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Well, hello, everybody. You know, sometimes here on the Ben Shapiro show, we cover the news and sometimes we are the news here at the Daily Wire. Well, over the past few weeks, the Daily Wire, you might have noticed, has been the subject of a bunch of hit pieces. Like a veritable cornucopia of hit pieces. There was one from the Washington Post, and there was one from Puck, and then finally there was an especially ridiculous one from the stellar journalist at New York magazine who literally plagiarized their hit piece from the Washington Post. So much journalism, high level journalism. Well, this morning that New York Magazine piece is lighting up the interwebs. It's lighting up X. Well, New York Magazine claims there was a time when Ben Shapiro could reasonably call himself the king of all conservative media. I don't remember that time, but sounds cool. He said that's all over now. The Daily Wire is instituting significant layoffs. Well, according to New York Magazine, the future of conservatism isn't traditional conservatism, you know, like free markets, like equal rights before law, like checks and balances, like traditional virtue. That's done. The future, according to New York Magazine, is Nick Fuentes, confirmed Nazi Stan and woman hater and man who will never be able to get a human woman pregnant through natural means. Or Tucker Carlson, confirmed anti capitalist and Muslim apologist and victim of demon scratching. Or maybe Candace Owens, the confirmed slanderer of widows and connoisseur of French testicles. Or maybe Megyn Kelly, click whoring grandma Griper over there. Well, New York Magazine writes, quote, the collapse of the Daily Wire can be seen as a dire warning for traditional Republicans. There are two realities to Shapiro conservatism. In 2026, it retains a significant foothold among Republican elites and it is being fast rejected by the future grassroots of the parties. First of all, that's just wrong. By the polling data, the positions that we take here on the show are reflective of the broad majority of Republicans. That's just the reality. But I figured that we should address all of this head on. So it's true. The Daily Wire laid off some 13% of our workforce since the beginning of the year. And that really sucked. It was truly sad because all those people are great. And anytime, you know, we're in business, anytime you lay people off as a business, that really sucks, it's tough. It's bad for them, it's bad for us. And I'm personally working to find other places of employ for as many of these people as I possibly can. Because everybody who we let Go deserves a job somewhere else. They're great folks, but for our critics, this was all cause for massive celebration. You know, the joyful popping of the corks. Or maybe in the case of Nick Fuentes, a victory celebration with catboys and lubricant. And listen, we're honored by the attention. See, here's the thing. People only tend to write stories like this about major American institutions, right? Like Amazon dumps people. It's a big story. Or the Washington Post dumps people, and that's a big story. And thank God, we are a major American institution. According to PodTrack, our podcast reach is 41 million people per month. We're ranked sixth globally. We have a total of 11 shows. Paramount, to take an example from that same chart, is ranked fourth globally. They have 145 shows. So on a per capita basis, we're killing it. We are responsible for the two most successful conservative documentaries in history. Matt Walsh's Amiracist and what Is a Woman? Just this week, Vice President Vance was quoting our reporting in his fraud investigations. And our White House correspondent, Mary Margaret Olahan is in the press room asking questions. See, here's the thing. There's no national media coverage if a top Candace Owens producer and her manager quit, or if Megyn Kelly's YouTube account starts shedding tens of thousands of subscribers a month, or if Tucker Carlson's traffic is disproportionately drawn from Pakistan. We all have our fan base. Those are all things that actually happened, by the way. But nobody really cares very much because, yeah, those people have significant audience numbers, but they don't have any real institutional influence. They are not institutions. That's not true of the Daily Wire. We're big enough that people care when we trip up. And of course, like any business, we have our ups, we have our downs. But as Mark Twain put it, the reports of our death are greatly exaggerated. But here's the thing. There is something else going on here. Something very clear going on here. The media left and the woke right. That'd be like Candace and Fuentes and Tucker and Megan, all of them together. The New left. They are attempting to destroy traditional conservatism. That's the whole thing here. See, the Daily Wire is the largest traditional conservative media company in the digital space by like a ton. By leaps and bounds. We are multiple times the size of any of these others. We have lots of conversations on our platform between our various hosts about topics ranging from AI to the Middle east, to on Catholicism and Judaism and all of it. There's A lot of rich disagreement here at the Daily Wire. But in the end, what we stand for here at the Daily Wire is pretty simple truth and virtue and freedom. And that is what the new left, meaning, you know, the old left and the horseshoe right, would love to destroy. It's why the attacks have been coming fast and furious for weeks now. They want to destroy traditional conservatism. It is their goal in life. They want to destroy it for a couple of different reasons. The left for one reason, the woke right. For another, in our supposed vulnerability, people from Nick Fuentes to Tucker, from Candace Owens to New York magazine, from the Washington Post to Megyn Kelly, they see an opportunity, an opportunity to supplant traditional conservatism with a conspiratorial grievance, addled, nutty version of populism. Or in Megan's case, just make some quick clicks in cash. It's a lucrative grift. It's a dangerous grift for America. So why is this happening? Well, obviously for the media left, we under get. We get it. We get it. For the media left, we get it. They're always happy to run this grift because they love a right that is crazy. They don't want a right that is characterized by normie beliefs. They want a right that's nuts. Because the easiest way to make AOC president in the 2028 election is to have that nutty lady run against a conservative movement that is focused on Brigitte Macron's testicles or demon attacks in the wilds of Maine or why the Jews are responsible for your incurable gingivitis and horrific body odor and inability to get a date. Now, as for