Ep. 2136 - No More TRANSING The Military!
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Well, folks, it turns out that when it comes to getting things done, the image of the thing matters an awful, awful lot. And this is something Democrats have understood for a very long time, that the image that any particular department gives off has a cultural impact. There are people like me who learned from Andrew Breitbart who said that politics is downstream from culture. But the truth is,

It's more of a cycle. It's more that politics is downstream of culture, which is downstream of politics, which is downstream of culture. What I mean by this is that politics, the power of government, can in fact shape culture to its own whims. And so if you give off an image of DEI or ESG

From the government, you create an unofficial sanction against people who disagree. Sometimes you have actual formal strictures against people who disagree. In other words, the government does an awful lot to shape culture in this country. This is something the left has understood for a very long time in a way that the right traditionally has not. And that includes people like me, because I tend to believe that the government should have a set of delegated powers and the government performs those delegated powers. And we elect that government. So really, culture should shape culture.

Our politics should shape our governance. But the truth is, it works the other way too. And this is a point that many people on the MAGA right have been making for a long time, is that when you have, for example, a defense department that decides that it's going to put out ads that feature lesbian families finding themselves, that this actually has an impact on the kind of people who are recruited into the military. And that in turn has an impact on how people think of the military. And that in turn has an impact on how people around the world think of the United States. And they're not wrong about this. That's obviously true.

The reason I say this is because now nature is healing and things are going back to normal. And it's starting with governmental action. Now, you can say that culture led to that governmental action. You can say that the culture in the United States changed. There was a backlash against the insane radical left-wing woke-ism of the last decade and a half.

In the United States. And that is why President Trump was reelected. It's why he has a conservative Supreme Court. It is why he has a Republican-led Senate and a Republican-led House. And all of that is true. But it is also true that now that the cycle has begun, now that culture has shaped politics, politics is shaping culture again. Perhaps the tip of the spear in this battle is the new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.

So, again, remember, the Defense Department, when we were growing up, when I was a mere child, the Defense Department was all about the idea that America was winning wars, a battle machine made up of strong, particularly men, who are going to go into difficult situations.

places and do things that no one wanted to see them do in order to keep America safe. That was always the image of the military. And the movies and TV shows that many of us grew up on were rooted in that image of the United States military. And the other day, I was looking for a movie to watch my eight-year-old son, and I brought up one of my favorites from when I was a kid. I tended to watch old movies when I was a kid, meaning movies from the 50s and 60s. And so I brought up a favorite to show him, the old Gregory Peck

David Niven film, The Guns of Navarro, which is a classic. Terrific, terrific film. If you have kids, teenagers, it's a wonderful film. It's about a secret mission by a group of essentially American and British commandos to blow up a Nazi-held stronghold. And it's a really, really good movie. But the entire basis of the movie is that sometimes...

Men have to do violent, nasty things in order to fight the bad guys. And this was always the idea of the American military. And then somehow it shifted. Somehow the American military became a tool of social engineering. And the glorious points of America's history were not America's military winning wars, but how the military was to be used as a sort of microcosmic stand in for the diversity, equity and inclusion regime.

So instead of the glorious moments of diversity in the military being linked with victory, so for example, the Tuskegee Airmen being helpful in winning World War II because we needed more people and we needed to get rid of the evils of segregation in order to have a better fighting machine. Instead, that was seen itself, whether it was useful or not useful, as the high point of the military.

And thus was born the idea that what the military really needs to do is draw from every segment of society. Basically, the military is not supposed to be a battle-hardened machine designed toward winning and breaking things and killing bad guys. Instead, the military was supposed to be a commercial for United Colors of Benetton. That was the basic idea of the military.

And that's why we needed Admiral Rachel. I mean, that's why we needed members of the military who were carrying pride progress flags. That is why every recruitment video needed to be about finding yourself as opposed to what the military has always been about, which is defending the country and defending the guy next to you. Well, all that is changing. Secretary of Defense Hegseth

who we on the show push very hard for, specifically for this reason, is changing the culture and the nature of the American military and how it is perceived almost single-handedly. Not because he's the only one in the military who is saying this stuff, but because the leadership of the military absolutely matters. Politically correct generals atop a structure filled with wonderful men and women who are fighting for the country is not good enough.

You need people at the top of the military who actually reflect the priorities and the image of the grunts on the ground, the guys who are actually doing the fighting and wounding and dying on behalf of the country. So Pete Hegseth did a couple of things yesterday that re-entrined again this notion that America's military is back. And by the way, you can see it in the numbers as we talked about on the show a couple of days ago.

Pete Hegseth announced that recruitment hit record highs, like 12-year highs in December and hit 15-year highs in January. And recruitment is going to keep going up. Why? Because it turns out that young men want to join this kind of military. If young men wanted to join the world's most diverse workforce, and that was like the top priority, they'd be going to Wellesley or they'd be looking for a job at Starbucks. But if what they actually wish to do is join a fighting machine, which is what the American war machine is supposed to be,

Then they're going to want to go into Donald Trump's military, but not, for example, Barack Obama or Joe Biden's military. You know how many questions I fielded over the course of the Obama and Biden administrations from young men, 17, 18 year old men who said, listen, I have a long family history of going into the military. I'm not sure I want to go into the military if the commander in chief is Joe Biden or Barack Obama.

