Ep. 2169 - BREAKING: Le Pen BANNED?!?
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Well, folks, America is on the comeback, but the fight for truth is far from over. While the left tries desperately to keep its grip on legacy media education in the courts, Daily Wire is leading the charge for fearless journalism and the values that made our country great. Now is the time to join us. Stream my show ad-free. Watch along with my producers in the chat. Plus, get exclusive content you're not going to find anywhere else.

Access premium entertainment. Join a community of thinkers, not followers. Watch anytime, anywhere on desktop, mobile, and TV with the Daily Wire Plus app. Don't just watch the culture war happen around you. Be part of the movement. Subscribe right now at dailywire.com slash subscribe. Well, President Trump continues to resist the calls from isolationists on the right and from...

insanely anti-American voices on the left to essentially make his foreign policy subject to the whims of other countries. He's just refusing to do that. So the Signalgate story, which ate up the headlines all of last week,

This idea that because there was a group chat involving the national security apparatus inside the Trump administration that also accidentally invited in Jeffrey Goldberg, the pseudo journalist editor of The Atlantic, that this was a rationale for him to blow up his entire national security infrastructure. That isn't true. President Trump addressed that over the weekend, according to a brief phone interview he did with NBC News over the weekend. He told the network, I don't fire people because of fake news and because of witch hunts. Here was NBC's Kristen Welker reporting.

In an exclusive phone interview on Saturday, the president told me, quote, I don't fire people because of fake news and because of witch hunts. Mr. Trump said he still has confidence in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and National Security Advisor Mike Walz.

Now, why did he say that? Because according to Trump, quote, we had a tremendously successful strike. We struck very hard and very lethal. Nobody wants to talk about that. All they want to talk about is nonsense. It's fake news. He says, I have no idea what signal is. I don't care what signal is. I can tell you it's a witch hunt. It's the only thing the press wants to talk about because you have nothing else to talk about. It has been the greatest 100 day presidency in the history of our country.

So, again, this is President Trump ignoring the foolishness in favor of the actual policy, which is if the Houthis hit at American assets or American allies, then they get struck.

And President Trump seems to be upping the ante all over the world with regards to this sort of stuff. So many people have been fearful that President Trump was simply going to cave to Vladimir Putin, that Vladimir Putin is sort of slow playing President Trump in Ukraine. Now, as you recall, Vladimir Zelensky came to the White House, got chewed out by both Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance, and then expelled from the White House over his sort of brazen attempts to get Trump to commit to security commitments in the room.

And then Zelensky effectively apologized on the world stage. And then he said that he was going to agree to an immediate ceasefire. And in the meantime, Vladimir Putin has refused to agree to anything like a comprehensive ceasefire. He said maybe he'll have a ceasefire with regard to energy infrastructure or maybe there will be a ceasefire in the Black Sea. Well, in reality, Vladimir Putin is playing a game and everybody can see that he's playing a game. On Friday, he called for a transitional administration to be put in place in Ukraine and then vowed his army would, quote, finish off Ukrainian troops.

So while Putin is attempting to pretend that he actually wants to get to the end of the war, it is now pretty clear which side does not want to get to the end of the war. Zelensky has accepted the reality, which is that Ukraine is not going to, at least in this round of fighting, win back Donbass or Crimea. But Vladimir Putin does not want the war to end because he feels the momentum is on his side and that if he can sort of continue the push, that eventually the West will give in and stop funding Ukraine. And he will, in fact, end up sitting in the presidential palace in Kyiv.

According to Yahoo News, a rapprochement between Washington and Moscow since Trump's return to office and the U.S. leader's threats to stop supporting Kyiv have bolstered Putin's confidence more than three years into an offensive that has killed tens of thousands of people on both sides. The renewed call to essentially topple Zelensky was the latest demonstration of the Kremlin leader's longstanding desire to install a more Moscow-friendly regime in Kyiv. Zelensky dismissed Putin's call for a U.N.-run administration as the Russian leader's latest ploy to delay a peace deal, which of course is true.

Putin said that Russia could discuss with the United States, Europe and Moscow's allies, quote, under the auspices of the U.N., the possibility of establishing a transitional administration in Ukraine. And then he said that that would organize a democratic presidential election that would result in the coming to power of a competent government. So basically, he wants to oust Zelensky by threat of force. And then he wants his own man put in place in Ukraine. Well, President Trump is now seeing through all of this.

President Trump, in an interview with NBC News, said that he was, quote unquote, very angry and pissed off when President Putin criticized the credibility of Zelensky's leadership, adding the comments were not going in the right direction. And there's a phone conversation between President Trump and NBC News. Here is Kristen Walker reporting.

President Trump called me to tell me he is, quote, pissed off with Russia's President Putin and threatened to impose secondary tariffs on Russia's oil. Quote, if Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia's fault, which it might not be, but if I think it was Russia's fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on all oil coming out of Russia.

Now, a secondary tariff means that it's not just that the United States will put a tariff on oil coming out of Russia. It's that he is going to essentially put tariffs on any country that takes Russian oil, which would devastate the Russian economy because Russia is basically a giant gas station with nuclear weapons. President Trump said that would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can't do business in the United States. There'll be a 25 percent tariff on all oil, a 25 to 50 point tariff on all oil.

Now, again, this is the correct response from President Trump. He has now pushed the Ukrainians as far as it is possible to push the Ukrainians. They're agreeing to rare earth minerals deals. They're agreeing to immediate ceasefires. Zelensky gets the picture. The problem is that Vladimir Putin does not, in fact, get the picture. And so when President Trump is pissed off, he has every right to be pissed off because he understands that Vladimir Putin is, in fact, playing him. And so for all the sort of tankies on both right and left who believe that Trump is going to simply cave into Vladimir Putin, that is not how Trump operates. The thing about President Trump

is that all these people who sit around trying to figure out exactly what he is saying, what exactly he's doing, there is no massive backroom calculus that is happening here. He is not sitting in the backroom with one of those Charlie Day, it's always sunny in Philadelphia, boards with all of the strings connecting picture to picture. President Trump says exactly what he thinks, and he says it clearly and openly, which is why he's been president twice.

The American people know what they are getting from President Trump. And everybody who keeps looking for some sort of secret motivation, there's no secret motivation. He just does the thing. This also happens to be true with regard to Iran. So President Trump had sent a letter to the Iranian president saying, would you like to open negotiations over your nuclear program? And if you don't want to open negotiations over your nuclear program, bad stuff is going to happen. Well,

On Sunday, Iran's president said that the Islamic Republic had rejected direct negotiations with the United States over its rapidly advancing nuclear program.

President Massoud Peshikian said that Iran's response delivered via the Sultanate of Oman left open the possibility of indirect negotiations with Washington, but such talks have made no progress since Trump in his first term unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from Tehran's nuclear deal with world powers in 2018. That, of course, was the so-called JCPOA, which was the ridiculous nuclear deal that was negotiated by Barack Obama that essentially gave Iran a clear pathway to a bomb. It said, you have to delay it for 10 years, but you can use all the money that we are giving you and now freeing up.

to spread terrorism all over the Middle East. And we have seen the consequences of that over the past couple of years when the entire Middle East has gone up in flames, thanks in large part to the additional funding that was granted to Iran by the

Obama administration and then the Biden administration, the relief that was given to them said they could then spread their terror all over the Middle East. Pajekian said, we don't avoid talks. It's the breach of promises that has caused issues for us so far. They must prove they can build trust, that we can build trust with you who are using all the money that the Obama administration freed up to pay for terrorist proxies all over the Middle East and ballistic missile development. That you can trust us? Excuse me.

