually it's the worst in the solid blue cities run by progressives.
You would think they'd be the ones saying, hey, we've got to change this.
It's not working.
So it's absolutely horrible.
We need to stop and back up, and what are we doing?
Stop what we're doing.
Well, I know you've also testified on Capitol Hill about how much our universities have gotten away with in terms of shady foreign donations from China.
They've even funded Chinese research that ends up being used against us.
How much, you know, is it beyond elementary education?
How much are colleges a part of the whole story here?
Well, you have to think about higher ed colleges and universities as big business.
And so we call them nonprofits.
They call themselves nonprofits.
And they're kind of treated with kid gloves, if at all.
But in fact, they're the ones who are running the Department of Education's policies that are supposed to be regulating them.
So we have regulatory capture by the regulated industry, and that's higher ed.
These are international conglomerates.
And so, you know, where is Elizabeth Warren when you need her to beat up on a big business, right?
She ought to be beating up on these international conglomerates that call themselves nonprofits, get preferential tax treatment.
And are just doing horrible things in this country.
And they've also, I mean, we're billions of dollars they've accepted from China.
You know, UPenn is particularly famous for having received, I think it was $61 million in the run-up to Joe Biden becoming president.
Once he launched the UPenn Biden Center, all of a sudden the money starts rolling in.
The president of UPenn was the one who was, you know.
I think it was Amy Gutman at the time, because that's my alma mater, so it's sort of embarrassing to see what happened there.
Well, it is, right.
And of course, she was rewarded with becoming ambassador to Germany.
And, you know, but I mean, you just, and there were, I think, 12 senior members of the Biden administration that were working at the Penn Biden Center.
And so they were essentially on the payroll of the CCP. You just can't make it up.
And I mean, you look at other universities, I mean, Stanford, Yale, Harvard.
Hundreds of millions of dollars from these universities.
TAMU, something like $493 million in contracts.
They finally decided they're going to get out of some of their Chinese operations.
But what we're doing is handing over our research product to the Chinese, who aren't stupid.
As your father often says, you know, we're the dumb ones.
Yeah, there are many things.
They're not dumb.
I'm not saying they're good.
That's not being an apologist for them.
But if you're playing in a war game, they are playing a much better game than us.
And there's no question to me that they're at war with us.
Absolutely right.
And, I mean, just recently, I think a few months ago, the House Select Committee on CCP issued a report called CCP on the Quad.
It revealed...
Our Department of Defense funded more than 2,000 scientific research collaborations with Chinese scientists who are working on emerging technologies, hypersonic and fourth-grade generation nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, advanced lasers, high-performance explosives, and rocket fuels.
I mean, this is our Department of Defense.
Our new secretary has his hands full.
And by the way, where was the IG at the Department of Defense when this was happening?
You know, this is extraordinary.
Same thing's happening with NASA. NASA's prohibited from using any of its funds in scientific collaborations with China, Chinese universities, Chinese scientists.
And yet there's evidence that's happening at many of our top universities around the country, research universities.
Incredible.
So, you know, with all these problems in the schools, given all of what we're talking about now, and, you know, obviously there's so much more, just how far has this set back our students at both the kind of K-12 level and as well as the college level?
I mean, I see these...
Elite universities, they're graduating all these people with gender studies degrees.
They're happy to rack up $300,000 worth of debt, but no possible way of paying it back because there's no market for that skill, if it's even a skill.
And, you know, how much worse was it made during the Biden administration with all this stuff?
You started talking about sort of paying off the student debt, having a plumber pay off, again, some Ph.D., because the plumber is actually far better off than the Ph.D., but the Ph.D. racked up probably half a million dollars in debt.
It seems like a huge transfer of wealth from the alleged elite from the working class of America who made better decisions and didn't make irresponsible ones.
Yeah, you're right.
And I mean, I think the problem goes really deep because we're not just looking at reversing four years of Biden.
We're looking at the eight years of Obama.
That's when all this really started and was serious.
So during Trump 45, we put the brakes on it.
And it took a long time to put the brakes on things.
