Ep. 2110 - We’re BACK!
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Well, folks, we are back. It is a brand new year. I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and a wonderful New Year's. And now it all begins. So this is going to be a very big year. President Trump is slated to be certified as the president of the United States today. The normal certification process will go through as planned in the Congress.

of the United States, and he will also have his Speaker of the House. So President Trump had endorsed Speaker of the House Mike Johnson for re-election. There were, as usual, a coterie of people who were very concerned about Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House. As I have been saying for...

I don't know, years at this point. It turns out the Speaker of the House has a very hard job. You have to cobble together a coalition of people across various party lines, and then you have to somehow materialize a majority to do things. So the job of the Speaker of the House is not, in fact, to be, quote-unquote, an ideological thought leader. There are plenty of people whose job that is. It is the job of the Speaker of the House to actually get done what can be done. It is to get as much of the pie as humanly possible.

And the problem with many of the ideologues, particularly in Congress, but also in the commentariat, is that when they suggest that the Speaker of the House has the magical Nietzschean ability to simply impose his will on Congress and get everything that you could possibly want, they are lying. It is simply not true. So this all came to fruition over the break. So on Friday, despite the attempts of people like Thomas Massey, the representative from Kentucky, to

prevent Speaker Johnson from being reelected. Johnson was reelected. Here was Massey looking rather disillusioned, actually, in this particular clip, trying to make the case against Speaker Johnson in the most colorful possible terms. You can pull all my fingernails out. You can shove bamboo up in them. You can start cutting off my fingers. I am not voting for Mike Johnson tomorrow. And you can take that to the bank.

Well, he didn't, but everybody else did because President Trump signaled his support for Mike Johnson. And the reason that he did that is because Johnson is as good as it's going to get. Johnson is, in fact, a very conservative speaker of the House. He is faced with an extraordinarily slim majority. And there are always going to be people in Congress who have decided that the best thing that they can do is go on television and spout rather than actually, you know, doing the job of being in Congress. But the job of being in Congress,

is very different from the job of saying what it is that you think about politics. The job of being in Congress, again, is to get as much of the pie as possible. And that changes pretty radically depending on whether you are in the minority or whether you are in the majority, whether there's a Democrat in the White House or whether there is a Republican in the White House. So somebody like a Thomas Massey, for example, might be a true asset to conservatives when the Republicans are in the minority, meaning that they're not in the White House or if they're in the minority in Congress.

We want to obstruct Joe Biden's plans after all.

And then there's the question of what you do when you have a president of the United States who's an elected Republican, Donald Trump, when you have an elected majority in the Senate, when you have an elected majority in the House. Then the question becomes, how much can you get? And obviously you want conservatives who are going to push back against the excesses, but you also want people who are going to make pragmatic and practical decisions rather than just standing there and shouting no at everything in order to get presumably the love of the clickbaiters online.

So over the break, President Trump endorsed Speaker Johnson. Johnson was indeed reelected on the very first vote out the gate, according to The New York Times. Speaker Johnson on Friday won reelection to the top post in the House, salvaging his job in a dramatic last minute turnabout by putting down a revolt from conservatives who initially voted to block his assent.

Johnson won 218 to 215. He mustered the majority with help from President-elect Donald Trump, who again, Trump is going to be absolutely utilitarian in his second term. He wants wins. He wants to chalk up wins on the board. That is the thing that he wants more than anything. He is not concerned with the sort of petty ideological squabbles that you are seeing inside the Republican caucus right now. All he wants is victory for the country. He wants to leave a legacy in his second term, even more successful than his first term.

Originally, there were three Republicans who opposed Johnson and six more who had abstained. And then Trump came in like a hammer in favor of Johnson. Johnson and Trump had both urged Republican lawmakers to elect him speaker so the House could start work on the president elects legislative priorities. And this was the thing. None of the people who were voting against Johnson posited an alternative to Johnson. None of them.

None of them had somebody better in mind who's going to get the Republican caucus unified rather than Johnson, which means it was all it was all a sort of bizarre attention seeking move on the part of these particular Congress people. If you don't have a better alternative, then you are being obstructionist and useless within your own party. Well, here is Speaker Johnson taking the gavel.

This is a powerful new coalition of our country. It's a coalition that insists that we purge the policies of America last and we bury them in the graveyard of history's mistakes because it was a big mistake. To that end, this Congress will renounce the status quo and we will listen to the voices of the people. We will act quickly and we will start by defending our nation's borders. That's the number one priority. Yes. And again, the thing that Republicans want more than anything is get the priorities that Trump wants done.

Well, this has betokened some interesting conversations about the strategy going forward for House Republicans. So there are basically two strategies on the table. There are two big issues that are going to come up this year in the Congress of the United States. Basically, because Republicans do not actually have a supermajority in the Senate, that means they have to use a process that is called reconciliation. Reconciliation can only be used on budgetary bills, on budgetary matters.

which means typically it can only be used once or possibly at the most twice inside of a year. The big question for Republicans in the House and in the Senate was whether they were going to separate out two separate bills and vote on them separately over the course of the year. One was going to be a border bill that's going to attempt to maintain border security, increase border security, complete the building of the wall, for example, change the law where necessary in order to make it easier to deport illegal immigrants.

That was possibility of bill number one. Possibility of bill number two was the making permanent of the 2017 Trump tax cuts. And there are basically two possible strategies here. Again, one strategy would be to separate those two bills. In some ways, that might be better. And in some ways, it might be worse. The other strategy was to wrap them up into one giant bill.