So the U.S. State Department responded, Again, this is not a complex calculus. President Trump himself said,

said that if they don't come to some sort of answer with regards to their nuclear program, the United States is going to come to an answer with regards to their nuclear program. And that answer might involve some bombs falling on their nuclear facilities. Now, of course, it wouldn't be the United States predominantly that would do that. Presumably, that would be the Israelis doing that with armaments essentially lent them by the United States. However,

President Trump's foreign policy is very clear. He is willing to make a deal at any time with anyone. But if you aren't willing to make a deal, the kind of deal the United States wants to enter into, he is going to clock you or he's going to allow America's allies to clock you. Again, this is called peace through strength. It is not particularly difficult to understand. It's actually quite easy to understand.

Now, meanwhile, in sort of funnier foreign policy news, J.D. Vance arrived in Greenland over the weekend. And I think he spoke for all Americans when he dropped this particular line. He arrived. He was talking to American troops. We do have American troops stationed in Greenland for national security purposes. We have a base there. And here is J.D. Vance summing up the feelings of all Americans with regard to Greenland.

Hey guys, how we doing? Please, at ease. At ease. Good Lord. Sit down and eat. Sit down and eat. Don't let the Vice President stop you guys from getting your chow here. How we doing? It's cold as s*** here. Nobody told me.

Okay, so yes, it is indeed cold as bleep in Greenland. He said, nobody told me. JD is right about that. The vice president is correct about that. I will say that I think it's bizarre that we are extending the same sort of logic to many of our allies that we have extended to our enemies. So JD Vance slammed Denmark. Now again, Greenland has like 50,000 people.

If the Greenlanders wish to join the United States, they could hold a referendum tomorrow and join the United States. They've made clear they don't actually wish to join the United States. The United States does have serious national interest in Greenland because of the Arctic channels that flow around Greenland that are now being victimized and used as bases in some ways by the Russians and the Chinese. However, slamming Denmark, like this part I don't really understand, I'll be honest with you. Here's J.D. Vance slamming Denmark.

There is no amount of bullying, no amount of obfuscating, no amount of confusing the issue. Our message to Denmark is very simple. You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland. You have underinvested in the people of Greenland and you have underinvested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful landmass filled with incredible people. That has to change. And because it hasn't changed, this is why President Trump's policy in Greenland is what it is.

And President Trump said, we will get Greenland, yeah, 100%. And then added, there's a good possibility we could do it without military force, but I don't take anything off the table. So war for Greenland, apparently, is still on the table. Okay. Greenland Prime Minister Jens Fredrik Nielsen pushed back and said, President Trump says the United States is getting Greenland. Let me make this clear. The United States is not getting that. We don't belong to anyone else. We decide our own future. Again, I don't think that's what President Trump is actually going for. Maybe he is. Maybe he is. It would be a...

use of political capital to go get Greenland. I suppose there are some reasons to get Greenland, but expending political capital in this way, it's a choice. I'm not sure it's a choice most Americans are deeply invested in. So obviously the United States does actually have some pretty significant national security interests in Greenland. I asked our friends over at Perplexity to spell those out. Of course, Perplexity is a sponsor of the show. By the way, I should mention here, Perplexity is such a great tool. They're not even paying me for this particular bump. I'm just saying this. Perplexity

Producer Zach went to the car dealer over the weekend and producer Zach got like a $10,000 discount on his car by using information that he got from perplexity about, for example, the VIN number of the car, how long it had been on the lot, how much it was costing them to keep the car on the lot.

every day and been there for like 200 days. And he negotiated down his car price based on information he got from Perplexity. So good for Producer Zach, a smart use of Perplexity. Anyway, I asked Perplexity, what are the United States' national security interests in Greenland? What is the U.S.'s history of protecting and defending Greenland? And here's what Perplexity says. Greenland holds significant strategic importance for the United States due to its location in the Arctic and its role in global security. It's situated at a critical juncture between North America and Europe, making it vital for monitoring air and sea routes. The U.S. operates...

...

As global rivalries intensify, particularly with Russia and China, Greenland is pivotal for maintaining U.S. influence in the Arctic region, which is becoming a contested area due to climate change and emerging trade routes because a lot of the ice up there is thawing, and that means that ships can now travel up there. The United States has a long history of protecting Greenland. During World War II, the U.S. actually established military bases there because Denmark, of course, had been occupied by the Nazis. The 1941 defense of Greenland was

Defense of Greenland Agreement, allowed American forces to protect the island from German influence during the Cold War. It was a strategic outpost for us to monitor the Soviets. The U.S. has tried to buy Greenland a bunch of times, all the way from 1867 to 1946, basically. So nothing new in what President Trump is trying to do, whether we take it by military force or not. You know, I'm a little skeptical.

Well, President Trump's polling remains solid because the government continues to do better things under Trump than it would otherwise. As Doge continues to surgically cut the fat from decades of bloated government spending and corruption, Pure Talk, the cell phone company I use for business every day, they're cutting the fat from the wireless industry. That is correct. Pure Talk says, I don't think so, to $100 a month cell phone plans. That's just wasteful. It's irresponsible. Instead, they're offering America's most dependable 5G network at America's most sensible prices. Listen to this. On the

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slash Shapiro. Also, if you're the owner of a growing business the way I am, imagine a hiring approach similar to speed dating, but instead of meeting potential romantic partners, you'd meet multiple qualified job candidates in a single scheduled session. Granted, no one actually likes speed dating, but people do like hiring those qualified candidates quickly. Wouldn't it be nice if there were an efficient format that allowed you to connect with several pre-screened interested applicants all at once, streamlining that recruitment process? Well, there's good news. There is. It's Zip Intro from Zip

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He's at 53.47, which makes sense. On the economy, he's at 48.52. On inflation, he's at 44.56. And this is the big problem for President Trump that faces President Trump right now. And this is the thing that President Trump has to focus in on. As I've been saying for weeks at this point, the only thing that can stop the Trump train here is a sinking economy. A sinking economy stops any train. It doesn't matter who the president is. If you're the president and you have a bad economy, it really stops you in your tracks.

Well, right now, the polling data show that the American people are pretty skittish about some of the economic plans that President Trump is making, particularly with regard to tariffs. And again, there's plenty of great stuff happening on the economic front, everything from doge to tax cuts. However, these swings with regard to the economy in public opinion polling are not good for President Trump right now. That same CBS News poll that showed him at 50%, which again is a very solid number for President Trump. The question of whether Trump's policies are making you financially better off, worse off, or the same

In January, 42% of people said better off. 28% of people said worse off. 30% of people said the same. Today, only 23% of Americans say that Trump's policies are making them financially better off. 42% say worse off, which is a 33-point swing. And 35% say the same. When it comes to inflation, 38% of Americans say that Joe Biden's policies are still to blame the most for today's inflation rate.

34% say Trump's policies and 19% say both equally. Well, that means that 53% of Americans say that Trump bears some responsibility for the nation's inflationary policies. This is a problem in the middle of President Trump's threats that he is going to have a liberation day with regard to the global economy. And by that, he means that we are going to push extraordinarily broad and high tariffs.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is scrambling to determine the specifics of its new tariff agenda ahead of its self-imposed deadline of Wednesday, weighing options as the president has promised to remake the American economy with a swath of new levies. One key point of debate is whether to impose individualized tariff rates for U.S. trading partners, as President Trump has previewed in recent weeks, or to revert to his campaign pledge for an across-the-board tariff that would affect virtually every country doing business with the United States, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Trump spent most of last week playing down expectations for his so-called reciprocal tariff plan on April 2nd. But in recent days, Trump has pushed his team to be more aggressive, according to people familiar with his conversations, encouraging them to devise plans that apply higher rates of tariffs on a broad set of countries. Trump reinforced that narrative on Sunday night. He said he would target, quote, essentially all of U.S. trading partners with tariffs of some kind. Well, that would be an extraordinary move by President Trump. Frankly, I don't understand how he has the executive authority to do that. This really is in Congress's purview.

And if the Republican Congress wishes not to lose a bunch of seats in the midterm elections, I would highly recommend that if President Trump pushes really high tariffs over the next couple of days, that Congress start thinking about taking back some of its constitutionally mandated authority over tariff policy.

