← The Ben Shapiro Show
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2230 - 2 MUSK 2 FURIOUS: Trump vs. Musk, Redux
01:06:41
President Trump and Elon Musk go to war – again – as the Big Beautiful Bill rests on a razor’s edge; Zohran Mamdani’s ascension is a sign of how much mainstream Democrats now dislike America; and we talk about the risk of major economic dislocation as AI takes hold. Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/3WDjgHE Ep.2230 - - - Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings - - - DailyWire+: Right now, when you join DailyWire+ for a year, we’ll cover half of it. Join now at https://dailywireplus.com and use code FREEDOM. My new book, “Lions and Scavengers,” drops September 2nd—pre-order today at https://dailywire.com/benshapiro Get your Ben Shapiro merch here: https://bit.ly/3TAu2cw - - - Today's Sponsors: Birch Gold - Text BEN to 989898 for your free information kit. Tax Network USA - For a complimentary consultation, call today at 1 (800) 958-1000 or visit their website at https://TNUSA.com/SHAPIRO Plus you’ll get 10% off all services through ...
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- [00:00]
Ben Shapiro
Get some more on this in a moment. First, you're great at protecting your personal information. You might use things like two factor authentication, strong passwords, vpn. As much as you try to be in control of how your information is protected, there are lots of other places that also have that information. They might not be careful the way you are. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Members of my own team use it. Producer Phil and his wife use it. They feel more protected. You will too. Save up to 40% your very first year with promo code ben@lifelock.com terms apply. Alrighty, folks, a ton to get to on today's show. President Trump's big beautiful bill has passed the Senate, but now it goes back to the House. So what exactly happens next? Plus, a new poll shows a vast majority of Democrats are not proud of being American. What does that have to do with Zoran Mamzani? An awful lot, as it turns out. Plus, what are the economic problems we have to avoid in order to avoid a Zoran Mamdani like socialistic backlash? First, we're starting our Fourth of July celebration early with something big. Six months of Daily Wire plus absolutely free right now. When you join Free Year, we'll cover half the cost. That means ad free shows from the most trusted voices in conservative media, exclusive documentaries, hit movies, breaking news alerts, and the best investigative journalism out there all in one place. You're not just subscribing. You're joining millions who share your values and your fight. Don't wait. Get six months free right now at DailyWire+.com Alrighty, folks. So President Trump has a big victory in his cap. So we had announced earlier this week that the president of the United States was likely to get the Senate to vote for the big beautiful bill, some version of that. And they did, in fact pass a preliminary vote earlier this week. But they have now passed an actual big beautiful bill. One big, giant, beautiful bill. We'll discuss the variegated beauties of this bill in just a moment. But essentially what happened is that Republicans lost three votes on this bill. Those votes would be Rand Paul, Thom Tillis, and Susan Collins. Those are the three they dropped. And then J.D. vance came in and had to break the tie. Here's what that sounded like. The yeas are 50, the nays are 50. The Senate being evenly divided, the vice president votes in the affirmative. The bill, as amended, is passed according to the Wall street journal the Senate's 5150 action puts Republicans on the verge of locking in Trump's top legislative priorities. Extended tax cuts, new tax breaks, reductions in Medicaid spending and more money for defense and border and border enforcement. They're using their full but narrow control of Congress to pull money from safety net programs in the clean energy industry and redirect it to national security and payers wallets. And we will get to the clean energy of this, the AI aspects of this bill because there is a rift emerging in the Republican caucus between some of the tech bros and sort of the rest of the Trump coalition. Elon Musk and President Trump are at it again. Well, the Senate passed the measure with no votes to spare following a 215 to 214 nail biter in the House in May. Senate Majority Leader John Thune described the vote as an extraordinary day for our country and highlighted the border security funding and spending cuts. He said, we were very excited to be part of something that was going to make America stronger, safer and more prosperous. And it really starts with an agenda that President Trump laid out when he was running last year. Rand Paul, of course, opposed the legislation's $5 trillion debt limit. Tillison Collins objected to Medicaid funding changes that reduce coverage for some people in some states. Senator Lisa Murkowski was the person who they were able to convince to join with the Republican majority In this particular case. She was really on the fence. She pushed for changes that would basically let Alaska off the hook in terms of some of the Medicaid cuts that were to follow. And Republicans did make some last minute changes to the bill that helped to sway Murkowski, which included a delay in nutrition assistance cuts for states including Alaska that have a higher payment error rate, a move that Democrats say would encourage waste, fraud and abuse. They also doubled to $50 billion a rural health fund designed to mitigate the effects of the bill's Medicaid cuts. So again, every time you have a very narrowly passed major piece of legislation, at the very end some piece of pork gets shoveled at one of the senators who's on the fence. This goes all the way back to Obamacare, which was passed and rather in the dead of night with a bunch of giveaways to specific legislators in order to make sure that that happened, murkowski said. This is probably the most agonizing, difficult legislative 24 hour period I've encountered and I've been here quite a while and you all know I've got a few battle scars underneath I held my head up and made sure the people of Alaska are not forgotten in this. Well, now the focus is shifting back to the House. The Senate bill has already irritated a bunch of factions of Republicans in a chamber that they control. 222, 212 moderates are worried about some of those Medicaid cuts. And meanwhile, fiscal conservatives like Chip Roy of Texas are very upset about the fact that the bill gets rid of some of the cuts that were already supposed to be in there, including cuts to these sort of green energy subsidies. And again, this took forever. Senators trudged through more than 26 hours of motions and amendments starting mid morning Monday, going all the way beyond Tuesday's sunrise. And just past noon, Senate Republican leaders were altering the bill all the way up until the last minutes. And they finally again got Murkowski on board. So what exactly is in the latest version of the so called big beautiful bill? Well, the making permanent of the Trump tax cuts. And again, so much of what happened with this bill is rooted in, in an unbelievably stupid idea, which is that if you're going to assess the additional debt created by the bill, we have to assume that the tax cuts were going to expire. So called baseline budgeting. The idea was that since the tax cuts were set to sunset at a certain point, that we would simply assume that the tax expenditures coming into the government, the tax revenue to the government would automatically increase. And so if you maintain the tax rates at the same rate, that actually was increasing the deficit, which again is sort of a weird accounting trick, and that necessitated cuts in other areas in order to offset those supposed additions to the deficit. The projected cost of the continuation of the tax cuts, some $4 trillion. But again, that's a continu. It's not, it's not a new tax cut. It's a continuation of current tax rates preventing a reversal of the tax cuts. The state and local tax deduction, that provision would allow people to deduct up to $40,000 per year for five years from their federal employees income taxes. As part of the compromise with Senate Republicans, the cap would go back down to $10,000 per year after five years. Now, in reality, again, is it likely to sunset like that? Pretty unlikely. The bill also includes no tax on tips, overtime and car loans. It includes making permanent the annual child tax credit at a level of $2,200. House Republicans want to bump it to 2,500 bucks and then scale it back to $2,000 after 2028. And again, the, the child tax credit is essentially a giveaway to people who don't pay taxes in the first place, like the Earned Income Tax Credit. Very often you're giving a tax credit to people who don't pay taxes, so it's just a check. The bill would provide Customs and border patrol with $47 billion to build the ball and associated infrastructure like access roads, cameras, lights and sensors. It also includes $2 billion for Department of Homeland Security and about $30 billion for for ICE. The bill includes $25 billion for President Trump's Golden Dome missile defense system, another $30 billion for shipbuilding, $15 billion for nuclear deterrence. So where are the cuts coming from? Well, Republicans are adding a work requirement of 80 hours per month for able bodied adults under the age of 65. There are exceptions for parents with children under the age of 14. That's just reasonable. Forget about having to create cuts in order to offset the supposed deficit increase from the continuation of the tax rates. That should just be policy anyway. Of course there should be work requirements. You. You should be required to go look for a job so you're not just living on the taxpayer dole. The Senate goes further than the House did in restricting state levied fees on health care providers that are primarily used to fund Medicaid, especially in underserved communities. The federal government would not be on the hook to reimburse states, and that means states would have to presumably either lower their existing rates or come up with money themselves. That is slated to save some $930 billion. There are other aspects of waste, fraud and abuse that the Republicans are targeting in Medicaid that are supposed to save $170 billion. There are going to be work requirements for people who rely on food stamps. Again, these work requirements are fairly minimal. You're talking about people having to work 80 hours per month with exceptions for people with children under the age of 10. So these are very, very mild provisions. It seems to me the bare minimum of what morality requires. If you are receiving food stamps, that should be supplemental. Okay? Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs are supplemental. They should not be the main source of your nutrition. One of the more controversial cuts here has to do with the Clean Energy Tax credit. So the bill rolls back tax credits under the Inflation Reduction act that President Biden signed into law, including for clean vehicles and electricity. And that includes, according to NBC News, a last minute total repeal of federal subsidies to wind and solar industries unless those projects were placed in service before the end of 2027. An additional tax could be phased in depending on how much of those products are actually manufactured in China. There's also a tax incentive for coal production. So, of course, this means a lot of people who are on the sort of green energy side are very upset. They're saying, why are you subsidizing coal? But you're not subsidizing wind and all the rest of the. One of the reasons is because coal is still a more durable source of energy than wind at this point, because, again, wind is seasonal, it's very difficult to store. The battery power is not particularly good at this point. There's been. One of the problems is that the flex power capacity of the grid is dependent on permanent sources of energy like coal or gas, not like wind or solar. There's a bunch of funding for Space programs, including $10 billion for Mars mission Priorities. There's the defunding of Planned Parenthood. And of course, most controversially, when it comes to fiscal conservatives, the package includes a $5 trillion increase in the debt ceiling, which is more than the $4 trillion in the House passed package. And that's what Senator Rand Paul is opposing. Now, President Trump, for his part, he is actually, if he's critical of the bill in. In any specific way, he says he doesn't like the cuts. Right. The cuts are the thing that's dangerous. And again, this rings true in terms of the economic populism that President Trump pursues, which is a big spending version of conservatism, if it can be said to be conservative at all. I mean, it's a very large spending political version of Republicanism.
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Producer Phil
Are there parts of the bill or.
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Ben Shapiro
Amendments that you think cut too much?
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Elon Musk
We're gonna have to see the final version.
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Ron Johnson
Now.
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Elon Musk
I don't want to go too crazy with that. I don't like. I don't like cuts. There are certain things that have been cut, which is good. I think we're doing well. We're gonna have to see some very complicated stuff.
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Ben Shapiro
Now, again, is this thing gonna materialize before July 4th? That was President Trump's initial call. It is, of course, July 2nd. That means that they essentially have a day and a half to put together a reconciliation bill. President Trump has signaled his willingness to push this beyond July 4th if needs be. In all likelihood, this thing does get pushed probably beyond July 4, just given the constraints here. But it is true that some fiscal conservatives have shifted on this, most famously in the Senate, Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin. He says, listen, in the end, what is this about? In the end, it's what I always said it was. It's about stopping the tax Increases. It's easy to be a Democrat, spend more of your kids future, never be held accountable by the media. It's pretty hard what we're trying to do. And so this may take a little bit more time. Time. Well, deficit spending is a bipartisan affliction. You know that better than anyone. Earlier this month you were warning about this bill adding trillions to the national debt. You told ABC News, quote, I'm worried about our kids and grandkids. The fact that we're mortgaging their future, it's wrong, it's immoral. Is, is, is your, has your position changed? It's this bill. I mean this legislation is still going to add to the deficit. So, so Democrats, their only solution is increase taxes. We don't want to do that. That harms economic growth. We won't get the revenue. Who you ever look for? All Democrats do is spend. Okay, so again, in the end, what does this mean? It means that Republicans are likely to vote for it because the tax cuts must be enshrined permanently into law. But as I mentioned earlier on, there are some splits that are emerging inside the sort of coalition that President Trump has put together between Tech Bros. And the populist economists that he has in his own corner already. Coming up, Elon Musk. President Trump really going at it again. First, we are days away from what has been dubbed the Rio Reset, the greatest threat to the US dollar's global dominance in maybe 80 years. On July 6, Brics nations, Russia, China, India, Iran, many more are expected to unveil their plans to circumvent the American dollar, thus cratering its value. They've already been laying the groundwork as their central banks have been methodically divesting from the US Dollar and US Bonds in favor of gold. How can you protect your IRA or 401k from the fallout from this landmark shift? Diversify with gold from Birch Gold Group. Historically, gold has been a safe haven in times of high uncertainty. And that would be like right now. I recently bought some more gold specifically because I'm afraid of this sort of stuff. And it was really, really simple. The process was easy and now the gold is sitting in my safe. Get a free info kit on tax sheltered gold IRAs by texting the word BEN to 989898. July 6th marks a monumental shift happening among nations that control one third of the world's gdp. Arm yourself like I did, with information to diversify your retirement savings. Text Ben to the number 98. Claim your FREE info kit from Birch Gold. Again, text Men to 9,898 98 to get started. Also this month, Tax Network USA proudly celebrates our nation's birthday honoring freedom, resilience, financial independence. To mark the occasion, they are offering 10% off all services through July 4th. If you're dealing with back taxes or you missed that April 15th deadline, don't wait. The IRS is rapidly stepping up enforcement penalties can add up quickly, up to 5% per month, maxing out at 25% of your total tax bill just for not filing. That's on top of what you already owe. But there is good news. Tax Network USA can still help you turn things around. Whether you're self employed, run a business or your books are a complete mess, their team knows how to cut through the chaos and find solutions that work. Your consultation is always free. Getting ahead of the problem now could help you avoid harsh penalties, wage garnishments, surprise bank levies. Take that first step. Call 800-958-1000 or visit tnusa.com shapiro and don't forget, you'll get 10% off all services through July 4th as part of their celebration of our nation's birthday. Regain control of your finances with expert help from Tax Network USA. You don't want to go up against the IRS. Call 800-958-1000, visit tnusa.comshapiro to get started. Again, don't forget you get 10% off all services through July 4th as part of their celebration of Independence Day. Right. So you have a bunch of wings of the Republican Party of the fiscal hawks, the people who want less debt, less deficits, lower spending and lower taxes. Then you have people, the economic populace, who'd like lower taxes and big spending. I mean, like Josh Howley of Missouri, for example. And then you have people who are the tech guys and what they're mostly concerned about is deregulation. And yes, they would like some subsidies aimed at things like AI and green energy. And you're seeing that all break out into the open with regard to Elon Musk. So as Axios reports, critics say that President Trump's mega bill amounts to an abject surrender in the battle for the future of energy. The consequences for US Jobs, electricity prices and the air arms race could reverberate for decades. Elon Musk tweeted out, quote, a massive strategic error is being made right now to damage solar and battery. They'll leave America extremely vulnerable in the