Shownotes Transcript
Well, folks, tons happening in the news. The Trump administration going after Harvard. Nayib Bukele from El Salvador stops by the Oval Office and the latest in the trade war. Becoming a member of Daily Wire Plus isn't just a subscription, it's a statement. And you need to be here with us because...
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slash subscribe. Alrighty, so the big story over the course of the last couple of days that the United States government has now frozen billions of dollars in funding to Harvard. The reason for this is because Harvard refuses to go along with the federal government's demands that it abide by the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The Civil Rights Act dictates that
that universities and any business that actually receives federal funding must abide by anti-discrimination law. Now, you cannot like some aspects of the Civil Rights Act, its attempts to intrude into the private sphere, for example. But the Civil Rights Act is in fact the Civil Rights Act. And the fact is that if a university had facilitated anti-Black racism to the extent that Harvard University has facilitated anti-Semitism, there is no question that removal of its federal funding would be on the table.
Now, we can also be real about the politics of the situation, which is that federal funding should not be going to these universities anyway. So how much money does Harvard actually get from the federal government? I asked our sponsors over at Perplexity exactly how much money does Harvard University receive on an annualized basis from the federal government?
They said Harvard University receives substantial funding from the federal government each year, primarily to support its research activities. In fiscal year 2024, Harvard receives approximately $686 million from federal agency. This amount constituted about 68% of the university's total sponsored research revenue and accounted for roughly 11% over its overall operating revenue, which is a lot of money. I mean, that's a lot of money that they are receiving. Most of it goes to various science programs
like Harvard Medical School or the School of Public Health, but it also does go to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
The Department of Health and Human Services, the largest federal funding, they provide $520 million in fiscal year 2024. Now, again, this is a lever. It's not as though all of this money is going into the pockets of the English professors at Harvard, but money is also fungible. So money that would have been spent on the medical facility is now being spent instead on the English faculty. And this is sort of the point the Trump administration is making. There's no reason at all that your federal taxpayer dollars should be going to Harvard University, which has a massive endowment.
billions and billions of dollars in its endowment, $53 billion at last count. There's no reason your taxpayer dollars should be going to fund Harvard in the first place.
And maybe that's the overall fight that we actually should be having. But that's a fight that has to be had in Congress as opposed to inside the executive branch. The executive branch is now making the claim that Harvard University should have its funding removed because it is in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Harvard, for its part, says it is now going to resist the Trump administration's demands to change its governance structure over campus anti-Semitism concerns and
And so the government then responded by announcing a $2.26 billion freeze of Harvard's multi-year grant and contracts. That's according to the Wall Street Journal. However, President Alan Garber put out a statement complaining about the federal government and suggesting the federal government was wrong for involving itself in this way.
How dare the federal government actually attach strings to the things it has always attached strings to? However, President Alan Garber said the university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. The Trump administration said the school's response, quote, reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation's most prestigious universities and colleges. That federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws. What exactly are the demands? Well, they asked for nine actions.
Most of the demands concerned how the university operates. The government was asking for a comprehensive mask ban, as well as changes to governance, leadership and admissions and an end to diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI program. So DEI programs are in violation of the Civil Rights Act. There is no question that DEI, which is predicated on the false notion that inequality of outcome by group must be due to discrimination and therefore must be rectified by reverse discrimination, that that is in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
It's certainly in violation of Supreme Court standards with regard to affirmative action. As far as things like a comprehensive mask ban, the idea there is that you don't want people who have shown up to campus on student visas participating in anti-American activity that would otherwise get them deported. And the university is facilitating all of that.
The government is also demanding necessary changes be made to address bias, improve viewpoint diversity, and end ideological capture, fueling anti-Semitic harassment, according to the task force's letter. Lawyers for the university said Harvard has made and will continue to make lasting and robust structural policy and programmatic changes to ensure the university is a welcoming and supportive learning environment. But the task force is making demands, quote, in contravention of the First Amendment and say that they are ignoring due process.
Now, again, this will all get played out in the courts, presumably. But the idea that Harvard University is somehow owed federal money is absurd. It's absurd on its face. There's no reason that the Trump administration should not be able to attach strings to money that it is sending out the door to a university with a $53 billion endowment. You know what's an easy way for Harvard to
continue its policy of independence from the federal government to be independent of the federal government. It turns out that's an excellent way. Don't get in bed with the government if you don't want to get screwed. It tends to be a pretty good way of approaching life.
The faculty put out a statement on Friday saying, quote, that the federal government's actions overtly seek to impose on Harvard University political views and policy preferences advanced by the Trump administration and commit the university to punishing disfavored speech. Well, no, actually, they're just saying that if you engage in anti-Semitism, then that is in violation of the Civil Rights Act. It's funny to watch all these universities that for years were willing to expel students for saying that boys were not girls.
that went after Harvard University. I was there when they went after Lawrence Summers, who at the time was the president of Harvard University. They got angry at him because he made the mere suggestion that perhaps the lack of women in scientific institutions might be due to the fact that women are less interested in scientific pursuits overall as opposed to men, and also that the ends of the bell curve with regard to scientific performance on tests tend to be heavily male. He was ousted from his position for that. So don't give me your free speech concerns.
when you guys have been cracking down on free speech yourselves for a long time. At the very least, if you want to say that free speech doesn't apply, they're a private university, all right, then you have to be a private university. You can't have it both ways. You can't say free speech applies to us. We are a free speech institution. Also, we want your taxpayer money. That's not the way that it works.
At least it shouldn't work that way. However, Professor Nicholas Bowie says this is authoritarian. Now, what seems authoritarian to me is you seizing my taxpayer money, shoving it in your giant endowment and then cramming down a bunch of left wing agitprop on your tens of thousands of students.
What the president of the United States is demanding of universities is nothing short of authoritarian. There is a quote on the building of the Department of Justice where law ends, tyranny begins. And tyranny, frankly, is the only word to describe what the Trump administration is doing with respect to universities. I'm confused. How is it tyranny to say you don't get federal dollars if you violate the Civil Rights Act?
The Trump Task Force on Antisemitism has been investigating Harvard, among other universities, because, again, during the gigantic anti-Semitic protests that erupted last year after October 7th, and many of them were, in fact, openly anti-Semitic. We're not just talking anti-Israel. We're talking about full-scale screening for Jews walking through courtyards. Shabbos Kestonbaum is a student at Harvard University. He sued the university. His case is currently in court right now based on all of this sort of stuff.
