Ep. 2115 - The Right Should DUMP Andrew Tate
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Well, folks, it's going to be a very big week. President Trump's nominees for his cabinet are going to get hearings this week, maybe votes this week. All the fallout from the fires in California for one time presidential contender Gavin Newsom. Plus, we're going to get into all of the controversy surrounding Andrew Tate.

on the right. First, your reminder, get ready. In exactly one week, we will be live on the ground in Washington, D.C. for the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 47th president of the United States. Watch live. Join the fight at dailywire.com slash subscribe. I want to start today with a controversy that erupted online, but is sort of indicative of a broader problem that the right currently has with, say, the influencer class. This controversy erupted because Benny Johnson,

Had on Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate, for those who don't know, is an online provocateur. He is mostly famous for one time being a kickboxer, and now he sort of runs around with his shirt off with fancy cars and good-looking women and smokes cigars and says some things that are sort of useful critiques of the left, but mostly says crazy stuff online. And he has generated an enormous following, an enormous following. So Benny Johnson had on Andrew Tate.

And he also had on at the same time, Alina Habbo, who is a counsel for the Trump team. And Alina Habbo was really praising Tate and so was Benny Johnson. And this erupted into a controversy. Here's what that sounded like.

Nice to meet you. I'm a big fan. Well, nice to meet you. I'm a fan. You're the one saving Trump. You're doing more important work than me. America, America, not just Trump. And I agree with everything you just said. And I think that your anger is the same that President Trump has for our country. And I

the time is now for us to stop being wimps. I think that's exactly the right sentiment. And I also have to say that I sympathize with you because I think you go through a lot of the same, show me the person, I'll find the crime that President Trump has gone through. Okay, what Alina Haba is saying there is not actually true about Andrew Tate. He is not of the same ilk

as President Trump. Find me the person and I'll find you the crime. That is true of President Trump. That is not particularly true of Andrew Tate. And Russell Brand, of course, rushed to the defense of all of this. Russell Brand then suggested that anyone who objected to the treatment of Andrew Tate on the right, that they needed to sort of check their problems at the door. Here was what Russell had to say. So,

Someone like Andrew Tate with the audience he has could make a significant difference if correctly backed. He does say some stuff that's pretty out there. But the fact is, in a democracy, if someone is able to glean popular support, they can have a mandate, they should be represented. I suppose what's more significant and interesting to me is the way that figures like Andrew Tate or Tommy Robinson have gone,

always been maligned, I think, to place an impassable threshold around systems of influence and power. You can have your own views of Andrew Tate. You might think he's misogynistic or vulgar, but the fact is he appeals to a lot of people and he represents some things that a lot of people are very interested in. Okay, so I think that the way that some people are defending Andrew Tate today is a conflation of a couple of different ideas.

So I think there is a big difference between having people on, have whoever you want on. That's totally fine. Free speech and all the rest. That's totally fine. And cheering on bad people who don't actually care about your principles.

And Andrew Tate is the latter. Now, again, let me say right at the outset, I am not upset at all with anyone actually just interviewing Andrew Tate. Go for it. Have at it. There are tons of excellent questions to ask Andrew Tate, but none of these people are asking Andrew Tate any of those questions. Instead, a lot of people are sort of glomming on to his very online popularity in order to get clicks.

And some people are dishonestly conflating interviewing Andrew Tate with cheering for Andrew Tate or applauding him or talking about how brave and wonderful he is. And Andrew Tate is not brave and wonderful. He rips off thousands of people with his scam hustlers university. He preaches the virtue of treating women in a way you would never, ever allow anyone to treat your wife

or your daughter. No one is saying you can't have Andrew Tate on your show. It's a free country. You should do what you want. What I'm saying is that if you say you're conservative and then you have someone who truly is disgusting on and you proceed to tout them, praise them, nod along to everything they say, cheer them,

You're doing more than platforming, which, again, is fine. Platforming, the idea that you can never have a conversation. You can have a conversation with whomever you want, but there's a difference between having a conversation with a person and becoming a propagandist for that person. If you're a person, for example, who purports to stand for biblical values or American values or traditional values, you probably have a moral obligation, not probably, you certainly have a moral obligation to ask Andrew Tate

who is a self-stated bad man, hard questions about his actions and his beliefs and his past, not to, as so many on the right have, help him falsely rewrite his legal record or ignore all of the things he's actually said while nodding enthusiastically. See, here's the thing. Andrew Tate, now he's trying to play himself off as a politician. He's not. He's an influencer. He's an online troll. That's really what he is. Now he's trying to start some sort of party in the UK, but he's not a

A conservative politician, for example, trying to push conservative policies where part of the job of the interviewer is separating out his agenda from his personal behavior. Like what does the public get out of this person versus what they do in their private life? That is a question typically reserved for politicians. That's not what he is. He's an online troll and he revels in precisely the evils conservatives hate that his entire like not some of it, his entire self-stated persona.

If you don't ask about that, you're not doing your job as a conservative, as a traditional person, a person with actual values. Now, listen, I understand the appeal of Andrew Tate. I get it. I've seen his stuff. He's really charismatic. And for decades, the hatred of traditional masculinity in our society has been so strong, so thoroughgoing throughout the media, throughout politics, from our institutions, from our colleges, everywhere, that people...

including people on the right, have run away from traditional masculinity altogether. And they've sort of feminized what masculinity is supposed to be. Young men for at least a generation, maybe two, have basically been told they were useless at best and toxic at worst. And that leaves a giant vacuum, a vacuum for somebody who can sort of cosplay masculinity. And Tate fills that vacuum with his form of masculinity. But masculinity has good iterations and it also has really, really ugly iterations.