The problem with wrapping them up into one giant bill is more compromises are going to get cut in that giant bill than might be cut if you separated them out into two separate bills. Why? Well, because if you pile everything into one bill and you give that giant one bill on border matters and tax matters an up or down vote, there will be more crap in the crap sandwich.

There just will be. It's like an omnibus package that includes tax matters and border matters. And this is something that many conservatives are concerned about. For example, the House Freedom Caucus is upset about all of that because it will take additional spending on the border in order to secure the border. The Trump tax cuts may have short-term lowering of federal revenue into the tax coffers. So how are you going to offset that in terms of the spending? And meanwhile, Republicans also would like to increase the defense budget in the face of a vastly aggressive China.

So all of those things getting wrapped into one bill, it means that if it all gets wrapped in one bill and Trump says to the American body politic and to the constituents of all these Republicans, listen, the bill has a lot of stuff I don't like, but it has a lot of stuff I do like. I'm yes on the bill. Everybody else should be yes on the bill. There's going to be heavy pressure on Republicans to go yes on the bill, even if there's more crap included in the crap sandwich.

The alternative, which is to separate the two bills, the border bill and the tax bill, is that you may get neither. It may be an opportunity for people to signal their discontent on matters regarding Donald Trump's approach to the border if you're on the sort of left wing of the Republican Party.

On tax matters, there's going to be some pretty serious battles inside the Republican Party with regard to the so-called SALT deductions, state and local tax deductions. So the 2017 tax cuts, one of the things that they did is they said that if you pay taxes in California or New York, that doesn't mean that you can deduct the taxes you paid on the state level against your federal taxable income because it's effectively a sort of affirmative action program on taxes for blue states.

So that got removed. But there are a lot of people, Republicans from New York and California, who would like to restore the SALT deductions in the tax code. And that's going to be an open battle. So strategically speaking, the question is, do you go for two purer and smaller bills or do you go for one less pure, bigger, beautiful bill? So for Johnson, because he's working with such a slim majority, he would love one big, beautiful bill. He would love it. Again, the reason being because he wants to get everything that Trump wants.

And so if your choices are get less of what Trump wants and less bad stuff and get more of what Trump wants and more bad stuff, right? Those are the two choices. He prefers more of what Trump wants and probably a little bit more bad stuff.

That's the nature of the bargain here. And there really is no third choice where you just get like all the great things that you want and none of the bad things that you don't want. That is not how it works with a majority this slim in the House and a pretty slim majority in the Senate as well. Here was Speaker Johnson explaining Trump is apparently on board with this particular strategy.

I respect Lindsey Graham and all my friends who kind of preferred a two-step strategy. The idea would be get something done on the border and maybe defend spending right out of the blocks very quickly in what we would call a skinny reconciliation bill and then do the rest of it in a larger chunk later. But I think at the end of the day, President Trump is going to prefer, as he likes to say, one big, beautiful bill. And there's a lot of merit to that.

because we can put it all together one big upper down vote which can save the country quite literally because there are so many elements to it and it'll give us a little bit more time to negotiate that and get it right

Again, this is a matter of strategy. It's not really a matter of principle. Johnson is very conservative. So, for example, his House Ways and Means Chair, Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri, also a very conservative member of Congress. He's also calling for one big, beautiful bill. The idea would be get this thing rammed through by April. Do it fast. Do it quickly. Because as we all know, the midterms are going to come up in a couple of years. And so basically, Trump has two years to get everything he can get done, done.

And that really means he has year one to get it done because by the time you hit year two, everybody's already running for reelection and they've got their eyes on their next race. Well, folks, President Trump has a very short time period to get all of this done. But what you need is efficient government. It's also time for you to trim the fat from big wireless. If you are still on Verizon, AT&T or T-Mobile, why? I personally use PeerTalk. I can tell you it gives me the exact same service on the exact same towers with better customer service because they're based right here in the United States,

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So, Jason Smith, for example, he wants one bill instead of two. He and his allies, according to Politico, are warning that separating the tax package into its own reconciliation bill risks them not passing a measure at all to extend the 2017 tax cuts set to expire at year's end.

What he's basically saying is let's get this bill out the gate because the closer you get to the deadline, the more leverage a few holdouts are going to have. Instead, wrap it all up in one big bow. Yes, there'll be more trash in there, but at least you will get all the things that Trump wants, along with some stuff that probably nobody likes all that much. As Smith says, my only focus is to deliver on all these priorities that the American people ask for. That's tax. That's border. That's energy. I've always thought the best process of doing that is through one.

And he pointed out that literally zero parties have succeeded in passing two reconciliation bills in the same year in decades. Most recently, congressional Democrats fought amongst themselves for much of 2021 and 2022 to enact a second reconciliation package and then abandoned many of the policies they envisioned under their Build Back Better plan that eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act. So it'll be interesting to see how all of this plays out. The bottom line is Johnson is, in fact, a very good strategist.

So is John Thune. John Thune is the Senate Majority Leader. John Thune says his priority is extending the 2017 tax cuts. Again, I think this is all going to be done in one big bill. I think that we intend to ensure that we don't have a $4 trillion tax increase on the American people by December 31 of this year. And in order to do that, we've got to act collectively, House, Senate, and White House, to extend the 2017 tax cuts.