We did it right, but there wasn't any kind of radical.
We didn't have a colonoscopy, which is what we need now.
And by the way, your father, you probably remember this, he actually proposed eliminating the Department of Education in 2018. We have a bunch of its responsibilities to other federal agencies.
And that's what happens to happen.
But I mean, these students who are graduating in their 20s and later with worthless degrees, advanced degrees from these paper mills that produce diplomas, no wonder they're resentful.
No wonder they're angry.
No wonder they're on drugs.
I mean, they have a right to be angry.
The system is failing them.
They're getting these worthless degrees.
And then they owe all this money, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It's like, of course, they're radicalized.
And so we're really top to bottom.
We've got to re-examine the system.
And what we're doing, because it's not education.
It's indoctrination.
We need new professors.
We need, you know, the other thing, too, is there are program participation agreements with all these universities.
And so, in other words, for them to be able to access federal student loan money and grants for their students, even private universities, they've got to enter into these program participation agreements.
And that's the tool that the Department of Education has, even if it's in its limited lifetime expectancy, to yank that string and say, You're doing things that are wrong, so I'm doing this stuff, teaching that stuff, you know, indoctrinating and all the gender madness.
So, I mean, you know, there's a great opportunity using those program participation agreements to immediately reach deep down, you know, because the tentacles of the Department of Education doing it's kind of evil over the last few years.
They're really deep.
And one other thing I should point out, there are only 4,400 employees.
It's still a lot at the Department of Education.
But the Department of Education actually funds about 48,000 employees at state agencies around the country.
So technically state employees, they're being funded by money from the Department of Education.
Even if you eliminate every Department of Education employee tomorrow, you've still got all these people that are, you know, they're kind of shock troops out there, in a lot of cases carrying out the same programs.
You need to go deep into those folks, figure out who they are, what they're doing, you know, really cut off that money or open it up so it's examined by their states.
So, you know, it seems like, obviously, you're of the opinion that the Department of Education should be abolished.
My father's obviously been talking about that as recently as, like, yesterday.
But, you know, what would that look like?
What would the sequence of events to make it happen be?
You know, how does that work, you know, in practice?
Because you're right, I'd rather go to the states and have their responsibilities.
But if 4,000 people are funding 48,000 people throughout the states, that's, you know, plus a little less than 1,000 people a state.
How do you get that rot out of there as well?
Because if you just transfer it to the States, but it's the same people just with different funding mechanisms, how do you make that happen to effectuate actual change?
Well, I think the way it's happening right now is executive orders is a great start.
You've got to start there.
And that's been happening rapidly since day one, which is wonderful.
It's amazing.
Not wasting any time.
So, I mean, you begin there.
Ultimately, it's got to go to Congress.
Congress needs to do something.
But here's what I would do.
I would transfer, like, the $1.7 million student loan portfolio that's backstopped by the Department of Education.
You know, the Department of Education, financial aid, they have no expertise in handling money.
All they do, they write checks.
That's their job.
They write checks.
So get it out of their hands.
They don't have the expertise.
Move it to Treasury or somewhere or private sector.
I mean, at least have that portfolio overseen by people that are trained to handle money and know how to track money and know how to look at qualifications.
I mean, the rollout of the FFSA, which happened a year and a half or so ago by the department, is a perfect example of departments in competency when it comes to handling financial.
That's the application that was supposed to be simplified from 100 questions to 18 questions.
For people who want to go to college to apply to the department to see if they qualify for student aid, financial aid.
And they completely bungled that.
There was a GAO study of it.
I mean, they rejected incorrectly about 500,000 applicants who then couldn't proceed with their college plans.
It may be a good thing.
They have done them a favor.
Who knows?
But I mean, you know, just the ability this department handled, that's about half of what the department does.
So get rid of that.
Move into the treasury.
There's some important things that do happen.
I think DOGE needs to have the council of people who say, look, this is actually something important the department does.
Let's get it to somewhere where it can be done effectively and competently.
And if there are good people working around that, move them with it so that the institutional knowledge isn't lost.