Because, number one, I don't trust their foreign policy instincts and I'm not sure I want to fight in a place that is far flung, having no impact on American interests. But more importantly, I'm not sure I want to go into a military where people like me are scorned and looked down upon. Historic military families who are not members of the sort of diversity coalition that's going to be on the brochure cover for the Biden or Obama military.

All of that is changing. So Pete Hegseth yesterday, he went and he trained with a bunch of members of the military. Of course, he himself has a military background. Here's some of the video of him greeting members of the military. I mean, look at these guys. They're all eager to meet Hegseth because Hegseth is one of them. Hegseth served in the exact same kind of combat roles that they did.

OK, look, the image of that, as opposed to Lloyd Austin strolling down lines of men and women wearing like a face mask is very different. And then, of course, Hegseth went out and he was pumping iron. Now, again, people on left say, oh, it's so stereotypical. This is so what does it matter? I mean, isn't this kind of just garish and boorish? Well, the answer is sure and awesome.

Because the image that you want to give off to the world is one where if you screw with us, we will kick your ass. That is the image that the American military should in fact be purveying to the rest of the world. And Hegseth is a key part of that. So he made a couple of announcements yesterday that go to this. So number one, Hegseth issued an immediate pause on gender affirming medical care procedures for all active duty service members in a memo addressed to senior Pentagon leadership and military command, according to ABC News.

It also ordered an immediate pause on all new promotions in the military for individuals with a history of gender dysphoria. In other words, this is not a diversity machine. This is a battle machine.

Now, none of this should be surprising. Gender dysphoria is a very serious condition. If you have depression, you are not allowed to be recruited into the military. If you have clinical obesity, you're not allowed to be recruited into the military. Anything that is supposed to inhibit your function as a member of the military is supposed to bar you from entering the military. There's a wide variety of mental health conditions that bar you from joining the military.

If it doesn't bar you from joining the military, that you're a man who wants to cut off your junk and have hormone treatment, I'm not sure exactly what should precisely. And again, that's not a question of the patriotism of people who want to join the military in this condition. It's a matter of what the military wants and what the military needs.

The memo says, quote, effective immediately. All new accessions for individuals with a history of gender dysphoria are paused. All unscheduled, scheduled or planned medical procedures associated with affirming or facilitating a gender transition for service members are paused. Individuals with gender dysphoria have volunteered to serve our country and will be treated with dignity and respect. The memo continued. But the Department of Defense would provide additional policy and implementation guidance to service members with the current diagnosis or history of gender dysphoria.

Again, the executive order that President Trump signed not long ago directed the DOD to revise the Pentagon's policy on transgender service members and stated that expressing a false gender identity divergent from individual sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service. And this would appear to be perfectly obvious.

This would appear to be perfectly obvious. If you are body dysmorphic, if you have anorexia, if you think that actually you're a fat person and you're a deathly skinny person, you shouldn't be in the military. If you're a person who believes that you're a one-armed person in a two-armed person's body, you shouldn't be in the military. The order continues, quote, consistent with the military mission and longstanding DOD policy, expressing a false gender identity divergent from an individual sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service. And Hegseth

echoed this. He said, quote, efforts to split our troops along lines of identity weaken our force and make us vulnerable. Such efforts must not be tolerated or accommodated. And this is correct. Our military needs to be a fighting machine because, of course, our freedom is not free. Freedom has to be defended. But what isn't said often enough is that online freedom isn't free either. It too has to be defended, not by military force, but by a certain technological force, encryption. Strong encryption can

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Of course, the left immediately sued because the idea here is not that the military must be strong, that the military must in fact be a diversity organization. Human rights campaign and Lambda Legal then filed a federal lawsuit

The lawsuit says, quote, by categorically excluding transgender people, the 2025 military ban and related federal policy and directives violate the equal protection and due process guarantees of the Fifth Amendment and the free speech guarantee of the First Amendment. They lack any legitimate or rational justification. Well, actually, there's a pretty easy legitimate or rational justification. If you join the military and demand hundreds of thousands of dollars in services to cut off your penis, it seems that that might be an inhibiting factor in your military service. And first of all, terming

Okay.

Good for Hegseth. And again, the image of the American military is going to be stronger because of all this. That was only one of two things that Hegseth did yesterday. He also renamed Fort Liberty to Fort Roland L. Bragg. So he is renaming Fort Bragg back from Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg. But there's a twist.

And this is really smart. Okay, so what Hegseth is doing, what the Trump administration is doing. So originally Fort Bragg was named Camp Bragg and it was named after a person named Braxton Bragg, who was a former US Army artillery commander and a West Point graduate who fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. And by the way, one of the reasons that many of the forts in the United States were named for Confederate generals

Fort Hood, for example. One of the reasons for that was not because there was a great love for the Confederacy in the United States. It was because the way that you bring a country back together after the most bloody civil war in American history and possibly world history

is that you actually express conciliation by recognizing that the Confederacy existed and now they have been subsumed into the broader union. But the Biden administration decided to rename Fort Bragg because the idea was that presumably black soldiers would go to Fort Bragg and suddenly they would think of Braxton Bragg and they'd think of the racism of America. Now, again, I'm wondering what the evidence was to that effect, that black soldiers who were at Fort Bragg spent every waking moment thinking

about the name of Fort Bragg. I've heard Fort Bragg thousands of times. It had never occurred to me to even look up who Fort Bragg was named after, let alone to look into the deep history of Braxton Bragg. But what Hegseth is doing is smart. They found another American hero named Bragg so they could go back to Fort Bragg. So that way, when veterans say, I served at Fort Bragg, everybody knows what they're talking about because there's still a fort named Fort Bragg, a U.S. base named Fort Bragg.

