Ep. 2126 - Did China Just DRINK OUR MILKSHAKE?!
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Well, folks, did China just drink our milkshake? China has a brand new AI model. It's called DeepSeek. And some people are comparing this technical advancement from China to Russia's Sputnik moment back in 1957 when they launched a

a satellite into orbit, shocking America's technological cadre. What exactly are we talking about here? Apparently, China has now released a brand new AI. It is called DeepSeek. This is an AI that was trained on chips that are way less sophisticated than the NVIDIA chips that have been sort of the drivers of the AI revolution. So to review for just a second, for those of us who haven't been following AI very closely, artificial intelligence,

has progressed tremendously over the course of the last three to four years. Tremendously. If you've been following ChatGPT, it is so good at this point at pretty much everything, and it is only one step removed from being able to do many things in the real world. So for example, if you use ChatGPT to put together a travel itinerary for any location on the globe, you can give it a prompt. It'll give you the travel itinerary. Right now, you can't just hit book, but soon you will be able to do that. And AI is going to change how we do our jobs in so many different industries. It was assumed,

that America had a massive lead in the AI industry. Why? Well, because AI, working as it does, of incredible levels of data, just reams and reams of data, has to use very sophisticated microchips, typically created by NVIDIA and then produced at TSMC, which is an actual semiconductor factory over in Taiwan. And firms like Meta that have been investing billions of dollars into AI or OpenAI or Google, all associated

of these various companies have been pouring billions of dollars into buying these Nvidia microchips that are designed in order to be able to process these huge quantities of data, because that's how AI actually works. The way that AI works is it crunches as much data as humanly possible. It works it through a matrix.

where it can actually determine which words in any given sentence are the most important. And then it predicts, essentially, this is how LLMs work, large language models. It then predicts what the next word in a sentence is going to be. This is why you can prompt ChatGPT to write you a joke about a duck in the style of Charles Dickens, and it will do that, simply based off cramming extraordinary amounts of data. Takes huge energy, takes huge number of sophisticated microchips, or at least that's what everybody thought until a little bit earlier this week.

This week, China released an AI model called DeepSeek. DeepSeek is apparently just as sophisticated as ChatGPT, but it cost a fraction of the cost to produce. Instead of using NVIDIA sophisticated microchips, apparently they were using less sophisticated microchips. That's the reason why NVIDIA, which had been

moved up to a trillion dollar market cap. It had grown massively. It's a 30-year-old company, but only in the last three, four years has it spiked to that trillion dollar valuation. It dropped almost 20% in the stock market because suddenly it appears the barrier to entry in AI has dropped precipitously as well. It is less expensive than thought to develop a very sophisticated AI. China was able to do it apparently based off chips.

that were not from NVIDIA, which is why NVIDIA's stock dropped. It's also why a huge number of stocks that were tied into American AI dropped as well. The idea is now there's a much more competitive sphere. According to the Wall Street Journal,

Technology stocks tumbled Monday on news that China's DeepSeek had trained a sophisticated artificial intelligence model at a fraction of the cost of its Silicon Valley rivals, triggering a sudden reversal of the recent AI rally. NVIDIA, whose chips have been used to power many of the leading AI models, sank 17%. The move wiped out more than $590 billion from the company's market value and tarnished one of the stock market's brightest stars. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composites led 3.1%. The S&P 500 sank 1.5% after reaching a record last week.

Now, again, it's quite possible that AI was being overvalued, that all of these various companies were being overvalued, that it's sort of like the tech bubble in the late 90s, that a huge amount of money is being invested into AI, but it's not clear how much revenue is actually going to be generated by AI in the real world. So tons of money is now chasing a couple of sort of big hits.

This happens very often when you have a speculative bubble that's created by a new technology. And then the market tends to wipe out a lot of the speculation, and what you end up with are the long-lasting gains from the technology. The dot-com bubble, of course, did not end dot-com. The dot-com bubble did not end the internet. Instead...