And he has many stories to tell about what happened at Harvard University while he was there. The idea that Harvard did not violate the Civil Rights Act is ridiculous.
Now, does that mean that every demand that the Trump administration is making is going to get upheld in court? No, I'm sure that some of those demands will be held to be extraneous to the Civil Rights Act complaint the Trump administration is voicing on Harvard. However, Harvard does not have any moral grounds to stand on when they insist that everyone else pay the bills at an incredibly rich university so they can continue pushing whatever nonsense it is they are pushing.
Well, the Trump administration is looking for places to cut fat. Well, you should be cutting fat from, you know, your cell phone company. Pure Talk is the cell phone company I use for business every day. They are cutting the fat from the wireless industry. That is correct. Pure Talk says, I don't think so. It's $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.
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Nayib Bukele, who's the head of El Salvador, stopped by the Oval Office with President Trump, and they were talking about a very controversial case surrounding a man named Kilmer Armando Abrego Garcia. That person is a Salvadoran national who lived illegally in the United States.
And he was adjudicated as credibly accused, not just of being an illegal immigrant, but of being a member of MS-13 by a variety of courts. That doesn't mean they found that he was, in fact, a member of MS-13. They were saying that there was credible evidence that suggested that he might be a member of MS-13 and the executive branch has the ability to deport him. That was found several years ago. Then there was a withholding order that was put on him because he made a claim that if he were deported specifically to El Salvador, that he would be killed.
Well, the Trump administration then deported him. In court, they claimed in their filings that they'd made a mistake in deporting him. They admitted they'd made a mistake in deporting him, not because he shouldn't be deported, but because they didn't realize that the withholding order was still good and they had to go through the process. So he ended up being deported. He goes down to El Salvador. He's currently being held in prison in El Salvador. And the Supreme Court found nine to nothing, not that he couldn't be deported. They found nine to nothing, that the process by which he was deported was flawed. And the Supreme Court suggested that
that a lower court clarify its directive with due regard for the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs. And they said the U.S. government had to, quote, facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador and ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador. So the question legally here rests on what it means to facilitate his return from El Salvador. Again, this is not about him ending up in the United States. So yesterday in the Oval Office,
Large scale controversy broke out because Bukele was there. Bukele is the head of the prison that is holding this particular Salvadoran national. He is doing so under the terms, by the way, of an agreement between the United States and El Salvador. As Andrew McCarthy over at National Review points out, there's actually an agreement between the U.S. government and El Salvador. It's for temporary detention for a period of one year.
By the conclusion of that period, the United States is supposed to make a final decision on the detainees long term dispositions. The idea here is that the United States still does have some level of control over the detainees that we are sending there because they're still supposed to be some sort of final disposition of those people. They get sent back to Venezuela. Do they get sent back to Mexico, wherever it is they're supposed to be sent back to? OK, so yesterday, members of the media started asking about this particular national detainee.
They started asking about, is he being brought back? Why won't you send him back? Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, she was in the Oval Office. Here's what she had to say. First and foremost, he was illegally in our country. He had been illegally in our country. And in 2019, two courts, an immigration court and an appellate immigration court, ruled that he was a member of MS-13 and he was illegally in our country.
Okay, so that's not quite what they ruled. They ruled that he was credibly accused of being a member of MS-13 and that the executive branch had the ability to deport him. So that part of what she's saying is true. Stephen Miller, as always, makes the most credible case for what the administration is doing. Stephen is obviously incredibly articulate and very hard on this issue. Here we go. With respect to you, he's a citizen of El Salvador. So...
It's very arrogant even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens as a starting point.
OK, now it's true he's a Salvatorean citizen. The question is whether he went through due process in the United States before we deport him. This is a separate issue from whether we should deport him. The answer is presumably we should deport him. And the Trump administration does have the power to deport him. The question is whether he went through the due process to which pretty much everybody in America is actually. Oh, it's not the same due process. If you're not a citizen, the process is different than if you are a citizen, for example.
For his part, Bukele, who is a strong ally to President Trump, particularly on immigration and crime, he says he's not going to return the prisoner. How can I return him to the United States? Like, I smuggle him into the United States or whatever? Of course, I'm not going to do it. It's like, I mean, the question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don't have the power to return him to the United States.
OK, now, of course, that's a bit of a red herring. The reality is that the United States is not actually going to request that Bukele smuggle him back into the United States. The question is whether under the Supreme Court's ruling, we have to facilitate his return so that he can be adjudicated, not here legally. And then he gets sent out of the country. And so facilitation might mean that we request it of Bukele. The idea we have no control over the people that were shipping down to this prison in El Salvador is obviously not particularly true.
And nobody has taught what we're paying El Salvador right now, some six million dollars for the current arrangement. So, again, this is an interesting legal issue. As far as a moral issue, the fact is that this is a loser for Democrats to loser for the left. People do not want to see MS-13 members in the United States. And if the idea is that he didn't get his day in court, I mean, his case went all the way up to the Supreme Court.
If the idea is that he must be returned so that he can have a one day hearing and then deported again, I don't think that's something most Americans are going to lose sleep over one way or another. President Trump, however, he says, because President Trump is always going to go to the limit. He says the homegrowns are next. Not clear what he means by this. I'd like to go a step further. I mean, I say I said it to Pam. I don't know what the laws are. We always have to obey the laws. But we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways that are
hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking. That are absolute monsters. I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country, but you'll have to be looking at the laws on that, Steve, okay?
OK, now, again, the president continues to say he's going to abide by the laws here. He's not going to just willy nilly pick American citizens up and throw them in a Salvadoran prison. This, of course, has driven the left insane because whenever President Trump says something like this, even though he is caveating at 10 times that he's going to look at the legality, they immediately jump to he's going to start rounding people up off the street and sending them to Salvadoran prisons. And meanwhile, the administration continues to be extremely strong in pursuing means for the
deportation of non-American citizens who are here for no reason other than to agitate. According to Politico, authorities have now detained a co-founder of Columbia University's Palestinian Student Union as he was completing the final steps for gaining U.S. citizenship. His name is Mohsen Madawi. He had permanent U.S. residency. He was taken into custody Monday in Vermont when he went to a federal office building for his naturalization appointment. Why? Well, because he has expressed open sympathy for the October 7th terrorism. I described his
his empathy for it. So people were complaining about the deportation of this person. If you check his Instagram, what you will find is tributes to actual terrorists. So there's a picture, for example, of his cousin who actually is in like a terrorist outfit with a gun and he's paying homage to him.