future. Jason Bordeaux, who leads the Columbia University energy think tank, said the bill could hinder the United States in the Air race with China. He said, quote, winning that race is going to require we increase electricity generation capacity increase in the US really fast and by a lot. That soaring demand is creating tailwinds for natural gas and nuclear. But even those great sources cannot ramp up fast enough to meet the urgent near term needs of data centers and AI infrastructure. And so he's saying basically you need to throw everything at energy, including at so called renewable energy. So this is a major battle that's broken out again inside the sort of tech centric part of the Republican Party. Beyond that, there was supposed to be an amendment to the big beautiful bill in the Senate that was going to protect the development of AI in the United States by creating a federal moratorium to bar state level experimentation with regulation on AI. So Florida couldn't have its own AI rules, in California its own AI rules. Basically the idea was that there would be a federal ban on state level legislation. The federal government could still legislate and regulate with regard to AI, but you don't want AI companies having to navigate the thickets of 50 different state regulatory structures in order to develop because we are in a national competition with China on the development of AI. Unfortunately, the US Senate voted 99 ones. It's stripped from the sprawling tax and immigration bill a provision that would have blocked states from regulating artificial intelligence for the next decade. And again, the reason for that is when it became apparent that this thing wasn't going to pass, a bunch of the people who sponsored the bill, including Senator Ted Cruz for example, voted against it. Knowing that it was basically doa. It left the Republican led industry backed push to roll back state AI laws on life support. As voting continued on the broader bill. According to the Washington Post, Republican leaders and tech trade groups have pitched the multi year freeze on state regulations as necessary to pave the way for US AI firms to innovate and outcompete their Chinese counterparts. Last month the House of Representatives passed a version of the tax and immigration bill that did include a 10 year ban on states passing or or enforcing regulations on AI. So Senator Cruz was pushing a behind the scenes effort to rework that provision to comply with procedural restrictions and gain the support of a small handful of Republican holdouts. And it looked like it was going to happen. The problem is that there were other opponents who said that it was unclear to them exactly what kinds of regulations would be barred. And so Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee announced she no longer supported the compromise and would instead propose an amendment to remove that AI law moratorium on altogether. She said While I appreciate Chairman Cruz's efforts to find acceptable language that allows states to protect their citizens from the abuses of AI, the current language is not acceptable to those who need protections the most. Until Congress passes federally preemptive legislation like the Kids Online Safety act and an online privacy framework, we can't block states from making laws that protect their citizens. The left was very, very happy about all of this. Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, who is quite radical, she says the Senate came together tonight to say we can't just run over good state consumer protection laws. And of course, all of this is definitely going to hold up the development of AI on a national level. Again, all of this is leading to the massive clash that is now occurring between President Trump and Elon Musk. This is round two, part due Hotshots 2 Musk 2 Furious. So what exactly happened here? Well, essentially, Elon Musk decided that he was going to go to war with the bill again. So he's threatening that he is going to primary senators and congresspeople vote for the bill. He's also vowing to help Thomas Massie, the Republican congressperson who really gets on President Trump's nerves by voting against everything Trump wants. He's vowed he's going to help him in a primary. President Trump then hit back with a long social media post of his own, seeking to frame Musk's opposition as a bid's cling to his electric vehicle subsidies. He said, quote, elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history by far. And without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa. No more rocket launches, satellites or electric car production and our country would save a fortune. Perhaps he should have Doge take a good hard look at this. Big money to be saved. So there he is going right at Elon's jugular, basically saying, listen, you started Doge and why don't we examine the cost structure on the Tesla EVs? Why don't we examine the cost structure on SpaceX and all the rest. Again, all of this follows Elon Musk pledging that he would form a new party that he calls the America Party. Quote, if this insane spending bill passes, the America Party will be formed the next day. Our country needs an alternative to the Democrat Republican Unit Party so that people actually have a voice. And again, he pledged as part of that he was going to support Thomas Massie of Kentucky Massey, who of course has been on sort of the horseshoe theory, right, with regard to foreign policy, but also happens to Be a Ron Paul, low spender, anti regulation type. Musk wrote nearly the entire House and Senate GOP will lose their primary next year if it's the last thing I do on this earth. And he went out of his way to call out two House Republicans who call themselves budget cutters. Andy Harris of Maryland and Chip Roy of Texas. He's also squabbling with Senator Mark Wayne Mullen of Oklahoma. So again, all this now breaking out into the open. President Trump going after Ellen saying, listen, buddy, you know, we were, we were friends, we were on the same side of this. But if you keep going after this bill and you're doing so because you want a subsidy, well, I mean, we could just remove all of those subsidies. Here was President Trump saying all this verbally?
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Elon Musk
I don't know. I think we'll have to think, look, we might have to put Doge on Elon, you know, you know, Doge is, Doge is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn't that be terrible? He gets a lot of subsidies, Peter. But Elon's very upset that the EV mandate is going to be terminated.
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Ben Shapiro
Hey. Elon then responded on Twitter. So tempting to escalate this. So, so tempting. But I will refrain for now. Now, again, this is the result, I think, of a few different factors that are, that are clashing. I've said this before. I think that on an ideological sort of politically pure level, Elon complaining about the big, beautiful bill is not wrong. It spends way too much money. But that's true for virtually every bill we pass at the federal governmental level. That's just the reality. I wish that the American people approved of Elon's spending plans. I do. I wish that we were restructuring our entitlements in a serious way. I wish that we weren't going to sleepwalk our way right over that Thelma and Louise cliff, that fiscal cliff that is going to come sometime in the next few years. I wish that we did all these things, but the American public is not prepared to do any of those things. And that's where you enter the realm of the pragmatic, where President Trump simply is right. So is this fight really about EV subsidies? Is this fight truly about sort of political purism, or is it something more personal, as I've suggested before, the fact that the Trump administration decided that they were going to get rid of Elon's handpicked head for NASA, and apparently Sergio Gore is the guy behind that, that's what ticked Elon off. He hasn't let go of that. He's still going after the bill because of that. You combine that with Elon's, I'll say, idealistic view of how politics should work. And it is not a shock that Elon is now attempting to wield his power in a sort of blunderbuss fashion. It's also not a shock that President Trump is slapping back at Elon, saying, listen, I'm the President of the United States. Thank you for your help. Also, I'm the president. I'm the one who has to do all this stuff. I'm the one who has to cut the deals, and I'm the one who has to live with it if we don't actually make permanent these tax cuts. This was a point that Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, was making about Musk. Here's what he had to say.
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Elon Musk
What's your reaction?
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Ben Shapiro
You guys famously tangled in the White House. I admire Elon's leadership on rockets. I will take care of the finances. Again, I think that's an appropriate step for Besson to take at this point. He is, of course, the Treasury Secretary. Meanwhile, there are sort of the hangers on who are looking for a way back into power. One of those has been Steve Bannon, who's been targeting Elon Musk for quite a long time because he sees Elon Musk and his sort of libertarian leanings with regards to economics as a threat to the big spending Republican Party, the statist Republican Party that Steve Bannon prefers. So Bannon is using this as an opportunity to try to not only drive a wedge, but to get himself closer to Trump.