And the iteration that Andrew Tate pushes is not a responsible masculinity, a traditional masculinity that is all about channeling the sort of testosterone-fueled side of man into protecting women and children and civilization and building good things, but the kind of masculinity that tears everything good down. It's a barbarian masculinity that is interested in destroying rather than building.

Now, Andrew Tate plays a WWE heel. He knows it. I mean, he's not making any bones about this. He released a video yesterday, a very long 21-minute video, rambling video, sitting in a jacuzzi in cold weather, smoking a hookah and basically saying that he wants to be the most hated man on earth and that he makes money off of that. And he's telling the truth about that. That part is true.

But here is the thing. Andrew Tate is, at best, a crap sandwich. He presents totally differently to different audiences. So for people, sort of traditional people on the right, when he's in interviews with them, he will present as a sort of low-rent, anti-feminist talking head. Doesn't know much, but he's saying the things that need to be said, bashing left-wing wokeism. And then, to the crazier side of the internet, he'll present as an anti-Semitic radical who's willing to violate any taboo for the fringes.

And then when he's sitting down with someone actually conservative, he'll pretend he's an upstanding person who cares about family values and that he's been out of this, the sort of sex cam business for in the end, what he really is, is a con artist. And he's actually kind of an evil con artist, not kind of, if you believe the allegations against him, and there are lots of them, an actually evil con artist. Even if you just believe the stuff he said about himself, what he says is evil. He made his money off of cam girls, which is to say pornography, right?

He is a pornographer. He is a self-professed pimp and pornographer. He made his money grooming women for the sex industry. Now, all the people on the right who are very upset correctly about the grooming gangs in Britain are going to have to explain why they're OK with his grooming gang. Here is Andrew Tate explicitly explaining his method. Now he claims it's all a joke, but it's not a joke. He literally made millions of dollars doing this thing.

So, yeah, on corporate.com, I have my Ph.D. program and that is a Ph.D. is a pimp and hose degree that I'm clever. That teaches basically how I got girls, how I met girls, how I got girls to like me, how I got girls to fall in love with me to work on webcam for me.

Because that's what I did. That was my MO was find girls, make them love me and make them work for me. And that's how I got rich. Okay, now, if you know anything about the grooming gang scandal in Britain, that's exactly what the grooming gang scandal is. That's exactly what it is. These are the underage girls. They would convince these young girls that the girls were in love with them and then they would pass them around their group of friends for money. That's exactly what happened in the grooming gangs trials in the UK, which is a massive scandal internationally as it should be. But I guess for Andrew Tate,

Then if you confess to doing things like this on tape, like he just said, then morally it's somehow okay because you're anti-woke or something. Well, folks, politically, things are changing. You voted big government out and efficient government in. Well, now it's time to trim some fat from big wireless. If you're still on Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, why would you do that? I personally use PeerTalk. I can tell you it gives me the exact same service on the exact same towers with better customer service because they're based right here in the U.S. all for 50% off.

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Hey, the latest...

in terms of his legal situation, is according to the BBC, he's been placed under house arrest by a Romanian judge as prosecutors investigate new and serious allegations, including sex with a minor and trafficking underage persons. The allegation, by the way, is that he did exactly the same thing that the grooming gangs did with a 15-year-old girl. Prosecutors had asked the judge to remand the brothers in custody for 30 days. That would be him and his brother Tristan.

While they continued a new investigation involving a total of 35 alleged victims, including a woman who was 15 at the time. In a statement, Romania's agency against organized crime, DICOT, said six people had been detained in total, both Romanians and foreigners. He, of course, says that 30 of these girls say we've done nothing wrong, which, again, that's not actually super rare in sort of grooming cases. That's actually the original perspective of many of the girls who actually were groomed in Great Britain by the grooming gangs.

Two are the mothers of our children. Two have never even been here to Romania. Asked repeatedly by the BBC about the allegations of sex with a 15-year-old girl and trafficking underage persons, he walked away and refused to reply. Now, these are new and separate allegations from the old allegations.

The anti-organized crime agency in Romania says the accused were grooming vulnerable people who were then housed in different locations and forced to produce pornographic material for online broadcast. One of the foreign men is accused of forcing a 17-year-old foreign citizen to perform sexual acts in order to make online video content. He's said to have kept all the $1.5 million in profit. The statement does not name him. That same man is accused of repeatedly having sexual relations with a girl who was 15 years old when they met.

And actually, there's a fair bit of tape of the girl talking about when she met Andrew Tate, allegedly. And if that tape is in any way correct, and if his own statements on tape are in any way correct, she was underage at the time. Some of the other allegations from the new allegations that are being brought include rape. According to the actual case that's being brought, quote,

Okay, the...

These are pretty significant accusations. Now, maybe it's all lies. Maybe all of it is lies. But the problem is that he said a lot of things like this on tape. So we'll have to see how that goes. And again, it's not just trials in Romania that are happening. There is also legal considerations in the UK. In March, both of the Tates were taken into custody in Romania on a new European arrest warrant issued by the British authorities. Those charges related to the arrest were made between 2012 and 2015 and include allegations of sexual aggression.

The Bedford trial police in England said at the time they were working with the authorities in Romania on investigation into allegations of rape and human trafficking as well. So they're in a legal snafu. At the very least, the stuff that he has said himself on these matters is pretty terrible.