So according to the Defense Department, while flying aboard a C-17 from Joint Base Andrews to Stuttgart on February 10th, 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth signed a memorandum renaming Fort Liberty in North Carolina to Fort Roland Elbrag. The new name pays tribute to Private First Class Roland Elbrag, a World War II hero who earned the Silver Star and Purple Heart for his exceptional courage during the Battle of the Bulge. This change underscores the installation's legacy of recognizing those who have demonstrated extraordinary service and sacrifice for the nation.

So apparently Roland Elbrecht was, again, another American hero, but he was an American hero circa World War II. And he had effectively apparently hijacked during World War II a German ambulance to get a wounded soldier to an allied hospital in Belgium. He drove like 20 miles. And so what they're doing is they're restoring the legacy of Fort Bragg without paying homage to a Confederate soldier.

which is a pretty good way of squaring the circle here. Pretty smart. And all the people who would normally be protesting against the renaming of Fort Bragg are going to have trouble protesting the naming of Fort Bragg for a World War II Battle of the Bulge hero. And all this goes to the sort of broader thing that Trump is doing. The broader thing that Trump is doing is very much image-driven. And this is something that Trump understands better than literally anyone alive. He is the best marketer in the history of the American Republic, bar none. I mean, who else would be up for the job? Like Henry Ford,

Thomas Edison, Donald Trump, just in terms of branding genius, the people who did Coca-Cola. Donald Trump is amazing at branding and he understands the power of imagery. And the left is panicking because for a very, very long time, the right never understood the power of imagery. The power never understood the power of culture in general. And when you say that, again, there's that cycle, culture being upstream of politics and then culture also being downstream of politics.

That is, it's the cycle that one pushes the other. Remember, Donald Trump was a cultural figure in Home Alone 2 and in every rap song from about 1988 to 1997, long before he was president of the United States twice. And now he's using the power of culture in order to push his particular brand of politics. This is one of the things about Doge. So the Department of Governmental Efficiency, remember the history of Doge. So Doge was originally suggested as a sort of

advisory council led by Elon Musk that would exist outside the federal government.

And Trump talked about it and the entire left scoffed. The media scoffed too. They said, well, this is just a way for him to sort of throw a sop to Elon Musk. They're not really going to do anything. They'll make a few recommendations. It'll be like a task force and nothing will happen. And then it turns out that Trump just outsourced a bunch of the hard-nosed federal cuts to Elon Musk. Why? Because Musk is number one, incredibly famous for going into companies and clearing out deadwood. When he went into X, he fired 80% of the staff day one.

It broke a lot of the systems. And then he had to rebuild a bunch of those systems. This is something that Musk is famous for too. Musk is famously...

volatile in the sense that he comes in and he breaks things and he does it fast. And if he makes mistakes, he'd rather break things and then fix them than not break anything and leave bad systems in place. This is what Musk does. And three, Musk happens to be the richest and one of the most famous people on earth, which means that he can draw the fire. It's not about Trump. Now it's about Musk. So again, this is very smart strategically and targeting the sort of waste, fraud and abuse that Musk is targeting is also very smart PR.

Now, as I've discussed before, the only way to solve the systemic debt problems of the United States, it's not going to happen through kind of cutting around the edges at the Department of the Treasury. It's only going to happen when you restructure the major entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. However, none of that's going to happen anytime in the near future because both parties are deathly afraid of touching those third rails of American politics. And so what Trump is doing right now is he's allowing Musk imagistically to carve away at the image

of an efficient government that has never been true. Musk tweeted this morning that the amount of waste, fraud, and abuse in America's governmental systems put to shame any private waste, fraud, and abuse in the history of the American Republic. And that, of course, is wildly true because the size of the American government is so huge, so exorbitant, that it is not hard to throw a dart and you will hit waste, fraud, and abuse almost anywhere in the federal government. In the private sector, you see you're responsive to things like return on investment.

You're responsive to the profit motive. You're responsive to your shareholders. In the government, if you waste money, well, there's always more money where that came from. You can either print it or you can steal it from the American taxpayer. So that is what Musk is doing. And he is putting Democrats on the wrong side of the issue because who exactly is in favor of waste, fraud, and abuse? What exactly is the objection to cutting waste, fraud, and abuse? So what Democrats are doing instead is they're pretending that this is an assault on quote-unquote the system.

that it's a constitutional threat. Here's the thing. Democrats over the course of the last century and a half have hollowed out the Constitution and worn around its face like Hannibal Lecter.

That is what Democrats have done. They created an entire administrative bureaucratic executive branch filled with 2 million people to make all the rules that govern your life. They've turned the legislature into a vestigial organ of American government. And now Trump is coming in and he's the head of the executive branch and he's deploying people in the executive branch to make cuts within the executive branch. And they say this is a constitutional threat to the country. They want some separation of powers now.

Well, welcome to the party, pal. But here's the thing. You created these rules and now you are going to have to live by them. F.A.F.O. Well, five former Treasury secretaries, all Democrats, of course, have now written an op ed for The New York Times saying, quote, our democracy is under siege. Now, what they can't say is our bureaucracy is under siege, which is the reality. Our bureaucracy is under siege and it should be.