the woke right, you know, the new left again, that would be Fuentes and Tucker and Candace and company. They're ecstatic about all of this for both business and political reasons. One, there are competition. But second, they want to tear down traditional conservatism. Their whole goal is to cannibalize the traditional conservative audience. There are, by all available metrics, a hell of a lot more traditional conservatives and rational people in this country then nuts. But their goal is to gut the conservative movement and then turn it into a skin suit for their own perverse politics. That's the whole thing, which is why many of them are now coming out as Democrats. That unity is the thing. That unity is the thing. This is why Russia Today. Russia Today is the official outlet for the Kremlin, right? It is run by. The Russian government is retweeting Nick Fuentes triumphalism Today Fuentes tweeted out I won. After that New York magazine piece came out that Fuentes won. Well, I don't know. Living in your basement and streaming for eight hours a day while jacking off to the Cowboys, it's a form of winning. I said, all right. I mean whatever. Whatever floats your boat, my dude. You might call the Russia Today Fuentes get together an online Molotov Ribbentrop pact. Well, it's also why the Washington Post is happy to quote Candace Owens, the ranting bag lady of the Internet, to explain that the Daily Wire's numbers are down again. That alliance between the left and the woke right is totally real and it's active. This is why they are getting together to formulate stories. It is why they are repeating the same talking points. Now Candace says that the Daily Wire's numbers are down because people don't want to be lectured. And this is the teenage point of view from Candace and Megan and Tucker. They're all saying the same thing. They don't want to. They don't want to be lectured. Don't lecture me. Megan tweeted in March 2026. You're the coward, Ben. And your moral preening, priggish lectures and holier than thou judgments are the reason you are losing fans and more than that, friends at a record rate. All these people are on the same script. They're all on the same script. And also because as people who traffic and crap for sweet, sweet lucre, they would love to be spared the lecture. They don't want to be lectured as they grift. So they're gonna do the same thing that you know, a 13 year old boy would do if caught doing naughty things on his on his iPad. They don't want to be lectured. Don't you lecture me. Well, it turns out sometimes in life people need lectures in decency, in reason and in truth. You know, people who smear the wives of murdered men or cover for people who smear for the wives of murdered men. Those people deserve lectures. Maybe the people who revive Nazi propaganda. Maybe the people who have a weird interest in the non existent testicles of the spouses of French politicians. Or maybe the people who make a cause with actual Nazi stance. Maybe those people deserve lectures. Maybe the people who are repeating talking points from Hasan Piker and mimicking the propaganda of Vladimir Putin, or people who just randomly start cursing so much and are hanging out with the Grupo adjacent and embracing Islamic. Maybe those people deserve lectures. I don't know. Well, listen, there's always a big YouTube audience for that sort of crap. But let's be real, there's a massive online audience for pornography as well. People addicted to both deserve a bit of a lecture. But let's get back to the central issue. The point of the attacks on the Daily Wire is of course, not just to attack the Daily Wire, it's to destroy traditional conservatism. That's the whole thing. The entire thing. All of it. Every bit of it. That's the whole thing. The reason they are coming after the Daily Wire is because they want to come after you. They want to come after traditional conservatives who believe traditionally conservative things. It is no coincidence that at the same time the Washington Post and New York Magazine and all the rest of these legacy left publications are attacking the Daily Wire, they're also writing strange new respect features on Neg Fuentes and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson. The left wants those people to win, by the way. They're not hiding it very well. New York magazine's piece says, quote, like the Rockefeller Republican of yore, the Shapiro Republican could go extinct entirely. That's what they want, right? They want traditional Normie Republicans to go away. It's what they want and it's what they hope for. And listen, maybe it will turn out that all these people who hate conservatism and what I consider to be traditional American principles, maybe they're right. Maybe it'll turn out that the future of the right, perverted by the algorithmic insanity of the Internet is sloppyism. You know, the Tucker style grievance conspiracism, complete with the night Scratching demons, or Candace Owens his usual brand of kukri, or Nick Fuentes's transgressive Nazi cosplay, or Theo Vaughn's man Child podcast illiteracy. Maybe that's where the right goes. Maybe that's what comes next. Maybe that's all facilitated by the click whoring of the Megyn Kelly's of the World and justified by an appeal to audience numbers. Because none of these people ever appeal to morality. They just point to their clicks. Maybe Idiocracy wasn't a satire. Maybe it was a prophetic documentary. But here's the thing from where I sit, that does not change one single thing for me. Not a single thing. See, here's the thing. I've been doing this since I was 17 years old. I started off when I was 17 years old writing a syndicated column on politics. I didn't do that because I wanted to get rich that way. That's not how you get rich. I got into politics because I cared about the truth, about saying things that I believe to be eternal and true. Because I care about the ideas of conservatism. It's why I've done that for all these years. I care about free markets and I care about private property and I care about equal rights before the law and checks and balances and the Constitution. I care about all of those things. I care about the America that the founders promised us and the America that our parents and grandparents fought and worked for. And I'm not gonna lie for cash. I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna tell you about the wonders of Moscow's supermarkets or the glories of Sharia law in Qatar. I'm not gonna pander for clicks by pretending that Erica Kirk might have been complicit in Charlie Kirk's murder or that perverse and malicious questions about TPUSA's cover up are somehow a bizarre form of investigative journalism. I'm not gonna wink and nod at the transgressiveness of the Nazi incels or chuckle along with