His posts include the following. This morning, I received the news of the martyrdom of my cousin, my derby companion, my brother, and my love, Masra Suleiman Masharqa, after a clash with the traitor Zionist force who tried to assassinate him along with his companions, the resistance team, Husam Khazam and Arafat al-Amer. It didn't work until the planes entered and bombarded them. He was a leader of a fierce resistance fighter. So yeah, this guy is just a terrorist sympathizer. I mean, that's all there is to it.
Pretty amazing stuff. And the media are finding a way to defend him, too, because, as always, our politics is kind of the stupidest form of our politics. We should want people who are un-American not to be here in the United States. Also, we do have to follow the due process for all of that. And I think President Trump agrees with that, although we'll have to see how this case of the Salvadoran citizen plays out.
And meanwhile, the stock markets continue to be unsure about what to do given the current tariff war. Every day brings a new surprise in the tariff war. Stocks rose yesterday, more than 300 points. Stock futures were down a little bit today. The reason, again, was because it is totally unclear what is coming next in the trade war.
So on Friday night, President Trump drove a hole through the middle of his tariff regime. I had suggested for a couple of weeks this was going to happen. I believe I said it on the All In podcast. I believe I also said it on this podcast. The most likely scenario was that President Trump was going to realize the dire economic impact this was going to have on core American industries, and he was going to have to start making significant exceptions to his own tariff rules. Now, again, I think that before we get into the details of what exactly President Trump is trying to do,
we have to try to figure out exactly the general goal. So it is pretty clear at this point that President Trump wants to box in the Chinese, which again is a goal with which I wholeheartedly agree. We talked about this at length with former representative Mike Gallagher, now of Palantir, talking about what we could do to box in the Chinese with regard to the markets.
Because obviously they're stealing hundreds of billions of dollars of RRP every single year. They're growing their military at exorbitant rates. They're flexing their muscles in the South China Sea. They're building connections all over the world, ranging from Africa to the Middle East to Latin America and all the rest. So absolutely agree with President Trump's orientation toward the containment of China and the reversal of their economic growth. I totally agree with that. If you're going to do that, you have to have a few preconditions. There are certain things you have to do. Number one.
You have to have allies on board because if China just increases its trade with everybody else, then you get in macro scale basically what's happened with Russia during the Ukraine war, where there's an attempt to cut Russia off from the world economic system. Russia formed greater alliances economically with places like Russia and even places that are sort of oriented between the United States and Russia, like India. And they've been able to economically survive.
So you really have to box everybody in. It's really, really important to box China in by having a bunch of allies around because that's step number one. You got to have allies. Number two, you have to make sure that your own supply lines are durable, that China can't break your supply lines because China has certain things that they can do to really hurt the United States economy and put us on the wrong foot with regard to even things like military readiness. So that means we need alternative supply lines with regard to everything from semiconductors to rare earth minerals.
That would be step number two. And then step number three is you would actually have to gradually increase the tariffs so that you don't destroy American businesses in the process. Give them a chance to adjust.
There are a lot of people who I've been talking to, business people, who have, after 30 years, 40 years of working with the Chinese, they were hit overnight with 145% tariff. Many of those businesses are likely to go under because there is no actual replacement supply chain for those businesses at this point. Prices are likely to skyrocket. Demand is likely to then fall. And then you are likely to see an actual economic recession if that sort of thing was to continue. So the administration-
went whole hog. They put tariffs on everybody, but most of all on China. Then they backed off the tariffs on the rest of the world to a certain extent, but not all the way. 10% tariffs are still quite high by historical standards. 10% tariffs across the board.
The United States was charging an effective 2.7% tariff on the rest of the world. That would have included China before all of this. And now it's 10% on everybody who's not China and 145% on China. So it's a pretty radical escalation. And so now it seems that they're trying to walk their way back into what would look like a good tariff policy. The question is whether they're going to be able to effectively do that. So on Friday night, President Trump created exemptions for semiconductors and iPhones.
This led to a late afternoon spike in the stock markets on Friday, and it led to mild gains at 10, the Dow Jones Industrial Average yesterday. Now everybody is unsure of what comes next exactly. According to Newsweek, President Trump's reciprocal tariffs as of a Friday night update spares smartphones, computers, and other electronic products that had been expected to face steep duties under sweeping new levies, particularly those targeting Chinese imports. Now again,
Some of this looks like favoritism. It looks like some of the big companies that President Trump has been working closely with, companies like Apple or NVIDIA,
that those particular companies got carve-outs specific to them. And this is one of the problems when you have tariff policies that are not specifically calibrated. What you end up with is that the people with the best lobbyists get the exemptions and everybody else gets screwed. So the small business owner who doesn't have lobbyists in Washington pledging to spend $100 billion in America, those people are going to get totally jacked by the tariffs. Whereas if you are a big company, then you're going to be able to go to the Trump administration and get a carve-out. So it's not particularly fair.
It's also true that it's going to take longer than just a few months to reshore crucial industries like, for example, semiconducting manufacture. If you're a semiconductor manufacturing facility, that's going to take you five, 10, maybe 15 years to build in the right way, particularly in the United States, where it's very, very difficult to build. What you really need is radical deregulation inside the United States, making it easier to build.
The exemption list includes the products the U.S. heavily relies on for overseas production with limited domestic manufacturing capacity and high consumer demand. The administration rolled that out Friday night and everybody said, OK, well, maybe this is the start of a loosening or recalibration.
And then on Sunday, President Trump put out a statement saying, no, no, no, no, no, you're misunderstanding me. Nobody gets off the hook, which is weird because Apple and Nvidia seem to get off the hook. He said nobody is getting off the hook for the unfair trade balances and non-monetary tariff barriers that other countries have used against us, especially not China, which by far treats us the worst. There was no tariff exception announced on Friday. These products are subject to the existing 20% fentanyl tariffs. There's
They're just moving to a different tariff bucket. The fake news knows this, but it's refusing to report it. We're taking a look at semiconductors and the whole electronics supply chain in the upcoming national security tariff investigations. What has been exposed is that we need to make products in the United States and that we will not be held hostage by other countries, especially hostile trading nations like China, which will do everything within its power to disrespect the American people.
We also cannot let them continue to abuse us on trade like they have for decades. Those days are over. The golden age of America, which includes the upcoming tax and regulation cuts, a substantial amount of which was just approved by the House and Senate, will mean more and better paying jobs, making products in our nation, and treating other countries, in particular China, the same way they have treated us. The bottom line is that our country will be bigger, better, stronger than ever before. We will make America great again. Now, again, it is not totally clear what President Trump means by the idea that this is going to fall into a different tariff bucket.
