Ep. 2101 - Alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO Shooter CAPTURED…HERE’S WHAT WE KNOW
49:27 Share

Folks, the alleged shooter of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan last week has now been arrested. He was arrested yesterday in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

This apparently happened because somebody at a local McDonald's saw him and his picture had been plastered across the news and they recognized him. They called the police. The police showed up. They searched him and they found a so-called ghost gun, a 3D printed gun. They found a bevy of fake IDs. He apparently also had a two-page manifesto on him that was radically anti-capitalist in nature. And it's sort of fascinating to get into who this person was.

I want to get into that. I also want to get into the public response to him, which to me is far more disturbing. And yes, I've seen the comments on my recent shows talking about how, believe it or not, it is very, very bad. It is, in fact, evil to shoot the UnitedHealthcare CEO, even if you are upset at the healthcare industry in the United States. The fact that this has to be said is sort of incredible.

But it does have to be said. So let's start with what we know about the alleged shooter here. His name is Luigi Mangione. And we have a policy on this show that we don't normally say the names of mass shooters. He is not a mass shooter. He's an individual murderer. And obviously his name is plastered all over the news. So you've seen him and you know about his name. His name is Luigi Mangione.

He is 26 years old. We know that he had upon him a 262-word handwritten document, so presumably written at the last minute, in which he said that UnitedHealthcare's market capitalization, even though it has grown American life expectancy, has not. This is according to the UK Daily Mail. He condemned companies...

That, quote, continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it. Mangione then reportedly also added that he acted alone and that the entire effort was self-funded, saying, quote, to save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly I wasn't working with anyone. These parasites had it coming. I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done. We'll get into that particular argument that it, quote, unquote, had to be done in a moment because one of the things about evil is that it tends to masquerade as good.

Nothing in the American healthcare system changed because the UnitedHealthcare CEO was shot. And in fact, one of the sort of outlying symptoms of evil is to use broad-based rationalizations about systemic problems in order to justify individual acts of evil, like murdering a father and CEO of a legal company that even if you don't like how the company runs, and I know a lot of doctors who don't like how UnitedHealthcare runs, they think the UnitedHealthcare rips off customers and fights them at every turn.

Whatever you think about UnitedHealthcare is irrelevant to the question of whether Brian Thompson should have been shot to death on the streets of New York. So more about the alleged shooter. According to the Wall Street Journal, a review of his reading diet suggested that at some point his ideas about activism had crossed into an interest in violence.

His circumstances were hard to reconcile with his standing, says the Wall Street Journal, less than a decade ago when he was a fresh-faced valedictorian at the nearly $38,000-a-year Gilman School in Baltimore, which he attended from the sixth grade until he graduated in 2016. Again, this is a very upper-class person from a very upper-class family. He ended up going to the University of Pennsylvania, where he would major in computer science and earn a master's degree. So this person has very high IQ, intelligent person.

A particular person from that class named Luigi Mangione, according to the Wall Street Journal, was inducted into an academic honor society reserved for top students in electrical and computer engineering. According to the Wall Street Journal, he appeared to enjoy Greek life, posting photos on Instagram of him and his Phi Kappa Psi fraternity brothers, often on a couch outside their house in Maryland.

The family is a well-known clan. They founded something called Lorient Healthcare, which is a senior care company with services including nursing and assisted living in 1977. And they also developed something called Turf Valley Resort, which is a spot and conference center in Maryland and suburban Baltimore's Hayfields Country Club. One of his cousins is a Republican member of the state House of Delegates. So again, very rich family, very wealthy family.

It appears, and you can examine his sort of political record all you want, and again, if you view his old Twitter account, for example, what you will see is a sort of bizarrely heterodox, sometimes center-right Twitter account. But what is very clear is that in recent months, he underwent some sort of serious health crisis, which was probably exacerbated by psychedelic use.

According to the Wall Street Journal, in recent months, there were hints he'd become estranged from friends and family, according to interviews, as well as his social media accounts, which might also shed light on his own health. So the banner photo of Mangione's ex-account features an X-ray of a person's back.

And the picture is pretty horrifying. This appears to be like an L4, L5 surgery, a spinal fusion surgery, which has a very low rate of success. It usually leaves people or very often at the very least leaves people with significant pain for life. So this person must have had a massive back injury. According to his friends, he did that while surfing.

His Goodreads profile showed that he had been reading books about back pain and apparently suffered from chronic back pain that, quote, affected all parts of his life, including his ability to have a romantic life or enjoy sports such as surfing, according to a person named Josiah Ryan, who is spokesman for the founder of a Hawaii co-housing complex where Mangione lived a couple of years ago in 2022. About six months ago, he says, Mangione stopped replying to texts and sort of disappeared.

So Mangione told a person named RJ Martin and others at this co-living facility in Hawaii, a place called Surf Break, that he was returning to the mainland to have back surgery. In late 2022, Ryan said that Mangione sent friends at Surf Break photos of his spinal x-ray and injured back. He did move back to Hawaii, but he stayed not at Surf Break and then stayed in touch by text

with his friend, R.J. Martin, and then he dropped off the radar about six months ago. According to a friend of R.J. Martin's, he just stopped replying to R.J.'s text. Part of the cognitive dissonance for R.J. is there was no indication from anyone, anyone at all, that this sort of thing might be in his future. Now, again, it's not a giant mystery because Mangione was posting about anxiety and mental health. He shared a quote by an Indian philosopher that read, quote, it is no measure of good health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Again, you can start to see the radicalism creeping into his social media accounts.