people who pretend that a conspiratorial elite are the reason your life isn't everything that you want it to be. In the freest and most prosperous country in world history. I'm gonna be grateful for America and I'm gonna point out what's great about America and what our principles are. I'm not gonna do any of that other stuff because here's the thing. I got into this business to do precisely the opposite. I haven't changed my principles. I've been doing this for 25 years. I have not changed my principles. Now there's a question that I get a lot these days, a lot from friends, from family. People will come up and they'll say, what happened to all these people? Yeah, they understand New York Magazine and Washington Post and what they are. But what happened to, you know, Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson or Megyn Kelly and all the rest? And I don't know the answer because I'm not a psychiatrist. But here's what I do know. Nobody has, has ever asked that question about me. No one. Because my worldview has not changed. It has not changed. My principles haven't changed because I think those principles are true and good. And those principles are not going to change. So in the end, take it or leave it. If people decide they don't wanna hear it, it's a free country. That's their choice. But I am willing to bet my future and the future of America that more Americans agree with me than agree with the people who want to destroy the Daily Wire. I'm betting there are a lot more rational people in this country than conspiracy mongering nutjobs. I'm betting that there are way more people in America who believe in truth and virtue and freedom than people who revel in grievance and demoralization and stupidity. And again, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm wrong, maybe we lose. But here's the thing that also doesn't change a thing. It doesn't change a thing. It doesn't make sense matter. Because the only thing that matters is the only thing that has ever mattered to me. Speaking the truth, whether people like it or whether they don't. Because facts still don't care about your feelings. This is the Ben Shapiro Show. Now, speaking of people who would love for the west to fall apart. And again, I think that the attack on the Daily Wire is in large part that. I think that this coordinated assault on the Daily Wire is. If you can take out the leading conservative online institution in America, you do an awful lot of damage. There are a lot of people all over the world who really dislike the fundamental principles of the West. That is particularly true of the left, of course. Greta Thunberg yesterday spent her day protesting the deportation of illegal immigrants in Sweden. Again, it is amazing to me that the entire legacy media treated Greta Thunberg. I'm allowed to make fun of her now, cuz she's over 18. When she was a child, she was basically a child soldier for the left should go out there. And if you pointed out that what she was saying made no sense, you were attacking a child. Well, now she's an adult, which means that I can mock her and her stupid beliefs. But the movement to destroy the west is not relegated just to the United States. Obviously. Here is Greta Thunberg protesting the deportation of illegal immigrants in Sweden.
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In Sweden, people who came here as children, grew up here and built their entire lives here are now increasingly being deported without their families to countries they have no connection to and that are very much not safe for them to be in. And these young people did not do anything wrong. They followed the path given to them and are especially children of labor migrants who upon turning 18, now risk losing the right to stay here. And this is in light of Sweden becoming increasingly hostile and racist in its migration politics like so, so many other parts of the world.
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Again, this is a woman who has lived off the largesse of the richness of Western society and has spent her entire teenage years and now young adulthood protesting the west that made her famous in the first place. Right? This is a lady who gets on boats and floats her way across the Mediterranean to try to enter Israel, whereupon she's immediately put back on an El Al flight out of the country. Or she's the one who is getting herself fake arrested for the cameras. And yet she's there saying that what really needs to happen is again, the mass migration invasion of the West. Not relegated to Europe, of course. You got Hasan Piker over here in the United States embraced by a wide variety of top level Democrats. He spent yesterday lecturing Democrats not to engage in what he called China hawkery. Quote, democrats do not try to engage in China hawkery. Please do not repeat your mistakes. The best and only path forward is peaceful coexistence and cooperation. Yes, love your new masters. Love your new Chinese masters. Says the guy who was literally in China talking about the glories of, of Mao Zedong. And there are a lot of people in the west, homegrown and imported, who really, really do not like the West. Do not like it one little bit, like at all. Now Democrats are imbibing from this. Well, they have decided that it's important to read you all the institutions of America to enforce these political principles from above. Kamala Harris yesterday, who again will not go away. It's kind of amazing. I don't know why she thinks she's going to be president because again she ran and she lost. But she ain't going away. She says she wants to have a no bad ideas brainstorm. Just gonna point out at this point there are tons of bad ideas. Truly, there are a lot of bad ideas. Whenever a teacher says there are no stupid questions, there are, there are stupid questions and there are also stupid people. And there are also bad ideas. And they're also bad people. And it turns out all of them come together in this little clip from Vice President Kamala Harris.
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This is a moment where there are no bad ideas. No bad idea brainstorm is what I'd like to call it. And in that no bad ideas brainstorm, we talk about what we need to do and think about doing around the electoral college. We talk about the idea of Supreme Court reform, which includes expanding the Supreme Court. We invite a conversation about multi member districts. Let's talk about statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C. these are the things I think that we've got to do. We've got to neutralize these red states from cheating, including blue states, expanding their maps. And all of this I think is, look, we gotta Fight fire with fire. These folks are playing to win. We gotta play to win, too.