The thing that they cannot say is that our waste, fraud and abuse ridden system is under siege. That's what's under siege. Instead, it's our democracy. Now, you may have gotten used to during the Biden administration or the Obama administration hearing the word democracy thrown around a lot. All Democrats mean when they say democracy is stuff they like. If they do something totally undemocratic and you say no, they say you're a threat to the democracy. If they say that the Equal Rights Amendment is now law, even though it totally isn't,

And you say no. They say you're a threat to American democracy. If you cut the bureaucracy, they call you a fascist. I mean, if what we are watching right now is fascism, which is severing the bond between government sponsorship and blue constituencies, if that's fascism,

I feel like your definitions are wrong. Folks, what we are watching at work here is not fascism. I've never seen a fascist cut the government before. However, Democrats are banking on future uncertainty. In fact, they're trying to foster future uncertainty. Securing your family's future is of utmost importance in today's world. As somebody who always advocates for smart financial planning, I can tell you having the right life insurance coverage isn't just about peace of mind. It's about giving your family options if, God forbid, something terrible happens. That's why I want to tell you about Policy Genius. They're not an insurance company themselves. They're not a company that's going to help you.

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Quote, when we had the honor of being sworn in as the 70th, 71st, 75th, 76th and 78th secretaries of the Treasury, we took an oath to support and defend the United States Constitution. Our roles were multifaceted. We sought to develop sound policy to advance the president's agenda and represent the economic interests of the United States on the world stage. But in doing that, we recognize that our most fundamental responsibility was a faithful execution of the laws and the Constitution of the United States.

We are fortunate that during our tenures in office, no effort was made to unlawfully undermine the nation's financial commitments. Regrettably, recent reporting gives substantial cause for concern that such efforts are underway today. The nation's payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants. Okay, now the first time you hear that phrase, nonpartisan career civil servants, it sounds kind of nice. These are just people who serve you. It's like a waiter at a restaurant. They're nonpartisan and they're serving you in the civil service. Well, here is the thing. Wrong.

The nonpartisan civil service has become quite partisan because their patrons are all Democrats who continue to expand their agencies, their scope of authority in their budgets. These are not nonpartisans. Very often they're deeply partisan. But again, you have to wear around the face of objectivity while enacting highly partisan agendas.

These five former secretaries of the Treasury write, in recent days, that norm has been upended. The roles of these nonpartisan officials has been compromised by political actors from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. One has been appointed fiscal assistant secretary, a post that for the prior eight decades had been reserved exclusively for civil servants to ensure impartiality and public confidence in the handling and payment of federal funds. Here's the question. How'd they do on that?

Seriously, how'd they do on that? If these are such amazing nonpartisan civil servants, why are billions of dollars going out the door to some of the worst people on earth?

I mean, again, look at USAID, where billions of dollars were going directly to line the pockets of Hamas as they built terror tunnels. Explain yourselves, gang, nonpartisan civil servants. These political actors, say the former treasury secretaries, have not been subject to the same rigorous ethics rules as civil servants. One has explicitly retained his role in a private company, creating at best the appearance of financial conflicts of interest. They lack training and experience to handle private personal data, like social security numbers and bank account information. Yeah, I'm, yes, yes.

I'm sure that the federal government run by career bureaucrats and lackeys has been so secure in its handling of our private information, which is how Donald Trump's IRS tax returns ended up leaked to the New York Times just a few years ago. Their power subjects America's payment systems and the highly sensitive data within it to the risk of exposure potentially to our adversaries. Man, wait until you hear about a secretary of state named Hillary Clinton who literally stored classified information on a private server and then was found by the FBI to have probably exposed it to foreign sources.

Wow, that I mean, that would be terrible if that happened. A key component of the rule of law, say these secretaries of the Treasury, is the executive branch's commitment to respect Congress's power of the purse. The legislative branch is the sole authority to pass laws that determine where and how federal dollars should be spent. The role of the Treasury Department is not to make determinations about which promises of federal funding made by Congress it will keep and which it will not. Well, we're about to find out.

Because the reality is that withholding a payment actually was something that the federal executive branch did since the time of Thomas Jefferson. But Democrats somehow have to make this a threat to the system as opposed to the reality, which is it is a threat to the bureaucracy. It's turning into a threat to democracy.

And again, in the words of the Democrat, everything turns into a threat to democracy. I think the most ironic instance of this is Democrats screeching and crying to the heavens, sackcloth and ashes, wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. So for those who don't recall, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is one of the most ridiculous institutions of American government. It was created by Elizabeth Warren before she was a senator.

It was pushed by the Obama administration and it was directly made unaccountable to the American people, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. As the Wall Street Journal reports,

Before Ms. Warren became a senator, she persuaded Congress and then President Barack Obama to create a strange creature called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the 2010 Dodd-Frank law. The bureau would duplicate, replace, or expand on the efforts of existing financial regulators, but with a few dangerous twists. It would have no mandate to protect the safety and soundness of the financial institutions it regulates. It would not rely on Congress for funding. Instead, the bureau would have the ability to draw funding directly from the Federal Reserve, ensuring it wouldn't have to pay much attention to legislators.