Again, I think all of this is going to get done and there should be an expectation of your congresspeople and your senators that it should get done. And all these sort of little niggling things

small issues that people are upset about or issues that are totally insoluble. When you hear Republican Congress, people talk about we're not solving our national debt with these bills. You're damn right. We're not solving our national debt with these bills. And you better stop pretending that anything you're proposing is going to solve the national debt. The reality is the national debt ain't going to get solved until you touch precisely the entitlement programs that no one is going to touch ever.

And until you touch Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, you are not going to be able to tackle the national debt. So what does that mean? You better get those tax cuts made permanent because otherwise Democrats are going to reverse those at the first available opportunity, thus destroying the possibility of economic growth that could help grow you out of things like the national debt. You better get that border bill done now because Democrats sure as hell ain't going to pass a good border bill if they were in charge or if they gain control of the House of Representatives, which is already very tightly split in 2026.

Meanwhile, other top priorities for the brand new Congress, giving Donald Trump his nominees. Lindsey Graham, senator from South Carolina, he says, listen, we have some major national security threats on the horizon and making themselves present right now. Give him his nominees.

We need our team on the field. We need FBI director. We need an attorney general. We need them all. Get it done. We've got to get it done. We're under attack here. We're at war. So you're prepared to vote for all of Trump's nominees then? I am ready to go. Bring them up. I'll vote. Let's get it done. Senator, it's great to see you this morning. We're under siege here.

And he is right about all of that. The good news is it looks like the votes are, in fact, there for Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense. Again, if you're talking about the most controversial Trump nominees in order, they are probably at this point, Tulsi Gabbard for DNI, who, again, I think is very likely to be confirmed. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services. A little more dicey, but I think he probably will be confirmed.

Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense. It looks as though very good shot. He is confirmed in Kash Patel as head of the FBI. Again, I think there's a very good shot that all these people are confirmed. If there's one who's most on the chopping block, it is probably Tulsi Gabbard because there are some people in the Republican caucus who have some doubts about her foreign policy ideas from several years ago. She's going to have to explain those ideas presumably to the senators. But the vast majority of Trump's nominees at this point are going to go through as well. They should.

And they should specifically because we have some real threats that are currently materializing. One of those threats is obviously the threat of radical Islamic terrorism. That threat was made clear on New Year's Day in a terror attack in New Orleans that killed 14 people.

It was carried out by a radical Islamist, a recent convert to radical Islam. According to the New York Times, months before the man behind the New Orleans terror attack plowed a truck into a New Year's Day crowd, he rode through the area on a bicycle, recording videos of his target using eyeglasses with a built-in camera, investigators said on Sunday. He was back again a few weeks later, they said, probably to continue his plotting.

Those details emerged as investigators revealed more about the driver and the extensive planning behind the attack, which killed 14 people, injured many others, and left New Orleans starting 2025 grappling with a cascade of anguish and alarm. This person was apparently murdered.

radicalized by ISIS, claimed alignment with the Islamic State terrorist group. He's a 42-year-old army veteran with a fairly lucrative job, apparently, but his life started to collapse, and it appears that by the time of his terror attack, he was living in a rather impoverished, heavily Islamic area nearby. Apparently, the attacker made trips to Egypt and Canada in 2023, which, again, traveling to Egypt in 2023 is...

Yeah, unless you're going there as a tourist just to see the pyramids. They're probably not an amazing reason to visit Egypt at this time. Our agents are getting answers as to where he went, who he met with, how those trips may or may not tie into his actions here in our city, according to Lionel Merthel, the special agent in charge for the FBI in New Orleans. Now, remember, the FBI immediately made the jump. This is why Cash Patel needs to be the head of the FBI. The FBI immediately after the New Orleans attack tried to deny that it was, in fact, being investigated as a terrorist attack only to reverse themselves just a few hours later.

The attack, of course, ended when the attacker was killed in a shootout with the police that left two of the members of the police wounded. The terrorist expressed allegiance to ISIS after a transformation that perplexed and troubled those who knew him. He had the group's flag on a rented Ford F-150 pickup truck he used in the attack. In a video recorded for his family, he said, quote, I want you to know I joined ISIS earlier this year. He was living in a heavily impoverished Islamic area that was apparently in Houston, Texas.

Well, this area was also near a mosque. The police have been reaching out. The FBI had been reaching out to members of the mosque and other nearby Islamic organizations. And the mosque immediately put out a statement urging members of the congregation not to actually respond to media inquiries. And if contacted by the FBI, not to talk to the FBI, but instead to call up the Council on American Islamic Relations. And herein lies the Trump 2.0 question. Will the Trump 2.0

Administration, part two, take seriously the threat of radical Islamist terror to the extent that they will actually investigate groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations, a longtime terror-connected organization. The Council on American Islamic Relations welcomed back into the White House by the Biden administration and the Obama administration, but which was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trials of the 2000s and was founded by very deeply connected friends of Hamas, associates of Hamas.

CARE has been treated as a sort of civil rights organization, civil liberties organization for a long time. But I don't think it's coincidence that the mosque put out a statement suggesting that its brothers and sisters, instead of working with the FBI, refer to CARE and the Islamic Society of Greater Houston.

There are very serious problems with radical Islamic organizations inside the United States. By the way, that's not just according to the U.S. government. That is also according to the United Arab Emirates, which listed CARE as a terrorist group in 2014 over its alleged affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood. There have been calls already to investigate CARE National. There should be such investigations.