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Again, the idea that the far left is going to implement its vision through terrible ideas like Supreme Court expansion or randomly adding states in order to remake the Senate. Now, this is dangerous stuff. Truly dangerous stuff. Alrighty. Coming up, we'll get to the Democrats race baiting and President Trump's China visit. And is Cuba about to fall? We'll get to all of it. First, let me ask you something. Do you actually know where all of those old family videos are right now? For most people, the answer is something like, well, there's probably a box in the garage somewhere. That's not great because garages and attics are basically where memories go to slowly disintegrate. Heat, moisture, time. All that old media breaks down. VHS tapes, camcorder tapes, old film reels, photographs. People assume that stuff lasts forever. It absolutely does not. Every year you see these stories after fires or floods where people say the thing they miss most is the family footage they can never replace. This is why Legacy Box is an amazing idea. Legacy Box helps you protect those memories before it's too late. They're the world's largest digitizer of home movies and photos, and the process is incredibly easy. You send them your old tapes, film reels, photos, whatever you got sitting in storage. Their team professionally digitizes everything by hand in Tennessee. Then they send it back to you as digital files on the cloud or a thumb drive or along with all your original media. And they handle more than 15 different kinds of media. You name it. VHS tapes, camcorder tapes, Super 8 film reels, photos, DVDs, all the stuff people have sitting around deteriorating. Like right now. We've done legacy box for my family. So I have all of my old childhood videos and photos. We did it for my parents, and they have theirs as well. It's awesome. It's amazing. Preserving your family's collection is the only way to ensure your legacy is safe for generations. Join over 1.5 million families who have already used the legacy box. Don't wait. The risk is too great. Visit legacybox.com Shapiro get started today. Save 50%. That's legacybox.com Shapiro and the Democratic Party continues in the end to use whatever is at hand. It is not about principle for them. It is simply about power. I think the best example today is their use of the race cards. This is pretty funny. The Democrats have decided that the way they are going to run in the midterm elections is to claim that Republicans are racist for redrawing electoral maps. Representative Sean Kastin of Illinois. He is comparing the Supreme Court to the kkk, including presumably Clarence Thomas, you know, the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court who is black. Now, Chief Justice Roberts has said that
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we now live in a colorblind society.
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To which I would ask you all, does your answer to those questions depend on whether their robe is white or black?
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Because make absolutely no mistake, the agenda of this Supreme Court and the agenda of the Klan are far too similar.
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The Supreme Court and the Klan have the same agenda. This is what Democrats are going to run on. Gavin Newsom saying the same thing. Gavin Newsom, who will say anything to anybody. The governor of California. He says that Republicans right now are engaged in Jim Crow 2.0. They need a new line. By the way, they've been using this Jim Crow 2.0 crap for decades. Aren't we at least at like 3 or 4.0? When's the next upgrade? When do we get Jim Crow 5.0? How does this work? And then he says anti woke is anti black. So you thought woke was dead wrong. You are. Democrats are going to bring it back with a vengeance. This just Jim Crow 2.0. It's sick. Stone cold racism in a scale I never thought I'd see in my lifetime.
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Never have seen in my lifetime.
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It's all happening. Bring us back to a pre1960s world. It's jaw dropping. What's happening? It was jaw dropping what Governor Landry did. He suspended a primary election where tens
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of thousands of people had already voted. Why?
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To redistrict two districts to eliminate black representation.
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I can't believe we're experiencing this. My parents talked to me about this.
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I said, well, thank God it's not
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going to happen on my lifetime and
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it's happening in real time.
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Anti woke is anti black. Anti woke is anti black. Again, you thought the wokeness had gone wrong. You are. The threat is ever present. But here's the thing. It's all a power play. It's all a power play. Hilarious article in Politico today about whether Democrats really care all that much about black voting power. And here is what the article says. Apparently, in theory, Democrats would love to maintain majority minority districts. However, if they are reminded about the context of the Supreme Court ruling that said that you're not supposed to be drawing racial districts and Republican gerrymandering, which is to say the drawing of more Republican districts, suddenly a 45% plurality of Democrats say that Democrats must counter GOP efforts, quote, even if it means reducing the number of majority minority districts. So it turns out that if power comes up against principle, power wins every time. For the Democrats, Democratic governance not going to be great. Speaking of which, we now have new details. Remember just a couple of days ago, Zormandani was bragging about the magic that he had performed, the magic he had performed with regard to the New York City budget. Remember, he said that he was going to do an amazing job with the New York City budget, that he had closed the budget gap. Well, it turns out what actually happened is that he just got a bailout from the state. And also according to the New York Post, that pied a terre tax. That would be the tax on the second homes in New York, which again is a ridiculous tax. Immediately the threshold for taxation has been lowered. According to the New York Post, a controversial new tax on second homes in New York City was quietly lowered from $5 million to a market value of $1 million, increasing the number of homeowners who will get squeezed as part of Governor Kathy Hochul's never ending budget negotiations. Hochul's office finally released details of her and Mayor Zoran Mamdani's new tax on second homes in New York City to the New York Times on Thursday. The latest concession to the democratic socialist mayor and his liberal followers on a tax hike crusade. They say we'll target the rich. The Democratic program, it never sleeps. The open borders, high taxation woke program, it never sleeps and it never stops. Okay, on over to China. So the President of the United States completed his China visit. Not much of a tremendous outcome from the China visit. I wasn't expecting much to come out of it. I wasn't expecting a giant Trump win or a giant Trump loss. And that seems to be what has emerged in all of this. The President of the United States mainly went over there and was nice to Xi and Xi was nice to him. And we'll have to see how the negotiations play out. When it came to the issue of Taiwan, basically, we are where we started. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, says that the United States will oppose any forced change in the status quo. In other words, China simply annexing or invading Taiwan.
