May 21, 2025 - Tim Pool Daily Show
58:41
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Oh! | ||
| Hey. | ||
| Hi, guys. | ||
| We're live. | ||
| I'm Libby Emmons. | ||
| I'm filling in for Tim Poole as he's out, and I'm happy to be with you for the second day of my time in the chair this week. | ||
| It's really exciting. | ||
| I wanted to just dive right in to a story that you guys might have seen. | ||
| The mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, is under investigation by the Department of Justice, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. | ||
| Harmeet Dillon has brought that case. | ||
| And after that case was brought, Mayor Johnson was taking questions from reporters, and he took this rather stunning question. | ||
| And I wanted to just start off by playing that for you guys, if we could. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Real Chicagoans woke up this morning relieved that the Department of Justice is finally investigating your race hustle. | |
| Someone who grew up on the south side of Chicago, I've heard a lot of race hustlers in my life, trust me, but they were usually marching around outside of City Hall, which is what makes this so embarrassing and dangerous. | ||
| Very, very dangerous to the city of Chicago. | ||
| Okay, we need that question. | ||
| I'm more than happy to ask this question. | ||
| It's long overdue. | ||
| For over a year, real Chicagoans, white and black, have been telling me... | ||
| That your black power rhetoric is bringing the city backwards from a place that... | ||
| We need the question. | ||
| ...had overcome. | ||
| You want the question? | ||
| Please. | ||
| Real Chicagoans want to know, why are you a racist? | ||
| Well, you know, first of all, I reject the idea and the premise that somehow that's an actual legitimate question. | ||
| You want that? | ||
| All right, we're going to go to the next one. | ||
| Alice? | ||
| The next question, my follow-up question is... | ||
| A businessman, Robert Gomez, had his Riverfront restaurant license yanked. | ||
| You said that the reason you hire black people is because they're the most generous race on the planet. | ||
| His riverfront restaurant license was yanked and given to a black restaurateur. | ||
| That seems to, that has once again reinforced the belief among real Chicagoans, white and black, and Mexican, that you are a racist. | ||
| And Again, I reject the premise that somehow that your question has any legitimacy. | ||
| Thank you for your time, sir. | ||
| That's truly amazing. | ||
| Why are you racist was the question, and Mayor Johnson refused. | ||
| To answer it, he questioned the legitimacy of the question at all. | ||
| So we did some digging into this. | ||
| Where's that story? | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. | ||
| I was looking at this this morning. | ||
| I was just fascinated. | ||
| I was really interested in what was going on here. | ||
| So what we see is that Mayor Johnson does not want to be called racist, even though repeatedly he has bragged about having specifically hired black people for key positions. | ||
| And I just I just think this is incredible. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| I In April, that man that the reporter referenced, Mr. Gomez, who had a restaurant on the Riverwalk, spoke to local news about the revocation of his lease at that space. | ||
| He had a restaurant called Beat Kitchen. | ||
| He said it generated about $3 million annually, and he's had the restaurant under a five-year lease, and I guess that's a lease from the city directly, and he'd only been operating for three years after the first two years were taken up with delays. | ||
| He applied for the lease again at the renewal point and competed against just one other applicant. | ||
| He was not permitted to keep his restaurant open during the renewal period, which he said dragged on for months. | ||
| So he applied to continue his lease to keep operating his restaurant, and he was told that He had to close it down while they were waiting to see who was going to get the lease. | ||
| So that's jobs, that's revenue, and that's a shuttered restaurant in a place where you want a lot of foot traffic and where you want to have, you know, a vibrant part of your city. | ||
| So he wasn't allowed to keep it open. | ||
| The process, he said, dragged on for months and the space remained closed for the entire 2023 season. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| Chicago took the lease from Gomez and gave it to someone else. | ||
| Gomez told ABC he didn't know why he was passed over and his lease was revoked. | ||
| He wasn't given any reason. | ||
| He called out the lack of transparency of the lease award process, asked the city for a briefing. | ||
| The city said that they would tell him about it, but only after they had taken his lease away, meaning that he had absolutely no recourse. | ||
| And the evaluation committee for leases said the purpose of the RFP process, which is request for proposals, anyone who's applied for work with any government, what you do is the government agency, after all their stupid research, puts out a request for proposals with all of these guidelines. | ||
| And that's where you're going to see not just what the intention of the project is, but you're also going to see all of your quotas about how many people at companies of different races you have to include, like your minority or business, minority or women-owned business enterprise. | ||
| he was operating a successful business for a number of years. | ||
| And this comes, Brandon Johnson's comments come after the Department of Justice is investigating the employment practices of the city of Chicago to determine whether it has engaged in a pattern or practice of racial discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| The DOJ, Harmeet Dillon, who you guys are probably familiar with, she's absolutely excellent and she's very involved in civil rights cases. | ||
| And she said that his list of remarks, this is a letter that she sent to the mayor, include business and economic neighborhood development. | ||
| The deputy mayor is a black woman. | ||
| Department of Planning and Development is a black woman. | ||
| Infrastructure deputy mayor is a black woman. | ||
| Chief operations officer is a black man. | ||
| Budget director is a black woman. | ||
| Senior advisor is a black man. | ||
| I think that's sort of wild that you could just list off all the races of the various people that you may have hired in your government. | ||
| Governments are rather large And I don't think that it's reasonable that the first things that come to mind are what race and gender your employees are. | ||
| I know that when I think of the staff at the Postmillennial and Human Events, mostly what I think about is their talent, their hard work ethic, and their amiability, to be honest, because I like to work with people who are easy to work with. | ||
| But that's what I think about. | ||