But, I mean, that's a very small handful of people.
So, you know, move things out, get them to the right places, and then have Congress pass a law that says we're done with the Department of Education.
It has abused its trust and no more.
So what do you do about what's going on with the student loan forgiveness, so to speak?
Biden did it.
It was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
He did it again.
It didn't matter.
It was pretty clear he was just trying to buy votes.
Where does that sit right now?
Has it been actually forgiven?
Is it on a pause?
Is it racking up more interest that the person with an underwater basket-weaving degree is still not going to be able to pay off?
How does that work?
Yeah, well, that's, I think, you know, from everything I understand, that's one thing that they did competently.
They give away other people's money very well.
And they, you know, even though, frankly, they mangled that a few times, but they, because they were rushing it for it to be done right before elections.
And by the way, they had contracts to have calling people, like, right before the election, weeks before the election, they had automated calls going out saying, President Biden has canceled your student loan.
Did you know that?
Make sure you go to the polls in a few weeks.
I mean, it's just extraordinary that these things were happening.
But I think that most of that $400 billion has already been granted.
I don't know if you claw that back somehow from the people that no longer have to make the payments.
I can't imagine how you do it.
But I mean, it needs to be exposed very thoroughly.
And by the way, the people that came in the Biden administration, largely from Massachusetts and Senator Warren's sphere.
They had promised to do exactly what they did.
And also, one of their big purposes has been to destroy for-profit educational institutions.
So there's no competition.
So the other thing that they've done incredibly well is protect the NEA, the American Federation of Teachers.
It's like, if you want to know where the department excels, it's in protecting those organizations, not the students.
Yeah.
Well, you saw that with the whole teachers union during COVID, you know, well, we don't want to teach because it's not safe.
Well, we don't want to do remote learning because we don't really like it.
We do want to get paid no matter what.
You know, it was sort of it was so disgusting to me to to watch that, you know, and every time it's always a fight for more vacation.
I'm like, I don't know anyone who has more vacation time than teachers that get paid for a full year.
It's sort of wild.
I'm not saying it's an easy job or, you know, there's not great teachers out there, but the teachers' union itself has weaponized all of these things so badly to the detriment of our students.
And again, it's not like we're overperforming.
So, I mean, I do feel like something has to be done about that one.
The other thing, too, is there was $190 billion thrown at elementary and secondary schools, you know, under the guise of COVID. And so, you know, in that crazy year 2020...
That was passed by Congress, but most of it was then, you know, doled out during the Biden administration.
So one of the first things the Biden administration did is said states and localities, if you did the school districts, if you want any of this money, you have to submit an equity plan to the prior education.
Otherwise, we won't even consider it.
So DEI was so infused from day one, you know, tied to any kind of money, these agencies.
That any grant could be awarded.
So, I mean, it was, you know, this is how abusive and disgusting they've been.
The DEI was a way to channel money to their friends and to hold it back from people that they didn't like, probably mainly in red states.
But they basically, you know, they got four years of everyone, you know, local school districts on up through state agencies marching between their drummer.
And so it's like the executive orders that are coming out now have been wonderful.
And keep going down, down, down to remove, you know, the last, you know, vestiges of cancer.
I mean, you've got to keep treating this patient until it's all gone, every state, every local school district.
So you've also worked at the DOJ. You know, talk about what you think Pam Bondi's top priority should be.
You know, as she sort of, you know, really gets rolling.
Is it to stop the lawfare and restore credibility?
Is it, you know, deeper than that?
And what can we do to stop those abuses from the Office of Civil Rights and others?
You know, civil rights, except for those they disagree with.
Those people don't get any civil rights.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And again, this is something where...
We're really decades.
This isn't following up on four years of lawfare.
We're decades into lawfare.
And I was at DOJ for most of your father's previous administration.
And, you know, the open sabotage by high-ranking department officials, by the deputy attorney general, others there, was just extraordinary.
And it's, you know, completely beyond their mission.
It's an agency, too, that has grown tremendously.
If you pare it back, all of a sudden they'll have to focus on the things that actually matter.