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Steve Bannon
Elon Musk is out. And he's not that I told you this was going to happen, but he's out lighting up the president and, and lighting up MAGA and claiming that it's time for a third party and that this is, he calls it, I think, in all his maturity, the porky pig bill. He's going on about the spending, hammering it, hammering it. And this is what galls me about this. This was the guy that told the President he was going to get $2 trillion of waste, fraud and abuse cuts. Then he backed it off to $1 trillion. And this was on an annual basis. This wasn't over 10 years. This was a trillion dollars. Because we asked him, made sure the question was asked very specifically, and he said it over and over again. A trillion dollars. And at the end of the day, I don't know, folks. I know some of you fanboys said we got 160, but we haven't seen the $160 billion. What we do is have a $9 billion decision. And all of that is programmatic. I haven't seen any. I haven't seen any. Anything specifically fraud and abuse put forward from the Benedictine anywhere.
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Ben Shapiro
Hey. So again, this is a little bit ironic in and of itself, because, of course, Steve Bannon was a big Tea Party advocate who wanted smaller government. Now he's complaining that Musk is complaining that the bill is too big. And many things can be true at once. This bill is a lot of pork. So is every single government funding bill of my lifetime. There has yet to be a major government bill that is not a big spending government bill. Because the American people lie to. We lie to ourselves all the time. We say we want lower spending, and then when asked, what would you cut? We start scratching our heads and looking around like, I don't know. This is the problem. If you wish to build a cohesive movement for serious cuts to the government, that was never the MAGA movement. It wasn't. I mean, I may not like that about maga. In fact, I've been speaking publicly about not loving that about MAGA since 2016. President Trump was the one candidate declaring in 2015, 2016, he was not going to touch the entitlements. And I criticized him for it. I've been criticizing him for it for a decade. Because I would love to touch the entitlements. I think the entitlements are a disaster area. I think they're bankrupting the country. I think they're wildly ineffective as they currently stand. I think there are fixes that could be made to them. I think many of them could be delegated back to the state or local level. I don't think it's the proper function of the federal government to be involved in three quarters of this stuff. But my opinion is not the MAGA opinion, and my opinion is also not the going opinion in the United States of America. It just isn't. If you're going to be politically pragmatic about this, you have to recognize that what this bill effectively is about more than anything else is making sure the tax cuts don't go away, making sure defense is paid for, making sure immigration is paid for, and all the rest. And so when it comes to this Musk Trump fight, again, I just want to know what the end game here is. What. What is it that Elon is really looking for here? If he wants to build, again, a popular movement outside the government in favor of slashing and burning large swaths of the federal government, sign me up today. But if what we're talking about is the idea that, say, Chip Roy is unsuitably big government, or if what we're talking about here is that the choices here are letting the tax cuts expire and taxes radically increase and you still don't get lower spending or this bill, I choose the bill and I think most Americans will choose the bill. Now, that doesn't mean that the bill pulls particularly well. It doesn't because the bill's been criticized every which way. But I guarantee you, I guarantee you that if Republicans don't get this done and the taxes do increase, that's going to be even more unpopular already Coming up, Zoran Mamdani, Democrats are embracing him. Why? Well, maybe because actually his anti Americanism fits what they're looking for. First, speaking of a place that doesn't hate the country, Grand Canyon University, private Christian university in beautiful Phoenix, Arizona, they believe were endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. GCU believes in equal opportunity and that the American dream starts with purpose. And GCU equips you to serve others in ways that promote human flourishing and creates a ripple effect of transformation for generations to come. By honoring your career, calling, you impact your family, your friends and your community. 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That's pound 250, baby. Or visit preborn.comBen that's preborn.comBen okay. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party continues to remain in a state of disarray. The Democratic Party has decided over the course of the last 15 to 20 years in this country that if they do not win elections, they don't like the country anymore. It's kind of amazing. There is a poll From Gallup conducted June 2nd to 19th. This is before the successful American attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities. Among American adults, it found only 58% said they were proud to be American. That is a new record low. The poll noted Democrats are mostly responsible for the drop in US pride this year. 36% only say they are extremely or very proud, down from 62% a year ago. So first of all, 62% is super low. Super low. And you're talking about a time when Democrats were running the government and Joe Biden was president a year ago, and only and still not even 2/3 of Democrats said that they were extremely or very proud of the country. When President Trump is president, that number drops to 36%, which suggests that actually the bulk of Democrats are not particularly proud of the country. Just generally, they're not proud of. They might be proud of their politicians, but they're not proud of the country. See, if you asked me when Barack Obama was president of the United States, I thought he was a terrible president, an awful, historically bad president. If you asked me if I was extremely or very proud to be American, of course I would say yes. I can't imagine a moment in my lifetime when I wouldn't have said that, actually, including during the Biden administration when Joe Biden was doing terrible, terrible things. Because the President of the United States is not the definer of Americanism. He is the elected official at this point in time. But for Democrats, if they don't get their way, meaning a left leaning government that crams down a vision of America that is perversely anti American on the rest of the population. Then they just don't like the country. Pride among independents fell from last year, but only by about 7 points. Republicans say they are slightly prouder this year than in previous years to be American. Typically, Republicans level of national Pride registers around 90%, including 92% this year. It was at 85% in 2024. Again, most Republicans feel the way that I do. Presumably like many might listeners do. We love the country no matter who the President is. Not true for Democrats. The only years in which fewer than nine in 10 Republicans were proud were 2016 and 2020 through 2024. Nationwide, pride was at its highest in the years immediately following 9 11. It declined significantly after the Iraq war and then again after the BLM movement. But again that was driven mostly by Democrats, as Joel Pollack points out over at Breitbart. Which leads us back to Zoran Mandani, who certainly is not proud to be an American who brags about having an outside American perspective, meaning a third worlder's perspective. He brags about this stuff while eating rice with his hands in order to appeal to people who have a peculiar, I don't know, antipathy for forks for cutlery. The, the scavenger movement led by people like Zoran Mamdani is quite real. It's quite real and it is rooted in a baseline hatred for what the country actually is. It's why they call for communism. It's. It's why they call for bds. They would BDS America if they could. They would boycott, divest and sanction America for being a settler colonial estate if they had the capacity to do so. They would float three feet above the ground so as not to occupy American land originally taken from the Native Americans. According to their peculiar lights. That's who they are. The Zoramdani wing of the Democratic Party is not proud to be American. The Zormadani wing believes that America is a net bad for for the world. That America has been a negative force in the world and continues to be a negative force in the world and will continue to be a negative force in the world until it is brought low. And yet Democrats continue to praise Zoram Mamdani. Connecticut's governor Ned Lamont was out there praising. I think he is a big deal. I think he's transformative. I love what he's doing on a universal pre k for everybody. Same thing that we're doing right here. Talking about free bus service for folks. We did that all during COVID as well. But you're absolutely right. Affordable housing is the biggest key to affordability in our state and I think across the country. And again, these are the supposed moderates in the Democratic Party who are now cheering him. Then you have the people who are not moderate at all, but who were mainstays of the legacy media. Taylor Lorenz is still out there haunting the landscape. Again, the Miss Havisham of politics. A ghost wearing a bridal dress that will never be used to Taylor Lorenzo. So now Taylor Lorenz is appearing on Piers Morgan's show. Piers Morgan's show has essentially become a repository of Jerry Springer esque politics in which he invites the ambulatory psychotic to debate the sometimes sane. And then that's his show essentially. Anyway, Taylor Rens goes in the ambulatory psychotic category. And it's good tv, I'll admit that. I mean, everybody cheers Jre jre when somebody gets hit with a chair or when we find out who the dad is. But in any case, Taylor Lorenz is now out there defending the death to the IDF chant that was originally put out there by a band that no one had heard of until five minutes ago called Bob Villain over at the Glastonbury Music Festival in Great Britain. Here she was defending that it's totally fine. According to. Remember, the important thing here is that Taylor Lorenz was a mainstream media establishment journalist. She was the online journalist for the Washington Post for a lot of time here. And now she spent the last couple of years defending Luigi Mangione murdering people and people shouting Death to the idf.