| Considering these remarks, wrote Hermit Dillon, I have authorized an investigation to determine whether the city of Chicago is engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination as set forth above. | ||
| If these kind of hiring decisions are being made for top level positions in your administration, then it begs the question whether such decisions are also being made for lower level positions. | ||
| And it also begs the question that this reporter brought up, which is Mayor Johnson, why are you racist? | ||
| So I don't think that reporter's going to get the answer to that question. | ||
| I don't think we're going to get the answer to that question, but I do have faith that Harmeet Dillon is going to dig in and find out. | ||
| If perhaps not why the mayor is racist, uncovering perhaps that he is racist in a formal way. | ||
| So we'll definitely keep our eyes on that. | ||
| And I applaud the temerity of that reporter who continued with his follow-up question even after aides tried to shut him up. | ||
| So well done. | ||
| Well done, Mr. Reporter in Chicago. | ||
| Another thing that was interesting today is the black governor of Maryland vetoed a bill on reparations. | ||
| This was passed by the legislature. | ||
| They wanted more money for another committee to determine about reparations. | ||
| And Maryland Governor Wes Moore said, I strongly believe now is not the time for another study. | ||
| Now is the time for continued action that delivers results for the people we serve. | ||
| So we saw recently that you had members of Congress, Ayanna Pressley is the one who jumps to mind because she was very vocal about it, trying to bring another reparations bill to the floor of the House and say, you know, that all this tax money should be used for reparations, cash or otherwise, for black Americans. | ||
| And California has passed some stuff like this, and some different states around the country have done various studies to determine how eligibility would be determined for constituents who may or may not be able to obtain these reparations payments. | ||
| But let's take a look at this. | ||
| What he said was, I applaud the legislature's work on this bill, and I thank the Black Caucus for their leadership. | ||
| Maryland is proud to be a state with the largest Black Caucus in America, our first Black Attorney General, our first Black Senator, a Black Treasurer, and a Black Speaker of the So he's got a similar thing to... | ||
| Brandon Johnson here. | ||
| He can list it all. | ||
| We have moved in partnership with leaders across the state to uplift black families and address racial disparities in our communities. | ||
| That is the context in which I've made this difficult decision because while I appreciate the work that went into this legislation, I strongly believe now is not the time for another study. | ||
| Now is the time for continued action that delivers results for the people we serve. | ||
| The bill... | ||
| Would have authorized the Maryland Reparations Commission to be established and would study and make recommendations relating to appropriate 21 benefits to be offered to individuals impacted by historical inequality. | ||
| So I think that's kind of interesting. | ||
| What does it say about the future of reparations in this country if a state with a large black population headed by a black governor, Democrat governor, is opposed to reparations? | ||
| More reparations, more of this kind of inquiry. | ||
| I think that perhaps the whole push for reparations right now in 2024 is not meeting the needs of the Democratic Party. | ||
| I think that Democrats are pulling back a little bit on this issue, at least for Wes Moore, because it's not. | ||
| It's not resonating with voters, right? | ||
| You have a lot of voters out there still having trouble with their bills, housing payment, all of the other stuff that goes into just paying for your life because paying for life is super expensive and difficult. | ||
| And people don't want to think about what should happen to all of their tax dollars that is not going to fixing roads and fixing schools and doing all of the things that people need in order to further their own lives and their children's lives. | ||
| So Moore wrote that the state has launched several commissions and study groups to examine the legacy of slavery in our state over the last 25 years, saying that we are grateful for the Marylanders who have contributed their expertise to the state. | ||
| So that's a ton of money that's gone into commissions to figure it out. | ||
| So that money wasn't even spent on reparations. | ||
| It was just spent on studies about reparations. | ||
| So you can imagine that the people that... | ||
| The reparations committees were brought together to figure out how to help, didn't even get any help from those committees. | ||
| So that's ridiculous. | ||
| And Wes Moore, I think, did the right thing in vetoing that bill. | ||
| And you can see that he published that, his letter on that as well. | ||
| Black faith leaders supported Moore's veto, echoing his sentiment that there have been enough studies and now is the time to take action. | ||
| While important work went into this legislation, now is not the time for another study. | ||
| So I don't think that means that they're going to issue reparations. | ||
| I think it means that they're going to work for all Marylanders, and I hope that... | ||
| I hope that's true. | ||
| Because dividing up tax dollars to help people based on race under the guise of writing past discrimination by creating current discrimination is, I think, not really constitutional. | ||
| I could be wrong on that, but I'm pretty sure that's right. | ||
| We also have another leader. | ||
| This is the mayor of Newark, Ross Baraka, who compared ICE to slaveholders during an April campaign stop. | ||
| This video was from the New York Post, and I'd like to just play that. | ||
| He gets big laughs. | ||
| So I think he also might have a career in comedy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, you can relate to that because we was undocumented too. | |
| Well, I don't want y'all to be confused. | ||
| Black folks, you was a lot of undocumented people. | ||
| And if they didn't even have your papers, you're going back to the plantation. | ||
| They had people chasing, catching you. | ||
| It wasn't for ice then. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We know what that means and what that feels like. | ||
| In fact, the 14th Amendment exists because you were being chased. | ||
| Because you were undocumented. | ||
| Because your citizenship was in question. | ||
| And I wanted to take a look a little closer at Ross Baraka. | ||
| He was arrested by, let's see, when was he arrested? | ||
| May 9th. | ||
| He was out there at Delaney Hall in Newark protesting the ICE facility that's holding illegal immigrants. | ||
| He was one of, I think, four lawmakers who were out there. | ||
| You also had Reps LaMonica McIver. | ||
| Bonnie Watson Coleman and Rob Menendez. | ||
| Monica McIver. | ||
| Is, of course, facing felony charges for her actions. | ||
| Alina Habba, the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, said that she was basically assaulting ICE officers. | ||