Regardless of what you think of President Trump's policies, no president, Democrat or Republican should have the unilateral ability to simply increase the prices on goods across the board by 20 percent on all Americans. That is not a power delegated to any president under the Constitution of the United States. In recent days, advisers have considered imposing global tariffs of up to 20 percent that would hit virtually all U.S. trading partners.

Trump and his team for months promoted such a plan on the campaign trail before the president publicly ditched it in favor of that so-called reciprocal tariff plan that is still possibly on the table. Whatever the final plan, the official said, the president wants the policy to be, quote, big and simple, which means the final action will be broader than earlier plans to prioritize levying tariffs on the U.S.'s biggest trading partners, about 15% of the world's nations, which Treasury Secretary Scott Besant had labeled in the media appearances as, quote, the dirty 15. Now, again, this is not good policy. It just isn't. Again, I want President Trump's

policies to succeed. This is not a policy geared towards success. Now, the case to be made, if you're going to steel man the argument in favor of a broad tariff regime, the steel man case is the effect of the tariffs over the long haul. Let's say that you believe that

trade deficits are one of the biggest problems facing America. The idea that we buy more from other countries than other countries buy from us. I don't believe in this because again, you have a trade deficit with your grocery store. You have a trade deficit with your barber. You have a trade deficit with your local auto dealer. You have a trade deficit with everyone from whom you buy. That does not mean they ripped you off. It does not mean some great injustice has been done.

That is not the way global economics works. And in fact, when we run a trade deficit with another country, they have to use those dollars for something. And typically they use it to buy up treasuries. Very often they are using that in international trade in order to finance our debt. So let's be clear that it is not just we spend money on Vietnamese T-shirts and that money disappears into the ether. That is not the way any of this works. And you may not like the fact that Vietnam makes T-shirts and the United States no longer does. But we also make the entire world software industry and Vietnam does not.

There are good purposes to tariffs for national security reasons. I've said this a thousand times. When it comes to important national defense industries, obviously we have to maintain their production capacity in the United States because we don't want to be reliant on anyone else if it comes to a war, for sure. And for national security reasons, there may be reasons to tariff other countries as a punishment. You want to do a tariff, as we mentioned earlier on, Russian oil, because you want to stop them from pursuing a particular policy, or you want to tariff China because you want to stop them from stealing our IP.

Totally in for that as well. But the idea that tariffs in and of themselves are going to be good for the economy, that's wrong. But to steel man the argument, the basic idea would be that the American dollar right now is very strong in international trade.

And the reason the American dollar is very strong is there's a large demand for American treasuries and services and all of that because of the trade deficits that we run. If you end those trade deficits and you rebalance it, you weaken the American dollar. What is the good part about weakening the American dollar? Well, if you're President Trump, the good part about weakening the American dollar is that it leads to more domestic consumption because everything becomes more expensive imported from overseas to the United States. Your dollar doesn't go as far. It's not as strong. And two, it means that we get to pay off our debt in inflated currency.

However, we're already in the middle of an inflationary spiral. It has not ended yet. And so the deliberate idea that we are going to essentially inflate the currency by weakening it against other currencies and making prices higher for Americans in the process, that's a lot of pain for what I think is not a lot of gain. The reality is we are not going to, at this rate, inflate our way out of our national debt without crushing the economy. The actual way that you are going to be able to get out of the national debt is by growing the economy by leaps and bounds. And that does not happen via tariff regimes.

That is, tariff regimes do not lead to massive economic growth. There was something that was widely applied in Latin America, South America, during the 1970s and 80s. It was called dependency theory. It was actually a Marxist theory. The basic idea was that all of these countries in South America were being ripped off by the more sophisticated Western countries who were trading in sophisticated products. And then all of these countries in South America were trading out unsophisticated, unfinished materials, for example. And this was leading to, quote-unquote, dependency.

And so what these countries did is they raised tariffs on developed products from other countries that did not make their countries richer. Overall, it made their countries significantly poorer. It was very, very bad economic policy. So what does this look like? Well, President Trump already, this is not a great political pitch. It just isn't.

He told NBC News on Saturday he does not care, for example, if foreign automakers raise their prices for U.S. consumers in response to new tariffs. Quote, I couldn't care less. Here's Christian Welker reporting on President Trump. I promise you, by the way, American consumers do care if their prices go up by leaps and bounds on the cars they want to buy for their families.

And the president telling me tariffs are, quote, absolutely permanent. And on fears of foreign automakers raising prices, quote, I couldn't care less if they raise prices because people are going to start buying American made cars. OK, autarky is bad economic policy. It just is. It's been bad economic policy forever. The idea you can produce everything within America's borders for the same prices that you're currently getting is not true.

I understand that politicians have a stake in pretending that magic can happen in the economy, whereby you shut down global trade and you don't import anything and everything gets produced right here in America. And it's the same price and your life doesn't change in any way. That is not true. Things are going to get more expensive. The product in the United States, by the way, gets worse because

If you don't have competition with foreign competitors, there's no reason for you to make a product any better. This is basically the story of the American car industry during the 1950s and 60s. We dominated the planet in the 1950s. By the end of the 1960s, Toyota was eating our lunch. Why? Because we had massive tariffs.

on foreign automakers. We had huge subsidies to American automakers. Those subsidies were largely going to the UAW and other union members. And then when we finally lowered our trade barriers, better cars came in at a lower price and they completely swamped the American auto industry to the point that we had multiple bankruptcies in the 1970s. And tariff policy, protectionist trade policy is overall not good for, it can be good for certain sectors of an economy that are now receiving benefit at the hands of loss for the vast majority of American consumers.

But let's not pretend that it is good economic policy for the vast majority of American consumers. It's just like any other subsidy. If you tax everybody a buck and then you pay somebody $300 million, great for the guy who gets $300 million, not great for everybody who has to pay a buck.

And here we're talking about a lot more than a buck. Tariffs, as it turns out, are not amazing for the vast majority of Americans. But you know what's great for all Americans? Spring, it's here. And that means it's time to bring some life back to your home or yard with some new trees and plants. Did you know that Fast Growing Trees is the biggest online nursery in the United States?

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and everything is recorded and stored on that outdated technology? Well, you need Legacy Box. I've used Legacy Box myself for my family, for my in-laws. Spring cleaning might have you tossing everything out, but you don't want to toss out the family videos and the photos, right? You want to see that stuff, but you can't, except with Legacy Box. With Legacy Box's spring cleaning sale, you can check digitizing your memories off your to-do list and protect them forever for only $9 a tape. Legacy Box makes it incredibly simple. Just pack up your outdated tapes,

films and photos, mail them in, they handle the rest. Everything comes back digitized to the cloud so you can view and share your memories from any device anywhere. It's so effortless, you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner. Again, I've done this myself. I've done it for my parents. I've done it for my in-laws. There are all these old memories that are just out in the garage. And over time,

The price of core goods, by the way, in the Consumer Price Index fell 1.7% between December 2011 and December 2019.

Over the same period, prices of core services like housing, healthcare, and education rose 2.7% per year. That led to an inflation rate of 2% a year overall, according to the Wall Street Journal. Goods prices shot up during the pandemic. They peaked in summer 2023. But in September, core goods prices started rising again by an average of 0.1% a month, including 0.2% in February. So we already do have inflation. And that inflation continues.

Now, the Trump administration, because of course they work for President Trump, they continue to push forward this vision of tariffs. Peter Navarro, who's a big fan of tariffs and one of the president's advisors on trade policy, he said that we are going to make $600 billion in tariff revenue. This is not true. It is not going to happen. Here's Peter Navarro.

We're going to provide tax benefits, tax credits to the people who buy American cars. This is a genius thing that President Trump promised on the campaign trail. So that's going to happen. In addition, the other tariffs are going to raise about $600 billion a year. Okay, so last year, tariffs in the United States were responsible for about $80 billion in revenue. To get to $600 billion in tariff revenue,

We would need to assume that people are going to continue consuming foreign products at the same rate. It's sort of mutually exclusive ideas. One is that we're going to continue to consume foreign products and thus the tariff revenue will increase. But also we're not going to consume foreign products and we're going to buy American. So one of those two things is not true. Either we're going to redirect our consumption toward American product, in which case the tariffs actually are not going to raise that much money, or we're going to continue to buy foreign products, in which case we're going to raise more money via the tariffs, but we're not going to buy American.