Then Representative Randy Neugebauer of Texas wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2012, quote, My House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations has tried unsuccessfully to gain greater visibility into the Bureau's budgetary planning process. Those requests were denied. Once the director has decided a money draw is necessary, there's nobody with authority to prevent those funds from being paid out. Not congressional appropriators, not the Fed, not even the president's Office of Management and Budget.

Well, the problem is that this totally unaccountable bureaucracy has now been taken over by Russ Vought, who is Trump's Office of Management and Budget Director.

Vaught posted on X, quote, pursuant to the Consumer Financial Protection Act, I have notified the Federal Reserve that CFPB will not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding because it is not reasonably necessary to carry out its duties. The Bureau's current balance of $711.6 million is in fact excessive in the current fiscal environment. This spigot, long contributing to CFPB's unaccountability, is now being turned off. So effectively, Vaught shut down the funding. He could transfer the amount back to the Federal Reserve.

What's the problem? What's the problem? And it was made unaccountable to the legislature. So now Democrats, having designed the instrument, are now upset that it's being used in the reverse way.

Because this is how Democrats operate. There is no consistent rule of law. There is no actual consistent, objective regulatory agency established that cuts in all directions. Instead, the CFPB is a left-wing tool created by Elizabeth Warren, independent of the legislative branch. And when Trump takes it over and puts Russ Vought in charge, and Russ Vought immediately shuts down the funding, she screams and cries that somehow the legislature is being ignored.

Here she was yesterday, freaking out over the death of her idiotic brainchild.

If you have a bank account or a credit card or a mortgage or a student loan, this is code red. I am ringing the alarm bell. Elon Musk and the guy who wrote Project 2025, Russ Vogt, are trying to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If they succeed, CEOs and Wall Street will once again be free to trick, trap, and cheat you. So why are these two guys trying to gut the CFPB?

Not rocket science. Trump campaigned on helping working people. But now that he's in charge, this is the payoff to the rich guys who invested in his campaign and who want to cheat families and not have anybody around to stop them. Yeah, it's another scam.

It's a scam. Okay, so the CFPB was put in place by Democrats in order to regulate the living hell out of businesses, unless those businesses did the bidding of the federal government. That's what the CFPB was for. And now Trump is zeroing it out. Reservoir is coming in, and he's basically cutting the funding and pausing all operations.

And they're freaking out. It's a threat to democracy. It was never a democratic institution. It was an explicitly anti-democratic institution. If you want to pass a regulation against business, do it through the legislature. But I noticed you didn't want to do that. I noticed that instead, you wanted to set up an agency that passes thousands of pages of regulations and goes after banks without any sort of reference to the underlying issue of how banks operate.

And Democrats are so ridiculous on this stuff. Representative Maxine Waters, who has routinely been considered one of the most corrupt members, if not the most corrupt member of Congress. This is a person who, according to the LA Times in 2014, had shuffled a million bucks in the last eight years by doing business with companies, candidates and causes that Maxine Waters helped.

And she literally oversaw the banking committee and her husband was being regulated by the banking committee at the time. Like Maxine Waters is super duper. Here she is outside the CFPB saying that this is an assault on democracy to, you know, have an executive branch agency run by the executive branch.

Wow, wow, wow. Look at this crowd. Elon Musk, where are you? Bring your ass over here so you can see who's here and what we're doing. We're not afraid of you. We know that you are the co-president now of the United States of America. He's a thief. He's a gangster.

He brings his billionaire friends along with him because they think that they can take over this country. And Trump has said, you give me enough money, you can have it. Ma'am, this is Denny's and they're not yet open for the early bird dinner. Maxine Waters. Wow. This person has been a sitting congressperson for, I believe, longer than I've been alive or close to it.

and is deeply corrupt. You want to talk about people who have enriched friends and family? Maxine Waters is at the top of that list. And yet there she is yelling at Elon Musk, get your ass out. Yeah, I'm sure Elon Musk lives in fear of Maxine Waters. And it's not just Maxine Waters. Ayanna Pressley, the Ringo Starr of the squad. She's kind of been forgotten because there were some new hot squad members and then they ended up being defeated in primaries, the Jamal Bowmans or the Cori Bushes. But Ayanna Pressley is out there too, shouting about the evils of Elon Musk.

Last week, I saw a sign in the crowd that said Doge stands for dangerous oligarchs grab at everything. And I said then and I'll say it again, that Elon Musk needs to keep his grubby hands, his greedy, grubby hands off of our government. OK, I do love the idea that it is greedy and grubby to go into government and cut it.

That's what he's doing. He's going in and he's making cuts. And they're saying, oh, that's so greedy of Musk. I mean, look at him being all greedy. By cutting? I'm going to need an explanation for how him cutting the federal spending initiatives, cutting waste, fraud, and abuse is somehow an element of greed. I'm going to need an explanation.

Democrats are barking up the wrong tree, but this is desperation because, again, they are losing control over the institutions they themselves built. Representative Kweisi Mfume of Maryland, they keep looking for good acronyms for what DOGE is supposed to be, and they keep failing. So you heard there something about, you know, grabbing everything. And now here's another version. They're going to need to come up with something better. It's not good. Every time you hear DOGE,

The Department of Government Efficiency. You just remember, it is the Department of Government Evil. Government Evil? They're literally cutting the government. It seems to me the Department of Government Evil is very often just called the government. In just a moment, we'll get to Democrats and their continued attempt to foster a constitutional crisis.

largely through judges. I mean, they're actually doing some pretty incredible things via the judiciary that are totally unconstitutional. When you join DailyWare Plus, it's not just a subscription, it's a statement. A refusal to be spoon-fed the nonsense shoved down your throat by the media, Hollywood, and every self-righteous blue-haired activist with a TikTok account. You've heard the lies, you've seen the manipulation, you know the game is rigged.