Presumably, he means that these will be covered by 232 tariffs, which are basically investigations into product manipulation, essentially. Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 allows for sectoral tariffs. Basically, you start an investigation into importing products.
and you see whether it's being manipulated, and then you can do tariffs under that provision. He's saying that we need an investigation. The truth is we actually don't need an investigation with regard to the import of semiconductors. We know a lot about that particular area of the supply line. It looks more like an excuse to hold off on the worst impact of what the tariffs would be if we were to actually include electronics products, semiconductors, iPhone manufacturer, and all the rest in the tariffs.
So mixed messages coming from the administration on this particular point. Howard Lutnick is the Commerce Secretary. Here he was on Sunday saying that tariffs are, in fact, coming on semiconductors.
You're going to see this week there'll be a register in the federal registry. There'll be a notice put out. That is different types of work. So we're going to do that. We did that in autos. The president's going to do it for pharmaceuticals and he is going to do it for semiconductors. So all those products are going to come under semiconductors and they're going to have a special focus type of tariff to make sure that those products get reshored.
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OK, meanwhile, Peter Navarro, who, again, should not be inside the administration since he doesn't know what he's talking about on trade and has single handedly helped crater international bond markets, for example. He says that there are no exceptions to the tariff regime, which is weird because there's a giant exception to the tariff regime, at least for now.
The policy is no exemptions, no exclusions. What Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick is going to do, is doing it as we speak, is an investigation of the chip supply chain. The goal is stability and resilience. And you will see actions taken based on those investigations on copper. We already have steel in a moment. We already have autos. There will be pharmaceuticals. And there will be chips.
Meanwhile, Stephen Miller laid out the best case for why the administration was doing what it's doing again. Miller is the best expositor of what the administration is thinking. When the tariff rate went up to the full rate of 125 on top of the 20, it was necessary to publish a more detailed list from Customs and Border Protection explaining the rates and how they're applied. There are no exemptions. Everyone pays at least the 20%.
And these particular components are being put through a separate process controlled by the Department of Commerce, which is the 232. So this is a sophisticated, elegant, detailed plan to deal with Chinese economic aggression against the United States.
Okay, I wish it were more sophisticated and elegant and explicable because the reality is that the markets have no idea what's coming next or what exactly is going on. And that's being reflected in the bond markets as well as the stock market. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board says, what happened and what's the real policy? Who knows? Perhaps Mr. Trump didn't like the reporting. The tech giants like Apple and Tim Cook were getting exceptions. Other winners in the CBP notice would be Dell Technologies' Michael Dell, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, and the executives and shareholders of Hewlett-Packard and TSMC.
These exemptions would be good news for consumers who are otherwise facing much higher prices for smartphones that are a staple of modern life. But after President Trump's broadside, tech companies and electronics firms are left wondering exactly who is going to get a reprieve. And what it's going to look like, frankly, is a bidding process because NVIDIA immediately after receiving this reprieve unveiled plans to produce new made in America supercomputers powering AI in the United States, claiming $500 billion spending on
on AI in the United States. Now, do I think those two things are disconnected? I absolutely do not. I think that what you are seeing is major companies basically coming to the Trump administration and saying, if we pledge that we're going to spend X number of dollars in the American economy, can we get an exemption from the tariffs for the moment? That's what it looks like, which is why tariffs provide for political chaos, and they also provide a heavy dose of lobbying. The lobbyists are going to do real well when you have regulations that basically can be relieved with one stroke of the pen.
Apple apparently is also studying potentially bringing some iPhone production into the United States. Or Apple could produce an ultra-expensive version of the phone that have lower mass market appeal, sort of like the Mac Pro that was assembled in the United States during the first Trump administration. President Trump is now saying that he wants to extend exemptions into, wait for it, the auto industry. Again, all of the crucial industries. By the way, these are the industries that China is most likely to be able to make inroads with its economy into.
Let's just be clear about this. China makes an awful lot of money on these particular exports, so we are exempting large swaths of its export industry. We're still keeping the tariffs on like stuffed animals, but we're not keeping tariffs on iPhones or on computers or on car parts.
That is a very large chunk of the Chinese export industry to the United States. So let's just be clear about what exactly is happening here. President Trump is, in fact, cutting holes in the middle of his tariff regime. Now, again, you may say this is necessary because we need time in order to adjust to President Trump's larger tariff regime. OK, that's fine. But then we should be explaining that that's exactly what is happening here. Here's President Trump considering a pause on auto tariffs now.
I'm looking at something to help some of the car companies where they're switching to parts that were made in Canada, Mexico and other places. And they need a little bit of time because they're going to make them here. But they need a little bit of time. So I'm talking about things like that.
Okay, so again, cutting holes in the middle of this tariff regime. I've been saying this for a couple of weeks, really since President Trump announced it. This was the most likely outcome is that he was going to have to back away from the strongest parts of the tariffs because they were not well calibrated or well adjusted. And hopefully this is a better form of these things. That is sort of the half glass half full version of what's going on with the tariffs. The glass half empty says that basically the administration laid out a set of
of tariff priorities that were uncalibrated and now is rushing to try and fix them as best it can. And basically, they're spackling over many of the cracks in the edifice in order to prevent complete collapse of the global international trading system. The reality is that many of the theories upon which the Trump administration is predicating itself here may, in fact, be mistaken. So, for example, the idea that when you erect tariffs, a bunch of companies are going to come reshore in the United States. The question is whether they're actually going to do that.
According to a new CNBC supply chain survey, if China loses some manufacturing as a result of President Trump's tariffs, the U.S. manufacturing sector is not going to be the place where people reshore. People aren't going to reshore from China to the United States. They're going to reshore from China to, say, Vietnam. Over half of those surveyed said cost was the top reason for saying they would not be reshoring production. 21% said their top reason was the challenge of finding skilled labor.
The Trump administration is promising tax cuts for companies that bring back manufacturing. The survey found tax is 14% lower in companies ranking of factors that impact manufacturers' site decision-making.
Taken together, the majority of respondents estimated the price tag of building a new domestic supply chain would be at least double current costs or more likely be more than double. Instead of moving supply chains back to the United States, according to 61%, again, these are people who are manufacturers. They said it would be more cost effective to relocate supply chains to lower tariffed countries. So you will get people moving away from China. That's fine, by the way. Moving from China to Vietnam would be great so long as we actually are negotiating trade agreements with these other various countries to cut off the Chinese.