The law enforcement community is still trying to figure out exactly what happened in New York. He stayed at a hostel on Manhattan's Upper West Side. And then, of course, Thompson-

Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was intercepted by the alleged shooter Wednesday morning as he was walking to the Hilton Hotel for the UnitedHealthcare Annual Investor Conference. But apparently, according to social media posts, a lot of his friends were reaching out to the shooter asking where the hell he was. Quote, Hey, man, I need you to call me. I don't know if you are OK or just in a super isolated place, but I haven't heard from you in months.

This particular friend said, you made commitments to me for my wedding, and if you can't honor them, I need to know so I can plan accordingly. And then on October 30th, another person posted to his ex account, hey, are you okay? Nobody's heard from you in months. Apparently your family is looking for you. Now, according to the UK Daily Mail, he suddenly went radio silent while he was recovering from this back surgery, and he sought alternative forms of pain management, including psychedelics and magic mushrooms. Okay, so let me just be clear. There are a lot of podcasts and people out there who recommend use of, shall we say,

untested, unverified, uncontrolled studied drugs. And there are a lot of young people who are listening to these people and then taking these psychedelics. And it turns out that they are not harmless. One of the amazing things about sort of our constant information environment is that many of the same people who will suggest correctly that the overuse of pharmaceuticals can mess with your brain

will then pump themselves full of psychedelic drugs that are completely untested, that you don't know the effects of, and that can, in fact, cause serious mental issues.

On X, for example, Mangione had created a titled psych full of tweets about psilocybin. Those would be magic mushrooms. In January 25th of this year, he added to his Goodreads a book called Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, an Identification Guide, and quote, Mushrooms of Hawaii, an Identification Guide, which sort of suggests that he's walking around Hawaii, picking up mushrooms, identifying them, and then ingesting them, which is not going to be good for your mental health, folks.

Emergency physician Dr. Kashif Perzada wrote on X, the picture looks like a lumbar spinal fusion surgery. This would be his spinal fusion surgery that we talked about a moment ago. And again, there are lots of books on hisgoodreads.com about pain management. There's a guy named Jack Mack,

A staffer at Barstool Sports who said that high school friends of the alleged shooter claimed that he went crazy after being injured, quote, spoke with a source that had a lot of friends that went to high school with Luigi Mangione while keeps coming up as a back surgery that changed everything for him. And he went, quote, absolutely crazy. He moved to Japan. His contact with family stopped about a year ago. Recently, the family reached out to his friends from high school, asking if they even had information on him.

Some of the books that were on his Goodreads list included, quote, back in control, a spinal surgeon's roadmap out of chronic pain. Another is, quote, crooked, outwitting the back pain industry and getting on the road to recovery. Some friends, according to, again, this is the Daily Mail, now say that Mangione seems to have become radicalized after being laid off from a job at Trucar last year and then, of course, undergoing bad surgery. So that keeps coming up over and over and over. And again, there are indicators of just how radicalized he had become.

So, for example, he had posted about the Unabomber's manifesto over on Goodreads, a four-star book review. And here's what he wrote. It's a window into his mind and it's a window into how people who have quote-unquote social concerns...

can start channeling those into acts of individual evil, just as Ted Kaczynski did, the Unabomber. Quote, clearly written by a mathematics prodigy, reads like a series of lemmas on the question of 21st century quality of life. It is easy to quickly and thoughtlessly write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic. Again, this would be the alleged shooter who is writing this about the Unabomber.

in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it's simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out. He was a violent individual, rightfully imprisoned, who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a cradie Luddite, however, they're more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary. A take I found online that I think is interesting. Quote, had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere. And at the end of the day, he's probably right. Oil barons haven't listened to any environmentalists, but they feared him.

When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it's not terrorism, it's war and revolution. Fossil fuel companies actively suppress anything that stands in their way, and within a generation or two, it will begin costing human lives by greater and greater magnitudes until the Earth is just a flaming ball orbiting third from the sun. Peaceful protest is outright ignored. Economic protest is impossible in the current system. So how long until we recognize that violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self-defense? Again, this is his review of the Unabomber. So...

Some like minds happening here. These companies don't care about you or your kids or your grandkids. They have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck. So why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive? We're animals just like everything else on this planet, except we've forgotten the law of the jungle and bend over for our overlords when any other animal would recognize the threat and fight to the death for their survival. Violence never solved anything is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.

And that is a quote that he is quoting, a take that he's quoting about the Unabomber's manifesto. We'll get to more of this in a moment. First, you have an opportunity to open an IRA in gold with Birch Gold and receive free silver delivered to your home. During this special holiday season, Birch Gold is offering a complimentary one ounce of Silver Eagle for every $5,000 purchased. The best part is there's no out-of-pocket cost to you.