- [34:58]
Taylor Lorenz
Now what they should do next is stop the genocide. Again, if people want the public and these artists to have more positive sentiment towards the Israeli military forces, I don't.
- [35:08]
Piers Morgan
Think anyone wants positive sentiment. I don't know why you twisted around. We're saying we don't want anyone to call for the death of, of anyone. I mean, if you are advocating for against genocide and you don't want people to be killed, how can you turn around and say at the same breath that you think chanting for death should be contextualized somehow?
- [35:25]
Taylor Lorenz
Well, yeah, because again, if an army is committing genocide and slaughtering babies and creating the highest rate of child amputees in the world, and if that is what they have done for months and years now, and then the public is rightfully outraged about that child calling for their death.
- [35:40]
Piers Morgan
That's the issue. It's not calling for the death of.
- [35:44]
Taylor Lorenz
A military entity that is currently committing.
- [35:47]
Ben Shapiro
Taylor, you can't, you can't. Taylor, you can't keep saying that.
- [35:49]
Piers Morgan
It's a compulsory army.
- [35:50]
Ben Shapiro
You don't even believe that when you're saying it. Yeah, if they say death, if they say death to the British army, no one's taking that as meaning the institution, but taking it as meaning British soldiers.
- [36:00]
Taylor Lorenz
When people say death to America, they mean death to American imperialism. That is, that is subjugated.
- [36:05]
Ben Shapiro
No, they don't. I mean death to Americans. That's a very generous.
- [36:08]
Piers Morgan
As the supreme leader of Iran, what they mean.
- [36:10]
Ben Shapiro
I don't think you even believe this as you're saying it.
- [36:13]
Taylor Lorenz
Again, this is, this is. They didn't say death to Israelis. They said death to the idf.
- [36:18]
Ben Shapiro
Again, who are Israelis?
- [36:20]
Taylor Lorenz
Genocide.
- [36:21]
Piers Morgan
It's a compulsory service. We have to join the army in Israel.
- [36:25]
Taylor Lorenz
You can. And you can, you can choose to not join the army.
- [36:27]
Ben Shapiro
Of course, of course.
- [36:28]
Piers Morgan
And go to prison.
- [36:30]
Ben Shapiro
Okay, so again, this is who? Taylor Lorenz's. But again, the reason she's important is not because she in and of herself is important. It's because she was a charter member of the mainstream until very, very recently. And she will be mainstream again because the anti American left is quite real. Now, sane Democrats, there's still a few of them are out there saying, this is kind of nuts. Stephen A. Smith, who shockingly has become one of these Democrats, he's out there saying, listen, if we follow Zoran Mamdani here, we are in serious trouble as Democrats.
- [36:58]
Stephen A. Smith
Ladies and gentlemen, let me be very, very clear. If the Democratic Party becomes the likes of Zoran Mamdani, who by the way, I like not trying to throw any shade on him or anything like that, but if the Democratic Party becomes him, you have no chance. You have no chance on a national basis, in terms of the presidency, in Senate seats, seats in the House, you have no chance. You have no chance. I want to be very, very clear about that. You might have a democratic socialist sprinkled here and there, but that ain't what America is. America is about capitalism. America's about dollars and cents. America is our. America is about an economy, a flourishing economy, okay? And you know what? It's not about free stuff.
- [37:47]
Ben Shapiro
Okay? Again, this is a commonsensical Democratic position. Although I will say it is amazing how every Democrat I say, I have nothing against Zoram Hamdani. Why not? Why don't you have something against Zoramdani? The guy embraces actual government run grocery stores as though that hasn't been tried in Cuba or in Venezuela, where citizens as John Casimitis writes over at the Wall Street Journal where citizens stood in line for hours to get a loaf of bread or a bag of rice if there was any food left at all. Why do you have to say? Why is there always this proviso? I have nothing against. I have something against Armadani. I think that he is a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with both our immigration system and our educational system and our political system. All of those things. Our immigration system never should have made provision for his parents to come to this country because they evidenced no love for the country or its principles when they were let in. His father is a teacher of settler colonialism studies or some such bull over at Columbia University and his mother makes left wing agit prop in Hollywood. We don't need more of those in this country. We never did. He comes to the country at the age of 7 or 8 and is deeply ungrateful to be in this country and believes everything about it ought to change. And brags that he has a third worlder's perspective, which is incredible. Having grown up in the first world for the vast majority of his life. The scion of two wealthy parents, he is moved even further to the left by our garbage educational system. And now he is going to be the mayor of New York. In all likelihood. Yeah. I have something against somebody who's had every privilege America can offer. Anyone handed to him on a silver platter and spits in the face of our country. Yeah, I have something against him. And Democrats should too. Now, unfortunately, his opponent in the New York mayoral race is Eric Adams. Eric Adams is is saying true things. The problem is Eric Adams has a 19% approval rating. So here for example is Eric Adams slamming Mamdani for having supported Hamas, which is true.
- [39:36]
Ron Johnson
Clearly he has. And I think that Jewish voters are going to do an analysis to determine exactly where he stands on stand on these important issues. The largest Jewish population outside of Israel is in new.
- [39:50]
Ben Shapiro
Okay, so again, not wrong. He also points out that Mamdani is a member of the elite. He likes to portray himself as like this down and with it, man of the people. But he is not in any way shape or form.
- [40:02]
Ron Johnson
Listen, Madani is in is an academic elitist. Great things that he state on paper, free, free, free. Those are great philosophical things. But when it comes down to governing a city and balancing a budget and ensuring that you can create the we have of more jobs in the city history, you're seeing how we have made it safe on our subway system and above ground. What we're doing in education. That's what it's going to come down to. And this academic elitist, a person who didn't get a job until he was 29. She was basically financially supported by his parents. This is about running the most important financial institution in our country, if not the globe, and that's New York.