The question, of course, is whether, in fact, those other countries will cut off the Chinese or whether they will continue to trade with both sides. So this raises the question, of course, as to whether the countries we are attempting to cut deals with on trade are actually going to move away from China, because those are two different questions. It
It is clear that President Trump wants to negotiate what he calls better deals with a variety of these countries, and maybe we'll get some of them. Treasury Secretary Scott Besson, there's a rule inside the administration, by the way. Every time Peter Navarro appears on the television, the stock market goes down. Every time Scott Besson appears on the television, the stock market goes up, which is why President Trump should listen to Scott Besson and not Peter Navarro or Howard Lutnick on this sort of stuff. Scott Besson has been out there saying that we are moving fast to do deals.
We are moving quickly with many of our most important trading partners. So we had Vietnam in last week. We had Japanese on Wednesday, South Korea next week. So it's going to move fast.
Okay, so good. I mean, we need to move faster than fast on this stuff. Kevin Hassett, who again is another one of the members of the administration, who is looking at a smarter tariff policy. He's of the National Economic Council. He says, we're being contacted by everyone.
You know, it's going up every day. And the fact is that we've been contacted by virtually every country on Earth. And I talked to Jameson Greer many times today. And I think that the count of actual offers is north of 10 a little bit right now. And so I was being cautious with it when I said 10 earlier today. Now, if you want to understand what's going on in this trade war, you have to also understand what's going on on the other side of the chess table. So the United States is making moves and China's not sitting still.
If, as I said, the goal of the United States in cordoning off China and boxing them in, if the goal is one, activate your allies and make sure that they're not trading with China. Two, make sure that you have reshored key industries such that you're not reliant on Chinese exports anymore.
Those are the two big things. And three, you really have to build up your military. What China wants is to counteract those things. So what they are going to attempt to do, presumably, is to make friends with all of the people that we are attempting to militarize against them. The bad news for the Trump administration is it seems like that actually is happening quite quickly. And the reason for that is, again, the original approach here, which should have been let's be great friends with all of our friends. Let's be really bad enemies to our enemies.
Instead, it was like, what if I just run around the room slapping everybody in the face with this rubber chicken and then we'll walk it back? Again, that was not a good plan. Now, it may reverse back into something that looks like a better plan. But in the meantime, that sort of attitude is leading other countries to say, well, you know, maybe we'll triangulate. Maybe we'll take a better deal from the from the U.S. and maybe we'll also continue to trade with the Chinese. What's the U.S. exactly going to do about that?
Unless the U.S. is willing to place secondary sanctions on the EU or something for trading with the Chinese, which would just drive the EU deeper into the heart of the Chinese sphere. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out over the weekend, U.S. allies are sitting out Trump's trade war with China.
Some 70 countries currently negotiating tariff relief with the United States should approach China as a group together with Washington, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson said last week. But the problem is many European and Asian partners aren't sure to what extent they're still allied with Washington. Trump's initial Liberation Day order, after all, slapped them with sky-high tariffs that made no distinction between long-term adversaries and faithful allies.
The shock from this attack, partially reversed only as a result of the U.S. market route with additional exemptions, quietly adopted on Friday, has added to months of concerns about how much Trump's America can be relied upon in an increasingly brutal world. Again, if the idea is that China is our geopolitical enemy, we need to box them in. You don't want to slap around the people who you're considering your allies.
It is thus no surprise to see Vietnam, which is one of the states that the Trump administration originally slapped with a 46% tariff and then walked it back all the way down to 10%. Vietnam is now making common cause with, wait for it, China. They're trying to triangulate between the United States and China.
According to the Washington Post, Chinese leader Xi Jinping called on Southeast Asian countries Monday to join him in resisting President Trump's unilateralism and protectionism. Part of his effort to present Beijing as a more reliable ally and trading partner. So again, this is what you would do if you were the leader of China. You would try to escape the box being created by the Trump administration by making alliances or at least trade relationships with all the people that Trump is trying to alienate you from. Xi arrived Monday in Vietnam. He got a very, very warm welcome, apparently.
His strategy aims to expand China's friends and trading partners in the region to better insulate itself against Trump's tariffs. It also is part of China's efforts to unseat the United States as the preeminent superpower in the region and establish a world order more in line with Beijing's interests. Xi wrote an editorial for the official newspaper of Vietnam's Communist Party, saying Asia faces both unprecedented opportunities and challenges. China will ensure continuity and stability of its neighborhood diplomacy.
So again, China is doing all the things you would expect them to do. That includes, by the way, pressing its finger directly in the wound that is America's supply line. So, for example, China, as I said they would last week, and not that I told you so, but I totally told you so. This is the benefit of listening to the show is you're a couple of days ahead of the news.
China is now stopping its shipping of some heavy rare earth metals and magnets, critical to U.S. production of everything from cell phones to fighter jets as the trade war simmers, according to the New York Post. Effective April 3rd, China is no longer exporting seven heavy rare earth metals processed exclusively in China, as well as heavy rare earth magnets.
of which about 90% of the world's supply are also synthesized on Beijing's territory. The export halt applies to all countries, but access to elements like dysprosium and yttrium is critical to U.S. industry, especially in tech, electric vehicle, aircraft, and defense sectors, according to Drew Horn, who served as the top U.S. official on strategic minerals and energy supply chain development under President Trump the first time around. Rare earths earn everything, he said. The EV, autospace, everything from cell phones, defense key components, space travel,
China, he said, has essentially created an all-powerful monopoly with them, which again is the reason why the United States, for example, should be drawing closer to, wait for it, Canada, because Canada does have access to some of these critical rare earth minerals. So instead of alienating and slapping around the Canadians, we should have been trying to draw closer to them to make sure that our supply lines were actually reshored. Horne said the Chinese have been threatening this because they do have that leverage to basically cut us off and cut the world off, which essentially cuts us off through all sorts of different means. And now they're doing it.
So again, Beijing is doing exactly the thing that you would expect them to do. Beijing is also trying to cut off American companies from doing business in China, including Boeing. According to Channel News Asia, China has now told its airlines to stop taking deliveries of jets from American aviation giant Boeing.
Apparently, China is also ordering airlines to halt deliveries of Boeing planes. Beijing has told its carriers to suspend purchases of aircraft-related equipment and parts from U.S. companies. So China is, in fact, pretty good at manufacture, right? Basically, we took all the service sector and China took a large swath of the manufacturing sector. And so China is now attempting to damage the United States. And they can do damage to the United States, which is why you actually have to have a plan for what you want this trade war to look like, how you want it to go.