Here's how it works. Simply convert your existing IRA or 401k into a tax-sheltered IRA in physical gold, and Birch Gold will send your free silver coins directly to your home. Now, you might be thinking, why do I need to diversify into gold? Well, here's the thing. One of the most significant issues is our national debt. The fact is, it's important our nation is broke. Debt is a house of cards that cannot be

quickly dismantled. For as long as the economy is sitting on that house of cards, the strategy remains the same. Diversification. That's exactly why I buy gold from Birch Gold. So you should take action the way I have. Text Ben to 989898 before December 18th. Get a free info kit on gold and claim your eligibility for free silver on qualifying purchases from Birch Gold. Do this before December 18th. Again, text Ben to the number 989898 for peace of mind that lasts longer than four years. Again, text Ben to 989898 and talk to my friends over at

Birch Gold about how you should diversify. Also, selling a car privately can be a real pain in the butt. Endless negotiations, tire kickers, paperwork hassles, but there is a better way to get your unused car off your hands. For 30 years, Cars for Kids has perfected the car donation process to make it truly effortless. They'll take your car in any condition, running or not,

It will turn it into funds for kids in need, plus a tax deduction for you. It takes just two minutes on the phone or at carsforkids.org to donate. They'll take over from there, getting your car picked up as soon as the next day. No haggling, no scheduling conflicts, no paperwork nightmares. You'll receive a vacation voucher and maximum tax deduction while supporting proven programs that actually help kids reach their full potential. With over a million successful donations over three decades, Cars for Kids continues to be a trusted partner for car donors across the country. Again, it's free.

convenient, easy. It frees up your driveway while making a difference for the next generation. So give them a call right now. 1-877-CARS4KIDS. That's K-A-R-S, the number for kids. Or donate online at Cars4Kids. That's with the number four. Cars4Kids.org slash Ben. Donate your car today. That's Cars4Kids.org slash Ben to get started.

So you can see the extreme political radicalism here that suggests, again, that violence is justified because the system is unworkable, because the system is unfixable, and because grievances are justified. Now, the family of the alleged shooter did put out a statement saying, quote, our family is shocked and devastated by Luigi's arrest. We offer prayers to the family of Brian Thompson. We ask people to pray for all involved.

The statement also says the family only knows the facts of the case that have been released in the news or devastated by the news. The short statement says now, obviously, windows into the minds of people who have had serious health problems, who are messing around with psychedelics. It is very difficult. And I've said this before about alleged shooters and alleged criminals right and left. Mental illness, psychedelic use, all of these things play a role.

But the generalized willingness by many members of the media and in the political class to justify this sort of stuff is a symptom of something deeper and sicker going on in our society. So, for example, when this alleged shooter was still at large, according to the UK Metro, some of America's highest profile amateur sleuths are flat out refusing to help identify the killer.

TikTok sleuth, that Danish guy, told 2 million followers in a video, quote, I don't have to encourage violence. I also don't have to condone violence by any means, but I also don't have to help. Savannah Sparks, who has been reportedly tapped by police to help train officers in how to track suspects online, told NBC whether she's working on the case absolutely the F-naught.

Michael McWhorter, better known as a person named Tizzy Ent on TikTok, explained in a video, quote, I've yet to see anyone online posting, we've got to find this guy, we've got to get him off the street. I have, however, seen people making an argument, doing the hear me out thing, talking about how attractive the killer is, people calling him Robin Hood, people quite literally making fan art. I don't think it's that difficult to figure out why. I don't think there's a single person in this country who hasn't themselves or had someone very, very near and dear to them suffer from the absolutely abysmal thing that is privatized healthcare in this country.

Now, the thing about that that, of course, is amazing is that nationalized health care in places like the UK are full scale disastrous. And the same people who presumably were cheering on the alleged shooter in this case are in favor of a health care system that ends with lower life expectancy and actual government rationing of care. Many of them. But there is something deeper, a sickness that is going on in our political class, best exemplified by the absolute nut job. Taylor Lorenz used to work for The Washington Post.

as well as for Box. She was fired yesterday, it appears. She appeared on Piers Morgan yesterday. And I have to say that Piers, his show is entertaining largely because it has become the Jerry Springer of politics. But he had on Taylor Lorenz, and she said that she felt actual joy when the UnitedHealthcare CEO was murdered on the street.

I do believe in the sanctity of life. And I think that's why I felt, along with so many other Americans, joy, unfortunately, you know, because it feels like... Serious? I mean... Joy in a man's execution? Maybe not joy, but certainly not, no, certainly not empathy. Because again... We're watching the footage. How can this make you joyful?

This guy's a husband, he's a father, and he's being gunned down in the middle of Manhattan. Why is that making you joyful? So are the tens of thousands of Americans that are being murdered. So are the tens of thousands of Americans, innocent Americans, who died because greedy health insurance executives like this one push policies of denying care to the most vulnerable people.

Okay, again, this is the case that is being made by the political and media chattering class. Not all of them, but a large number of them. And it is, in fact, a real problem. By the way, it is not designed at solving the actual healthcare problems in the country. It turns out that healthcare in the United States is a giant cluster F. Everyone knows this. It is a mix of massive government subsidization, massive government regulation, and then private healthcare companies who are attempting to navigate all of that.

One of the big questions that you should always ask in a quasi-market system is why companies are choosing UnitedHealthcare. And the answer is because UnitedHealthcare is cheaper for the companies. And why aren't companies getting better healthcare for their employees? Because it turns out that there aren't a lot of other companies that are significantly better than UnitedHealthcare. Why? Because of the regulatory environment that surrounds health insurance companies. The profit margins on health insurance companies, by the way, are not 50%. They're more like 3% on average, 2% to 3% on average.

And it turns out that large parts of that are because of the bizarre subsidization of particular parts of the healthcare industry and the bizarre regulation of other parts of the healthcare industry. The American health insurance system is basically a Frankensteinian monster crafted by the conjunction of politics and business. And it ends up wasting an enormous amount of money on administrative overhead. It ends up with ugly negotiations between patients and insurance companies over what sort of doctors they can get.