- [40:53]
Ben Shapiro
Okay? So again, he's not wrong about all that. By the way, he sort of grew up middle class, pretends to be a poverty stricken victim of the American system. Routine from Democrats, extremely common aoc. Of course, her past is now being brought up in this context because people are discovering anew that she went to Yorktown High School, which is a very middle class section of New York in Westchester county, where she was known as Sandy. She was known as Sandy at the time, Sandy Cortez. And she was affectionately remembered as a top notch student in a school district that's 35 miles north of the Bronx. When she says that she grew up in the Bronx. So again, not rare. Not rare. State Assemblyman Matt Slater of Yorktown noted Sunday most of his constituents remember the progressive politician is Sandy Cortez from Yorktown Heights. He said she's embarrassing herself for doing everything impossible to avoid saying she grew up in the suburbs and instead of the Bronx. She said she visited extended family. She said she commuted. Now she's in between. It's clearly desperate attempts to protect the lie that she's from the Bronx at all. Again, there is a sort of bizarre pride in growing up impoverished, as though this grants you added credibility in America to the point where people actually have to fake it. If you're a Democrat and meanwhile the assumption, of course, is that if you're a Republican, it's because you grew up rich. I get this crap all the damn time. It's amazing. Now, I did not grow up poor in America. I grew up absolutely dead center middle class in America. I grew up in a very small house in Burbank, California, which is a cute suburb of Los Angeles. Our house was 1100 square feet, two bedrooms, one for my parents, one for all four of us, the siblings, me and my three sisters. Until I was 11 years old, we had one bathroom for six people. We weren't poor because that's called living in America. Living in America means for the vast majority, vast, vast majority of people, you're not poor. That does not confer some sort of added virtue to me because that's how I grew up. My parents did the best they could. They got richer as time went on. They did better as Time went on and good for them because that's the American dream. But this notion that has been placed out there, that people like Zoran Mamdani saw the worst that American society has to offer, but Republicans are all silver spoon born and bred high society types. It's such a lie. It's such absolute trash. President Trump, for his part, is ripping Zorin Mamdani. He points out correctly that New Yorkers would be nuts to vote for him, but they probably will.
- [43:24]
Elon Musk
Having such a hard time condemning the.
- [43:26]
Ben Shapiro
Phrase globalized to Intifada.
- [43:29]
Elon Musk
I think he's terrible. He's a communist. The last thing we need is a communist. I said there will never be socialism in the United States. Tell him a communist. I think he's bad news and I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with him watching him because he has to come right to this building to get his money. And don't worry, he's not going to run away with anything. I think he's, frankly, I've heard he's a total nut job. I think for people of the New Yorkers crazy, if they go this route, I think they're crazy. We will have a communist in the for the first time.
- [44:01]
Ron Johnson
Really?
- [44:02]
Elon Musk
A pure true communist. He wants to operate the grocery stores, the department stores. What about the people that are there? I think it's crazy.
- [44:14]
Ben Shapiro
He is not wrong. He is not wrong. But why am I worried about Zoran Mamdani and company? And the answer here is because every civilization is just one generation from getting rid of its own freedom in the name of some sort of catastrophic attempted solution to a problem. And that problem can come in the form of a bad economy. Bad economies tend to generate radicalism. They tend to generate an upsurge in stupidity. They tend to generate people making insane moves in an attempt to avoid the consequences of past bad policy. And so this is why I remain somewhat concerned about the American economy. President Trump is stepping up pressure on Jerome Powell over at the Federal Reserve to cut the interest rates. He's, he actually wrote him a handwritten note saying that he was costing the country a fortune and demanding that he cut interest rates by a lot. Because his idea here is that the economy is on solid footing, that inflation is not in fact high, that the tariff regime is probably going to get solved. So what are you doing here? Well, Jerome Powell, to his credit, actually came out and acknowledge some of that. He's at the European Central Bank Forum in Portugal. He said, you know what, the US Economy actually is in pretty good position at this point, I guess I would.
- [45:23]
Producer Phil
Start, if I may, by saying that the US Economy is in a pretty good position. Inflation has come down close to 2%. We're at 2.3 headline 2.7 core. The unemployment rate is at 4.2%. So we're healthy overall. The, if you look, ignore the tariffs for a second. Inflation is behaving pretty much exactly as we, as we have expected and hoped that it would.
- [45:49]
Ben Shapiro
So he is right about that. He also says that, you know, the, the rates will likely be reduced sometime later this year. So that should provide the economy with some level of sanguinity here.
- [46:01]
Producer Phil
A solid majority of FOMC participants do expect that it will become appropriate later this year to begin to reduce rates again. And so, and that will depend, though, as Christine just mentioned on the incoming data we'll be monitoring particularly what does show up in terms of, of inflation or what does not show up. And also carefully watching the labor market. You know, there we watch very carefully for signs of, of unexpected weakness. We see a gradual cooling, but we see, we don't really see that yet. So those are the things we'll be watching. But as I mentioned, a majority of us do feel it will be appropriate in the remaining four meetings of the year to begin to reduce rates again.
- [46:41]
Ben Shapiro
And now with all that said, Jerome Powell says that he is going to withstand any pressure from Trump because that's the job of the Federal Reserve. You don't work for the President of the United States. Now, by the way, that's not horrible for Trump. I'm just going to point out that if it appeared that Powell was lowering the interest rates at Trump's behest, that would actually not be particularly good for the economy. It would then appear that, that President Trump is able to manipulate the currency. But Powell saying, actually, I'm going to stand up to President Trump when I think it's necessary, but also I am likely to lower the interest rates. That's probably the best available solution here.
- [47:11]
Producer Phil
I'm very focused on just doing my job. I mean, there are things that the things that matter are using our tools to achieve the goals that Congress has given us. Maximum employment, price stability, financial stability, and that's, that's what we focus on, 100%.
- [47:29]
Ben Shapiro
And then everyone cheers.
- [47:30]
Steve Bannon
Yes.