He is currently going on trial in Romania for both sex trafficking and rape, all while supposedly running for prime minister of Great Britain in order to stop radical Muslim grooming gangs. He is a Muslim. He's a self-stated Muslim. And according to his own statements, he was involved in grooming girls for pornography. This is, again, according if his own statements about himself. I'm not saying it. He's saying it. Here's Andrew Tate talking about exploiting women.

I was all about trying to get paid. Like my whole, I used sex as a tool to make women love me so they'd obey me and live in my house and make me money. That's what I wanted. So I was a pimp in that sense. Being kickboxer, playboy, pimp. I'm happy with those labels so far. But the majority of my money wasn't made in fighting. My money was actually made in

- In the pimp game. - I want you to understand some basic concepts to the pimp game. Basic concepts to the realities between men and women. - Women need a man to do OnlyFans. It's the same reason a woman need a man to do anything, because they're incompetent and they're very, very lazy. And they're stupid. - When you're pimping like me, it's a full-time job.

And Nathan Livingstone, who's kept tabs on this, has put together a lot of these videos that we're using right here. Now, Tate has then claimed in interviews with conservatives that he stopped his webcam business long ago, like super long. He stopped his webcam business technically in about 2022. It's not that long ago, as you may know. And apparently he stopped his webcam business when he found a new grift, the thing he calls Tate University or Hustlers University, which is effectively...

multi-level marketing scheme that is designed to spread social media awareness of Andrew Tate. That's basically what it is. So CoffeeZilla, who does investigations into sort of these MLMs and pyramid schemes, he did an entire investigation into Tate and what Tate does with his operation. Here's him explaining.

Most people know the Tates from clips talking about the Matrix, politics, and feminism, but the two brothers have made almost all their money from something else. According to Tate, the way they got rich was webcams. Taking advantage of lonely men, they bragged about it. And me and my brother, and eventually some staff I trained, would do all the talking. The girls were just pure, just famoosers. We were taking their money, all of it. And then they broke into male empowerment, which is...

ironic, teaching dating, manliness, and of course, money. You could join Hustlers University for $49 a month, where the best hustle was students reselling the course to their friends, which actually got the Tates quite popular because they encouraged the students to post their videos everywhere.

And he continues explaining exactly what Hustler University is. Again, he's making a lot of money off Hustler, not as much as he says he's making. Andrew Tate at one point said that he was going to be the world's first trillionaire and suggested that he was making something like $110 million per year. But when you actually dig into how much money he is worth...

He had suggested, for example, that he owned a chain of 15 casinos. The UK Guardian found that apparently not. It's tough to find out how much taste Romanian companies are actually worth. We can find tax returns for only one. Talisman Enterprises listed as a web portal business, which had 1.2 million pounds in debt. And so even many of the places he's declared are like his amazing castle in Italy. These are places that you can rent for like 800 pounds a night. In any case, here was Coffeyzilla explaining the hustler's university grift of it.

The main project Tate keeps promising, which is real world token. All of those others, if you want to believe Tate, were just promotions. Tate claims that this is the coin he's actually behind. And it's tied to his paid course. It used to be called Hustler's University. Now it's called the real world. Now,

This has always kind of been the biggest part of Tate's businesses, this get rich quick scheme. But the problem with monthly subscriptions is, of course, that people drop out. They leave. And so the Tates have always tried tactics to get people to stay. Like they've said, Hustlers University was closing. It's almost full. We do have a cap. So anyone who quits or leaves any time, if the cap is reached while you're not subscribed, you're not getting in. Don't give a shit.

That's it, we're closing. We're closing. But now the new angle is this real world token. Tate is promising a crypto airdrop to people who subscribe and stay subscribed to his monthly Get Rich Quick course. It's also very important for you people who think you can join for a month and quit the real world and just go back to being nobody. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You have to stay inside to increase your rank, your power level, because if you quit, you're

And then you rejoin, you lose all your PowerPoints. So why would you lose all your PowerPoints to save $49? It doesn't even make sense. Okay. So Tate's new plan is that you buy a Get Rich Quick course, gain PowerPoints. You have to stay subscribed to keep your PowerPoints. And then they say they will pay you a percentage that their school makes. The goal is that you can buy the token and own a percentage of the school. So imagine you sign up for the real world.

You start to make money. You focus on your tasks. Then you can invest that money in the real world token and get paid every single month, a monthly dividend from the profits of the school. All right. I think I get it. So you got the people at the bottom. They're paying up into the course, into the school. Then you got the people higher with higher power levels. They're making money from people at the bottom with the coin. And then all that money flows up. It's just kind of this nice little...

Pyramid scheme. Okay, so there is a person who is actually quite wonderful online named Zach Bonfilio who goes by Misfit Patriot over on X. And he put out a post saying, Mad Guy has an Andrew Tate problem and it's a big effing problem. Y'all better wake the eff up and see what he's doing before he ruins everything we've worked for. Stop acting like a dog who finally caught the car. We still have work to do and you're effing up. And Andrew Tate then replied to that. Hello, Jew. This is who Andrew Tate is.

He's a delight. By the way, big fan of Yahya Sinwar as well. So why exactly did the right embrace and rotate in the first place? Well, because there was a three-step process that took place on the right. First, in response to the left hating men,

The right delinked strength from virtue. Virtue was supposedly the thing that made you a cuck, that made you unable to defeat the left. What does conservatism conserve in order to defeat that? You have to do things that are not going to be virtuous. Then the right actually linked strength with transgressive behavior because the idea was that it took bad men to stop bad people, which sometimes is true. But then there was the final step.