The history of the American healthcare system is really complex. It is also really difficult to untangle because it also has disparate results in a wide variety of areas. So for example, if you have cancer, you would prefer to be in the United States. If you have a broken leg, you might prefer to be in a nationalized healthcare system depending on how the care is getting rationed. Like emergency care in nationalized healthcare systems sometimes is quite good because again, basic care

happens with alacrity. But if you have any sort of complex problem, you're not going to want to be there. You're going to want to be in the United States, which is why you see people from foreign countries like Canada and the UK traveling to the United States if they have cancer. A lot of this is really complicated. And that's sort of the point. There's a piece by Alicia Finley talking about how Obamacare helped exacerbate all of these problems. Quote, Obamacare's perversions effects are fueling public rage against insurers and support for a single payer system that would eliminate them.

Mr. Obama, Barack Obama, who pushed Obamacare, of course, and Peter Orszag, the law's chief architect, must be smiling. Orszag, who's now CEO of the financial services firm Lazard, has dined out on advising health insurance on mergers he said were spurred by the law's regulations. The U.S. is spending $2 trillion more on health care than it was back in 2010, but Americans are not any healthier.

Now, again, one problem is that having insurance doesn't change people's behavior. It causes them to use more care. Medicaid beneficiaries, for example, rush to the emergency room for non-emergencies because they are covered by Medicaid. They don't have deductibles or co-pays. Also, the Medicaid reimbursement rates are significantly lower than UnitedHealthcare, for example. So there are a lot of doctors who will not accept Medicaid. And then Obamacare expanded eligibility because states have tried to hold down Medicaid costs by reducing reimbursements.

Patients with exchange plans are not faring much better. Affordable Care Act plan networks include on average only 40% of local physicians and 21% of those employed by hospitals. Insurers are narrowing coverage to keep down costs because they sort of have to in many cases. They're also hiking deductibles, which this year averaged $5,241 for a typical plan. It turns out there are not a lot of easy solves for a complex system. And herein lies the actual problem.

There's nothing new about the United States people cheering murderous criminals. This has happened for a very long time in the United States. There are full movies about this sort of stuff, right? Bonnie and Clyde, famously with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, is a movie about the glorification of actual murderous criminals. John Dillinger, who robbed some 24 banks with his gang,

He was widely proclaimed a folk hero in the 1930s by one segment of the population. According to the Sunday Times, for example, his gang robbed more than a dozen banks between May 1933 and July 1934, stealing over 300 grand. He also destroyed thousands of mortgage records during the robberies, which made him very popular with poor people who were seeking to escape the payments that they owed to the banks. So back in the 1930s, obviously, there's a lot of frustration and anger at the banking system because of the Great Depression.

And so there was a sort of justification that went on of, for example, robbing banks or shooting bank managers. And as you can see in the alleged shooter in this case is justification of Ted Kaczynski. You can easily see the logic of this extending out to pretty much every aspect of free market enterprise in the United States. Healthcare, oil companies, banks, literally anything. If you don't like the way a business is acting, according to this logic, you should shoot somebody.

So why is that? Why is that happening? Well, there is now an entire media and political class dedicated to a simple proposition. America is so flawed. Its systems are so corrupt that criminality is a reasonable response to those flaws. This is demagoguery in a democracy, in a republic. The way that you change policy is by electing politicians. And then those politicians work with each other and with regulators at the state level, at the local level in order to change the policy.

Once you say that the system is so broken that the only solution

resort is revolutionary violence and not even useful revolutionary violence in the sense that you're overthrowing the system. At least if you're going to make the case for revolution, you have to make the case for overthrowing the entire system. But that's not what these people are doing. It's just nihilistic violence lashing out at a system that these people believe is targeting them in some way. Why do they believe that? Because instead of saying the truth, truthfully, instead of saying the real truth, which is that these systems are really complex, they are very difficult to fix.

There's a whole class of demagogues in political office and in the media who spend their days saying that all problems are easily solved except that there is an intractable coterie who want to keep people in misery for their own profit. And there's just a bunch of people who don't care, for example, if you are...

being denied alone. They're a bunch of people who don't care if you're having a tough time with the healthcare system. They don't care about, if they just cared more, then it would all be solved. This is ugly and it's stupid and it's not true.

One of the easiest things in politics is to attribute malice to your opponents. But you know what? That actually doesn't get the job done. You know what tends to get the job done is charity. This Christmas, as we celebrate the gift of life, you have an opportunity to share that same gift with a mother and her baby. Imagine a young woman facing an unplanned pregnancy, feeling alone and unsure of what to do. She's searching for hope. And this is where Preborn Ministries

comes in. When Valeria found out she was pregnant, she was beyond terrified. She'd often dreamt of being a young mom, but as a Christian and single, she now felt overwhelmed by shame and was seriously considering abortion. Valeria began the search for an abortion. It was on that search she called up a nurse at a pre-born at network clinic who walked her through her options, including the true reality of ending a baby's life with the abortion pill. When she heard that, she knew she couldn't do that. Instead, Valeria chose life and now has a beautiful little girl. This Christmas, for just 28 bucks, you can help save a life.

Thanks to a special matching grant, your gift is doubled. Just $28 provides one ultrasound. $140 sponsors five. That means your $140 gift becomes $280, potentially helping 10 moms and their unborn children to donate. Dial pound 250, say baby. That's pound 250, baby. Or visit preborn.com slash ben. All gifts are tax deductible. Preborn has a four-star charity rating. Preborn.com slash ben. Also...

The result?