Navarro and some of the team wants to have it both ways. By the way, even if we raise $600 billion through tariffs, you've heard from people that this is going to pay off our national debt. It is not going to pay off our national debt, not remotely, not close. We run a deficit every year in this country because we spend too much money. It is not because of lack of tax revenue. We pay an enormous amount of tax revenue in the United States. It rises pretty much every year. It just doesn't keep up with our spending.

And then Navarro suggested that tariffs are tax cuts. They are not, in fact, tax cuts. That is silly. You can have tax cuts. You can have tariffs. Those are not the same thing. Tariffs are, in fact, an increase. They are a tax on the consumer. That is what they are. In the same way that Obamacare was a tax on consumers because it got passed along to the consumer every time you paid a bill, tariffs are a tax on American consumers.

The message is that tariffs are tax cuts. Tariffs are jobs. Tariffs are national security. Tariffs are great for America. Tariffs will make America great again. Okay. Well, I mean, you can try this sell. The bottom line is that if Americans feel it in their pocketbook, they're not going to care about the sell. Vice President J.D. Vance was on the campaign trail as well, and he was explaining why he was a fan of the tariffs while he was in Greenland.

For 40 years, a lot of our friends all over the world have used America as a piggy bank. They have used us to absorb all of their excess economic production. What does that mean for Americans? For Americans, that's meant manufacturing jobs declining. That's meant middle class wages going down. That's meant whole towns that have been hollowed out by empty factories. And that means an America that is less safe because our manufacturing isn't as powerful now as it was 30 years ago. Okay, so that is not true.

Okay, J.D. Vance is a very, very smart person. And what he's saying here is just economically false. When he says that our European friends have, in fact, taken money from us, he's correct on the defense side. That is absolutely true. They've been living off our largesse since World War II. It's one of the reasons why President Trump is absolutely 100% correct to demand that NATO countries pay a certain percentage of their GDP for defense. He's totally right about that. However, when he suggests that

that the Europeans have used us to, quote, absorb all of their excess economic production. That is not remotely capitalist language. What exactly is excess economic production? Please, like, I want to hear it. Do you think that there's a factory in Germany that churns out things at zero cost, basically, for no reason, and then just ship them here? And what, force us to buy them? Well, what exactly is, please define excess economic production.

The laws of supply and demand do not work that way. If there is no demand for T-shirts, then no one is going to produce the T-shirts or they're an idiot. It bankrupts them.

When he says that using America as a piggy bank to absorb all of their excess economic production, what does that mean? That we are buying their stuff? You know, like you buy a thing at the store? That's you absorbing their excess economic production? When he says that's meant manufacturing jobs declining and middle class wages going down. Middle class wages have in fact not gone down in the United States, adjusted for the benefits that are received from the federal government. In fact, much of the middle class in the United States over the course of the past 40 years has become upper middle class over the course of the last 40 years.

And as far as the manufacturing decline in the United States, the truth is that manufacturing production has gone up in the United States. The number of jobs that it takes to make the manufacturing go up has gone down. That is because of technology in the main. It is not, in fact, because of outsourcing to China. Now, again, you can make the argument we shouldn't outsource that stuff to China. But to pretend that America was going to look in 2025 the way it looked in 1980 is not true.

So, again, you can make this case. It's just not going to be a particularly successful case. When this was pointed out, by the way, then J.D. Vance, who spends an awful lot of time on X sort of fighting his critics, he said, it is this brain-dead liberalism pretending to conservatism that saw the U.S. go from the world's manufacturing superpower to one in which the PRC makes nearly twice as much as we do and where if the small island of Taiwan fell to invasion, we'd be hurled into a Great Depression.

Now, I'm confused at the idea that if the United States had divested itself of global trade, then magically all manufacturing of semiconductors would be done in the United States as opposed to, say, in other places in Southeast Asia or in other places in Europe. It turns out, actually, that the line of manufacture for, for example, superconductors for semiconductors goes through places in Europe as well. There are many firms that are involved in the production of this sort of stuff.

He says, this is not just about a few union workers. This is about a globalized economic system in which the United States absorbs much of the producer surplus of the world. Again, producer surplus is a term that does not appear in classical economics for a reason. What is a producer surplus that is absorbed? Who is sitting around just making extra stuff, hoping that people are going to quote unquote absorb it?

He says a system whose brittle supply chains exposed our economic vulnerability after COVID. And speaking of those autoworkers, this guy has such contempt for it was autoworkers of the 40s who allowed the United States to go from a peacetime economy to the best mass producer of aircraft the world has ever seen. Is anyone making the suggestion that GM and Ford are going to be making our airplanes now? Like the F-13, the F-47 that President Trump talks about is going to be manufactured by GM and Ford?

It is true, actually, that the auto manufacturers turned to wartime production during World War II. And again, if you're doing tariffs in order to maintain our national security production, I'm with you. That's fine. But the idea that you need broad-based tariffs in order to protect what? Not even Stellantis, to protect Tesla, I guess. Because Tesla is then going to make our national security apparatus if there's a global war. And there's a lot of misdirects from the vice president. It just is.

And I'm not saying this because I want the president to fail on this stuff. I'm saying this because I think that his economic plans here can harm him. The worst thing that could happen to the Trump administration, by the way, the vice president, Vance, too, wants to run for president in 2028. The worst thing that could happen here is an economic downturn. That is the worst thing that could happen. As Axios points out, economic growth has flatlined so far this year. Inflation has picked up. Consumers expect both to get worse in the months ahead.

Okay, the...

I'll repeat again. If you like President Trump's agenda, he needs to avoid stepping on economic rigs. He needs to avoid it. The notion that you're going to rejigger all of global trade and that's going to have no effect on American consumers, on the American economy, on American businesses,

That is a hell of a gamble because either several hundred years of economics are wrong or this policy is. And we are apparently going to find out which. Now, the good news again, I think President Trump, he sticks, he moves. I think he adjusts to the bad headlines. If the economy downturns, do I think he's going to stick with these big, broad inflationary plans? I don't. I think that he's proved that over and over and over again, actually, over the course of his career.

However, that does not mean that this is in fact a wise move and there is a reason that the markets are really, really nervous right now. Meanwhile, there are in fact good things about to happen for the economy. Just get out of the way. Just get out of the way. According to Politico, Senate GOP leaders are going to move as soon as Wednesday to begin advancing a budget plan that is the next key step to unlock President Trump's

massive agenda through a party-line bill. Under the ambitious timeline being privately considered by Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the Senate would adopt its budget resolution before heading home for the weekend. A marathon voterama could kick off on Thursday. Four people granted anonymity to disclose private discussions. Caution could slip to Friday, depending on how quickly the chamber moves.

In order to make all of that work, the Senate parliamentarian would need to sign off on the Republicans' plans to use a tactic known as the current policy baseline, which allows them to pursue trillions of dollars in tax cut extensions while claiming it doesn't cost anything. Well, it doesn't cost anything. That's silly. That's the assumption of a current policy baseline is that what is current policy is in fact...

the baseline. And so when the Senate parliamentarian has to decide on the cost of a bill saying that you're going to continue to extend the same level of taxation that has obtained in the United States for the last 10 years or so,

That is not, in fact, some sort of weird economic trickery. That makes perfect sense. Otherwise, why not assume that the taxes are going to revert to like a 60% rate? Then everything costs an enormous amount of money anytime you want to lower the taxes or even maintain them as they currently are. Senators believe they could secure such a ruling from the parliamentarian as soon as Tuesday or Wednesday of this week, though the meeting has yet to be scheduled. This ruling is crucial because Republicans can't finalize the retooled budget resolution until they know if that accounting gambit will in fact be approved.