Some on the right have now fallen into the trap of believing that so long as someone is purportedly anti-left, no matter what insanely non-conservative thing that person believes, from the wonders of sexual promiscuity and mistreating women to standing for Islamic jihadis, all of which Andrew Tate has done, you can commit literally any sin, up to and including being a pornographer, and be treated to applause.

Well, this has to stop because it's stupid and it's counterproductive and it is morally wrong. It turns out that in a reactionary world, the pendulum swings back and forth from wild, disgusting, terrible, radical feminism to sometimes wild and disgusting anti-woman trash. But there has always been in human life one constant. This is a conservative point. That constant is virtue. That's the constant. If you're covering for a self-described bad guy like Andrew Tate, you're doing it wrong. If

If you're traveling to Romania to let him lie about his grift and pretend to weigh his legal cases and act as though he's a paragon of masculine decency, you are participating in the lie. If you spend your days shouting correctly about the evils of pornography and sex trafficking, but not about Andrew Tate, you are, full stop, a fraud.

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That's L-U-M-E-N dot M-E slash Shapiro for 20% off your purchase. Thank you to Lumen for sponsoring this episode. That's Lumen dot M-E slash Shapiro. Get 20% off your purchase. Alrighty. Meanwhile, the news continues apace. The wildfire threat in Los Angeles remains very high. The death count has now risen to 24 from 16. That's what officials said on Sunday evening. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Santana winds aren't done provoking the historic L.A. fires that have so far claimed at least two dozen lives.

A wind advisory and red flag warning, which indicates extreme fire conditions, were in effect Sunday night with Santa Ana winds expected to move in by Monday and remain all the way until Wednesday. Apparently, the gusts could reach 45 to 70 miles an hour in certain parts of L.A. between Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon. And that could make it harder to drop aerial retardant. It could accelerate the spread of the fires. There's a big problem in Altadena, which has largely been burned, which is in the Pasadena area. Also, the Palisades blaze continues to be extremely large.

The containment of these blazes is not even remotely full. The Palisades blaze is only 14% contained. It's already burned almost 24,000 acres. That Palisades blaze, which is the one that you're seeing so much on the news, or you're not seeing as much about the Eaton blaze, which is the one around Pasadena. It really is amazing. If you know these areas, and again, I grew up in Los Angeles, so I know all these areas really, really well. If you look at the map,

The astonishing extent of the Palisades fire, it's truly crazy. It's approaching Santa Monica in the south and it's moving along the coast all the way through Malibu and in some cases all the way up towards Santa Barbara. That's how far the fire map is moving. And again, a lot of that is sort of

A preliminary attempt to prevent people from being caught by surprise because the idea is if the wind catches correctly, it's going to burn an enormous amount of the dead wood and barren trees that are out there in these areas. But if you look at the actual populated areas of Los Angeles, the evacuation warning zone is now including areas of Bel Air. It's moving all the way toward Beverly Glen.

In the north of that particular fire, they've moved the evacuation warning area all the way up to Ventura Boulevard in Encino. It's approaching Sherman Oaks. I used to live in Studio City, which is kind of near that particular area. And then again, parts of Santa Monica are now under evacuation warning. Brentwood is under evacuation warning.

Meanwhile, if you look at that Pasadena fire, the Eden fire, the evacuation warning area is now extending all the way out toward the outskirts of Glendale. It's already hit La Cunada Flint Ridge. These are massive, massive fires, truly massive fires. And so there's a conflation of events here, a confluence of events rather. That confluence of events is horrible wildfires, really, really high winds, enormous seasonal dryness, and of course, incredibly bad policy.

Bad policy very often is only exposed when the cover sort of gets ripped off. It's sort of like a termite infested area until you actually break through the drywall and see the termite infestation. You don't realize how bad it is. The fire broke through the drywall and now you've seen the termite infestation and it is awful. Basically, the foundations of the entire governmental system in Los Angeles and California more generally have been eaten away at over the course of decades.

So it's easy to find sort of excuses for why this particular reservoir was dry, for example. They had to let it out in order to fix it. Okay, the question is, why weren't there more reservoirs in the first place? And the answer is, California hasn't been in the business of building more reservoirs since like the 1960s and 70s. It's been a very long time. The transformers in the Los Angeles area date back in some cases to the 1920s.

Los Angeles and California have been wildly underserved by a far left progressive administration that has been in place for the past several decades being ruled by environmentalists and redistributionist progressives. While the L.A. Fire Department chief got herself in trouble, Kristen Crowley did, because she did an interview where she pointed out that the budget cuts had made it difficult to actually fight the fires.

The budget, there's so much talk about it. It was cut 17 million. It was cut this. It wasn't cut at all. According to one newspaper, was your budget for the fiscal year 2024-2025 cut?

I can tell you, I'm going to go back further than that. Again, since day one, we've identified huge gaps in regard to our service delivery and our ability from our firefighters boots on the ground to do their jobs. Since day one, this is my third budget as we're going into 2526. What I can tell you is we are still understaffed. We're still under resourced and we're still underfunded. So

So with that, whether it's $7 million, $10 million. But was the budget cut? Yes, it was cut. And it did impact our ability to provide service. She's saying the quiet part right out loud. Karen Bass was apparently wildly furious at her and called her on the carpet to yell at her. The Atlantic, meanwhile, ran a piece titled, quote, How Well-Intentioned Policies Fueled L.A.'s Fires.