That's $15 off at

ro.co slash ben. Compounded drugs are permitted to be prescribed under federal law, but are not FDA approved and do not undergo FDA safety, effectiveness, or manufacturing review. Only available if prescribed after an online consultation with a provider. You can go check them out right now. Get $15 off your very first order. Connect with the provider at ro.co slash ben. That's ro.co slash ben for $15 off. There may be people who are perfectly willing

to keep people in misery for their own profit. Maybe there are those people. That is not the vast bulk of people in the United States or in positions of high power or in positions in high industry. That is not how it works. This is a strategy, a political strategy that was termed by the philosopher Alistair McIntyre, emotivism. The idea that you, instead of making an argument about the policy the person is promoting, you actually just say that the person has bad motivations. That person is evil. That person is wrong.

Right. Not just wrong, but like motivated by a sociopathic evil. So the only way that you kill somebody like Brian Thompson is by suggesting that he is motivated, not by a desire to keep the company working and operative in a very difficult regulatory environment with a bizarre system of subsidies and administrative details and all the rest of that. And you can disagree with his decisions, think they're wrong. But that's the actual instead what you do is you say he's evil and he's just trying to maximize profit.

Once you start saying the evil profiteers are trying to harm Americans, like that's their goal. Their goal is to harm Americans. And I'm telling you this on both sides of the aisle. It is on the left predominantly, but there's a swath of people on the right who are also doing this routine. It's ugly. Now, I will say that there are elites who have lent credibility to this particular argument through their malfeasance. I think COVID had a lot to do with this. You had people like Anthony Fauci who were giving the platonic lies to the American public.

Lying for their own purposes in many cases, quashing their political opposition. But the generalized argument that is made too much in politics, and it does boil the pot, it leads to an increasing temperature that justifies violence, is this language that disagreements on policy are not because of a pragmatic inability to come to a conclusion or starting from different first principles or using logical deductions that end up with different conclusions.

Now, the actual reason that, for example, the health care system is a mess is because Brian Thompson is an evil person who is trying to kill grandma. Or the reason that the oil companies are attempting to pump more oil is not because there is high demand for carbon based fossil fuels, because it's still the most effective form of energy production on the planet. It's because they want to destroy the earth and don't care about destroying the earth.

Or the reason the bank denied your loan is not because the bank looked at your loan, assessed the risk and found that it wasn't worth the price. It's because the bank manager is actually Mr. Potter and is trying to deny your bank loan because he himself is evil. Now, this sort of stuff does get politicians where they want to go very often because the easiest form of politics is to label your political opponents evil.

motivated, not by mistake, but motivated by actual sociopathic Darth Vader style evil. People just want to do bad things to you. But this does lead to higher levels of violence across the board. And one of the things that's sort of amazing in the right left breakdown is depending on who is doing the justifying using the exact same logic, you'll see one side or the other justify it. So, for example, when Bernie Sanders back in 2020 says that our system creates huge profits by deliberately killing people.

which is not the way the health care system works. If that were true, life expectancy in the United States would have declined over the course of, say, the last 50 years rather than radically increasing over the course of the last 50 years. The regulatory environment in the United States, as we've discussed for health care, is a complete mess. But Bernie says he could just cut that Gordian knot by suggesting the reason that health care isn't better is because we need to nationalize it. And anyone who doesn't want to nationalize it wants grandma to be murdered.

The function of our current system, however, is simply to make huge profits for the drug companies and the insurance companies who made $100 billion in profit last year while people die because they don't get to a doctor on time.

Again, the basic notion that Bernie Sanders is spewing there, this Marxist notion that profit is inherently some sort of grave evil. And if you just got rid of the hundred billion in profit, then magically health care would get better. There are non-profitable systems are called nationalized health care systems and the outcomes are not better. It's just not true. But it's a sexy argument to many people on the left.

It's even a sexy argument to some people on the right. Again, there are demagogues on the right who will do the same exact routine. Well, look at these systems. You know, it's very difficult for young families to buy single family housing. That must be because there's a coterie of elite who don't care whether you can get single family housing, who want to exploit you, who want to harm you. And we should go after those people.

This sort of demagoguery exists across the aisle. What's funny, again, is depending on the context in which it crops up, you'll see different crowds condemning it. So to take a completely, the exact same argument, but now applied to a different context. Yesterday, Daniel Penny was acquitted in New York, as he well should have been. Daniel Penny is a hero. Daniel Penny was protecting people on a subway.

from the predations of a mentally ill, deeply schizophrenic drug abuser who is threatening them physically, according to witness testimony on the subway train. This trial never should have happened. It should not have happened in the first place. He was acquitted yesterday. OK, and I want to get into the acquittal in a moment. But what's really fascinating is the reaction to the acquittal. So, for example, on the left, you're seeing the exact same arguments that are being made

About the quote unquote racial systems of the United States, as you see being made about the health care system of the United States. So Hawk Newsome, famously of the Black Lives Matter movement, he says we need vigilantism. He he's basically making the Unabomber argument here. He's making the alleged shooter argument here. The racial system of the United States, the justice system is so broken that perhaps people should be assassinated.

Now, you hear that a lot of my listeners, many of the people in the comments a couple of days ago, and they will say, well, that's evil. What do you say? Yes. Yes, it is. Yes. It turns out it is. Here he was yesterday. It's like everybody else has vigilantes. We need some black vigilantes. That's right. People want to jump up and choke us and kill us for being loud. How about we do the same?

when they attempt to oppress us. I'm tired. I know you're looking for us to be like, oh, go and march, go and march. No, this weekend, I want you to hold a community event everywhere from the Bronx to Houston to Seattle to Florida. Black people, whole community event and talk about what you need.