To me, what I've seen the new Attorney General doing, really good stuff, focusing, going after these cities and saying, you're not going to get any more funding if you're going to be a sanctuary city, if you're going to be a sanctuary state.
We're going to come after you because you're actively passing these laws.
And enforcing them to prevent the federal government from doing its job on immigration and other things.
So, I mean, I think she's off to a great start.
And, you know, that's what the American people expect.
So, you know, it's finally being delivered.
I think there's a lot of shock right now because, you know, a lot of Republican presidents and presidential candidates have talked about it.
No one's ever done it.
So it's absolutely shocking.
The left will be hysterical.
That's what they do the best at.
And so we can expect the hysteria.
But I think it's great how they're going at things.
And get the FBI back in the business of investigating and not counterintelligence, not missing its tools to go after its political opponents or to go after school parents that express a different viewpoint.
I mean, it's just extraordinary.
So again, the tentacles of what's been done, this has been a disease really from the left.
There's got to be a lot of active work to pull out.
To have Elon Musk You know, I mean, the Twitter files with Matt Taibbi, I think one of the best things that's happened in this country, to have that man leading the effort now to expose what's been happening at different agencies, I think it's terrific.
No one better.
Well, Paul, I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much for your time.
A lot of work to be done.
Hopefully they call you for some other tips if they're not on it already.
Otherwise, we'll have to just make it very vocal in the Twitter sphere.
Absolutely.
Happy to help.
Thank you, Don.
Appreciate it, man.
Thanks a lot.
Have a great day.
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Joining me now, CEO of MBS Highway, entrepreneur and housing expert, and a good friend, Barry Habib.
Barry, great to have you, man.
How are you?
I'm great.
Thanks for having me.
So, first, I want to get to sort of January's inflation numbers.
They were worse than expected, which tells us that the Biden administration did, in fact, leave us with a mess.
We knew it was building up.
You saw all the waste, fraud, abuse that they were throwing in the last weeks after the election.
Is it even worse than we anticipated?
We knew some of it was going on.
How much were we perhaps missing?
So, yeah, the inflation numbers certainly were hotter than expected.
You look at inflation in two ways.
The way that an economist looks at it, they look at the rate of change.
The way that a customer or consumer or just everyday person looks at it is, how much does this cost him at the grocery store, which is a cumulative effect.
So even saying the rate of change came down, which it did to some extent over the last year, it still is adding to the inflation that the consumer is feeling.
So it's just a little bit of a different way to gauge the inflation numbers.
So look, I think that inflation, while...
And I know that President Trump would like.
Interest rates to come down.
But a key function of this is seeing the correct information on inflation going forward.
Yeah, it feels like they're always moving the goalposts.
You're right.
The rate of change, that was the metric that they used to say.
Inflation's coming down.
It's like, no, no, no.
Inflation's still here.
It's still going up.
It's just not going up as fast.
So they tried to say it's coming down when it's actually going up.
And for someone who's not an economist and isn't dealing with it every day, they're telling me it's going down.
But if you look at the groceries, That ain't the case.
What can you talk about in terms of what drives up this cost that is essentially entirely self-flicted, specifically in housing?
You have illegal immigrants overwhelming the country.
Then there's also a mass influx of foreign ownership, especially in high-end markets.
I mean, just how hard is it to buy a house for, let's call them, common-sense, middle-class Americans these days relative to what you would have seen five or six years ago?
Well, it's a challenge.
It's a challenge, especially if you're a first-time homebuyer.
Even people that own a home, they say, well, I couldn't afford to buy my own home today.
Part of that's good.
They've gained equity in their home because the value has gone up.
But the other is that mortgage costs have gone up rather significantly.
Again, that goes back to the inflation issue because in order to get a real rate of return, an investor is going to lend money and say, well, I'm going to...
Blend it out at this rate, but inflation is going to erode this amount, so I've got to preserve this real rate of return.
So as inflation goes up, it drives interest rates higher.
So what we need is we need to see inflation come down.