Okay, who cares about the intent? This is such a difference between how the left and the right think about the world. The left thinks that well-intentioned policies are their own justification. If the intentions were good, it doesn't matter if L.A. burns.

Which is, of course, totally insane because it turns out that in pursuit of these well-intentioned policies, many, many bad things can be done. So the Washington Free Beacon, which does some of the best reporting in America, reports today, quote,

Crowley wrote to the city's fire commissioners, a five-person board appointed by Bass on November 18th, and asked them to transmit the message to Bass and the city council. The fire department's size, she said, had not increased in decades despite significant population growth. Crowley said in many ways the current staffing, deployment model, and size of the LAFD have not changed since the 1960s. In 2022, Crowley said 61% of the department's firefighters failed to meet the four-minute first response time, which is a national firefighting standard.

The National Fire Protection Association recommends cities like L.A. employ between 1.51 and 1.81 firefighters per thousand residents. In L.A., that number was about half. Two months later, historic wildfires erupted, and Crowley's memo magically disappeared from a city website. Why, shocking. I can't believe that they would make all of that disappear. Well, meanwhile, it turns out that pretty much every area

of California law has been screwed up. Many people today are in desperate need of fulfillment from their fire insurance because their house got burned down. The problem is that California has spent decades attempting to destroy the entire fire insurance market by placing artificial regulations on pricing. And what that does is it drives out alternative pricing. It drives out programs that you can buy. It limits your availability of choice. It leads people to go uninsured.

According to the Cato Institute, in recent years, state price control regulations have driven private home insurance providers like State Farm and Allstate out of offering new products in the state and led to the non-renewal of thousands of existing home insurance policies. This has left many homeowners exposed to catastrophic financial losses from the recent wildfires and created a huge strain on the state-run Fair Access to Insurance Requirements Plan, the insurer of last resort.

California's price controls, where regulators must approve proposed premium increases, require insurers to submit detailed justifications for rate increases to the California Department of Insurance. Those companies had until recently to demonstrate that proposed premiums are based on historic losses, not analysis based on forward-looking risk assessments, which is insane, by the way. So apparently the insurance companies, in order to justify future price increases, had to say, here's what the fires have been like in the past.

So you can't assess future risk, which is literally what insurance is there to do. This, by the way, is true across how Americans think of insurance. We think of insurance totally wrong. Insurance is designed to spec out future risk. It is not designed as a quote-unquote coverage plan. That is not what it is. This is true from health insurance to fire insurance to flood insurance. And the thing about insurance is if it's speccing out future risk, that means differential prices if you have a house in the middle of a forest in Malibu than if you're living in downtown L.A.,

Designed to keep insurance premiums affordable through rates that are, quote, never excessive, inadequate, or unfairly discriminatory, these regulations led to rules preventing companies from recalibrating prices to fully reflect what they believed were higher future wildfire risks after 2017. The CDI rejected or delayed approval for substantial rate increases in many cases, creating a de facto price cap.

Previous research showed average delay was now 293 days between 2020 and 2022, which is significantly worse than 157 days. In fact, California was the worst state in the country for rate suppression, having the biggest gap between actuarially indicated rate and the rate approved by regulators. And so what ended up happening there is that people just stopped buying their insurance and insurance stopped offering options because they knew they were going to have to pay out more than they were taking in.

So what ended up, they all get thrown onto the tax paradigm as always at all, as always. And by the way, Karen Bass continues along these lines. So Karen Bass put out a tweet yesterday saying that you should report price gouging in housing. So like a huge percentage of the housing stock in SoCal has now been burned down, which means more demand and less supply, which means the price naturally goes up.

And instead, Karen Bass is like, report price gouging to me. Somebody's doing a capitalism. Stop. Well, how exactly are you going to allocate those housing spots if you can't increase the prices? You can't build anything new in California. The regulations are insane. So hilariously enough, Gavin Newsom is now attempting, the governor of California, to reverse field and campaign as a moderate Republican. We'll get to that in just one moment. First...

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So in the face of his radical incompetence and his state burning down, California Governor Gavin Newsom is now attempting to reverse field on pretty much everything and pretend that he's a moderate Republican. Now he's running as Rick Caruso, the L.A. mayoral candidate who lost to Karen Bass. So first, he put out a statement that he's going to cut through red tape. Quote, just issued an executive order that will allow victims of the SoCal fires to not get caught up in bureaucratic red tape and quickly rebuild their homes. We're also extending key price gouging protections to help make rebuilding more affordable price gouging protections. This is what the left,

Suggest is a solution. It is not a solution.

The prices are going to go up because demand just went up and supply is still constrained. As far as the beginning where he says that he's going to cut red tape, why only for the people affected by the SoCal fires? Why are you leaving it in place for everyone else? I love how now you acknowledge the bureaucratic red tape in California is bad. By the way, it's absolutely terrible. Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom, he says there will be zero, zero tolerance for looting during wildfires. Again, the question you should be asking yourself is why is there tolerance for looting not during wildfires, Gavin?

We have to keep people safe. No room, zero tolerance for moving. That's why these guys are out here. I'm very grateful for them, particularly for these critical checkpoints that allow law enforcement to move more globally and do the interior work.

Well, I only have one question for you. Why did the state of California effectively decriminalize shoplifting in 2020, 2021? State law says stealing merchandise worth 950 bucks or less is a misdemeanor, according to Leo Hannion at Hoover, which means law enforcement won't bother to investigate. And if they do, prosecutors will simply let it go.