The reality is that there are 340 million people living in the United States. You can't keep track of everybody. What you can do is keep track of the organizations that seem to be at least somewhat friendly toward radical Islamic terror groups. Representative Mike Turner of Ohio, he was on with Margaret Brennan on Sunday. He says, listen, there are definitely people who are friendly to radical Islamic terror living in the United States.

Are there individuals that are affiliated with ISIS and terrorist groups and organizations that have crossed the border that are inside the United States? Director Ray, FBI director, has said so. We certainly have intelligence that says so. I agree with his assessment. Jim has also seen it. He's testified before our committee publicly of that fact.

Those individuals are working in conjunction with ISIS with the intention of harming Americans. The director has said it directly. They are known to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement. And we are working diligently to try to take them down to prevent them from doing so. And that's why the director is publicly saying such. And that's what the new administration is going to be handed. The fact that these individuals are here.

that we need to locate them, we need to remove them, we need to bring them to justice and prevent them from doing harm to Americans. Okay, this also means no more political correctness when it comes to counterintelligence, when it comes to things like investigating the possibility of terror connections inside the United States. No more political correctness.

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The fact of the matter is that under Democrats, there has been an attempt to whitewash the problem of radical Islamic terror in the United States to focus instead on, quote, homegrown violent extremism, which is a category error. Yes, of course, you're going to have to worry about white supremacists shooting up churches.

That's a thing that has happened in the United States. But if you are talking about ways to monitor preventable terrorism, it seems like a pretty easy way to monitor preventable terrorism would be to trace the funding mechanism for radical Islamic mosques inside the United States, which, by the way, broadcast pretty clearly their intentions on a fairly regular basis.

When Alejandro Mayorkas, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, categorizes this as, quote, an increase in homegrown violence extremism. I mean, what kind of they're not all the same. They're not all equally easy to trace either, by the way. Here's Alejandro Mayorkas. Thank God, the outgoing secretary of Homeland Security.

We have a heightened threat environment, as Director Wray and the Attorney General both articulated, and we've been saying this for quite a number of months. We have not only the persistent threat of foreign terrorism that, of course, created the Department of Homeland Security, but we have adverse nation states. And for the past 10 years, we've seen a significant increase in what we term homegrown violent extremism.

extremism. It is a very difficult threat landscape and it is why that we as a community, not just the federal government, but state and local officials and residents need to be alert to it and take the precautions necessary to avoid violence from occurring.

Again, these sort of broad categories are not helpful. You know what would be really helpful? Keeping track of organizations that historically have had ties to terror groups. That would be a really good way of doing this sort of stuff. And it's exactly this sort of politically correct approach that is leading to the current breakdown in politics across the water over in the UK. So over the course of the break, Elon Musk went hard on Keir Starmer, who is the new prime minister of Great Britain.

Starmer, of course, is the leader of the Labour Party. He was also a member of law enforcement during the time where law enforcement was largely ignoring these massive grooming gang cases about radical Muslims in Britain who were legitimately raping en masse white girls. It has been very well covered by the media now. It wasn't at the time. And the reason it was not covered well at the time, it's been going on for decades. The reason it was not covered at the time was very obvious.

And it openly stated was because for years, for literally decades, there were these groups of Muslim men who had been imported into the UK under the guise of multiculturalism, who had then begun to groom and rape 13, 14, 15 year old girls. They'd set up these gangs, just pass these girls around.

And the authorities full on knew about it. So did the media. They also knew about it. But there was one problem. They weren't going to report on any of this. The reason they weren't going to report on any of this is because there were far right extremists who might take advantage of the messaging. This is the way that the politically correct left has decided to approach the problems with its own ideology, ignore them, pretend they don't exist, or pretend that the real problem is the people doing the noticing. That if you notice that there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of girls who are being raped,

by Muslim men in the UK. If you notice that, that this is somehow a brand of your extremism and we mustn't help, we mustn't help the extremists to gain political power in Great Britain. And this is not me saying this. This is the journalist who covered the story. So for example, the BBC did a documentary in 2017 called The Betrayed Girls. And they interviewed one of the journalists who really covered this thing in full in 2010. But he knew about this as early as 2002, 2003.

His name is Andrew Norfolk. And here he is admitting full scale that the reason he did not cover what was called the Rochdale scandal is because he was afraid that it would lend credence to the British National Party or the English Defense League. Both considered, quote unquote, far right extremist organizations for the great crime of saying perhaps we shouldn't be importing into the West members of radical Islamic civilization. The key point of the press release was that the men who were doing this to these girls were extremists.

I think the word used was from the Asian community. I spoke to Anne Cryer's researcher. She told me that the scale of this was far greater than they'd been able to say in the initial press release. They'd identified over 30 men who were involved. The idea of young girls, 13, 14,

being befriended by lads who weren't much older than them initially and then introduced to a wider and wider circle of friends, the idea that this was in some way a collective activity, that girls were being passed around men, I'd not encountered anything like that before. I remember so clearly the feeling of how on earth do you report a story that is a fantasy for the far right? It's everything.

you could wish for if you're pushing a particular agenda. It's innocent white girls and it's evil dark-skinned men. The government's failure to control asylum and immigration was a force for bad. Norfolk's fears were not without foundation. The BNP's vote in recent local elections had increased 300-fold in only three years, winning them seats on councils across northern towns.