Meanwhile, there are significant problems in the bond market. The reality is that the U.S. 10-year Treasury Yield Index has been climbing sky high. People are moving out of bonds, which shows lack of faith in the American markets. Meanwhile, the price of spot gold is going up because, again, people don't know where to put their money, and so they're figuring that precious metals is a pretty good place to put it. If you're worried about the dollar, if you're worried about bonds, if you're worried about stocks, where exactly do you put your money? You put it in gold. The United States, meanwhile, the trade representative, Jameson Greer,
He he's saying that China didn't have to retaliate, which is like, I'm sorry that if you don't like what China did in response, maybe you shouldn't have put your pawn there. Right. Honestly, if you're playing chess, you can't blame the other side for taking your pawn if you put it in a vulnerable position.
The only reason we're really in this position right now is because China chose to retaliate. So many other countries affirmatively said they did not want to retaliate. We want to negotiate with the Americans. And the Chinese made a different decision. So it's not a plan to do that. It was a Chinese decision. They have agency here. Well, yes, they do have agency. But why would they not retaliate considering you slapped them with a 145% tariff and made clear to the rest of the world that you wish to go to trade war with them?
And there are better ways of approaching this and worse ways. As I say, I agree with the overall global strategy that Trump is pursuing. The question is, what are the tactics you use to achieve the strategy? The idea for a war can be correct, but if you pursue it in the wrong way, you can still lose the war. And this here is the problem.
And meanwhile, speaking of areas where the Trump administration foreign policy is riding a razor's edge, I have to say the Trump administration continues to deploy Steve Witkoff as though he is some sort of negotiating savant. And I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever that Steve Witkoff is a negotiating savant. Steve Witkoff is a business person who has now been thrust into an arena in foreign policy he knows literally nothing about. And he continues to show it pretty much every time he appears on television or talks about it.
This is the same Steve Whitcoff, the special envoy. President Trump has appointed him special envoy to Russia, Ukraine. And when it comes to Russia, Ukraine, I should point out that literally nothing has happened with Russia, Ukraine. Russia over the weekend fired missiles into Ukraine again, killed some 34 people, including civilians, because Russia doesn't care about killing civilians like at all at all. It's not targeting anything.
And Steve Witkoff pressured Zelensky to come to the table. Zelensky, because President Trump and J.D. Vance basically yelled at him, came to the table and said, we're willing to do a ceasefire now. And Russia has done zero things. Zero. Russia has done nothing. So Steve Witkoff is a negotiating genius. Why isn't Putin at the table? Where is he?
Now, President Trump seems fed up with Putin, as well he should be. Now, President Trump's peace through strength foreign policy is not being well served by Steve Woodcuff, who appears to have no capacity whatsoever to actually threaten the use of the fist. Instead, it's all velvet glove and no fist, which is definitely not the way that Trump has historically approached foreign policy. Here's President Trump yesterday blaming Vladimir Putin predominantly for the war in Ukraine and then Biden and Zelensky. And most importantly, you have millions of people dead, millions of people dead because of
Three people. I would say three people. Let's say Putin, number one. But let's say Biden, who had no idea what the hell he was doing. Number two, and Zelensky. So, again, he's angry at everybody. He should be angry at everybody because, again, here's the thing. He got Zelensky to the table. Where's Putin? Where's Putin? Well, now Witkoff is saying that he had a meeting with
On April 11th in St. Petersburg, he said it was a compelling meeting and that Putin had shown a willingness to work toward a permanent peace. But he said it took a while for us to get to that point. He said this peace deal is about these so-called five territories, but there's so much more to it. I think we might be on the verge of something that would be very important for the world at large. OK, suffice it to say, I do not trust Steve Witkoff's judgment when it comes to cutting deals, because so far the deals that he has cut.
have been effectively useless. The only deal that he cut was the deal to release some of the Israeli hostages from Hamas very early on. And frankly, that deal was maybe the mediocre deal I have seen. Preborn's network of clinics are on the front lines nationwide, on standby for women deciding between the life of their babies.
Everything else that Wyckoff is doing, he says...
that there's a broader aim behind the talks, suggesting economic cooperation could help stabilize relations between the U.S. and Russia. He said, I see the possibility of reshaping the Russian-United States relationship through some very compelling commercial opportunities that gives real stability to the region, too. Okay, let's see.
what exactly Witkoff is arguing here for, because it seems like every place he goes, he just proceeds to lather up whomever is the dictator and then treat them with kid gloves. So really, I'd love to see what exactly is the compelling offer that Vladimir Putin is making, because so far, Vladimir Putin has not stopped for one iota of one second with regard to his war in Ukraine. Again, Zelensky said, I'll do a ceasefire, full ceasefire today. We are now weeks into this.
And nothing from Putin. So where is Witkoff? Speaking of which, meanwhile, Witkoff is saying stupid things with regard to Iran as well. So President Trump, again, he trusts Steve Witkoff on a personal level, I take it. But I have yet to see why Witkoff should be trusted with matters of foreign policy of which he understands pretty much nothing. I mean, truly nothing. So Witkoff was on Fox News last night with Sean Hannity. He was talking about the negotiations that are happening, not direct negotiations, indirect negotiations happening with the Iranians.
And he proceeds to spell out here the Obama Iran deal as though this is a win. This is not what Trump ran on. This is not what Trump did during term one.
Trump has used extreme measures in order to contain and destroy the Iranian economy to bring the Iranians to the table. The skies over Iran are clear right now. Never has the United States had more leverage. Never has the West had more leverage over Iran. And yet he's deploying Steve Witkoff to apparently make offers that sound exactly like Barack Obama's cowardly, ridiculous offer that ended up as the JCPOA, the Iran deal that basically gave Iran money and a pathway to a nuclear bomb. Here's Witkoff.
This is not a threat on my part now. It is just a simple fact. The president means what he says, which is they cannot have a bomb. The conversation with the Iranians will be much about two critical points. One, enrichment. As you mentioned, they do not need to enrich past 3.67%.
In some circumstances, they're at 60 percent. In other circumstances, 20 percent. That cannot be. And you do not need to run, as they claim, a civil nuclear program where you're enriching past 3.67 percent. So this is going to be much about verification on the enrichment program.
and then ultimately verification on weaponization. That includes missiles, the type of missiles that they have stockpiled there, and it includes the trigger for a bomb.