The dot-com bubble was created by enthusiasm for an entire new wave of products. And it turns out that a lot of that enthusiasm was put in the wrong places. But it didn't mean the internet didn't transform life. It did. The same thing is going to be true of AI. So a lot of these stocks that are currently highly valued may be overvalued at this point. And the fact that China was able to develop DeepSeek without using NVIDIA chips means, again, that many of these companies that were assumed to have essentially an oligopoly, that they were going to have enormous power in the AI market,

Maybe they don't have as much power as they thought they did because it turns out the barrier to entry is now much lower. All in all, Monday's market bloodbath wiped out some $1 trillion from the stock market's value, according to the Dow Jones market data. Now, as I said, some people like Marc Andreessen, the investor, have been comparing this to the Sputnik moment. Sputnik, of course, is when the Soviet Union launched a satellite that orbited the Earth and shocked the Americans out of their complacence about their technological superiority.

This is something very, very similar. America had assumed that we were way ahead in the world of AI, and that was particularly because of our control over the microchip sector via TSMC and NVIDIA. And it turns out, not so much. According to the New York Times, this new chatbot created by DeepSeek is the talk of the AI world.

Apparently, it works basically as well as ChatGPT. One columnist said,

Now, there are some problems with DeepSeek, and this is one of the reasons why America needs to win the battle for AI. DeepSeek monitors all your data. If you use DeepSeek, it is doing the same thing that all other various Chinese companies do. It is mining your data to an extraordinary extent. The same way that TikTok is a Chinese psyop that is designed to draw enormous amounts of American data to it, the same thing is true of DeepSeek.

According to their user agreement, we automatically collect certain information from you when you use the services, including internet or other network activity information, such as your IP address, unique device identifiers, and cookies. We collect certain device and network connection information when you access the service. By the way, this includes keystrokes. It includes pretty much all data. You know that...

Deep Seek also is censoring like mad. Deep Seek will not allow you to ask questions, for example, about the Tiananmen Square massacre. So what does all of this mean? Well, according to President Trump, what this means is that it's a wake-up call to American industry. Get competitive. Get competitive now. Here's President Trump saying it's a wake-up call. He was speaking at the Congressional Institute yesterday. The release of Deep Seek.

AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser focused on competing to win because we have the greatest scientists in the world. Even Chinese leadership told me that. They said you have the most brilliant scientists in the world in Seattle and various places, but Silicon Valley, they said...

There's nobody like those people. This is very unusual when you hear a deep seek, when you hear somebody come up with something. We always have the ideas. We're always first. So I would say that's a positive. That could be very much a positive development. So instead of spending billions and billions, you'll spend less and you'll come up with hopefully the same solution. Under the Trump administration, we're going to unleash our tech companies and we're going to dominate the future like never before.

Okay, he's right about all of that, right? When the cost goes down of actually being able to participate in this market, that means more innovation and more competition, and that's good. As the Wall Street Journal points out, DeepSeek is challenging assumptions about the computing power and spending needed for AI advances. OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank last week made headlines when they announced a joint venture, Stargate, to invest up to $500 billion in building out AI infrastructure, Microsoft's

plans to spend $80 billion on AI data centers this year. CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday said Meta would spend $65 billion on AI projects and build a data center so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan. Meta expected to have 1.3 million advanced trips by the end of the year, but DeepSeek's model reportedly required as few as 10,000 to develop, which means a radical reduction in the cost to actually develop a useful AI.

So what exactly does this mean? Well, number one, President Trump had rescinded a Biden executive order that gave government far too much control over AI. Companies developing AI models that pose a serious risk to national security, economic security, or public health and safety would have had to notify regulators when training their models and share the results of red team safety tests. Biden had suggested that that was necessary in order to eliminate bias and limitation and errors. But DeepSeek is an open source model, meaning anyone can see the code.

And that is designed to basically wipe out all competitors. Because if you have the most advanced version and you just release the advanced version, everybody ends up using your code. Now, all of that could be a positive. One thing is clear, however, and that is we do have to out-compete China. That is why I'm so puzzled by President Trump in that same speech, suggesting that he's going to be putting tariffs on Taiwan. I understand President Trump wants to reshore a lot of this production. President Trump seems to be of the belief system that if we reshore Taiwan,

semiconductor production in the United States away from Taiwan, that that effectively means that the United States doesn't have to get involved if China decides to make a play for Taiwan because an American key national interest will no longer be at stake. There's a big problem with this. One is TSMC is leagues ahead of anything that's being produced inside the United States right now. And two is it appears that DeepSeek was just able to

can radically increase its capability without using sophisticated semiconductors like from TSMC. So it might be a moot point anyway. Well, all of this is a transformative move in American and international markets, but you need to look at your own personal finances. Looking back, can you recall a time when your financial habits weren't serving you well, whether it was keeping your money in low interest accounts or making purchases you later regretted? Or were there barriers that kept you from starting to invest earlier? Perhaps it was limited funds, a busy schedule, or feeling uncertain about where to begin. That's why I want to tell you about Acorns.