Now, fortunately, the way that this is computed is it's interesting, Don, in that what we have to look at is the biggest component in, let's say, the consumer price index that we got yesterday.
It's called shelter.
Now, people think of shelter as a roof over their head.
The way that the government looks at this is very antiquated.
They don't look at mortgage payments.
They don't look at what the value of the home is.
They simply convert it into rent.
So they look at housing as a service, and it's either rent or the equivalent rent that if you own a house that you could charge.
Now, if you were looking at these numbers, the problem with the way the government looks at it is it's antiquated.
They look at this...
In dividing the country up into panels because they're understaffed, meaning that they look at one-sixth of the country every month.
So that means if you look at an area of the country in January, the next time you're going to revisit it is in July.
As things change, you could see big influxes.
The problem with that is that you are not going to capture what's actually happening, and the result is this.
Right now, the government's telling us that rents are going up on an annualized basis at 4.5% a year.
That's 46% of CPI. If you take a peek at what they're really going up, it's only 1.5% by all the real-time data we have, whether it's Zillow, CoreLogic, Realtor.com, ApartmentList, Redbit.
The metrics that you have available that were not available 50 years ago when they came up with these could be used.
It's like adding instant replay to football.
So if you were to simply make this change, inflation would be at the Fed's target of 2%.
Again, still adding to inflation, but we could actually see 2% inflation.
You'd see mortgage rates come down and you'd see housing become a lot more affordable because rates should really be at 6%, not 7% right now.
That would help those people buying a home because currently they're under a lot of pain in trying to make that move out of a rental where they get no equity and into a home where they could really make a lot of wealth for themselves for the future.
Yeah, I mean, that's a big one.
I mean, just the notion of that home ownership being there.
But you're right.
They utilize metrics to sort of suit their needs.
I remember it was, I guess, 18 months ago or something.
I always talk about Paul Krugman.
He wrote this thing.
Inflation is great.
It's totally under control.
And then you look at the bar graph.
He's a Nobel laureate economist.
He won the Nobel Prize in economics.
It's clearly just a liberal shill functioning as the arm of the Democrat Party.
Because you look at the chart and it goes, asterisk, if you exclude housing, food, transportation, and energy.
And I'm like, wait a minute.
For the average American, maybe there's some niceties that you could have in there, but in the grand scheme of your life, what...
It's like 90% of your life is housing, food, transportation, and energy.
So that's all a disaster.
But if you exclude that, the inflation numbers look great.
I mean, it's wild.
And they'll gaslight you, and then everyone else never gets past the headline.
They don't bother to check out what the asterisk says.
And so they just lie to your face.
Who would do that?
Just like with CPI, when they exclude gas prices.
It's like, I don't know.
It's used in every other aspect of CPI. I mean, it should be a big part of that, but they cut it out to conveniently sell a narrative.
Well, to your point, I've had a few dinners with Krugman, and the way he's thinking is bizarre.
Let's leave it at that, okay?
And he just has an agenda in the way he thinks.
But really, the problem does come not just in the inflation numbers, Don, and it is the way that the BLS reports the employment numbers.
They have made several errors, and let's put it this way.
It is at least questionable.
What they did near the election.
Well, they did it every time, Barry.
They put up a great number.
Oh, the jobs report is looking great.
Two months later, it gets revised down to literally what would be disaster-level numbers.
And they did it each and every time.
And they certainly did it right before the election.
But when they revised it and corrected it to a bad number from a glowing number, that's on page 12. No one ever sees it.
No one ever reports on it.
So, I mean, it is sort of this mafia of people gathered together to sell you misinformation.
You don't get it wrong every time.
And by the way, if they do get it wrong every time and they have to adjust it all, shouldn't there be a consequence there?
Shouldn't those people get changed?
Shouldn't there be other objective people looking at it and doing a peer review to say this is actually accurate, not weaponized politics?
It is reviewed.
It's reviewed by the QCW, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.
And what they found was that although the Bureau of Labor Statistics said...
After they themselves revised the numbers lower, there wasn't 2.5 million jobs created.