With a general election looming, immigration, race and asylum were key topics of the day. Yes, it is true that we need to control immigration. Yes, it is important we discuss it, but it's an issue that should be dealt with, not exploited. To my shame, I allowed my liberal fear about giving succour and credence to the British National Party to act as a brake on actually doing my job.

OK, that's an amazing admission by one of the journalists who actually ended up breaking the story. But it wasn't just the journalistic institutions in the UK that decided to ignore this because it might lend credence to, quote unquote, right wing narratives about mass migration from radical Muslim countries. It wasn't just it was members of authority. It was members of the police who not only looked the other way, they blamed the white girls themselves, suggesting that they had engaged in consensual activity, which is not even legal. They were like 13, 14, 15 year old girls.

And this carried on for literally decades. As Norfolk says, there were cases in which there were Muslim men who had raped white girls. Those white girls grew up and became moms. And later their own daughters would be raped by the children of the Muslim men. This is something that Andrew Norfolk says in this particular documentary. And the authorities ignored it for years.

And it was only in 2013, 2014 that the authorities really started to take this very seriously. In 2014, there was a state commission report by a senior social worker named Alexis Jay, this is according to Politico, who found that some 1,400 vulnerable children were targeted and sexually abused in Rotherham alone between 1997 and 2013. That's not even in Rochdale, which is the story that was being covered in this particular BBC documentary. There are tons of towns all over Britain where this was happening, in Oldham, in Rochdale,

in Rotherham, all over the place. And the politicians, the mainstream politicians, were absolutely complicit in all of this. They ignored it. They refused to take a look at it. In fact, even certain rare Labour MPs who actually attempted to cover this were shut down. So Elon Musk, over the weekend, he went after Keir Starmer. And the reason he went after Keir Starmer is because there was a request that there be a federal investigation in Britain

into a national investigation into these grooming gangs, a national inquiry. And Starmer's labor government rejected that, instead pointing to a series of existing inquiries on the issue and a 2022 report whose findings are still being implemented. And Musk immediately went after Starmer and he suggested that Starmer was complicit because Starmer, of course, was involved in the Crown Prosecution Service at the time that a lot of this was going on.

He called him despicable and said he was, quote, deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes. And again, this is a party. This is, in fact, a party, the Labour Party, that has been complicit in the attempts, if not actually guilty of the attempts, to cover up crimes related to the failures of multiculturalism in Britain. Remember, I mean, it's Sadiq Khan, who's the mayor of London, who's openly calling for the criminalization of, quote, unquote, Islamophobic speech. He's a member of the Labour government.

Here he was this year. One of the things that is coming up over and over again is Islamophobia. And you can see the stats, you can see the numbers rising, particularly since October the 7th. Although we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking that before October the 7th, this was all heading in the right direction. It's been far too high for far too long. Clearly, we need to just say over and over again,

Islamophobia is intolerant. That's Keir Starmer, by the way. It can never, ever be justified. And we have to continue with a zero tolerance approach. And I think there's more we can do in government. There's certainly stuff online, which I think needs tackling much more robustly than it is at the moment. What I'm hoping, Keir, is your experience as a prosecutor means you'll be thinking about the strategy we can use to make sure we take action against those who break the law.

OK, that is the most Orwellian crap I have ever heard. I mean, truly Orwellian in Great Britain. That's Keir Starmer, who is the current prime minister, talking to the mayor of London about criminalizing Islamophobia. What are the things you can do as a former prosecutor, says Sidi Khan, the mayor of London, to criminalize Islamophobia, which Keir Starmer says has risen dramatically in the aftermath of October 7th, which, as you recall, was a mass Islamic terror attack on Jews.

Hey, this is where the Labor Party is. You want to know why there's this massive right-wing backlash happening all over the globe, particularly with regard to immigration? This would be the reason, because mass migration has not been a boon to the West, not in the modern era. Mass migration is a massive problem because it has been combined not with assimilation, not with economic growth, but with economic stagnation and non-assimilation.

And it has been biased toward countries that are exporting people who have no interest in assimilating to Western values, and in fact, many of whom despise Western values. And if you say that sort of stuff out loud in the UK, apparently you get arrested. There's a better shot you'll get arrested in the UK for something, for saying something, quote unquote, Islamophobic than apparently for raping white girls if you're a radical Muslim. That seems to be the logic over in the UK and has been for quite a while. Markir Starmer has yelled at Elon Musk now. He's very angry because Elon Musk attacked him. And so

And so he says that Elon Musk is now a member of the far right. Again, this is the labeling process. What really despicable. And by the way, where's the conservative party in the UK on all this? Because this wasn't just a labor problem. This is a Tory problem in the UK. Where are the people who are willing to stand up and say the truth?

It's been a lot of talk about Tommy Robinson, who's in jail. And he has said some very true things on this. And Tommy Robinson has his own sort of checkered history as to saying certain things that are not true. But he is right on this. And he has been right on this particular issue as a general matter. And that's the reason that he has been targeted by law enforcement. Also, this stuff has been ginned up. In any case, here is Keir Starmer responding to Elon Musk. When politicians, and I mean politicians...

who sat in government for many years, are casual about honesty, decency, truth, and the rule of law, calling for inquiries because they want to jump on a bandwagon of the far right, then that affects politics because a robust debate can only be based on the true facts. Ah, it's only based on the true facts, says Keir Starmer. The facts that you're not allowed to acknowledge in Great Britain.