- [47:30]
Ben Shapiro
What a hero. Okay, again, that's literally his job. That's literally his job. Not particularly heroic, but not bad for President Trump. So what am I worried about? Well, there, there are a few things I'm worried about. One, the dollar is off to a pretty poor Start this year. According to the New York Times, the US currency has weakened more than 10% over the past six months when compared with a basket of currencies from the country's major trading partners. The last time the dollar weakened so much at the start of the year was 1973, which is right after the United States had basically delinked the United States dollar with the price of gold. This time, of course, it is the aggressive tariff push and the fact that a lot of countries around the world who are starting to think maybe we shouldn't bank so much on the American economy. So of course, the American dollar has been weakening. I asked our friends and sponsors over at Perplexity what are the most important historic examples of the US Dollar weakening? How does the weak dollar threaten American economic strength? And as I mentioned a Moment ago, obviously 1973, the end of the tying of the American dollar to the price of gold led to high inflation, oil shocks, underperformance of US equities relative to international markets. Other examples include the early 2000s. The dollar weakened significantly throughout the mid 2000s because capital was flowing into emerging markets and commodities surged. The 2007, 2008 global financial crisis, the dollar weakened sharply. What are the impacts of weak dollar? Well, investor confidence goes down because global trust in American assets makes it harder to attract foreign investment. It makes imports more expensive, which increase costs for consumers and businesses. It increase borrowing costs for the government because our dollar doesn't go as far, it is now weaker. There's more market volatility and of course, the global reserve status, because if a bunch of banks don't use the dollar in their transactions anymore, there's less demand for the dollar. And that means that there are fewer people who are seeking to purchase dollars or to gain dollars or to buy bonds or to allow us to borrow. Initially, the dollar actually soared when Trump was reelected because a lot of investors in the stock market wanted to move into the dollar. Currency players thought he was pro growth, pro business. And then after the tariff announcement, things started to reverse themselves. It's possible that could reverse itself, but it needs to reverse itself. Because if the dollar stops being used, for example, as the world's reserve currency, that is a serious problem for our capacity to raise debt in the future. Beyond that, we could be looking at some historic labor market dislocations. And here I don't mean permanent unemployment rates of 20, 30%. But as AI gets more sophisticated, as robots get more sophisticated, you are likely to see job dislocation. Eventually the market will settle itself out People will learn to cooperate with the technology, become more productive because of the technology, find newer jobs that don't exist right now having to do with these technologies. But whenever there's a major market move, there are serious labor dislocations and that tends to lead to an upsurge in sort of revolutionary sentiment. This happened obviously at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and then it happened again in the 1920s and 30s. You're likely to see something similar happen now if AI hits the market en masse and starts to take away serious numbers of jobs. And by the way, it's not just gonna be AI taking away white collar jobs. Everybody right now is thinking about ChatGPT, killing lawyers, for example, getting rid of accountants. But robots are getting more and more sophisticated. Article in the Wall Street Journal today pointing out the automation of Amazon.com facilities is approaching a new milestone. There will soon be as many robots as humans. The e commerce giant has deployed more than 1 million robots in its workplaces. That is the most it has ever had and near the counts of human workers at the facilities. Company warehouses buzz with metallic arms, plucking items from shelves and wheeled droids that motor around the floors, ferrying the goods for packaging. In other corners, automated systems help sort the items which other robots assist in packaging for shipments. Some 75% of Amazon's global deliveries are assisted in some way by, by robotics. I mean, imagine how many Amazon drivers are there out there on the roads right now. When the automated cars are ready, all those people are going to be finding different jobs. Presumably now for some Amazon workers is great because you're not schlepping around giant boxes that wreck your back. Instead, you're sitting in front of a computer screen making the robot do that work for you. However, robots are in fact supplanting some of those employees. The average number of employees Amazon had per facility last year, 670, was the lowest recorded in the past 16 years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. So pretending that this is going to have no impact on job markets, no job dislocation is wrong. Now, that may come alongside brand new productivity numbers that make things better and cheaper, that make it possible for product to reach people in record time, and all that may be great, but dislocations do have consequences. And somebody's going to need to explain those consequences as they happen and make provision for those consequences and at the communal level, because again, change comes with adjustment periods. And those adjustment periods, if they're sudden enough, can really shake loose some nuts from the tree and Those fall on everybody's head. Zoram Hamdani just being an example of that. In New York City, meanwhile, President Trump yesterday headed on over to Alligator Alcatraz, which is a, which is a facility less than 50 miles west of the Trump resort in Miami. In the Florida Everglades, workers have transformed the so called Dade Collier Training and Transition airport from an 11,000 foot Runway into a temporary tent city that President Trump toured on Tuesday. It's going to house up to 5,000 migrants as they await deportation. Officials are telling CNN. Florida Governor DeSantis said, We had a request from the federal government to do it. And so Alligator Alcatraz it is. That is the nickname coined by his attorney general for the Everglades facility. Of course, again, we use alligators and in a lot of our, we have like the alligator alley in, in Florida, which is a highway. So again, alligators, they, they play a large role in our Florida identity. DeSantis said. Clearly, from a security perspective, if someone escapes, there's a lot of alligators you're going to have to contend with. No one's going anywhere. Once you do that, it's as safe and secure as you can be. But of course, immigration rights activists are very upset about this. One immigration advocate named Thomas Kennedy says this is all cruel and inhumane. When we talk, you know, about people as if they were vermin, the location, the manner in which was done, and the language, right, the dehumanizing language employed by the authorities here. There's nothing about this facility, about this detention camp that is not cruel and inhumane. The fact that we're going to have 3,000 people detained intense in the Everglades in the middle of the hot Florida summer during hurricane season, right? I mean, this is a bad idea all around that needs to be opposed and stopped. And so I'm just going to point out it's not cruel and inhumane at every level. There's water, sewage, power, there's air conditioning, portable units that are going to be used to cool the structures on the site. Again, the facility is both temporary and necessary because of the state's law enforcement agencies and jails being overcrowded thanks to the immigration crackdown. President Trump had some, had some words about this. He said, listen, if they escape, then, you know, they'll have to run away from the alligators. With the alligator Alcatraz, it's the idea that if somebody just get eaten by an alligator or a snake or something.
- [54:55]
Elon Musk
I guess that's the concept. This is not a nice business. I guess that's the concept to you? You know, snakes are fast, but alligators are. We're going to teach them how to run away from an alligator. Okay? If they escape prison, how to run away. Don't run in a straight line. Look like this and you know what? Your chances go up about 1%. Okay? Not a good thing.
- [55:21]
Ben Shapiro
So while President Trump is doing that, his opponents are busily attempting to make it easier for people to escape detection if they are illegal immigrants. That includes cnn. CNN actually put out an entire article on Monday touting an iPhone app called Ice Block, which again is designed to help avoid the immigration crackdown being pursued by ICE. It currently has more than 20,000 users, many of whom are in LA where controversial large scale deportation efforts have taken place. The newest app is designed to let users alert people nearby to sightings of ICE agents in their area. It's an early warning system for users when ICE is operated nearby. According to its creators, users can add a pin on the map showing where they spotted agents, along with optional notes like what officers were wearing or what kind of car they were driving. So it's a, it's a law breaking app, essentially. And that's now being touted by cnn. This is a point that Tom Homan, the border czar, is making that cnn, legacy media, they're actively attempting to give people means to avoid law enforcement.
- [56:20]
Tom Homan
And I just can't believe we're in a place where, you know, a TV network like CNN is talking about the ZAP and educating people on the existence of the ZAP ICE law enforcement officer. Like I said earlier, they're concentrating on public safety threats and national security threats. This is a dangerous job and this app is going to give the bad guy heads up that we're coming, which means more bad guys are going to escape arrest, which makes this country less safe, which is a public safety issue. And on top of that, it's only a matter of time for a bad guy like someone who threw a mouth off cocktail AT officers in LA who assault against ICE officers up over 500%. It's a matter of time. If someone uses that and ambushes ICE officers. This is something we cannot tolerate, we can't stand for. So we're calling them out and I'm begging Department of justice look into this and hold people accountable.