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From our perspective, any forced change in the status quo and the situation that's there now would be bad for both countries. One of the things the Chinese emphasize, which we agree is strategic stability in our relationship, a constructive relationship, but also one that establishes strategic stability so that we don't have misunderstandings that can lead to broader conflict. And so we always reiterate the point we hear them when they say this. We always respond by saying anything that would compel or force a change. And what we have now would be problematic and that we would. Certainly our policies on that have not changed. It's been pretty consistent across multiple presidential administrations and remains consistent now.
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So again, Democrats were claiming that Trump was going to give up the ghost on Taiwan, and that's not true. As the Secretary of State said, strategic ambiguity remains the policy of the United States. Well, how about on Iran? So the President had claimed that China was making some moves to help us out with regard to Iran. Again, unclear whether that's going to materialize in any real way. We should say at this point that according to Iran International, the Iranian leadership is becoming increasingly frustrated with their economic situation. Iran International reports that senior Iranian officials have grown frustrated with the plan to generate revenue from shipping in the Strait of Hormuz with little money collected despite expectations of significant income. Again, Iran was trying to toll the straits. And it turns out everybody's just kind of waiting around and nobody's paying those tolls. Meanwhile, the CENTCOM chief, Brad Cooper, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that U.S. forces have destroyed more than 90% of Iran's inventory of 8,000 naval mines to prevent their deployment in the strait. And in his written testimony, he said that Operation Epic Fury had damaged or destroyed more than 85% of Iran's ballistic missile, drone and naval industrial base through more than 1,450 strikes on weapons grade manufacturing facilities. He said it would take Iran a generation to recover its navy and years for its drone and missile production to recover. So remember, there was a story earlier this week suggesting that Iran's missile silos were still fully intact and all that. Well, again, there might be a few missiles that are intact. The reality is their entire missile production base is gone. Not only that, according to Admiral Cooper, we have basically blown all of their fast boats out of the water, too. So their control over the Strait of Hormuz is weakening.
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Their capability have been significantly degraded. If I just use my own professional experience and 100 transits through the Strait of Hormuz, you would typically see 20 to 40 fast boats. And lately we've seen two or three.
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So again, the United States is winning. We are winning. Not just that. This is, I think, the biggest story that's been undercovered. He says the United States has now flipped the cost curve on drone warfare. So you saw all those propagandistic pieces from people like Congressman Ro Khanna suggesting that every time a drone went up on the Iranian Side, we had to fire a $45,000 missile at the thing. That's not true. Here is Cooper explaining.
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I'd like to use the opportunity to myth bust on drones.
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Okay?
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The days of $35,000 drones that we saw in the last couple of years, particularly in the fight against the Houthis in Yemen, those days are behind us. Today we face an increased threat from drones that are highly sophisticated, they're jet powered, they have high end sensors, they have electronic warfare, they have signals intelligence. So those days of using high value defenses to shoot down cheap targets are behind us. Quite the contrary. What we have been doing lately is using our own low cost, one way attack drones attacking Iran, making them use higher end, more expensive weapons. So I can confidently tell you we have flipped the cost curve in many ways. Always work to be done. But I like where we are in this regard.
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I mean, again, that's big news. That was totally undercovered. Well, how's it going with China? Well, the president, of course, was in China. He spoke with Xi. He said that Xi has said he's not going to give military equipment to Iran. There was the president.
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You've been asked about it and you've spoken about it, and that is China's support of Iran.
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How big a discussion was that today?
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We discussed it. I mean, when you say support, they're not fighting a war with us or anything. No, he said he's not going to give military equipment. That's a big statement. He said that today. That's a big statement.
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Okay, so again, if that's the case, then that's a great thing. Trump says that she also wants a deal made with regard to Iran and said that they would like to be of. I'm sure they want to be of help. The question is what kind of help.
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He would like to see a deal made. And he did offer, he said, if I can be of any help at all, I would like to be of help. Because he did say that. Yeah, he did say that. And look, anybody that buys that much oil has obviously got some kind of a relationship with him. But he said, I would love to be of help if I could be of any help whatsoever. He'd like to see the Hormuz Strait open.