Again, he's calling for open vigilantism. This was the Black Lives Matter movement, by the way. The Black Lives Matter movement, just take the healthcare context away and take the Black Lives Matter movement and put it in, and it's the same exact argument. The system is so broken, it is so despicable, that individual acts of vigilante evil are now justifiable. Fiery but mostly peaceful would be the argument in this particular context. It's a bad argument, and it's a wrong argument. It is a morally wrong argument.

Meanwhile, as far as the Daniel Penny acquittal, obviously this trial never should have taken place. Here is Daniel Penny explaining the circumstances, this is a few months ago, explaining the circumstances of what happened on the subway. In this instance, I was coming from school. I got out of class around 2.15 and I took the, I was at J Street Metro Tech, took the uptown F train at 2nd Avenue. A man came on, stumbled on, he appeared to be on drugs. He

The doors closed and he ripped his jacket off and threw it at the people sitting down to my left. I was listening to music at the time and he was yelling so I took my headphones out to hear what he was yelling. And the three main threats that he repeated over and over was, I'm going to kill you, I'm prepared to go to jail for life, and I'm willing to die.

You know, this was a scary situation and Mr. Nurelli came on, he was threatening. I'm 6'2" and he was taller than me. So it was, and there's a common misconception that Marines don't get scared. We're actually taught one of our core values is courage and courage is not the absence of fear, but how you handle fear. And, you know, I was scared for myself, but I looked around, I saw women and children. He was yelling in their faces saying,

saying these threats, I couldn't just sit still. Some people say that I was holding onto Mr. Neely for 15 minutes. This is not true. I mean, between stops is only a couple of minutes. So the whole interaction lasted less than five minutes. Some people say I was trying to choke him to death, which is also not true. I was trying to restrain him. You could see in the video, there's a clear rise and fall of his chest indicating that he's breathing. I'm trying to restrain him from him being able to carry out the threats.

And then some people say that this is about race, which is absolutely ridiculous. I didn't see a black man threatening passengers. I saw a man threatening passengers, a lot of whom were people of color. A man who helped restrain Mr. Neely was a person of color. A few days after the incident, I read in the papers that a woman of color came out and called me a hero. I don't believe that I'm a hero, but she was one of those people that I was trying to protect.

We were all scared. Mr. Neely was yelling in these passengers' faces and they looked terrified. The reason why there was no video at the start of the altercation was because people were too afraid getting away from him. And the videos didn't start until they saw that situation was under control.

I knew I had to act and I acted in a way that would protect the other passengers protect myself and protect Mr. Neely. I used this hole to restrain him and I did this by Leaving my hand on top of his head to control his body You can see in the video There's a clear rise and fall of his chest indicating that he was still breathing and i'm calibrating my grip based on on the force that he's exerting and um

I mean, I was trying to keep him on the ground until the police came. I was praying that the police would come and take this situation over. I didn't want to be put in that situation, but I couldn't just sit still and let him carry out these threats.

Okay, again, the fact that this everyone's trial is totally insane. The bizarre victim mentality that is now being adopted by Jordan Neely's father in particular is amazing. So Jordan Neely's father, who was completely absent while his son spun into criminality, violence, and heavy drug abuse, is amazing. It's amazing. Here's Jordan Neely's father calling the system rigged. I just want to say I miss my son. My son didn't have to go through this.

I didn't have to go through this either. It hurts. Really, really hurts. What are we going to do, people? What's going to happen to us now? I had enough of this. System is rigged. Come on, people. Let's do something about this. By the way, Adam Coleman, a columnist for The New York Post, he points out, quote,

When I see a father tell a world at the end of a tragic game that we need to do something, my question is, where was he all this time? Where was Andre Zachary when his son was arrested over 40 times, including multiple violent offenses? Where was he when Neely was struggling to mourn his mother's loss? Where was his father when Neely was abandoned in the foster care system with no one to advocate for him? Why is America being held responsible for Zachary's fatherhood issues?

The reality of his of his background is horrifying. Neely apparently suffered as a child growing up in an abusive household. He testified at trial after his mother's boyfriend murdered her and stuffed her into a suitcase to dispose of the body. And then he was running around New York, bouncing from homeless shelter to homeless shelter while abusing drugs and schizophrenically threatening people on subways. And dad was nowhere to be found. And so society is to blame.

No. So here's the thing. The American people will resolve with the BLM movement is gone. This is no longer a thing. There will not be mass riots in the aftermath of this trial, nor should there be because the American people are tired of, for example, the justification of criminality on the basis that America is, quote unquote, racially corrupt. Well, if you're tired of that, then I have news for you. Applying that exact same argument to other contexts where it does not apply is

is not helpful in any way, shape, or form. In just a second, we'll get to all the updates from Syria. First, if you're still searching for the perfect holiday gift, look no further. Daily Wire Plus gift memberships are 40% off. That's right. You can save big while giving the gift of truth and entertainment this season. When you give a Daily Wire Plus membership, you're giving a full year of uncensored daily shows from the most trusted voices in conservative media with limited ads, groundbreaking investigative journalism, access to our entire entertainment catalog, including What is a Woman? and the number one documentary of the decade, Am I Racist?

Meanwhile, chaos has continued over in Syria, where a rebel insurgency that was largely made possible by the destruction of Iran's entire swath of

control ranging all the way from Iran to the coast of the Mediterranean, as we talked about yesterday. That chaos is continuing. According to the Washington Post, a U.S.-backed Syrian peace process begun after civil war broke out in 2011 was moribund. Lines dividing the country into spheres of influence among world and regional powers hadn't changed significantly for years. But the sudden offensive launched by Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rebel group leading to the collapse of Bashar Assad's government has left governments around the world

scrambling to figure out what to do about it, none more so than the Biden administration. Senior U.S. diplomats have rushed to the region, fanning out for discussions in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are also involved in talks about an effort to maintain stability in Syria and attempt to foster some sort of political transition.