Before Wednesday, the big six budget negotiators, that would be John Thune, Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo, Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessence, and top White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett will huddle on Tuesday for their standing weekly meeting. Now, again, the Senate parliamentarian could throw a wrench into this entire timeline if they suggest that they can't use the current policy baseline.

With a 53-seat majority, Republicans can still lose three votes and pass something. But a big, beautiful bill will certainly go a long way toward making investors feel more sanguinity about the future of economic performance under President Trump. Again, business people are ready to invest. They're ready to do it. The uncertainty with regard to things like tariff policy are causing investors to hold back their dry powder.

And I spent a lot of time talking to investors and business people. And right now they are all very nervous because they don't know what tomorrow is going to bring. Predictability in the markets is probably the number one factor in allowing investors to actually put their money where their mouth is. This podcast is sponsored by Ramp. Look, there's feelings and then there's the facts. If you're feeling like your finance team is bogged down in mundane manual tasks, the fact is you need Ramp.

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Meanwhile, in absolutely extraordinary news, this really is crazy. A court has now banned Marine Le Pen, who is very, very likely to win the next election in France, from seeking public office for five years. This is crazy. And this is part and parcel of a broader attempt by left wing judiciary activists across the globe to stop, quote unquote, populist politicians from being able to run.

We saw it with President Trump, where the DOJ went after President Trump for supposed crimes that they then let Joe Biden off the hook for. We saw it in New York, where a New York attorney general filed a civil fraud lawsuit in an attempt to stop President Trump. We have seen it in Brazil, where the entire judicial apparatus has been brought down on the head of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, in favor of Lula da Silva, who was then freed by that same exact judiciary.

We've seen it in Romania. There was a candidate named Georgescu who won an election in 2024. And then the judiciary found, they said that basically the election had been rigged by the Russians and they just said that the election didn't count at all.

We have seen it in Israel, where the attorney general of Israel has been going after Benjamin Netanyahu on specious charges for literally years at this point. And the judiciary keeps saying that Netanyahu can't do like the basic functions of an executive, like fire his attorney general or fire anybody in the executive branch. It's pretty crazy. And now we are seeing it in France. It is absolutely amazing to watch these unelected officials

going out of their way to thwart the will of the people in supposed democracies. It's really insane. You want to talk about undermining democracy itself? This undermines democracy because the reaction to this is, okay, well, what if we just overthrow the judicial institutions? That's going to be the reaction. According to the Wall Street Journal, a French court convicted Marine Le Pen of misusing EU funds, sentencing her to prison and banning her from France's next presidential election. Judges handed down a sentence on Monday that bars Le Pen from seeking public office for the next five years.

Le Pen also received a four-year prison sentence, half of which was suspended. The ruling takes Le Pen out of contention for the 2027 race when President Emmanuel Macron finishes his second and final term. She was expected to be the frontrunner. The court ruled that Le Pen and other members of her party illegally used millions of euros in EU funding that was earmarked for assistance helping lawmakers in the EU parliament with their work. Instead, judges said, Le Pen and her lawmakers used the money to pay party staffers who weren't involved in work for parliament.

So just to get this straight, they're putting her in jail for two years and banning her from running for five because her party, which sits in the European Parliament, was paid money by the EU to help lawmakers. And those aides did work for both Le Pen's party and the lawmakers. And this is worth banning Le Pen from the election entirely over. Why do I feel like this is a put up job?

I mean, the answer is because it's a put-up job. Judges applied provisional execution to Le Pen's ban. That means it takes effect immediately, even if Le Pen appeals Monday's ruling. Her prison sentence remains suspended while any appeals are underway, which I think shows exactly where they are. The big thing is get her out of the elections. That is the big thing. So they're suspending her jail sentence, but they are not suspending banning her from running.

I wonder what their goal is. Hard to imagine. Le Pen has denied the charges. She testified it was appropriate for the assistants to perform other party-related work because they were political aides, not direct employees of the European Parliament. In other words, they didn't work for... If the European Parliament wanted them working on just European Parliament stuff, maybe the European Parliament should have hired them as opposed to paying the party to do some of the work for the European Parliament. Seems like a fairly strong defense.

Is the idea here that Marine Le Pen desperately needed a couple of million euros in order to pay off her political party? I feel like she probably could have raised it. Her party's pretty big in France. And again, this is just the latest NATO member to reject a populist candidate over some sort of judicial intervention. Pretty unbelievable.

And you want to talk about, again, undermining the argument that democracy must flourish in Europe. This would be a great way to do it. Meanwhile, these same courts all over the world are perfectly willing to allow left wingers to do whatever the hell they want. So, for example, a South African constitutional court has now decided that a controversial song featuring the lyrics, kill the boar and shoot the boar, boars being a term for white farmers of originally German extraction.

That song actually is not a violation of the law in South Africa. So it's not hate speech. Shouting, singing, kill the boar and shoot the boar is apparently totally fine. That is not incitement in any way, according to the UK Independent.

A decades-old anti-apartheid anthem recently denounced by Elon Musk for allegedly inciting violence against white South Africans returned to the spotlight last week following a ruling by the country's highest court. The controversial song featuring the lyrics, kill the boer and shoot the boer, boer being a term for a white farmer, has long been a source of contention in South Africa. Its use has been primarily confined to political rallies of the Economic Freedom Fighters, EFF, a small far-left opposition party, but is not a small left-wing opposition party. It is a party that has large-scale agreement with the ruling ANC.

The song's resurgence in the headlines follows a rally last Friday where EFF leaders sang the anthem. The EFF maintains the song is a tribute to the struggle against apartheid and should not be interpreted literally. This is one of the games that gets played in South Africa, is that you either have to choose between the currently racist regime of South African government

and the apartheid regime. There's no in-between and there's no other solution. The only answer is you have to be totally fine with kill the Boer or you have to be in favor of apartheid. No answer in between, which is a lie. It is not true. We had the opportunity last week to sit down with Dr. Ernst Root. He's an Afrikaner activist, author and filmmaker from South Africa to discuss exactly what's going on in South Africa, which should terrify anyone who believes in equal protection of the laws. Here's what it sounded like.

Dr. Roots, thanks so much for stopping by. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. So for our listeners who are not familiar with South Africa, they might be seeing a tweet from

from President Trump here or a tweet from Elon Musk, but they don't actually know the roots of South African history. And so they look at the racial issues that have arrived there and they have sort of a left wing view that's been drilled into them that essentially this is just a matter of decolonization, colonialism. Why don't we go back to the beginning? What are Afrikaners doing in South Africa? Well, thank you, Ben, for having me on the show. So the Afrikaner's history in South Africa goes back to 1652.

which is before the Declaration of Independence. So we've been there for hundreds of years, almost 400 years. It started initially as a settlement or a refreshment station in the Cape, where Cape Town is today. And eventually they were joined by other groups coming in from Europe, French, Germans, and then in smaller numbers, initially some other groups as well. Later the English came, so we have a big white Anglo community in South Africa.

And we've been there for hundreds of years. We're not Dutch anymore. We have developed our own culture. We have our own language. We named ourselves after the continent. We are the Afrikaners. Our language is Afrikaans. And we have our own literature, our own poetry, our own philosophy. We have all these things that we have had.

again, developed for hundreds of years. And over time, obviously in any country like this, our history is very similar to the American story in a sense. Also with the pioneers, the great track that we had into the interior in America, you had the track to the west.

So, and there's, in a story like this, there's always friction and it's almost like news. People like to focus on the friction and ignore the cooperation. But there were incredible stories of cooperation between communities in South Africa. But when you talk about history in South Africa now, you're only allowed to talk about the friction. When the truth is that we've had a history, a long history of cooperating with communities and so forth.