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Now, again, what does that mean? I think it's totally unclear at this point. The China's Ministry of Foreign affairs, they put out a statement suggesting that China's position on the Iran situation is very clear. The conflict has initiated severe losses on the people in Iran and other regional countries. But the spillover still, expanding the conflict has put a heavy strain on global economic growth, supply chains, international trade order, etc. Etc. There's no point in continuing the conflict. Okay guys, you know what you could do? You could force the Iranians to give up the Ghost. You could cut off your support for the Iranians and you could tell them that they received no support from you absent them turning over their nuclear materials and opening the strait. That's what needs to happen. It doesn't appear that is going to happen. By the way, China is still giving low level support to the Iranians. According to the New York Times, Chinese companies have been discussing arms sales with Iran, plotting to send the weapons through other countries to mask the origins of the military aid. Presumably they use Pakistan as a cutout. Just another reason why we should not be using Pakistan as our place of negotiations in any of this. And I've said it before, I'll say it again. It seems to me the clear path out of this, if you want China to actually flip the clear path out of this is to destroy Iran's energy facilities once they have nothing that they can actually export to the Chinese. The Chinese will be greatly annoyed with the Iranians shutting down the Strait of Hormuz. If the Iranians can't provide the Chinese what they want, of what use are they to the Chinese? That would be the big question. Okay, then there is the issue of the economy. Again, there are multiple issues that came up with regard to China and the United States. In the President's trip, Scott Bessant, the Treasury Secretary, was in the room for a lot of these meetings and he says that we are going to be discussing guardrails on AI with the Chinese. But I guarantee you Secretary Besant is not going to hand over leadership of AI to the Chinese on the basis of some specious perception that the Chinese are interested in safety.
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First of all, the good news is the US is the the undisputed leader in the world here. We have the greatest AI companies. We're actually going to be discussing the AI guardrails with the Chinese. Well, because the Chinese are substantially behind us, but they have a very advanced AI industry here. So the two AI superpowers are going to start talking. We're going to set up a protocol in terms of how do we go forward with best practices for a AI to make sure non state actors don't get a hold of these models
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again. Does that mean that we're actually gonna be cooperating much with the Chinese? I think not. Again, I think most of this visit was Just pro forma. I think much came out of it. Bessen talked about the formation of a board of trade or a board of investment for US China negotiations. He said there are lots of things China could invest in. We just wanna make sure that those things don't get referred to to CFI US to make sure that they're not trying to invest in sensitive economic areas and security areas for us. Here is the Treasury Secretary.
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We talked about purchases, we talked about some issues that the Chinese side have. And we're going to talk about forming a board of trade for the bilateral trade between the US And China. And we're going to talk about a board of investment that will be responsible for investment in non sensitive areas.
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Okay, whatever. Again, I don't think this is much of a big deal. The only thing that happened on this trip that I find troubling, truly the only thing that I find really troubling is what the President had to say about Chinese students coming to the United States. Now, I made the case earlier this week that the United States should ban Chinese foreign exchange students. They're an enemy regime when they send hundreds of thousands of students here. They're not doing so in order to enrich America. They're not doing so in order to immigrate to the United States. If they want to immigrate to the United States, they should apply for immigration papers. Coming here on a student visa to learn about our tech and then going back and stealing our tech or going back and strengthening our enemies. I don't see the purpose of this. The truth is that our university system is heavily reliant on foreign exchange students who are paying full freight as opposed to many students locally who are paying discounted freight. It doesn't matter if the universities have to take it on the chin. Frankly, they should, given the amount of fraud they've perpetuated against their own students. But if the universities have to take it on the chin, I guess that should be a consequence of national security. There's one area where I think the President is just wrong here. He was telling Sean Hannity that there would be a brain drain if we ban Chinese students from the United States. I mean, I'm sure there are smart people who had not come to American universities, but the point is they're going back where they came from and bringing all our stuff with them.
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I could tell them I don't want any students. It's a very insulting thing to say to a country. They would then immediately go out and start building universities all over China. But if you don't have those students, good students, by the way, if you don't. And we do another thing, you know, if they're good and they want to stay in America, we won't give them a green card and things like that, you know, and that not only them, but other countries. But if you want to see a university system die, take a half a million people out of it.