In just one second, we'll get to the further consequence of the immigration debate. First, kick off 2025 with 25% off your new DailyWire Plus annual membership. This year will be one for the history books. In just 14 days, Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States. The DailyWire will be there bringing you live uncensored coverage of every monumental moment. But while we celebrate victory's head, we can't forget the fight continues. 2025 reminded us of that fight in its very first hours.

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The matter of mass migration, how it's affected the West, isn't, of course, relegated to the United States or to Great Britain. It is also true in Germany. Elon Musk has now endorsed the so-called Alternative for Germany Party, the Alternative for Deutschland, AFD. The AFD has been condemned as a quote-unquote neo-Nazi party, but the things that it's arguing for, the AFD today is not a neo-Nazi party. The AFD is arguing in favor of immigration restriction in Germany.

In a way that the so-called conservative party in Germany has not been, which is why AFD is gaining so much ground. Again, if you won't say the truth, there will be people who will say it, and those people will reap the political benefit of having said the truth. Heather McDonald writes for City Journal today, the alternative for Germany's leopard in German political life due to the party's opposition to Germany's lax immigration policies. Germany's federal office for protection of the constitution, a domestic intelligence agency, has granted itself authority to surveil the party, which it deems a threat,

to democracy. Germany's other political parties have pledged not to cooperate with the AFD. The AFD is denied committee chairmanships in the national parliament in Berlin. Its numbers would otherwise entitle it to. German courts have almost uniformly rejected the party's efforts to remove these legal and extra legal barriers to normal participation in political life.

So why exactly is all this happening? It's because of the mass migration into Germany starting in 2015, when then Chancellor Angela Merkel famously announced, we can handle this in response to thousands of Syrians crossing into the country. 23% of the German population in 2021 were first or second generation immigrants, and that was before the Ukrainian migration.

Over 17 percent of the German population are first generation immigrants, a higher percentage than in the United States, or less than 14 percent of the population were foreign born in 2020 and 2022. And they have a higher crime rate and they have serious draws on social benefits and all the rest of it. So Elon Musk has already endorsed the AFD, mainly because the conservative party in Germany has decided that they are not going to actually take any of this on.

CDU, which is the Christian Democratic Union, is a centrist party. The leader of that party, Frederick Merz, has pledged not to cooperate with what he calls a right wing extremist party because that would, quote, require selling his party's soul. But the reality is that people are responding to this. People are responding to the lack of support for domestic political institutions on behalf of a multicultural view of the world.

So Elon Musk is going to have a sit down with the leader of the AFD party, a woman named Alice Vidal, possibly on January 10th. There's a lot of consternation about Elon Musk's involvement in foreign politics right now because, of course, he's been speaking out against Keir Starmer in the UK. He's been speaking out against the current administration in Germany in favor of AFD. But he's simply voicing the reality for literally hundreds of millions of people in Europe who have been silenced by the political processes there and also in the United States.

And this opens another question about immigration in the United States. So, Musk, Trump, the entire right in the United States, totally united on mass migration from countries that do not like the United States. Totally united on these particular issues. Totally united on illegal immigration, by the way. Nonetheless, over the break, a vast controversy broke out about H-1B visas. H-1B visas are usually designed for technology companies to import labor from

From people with college degrees who want to work in tech, right? People who come and they work in the tech industry. Usually it is a pathway toward a green card in the United States, these H-1B visas. And there is some controversy over H-1B visas and the over-application of them. And a lot of that is good faith political discussion. How can H-1B visas be changed so that they're not being exploited by tech companies simply to bring in lower wage workers who aren't going to assimilate, for example. However, this broke into the open.

And I think the dumbest possible way. So a person who I personally know, actually, his name is Sriram Krishnan, who has worked in the past for everybody from Elon to Marc Andreessen to a bunch of tech bros on the right, was named the AI senior advisor to David Sachs in the new Trump administration.

It was a fairly mid-level position. It was sort of a senior advisory position inside the administration. It had nothing to do with immigration, nothing. It was about AI and the sort of lines that have to be drawn around AI. Well, this launched a thousand think pieces because there were certain members of the right

Some of them of the fringe, right, who decided that he was going to be deciding immigration policy. And not only that, they decided that he was an open borders guy. Now, I know I know Siram is not, in fact, an open borders guy. He has argued in favor of H-1B visas and for importing foreign talent in the United States so we can brain drain other countries.

So this kind of notion that he's in favor of open borders is really silly. Well, the opposition to Sri Ram, this notion that this was a foreigner who is going to be causing the importation of vast swaths of foreign labor. First of all, again, there are about 85,000 H-1B visas issued every year. You can argue maybe you want it lower. All right. You maybe increase the income limit for people who want to get in on H-1Bs. That's fine, too. We can have those conversations. That was not the conversation that was being had. In fact, the dumbest conversation was being had, as usual in our politics.

The argument with regard to H-1Bs that was being made by people who are sort of exclusionary in their immigration viewpoints was we need to stop all immigration, not just mass migration, not just illegal immigration. We need to stop all migration totally because these are American jobs and we don't need foreigners here. No more foreigners.

And that rests on a couple of suppositions. That rests on a couple of suppositions. One, that there is such a thing as an American job as opposed to a job that is located in America.

And two, that no one can actually become a good American. That if you come in from abroad, if you're from, quote unquote, the wrong country, it's not possible for you to become a good American. Now, as I say, we should be pretty careful about who we admit to this country. It's in the interest of the American people to admit people who want to assimilate to Western values or who already hold Western values. Things like free speech and freedom of religion. People who actually want to work for a living and not be dependent on welfare, who want to form families, join churches, become part of the social fabric.