Okay, so just to point out here, the original demand by the Trump administration was total denuclearization. That means no fissile material in Iran because it turns out it's actually quite easy to spin up fissile material from 3.67%, which was the Obama era limitation, to 60%. The goal would be no nuclear development in Iran. That was Trump's stated goal. It was President Trump's stated goal. It's been his stated goal for a decade at this point.
The kind of notion that Steve Witkoff is going back to the original JCPOA framework is wild. And it's a betrayal of what President Trump, I would assume, wants. Because President Trump doesn't just want any bad deal. He doesn't just want Obama 2.0 and then you slap a Trump label on it and magically it's good. Presumably he wants actual disarmament, like Libyan-style disarmament. As in, like, all of the nuclear material gets shipped out of the country as in missile verification. And by the way,
As in, if we are going to reopen the world's economy to Iran, they don't get to use that to fund terror regimes all over the region. That was the problem during the JCPOA. John Kerry openly admitted that all the money we allowed back into Iran was then used for missile development and terror support all over the Middle East, which eventually led to a multi-front war over the course of the last year and a half. So I know what Steve Whitcoff thinks. Again, maybe it's not coming from Whitcoff.
Or maybe it is. But I've yet to see the sort of genius negotiating capacity of Steve Witkoff in either Ukraine, Russia, or in the Middle East. If the president wants to get things done, maybe he should actually, you know, let his secretary of state do the work. Maybe he should let his secretary of defense do the work. There are plenty of other people inside the administration.
who can have these talks. I do not understand for the life of me why real estate developer Steve Witkoff is leading these talks. It makes no sense to me. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, had some very different words over the weekend. President Trump is dead serious on this issue. He's dead serious that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. He's said that for 20 years. He's been consistent. That is clear. He's dead serious that he wants it done at the negotiating table. He wants it done peacefully.
And that's why he's going straight to these talks. He set that deadline. These were productive talks yesterday. I don't want to get ahead of our skis. Steve Witkoff does a fantastic job, but it was a good step and they're going to go at it again on Saturday. But he's also dead serious that if we can't figure this out at the negotiating table, then there are other options to include my department to ensure that Iran never has a nuclear bomb.
I mean, that is the person who should be talking about this, not Steve Witkoff, apparently. I mean, again, maybe Witkoff changes his tune. Maybe he misspoke on Fox News. I will say that it was Witkoff's aide who originally proposed a hostage deal so bad that it would have forced Israel to give up literally all the Palestinian murderers that they are currently holding in prison in exchange for one tranche of hostages, leaving all the other hostages to die.
So I've yet to see Whitcuff's expertise. Maybe it will display itself sometime in the near future. It would be nice to see that at some point. Meanwhile, in other news, Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, his house was actually torched. The governor's mansion was torched over the weekend in a really, really scary attack. Josh Shapiro, of course, is a Democrat. He said that he, his wife, their four kids, two dogs, and another family had celebrated the Jewish holiday of Passover at the residence on Saturday. They were awakened by state troopers pounding on their door at 2 a.m. on Sunday.
Apparently, a man scaled an iron security fence in the middle of the night, eluded police, broke into the Pennsylvania governor's mansion. He then set fire that left significant damage and forced Shapiro, his family and guests to evacuate the building. The man who was arrested will face charges of attempted murder, terrorism, aggravated arson, aggravated assault. He appears to be a crazy person. I mean, that's probably the best descriptor of him at this point. It's not clear exactly what his political motivations were.
We are entering an era in which political violence is now being widely approved by an enormous number of people, up to and including Taylor Lorenz, who used to report for The Washington Post over the weekend.
She was asked about her obsession with Luigi Mangione. This is the murderer of the UnitedHealthcare CEO who's been treated as a hero by dullards like Taylor Lorenz, immoral dullards like Taylor Lorenz. Here she was on CNN praising Luigi Mangione for murdering an American for the crime of running a business.
Hilarious to see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone standing a murderer when this is this is the United States of America, as if we don't lionize criminals, as if we don't have, you know, we don't stand murderers of all sorts. We give them Netflix shows. I mean, she is a psychotic. She is an ambulatory psychotic who works for Madi Hassan. Great hire there over there. That's it. But
It's that sort of attitude that is going to lead to actual increased violence against a wide variety of figures in the United States.
Stupidity and radicalism, a dangerous combination. Speaking of which, Bernie Sanders is still touring the country along with AOC. By the way, I warned you that AOC is rising in the polls. She is. There's a brand new poll out of Democrats showing exactly who is leading the way in the primaries. And right now she is clocking in like third. Cory Booker had a brief spike to maybe 11 percent in the latest polling.
Kamala still leads, but Kamala's not going to be the nominee. That's basically just a holdover. In third place at 7% is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez because she's touring with Bernie. So Bernie decided that a great way to stand up for socialism was to show up at Coachella, where people pay $600 to dress like morons. Here's Bernie. This country faces some very difficult challenges.
Oh, the rich socialists at Coachella, they love Bernie. Old man yells at cloud. Yeah!
Now we got a president of the United States who... I agree.
He thinks that climate change is a hoax. Oh, God, I can't even listen to this schmuck anymore. It's unbelievable. And this is why it's very important for the Trump administration to succeed in its agenda and not be bogged down by distractions because what's coming around the corner is an AOC truck. I'm just warning you right now. That's the way this goes. If the Trump administration fails in its actual agenda, what comes around the corner is a left-wing populism led by whomever Bernie taps on the shoulder. Speaking of Coachella, my producers, because this is their job.
They have now decided to torture me with some of the outfits from Coachella. And remember, these are the proletariat, the proles that Bernie is saying need to rise up and destroy the bourgeois. So some of these outfits at Coachella. But by the way, Bernie was introducing a singer named Claro. I promise you that Bernie has the same idea who Claro is that I do, meaning none. But he was introducing Claro. So that happened.
And which is great. You want your socialist politicians introducing rich pop singers. Here are some of the outfits compiled by my producer. So Paris Hilton showed up as apparently a hooker. She was wearing a very Paris Hilton outfit. It appears to be that she got trapped in some sort of netting, that she was at one of those children's fun zones where you're jumping on a trampoline and she accidentally just burst
bounced directly into the netting and then was stuck there for a while. They had to cut her free, but unfortunately she's still tied up in it. She also seems to be having some sort of angel wings or something. I don't know. She's got some sort of white thing that she's carrying around and she's wearing the Hamburglar's mask as well. So that is definitely an outfit from Paris Hilton at Coachella. Dylan Mulvaney showed up. How this man is still famous is beyond me, but here we are.