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subscribe. So the Democrats, again, they're declaring that a constitutional crisis is taking place. Why? Because the executive branch is being cut by the executive branch. Well, now the New York Times has an article titled Trump's actions have created a constitutional crisis. Scholars say my favorite type of news piece from the New York Times and like minded institutions. What they do

is they have a premise. The premise is Trump bad. Then they go find an expert who says Trump bad. And so they say, Trump bad, experts say. You know pretty much anything. I can just as easily have an article that says, Trump's constitutional expertise.

Dominates America, experts say. And just go find some people who agree with Donald Trump. Like this is the easiest game in the reporting world. And so the New York Times is trying to now gin up the idea that a constitutional crisis is upon us. It's not a constitutional crisis when the entire government shuts down people who refuse to get the facts. That's not a constitutional crisis, apparently. It is not a constitutional crisis when Joe Biden literally attempts to add constitutional amendments by tweet to

It's a constitutional crisis when members of the executive branch go in and root out corruption, waste, fraud, abuse inside the executive branch. According to the New York Times, there is no universally accepted definition of a constitutional crisis. But legal scholars agree about some of its characteristics. It is generally the product of presidential defiance of laws and judicial rulings. It is not binary. It is a slope, not a switch. It can be cumulative. And once it starts, it can get much worse.

Erwin Chemerinsky, who's a very left-wing dean of the law school at Berkeley, says, quote, we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis right now. There've been so many unconstitutional and illegal actions in the first 18 days of the Trump presidency. We have never seen anything like this. He ticked off examples of what he called President Trump's lawless conduct, revoking birthright citizenship. Again, all that's gonna get adjudicated by the Supreme Court. Freezing federal spending, not clear that that's unconstitutional, given the fact that, again, the executive branch is allowed to put a pause. Everybody acknowledges this.

a pause on federal spending to align it with presidential authority. They can't just freeze it entirely, but they can certainly put a pause. Shutting down an agency. Okay, you can gut an agency. You can shift its actual functions to other agencies, depending on how the law is written.

Removing leaders of other agencies. Okay, all of those people work at the pleasure of the president. So again, he's just naming a bunch of things that Trump probably can do and calling it a constitutional crisis. He says, quote, systematic, unconstitutional, and illegal acts create a constitutional crisis. Okay, but here is the problem.

Some of the people who are creating a constitutional crisis are in the judiciary. So, for example, a federal judge has now determined that the Trump administration violated his order lifting the blanket spending freeze on federal grant programs. He's ordering the administration to unfreeze funds, including for NIH and the IRA.

They put together a TRO, a temporary restraining order nationally. Now, here's the problem. What in the Constitution, what in the Constitution gives one federal judge at a district court level the ability to shut down nationwide an act of Congress or the president? Where does this nationwide injunctive power come from? This is an open legal debate, a seriously open legal debate. Why should one judge in, say, the Ninth Circuit

be able to simply put a nationwide stay, you know, for the whole country on an action by the White House. There's a professor named Sam Bray over at Notre Dame Law School. Back in 2017, he wrote a piece called Multiple Chancellors Reforming the National Injunction. And he points out,

is that the national injunction is a recent development in the history of equity. There was a structural shift at the founding from a single chancellor model to a multiple chancellor model, but the vulnerabilities in the latter did not become visible until the mid to late 20th century when there were changes in how judges thought about legal challenges and invalid laws. Only with those changes in the second half of the 20th century did the national injunction emerge. And Sam Bray points out that national injunctions, again, are new, that what it leads to is a sort of tyrannical rule by one federal judge somewhere.

So Bray said history can be read in different ways. In my view, national injunctions go back to 1963. They don't exist before then. In fact, nobody even asks for a national injunction before 1963. Despite the thousands of lawsuits attacking New Deal legislation, there was never an attempt to get a federal judge in, say, California to strike down New Deal legislation such that a national injunction went into place. He identifies, Bray does, the second term of Barack Obama.

as the opening of the floodgates. He says, since then, almost every major presidential initiative by President Obama or Trump or Biden has been stopped at the nationwide injunction. And that seems not particularly good. According to another professor named Mila Sahony, who is the University of San Diego School of Law, Sahony acknowledged that this type of relief has now been requested all the time. Quote, what's being asserted is that those sources of law impose this crisp rule on federal courts under which federal courts can never grant relief to anybody that's not a plaintiff or a member of a certified class. Okay, but,

What she is saying is the opposite of what Bray is saying. What Bray is saying is the way that a federal court should take up a case is to put an injunction with regard to a specific plaintiff.

So if, let's say, you are a child of an illegal immigrant and you sue based on the birthright citizenship executive order put forward by the Trump administration, if the federal court is going to rule at the district level, they should put a stay on the injunction. They should put an injunction on the enforcement of that law with regard to just you, not to everyone similarly situated, because that is a question that belongs at the Supreme Court level. Bray said...

Remedies need to be based in equity. They need to have a traditional equitable basis unless they're authorized by statute. So again, these universal injunctions are a problem because what you end up with is basically single judges now determining for the entire nation what policy should be. And that's not right. That is wrong. It takes a long time for these cases to win themselves to the Supreme Court. President Trump makes this point. He says judges who are attempting to block Doge are a disgrace.