- [57:12]
Ben Shapiro
Again, he is not wrong about this. The fact legacy media continue to try to foster illegal immigration is pretty astonishing. Now, meanwhile, in Hollywood news, there is a Pixar movie that was just released called Elio. It has been an absolute box office dud like a complete gigantic failure. After two weekends in theaters, the 150 million dollar film about a lonely boy who becomes a galactic ambassador for Earth has currently grossed $42 million domestic and only $72 million globally. Gigantic, gigantic fail. So what exactly is happened with Elio? Why did this thing absolutely self destruct the box office? Fascinating piece over the Hollywood Reporter demonstrating how go woke go broke. According to the Hollywood Reporter, those who worked at Pixar while its latest film release, Elio was in production were delighted by footage they saw roughly two years ago. Among the moments cited as favorites by those at the animation studio at the time included a sequence in which the titular boy collected trash on the beach and and turned it into homemade apparel that included a pink tank top. The movie's team would refer to Elio showing this off to a hermit crab as his trashin show. But if you bought a ticket to Elio and don't remember seeing this, it's not that you chose the wrong time to refill your soda. According to multiple insiders who spoke to the Hollywood Reporter, Elio was initially portrayed as a queer coded character, reflecting original director Adrian Molina's identity as an openly gay filmmaker. Other sources say Molina didn't intend the film to be a coming out story because the character is 11. Either way, this characterization gradually faded away throughout the production process as Elio became more masculine following feedback from leadership. Gone were not only direct examples of his passion for environmentalism and fashion, but also a scene in Elio's bedroom with pictures suggesting a male crush. Hints at the trash fashion remain. In the released film, the boy wears a cape decorated with discarded cutlery and soda can tabs, although without any explanation for the unusual attire. Elio's turbulent ride began well before its calamitous nosedive at the box office during the June 20th to 22nd corridor. Indeed, the summer of 2023 became a fateful one for the animated film about a lonely boy beamed into outer space by an intergalactic organization after being misidentified as the leader of Earth. So apparently the writing was first on the wall when the film conducted an early test screening in Arizona. Viewers said that they enjoyed the movie, but then they were asked how many of them would see it in a theater. 0. Hands went up. 0. Apparently Molina then screened the film for Pixar leadership and they didn't like it and Molina was hurt by the conversation and then he left. And then it was reworked and then it arrived and bombed. Okay, so first of all we should ask ourselves, why are we shocked by any of this. We shouldn't be. I remember Disney is the same company that had top executives claiming that they were mainlining gay propaganda into children's programming. I mean, it's kind of an astonishing thing, right? I mean, this is a movie that is made for young kids by a gay director, and it was a queer coded 11 year old in the film. Why in the world would a parent take their kid to see that? Why? And Disney knew that was going to be a mistake and so they changed it. But it was too late. Because it turns out that the artistic efforts that went into making this a queer coded film could not simply be removed or without apparently affecting the final product in some way, shape or form. But it demonstrates the lengths to which people in the entertainment industry will go to hijack the brains of your children to screw with your children's values and morality. When you take your kid to a Pixar movie, you are not expecting that Pixar movie to be an ode to coming out of the closet for small children. That is not what you are expecting. And yet Pixar decided to hand this off to somebody who wanted to make it that thing. And now, of course, all the gay pride groups are very upset. Former Pixar assistant editor Sarah Lagatich, who provided feedback during LEO production, is a member of the company's internal LGBTQ+ divided by PSI Group picks Pride said, quote, I was deeply saddened and aggrieved by the changes that were made. Who carez? Who cares if you are deeply saddened and aggrieved by the changes that were made? What makes you special that you get to be aggrieved by a story about a kid that should have nothing to do with sexuality and you're mad because you didn't get to stack your LGBTQ + minus values into the movie. The changes to Elio were clear to one former Pixar artist who worked on the film. Quote, it was pretty clear throughout the production of the first version that studio leaders were constantly sanding down these moments in the film that alluded to Elio's sexuality of being queer. Now, apparently, sources told the Hollywood Reporter, Molina was informed shortly thereafter that the new director who wrote and directed Pixar's 2020 short Burrow and was a storyboard artist on Turning Red and Elio would be elevated to director. Molina was given the opportunity to wreck Elliot alongside the new director, but after numerous notes and changes, he decided to leave the project. Suddenly remove this big key piece which is all about identity and Elio Just becomes about totally nothing, says a former Pixar artist. The Elio that is in theaters right now is far worse than Adrian's best version of the original. Another Pixar staffer said the character was so cute and so much fun. It had so much personality. And he feels much more generic to me now. Again, there are people who worked on the film, like America Ferreira who left apparently because she didn't like that Molina ended up essentially being fired. But it's demonstrative how insane, insane these Hollywood companies are that they're willing to just on faith, give people script control and get deep into the production process on a movie for children that was about a queer coded 11 year old. It definitely shows you where their heads are at. And as the box office is proving, if you decide to do this sort of thing, you are going to fail. People do not want to see that. They don't, they don't. They're raising their kid in a particular way. When I show my kids entertainment, the only stuff I'll show them now is old stuff, old movies, specifically because of this kind of stuff. I'll show them content from Ben Key because we literally made a kid's programming decision. But that's a different. That is an entirely different outlet that we make sure is clean for your kids. You can't trust these folks. You can't. And meanwhile, July 4th is coming up every day this week. We've been doing something to do with July 4th. Today I want to talk about one of the myths of July 4th, which is that America is primarily a pure democracy, that the chief value of America is in fact democracy. Now, democracy is of course a value of America, very key value in America. But the whole point of the Constitution of the United States is to set aside certain things that people do not get to vote on because they're too fundamental to be alienated through majority rule. That is the goal of the amendment. That's the goal of the amendment process. In the Constitution of the United States. Free speech is not to be touched. Freedom of religion is not to be touched. And even if 55% of you, 60% of you wish to just encroach upon these fundamental principles, the answer is no. Majoritarianism is not the rule of the Constitution is what James Madison was writing about in Federalist 51 when he suggested checks and balances were necessary because the people cannot be trusted as a mob. No individual can be trusted with complete power and neither can a simple majority. You have to have checks and balances whereby everybody basically has to be on the same page in order to make a gigantic change. John Adams, many of the founders were deeply suspicious of this sort of vox day, vox populi routine. John Adams wrote in 1814, Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhaust and murders itself. That never was a democracy, yet that did not commit suicide. And you see this historically, obviously, there are a wide variety of countries in the late 19th and early 20th century that ended up going fascist as a result of majoritarian rule and no constitutional safeguards against that sort of stuff. Insufficient checks and balances. And the founders obviously were drawing on the work of Montesquieu, who spoke in the spirit of the laws about the necessity for interest, counteracting interests, balancing power against power. This is why the Electoral College exists. This is why senators originally were not elected directly by the people. Originally, they were selected by the state legislatures of the various states because the idea was the more institutions who had their own interests represented at the federal governmental level fighting one another for power, the better the result was going to be. Or more importantly, the less the government was going to be able to encroach on your fundamental liberties. Now, we've completely redone how government is done in the United States. A huge percentage of government is now done through the singular power of the executive branch. And that's a major problem. It's been a major problem before Trump. It'll be a major problem after Trump. It did not start with President Trump by any stretch of the imagination. The entire vast administrative bureaucracy established in the early 20th century, vastly grown under FDR and then vastly grown again under LBJ. All of that is a fundamental violation of what the founders wanted when they built the Constitution of the United States. But the key point is this. Yes, democracy is wonderful. But you know what's even more wonderful? Liberty, property rights, freedoms that are fundamental to you. Those things are really, really important. Because as Ayn Rand once suggested, the most important minority is the individual, right? You are an individual. You're a party of one. You're a minority of one. And your interests matter. And if they can just be stepped on by a simple majority, then really you don't have any rights worth the paper that they are printed on. Alrighty. Coming up, we'll bring you the latest on Middle Eastern negotiations. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is coming to the United States next week, and the Trump administration is making some major moves. The show continues right now. Remember to watch, you have to be a member. If you're not a member, become a member. Use code Shapiro checkout for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us. You know what I love about our partnership with Helix? Sleep? They understand that better sleep means better days. I've been sleeping on mine for months now and the difference is incredible. No more tossing and turning, just pure restorative sleep. Take advantage of their incredible 4th of July sale. Right now you can get 27% off site wide at Helix. 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