And yes, one thing led to another. The Cape was colonized around the time of the Napoleonic Wars by the British. We then moved in towards the interior. We had some battles. We had some treaties. We bought land. There were some areas that weren't settled. You're not allowed to say that, but South Africa wasn't densely populated back then. We started the Boer Republics, the Transvaal and the Free State, which led to the Anglo-Boer War after gold and diamonds were discovered.

After which South Africa became a union in 1910, which means all the republics, the kingdoms of the African tribes and so forth, the colonies, everything was combined into one big whole, which became South Africa. And then, of course, we had the apartheid history, and this is a very quick overview leading to the negotiated settlement in 1994, which led to this new South Africa.

which was celebrated all over the world as a miracle. And it was sort of the shining example of what the United Nations can do to save a country. And the constitution was celebrated. And now we are here where it turns out that that story, this miracle story was not as shining as people would have liked it to be.

And I think it's that part that is puzzling to people because they've been taught the miracle story. They've seen the movies about Nelson Mandela. They've seen the films and TV shows about the great moment when apartheid ended. And there's sort of been a ban publicly on talking about the problems that exist in South Africa post that because to mention that there are some fairly significant problems, as it turns out, in post-apartheid South Africa is seen as some sort of endorsement of apartheid itself, which is a false binary.

Yeah, exactly. So that's the problem that we have is we have this narrative that you can choose between the apartheid system and the current system. And there's only those two options. You have nothing else to choose from. And so you have to choose what's currently happening in South Africa. And if you don't choose that, or if you say this is a problem, that by definition means you want to go back. You want to go to the apartheid system, which no one wants to do. The fact is that the apartheid system didn't work. The current system isn't working and we need something else. We need a better system.

But it's been, we are very happy that a lot of people are taking note about what's happening in South Africa because this has been going on for decades. And I think the pendulum has swung so far to the one side or to the left, you could say that it has, it's the narrative about South Africa has become so detached from the realities on ground level that it's just not possible to ignore what's happening in South Africa. And so,

We are grateful that people are talking about this and people should be talking about it more. So let's talk about the history of South Africa since the end of apartheid. Again, that's where most people's story ends, is end of apartheid, happily ever after. What has actually happened? What were the political transformations that took place in South Africa after the settlement of '94? Well, one way I think to understand what's happening is the negotiations for the new South Africa started immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And that was, you know, the end of history era. And there was a sort of a narrative that capitalism and liberalism is as one and it's going to be the standard, the gold standard all over the world eventually. And we need to write a constitution for South Africa along these lines.

And the problem with that in South Africa is that it's a very big country. It's very diverse. It's more like Europe than like the US in a certain sense. It's almost as big as Western Europe, at least. And there are many diverse nations and peoples living there. And so the ruling party, the ANC, back then they said,

the way we're going to do this is we want what they call a national democratic revolution. And that essentially means using democracy as a way to promote socialist ideals. And the way they did that, they said it's going to be a two-phase revolution. Phase one is present ourselves as very liberal, very open-minded, very pro-democracy to get more and more support in South Africa and all over the world.

and which worked obviously brilliantly. And then the theory or the strategy that they wrote it out, it's all on paper. They said that once we have the power or the levers of power, as they put it, then we should eventually move to the second phase of the revolution. And that means using the state mechanisms to become much more aggressive in implementing socialist policies.

And so the first big one was 1996 with the, in America you call it DEI, we call it BEE, which is Black Economic Empowerment, but it has nothing to do with empowerment. It's handing out social grants and it's discriminating against people who aren't black.

So they started with that in 1996, which became more and more aggressive over time, up to the point where there are now more than 140 race laws in South Africa today. So that was one strand. Another strand was the property rights thing, where they said in 2018, we're going to start a process to change the property rights clause in the constitution so that the state can expropriate private property without compensation, which is just confiscation of property.

So that's another strand. And then there's also the strand of the hate speech and real hate speech. I mean, actually targeting a group of people, identifying them based on their ethnicity and then saying, we need to go out and kill those people. It's not offensive speech. It's calling for the boers to be slaughtered. And that's combined with political speeches, with statements such as, and this is a direct quote, all white people are criminals and they should be treated as such.

And then these politicians would burst out chanting, kill the boer, kill the farmer. And the boer is, of course, a reference to the Afrikaner people. And this has been getting worse and worse and worse up to the point where, again, as I said, you cannot ignore what's happening in South Africa. But what's really strange is how people in South Africa and unfortunately in America and some other places are trying to deny the existence of the problem by saying it doesn't exist. But it's...

So the farm killings, you have the names of the people who have been murdered. I mean, I knew people who have been murdered on farms. And for someone to say, well, this problem doesn't exist, it's really, really bizarre. So let's talk about the details of that, because a few years ago, this started to pop up in the news. I remember we covered it on the show at the time. That's when you and I first got in contact, actually. And the...

take from the media is that statistically speaking, it's not a big deal. People are being killed at kind of the normal rate that people are killed. There is a comparison between the rate of killing of farmers in rural South Africa to the rate of killing of people in Johannesburg, which is notorious for having significant violence problems. Talk a little bit about that. What's been happening with the killing of farmers? Well, the counter argument that you presented now is based on the idea that

that there are other problems as well, therefore you shouldn't talk about this problem. And the people who are saying this is a problem, we should do something about this, are not saying that there aren't other problems. And so one, just to point out the lunacy in this is one way to respond to this is there's a big problem in South Africa with the poaching of rhinos. But no one is saying, why are you talking about rhino poaching? You are discriminating against elephants that are also being poached. The fact is that rhinos are poached in disproportionate numbers and it has very particular consequences.

And so to say that the farm murders have to stop is not to say that there isn't gang-related violence in Johannesburg or Cape Town. But as far as the murders are concerned, it started in 1990.

And it gradually got worse. And there's been some debates on how to calculate it. If you use the police statistics, I think the police data is quite accurate in terms of the murders, but not in terms of the attacks. The attacks are much more like this shadow number that you don't know of than what the police say. But according to police data, if you look at a period of two years, there were two farm attacks every day in South Africa, during which two people were murdered every week.

And it's been going on and on and on up. And it's a small community. The farming communities, there are about 30,000 commercial farmers in South Africa. So it's a small community. And if you're a farmer in South Africa, you know people who have been murdered. That's just the reality. Or you have been attacked yourself. And I personally know people who've been attacked, people who've been killed and so forth. So that's the one aspect is just the rate at which it's happening.

The second aspect is the brutality and it's the worst tortures you can imagine. Really, I can't think of worse methods of torture than the ones that we've seen in South Africa with gorging out of the eyes. We've had one farmer where I grew up, they had a shower nozzle turn up on it's the highest warm water. They shoved the nozzle down his throat.

And there are many, many, many such examples. I mean, I can go on every torture you can imagine has been applied. And these are race-based murders? So not all the victims are white. The victims are people of all races.

I'm not aware of a black farmer that has been tortured. So it's a big phenomenon and a lot is happening and surely not all of them are politically motivated. Some of them certainly are. And we know that because sometimes the attackers write political slogans on the walls during these attacks. Or they would chant slogans and then the survivors would come and say, the attacker said something like, die white man, viva Malema, who's the politician who's chanting this, kill the boy, kill the farmer. So some of them are,

obviously and overtly politically motivated and some of them probably aren't or some of them aren't but we don't know those statistics in terms of the motivations but but it's it's very very alarming so when it comes to the politics here and the excuse that you hear in the world media is when when you see videos of Malema saying kill the boar the number one you'll hear well he doesn't actually mean it it's it's just it's just song who cares which is absurd on its face but the

But the other thing they'll say is, well, you know, he's part of a party that isn't actually the governing party. ANC is the governing party. So why are we focusing so much on Malema, for example? Isn't ANC just fine? Yeah. So he is. Some people have called him the most influential. I think that's an exaggeration, but some have called him the most influential politician in Africa. He's certainly one of the most influential politicians.

And certainly in South Africa, his party has had some difficulty in the last election. But the thing is, ideologically, he's not far away from the EFF. In terms of rhetoric, he's much worse. I mean, he's not far away from the ruling party, from the ANC. In terms of rhetoric, it's worse. And so a few years ago, he made a speech where he's... One of the statements he made during that speech was...