I think we should all be able to agree on that sort of stuff. But there are basically two possible arguments as to why you want to close all the borders, even sort of the most qualified immigrants coming in. One is, again, this idea that people can't culturally assimilate, which I think is not true. Again, there are some people who cannot, but there are many who can. And two, that there are these things called American jobs and that these American jobs must be reserved for Americans.

Now, I think that not only is this economically ignorant, it's counterproductive. So Steve Bannon has articulated this position, I think the best of anybody who's articulating it right now. He did an interview with the free press in which he sort of expressed his desire to close all immigration.

I'm also for big restrictions on legal immigration. Until Silicon Valley, until these places have, I don't know, 20% African American and 20% Hispanic and kids that can go to college. And every college you go to, every engineering school you go to is flooded with foreign students taking American jobs. I don't agree with that. American jobs should be for American citizens.

OK, again. So, again, there's a notion of American jobs and you can see he's using this very bizarre formula where all these, quote unquote, American jobs also have to be representative of the American demographic, which actually is a DEI left wing argument. That's the argument that's made by people like Ibram X. Kendi. If 20 percent of the population is black and 20 percent of the jobs aren't black, that means some sort of racism is occurring.

Okay, so there are a few problems with this. Number one, there is no such thing as an American job. There's just a job that is in America. And the question is twofold. One, who should fill that job? And two, how do you keep that job in America?

Because it turns out that there is no job being a baseline level programmer for a million dollars a year in America. Because that job doesn't exist anywhere. And if you try to make that job exist in America, that job is going to disappear and it's going to go elsewhere where you can pay somebody $100,000 a year to be a programmer. This is particularly true in the mobile age of the internet, where location is not necessarily where you have to be located for the job anymore.

Okay, then there's the stupid counter argument that's being made. So there are some people who made a dumb counter argument. So there's the dumb argument. The dumb argument was that they're just these American jobs. We protect the American jobs by shutting the borders. That's called economic autarky. And it is generally a failure because when you artificially limit the supply of labor, what you end up doing is pushing up the price of labor. And a few things happen. One, inflation. Two, prices go up.

go up to the point where they are not competitive with imports from other places. And so companies in America go out of business. This generally leads to either outsourcing or automation. This is true across industries in the United States. It's true across the world. This is how markets work. So if you want to make the case that we shouldn't be importing labor.

to marginally lower the labor costs for Silicon Valley, and instead we should be recruiting Americans? I agree with that. I totally agree with that. And I think we should be building programs that specifically go and recruit Americans to fill these jobs. Also, there are, in fact, jobs where immigrants who are coming to the United States, brain-draining other countries, they're coming in and they can fill those jobs, and they are maybe the best qualified person to fill those jobs.

Now, again, if you want to increase the level of pay necessary for an H-1B visa, right now it's $100,000, you want to increase that higher, that's fine. We get to pick the cream of the crop. You only get to come in the country if you're a person capable of earning $300,000 a year.

Now, you want to do that because you want to, quote unquote, reserve the other jobs for Americans? That's fine. You have to recognize there are downstream effects to this, economically speaking, that that is, in fact, like all tariffs, a subsidy to certain groups of the population at the cost of the rest of the population where prices go up and outsourcing takes place and all the rest.

This is why, for example, Elon has defended H-1B visas. Elon says that he would like to brain drain other countries. He would like to bring in the best labor from other countries. He wants Americans to get as many American jobs, jobs in America, as possible. But you can't just magically determine what the pay level is for a job. That's not the way that markets work. And if you try to do that, that's going to have significant externalities that are quite bad for the American economy and for American competitiveness more broadly.

Now, there was a really stupid counterargument that started to be made by some, and that was that the reason we need to import labor is because American culture is somehow insufficient. Now, there are some Americans who are lazy. There are some Americans who grow up in broken homes. There are some Americans who have poor educations, and we should fix all those things, obviously. And there are plenty of qualified Americans for a lot of these jobs, and we should go out of our way to try and recruit those Americans before we rely on foreign labor.

And all of that is fair. But again, it all gets reduced to kind of the dumbest possible arguments. And this is the thing to which I object. And there are a bunch of things we should be able to agree on. One, illegal immigration is wrong. Two, mass migration is

is particularly problematic today. Now, the United States has historically always had a sort of fraught relationship with mass migration that goes back to waves of people coming in from Ireland and from Italy and from Germany and from Sweden and from China and from Eastern Europe and Russia. All throughout American history, there's been great trepidation about mass migration. That is true. Also, it happens to be that in a system like the United States used to be,

where you're expected to assimilate one and two, there were no substantial welfare systems. What you ended up doing is acting like a magnet to the iron filings of the people who are the most risk-taking, most entrepreneurial from other countries. And one, just they were coming to the United States because they were poor, although many of them were, it was because they were willing to give up what they had in their homeland to come to a place where if they failed, there was no backup system, right? This is one of the things about American immigration historically. And then the immigration bargain changed in the United States.

That immigration bargain started to change with massive welfare systems that now immigrants could take advantage of. And now you had to balance who should get in and who should not get in. It used to be if somebody got in and they failed economically, it wasn't like the state and the taxpayer had to pick them up. Now, once you establish welfare systems, that all changes. And then it massively changes again in 1965 when Democrats pass an immigration act that fundamentally shifts where immigrants are coming from. Used to be they mostly came from Europe. After 1965, they start to come mostly from Latin and South America.