| There's body cam footage that backs it up. | ||
| What's really funny in that body cam footage is that McIver is wearing a red blazer, and she's the only one not in earth tones. | ||
| So, like, no matter what the angle of the body cam, it's super easy to spot her in the crowd. | ||
| You can see her arms going. | ||
| You can see all of it. | ||
| Because everyone else is wearing like army green and she's out there dressed like a poppy. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| You know, you want to spark a color. | ||
| But it's easy to see her out there on the video. | ||
| So this video of... | ||
| Mayor Ross Baraka was an exclusive to the New York Post, and he was out there at a campaign stop. | ||
| He's running for governor of New Jersey, and apparently his campaign is not doing amazing. | ||
| But I thought this was interesting in part because of what he said. | ||
| Now, first of all, is ICE comparable to slave catchers under what was it, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Totally different circumstance. | ||
| The 14th Amendment was designed to make sure that the children of enslaved people actually had rights to full citizenship, which obviously, like, they should. | ||
| They should never have been enslaved people. | ||
| Obviously, we all know that. | ||
| But anyways, so what you have here is Baraka. | ||
| I think that's a bit of a stretch because that's, you know, that's just where birthright citizenship is in the Constitution. | ||
| But a funny thing about Ras Baraka that I think you probably don't know is that his father was Amiri Baraka, who was a famed... | ||
| Black nationalist, poet, and dramatist who won an Obie for his play Dutchman that premiered off-Broadway, I think, at the Cherry Lane in 1964. | ||
| And Amiri Baraka, who was born Leroy Jones, had actually married this woman, Hedy Cohen, this white lady from Queens, white Jewish lady from Queens. | ||
| And after the assassination of Malcolm X, Leroy Jones changed his name to Amir Baraka, decided it was no longer cool to be married to a white Jewish lady, abandoned her and their two kids in Newark, New Jersey, meaning she had to give up her whole career. | ||
| She was also, of course, like a writer and, you know, very beatnik and whatever else was going on at the time. | ||
| She ended up becoming an education activist. | ||
| In Jersey, just to make sure that her kid's two daughters got a proper education. | ||
| Meanwhile, Amiri Baraka took off for Harlem, married a woman named Sylvia Robinson, who changed her name to Amina Baraka, and then was the co-founder of Sugarhill Records. | ||
| And then Ross Baraka was featured on Lauren Hill's The Miseducation of Lauren Hill in 1998. | ||
| So he's super oppressed. | ||
| Super oppressed. | ||
| He's actually just a... | ||
| Far-left culture Nepo baby. | ||
| And that's probably why he's got such good chops for the comic timing. | ||
| Grew up in that whole scene. | ||
| I think that's fascinating because he grew up with this oppressor, victim, morality, spoon-fed to him his whole life. | ||
| And here he is continuing with that. | ||
| He probably never even... | ||
| He probably never even questioned it. | ||
| Yesterday, Donald Trump, amid everything with Joe Biden, came out and defended what he called the cognitively impaired Joe Biden, accusing Democrats of taking advantage of him and the auto pen, which is really important because, of course, Donald Trump is questioning the pardons that Biden's team signed with this auto pen. | ||
| So an auto pen... | ||
| An auto pen is like a machine where you put in a card that has a signature on it, and then an actual pen in the machine will sign a paper with that signature on it. | ||
| So whoever has the card, whoever has the card has the keys to the kingdom. | ||
| And we can just take a look at what Trump said. | ||
| Let's open this up. | ||
| This is, of course, more reporting from the Postmillennial. | ||
| Your favorite publication and mine. | ||
| Donald Trump said Joe Biden was not for open borders. | ||
| He never talked about open borders where criminals of all kinds, shapes and sizes can flow into our country at will. | ||
| Trump is defending another president. | ||
| There aren't that many presidents left. | ||
| What do you got? | ||
| You got Clinton, Bush. | ||
| Obama, Trump, and Biden. | ||
| That's pretty much it, right? | ||
| Because Carter recently passed. | ||
| He said that it wasn't his idea, it wasn't Biden's idea to open the border and almost destroy the country and cost us billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars to get criminals out of our country and go through the process we're going in now. | ||
| It was the people that knew he was cognitively impaired and that took over the auto pen. | ||
| They stole the presidency of the United States and put us in great danger. | ||
| This is treason at the highest level, Trump alleges. | ||
| They did it to destroy our country. | ||
| The Joe Biden that everybody knew would never allow drug dealers, gang members, and the mentally insane to come into our country totally unchecked and unvetted. | ||
| And that probably makes sense because Joe Biden was a big proponent of, you know, like locking up black drug dealers, right? | ||
| Am I remembering that correctly? | ||
| That was before I really paid a lot of attention to politics, but I'm pretty sure that happened. | ||
| I wonder why Trump is defending the president, the former president. | ||
| I think part of why he's doing that is that he does respect the office of the presidency, and I don't think he likes to see one of his very, very elite, small group of men. | ||
| Also, we saw that Joe Biden, after the cancer diagnosis, he hasn't talked to anybody. | ||
| He's been basically like hiding out, and a lot of his friends in Congress are wondering where he is and are sending him private notes, apparently. | ||
| Meanwhile, you have Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson doing the whole circuit for their new original sin book and going all in on bashing Biden and bashing the Democrats because that's kind of where the money is now. | ||
| So that's what they're here for. | ||
| Oh, this was really interesting yesterday. | ||
| This was a little clip. | ||
| Joe Rogan apparently is now attending church, says Christian commentator Wesley Hough. | ||
| Joe Rogan has openly questioned the universe, as have so many of us. | ||
| And what's particularly notable about this moment where Hough said on a different podcast that Joe Rogan is attending church, Is that finally the numbers on church attendance are not in decline, right? | ||
| We saw declining church numbers for decades and decades, and now that number is starting to reverse. | ||
| And one thing I was talking to some of my friends about over the weekend, Shane Cashman, who I was talking to this weekend, we were talking about how the people who are going to church now, it's not like they're being forced to go to church. | ||
| There's no social stigma. | ||
| In fact, in some places, it's like the reverse. | ||