We are going to slit the throat of whiteness. And then everyone was applauding. And then two days after the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa publicly said, we invite this guy to come back and join our party because we can see that deep down in his heart, he's still a member of the ANC.

So we do find that the ruling party is a bit more subtle in its approach, although just as racist in terms of the policies that they are implementing. And then we have these parties to the left of them that are much more radical. But again, ideologically, there's not much of a difference. They both, the ruling party and the EFF think of people like Robert Mugabe as a hero, Mao Tse-Tung they think is a hero, Joseph Stalin even.

Maduro, they go all these Fidel Castro, all these communist examples. And then they would not only say that these people are heroes, they would say, we need to duplicate their policies. We need to bring their policies, but in South Africa, it's going to work. And as far as they would be willing to concede that it hasn't worked, they would say, this time it's gonna work. Well, one of the things that is fascinating about what's happening and horrifying is the connection of a sort of communist philosophy of economics,

with a Frantz Fanon decolonization, violence is the solution, and transforms people spiritually attitude that seems to have crept in South Africa. And it's part of a sort of third worldism that now spans not just South Africa, but wide parts of the Middle East, enormous parts of Asia. And it's part of a broader movement that we're seeing globally that basically suggests that the people

Anyone who is failing is a victim of capitalist excesses predominantly by white people. And all of that has to be overthrown. Yes. So Frantz Fanon has become more and more popular in South Africa and it seems like in other places of the world. And his philosophy could be summarized in The Wretched of the Earth. He says that

More or less that if someone treats you like an animal, you don't need to behave like a human being towards that person. So it's in a way a justification of violence. And now the Marxist line on that is, if you are poor, it is because someone stole something from you. And if you are wealthy or successful, it is because you exploited someone or you stole from someone. So being poor by definition means being

that you are a victim and being wealthy by definition means you're a perpetrator. But then they blend that with race nationalism saying that only black people are poor and only white people are rich or that's the only ones we care about. We only want to talk about wealthy white people and poor black people when reality is much different than that, of course.

And so then they blend these two by saying that the poor and the black South Africans are the same thing and whites and wealthy South Africans are the same thing when that's not true. And then they say now, and that's because they stole from us. And so we need to take this stuff. And then we have our own blend of philosophy in South Africa called

Called the Xenia critical theory. Xenia is sort of the leftist name for South Africa, which is taking some stuff from Frantz Fanon, taking some stuff from philosophers, critical race theory in America, Robin DiAngelo, people like that. And then in a way justifying, you know, that we should apply violence. And if you apply violence, it's actually morally it's appropriate.

to apply violence to the white minority. And you can see this manifesting domestically. You can also see it in terms of the foreign policy of South Africa. South Africa famously sponsored this ridiculous...

International Court of Justice assault on the Israeli government, suggesting that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. And there are deep connections between Hamas and the South African government, between Iran and the South African government. There's presumably money that's changing hands along those lines as well. Yes. So looking from a South African perspective at that court case, it was really bizarre to watch

the arguments because they use the same legal team as was used in South Africa to defend the kill the boer, kill the farmer chant. So they would say in South Africa that chanting about murdering people based on their ethnicity is not hate speech.

And then they would say it's not because you have to look at the context. So don't look at the words, look at the context. And the context is, of course, apartheid. So because there was apartheid, we can now talk about killing people in South Africa. And then the same legal team, the same lawyer argued in the case against Israel that do not look at the context. So ignore October 7. That context is irrelevant. And only look at this particular statement that was made by this particular soldier or something like that.

And so it's really bizarre. And so the argument was that we need to do this because we have a strong moral conviction and we have a strong sense of morality. And it's in the consistent application of our idea of morality that we have to take Israel to court.

when if you really look what that sense of morality is and you compare the, and you look at the application there of how some of the world's worst dictators historically they regard as heroes. Currently, they would defend them. They would not arrest them when they come to South Africa, even though they are, the International Criminal Court have sanctions on them and so forth. So it's really bizarre, but they seem to get away with that because there is this movement in the world that is,

so hell-bent either on participating in these type of activities or defending it and pretending that, you know, it's okay because morally it's appropriate to be on this side of the argument. So what are the answers in South Africa? Obviously, the Trump administration is now applying sanctions to South Africa, or talking about applying sanctions to South Africa based on the racial discrimination in the law, based on their threats to expropriate property from essentially white people.

What would the actual solutions be domestically? What would a better government in South Africa look like? Yeah, that's the important question. So one way to answer it is in your book, Three Easy Steps to Destroy America. It's in a sense the answer. You said that America, there's a sense of unity in America because of a shared philosophy, a shared culture, and a shared history.

The problem in South Africa is that we don't have any of those. So we have different, the proper way to think of South Africa is a region. So East Africa is a series of countries. North Africa is a list of countries. West Africa is a list of countries. South Africa is one country.

But in South Africa, there are many nations living in South Africa. And within these nations, they have shared philosophy, shared culture, shared history. But as a whole, we don't have that. And the problem is if you govern, it's pretty much the equivalent of the European Union as the government of Europe.

If you approach things like that, necessarily it would lead to conflict and friction. And so the only long-term solution is to work towards a more sustainable political dispensation or political system. A federalism. Yeah, exactly. Federalism, a decentralized system that's based on the idea of self-governance that local communities or cultural communities or however you want to frame it can have a degree of self-governance. Because currently we have this very big country, the distance from the north to the south

is the distance from Rome to London. And it's just as diverse, perhaps even more diverse than Western Europe. It is more diverse than Western Europe. And so we have this central government

trying to enforce its ideas, a government that says our philosophy or ideology is a blend of race, nationalism, and socialism, as if that's never been tried before. And so it's just not going to work. It's going to lead to more and more friction. So we need to move towards either federalism or some form of decentralization. And that could take many forms. I mean, the fact that that's even remotely controversial is sort of beyond me because that is the way that it has historically worked. It worked that way in the United States originally, where even the state's

members of states had their own identities. And that's why we have a very weak central government. And that's why Virginia was governed different than Massachusetts, which is governed different from New Hampshire. And the same thing is obviously true in Europe. I mean, much of the angst about the EC and then the EU has been specifically about the idea that a French identity is different from a British identity. And when you have people who are

who don't share a philosophy or a history or a culture or an ideology or anything like that, what you end up with is one group having to dominate another group. And in one form that can take is apartheid and a reverse form of that can be a racist regime that cracks down on white people. Yes. And so the idea that, and what you're talking about here is not racial identitarianism. What you're talking about here is cultural identity.

And the fact that you have cultural affinities between people, that of course is totally real and inarguable. You're not suggesting that white is better than black, black is better than white, black can't live with white. What you're saying is that there are cultures that are different. Those cultures should be able to self-govern. And the idea that those cultures have to be put into a system that is ruled top-down in tyrannical fashion by either one group grabbing the gun or the other group grabbing the gun is unworkable. Yes, so if democracy means

two wolves and a lamb have to vote on what's for dinner. You shouldn't blame the lamb for losing faith in democracy. But the good news is that's not democracy. That's not what democracy is supposed to be. Democracy is about self-governance. And unfortunately, we have this tyranny of the majority that many Americans have warned about over the centuries, where some ideas are just enforced. And let me give you a quick example. We have the

The name changes in South Africa. That's going to make the country better. Just change all the offensive names, which actually started there and now it's sort of flown, spilled over to America as well. And so they change. There would be street names and city names named after murderers, people who had just murdered innocent people. And if you ask the ruling party, how do you determine if something is

or not, like Church Street is offensive, but the name of a murderer is not offensive, then they would say, we are the people, we represent the people, and therefore we decide. And so it's just not going to work. And I think the answer is to go to the Jefferson line of eternal solutions. We're not trying to figure out some new ideological solution that no one has ever thought of. It's been a principle since the beginning, since Rome and Athens and Jerusalem, the idea that people

there must be some form of self-governance. People should be able to govern themselves. And with that in mind, you should have mutual relations with other communities. And yes, it is very politically incorrect to talk about that, but we need to break that wall because that's the only way forward. That's the only solution for South Africa. Right. I mean, again, I think that one of the things that people are trying to tie this into is sort of white nationalism or white supremacy. And that's a category error. That's not actually what you're talking about. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And so they try to blend it with all these sort of

these slogans that have been devised to sort of just swipe something off the table. I think there was a saying, one of the big Afrikaner entrepreneurs of the previous century, Anton Rupert, who was world famous in his days, said that you can't go to bed and rest assured at night if your neighbor is hungry.