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In particular, in the very near future, we're going to be placing tariffs on foreign production of computer chips, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals to return production of these essential goods to the United States of America. They left us and they went to Taiwan, which is about 98% of the chip business, by the way.

And we want them to come back. And we don't want to give them billions of dollars like this ridiculous program that Biden has. Give everybody billions of dollars. They already have billions of dollars. They've got nothing but money, Joe.

They didn't need money. They needed an incentive. And the incentive is going to be they're not going to want to pay a 25, 50 or even 100 percent tax. They're going to build their factory with their own money. We don't have to give them money. They're going to come in because it's good for them to come in. They're giving them money. They don't even know what they're going to do with it. I had people tell me we have no idea. We didn't need money.

They don't know if they're even, they're probably going to use the money to build in other places, other countries. It's a ridiculous plan, very expensive and ridiculous. The only way you'll get out of this is to build your plant. If you want to stop paying the taxes or the tariffs, you have to build your plant right here in America. That's what's going to happen at record levels. Okay, so he wants to reshore a lot of this stuff. Taiwan, for its part, is trying to basically talk him out of this, suggesting, hey, you know, you guys are running way behind Taiwan.

You design the chips, we make the chips. That's a pretty good deal when it comes to free trade and it lowers the cost and it's going to be necessary to lower the cost given the fact that China is now much more competitive. And this does play into concerns over the way that the Trump administration so far is dealing with China. Obviously, when it comes to TikTok,

My hope, and I think this is true, is that President Trump has been using carrots and sticks with regard to Chinese outfits like TikTok. He has delayed, for example, the implementation of the shutdown of TikTok in order to negotiate presumably a sale of TikTok that will end without TikTok being controlled by the Chinese.

If we are in fact in competition with China, which we certainly are, then we need to be using every resource at our disposal and not hamstringing our ability to compete with the Chinese by putting tariffs on semiconductors, which of course drives up prices for precisely the companies we need to actually out-compete the Chinese on this basis. Now, with all of this said,

President Trump has been pairing his call for tariffs more broadly with a call for tax decreases. So, for example, President Trump the other day suggested funding the government solely through tariffs. Now, if the question was, can we substitute tariffs for income tax? I'm in.

Really, if you're going to lower the cost on business in the United States by giving giant tax cuts and at the same time increase government revenues through tariffs, that seems like a worthwhile tradeoff. If, however, the idea is tariffs without any sort of concomitant deregulation or tax cuts, that just raises prices in the United States. How about just no tax? You know, if the tariffs work out like I think, a thing like that could happen if you want another. You know.

Years ago, 1870 to 1913, we didn't have an income tax. We had what we had as tariffs where foreign countries came in and they stole our jobs. They stole our companies. They stole our product. They ripped us off. And, you know, they used to do numbers. And then we went to tariff, a tariff system. Now, again, if he's using tariffs as a tradeoff for a relatively small government, if he's

If he's using it as a trade-off for lowering taxes, I agree and I'm in. And that seems to be the pattern that he would like to follow ideologically. That was, in fact, the plan of William McKinley, who he sort of modeled himself after. William McKinley, for those who don't know, was a twice-elected president of the United States, assassinated, and the person who took over for him was Teddy Roosevelt. As the Wall Street Journal points out in a piece by David Uberti, Trump tries to forge a golden age economy of self-reliance

and defiance. A potentially leaner, meaner government at the center of it all is already throwing the country's weight around even against longtime allies in the hope of bending global trade to America's will. In discussing possible tariffs that could upend some U.S. companies' supply chains and other countries' entire economies, Trump has likened his approach to that of President William McKinley, Republican leader during an era known as the Gilded Age,

a period of rapid industrialization after the Civil War that created tremendous wealth for America, but was marked by rampant inequality. President Trump said, quote, President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent. He was a natural businessman. Trump, of course, is pushing for a return to meritocracy. He is pushing for less regulation. Here he was just yesterday talking about the rise of the meritocracy in the United States. We are now in a merit-based world. We're a merit-based country.