| It's like a social stigma for going to church. | ||
| So reversing that trend, especially for someone who has the most popular podcast in the world, maybe. | ||
| I don't know if you guys saw those reports the other day, but it was a very popular YouTube channel, which everyone knows, obviously. | ||
| I mean, that's obvious. | ||
| But anyway. | ||
| I thought it was interesting because this is a very influential person. | ||
| A very influential person to people of so many different demographics under 50. And those are the people that are looking for meaning. | ||
| Those are the people who are saying, hey, everything that you sold me is trash and it's not working anymore. | ||
| You tell me to follow my passion, but that just ends me up in somewhere I can't pay any of my bills, which is hard enough to do anyway. | ||
| Follow your passion ends up with no kids and no family. | ||
| And then you hit your 50s and you're like, what happened? | ||
| Why don't I have anyone to love and talk to? | ||
| And that's a really sad situation. | ||
| So I think going to church... | ||
| Can help with that for all demographics, including young people, where you can find meaning and you can find community and you can find people of like mind who share moral values, which are in a lot of ways the key to living a life that, you know, living a life where you don't feel like you're always just the butt of some mean universal joke. | ||
| Faith makes a real difference. | ||
| So if that's true, what Wesley Huff said, I think that's great. | ||
| And, you know, I applaud Joe Rogan for doing that. | ||
| And I recommend church to everybody, as you probably know. | ||
| And here's one of the reasons why I recommend church to everybody. | ||
| Because our culture is giving us this. | ||
| Kim Kardashian has now come out with not just a nipple bra, but a nipple bra with piercings, you guys. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Like, why do this? | ||
| This is from page 6, the New York Post. | ||
| Following the success of her viral Skims Ultimate Nipple Bra, the entrepreneur is introducing a version with faux piercings, which will be available for purchase. | ||
| So this is a bra that not only has the nipples poking out, but a piercing through the nipples, just like Governor Andrew Cuomo. | ||
| So if you want to look like Governor Andrew Cuomo when you're wearing your bra out there, ladies, Then by all means, this is the bra for you. | ||
| But I would suggest that perhaps this is not really the greatest fashion statement of all time. | ||
| And also it costs $74. | ||
| So, you know, Skim said, it's our sexiest bra gets even hotter with faux nipple piercing design so you can get the ooh without the ouch. | ||
| It's fake, though. | ||
| And so much of what we're being sold is just fake stuff. | ||
| Fake lips, fake nose, fake cheeks, fake butt, fake hair, and fake boobs for sure. | ||
| But now, fake pierced boobs. | ||
| So don't put this on the list for your wives and girlfriends. | ||
| Don't do that. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| Oh, that's Wes Moore's letter. | ||
| Anyway, here's Wes Warren's letter. | ||
| You could look at that real quick. | ||
| What else do we have? | ||
| Oh yeah, this is funny. | ||
| I just thought we could get some funny stuff in here this morning. | ||
| I was having a rough morning and I just wanted a few laughs. | ||
| So Sean Combs, it turns out, took drugs every day. | ||
| Not surprising there. | ||
| But he also had Obama-shaped ecstasy pills. | ||
| Drugs come in all shapes and sizes. | ||
| The little bags they come in have all different patterns. | ||
| But I thought it was pretty funny that he had Obama-shaped ecstasy pills, and I wondered what that conversation might have been like. | ||
| There were various pills, but one was in the form of a former president's face, Combs' one-time personal assistant David James said in Manhattan federal court. | ||
| Of the type of ecstasy pills he saw his boss take. | ||
| I can't imagine taking ecstasy pills every day and actually getting anything done. | ||
| Well, I guess all he really had to get done were these freak-off parties and that probably was effective for that. | ||
| But in terms of like running a company or making good art, that's a terrible plan. | ||
| And, you know, I think that's a terrible plan. | ||
| But he also took... | ||
| Between 20 to 30 pill bottles, he kept 20 to 30 pill bottles in his bag, including Percocet, Ecstasy, Viagra, weight loss, and sperm count pills. | ||
| This was testified to Advil, Tylenol, water pills, all kinds of stuff. | ||
| That just is so crazy. | ||
| Apparently, Combs had a drug dealer named One Stop, which I guess that's about right. | ||
| That'd be One Stop shopping for sure. | ||
| So, pretty bizarre. | ||
| This is a fun one. | ||
| And then I think we have a guest. | ||
| Who's our guest? | ||
| Yes, we have Representative Sutzman coming up from the Freedom Caucus. | ||
| He is a representative from Missouri. | ||
| And he's going to talk to us about what's going on with this big, beautiful bill. | ||
| But in the meantime, I just wanted to play this for you because listen to the... | ||
| The jumping jacks going on in this woman's brain to make her assessment work. | ||
| This is a clip from Scarlett Johnson, who got it from Clown World. | ||
| And Scarlett Johnson is with Moms for Liberty. | ||
| She's a great lady. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| What's this sound on? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| And I'm a parent of two District 203 students, one at Lincoln and one at Central. | ||
| Today, I speak to you in support of transgendered students and transgendered student-athletes. | ||
| I am proud to live in a state that protects a student's right to participate in sports that align with their gender identity. | ||
| I thank you for supporting and following this law. | ||
| Other parties will tell you that they believe this is a disservice to our cisgendered students and especially our female athletes. | ||
| As the parent of two students in the district and as a woman... | ||
| I reject the notion that allowing transgendered athletes to participate in sports is detrimental to our students. | ||
| Losing a race is disappointing. | ||
| It is okay for our students to experience disappointment. | ||
| We cannot protect our children from all the disappointments in life, but we can encourage them to develop resilience. | ||
| This growth mindset will benefit them in numerous situations. | ||
| Can you believe that? | ||
| She's actually saying that it's good to lose in a totally unfair competition because it gives you life skills. | ||
| Of course, these girls are going to lose anyway. | ||
| They're going to lose to other girls. | ||
| And I think that it makes a lot more sense for the young women who are playing sports here to lose to other girls rather than to lose to a bunch of boys who are just stronger and all the rest of it. | ||
| What I'm really interested to know is what is the DOE doing about all of this? | ||
| This stuff is still going on despite the executive order about Title IX. | ||