So they're totally fine with mass looting during BLM, totally fine with looting just on a regular basis. Just walk to a Rite Aid and steal everything in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Now, of course, it makes for bad headlines. So Gavin Newsom has to cover his ass. Gavin Newsom also says that they're going to reimagine how the state of California works. They're going to do the Marshall Plan 2.0. Now, he has no idea what that means. Literally none. He's asked about, so what do you mean by that? And he's like, well, we're thinking that. I'm glad you came up with a name for a thing, my dude. Really good job.

We're already organizing a Marshall Plan. We already have a team of looking and reimagining LA 2.0. And we're making sure everyone's included, not just the folks on the coast, people here that were ravaged by this disaster. You just said you're organizing a Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of California. What is that Marshall Plan? For this region, we're just starting to lay out. I mean, we're still fighting these fires. So we're already talking to city leaders. We're already talking to civic leaders. We're already talking to business leaders and nonprofits.

We're talking to labor leaders. We're starting to organize how we can put together a collection of individuals on philanthropy for recovery, how we can organize the region, how we can make sure that we are seeking federal assistance for the Olympics more broadly. More hand motions. But also federal assistance for the recovery efforts. Really more. And how we can galvanize the community.

with folks that love this community to really develop a mindset so that at scale, we're dealing with the scope of this tragedy and responding to it at scale with efficiency, like the executive order I talked about, time value of delivering projects, addressing building codes, addressing permitting issues, and moving forward to rebuilding and being more resilient. What a joke he is. He just did like a minute and a half without saying a single damn thing.

He's asked, what is that Marshall Plan 2.0? And he proceeds to babble about synergy. We're talking to local leaders and civic leaders and philanthropic leaders about spending in the giant scale, but also on the particularly small scale. And then he starts doing like mime in a box. Like the hand motions are not a substitute for policy, my dude.

That is a lot of hand motions. As a guy who talks with his hands a little bit, let me just tell you, that is some wild hand motioning. I mean, if you just scrub through that tape once again and watch the number of hand motions, when he panics, that dude goes right back to jazz hands training in middle school theater. He is just going for it. Wow, that is a lot of hand motions.

He really went through the full panoply. I'm kind of impressed. I'll be honest with you. I thought he was going to run out and then he would pull a new one. He'd be like over here and over here and pulling it down from and then all the way from here and out here. And he is so awful. But he knows one thing, and that's Donald Trump is the problem. That's the biggest thing, of course. Mr. Trump has threatened to withhold aid for California wildfires, both as president and now again as president elect.

You're worried that he might actually do that? Well, I mean, he's done it to Utah. He's done it to Michigan. They did it to Puerto Rico. He did it to California back before I was even governor in 2018 until he found out folks in Orange County voted for him and then he decided to give the money. So he's been at this for years and years and years. It transcends states, including, by the way, Georgia. He threatened similarly. So that's just that's his style. And and, you know, we take it.

seriously to the extent that in the past it's taken a little bit more time. I've been pretty expressive about that in the context of someone threatening our first responders.

in terms of supporting the immediacy of their needs. That's what you take it as, that President-elect Trump is threatening the first responders here. Well, I mean, it's what he said. He said, "I'm not going to support the firefighting efforts. I'm not going to support the state of California as it relates to its emergency management." He made this pretty clear during the election.

unless they do my bidding. Well, actually, what Senator John Barrasso said, Republican from Wyoming, correctly, is actually what we're going to do is we're going to attach some strings. Like you actually have to clean up your forests if you want us to spend money on you, which makes some sense. Do you expect, though, that Congress and Republicans will still help these Americans in need, even if they don't like their local politics and the party?

I expect that there will be strings attached to money that is ultimately approved. And it has to do with being ready the next time because this was a gross failure this time. It is just it is amazing that Gavin Newsom continues to try to pretend that he is somehow the responsible player in all of this. He's now turned into the online meme. We're all looking for the guy who did this. Who could it be?

Oh, man. Or the who shot Hannibal meme. It really is. He's a living meme, Gavin Newsom. Well done, California. You guys have done yourselves proud with the people that you've elected. Well, meanwhile, President Trump's administration is preparing for its unveiling. That, of course, is going to begin next week. But we are going to get nominee hearings that begin this week because Congress has already been sworn in. That means it's time to have hearings for SecDef prospective Pete Hegseth, for Marco Rubio, Secretary of State,

And one of the things that you're starting to see is that many of the Trump cabinet members are now starting to say things that are in the realm of the more reasonable. Why? Because it turns out that the advice and consent process and the various constraints of American government tend to wash out most of the radicalism present from the right. Doesn't tend to work on the left because the left then staffs up in the administrative bureaucracy. When it comes to some of the kind of wackier opinions held by a wide variety of members of sort of the Team Trump, those things are being moderated.

which makes perfect political sense. So, for example, Tulsi Gabbard, who's been tapped to lead the U.S. intelligence community as director of national intelligence, had opposed originally Section 702 foreign surveillance authorities as a member of Congress that allows for metadata gathering and data gathering about foreign parties. And now she's reversed herself and she's going to support that. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made more noises about the kinds of things that he would. He says he'll give advisory opinions rather than issuing outright bans.

Pete Hegseth has been avoiding some of the more controversial statements that he's made in the past, for example. And so it's not particularly shocking to watch all this happening. This is how government works. So, for example, again, Gabber told Punchbowl News on Friday she now supports Section 702 surveillance programs thanks to updated whistleblower and civil liberty protections. Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma had said that if she reverses that, there's a good shot she gets confirmed. RFK Jr. told reporters on Capitol Hill last month, I'm all for the polio vaccine.