There was 1.25 million jobs created.
So essentially, 100,000 jobs a month was a BS number.
And look, it's a Herculean effort to do this.
But you have to be curious, especially around the liberties that they took with something called a seasonal adjustment.
Now, seasonal adjustment, Don, is meant to say, look, during the...
Holiday shopping season, you get all of these hires.
It doesn't mean the economy is going gangbusters.
And when they're let go in January, it doesn't mean the economy is falling off a cliff.
The same with teachers in June and September.
So they use a seasonal adjustment to smooth it.
But the last time they did this before the election, they did something they hadn't done in 49 years and gave the most generous seasonal adjustment to make the numbers look as pretty as possible right before the election.
Now, again, I have to say it's at least...
and the timing of why they did it.
And we know these folks did not want to go back to work, which they have to do now.
We know that the heads were Obama appointees.
We know that.
So you have to at least go in with eyes wide open and say, is there a bias there? - Yeah.
I'm going to go out there and say they definitely did this.
There's almost zero question in my mind that they did this because it was pretty consistent throughout.
You know where they stand.
You know what they want to do.
What do you expect right now as far as a possible rate cut from the Fed?
You touched on it a little bit before, but what does that look like to you?
How do we get to that point?
Will some of the savings on Doge, if we're not racking up the extra debt that we don't need to be doing, if Elon's able to cut a trillion dollars out of the budget?
You know, you're still running a deficit, but it's not racking up as much.
You know, what does all of that look like to you?
Because I mean, I feel like if we can get to a place where interest rates go down, you know, that's going to be when people start investing.
That's when people are going to start trying to buy homes.
That's when it's going to be affordable for other people who aren't already in a home to buy a home.
Well, again, as we mentioned, the accurate information on where the rate of change on inflation is will be critical.
But in addition to that, I do believe that the labor market is not as strong.
When you look at more...
Indicative numbers.
Job openings, which is the leading indicator, has precipitously fallen.
And the Wall Street Journal said that one out of five job postings is bullshit.
In addition to that, you also have the fact that there's double counting.
Nobody thinks about this.
On job postings years ago, if I wanted to hire somebody, I had to post it locally.
But with work from anywhere, I can post it in every state, and each one of those states counts the same job opening as it gets aggregated.
So these are grossly overstated, making the job market look better than it is.
So there's a lot of moving parts here that lead me to believe that the job market is not as strong.
If the job market slows, which I think it will, if inflation comes down, which I do think it will as well, that means rates will come down.
And it also means that the Fed...
Who can quickly change their mind, maybe talking very tough now about less rate hikes or even less rate cuts or even potentially would they do a rate hike?
They can quickly change their mind if they see the data change.
They give us their summary of economic projections.
And I think if we get the unemployment rate to 4.4%, 14 of the 19 Fed members are going to say, oh my gosh, we got this wrong.
We got to get aggressive with rate cuts.
So that's kind of the magic number for everybody to look at.
4.4% unemployment rate.
And watch the inflation rate of change come down closer to 2.3% from its current level of 2.8%.
Those are the magic numbers that will help interest rates come down.
And by the way, Don, housing is at a point right now where people think, well, it's overvalued.
Housing has continued to be very resilient.
And I think that when you just look at the sheer numbers of the laws of economic supply and demand, You get interest rates a little bit lower, and real estate may be one of the best investments out there because I do see a lot more price appreciation.
Yeah, no, that's interesting.
So I had no idea about that on the job postings, that each time it's in a newspaper or a different state, it counts as a new job posting.
I mean, how do you...
Two audits, I guess you ask.
How do you audit that?
Where does that have to take place?
How do you get that right so that the Fed is actually looking at objective numbers or actual numbers?
Or, again, I saw in the original job numbers a lot of people, well, if you took on a second part-time job because you needed it to make ends meet, that was two jobs in the job market, but it's one person just struggling to get by.
Not exactly the image.
That they're putting out.
And then you have Elon now talking about auditing the Fed.
Is that feasible?
What needs to be done?
There's a lot of good information right there and a lot of good questions.