| Are they getting involved here? | ||
| We have had boys winning sports competitions just recently, like the past couple months since Trump took office and even after his executive order, all of it. | ||
| Maine, California, Washington, Oregon, I think. | ||
| These boys are showing up. | ||
| People are lying to them. | ||
| And it's a disservice to these boys as well. | ||
| I mean, if your son comes to you and says, actually, I'm a girl and I'm 12 years old, don't lie to him and tell him that that delusion is accurate. | ||
| It is our job to cure our children of these weird delusions. | ||
| We don't encourage them to be puppy dogs or steamrollers or anything else. | ||
| And we certainly should not encourage them to be the opposite sex because it's really just, it's just really totally a lie. | ||
| What else do we have going on? | ||
| Oh, this is interesting. | ||
| Oh, we're going to go to our guest. | ||
| Well, okay, we're going to go to our guest. | ||
| We're going to talk about the Big Beautiful Bill. | ||
| Are we all set? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So the Big Beautiful Bill, they've been in meeting all night, so we can ask about that. | ||
| We can ask what's going on with the Freedom Caucus and some of the GOP holdouts. | ||
| What is it that they are looking for? | ||
| Hello, Representative. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| Is this Libby? | ||
| It is. | ||
| Thank you so much for joining us today. | ||
| You're welcome. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Sure thing. | ||
| So you're with the Freedom Caucus, and you guys have been working on getting this bill up to snuff. | ||
| Can you tell us what some of your concerns are with the bill? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, so I am one of the Freedom Caucus members that did vote for it in committee. | ||
| Obviously, the priority for the president, and it's also one that has a lot of good things in it. | ||
| And as I was reading through the bill, there's a lot of good pieces, but there's still some parts that we're concerned about on the spending side. | ||
| And so the Freedom Caucus leadership has been negotiating with the Speaker. | ||
| And the White House to try to, you know, increase the savings. | ||
| Instead of having the savings start in years five through ten, actually have the savings start year one. | ||
| And so, of course, the president was here yesterday, and, you know, we all felt like that the president, you know, wants the same thing. | ||
| And so there's still just some last-minute negotiations that they're working through. | ||
| Why would the savings not start in year one? | ||
| I mean, this is something that we see with so many bills, right? | ||
| And just as an editor and as a consumer of news, I often find myself opening up these thousand-page bills. | ||
| And even though I can read English perfectly well, I find myself a little bit lost. | ||
| So why, in this case, are so many of the provisions pushed off for a few years? | ||
| That's what we're asking, because we don't understand it either. | ||
| And I don't believe that that's what the White House wants, the fact that we're $36 trillion of debt. | ||
| If they're going to push those cuts back, let's say 5 to 10 years, we're going to be paying interest on the debt up until that point. | ||
| We're not going to get any benefit from it. | ||
| And this is some of the things that we all, you know, the president campaigned on, we campaigned on, eliminating all of the Green New Deal stuff, all of the IRA, you know, whether it's credits for green energy, EV mandates, pieces like that, get rid of it. | ||
| And also, just by... | ||
| Bringing those cuts forward immediately, it reduces our debt and deficits much quicker. | ||
| I don't know exactly who put that idea in to push it back out that far. | ||
| It meets all the criteria of our 10-year window that we worked in, but we need to operate in year one for cuts, not in year six or seven. | ||
| If it stays that way and it is year six or seven, is there a chance that whoever is heading up the next administration, if that were a Democrat administration, would they be able to reverse some of these things? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That's what we're concerned about. | ||
| Just as you guys are reversing some of the stuff from the previous administration now. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| No, absolutely. | ||
| That's what we're concerned about. | ||
| And I would think that President Trump and all of us, all the Republicans, should want credit for eliminating it immediately. | ||
| I mean, when Democrats are in charge and they enact the EV mandate, it happens within a year or two. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't take long. | ||
| I mean, they move very quickly. | ||
| And we should do the same thing to repeal it. | ||
| We don't want these things to start growing legs and actually... | ||
| You know, become big programs that don't go anywhere and we can never get rid of them. | ||
| And I think the American people elected President Trump for action today and not waiting for until after his administration is gone. | ||
| So that's there's only a couple of people that are really hung up on that. | ||
| You know, we have members from New York, California, New Jersey that are also pushing for larger deductions for their constituents and those expensive tax states on what they call the SALT provision. | ||
| I completely oppose the concept. | ||
| It's been around for several years now. | ||
| They're trying to increase that number. | ||
| You know, we should not be rewarding states like New York for their irresponsible spending. | ||
| You know, unfortunately, taxpayers there. | ||
| Yeah, I actually moved from New York City to West Virginia a couple of years ago, and I have been stunned by my tax bill alone. | ||
| It's been unbelievable, an unbelievable change. | ||
| What's the situation with the SALT deduction? | ||
| This is something that I think a lot of people hear about, and we don't always know exactly what it means. | ||
| It's more stuff that representatives say, and we're all like, what's just even going on? | ||
| Why did this come about? | ||
| Was this to help Republican members of Congress in these blue states? | ||
| Why is this something that's going on? | ||
| It is. | ||
| I mean, you know, some of the New York members and New Jersey members and California members are pushing for it. | ||
| They're fighting for their constituents. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| You know, they want their constituents to pay less in taxes, but it should not be at the expense of other Americans. | ||
| In fact, that was what President Trump's message was to us as a conference yesterday when he came down to the Capitol. | ||
| He said, you know, drop it. | ||
| Drop the salt provisions. | ||
| He's like, there's no reason. | ||
| That, you know, states like Indiana or other conservative states should be subsidizing states like New York or California or New Jersey because they're high-tax states. | ||