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So again, you want to see the American university system die? I mean, don't threaten me with a good time, Mr. President. You want to see the American university system die? I mean, the university system, aside from stem, is really kind of a trash heap at this point. Admitting hundreds of thousands of Chinese students to American universities in order to keep Yale alive seems like bad policy to me. How about the Democrats? Well, the Democrats, of course, responded to President Trump in China with all of their usual panic. Chuck Schumer made the case that Trump was going to sell out America. No evidence that he did that, of course. Just a day into Trump's trip to China and he hasn't done anything to ease concerns that he might sell out America. He arrived with a posse of billionaires in tow, including his own son, who oversees the family business. This kind of stuff is just incredible. So much for fighting against how China is hurting American workers and poisoning our communities with fentanyl. That would get in the way of Donald Trump and his family profiting off doing business with the Chinese Communist Party. I mean, it's so exaggerated, it's so silly. And it is amazing to watch as Democrats suddenly become hawkish on China. So hawkish that Hasan Piker has to tweet out at them not to do it. The bottom line is, did anything get done in China? Not much. Was a giant fail? No. Was it a giant success? Not really, because there wasn't that much for the President to actually get done. Status quo ante seems to be where we are in the end. All right, coming up, we keep hearing over and over and over that developers, they're the ones who are causing all of the housing costs to go up. I have some bad news for people with this dumb theory. First, at this point, running a household with children basically requires the organizational structure of a mid sized government. As parents, we need calendars and backup calendars and coordinated transportation schedules. Somebody apparently has to know where every shoe is in the house at all times. I mean, that. That is literally my life. This is a thing that I have to do all the time. Home life can be chaotic, but hiring at the Daily Wire, well, it's pretty straightforward because we use ZipRecruiter. What makes ZipRecruiter useful is speed and precision. Their matching technology helps identify qualified candidates quickly. The screening questions help narrow down who actually fits the role. Instead of wasting time sorting through hundreds of irrelevant applications, you can also immediately see how many qualified applicants are available in your area. That makes planning a lot easier. And when you find talented people who are genuinely passionate about the work, everything just functions better. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the very first day. Try it for free today at ZipRecruiter.com Daily Wire that's ZipRecruiter.com/Daily Wire. ZipRecruiter is indeed the smartest way to hire. Go check them out right now. Ziprecruiter.com Daily Wire in other news, there's been a lot of talk, obviously, about housing affordability in the United States. And as we've been discussing, there are a lot of areas of the United States where actually the cost of housing has been precipitously dropping over the course of, of the last couple of years. Not the heavily regulated areas, but a lot of other areas, and people are moving to those areas. I know, I know, this is verboten. You're not allowed to say that if you're a young person and you're living in a place that is too expensive to live that perhaps you might consider moving, even temporarily, somewhere else where it is cheaper to live to grant you an upward economic trajectory. I know we're not allowed to talk about that. We're supposed to pretend that the best policy is for you to sit in an apartment too expensive for you until you are foreclosed upon and, and lose your house. And then you can sit there watching the grievance mongers on the right tell you that it's all the fault of the Illuminati or something. But the reality is that Americans are using their feet to go to the places where they are likely to be more successful, which is a thing that Americans historically have done. There's a fascinating chart from the Wall Street Journal talking about the fastest growing cities in America, it turns out. Where are they? They're in the exurbs. The exurbs are, you know, the suburbs, but slightly further out. According to the Wall Street Journal, the latest Census Bureau data show that some of the fastest growing cities are often sitting in the distant orbit of a larger city and centered on booming master plan communities. Wait, did you say master plan communities? What? Who's building those master plan communities? Would those be corporations building the master plan communities and bringing down the prices so people can move there? But I thought the corporations were bad and terrible and horrible and raising the price of real estate. But wait, if it turns out the corporations are the one building the house, then oh no. What do we do about the fact that that entire narrative is stupid? Speaking of which, just gonna point out all this talk about corporate landlords buying up houses, increasing the rental stock but decreasing the housing stock for sale. It turns out that corporate landlords basically own almost none of the American housing market. A very, very small percentage. As this chart from John Byrne's research and consulting demonstrates, the vast majority of homes in the United States are purchased by the owner occupant. And then there's a pretty heavy share, people who own one to nine units, but the people who own like a ton of units, meaning like a thousand plus units, extremely small, 100 to 999 units, also extremely small. Turns out that the best policy when it comes to housing and affordability is to let the free market work its magic. As with all products and goods and services, private property and protection of property rights and low regulation leads to more production of the products and services people want okay, we do have an update for you on Luke Rosiak's fraud series, which is making waves again. Daily Wire does a lot of things One of the reasons the critiques have been leveled at the Daily Wire more broadly, not just against me personally, but at our institution, is cuz we actually are doing things in the world. Luke Rosiak's investigative journalism in Ohio is making a lot of waves. The latest installment of his series on Medicaid fraud and waste in Ohio shows that Ohio's Medicaid paid almost $6 million to a home health company that was owned by a convicted felon and our government programs run with enormous amounts of bloat in them. According to Luke's piece, Omega Healthcare Services is based on in a black windowless building in Columbus, a city that boasts one of the largest African immigrant populations in the country and also gets the bulk of the state's Medicaid dollars. When the Daily Wire visited its office during business hours, the door was locked and no one was there. The same building houses other home health care companies. One company collected seven and a half million bucks since 2018. Omega was certified to begin receiving Medicaid dollars for home health in November 2020 and they ended up receiving almost $6 million. The owners are people named Esther and Robert at Chiempong. Robert pled guilty to stealing 19 grand in 2005 from the IRS and also a priest. Stealing from a priest seems great. He received house arrest, by the way. Ended up in probation for 10 years after he got another felony conviction. The feds put out a $15,000 lien against him that was never collected. His accounting firm received 25 grand in forgivable Covid loans in the interim. And people who are willing to take government money and just abuse it, turns out they're willing to take it from all sorts of sources. Covid funding, Medicaid, fraud, all of it. Well, Vice President of the United States, who's been put in charge of rooting out waste and fraud in the federal government programs, he's out there making the case that we need to change the situation. He was out campaigning in Maine. Here's what he had to say. Something that we've seen in Minneapolis, but also in Maine. We have seen people go out there and say that they're providing services to autistic children, when in reality they maybe don't have any children at all, or they certainly don't have autistic children. So they get paid millions and millions of your dollars to provide services that they're not actually providing. And oh, by the way, what happened to the autistic children and their families who actually need those services and need a competent government to ensure that they're doing the right? My friends, this has gone on for far too long. You have been fleeced by your own
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government for far too long.