So starting with the data itself, yes, it is a Herculean effort to do it.
So I understand that.
However, just like we talked about earlier, you made...
We need to be taking these steps.
You need to be taking the data that is readily available and accessible and using and implementing the data that's there instead of going back to these things.
As far as the Fed goes, you've got to remember, Don, that you've got Fed members, people like Michelle Bowman, even our Fed chair, Jerome Powell.
These are not economists.
These are lawyers.
There's a big difference between understanding economic conditions and being an attorney.
I believe that these are things that need to be looked at as far as who is voting on the most important price in the world, the price of money.
The U.S. dollar is the world's reserve currency, and you've got 19 people determining the value of that.
Are these 19 people really qualified in order to make those decisions?
When it comes to what the Fed will do going forward, as I mentioned, I think that the Fed definitely should be looking at these numbers much more objectively and looking a little deeper.
They aren't looking at the numbers other than, for the most part, just on the surface what the headline is, but you have to look under the hood.
For example, the same thing we talked about with the delay, that lag in the shelter numbers, it made the Fed complicit.
In adding to the inflation problem, you had the Biden budget buster of $1.9 trillion that we did not need, and that definitely added a lot of issues.
Plus, you had a lot of the fraud that occurred with the spending that went on, which of course Doge is uncovering.
This is something that created a lot of the inflation.
But remember, the Fed continued with QE. They continued with zero interest rate policy.
Why?
Because they were looking at inflation numbers that were lagging because of the same shelter component.
And while rents in real time were going up and the inflation numbers were going up because of the lag, they said, oh, we're okay to keep QE. Oh, we're okay to keep interest rates at zero because what we're looking at in the data, remember they keep saying data dependent, shows that inflation is under control.
When in real time, how they had looked at that, they could have responded more quickly and at least to some degree contained that level of inflation.
They're making the same mistakes today in the opposite direction.
So, I mean, would you abolish the Fed?
Does it even serve a purpose anymore?
Obviously, that's a big thing for a lot of people on my side of the political spectrum, but I'm sure there is some purpose.
What would your ideal scenario be, whether it's abolished, whether it's sort of...
Extreme modification to make sure that there aren't just lawyers making economic decisions just because they get appointed to a prestigious position that probably they have no business being in.
So the latter point is excellent.
You need to have vetted, qualified individuals in this really critical position.
I do think an independent Fed can be a good thing because, look, whoever is in control, whoever it is, to have the ability...
To set interest rate policy, you'd have to think that there's potential conflicts there that could occur.
So if you truly have an independent Fed that is truly qualified, it's probably a good thing.
That's probably a good idea.
And in many cases, it does work well.
This particular Fed has bungled things.
Again, I believe it's because the way that they've looked at the data.
Look, when you have points where things are relatively stable, Lagging data doesn't really matter.
But in points of inflection, and we certainly have seen that after the COVID disturbances and what it caused in the economy, looking at lagging data can be very, very painful and the wrong thing to do.
And having people who aren't vetted, who aren't sharp, who are bureaucrats instead of sharp economists, that will cause the pain.
All of us have gone through.
I mean, inflation affects everyone.
These changes in interest rates affects everyone.
Stealing the ability for somebody to purchase a home creates an enormous issue for them generationally.
Just think about this, Don.
You have currently in the housing market, right?
You have 136 million households in the United States.
Of those 136 million, you have about 45 million that are renters.
They have zero equity.
Zero equity.
The 91 million of them have $37 trillion in equity.
They average $571,000 per household versus zero.
We want to help people.
You've got to get people into homes.
That's how you create generational wealth for them.
And also, it's the best hedge against inflation.
Well, Barry, I really appreciate it, man.
There's so much to go here.
As we discover more stuff, I'll definitely have to get you back on and let you do the full thing with the charts and the graphs because it's fascinating.
And there's just a lot of nuance there that I think a lot of people miss that they should be informed about because we're all about getting that information out there.
So great seeing you, man.
I appreciate the time and I look forward to seeing you again soon.
Thank you, brother.
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