United Nations Security Council held a closed door meeting Monday afternoon with the UN Special Envoy for Syria and the head of UN peacekeeping forces in charge of monitoring a ceasefire between Israel and Syria since the 1973 civil war. It is amazing, by the way, that the number one concern of the UN Security Council at this point is Israel deploying to the other side of Mount Hermon in Syria in order to create a buffer zone. So Al Qaeda and ISIS don't set up there. And the UN Security Council like this is the big deal.

Not Turkish-backed Islamist forces taking over the entire country. Israel setting up a buffer zone to prevent the invasion of the Golan Heights. Yeah, that's really where you should be putting your focus. Pretty amazing stuff. Hey, the reality is that Israel is currently doing everybody's dirty work by taking out pretty much every dangerous piece of weaponry in Syria. So Israel has knocked out the Syrian Navy now. They completely destroyed it, sent it to the bottom of the Mediterranean. They are doing that because they do not want that in the control of Islamist fundamentalists.

Israel has been taking out chemical weapons depots throughout Syria so they don't fall into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists who are backed again by the Turkish government, which again is a NATO member, which is insane. If the Biden administration had any stones at all, they'd be applying pressure to the Turks to moderate their friends over in Syria. But that's not what they're doing. Instead, apparently...

There is a piece of news breaking that suggests that the Biden administration is releasing more money to wait for it. Wait for it. Iran, according to the Washington Free Beacon, the Biden and Harris administration waived sanctions on Iran three days after the November election, providing Tehran access of upward to $10 billion in one's frozen funds. I mean, how sick and pathetic is this administration? They're trying to bail Iran out of its own failures.

The reality is the fall of the Assad regime is most damaging to Iran, which spent billions of dollars trying to not only uphold Bashar Assad, but to set up proxy groups across the Middle East by using Syria as a thoroughfare for weaponry. As The Wall Street Journal points out, Iran spent decades and billions of dollars building a network of militias and governments, allowing it to exercise political and military influence across the Middle East. In a matter of weeks, the pillars of that alliance came crashing down.

Assad's removal is the climax so far in a cascade of events catalyzed by Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7th of last year, which resulted in the most fundamental change in Iran's security landscape since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. While toppling Saddam Hussein ended up helping Iran, this time Tehran is at a massive disadvantage.

According to Ali Valles, director of the International Crisis Group's Iran project, the Islamic Republic thought Hamas's October 7th attack was a turning point in history. That's true, but in the entirely opposite direction to what it hoped for. The dominoes for the Western front have fallen one after another. And again, there are forces in Syria that would be much better for the West than, for example, HTS, which is this Islamist terror group that sort of broke away from ISIS and Al-Qaeda and ended up fighting both ISIS and Al-Qaeda. That doesn't make them good, by the way, because terror groups fight one another all the time.

As I mentioned before, there are the Kurds who are up in the northeast of the country and who have provided safety and security to members of a variety of religions, including Christians. That is not going to be the case, probably, for HDS, which is a tragedy of enormous and horrifying proportions. And then there are the Druze in the south. Yesterday, correction, I suggested they were Sunni Muslims. They're not, in fact, Sunni Muslims, of course. They're their own ethnic group. And their religion is sort of a mashup of some elements of Islam, even some elements of Hinduism or Greek philosophy. So I just want to correct the record on that.

The whole thing is a mess, obviously, and containment is likely to be the proper strategy here. In other words, let the pot continue to boil so long as it doesn't bother anyone else. That is precisely why Israel went to the other side of the Mount Hermon range and set up a buffer zone.

So Netanyahu, Bibi Netanyahu has suggested that it's only a temporary hold. We'll find out how temporary it is because again, security, security holds are temporary until they're not. Meaning that if Al-Qaeda continues to be on the other side of the mountain range, if ISIS continues to be there, then Israel ain't going to abandon it because that would be incredibly stupid of them. And then there's the question as to what happens next. So again, Israel has been doing heavy lifting

In Syria, according to the Times of Israel, there were some 250 Israeli strikes against Syrian military targets after the fall of Assad. Israeli planes bombed at least three major Syrian army air bases, housing dozens of helicopters and jets. They basically took out all of the MiGs. So the Syrians had these really old MiGs that were, you know, crap. But Israel took them out because they don't want Islamists in charge of those.

The 50-year-old regime, of course, had some weaponry, including chemical weaponry. And Israel has been steadily taking out all of those military targets over the course of the last few days. By the way, the rest of the world should be thanking Israel for that in the same way they should have thanked Israel for taking out the Osirak reactor in Iraq. And in the same way they should have thanked Israel in 2007 for taking out the Damascus-sponsored nuclear reactor that Bashar al-Assad was building. Can you imagine? HDS in charge of nuclear weapons. That's what would have happened if Israel had not done that.

So it'll be interesting to see if Israel takes the next step and then goes after the Iranian nuclear facilities. If there's one message that Israel took away correctly from October 7th, the message is you don't wait until your enemies arm up. That'd be a stupid thing. So it'll be fascinating to see what happens next.

We'll get to more on this in a second, but first, as a potential homebuyer, you've likely been waiting on the sidelines through some challenging times. Between the pandemic, inflation, limited housing inventory, and rising interest rates, the real estate market has been very unpredictable. But here's the good news. Conditions are improving. It's worth considering making a move now before the traditional spring surge brings more competition and potentially higher prices.