Did you ever think you were going to hear that again? It's based on merit. If you've got the talent, if you've got the work, the ethic, the whole thing, it's based now on... It's not based on any other thing. It's based on merit. It's based on your capability. The United States has now become, again, a meritocracy. Isn't that a beautiful word? A meritocracy? Based on merit. If you do your job well, you're going to go places.

Okay, that's great. Again, that's all great. Now, one of the things that he is also doing is he's taking executive action in order to radically reduce spending inside the federal government. So according to Politico, tens of billions of dollars in federal grants and loans to organizations across America will be halted today after yet another bombshell order from the White House.

A brief two-page memo, first published by Marisa Cabas, a New York-based journalist, and swiftly matched by Washington Post, revealed the next step in Trump's warp-speed overhaul of the U.S. state, an immediate freeze on all federal grants and loans to outside bodies, which may not align with the president's worldview. While Social Security, Medicare, and payment to individuals will not be affected...

This does include grants and loans issued to research bodies, charities, universities, and community projects. The scale of the order is so broad, it cites federal spending totaling $3 trillion that people are freaking out about all of this.

Of course, the memo issued by the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Matthew Vaith, said all federal spending must be aligned with presidential priorities. That includes immigration, foreign aid, DEI programs, and the environment. One of the things you're going to see here is something called malicious compliance, in which you see lower down deep staters attempt to apply these rules to clearly meritorious projects. So there's a grant for cancer research, for example, and you will see some low down deep stater basically say, well, we can't give the grant to the cancer project. What?

What's the point? The point is not to enact Trump's will. The point, of course, is to thwart his will by doing something that earns a bad headline. You saw the same sort of thing happen just the other day with Pete Hegseth. Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, put out a memo saying no DEI inside the DOD. And everybody freaked out because somebody low down in the DOD said we can't teach the Tuskegee Airmen anymore. And Hegseth's like, that's not what I meant at all. You're going to see much of the same thing applied to, for example, cancer research, but it will be quickly corrected. Now,

Trump does have the power to pause spending subject to review. And the president did have the power to withhold congressional spending prior to the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. So it'll be interesting to see what the Supreme Court has to say about all this. If we get a meaner, leaner government with lower taxes and lower regulations that gets paid for by tariffs, and he really does mean to sort of redo the McKinley policy, kind of interesting, certainly interesting.

Meanwhile, Democrats are insisting, of course, that President Trump fix all the problems within the first 24 hours. Chuck Schumer, who had not mentioned inflation for years, the Senate Minority Leader, now he's saying the president has to answer how he brings down egg prices. The president owes the American people some answers. What is he going to do about the price of eggs that's been exacerbated by bird flu? When hundreds of thousands and even millions of chickens die, they lay fewer eggs. And when there are fewer eggs, price goes up. The problem's reaching crisis levels.

In November, a dozen eggs cost approximately $4 at a grocery store in New York, already too high. It used to be $2 a year earlier. Now, that same dozen eggs cost $6. And experts believe that the price of eggs could increase as much as 20% more this year if outbreaks continue, meaning that the same dozen eggs would be $8.

Hilarious. So he wouldn't talk for years about the price of eggs, but now we are like a week into the Trump administration, part two, and he's talking about egg prices. Well, folks, when it comes to the world of politics, there are always battles over opinion, but then there are also battles over the facts. Well, how many times...

Have you heard someone spout off opinions as if they were cold, hard facts? The media spins, politicians distort, social media amplifies, and somehow the truth gets buried. It can be very frustrating. We live in a world where narratives often matter more than reality. But here's the thing, data does not lie. If you want the data, you need USAFacts.org. USAFacts isn't about narratives.

It's just the data, real nonpartisan verifiable data straight from government sources. Whether it's taxes, healthcare, or the economy, USA Facts gives you the numbers you need to cut through the nonsense and make informed decisions. And to make it really easy, go to usafacts.org, sign up for their weekly free email that you can rely on to get the data behind the news. It's like a personal briefing on the state of the nation delivered right to your inbox. No spin, no bias, just facts.