And he said that he actually will pursue anti-abortion policies at HHS despite being pro-choice himself. Hegseth has said that he supports all women serving in our military today, including in combat roles. Now, again, this is because so many of the Trump cabinet members want to work with President Trump. Trump's agenda is going to be the thing that actually rules the rooster. This is something Susie Wiles has made absolutely clear, and that's good. The same thing holds true, by the way, of Tom Homan, the out-of-central-casting agent

bloodhound who's going to track down illegal immigrants and deport them. So he is now the realist in the room, according to the Wall Street Journal. Homan has spent the weeks following the election right-sizing Trump's sweeping campaign promise to arrest and deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally.

In private transition meetings and occasionally in public, he has emphasized that immigrants with criminal records should be the primary targets for arrest, a narrower set of people than 15 to 20 million Trump pledged to go after. Homan also said the administration would not carry out intimidating sweeps of immigrant neighborhoods and that he's unsure how extensive the actual deportation campaign will be. He said, I keep getting asked the question, how many people are we going to remove in the first hundred days? I don't know. I don't know what the resources are that I'm going to have. Congress is going to have to give me funding.

Homan says, I've worked for six different presidents. I've seen hundreds of policies come and go. I've seen what policies worked and what policies don't. Well, yes. Now, all the people who are set to be disappointed by the fact that the Trump administration actually has to operate in the real world, get ready. The Trump administration actually has to operate in the real world. And there's no reason to be disappointed about that. That's what happens when you win. When you win, it turns out that many of these sort of outlandish things that you say are not applicable in real life.

So there's bound to be some disappointments. And I, for one, am pleased with the realism because I would prefer that things get done even if it's 70% of the pie that I want. This happens to hold true with regard to, for example, the January 6th arrestees. So J.D. Vance, the vice president-elect of the United States, he was asked...

on Fox News Sunday about who President Trump would pardon day one with regard to January 6th. And he said the reasonable thing, which is people who are guilty of nonviolent offenses will be pardoned. People who did violent things against cops should not be pardoned. I know that a lot of people online were very angry about J.D. Vance saying that. I don't know why. If you assaulted a cop, it seems to me you should go to jail for whatever reason you assaulted the cop. Here's J.D. Vance saying what is the rational and reasonable thing?

January 6th pardons, President Trump says there's a process. Where is the line drawn on who will and wouldn't be considered for a pardon? I think it's very simple. Look, if you protested peacefully on January the 6th and you've had Merrick Garland's Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned.

If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn't be pardoned. And there's a little bit of a gray area there, but we're very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law. And there are a lot of people we think in the wake of January the 6th who were prosecuted unfairly. We need to rectify that.

Okay, so again, what he's saying there is perfectly reasonable and rational. And there are people online who are, of course, going nuts. Everybody should be, they're all political detainees. I mean, some are and some assaulted cops. And that's not quite the same thing. By the way, J.D. Vance saying the same thing with regard to Greenland. So he's asked, you know, Donald Trump has said that he's not going to rule out military intervention. And J.D.'s like, what are you talking about? Here's J.D. Vance talking about Greenland. Again, this is what rational politics looks like if you have a high IQ, which J.D. obviously does.

What's the deal with Greenland and the Panama Canal? Are we using or considering use of military force in any of those situations? No, look, we don't have to use military force, Shannon. The thing that people always ignore is we already have troops in Greenland. Greenland is really important for America strategically. It has a lot of great natural resources. My friend Donald Trump Jr. was there a couple days ago, and you know what they told him?

They want to be empowered to develop, the people of Greenland want to be empowered to develop the resources there. We also need to make sure that Greenland is properly cared for from an American security perspective. And frankly, the current leadership, the Danish government has not done a good enough job of securing Greenland. I think there actually is a real opportunity here for us to take leadership

to protect America's security, to ensure that those incredible natural resources are developed. And that's what Donald Trump is good at. He's good at making deals. And I think there's a deal to be made in Greenland. So again, all of this is perfectly rational and perfectly reasonable. And that's true across the board in terms of how Donald Trump is approaching policy. So for example, last week, the incoming Trump team said, you know, Donald Trump may not get a deal done in Ukraine day one, but it's going to get done in the first few months. There are going to be talks.

It's going to be reasonable. That's right. Mike Walz is the incoming NSA congressman from Florida. He said, listen, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, they're going to have a talk.

Will the first meeting with Putin be just Trump and Putin, or will this be trying to bring in Ukraine as well as Zelensky, Putin and Trump? Well, we haven't set the exact framework for it yet. We're working on that. But I do expect a call at least in the coming days and weeks. So that would be a step. And we'll take it from there.

Well, it's also continued by saying, listen, it's not realistic to say that we're going to be able to expel every Russian from Ukraine as well. This has been true forever. The Biden administration acknowledges as much. It's just they refuse to actually create policy around reality.

All right.

All righty, so again, all of this is rational and reasonable, and that's what Trump 2.0 is going to be. There are going to be a lot of moments where members of the Trump base are unhappy with the kind of deal Trump is cutting. Why? Because he's the actual president now, and he has to get things done. It turns out getting things done means involving yourself in negotiations where you don't get 100% of everything, but you get most of what you want. There's going to be a lot happening.

of that in Trump 2.0 with an incredibly slim House majority and an incredibly slim Senate majority as well. Okay, meanwhile, we here at The Daily Wire, we have now announced and brought out a brand new documentary called Identity Crisis, all about the transgender movement, particularly directed at children.