Oh no. You speak when you're spoken to, ding-a-ling. It's true though. One of your babies was born on Earth. Are you the ruler of this Earth? How did you know? The quality of your talk? Do you love it? I love it. I am here if you need to talk. I am here if you need to talk. I am here if you need to talk.
That is a performative gay man. That is. And Dylan Mulvaney wearing apparently a pink teddy, which is great. Then you had James Charles show up. I will admit I do not know who James Charles is, nor did I care until this very moment. Apparently, James Charles is an American YouTuber and makeup artist.
who is a man who likes to dress up as a woman, I suppose, or dress like a woman. And so he's wearing apparently like a J-Lo outfit from 1997 and then posing in front of a white picket fence. Is he supposed to be the world's most glam rancher or what? What are we going for here? I don't know.
I can't say I fully understand the look, but then again, I don't understand much of what goes on at Coachella. Julia Fox also showed up. Julia Fox is an actress and a model, apparently. And she showed up with her ass hanging out. That's pretty much, so she was wearing a, what looks like some sort of, was it just a lingerie competition or what? Like, I don't, what has Coachella become?
She, she's a, a steampunk. Again, the hooker, I guess is the look here. Uh, I didn't realize that, that just putting your bum out there is now a form of fashion. If so, then my small children are high fashion.
because, you know, my nearly two-year-old removes his diaper and runs around the house. So apparently he is high fashion now. Yeah, there's been an Indiana Jones vibe or steampunk vibe that's going, Indiana Jones hooker? Okay, maybe. I could see that. 1890s Victorian, post-Victorian hooker? Something like that. These are looks, guys. And what I always love about these kinds of looks is we go, oh my God, this Slade. Really? Are you gonna go down to the store and buy one? And like wear that in public today?
If so, you will be arrested for indecent exposure. So good luck to you. Lola Young, another human. I have to be told who these people are. A British singer-songwriter dressed up as Fozzie the Bear. Fozzie the Bear lingerie happening in Ewok. Perverse Ewok is the look here.
Now, to be fair, Lola Young's most famous song, I guess, is called Messy, which I guess, I mean, that fits. Yeah, that fits. So she rolled out of bed wearing her brown sweatpants here. And then she murdered an Ewok, took his outfit, and it doesn't fit her the same way that it fit the Ewok. Good stuff there from this person.
who's no longer a human. And finally, Noah Cyrus. Is Noah Cyrus related to Miley? Sister. Okay. So here is the less famous Cyrus sister. And again, the look here is, what if I wore basically nothing as a dress? So,
totally sheer see-through stuff. Man, did they just not get enough attention as children from their parents or what? Like, what happened here? What was the failure of parenting that led to this sort of stuff from both Miley and then her sister?
Or maybe they got too much attention. I don't know what it is. Okay, so that's Coachella. I'm so glad that, by the way, all these outfits I'm sure cost a fortune. So maybe Bernie should eat those rich people first. As long as we're going to eat the rich, maybe Bernie should go after those people first. I feel like that would be a good look for Bernie. That's an actual populism that I can at least emotionally get behind. Meanwhile, speaking of very rich people doing very stupid things, Blue Origin sent a rocket to space containing a bunch of semi-famous women,
The the the semi-famous women were apparently Katy Perry, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, ex-NASA engineer Aisha Aisha Bao and film producer Carrie Ann Flynn. They became the first all woman crew to visit space. Well, they weren't flying the thing. I mean, like you think Gayle King and Lauren Sanchez was flying the thing? I don't think that counts as a first all female crew.
That's it. That's like saying that if you have a plane filled with I love Lucy impersonators, that it's an all female. It's like an all female crew on the plane unless they're flying the plane. I don't think that counts. That's not what is happening here. OK, so here is some video of these people flying above Earth for about three minutes. Apparently, Katy Perry was singing while this happened. And I guess that we narrowly escaped people attempting to rush for the exits.
If I were in space with Katy Perry and she started singing, I might actually just jettison myself into space. It might be a better choice, a better life choice. Here is some video of these people. It's okay. Leave Flynn up there. Flynn's behind you. Flynn, I gotcha. There's Katy Perry holding a daisy. I gotcha, Flynn. Gotcha. Proud of you, Flynn. Oh, the moon! You guys, I have to tell you, look at the moon! Look at the moon!
That's amazing. Cool. Wow, look at the blue line. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my God. Wow. That's our pink moon. Now, listen, very cool. I mean, honestly, like a cool thing. Also, clown show. So a few things happening at once there. And apparently, she then said, Katy Perry was singing to people, what a wonderful world. Whoa, whoa, whoa.
And, you know, again, no jokes about people floating off into space. And first of all, great premise for a film, right? Is that you send all these people to space and then they lose connection with Earth and somebody has to go save them. Presumably Bruce Willis and a team of all men to go save them. I do love some of the comments. Some of the comments are really funny. So...
One of the, Gayle King said, quote, anybody criticizing it really doesn't understand what's happening here. We can all speak to the response we're getting from young women, from young girls about what this represents. What does it represent? You didn't fly the thing. I'm sorry. That's not the same thing. That's like you were a passenger with Charles Lindbergh and you were a woman and you're like, I flew across the Atlantic. No, you didn't. Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic. Can we stop with this? Seriously.
Apparently, Lauren Sanchez said that it only got her more fired up. She said, I'd love to have them come to Blue Origin and see the thousands of employees that don't just work here, but they put their heart and soul into this vehicle. I mean, I agree with that. But guess what? That's a lot of men. That is a disproportionately male company. So why you have to like slather over all of this with wokeness is very silly. Now,
There are people who are criticizing these people for paying money to go to space. And all I can say is that everything in human life starts as a luxury good and then eventually becomes a common thing for normal humans. The way that you actually spin up a company like Blue Origin to the point where normies can fly to space is first a bunch of people who are really rich pay a lot of money to go to space. And then other companies start getting into it. And then you have competition. The price goes down. This is true for literally every product you have in your life. Rich people used to be the only people with cell phones.
And if you had just yelled at them for buying the cell phones, you would not have a cell phone today. So I'm not angry at these people for being rich and then buying a flight or being put on a flight. And frankly, that's fine with me.
However, I am kind of annoyed at the like first females in all female crew. Really? What was Gayle King's training to be an astronaut? Precisely. Well, guess what, guys? There's even more show. So apparently SNL went full anti-woke. We'll get to that in a moment. Plus, you're going to have to join if you want to actually have your questions answered in our vaunted Ben Shapiro show mailbag. 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.