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And we are stopping it every single day. And again, we are proud to be reporting on this sort of stuff. Luke is doing amazing work. Meanwhile, CMS Administrator Dr. Oz is detailing that there are tons of red flags in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom is pretending everything is hunky dory. California Medicaid deferral that the vice President mentioned is $1.34 billion. Their submissions of Medicare records in the backup estimates are generating major red flags for us. And we have looked carefully at these records we are allowed to audit. Looking back for a quarter, Dan Brillman, Caprice Knapp, who lead the Medicaid program, spearheaded this effort. And with a great team, we've discovered $630 million in of billions billing from the folks who are egregiously the top 5% of outliers in billing. This is numbers so big, you can't imagine anyone billing for these numbers of patients and that much for each patient. And so we're asking California to clarify for us how it got there. I have a feeling California is not going to clarify. Back to foreign policy. Cuba seems to be on its last legs, apparently. The CIA chief John Ratcliffe met with officials in Havana on Thursday. He met with the Cuban Interior Minister and the head of the country's intelligence service. Cuba's government said the meeting took place at the request of the United States. And Ratcliffe said that Cuba needed to make fundamental changes to work with the United States. He warned that President Trump should be taken seriously. He referred to a US Military raid that deposed Nicolas Maduro. Of course. And by the way, charges are now coming down for Raul Castro in American court. So is that the predicate to a raid on the Castro family? The Cuban President, Miguel Diaz Canal says that the deterioration of the island's electricity grid had a single cause, quote, the genocidal energy blockade imposed on our country by the United States. He says, quote, if there is truly a willingness on the part of the United States government to provide aid in the amounts it announces and in full conformity with universally recognized practices for humanitarian assistance, it will encounter no obstacles or ingratitude from Cuba. The damage could be alleviated in a much easier and more expeditious way by lifting or easing the blockade. Okay, so there is a limitation, by the way, in the end, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, in the end, the economic measures that we have taken in order to cut the legs out from under these regimes, someone is going to have to rise up and overturn the regimes. If you want the Castro regime and his successors to be gone, you need to literally overturn the regiment. Yes, right now we are strangling the Venezuelan regime. They can't do what they want, but if a democrat gets in power, you think they're going to keep that up? We need to be moving swiftly toward a replacement of the regime in Venezuela because otherwise all the gains that we have earned by arresting Maduro and stationing some, some ships off the coast, those will be lost. We should be pressing the regime to hold elections in Venezuela. That is a thing that should be happening. There should be a form of regime change pushed on the Venezuelans, not using military force, but using that economic power. And if not, then there needs to be facilitation of a movement inside Venezuela to overthrow the government. The same thing needs to happen in Cuba. Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, he says we can't have a failed state 90 miles from our shore. Obviously,
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our plan for Cuba is a prosperous future. That's what we want. It's in our national interest and to have a prosperous Cuba, not to have a failed state 90 miles from our shores.
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Marco Rubio went on to suggest that Cuba will never be successful with the regime, which of course is true.
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Cubans are successful everywhere in the world except one place, Cuba. And so that's what we want. We don't want Cubans not to have to leave that island in order to be successful. But they can't. Because the current model they have is not just it's broken, it doesn't work and it'll never change as long as the people that are there now are running it. They are close minded, unfortunately.
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Okay, so the question is going to be what replaces and how does that replacement happen? How does that happen? It's going to require some domestic opposition, a domestic uprising in all likelihood. That is the purpose of the blockade, which is effective. It is the purpose of strangleholding all of the oil supplies in Venezuela or of the Strait of Hormuz blockade that we now have working there. I know that regime change has become a dirty word, but not all regime change has to happen at the cost of American lives. There's been lots of regime change. Historically that has happened because domestic opponents rose up and did something about it. The conditions, precedent have been put in place in Venezuela, in Cuba, and yes, in Iran. The time is coming when the people are going to have to do something about it already. Coming up, we're going to jump into the mailbag. I want to answer some of your questions. But remember, in order to have your questions answered or even to watch this part of the show, people, you have to become a subscriber. We appreciate it that you are. You allow us to continue bringing you truth and virtue and freedom. You allow us to continue telling you the truth, not lying to you. For clicks, become a member. Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.
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Martin Luther King Jr. Is an American icon widely considered one of the greatest Americans who ever lived. A man who had a vision for a colorblind society, a post racial America. He had a dream. It's just not the dream you thought it was. Were his true aims a colorblind society? Or something far more radical? Who bankrolled him? What unfolded behind the scenes in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. Was civil disobedience actually peaceful? We wanted to show you a clip of the I have a Dream speech, but according to our lawyers, we can't. In fact, King's family has made a lot of money suing media outlets. They want to silence critics like us. What they're doing makes it very difficult to judge Martin Luther King, Jr. Not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. Is America today stronger, more unified and racially equal than before King's rise? These questions demand answers, and as Americans, we are entitled to a full accounting of the civil rights movement and its consequences. King's movement fundamentally transformed our country and our system of government. I speak as a citizen of the world.
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Each day the war goes on.
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The hatred increases, though the cause of evil prospers.
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First part of our two part special on the civil rights movement, a New Constitution, available now on Daily Wire.
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Plus, Sam.