| Let's put the blame where it belongs rather than actually bailing them out. | ||
| Again, I know they're looking out for their voters and their taxpayers, but again, at some point, and I believe this strongly, that the states like New York, California... | ||
| And Illinois are ruining this country at the federal government level. | ||
| Interestingly enough, and this is another place we need to make changes, is in our health care costs. | ||
| The state of California, their Medicaid reimbursement rates is about $160 billion a year. | ||
| That's larger than the state of Florida's entire state budget. | ||
| And so that's the problem here is we have... | ||
| States like California and New York that are just simply taking more than they're actually giving. | ||
| And it's got to stop because it's breaking the bank. | ||
| California's Governor Gavin Newsom recently came out and was talking about the California budget and said there was a huge deficit that was like since Trump took office. | ||
| And most of it, I think, is because of what they have, Medi-Cal payments. | ||
| A lot of what I've heard, I have a very lefty mom, and a lot of what I've heard about this. | ||
| The big, beautiful bill from people on the left are concerned about Medicare. | ||
| So I'd love to just go through some of that. | ||
| The bill has work provisions for people who are capable of working. | ||
| It has co-pays for people who are above the poverty line, which I guess would bring everybody in line with everybody else who pays. | ||
| I mean, I pay co-pays. | ||
| And then what are some of the cuts to Medicaid and how do those work? | ||
| Well, one of them that I strongly support and would actually like to see increased is that if you're going to use Medicaid to service illegals in health care, that there's a penalty. | ||
| First of all, it shouldn't happen at all. | ||
| But states like California do it. | ||
| And so they get less money from Medicaid. | ||
| Libby, I tell you, health care in this country is upside down, and this is the problem that we need to address. | ||
| It's not going to happen in this bill, and I think, you know, what we all know is that we've got to get the economy back on track. | ||
| Let's make sure the tax cuts are permanent. | ||
| Let's make sure that, you know, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime. | ||
| The one that I like a lot is the Made in America car tax credit. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| That's so fun. | ||
| Who doesn't want a new car without having to be totally burdened with the interest on the car loans? | ||
| Because those are expensive loans, too. | ||
| I mean, those get up there. | ||
| They are, especially with interest rates higher right now. | ||
| That's a huge benefit to support Americans, but also to support American manufacturing. | ||
| So there are some provisions already to try to rein in the spending. | ||
| On Medicaid. | ||
| And this has happened over the past decade. | ||
| We were all told by the Democrats back when Obamacare passed that Obamacare was going to fix our health care system. | ||
| It's going to lower costs. | ||
| It hasn't. | ||
| And now, as many of us said back then, the Democrats are trying to shove Americans all into this one health care plan for all. | ||
| What they call free. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| It's one of the most expensive. | ||
| They want Medicaid for all, and that's what's happening. | ||
| People in my district can't afford private insurance. | ||
| They may work for a company that doesn't offer insurance, so they're generally looking for what is affordable, and because of the subsidies from the federal government to the states, Medicaid becomes the affordable choice, along with a MediShare program, which I highly encourage. | ||
| But Medicaid is breaking the bank. | ||
| And so we're going to have to tackle health care costs. | ||
| One of the things that President Trump did do just recently is that he started putting price caps on pharmaceuticals. | ||
| I'm a free market guy, but unfortunately what's happened over time is that government is taking over. | ||
| The industry of health care. | ||
| And I think that price caps are something that need to be discussed because that's the only way we're going to rein in the cost that the federal government's paying. | ||
| And the debt and deficit are just spiraling out of control. | ||
| Yeah, I thought that was really essential as well, especially because Americans are essentially footing the bill for all of the R&D, for all of the drugs in the whole world. | ||
| There's no reason that shouldn't be shared. | ||
| I had another question for you. | ||
| There was another thing in the bill that I think is really interesting, and it's this golden dome, which is sort of like Israel's iron dome. | ||
| It's a self-defense thing. | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| What does that look like? | ||
| In terms of actual, you know, what would it look like in practice and what does it mean for American jobs in that whole sector? | ||
| Yeah, I think this is an exciting program. | ||
| Again, you know, as I said, there's so many good things in the bill already and, you know, defunding Planned Parenthood is one of them, stopping funding. | ||
| Transgender surgeries, things like that. | ||
| But this is one of our defense pieces that are in the bill. | ||
| And President Trump has talked about the Golden Dome for a while now. | ||
| And as you mentioned, it's similar to the idea of the Iron Dome that Israel has. | ||
| And as soon as a rocket is launched into Israel, a defense rocket is launched back in response to that rocket and knocks it out of the... | ||
| And so in this case, and we actually build the satellites that will be used for the Golden Dome in Fort Wayne, Indiana. | ||
| So I toured the facility a couple of weeks ago. | ||
| It's exciting because you have technology and manufacturing coming together to support our national defense. | ||
| But China is building up an incredible arsenal. | ||
| We have to be able to defend America and our allies. | ||
| And the fact that we can keep an eye on... | ||
| You know, the world from space, we can watch China and make sure that they're not launching a missile at anybody that, you know, we wouldn't want. | ||
| And, of course, then we could launch a defensive missile back at that and knock that missile out of the sky. | ||
| So that's why China doesn't like it. | ||
| I think it's brilliant. | ||
| And the fact that we have that sort of technology and capability is going to serve our country in the long term. | ||
| Somebody asked, well, is the... | ||
| You know, the price tag of about $150 billion worth it over 20 years to build the Golden Dome system. | ||
| And I tell people, I said, look, you know, I was just in Syria a couple of weeks ago and I saw how much destruction was done by Bashir al-Assad on his own people from just launching rockets into communities. | ||
| And it was probably anywhere between a half a trillion to a trillion dollars worth of damage. | ||