And that was an actual stated goal of people who sponsored it, like, for example, Senator Ted Kennedy. And this has changed the nature of mass migration. It's been a huge problem. Combine that with the left's insistence that multiculturalism means that you never have to assimilate. And now you've got a real problem. You've got a problem of ethnic enclaves who are not interested in assimilating to American values at all. However, those are all the things that we can agree on before we even get to high-skilled immigration.

Again, when it comes to high-skilled immigration, there are basically, again, two cases against high-skilled immigration, the cultural and the economic. The cultural case is, well, people might come here, they might not assimilate, or they go back to their, fine. So make it that they have to assimilate to get in. And make it more restrictive to people who want to assimilate and want to gain citizenship. Fine. The second case is the economic case. This is the one that's really dicey. Again, there will be downstream effects to economic protectionism and autarky. Pretending not is simply blinding yourself to the realities of economics.

Hey, we need more people like Elon Musk in the United States. Barring Elon Musk from the United States would not have been good for the United States. We need more people like Sergey Brin in the United States, founding giant companies in the United States. We need unicorn founders in the United States. Again, you want to raise the bar as two gets in, that's fine. But we do need those people. And if we don't gain them, other people will, other countries will, and then we'll lose. And I like America winning, which is by the way, why Donald Trump agrees with this. Donald Trump

says that he supports immigration visas. He said, I have a lot of H-1Bs on my property. He said, I've always liked the visas. I've always been in favor of the visas. That's why we have them. I've been a believer in H-1B. I've used it many times. It's a great program. And I think that there's going to be a lot of Nixon going to China in this administration for a lot of people who seem to believe that Donald Trump mirrors their more sort of nationalist predilections. Donald Trump is utilitarian. He wants wins for the United States. And that means a thriving economy,

That means Americans doing well across the board, not just in particular sectors. It'll be fascinating to see how it all plays out. And meanwhile, Joe Biden is going out with a whimper, not a bang.

Goodness gracious. So he has decided that he's basically going to find every despicable person in the United States and then give those people a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Why the hell not? You know, got to leave it all on the field if you're Joe Biden. At this point, F it to life. You're done. So Joe Biden has decided, among others, that recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom ought to be Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and Bill Nye the Science Guy, among others.

which is pretty incredible. George Soros has single-handedly helped destroy the law enforcement mechanisms of the United States. He has funded left-wing prosecutors who have destroyed the ability to prosecute criminals across the urban areas of the United States. He has funded every far-left cause he can find in the United States, undermining basic American principles. George Soros is a disaster area. So, of course, Joe Biden is giving him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

which of course is also designed to bribe his son, Alex Soros, who's actually the person who showed up to pick it up. Alex Soros is also kind of famous for tweeting out photos with prominent Democratic politicians standing high above the city of New York, where all of these politicians come to kiss his ring. Hillary Clinton also showed up to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presumably for lying about Benghazi, shredding all of her documents and all of the rest, as well as initiating Russiagate. That's what her campaign did.

Other people included humanitarian and chef Jose Andres, who has lied repeatedly about the humanitarian situation in Gaza and allowed his world central kitchen to unfortunately be used as a prop by members of Hamas. Bill Nye, the science guy who's mostly famous for now becoming a left wing kook and some others.

So so many deserving Liz Cheney. Also, he awarded the presidential citizens medal to 20 recipients, including members of the House January 6th committee as a final slap at President Trump. Also over the break, by the way, he decided to commute the sentences of a bunch of death row prisoners. 37 out of 40 death row. Apparently, certain victims just don't count, according to President Biden.

So President Biden granted clemency to 37 of the 40 federal inmates facing death sentences. The only three inmates who do not receive clemency are the convicted murderer in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, the gunman in the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston. That was the white supremacist shooting and the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, the terrorist. But apparently everybody else who committed rape and murder, all those people are basically going to stay alive on death row now.

Now, if Biden were truly principled about the death penalty, he'd commute it for everybody. So he's not.

He just thinks that some crimes are worse than others. And apparently raping and murdering little girls is not on the same level as shooting up a synagogue in Pittsburgh, which is kind of an amazing statement. As a final slap, of course, Joe Biden is also going to be putting in place a ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in vast areas ahead of the Trump term. Remember, Kamala Harris ran as somebody who is not going to fight fracking. So did Joe Biden, right? They were going to open America's energy exploration. Wrong. He's a liar.

According to Reuters, Joe Biden will ban new offshore oil and gas development along most U.S. coastlines, a decision President-elect Donald Trump was vowed to boost domestic energy production may find it difficult to reverse. So Biden's going to use his authority under the 70-year-old Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect all federal waters off the east and west coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and portions of the northern Bering Sea in Alaska. The ban affects 625 million acres of ocean.

Absolutely ridiculous. Absolutely terrible. The problem is the Lands Act, which allows presidents to withdraw areas from mineral leasing and drilling, does not grant them legal authority to overturn prior bans. That order from a court came in 2019 as a response to Trump trying to reverse a Barack Obama ban on drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic Ocean.

Another disgraceful move by a horrible president. Joe Biden is going to go down in history as probably our second worst president. I say probably because there is one other person on the list and that person died over the break. That'd be Jimmy Carter. We're going to get to Jimmy Carter's legacy in just a moment. First, if you're not a member, become a member. Use code Shapiro. Check out for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.