Well, joining us online is one of the people featured in the film Identity Crisis, Adam Vina. He lost custody of his son after he refused to affirm the child's quote-unquote transgender identity. Adam, thanks so much for joining the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Ben. Thank you for having me. It's a great honor to be speaking with you, Ben. So why don't we start from the beginning of your story? How did things come to this point?

Um, it started when Aiden was two years old. Um, is when I first received a picture of Aiden in a dress. Um, and I, I sent out some text messages basically saying he's a boy, not a girl. And I had thought it had stopped at that point. And on Aiden's third birthday, um,

We were potty training Aiden at the time and he asked if he could go use the restroom. I said, absolutely, buddy. Do you need help or do you want to do it by yourself? He says, I want to do it by myself. He went by himself. He came back out to me and he said, he said, daddy, mommy bought me a pink dress. And the way I tell you and everybody else, I got down on one knee. I looked him in the eyes and he, buddy, you're a boy, not a girl. And boys don't wear dresses. And he said, okay, daddy. And, and,

And at that point, I sent out another group of text messages. And those groups of text messages, none of them were threatening of violence or anything like that to her or him. But they were able to get a temporary restraining order put on me. So I've technically been on a restraining order for almost five years for no violence, no neglect to either my son's mother or to her.

The judges in California ordered a gender assessment to be done on my son, which I have never...

Mr. Shapiro, this whole thing has been extremely one-sided. Not at one time has the court system, the attorneys ever took the father into consideration into this situation. They've always took her side. So I wanted to sit in on the gender assessment at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, and they denied me that. I hired my own therapist to sit in on the assessment.

And they denied me that, denied me that. And I wanted to have a phone call with the doctor and they denied me a phone call. So the doctor has never called the father to ask his side of what he thinks is going on with his son.

So let's talk about what was going on with your son. I mean, obviously, you're spending a lot of time with your son. But by the same token, did you ever see any signs that your son absolutely thought he was a girl or anything like that? No, sir. I asked my I asked Aiden's grandparents every single day that I missed something in Aiden. Was there was there an inkling that he wanted to be a girl? And there was never any inkling that my son wanted to be a girl.

He was just your normal, typical little boy. Wanted to play with trucks, play in the dirt, your normal little boy thing. So there was never anything that he wanted to be this way. So what do you think happened with his mother? I mean, why did all of this begin? I think she started wanting to get back at me because we were no longer together at this point. But I truly believe that

the judges, her attorney, the therapists, the children's hospitals, doctors, I really truly believe that they brainwashed my son's mother to be a hundred percent on board with this whole transition. Um, it wasn't just up until recently in court where she actually started referring to Aiden as, um, a her, um, uh, referring to her, him as Luna. Um, and,

Aiden now has she, her pronouns. I received an email from a parent from school that she sent to school saying that Aiden is now full transgender at four years old. He goes by she, her pronouns. He goes by the name of Violet. Two years ago, it was Violet.

Now it's Luna. So as we all know, there's a transgender book out there for kids that the main character name is Luna. And a lot of these kids are taking that name up because they're referencing that book to to what's going on with them. So my son goes by Luna as of right now. So is there still a restraining order in place? What is the current legal status?

Currently, I'm in the appeals process right now, waiting to get an appeals hearing. But if this goes all the way through to the end, I'll be on an eight-year restraining order for no physical violence. And in the state of California, the only way a child can be removed from a parent or parents if there's abuse or neglect. And in this case, there was never any abuse or neglect with my son.

Well, it's a horrifying story. Obviously, we wish you the best. Whatever help you need, we're happy to cover it. That's Adam Vina, the father of five-year-old Aiden who lost custody of his son after disagreeing with his girlfriend about the son's alleged transgender identity. Adam, thanks for telling your story. It's a really important one.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate that. Folks, if you want to see the rest of that story, you want to hear more about that, you should go check out this brand new documentary, Identity Crisis. It's a project of The Daily Wire as well as TPUSA, and that is available over at Daily Wire Plus right now. All righty, coming up, there are some on the right who bizarrely are now trying to defend TikTok, even though it's obviously a Chinese op. If you're not a member or become a member, use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.

I've often said that gender-affirming care is health care, it is mental health care, and it can actually be suicide prevention care. I think I'm going to take some medicine so I can kind of like transform into a boy, get surgery. After the surgery, I didn't really feel any better. When it stopped being a thing for adults and it started to be a let's teach this to kids. Total lie. Manipulation. It's gaslighting. Please stop. He's a

He's a boy, not a girl. How could she do this to my son? What they're talking about is hormonal therapy or sex reassignment surgery on children. I thought fixing me externally would fix me internally. But of course I was wrong. The fact that the state thinks that they're more important and have a better say in what happens to your child over the actual parent's opinion is egregious. Puberty blockers, surgeries, big money makers for hospitals, for physicians. All I want to do is hold my son.

Are you asking me to lie to parents? And he said, yes. This is an weaponized...

Use of apparent sympathy and caring and concern by the left to destroy your child. Let's tell kids that maybe they can be the opposite sex. Maybe they actually are the opposite sex. It is an evil thing to tell children that happiness lies on the other side of puberty blockers or double mastectomies. The left so badly wants to blur these lines. That's a five alarm fire. It's criminal.