Tremendous fraud, tremendous waste and tremendous abuse and theft, by the way. And the day you're not allowed to look for theft and fraud, et cetera, then we don't have much of a country. So no judge should be no judge should frankly be allowed to make that kind of a decision. It's a disgrace. And again, he is not wrong about this is a very hotly contested issue by Democrats and Republicans.

If it's a constitutional crisis for Trump to ignore one federal judge, not the Supreme Court, one federal judge in, say, Oregon, striking down a nationwide act of Congress or a presidential action, who's creating the federal crisis? It would be that judge and people who are interpreting the law that way. Meanwhile, the American Bar Association, which is just a left-wing interest group, released a statement slamming Trump and Elon Musk.

William Arbe, president of the ABA. Remember, the ABA is such a corrupt institution. They actually signed on to Joe Biden by fiat, declaring a constitutional amendment.

They said, quote,

This is chaotic, but it is wrong. And most Americans recognize it is wrong. It is contrary to the rule of law. Okay, listening to the ABA about what's contrary to the rule of law at this point is like listening to the American Psychological Association talk about what's contrary to common sense when it comes to transgender care. Like you are an institution that has been thoroughly corrupted in the name of left-wing politics, and we can all see it. It is perfectly obvious.

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In reality, Democrats are just upset because they do not like the fact that they are losing.

Donald Trump picked an 80% issue when he said, let's cut waste, fraud, and abuse. Democrats are taking the 20% and then trying to swivel it into another argument about democracy and the Constitution that, again, avails you little when you guys are seen as a threat to democracy and the Constitution yourselves. And the desperation is clear and obvious. Eddie Glaude is a commentator over at MSNBC. Again, he is suggesting that it's all unconstitutional. Again, it's funny how Democrats suddenly like the Constitution the minute that Republicans are in power and they invoke it all the time.

You know, when they're not declaring that the Constitution is itself racist. Here's Eddie Glowd saying that the actual quiet part out loud, the Democrats actually believe the Constitution itself is bad. The same Constitution they are currently invoking to try and yell at Trump. There is this sense in which Donald Trump is hearkening back to a period where the United States imagined itself as an imperial kind of force,

Kind of informed by its democratic principles, an ironic and contradictory sort of position. And it's also the case, I want to say this, that there's always been this tension between America as an idea and America as blood and soil. Mm hmm.

This is the distinction between good nationalisms and bad nationalisms. Right. We think we're driven by the Constitution, but there's been an idea underneath it that this country must be must be and must always be a white nation. And that ideology has driven policy decisions. So Democrats are going to have to make up their mind. Is the Constitution good or is the Constitution actually a tool of white supremacy because they can't make up their mind?

It shows what Democrats actually think about all these things, which is just a power game. It's just a power game. If the Constitution is their enemy, the Constitution is a tool of white supremacy. If the Constitution is their friend, then violating the Constitution creates a constitutional crisis. Meanwhile, Ben Rhodes, he of the bad unpublished novels from Brooklyn, who was suddenly made into a national security advisor based on the fact that his brother was in charge of CBS News at the time under Barack Obama. Now he is complaining about Donald Trump

He is, he's very, very, he says Donald Trump is just like Vladimir Putin. And the histrionics from these folks, man, there's not enough room in this leftist tears tumbler. We need a bigger leftist tears tumbler. We need like a gallon size leftist tears tumbler for all the tears from people like Ben Rhodes.

If you look at other autocrats around the world, throughout all of human history, including in recent years, when you look at, say, Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, or how Xi Jinping is eyeing Taiwan ever more closely as he ages a bit, you know, there's this idea that a real legacy comes with more territory. That's not a new concept. It both helps you consolidate power at home. It stirs up nationalism. You get a bit of a sugar high. And it also is something that, you know, you can associate yourself with going forward.

When I listen to Ben Rose talk about America's national interest, all I can think is that he was actually nicknamed in the White House, in the Obama White House. His nickname was, I'm not even kidding, Hamas. That was his nickname in the White House because he was so anti-American. This guy. And now they're bringing him forth to talk about Donald Trump being anti-American. No one's buying it. No one's buying it. And the Trump

The Trump rebranding of America is going exceedingly well. And that, by the way, includes President Trump's rebranding of America against things like Hamas, against evil actors like, for example, Hamas. So yesterday, Hamas canceled all hostage releases until further notice. They did so basically because they made themselves look even more evil than they normally are. So over last weekend, they released three Israeli hostages,

These Israeli hostages had clearly been starved. They were emaciated. Apparently, one of those Israeli hostages, when released, weighed 39 kilograms, which, by the way, is 86 pounds. That is insane, obviously. Not only were these hostages emaciated, starved. Turns out the true starvation in Gaza, the true starvation crisis was applied basically only to the hostages in Gaza.