And so that's also, and that's an important thing for us as the Afrikaner community. We don't want to find a solution for us at the expense of everyone else, because that's not a solution either. The solution must be a solution for everyone. And I think what we have currently is a problem for everyone. There are very few people who would still say that South Africa is working. They would concede that it's failing. The debate is, is it a failed state or a failing state?

but then they would sort of defend the government still. And so it's not working for everyone, for anyone. And so we need to find a solution that would work for people. And the idea that bringing the government closer to the people is an eternal solution. It's something that has been the idea since the Roman Republic and before that. It's basic Montesquieu, right? I mean, there's nothing new here. I mean, this is what all the American founders talked about, the idea of...

your local government is going to be the government that is best for you, that you do have to have decentralization, that you do have to have local rule, that most of the things you agree on with your neighbors are going to be things that you agree on with your actual neighbors, not people who live thousands of miles away and share a completely different culture and affinity for different philosophy. Again, the fact that this has become controversial is because...

we live in a sort of bizarre world where you have to force yourself into these false choices again, that it's either apartheid or it's racial rule by the ANC. And there's no in between. There's there's nothing else that can be done here. And that obviously is untrue. So is there any level of support inside South Africa for this sort of decentralization? How does that level of support? Yes, it's it's growing. It's it's fast growing. So so firstly, it's

It's not that controversial anymore to say, look, guys, this isn't working. Again, you would have people in the media defending it. There was a piece just published today in South Africa, how expropriation of property would rejuvenate the economy. So you get that. You still get that. But the idea that it's not working is widely accepted.

I think the idea that we need to bring government closer to the people is also widely accepted. People agree with that. So there's talk about Cape Secession, sort of the Western province. There's really a movement there saying we need to break away from South Africa. The Zulus in KwaZulu-Natal are concerned that the central government isn't representing them

Um, there's a project called where Rania in the Northern Cape to develop an African or city. So, so they already many such projects. And I think that's naturally where things are headed. There's, there's going to be some form of a crash. You might say, or some form something's going to happen in South Africa.

And we must just ensure that when something happens, it's a turn to a better system rather than- Right, it's not chaotic violence and warfare in the streets or anything like that. Yes. I mean, I think there's also a great example of how paper guarantees mean nothing if you don't have some level of cultural affinity and unity among the population. When the South African constitution was written, Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously suggested it was a better constitution than the constitution of the United States because it guaranteed things like

a right to health care and a right to housing. A right to a good environment. Exactly. It's like a list of these rights that aren't actually rights. They're things that have to be provided to you by others. Yeah.

It's not like a right to free speech where essentially a right to free speech means you have a duty not to infringe on my speech. A right to housing means you have a duty to provide me housing. And it turns out that none of that materialized. There's a lack of housing. It turns out that the duty to the right to health care doesn't mean that health care in South Africa magically materializes in amazing ways where the health care is just tremendous. All these sorts of paper ideas that were that were put forward at the expense of realism.

in the 1990s in places like South Africa have completely fallen. Exactly. And so, and you've spoken about this a lot. It's one thing to talk about rights and rights are great, but if there's no focus on responsibility added to that, then the rights don't mean anything. So almost all of these rights in terms of the difference between de jure and de facto, the de facto reality has gotten worse.

Constitution guarantees a right to healthcare, but in reality, the health system is deteriorating. The constitution guarantees good education, but in reality, the schools are failing. And we can go down the list. And so this idea that if you have something good written as a document,

That means the country has been saved is very naive. And I think maybe it's one of the consequences of modern ideologies that you look at the text and that sort of gives you an overview of what's happening. But you have to look at what's happening in reality and compare those two. And the reality between the written document and what we call the actual constitution and the written constitution has gone like this. It's not comparable anymore. And so the question is, it's a great document, but

what does it mean to have a great document if that's just not reality? And I think there's an important lesson in that also that, and this is something that Edmund Burke cautioned against with the French Revolution, saying it's one thing to have great theory, but you need to look at experience and what's happening in the real world before you look at the theory. For sure. And one of the things Burke warned about was the idea that these sort of free-floating rights were equally applicable to

at all times and all places without any roots in the actual soil of a culture. I mean, the idea of Western-based rights are based in a particular ideology of the West that is an outgrowth of thousands of years of history. And the idea that they sort of magically manifest anywhere you drop them

is obviously untrue. You have to put in place institutions, you have to develop cultures around them, and if those things don't happen, then they don't mean anything. It's just a paper, right? So you're looking at what the Trump administration is doing. Obviously, the State Department is now sounding off pretty openly about this under Secretary Rubio. What would you like to see the Trump administration do? Thank you. Well, so

so we are very grateful for the focus they're putting on on what's happening in south africa they have announced um a process of refugee status to farmers now that in a certain sense is good because there are people who want to leave

But I think our message to them is a lot of people and the majority wouldn't want to leave. It's almost like saying to Americans, listen, there's trouble in America. You need to all move to Europe or something like that. So, I mean, we've been there for hundreds of years. That's where our culture was developed. That's where our ancestors are buried. And so we are very attached to Africa. And we are concerned that if we just leave in big numbers, then we will dissolve as a community. And we want to see a future for our community. But there are people who want to leave. And if they want to leave, that's fine.

But I think a more sustainable approach would be to work towards some form of dispensational change, recognizing firstly that it's not working, that the problem is wider than just not that the wrong person is the president of the country. If you put a white liberal, make a white liberal the president of South Africa, it's not going to work either.

because it's a system problem and we need to work towards a better system. And we don't want other countries to solve our problems on our behalf. But I think firstly, a recognition that there needs to be a more decentralized solution. And then secondly, support

or initiatives to support for initiatives in South Africa to try to promote this. I think that would be good. And so for a normal American who's watching this, and I think that we've talked about this, the fact that what's happening in South Africa is a bleeding edge indicator of sort of transnational

trends that are growing across the world, also in the West. I mean, this is an internal battle in the West that is happening right now about what exactly the West means. What are the West's values? Do the West's values require that you essentially sacrifice all the values of the West on behalf of empty rhetoric about...

about rights or about constitutional guarantees or about that sort of stuff. Like what, what does it mean to be a member of a culture? What does it mean to be a member of the West? What do you recommend that, you know, resources for, for Americans want to learn more about this. And also if Americans want to help, because this actually does have ramifications far beyond what's going on just in South Africa. Yeah. So, so, um,

There are many ways in which people can help. One way is just to help to talk about this. The more people talk about this, the better, the easier it is to make solutions, the easier it is, for example, for the government to do something or people in Europe to support. So help spread the message, that's one way. But another way is there are many institutions in South Africa. If people spend a little time looking into what's happening in South Africa, they will find that there are a lot of institutions who are working towards some form of decentralization or working towards

towards community organizing, towards safety initiatives, towards things like that. And I think support for such institutions will definitely go a long way. Well, Dr. Ernst-Rutz, really appreciate you being here and thanks for what you're doing. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me on the show.

All right, you guys, coming up, Representative Jasmine Crockett, the hot new face of the Democratic Party. She just goes totally racist. Plus, we'll jump into the mailbag. Remember, you can only ask questions in the mailbag and hear my answers if you are a member over at Daily Wire. Plus, if you're not, now's the moment. 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.