| If we build a system that defends the United States and keeps a missile from landing in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or Washington, D.C., the amount of money that we would protect... | ||
| I think it's worth it. | ||
| The Chinese are giving us a reason to because of their buildup. | ||
| And President Trump's doing the right thing by keeping America first and creating those jobs right here at home and making sure the country's safe. | ||
| What does the situation look like on the ground in Syria? | ||
| Bashar al-Assad was deposed. | ||
| He was replaced with someone who has a history of being involved with, I don't know if it's the Islamic State or the Islamic Brotherhood or some... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Al-Qaeda. | |
| Yeah, Al-Qaeda. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| Al-Qaeda terrorist organization. | ||
| And now we've lifted sanctions on Syria. | ||
| What does that mean for Syria and for the region? | ||
| And is his involvement with terrorism something that is going to be a problem in a region that's already plagued with that? | ||
| Yeah, well, he's 42 years old. | ||
| He is young, but he does have a checkered past of being involved in terrorist organizations. | ||
| Best we can tell from... | ||
| Our research is he was predominantly focused on al-Assad. | ||
| He was born in Damascus, raised in a middle-class family, and he was also focused on ISIS. | ||
| He definitely was part of terrorist organizations that Americans fought against, and they fought against us. | ||
| My feeling after visiting with him for about an hour and 15 minutes in Damascus is that we need to give the... | ||
| We need to give him a chance. | ||
| We need to give the Syrian people a chance. | ||
| But at any point, he makes a mistake. | ||
| Sanctions are back on. | ||
| Penalties are back on. | ||
| And I told him that we want to see the Syrian people. | ||
| Have an opportunity to rebuild their country after what Assad did to them. | ||
| You know, Assad was a monster. | ||
| And the fact that he killed his own people to maybe up to about a million people, millions of people fled Syria and went to other countries. | ||
| The history there is incredible. | ||
| You know, it's a holy city. | ||
| It's a biblical city. | ||
| The opportunities that are there and the potential that's there. | ||
| Is enormous if President al-Shara takes advantage of that. | ||
| And I asked him, you know, what would his vision be of a relationship be like with Israel? | ||
| Of course, you know, our great ally in the Middle East. | ||
| And he said that he was actually open to the Abraham Accords. | ||
| That would be huge. | ||
| Yes, he did. | ||
| That's really surprising. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, Trump was also suggesting that Saudi Arabia get involved in those accords. | ||
| Do you think that—I mean, I was a big proponent of the Abraham Accords during Trump's first term because it really did bring some stability to that region, which is always so tumultuous, you know, for like, I don't know how many thousands of years it's always been a little tumultuous, but in our lifetime. | ||
| What do you think is the hope—is there a hope for— Peace in that area. | ||
| I mean, it's like Israel is, you know, enemies with everybody is enemies with Israel. | ||
| It's a sort of terrifying situation to be a nation right there. | ||
| What is that looking like? | ||
| Do you think that there will be, you know, what's the hope for peace there? | ||
| I think there is. | ||
| I think there really is a genuine opportunity for peace. | ||
| You know, one of the things that I think is good is that the Saudis, the Qataris, UAE, they're already a part of the Abraham Accords. | ||
| They've been really, you know, kind of putting their Their arm around Syria and saying, you know, look, we want to help. | ||
| You know, going back to President Trump and his Trump doctrine, I believe, is peace through strength and prosperity. | ||
| And I've got to believe that, and I heard this a lot when I was in Syria, that people are so tired of war. | ||
| They want to be able to build their country back. | ||
| And President al-Shara told me, he's like, he understands. | ||
| The important location that Syria is to the world, where it's the intersection between the East and the West. | ||
| He talked about trade. | ||
| He talked about commerce. | ||
| He talked about tourism. | ||
| I mentioned to him, I said, you know, Christians from around the world would love to go visit Jerusalem and Syria, you know, to see the road that Saul walked on as he was going to Damascus. | ||
| I guess you've been there. | ||
| I've never been there. | ||
| That sounds amazing. | ||
| I would love to see that. | ||
| I got to walk on that road, and it was an incredible moment, just being able to walk where Paul walked. | ||
| So he seems to be grasping all that and is open to that. | ||
| He did tell us that he had an offer from the Russians already to come in and support him and his government, but he didn't accept it. | ||
| He wanted to talk to the West. | ||
| He wanted to talk to President Trump, and he had that opportunity recently. | ||
| So I'm very hopeful. | ||
| Well, that's so great to hear. | ||
| Thank you so much, Congressman, for joining us today. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| You're welcome. | ||
| Thanks, Lydia. | ||
| Great to be with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks. | |
| Okay. | ||
| That was awesome. | ||
| I was really interested. | ||
| I love the concept of touching history. | ||
| You know, I was in Greece several years ago and I got to, um, I got to walk the, uh, through the Agora and I just thought, oh my God, Sophocles was here. | ||
| Like, that's so cool. | ||
| I really want to thank you guys for joining me today and I wanted to let you know also About what we have going on at the Postmillennial. | ||
| But first, I did want to hit this story from the New York Post about Biden officials knowing about potential COVID-19 vaccine risks and taking steps to downplay them, according to a new Senate report. | ||
| This is another one of those situations where everyone was called a conspiracy theorist and full of it and liars and grifters and everything else. | ||
| And then it's like, oh, except... | ||
| Except you guys were right, but we're not going to give you any credit, and we're still going to make sure that you don't get hired back at the jobs you were fired from, and that your reputations are still destroyed. | ||
| So top federal health officials actively took steps to delay warning the public for months in 2021 about the potential risks of heart-related complications from receiving. | ||
| mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, a scathing interim report from Senator Ron Johnson's office alleges the report says even though CDC and FDA officials were well aware of the risks of myocarditis, Following COVID-19 vaccination, the Biden administration opted to withhold, issuing a formal warning to the public for months about the safety concerns jeopardizing the health of young Americans. | ||