Not only that, this particular hostage, who'd been held in a tunnel for some 440 days, had not been told that his wife and children had been murdered. So in a speech that they forced him to do before being released, he said he was looking forward to seeing his wife and children, who are dead. They had not told him that. So this, of course, made Hamas look even more evil than they already looked, which is hard to do, considering they are a mass murder, genocidal rape organization. And Hamas then realized

basically said, we're not going to release any more hostages. Now, the reason for that is probably because all the other hostages are either dead or in this kind of condition. And so the more hostages they release in this kind of condition, the worse it gets for them imagistically across the world. By the way, it is, in my opinion, almost certain that the Bibas family, who many people have been praying for, I would be shocked if the Bibas family is not dead. The father, I believe, has been released. But the mother and two babies, you know, those redheaded kids, almost certainly dead. The fact that Hamas,

committed those acts is the reason why they're not releasing the bodies because if they do that then the ceasefire is basically over so they announced they're not going to release any more people quote during the past three weeks the resistance leadership has monitored the enemy's violations and failure to abide by the terms of the agreement and now realistically it's not about that it's just an outright violation of the ceasefire so israel is is arming up at this point president trump then made a public comment about all this and he said listen

If these folks are not back, all of them, not some of them, all of them by noon on Saturday, Israel has the green light to do whatever the hell it wants. Well, I would say this and I'm going to let that because that's Israel's decision. But as far as I'm concerned, if all of the hostages aren't returned by Saturday at 12 o'clock, I think it's an appropriate time. I would say.

cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out. I'd say they ought to be returned by 12 o'clock on Saturday. And if they're not returned, all of them, not in drips and drabs, not two and one and three and four and two. Saturday at 12 o'clock. And after that, I would say all hell is going to break out.

Good for President Trump. Imagine if this has been the world's reaction October 8th, 2023. This is what strong American leadership looks like, is F around, find out. There's always been the way of President Trump, and he is right, obviously, about all of this. And the image of America and the world is changing. President Trump understands the Middle East better than any of his moronic predecessors. By far, it is not close, which is the reason he's actually achieved things in the Middle East that none of his idiot predecessors have been able to do.

Alrighty, meanwhile, fallout from the Super Bowl. So apparently people are very upset that Taylor Swift was in fact booed at the Super Bowl. There's an entire piece in Glamour magazine titled, Why Taylor Swift Getting Booed at the Super Bowl Was Even More Chilling Than You Think. Well, I mean, I'm sure it's more chilling than I think because I didn't find it chilling. I thought it was hilarious. Taylor Swift is one of the more obnoxious members of the celebrity culture.

Whether it is Taylor Swift sitting in on Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively bullying Justin Baldoni or whether it is Taylor Swift recording the warbling three note songs of 15 year old girls while being the same age as my wife was a doctor and has four children in which she talks about her horrific breakups and how she's a victim of the patriarchy and all this while being a billionaire.

She's a very annoying human, and that is why people booed her. But apparently it is chilling. According to Glamour, quote, since Donald Trump took office, there have been several times I felt chilled by the rapid increase in misogyny seeping in our culture. But watching Taylor Swift at Super Bowl, booed by a crowd of thousands on Sunday night,

was a new low. It was just a football game, people might say, or Swift got heckled by some rowdy Eagles fans excited to be at the biggest sporting event of the year. So don't take it so seriously, but I was there at that game. When Swift's face appeared on the Jumbotron, an almost instant and distinctly male descent erupted from around me. Swift, of course, was there to support her boyfriend. I was far from the only celebrity in attendance. In fact, the screen showed a few famous people from Paul McCartney to Anne Hathaway and Lady Gaga.

Swift was different. As soon as she appeared on screen, the crowd seemed to delight in jeering and heckling her, and the mood shift was palpable. I watched in real time as Swift, alongside her friend Ice Spice, took in the response, her brow furrowing in confusion and then apparent discomfort. Looking at the camera, she distinctly said, what is going on? And girls, same, because we were all wondering what the hell was happening. If you're wondering, it's because you haven't been paying attention.

Taylor Swift has earned the enmity of a lot of football fans. Why? Because we believe that she got into football approximately seven seconds ago when it became convenient for her to celebrity date Travis Kelsey. And people who like sports are kind of annoyed that they're watching a sporting event and then the celebrity girlfriend gets cut to every seven seconds by the NFL. And also, they think that she is one of the most manipulative public figures in recent history. I mean, even that sentence, Swift alongside her friend Ice Spice. Yes, I'm sure they are deep and abiding friends who hang out daily.

I mean, come on. Perhaps the moment would have felt less visceral if not for the fact that less than an hour earlier, the crowd had exploded this time with applause to see Trump on that same screen. As an image of the president stone-faced and standing in a salute was shown to the crowd during John Batiste's national anthem performance, the roar of approval and cheers was deafening. Well, yeah, because it turns out that Trump got elected. And not only did Trump get elected, he is, again, putting forward a face of America that is simultaneously old and new.

in which patriotism is glorified once again. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift is doing anthems to the matriarchy and her supposed victim status. Yeah, people are annoyed by her. To me, that disparate reaction felt like a message, says the Glamour columnist, that the Super Bowl, one of the biggest cultural events in the country, has been reclaimed by Trump and type of toxic masculinity he appears to be the beacon of. And he and his supporters seem to be living for it.

Again, if it were really just toxic masculinity, then literally every woman would have been booed. But that's the point. It was just Taylor Swift. And the reason it's Taylor Swift is for all the reasons just mentioned. She is deeply fake. She is deeply artificial, deeply annoying. And yeah, she deserves it. All righty, folks, coming up, more commentary on the Super Bowl. Some people suggesting...

There was some coded messaging in Kendrick Lamar's halftime show. We'll discuss. 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.