You might be thinking, Ben, isn't winter a terrible time to buy with the holidays? Actually, winter can be a smart time to enter the market. There are typically fewer bidding wars. That means you may have more negotiating power and better opportunities to find good deals. Here's how you get started. Go to ChurchillMortgage.com slash Shapiro. Churchill Mortgage is the company I trust to help you. I've met with the president of Churchill. They are committed to finding the right loan for your financial situation. They want to make sure they do right by you. Churchill gives you additional advantages as a buyer.

including a $10,000 seller guarantee Churchill will pay for. They even have programs to help you compete with cash offers. With rates trending down, this could be your moment. ChurchillMortgage.com slash Shapiro. Tell your loan officer I sent you, you'll be in good hands. This is a paid advertisement. Homebuyer Edge and Seller Guarantee are available for qualifying borrowers in select loan types only, not available in all states or locations. NMLS ID 1591, MLSConsumerAccess.org, Equal Housing Lender, 1749 Mallory Lane, Brentwood, Tennessee 37027.

Meanwhile, President Trump has made some new appointments to his cabinet. One of them is just fantastic. That, of course, would be our friend Harmeet Dhillon. Harmeet is an amazing lawyer. She has the right priorities. And he just nominated her to serve as assistant attorney general for civil rights within the Department of Justice, which is amazing. The Department of Civil Rights in the Department of Justice, the civil rights branch, has very often been militarized by the left to go after, for example, police departments. Harmeet is not going to do that.

Trump has praised Dylann for having stood up consistently to protect people's civil liberties and for representing Christians who are prevented from praying together. Harmeet is a wonderful lawyer. She, of course, has represented Daily Wire in the past when we sued the federal government. She was our representative on that. She at one point ran for head of the RNC, an effort that I supported. I think that Harmeet, I can't speak highly enough of Harmeet. She's a fantastic, fantastic representative inside the Trump administration on behalf of freedom.

She said that it has always been her dream to be able to serve the United States. And she's excited to be part of an incredible team of lawyers being led by Pam Bondi, who is the new attorney general nominee from President Trump. So again, very good news.

Harmeet is a great pick. Meanwhile, Donald Trump posted, I think one of the funniest things I've ever seen him post on Truth Social. So he met with Justin Trudeau. So Donald Trump despises Justin Trudeau. Donald Trump thinks that Trudeau is handsome Bernie Sanders, that he is an idiot, that he is a dullard. And of course, Trudeau has always treated Trump as sort of the fly in the soup.

He always has treated him as the turd in the punch bowl at all these international events. And now Trump is back and Trump is going to make Justin Trudeau eat it. It is amazing. So he tweeted, he put out on Truth Social the following statement yesterday. I love this so much. It's so great. Quote, it was a pleasure to have dinner the other night with Governor Justin Trudeau of the great state of Canada. I look forward to seeing the governor again soon. So we may continue our in-depth talk on tariffs and trades, the results of which will truly be spectacular for all. Remember, he had suggested that if you guys are so dependent on the American economy,

and you don't give us what we want with regard to trade, then we'll tariff you. And if you don't like that, then maybe we'll just annex you and Canada will become the 51st state. So that is a reference to that specific comment by President Trump calling him Governor Justin Trudeau of the great state of Canada. Oh, I love it. I love it so much. It's so great. By the way, we'll be greeted as liberators. Nobody in Canada wants Justin Trudeau anymore. It's time for him to go. Meanwhile, in other good news,

Pete Hegseth looks like he is going to continue to sail toward the actual Department of Defense slots. There were some questions last week about whether he was going to be able to get enough Senate votes. One of the votes in question was Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who had questions about some of the allegations that were being made about Pete Hegseth with regard to sexual impropriety or alcohol use. I said these are all anonymous allegations. And those anonymous allegations, aside from a police report, which is really sketchy at best from California,

That should not be enough to sink Hegseth's nomination. So now Joni Ernst has released a statement, quote, I appreciate Pete Hegseth's responsiveness and respect for the process. Following our encouraging conversations, Pete committed to completing a full audit of the Pentagon and selecting a senior official who uphold the roles and values of our servicemen and women based on quality and standards, not quotas, and who will prioritize and strengthen my work to prevent sexual assault within the ranks. As I support Pete through this process, I look forward to a fair hearing based on truth, not anonymous sources.

So that is great. With Joni on board, it looks very much as though Pete Hegseth is your next secretary of defense, which is wonderful. Hegseth has been stalwart throughout this process. Pete has been excellent throughout this process. Again, I highly recommend that people go back and watch the interview I did with Pete just a few months ago where he talks about what he would do were he secretary of defense, which apparently he now will be.

Pete is saying that he looks forward to getting his FBI background check back. You know, there have been questions about is there going to be an FBI background check? He's like, sure, you do it. Why not? Sean, you know what I look forward to? I look forward to the FBI background check.

I look forward to the actual under oath conversations with senators as we go through the process, because, again, this is what the left does, Sean. It's the anatomy of a smear. They take something and then they add anonymous sources and contortions and flat out lies. And then they try to try you in the media before you can even get into the doors with senators. Again, he is right about that. He'll be a great secretary of defense. Just terrific. So.

All seems as though it is working very smoothly for the Trump transition team at this point. Okay, in just a moment, we'll give you the updates on South Korea, on China, and on a bizarre political display from Pope Francis. If you're not a member, become a member. Use code Shapiro. Check out for two months free on all annual plans. Click the link in the description and join us.