| I think we all remember reports of young men suddenly dying on the field as they're perfectly healthy and performing sports activities. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, sports activities, that is what I said. | |
| Going out there and just dying from these heart problems. | ||
| It was so terrifying to be a mom to be told by the city of New York at the time that I had to vaccinate. | ||
| My child, knowing that there was a good chance that it was not the right thing to do, and I remember distinctly being in Brooklyn, and I wasn't allowed to take him to restaurants. | ||
| We weren't allowed to go out anywhere in public where you had to show your vaccine card, because yes, you had to show your vaccine card, which is ludicrous, of course, and I railed against that at the time to absolutely no avail whatsoever. | ||
| But we just kept driving to Jersey and going to Dave& Buster's at the mall, because... | ||
| I wasn't going to do this to him. | ||
| And it was really terrifying to see that happen. | ||
| And now that this report is out, I wonder if there's going to be any kind of admission of guilt from the Democrats who continued to push this vaccine. | ||
| You remember? | ||
| I mean, you had Fauci being like, oh, just get 200 vaccine shots. | ||
| That's going to be amazing for you all. | ||
| So I wonder if this is... | ||
| If this is really going to make any difference or if this is just going to be another case where a bunch of people were proved right after they lost their jobs for telling the truth or not taking the vaccine, which a lot of people did. | ||
| A lot of public servants, a lot of first responders lost their jobs because they refused to take the vaccine. | ||
| I wonder how that's going to go down. | ||
| By mid-April of, I think, what was it, 2021, a Defense Department contractor involved with the Pentagon's work on immunization delivered a presentation on the COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Technical Working Group that concluded there is a high likelihood that cardiac symptoms following COVID-19 vaccination represent a hypersensitivity eosinophilic myocarditis. | ||
| By that time, there had been more than 158 cases of myocarditis, pericarditis, and myopericarditis reported on the VAERS system, which also became a problem. | ||
| If you recall, even just citing the VAERS statistics on vaccine injury was an issue. | ||
| I think Marjorie Taylor Greene got called out for that and was told you're not allowed to. | ||
| Did she get banned on Twitter or something like that? | ||
| Maybe she got, I think she got suppressed on Twitter for that. | ||
| And so did so many other people who were simply writing about what they saw on this self-reporting site and were told that that was, you know, not the thing to do. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, I think the CDC is no longer pushing these vaccines and that's a bonus for everyone. | ||
| So I want you guys to check out the Postmillennial. | ||
| ThePostMillennial.com, HumanEvents.com, and you can sign up for my newsletter, which is, you can go to ThePostMillennial.com slash Libby to sign up for that, and I'm writing stuff every day. | ||
| This morning, actually, my prep for this show was very similar to my prep for the newsletter, and it covered a lot of the same things. | ||
| Another thing to look out for, and we've been on air, so I have not seen it, is that Cyril Ramaphosa, was in the White House today talking to President Trump, and I have been very curious to see what's going on there. | ||
| So as soon as I get off air, I am going to jump over to the White House Twitter feed and see what's going on there, remembering the fireworks that happened between J.D. Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Trump when he was in the White House. | ||
| I'm very interested to see how Ramaphosa defends his comments that the Afrikaners who came here as refugees were cowards for leaving. | ||
| And, you know, I wonder, can we just go to that? | ||
| I'm just going to ask real quick if we can. | ||
| Can we just take a look and see what happened? | ||
| Oh, I typed on the wrong thing. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| White House. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| They're currently live. | ||
| I wonder if they're talking right now. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's see. | |
| Nice to see you. | ||
| Thank you very much for having me. | ||
| Very cordial, of course. | ||
| Trump is always the gentleman. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's one of the great things about him. | |
| And are they live? | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Check it out. | ||
| Here they are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
because they feel they're going to be dead very soon. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
| I was going to tell you, if I could just ask you a question. | ||
| This is the key thing today, I think, in the news. | ||
| If they flee, do you feel that maybe the economy could collapse? | ||
| You may not have a gap to fill in those people that need to replace those farmers. | ||
| You know, I'd like my minister of agriculture, who is white, who comes from What is all this stuff about leaders just focusing on the race of their staffers? | ||
| Like, just have good staffers. | ||
| To address this very issue, including the question that you just raised. | ||
| John? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you very much, Mr. President. | |
| Let's hear what he has to say. | ||
| About the collapse of the South African economy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think anyone wants to candy coat that. | |
| And it requires a lot of effort to get on top of it. | ||
| It's going to require more policing resources. | ||
| It's going to require different strategies. | ||
| Oh, Elon Musk is over there, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But certainly the majority of South Africa's commercial and smallholder farmers really do want to stay in South Africa and make it work. | |
| And I've just come from the largest agricultural show in the Southern Hemisphere with organized agriculture and farmers, and the majority of them want to stay. | ||
| But they, too, there have a memorial to those who've died. | ||
| As a result of farm attacks. | ||
| And as the Minister of Agriculture, it is something that I'm particularly exercised with my colleagues at police and my colleagues in the justice cluster to stop making farm attacks and stock theft a priority crime. | ||
| So now they're going to make it a priority to stop the farm attacks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Good timing, guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I also want to just say this, that the two individuals that are in the video... | |
| Okay, we're going to pause this, but I'm going to keep watching that off air, and we are going to throw to Russell Brand. | ||
| Thank you so much for joining me today. |
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