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Democrats are searching for a way forward on a wide variety of issues. Number one on the list, of course, is immigration. Democrats have not yet decided whether to go along with President Trump's tough on immigration proposals or whether to resist them. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, he said yesterday that the military will be activated to protect the sovereign territory of the United States. If you see what the president said last week in his executive orders, he's hitting the ground running. He's made it very clear there's an emergency at the southern border.

that the sovereign, the protection of the sovereign territory of the United States is the job of the Defense Department and the cartels are foreign terrorist organizations. As a result, this Pentagon snap too last week, we helped move forward troops, put in more barriers, and also to ensure mass deportation, support of mass deportations in support of the president's objective. Tom Holman, the border czar, is saying similar things. He says President Trump is going to be happy with the level of deportations that we are now pushing.

First up, is the president happy with this progress? I think the president's happy, but we're going to make him a lot happier. Yesterday was just day one. These raids are going to go out throughout the country. We're not going to let up. We're going to put our foot on the gas and we're going to go. And as I explained to several stations yesterday, the aperture is going to continue to grow.

Right now we're concentrating on public safety threats and national security threats, but as we open up the aperture looking for fugitives, those who had due process a great taxpayer expense, there's over a million of them, 1.4 million, they're on the table. Anybody in the country illegally, they're on the table, but we're going to go after them in a prioritization that makes sense. The worst first.

Okay, he is right about all of that. Democrats are freaking out, being led by Selena Gomez. So first of all, points to Selena Gomez for actually being able to emote on camera. I wasn't aware she could do this. I mean, I tried to watch Only Murders in the Building, and she's the worst thing on screen by far. And then, of course, she's in the worst movie I have ever seen, Emilia Perez, which is a horror show of a film. She can't act in that either. But she was crying openly on camera about the thought of deportations pursued by the Trump administration.

I just wanted to say that I'm so sorry. All my people are getting attacked. The children don't understand. I'm so sorry. I wish I could do something, but I can't. I don't know what to do. I'll try everything I've...

Shut down on actresses crying on camera until they can figure out what the hell is going on. Executive order from President Trump to do all of that. Again, that was about my emotional response after having seen Amelia Perez. Again, the worst film possibly ever made. Meanwhile, Claudia Scheinbaum, the socialist president of Mexico, took over for Emmanuel Lopez Obrador. So she was out there suggesting that the United States is super bad for deporting Mexican criminal illegal immigrants.

She says, quote, the Mexicans there sustain the economy of the United States in the countryside, in services everywhere. Well, I mean, if they're such...

Great citizens who add to the economy. Why don't you want them in your country? That seems kind of weird. I mean, the real reason why Mexico has always been a big backer of illegal immigration, twofold. One, the drug cartels make an awful lot of money and the drug cartels basically run the Mexican government. And two, a huge number of Mexicans who cross the border then send remittances back to Mexico and send money back home. That is the actual reason. Meanwhile, Honduras is trying to lead a revolt of left-wing states from Latin and South America,

against the U.S. move to deport illegal immigrants. According to Breitbart, far-left President of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, on Sunday, called for an emergency meeting of the community of Latin American and Caribbean states later this week to discuss President Trump's crackdown on illegal migrants in the United States. CELAC is a 33-country bloc founded in Caracas in 2011, largely promoted by Venezuela's late socialist dictator, Hugo Chavez, as a U.S.-free alternative regional structure to the Organization of American States, of which the United States is, in fact, a member.

So President Castro announced that Gustavo Petro, who is the idiot socialist unpopular president of Colombia, will travel to the Honduran capital city to participate in the meeting. The event will address migration, the environment, and Latin American and Caribbean unity as its three main subjects. Well, let's see what they have to say because the reality is that, again, the United States represents a huge portion of the export market for all of these particular countries. They're going to have to take back their illegal immigrants. It's just that simple. Brazil, by the way, is still trying its own routine.

Lula da Silva, who is a dictatorial authoritarian left winger, has told his foreign ministry to, quote, seek answers from Washington over what it called the degrading treatment of Brazilian migrants during a U.S. deportation flight on Friday. The official request for an explanation, according to The Washington Post, was issued after Brazilian officials interviewed many of the 88 migrants aboard the flight. Among the first deported by the Trump administration, many of the migrants described a harrowing experience during their transport to Brazil.

The passengers said the plane operated by ICE was in faulty condition. There was no air conditioning and a mechanical issue became apparent soon after takeoff, requiring multiple maintenance stops in Panama and then in Manoas, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas. So they didn't like the plane enough. For hours in Panama and Manoas, the passengers said they were left to languish in the heat in handcuffs. People, including six children, began to feel faint, according to the migrants. When they tried to resist, they were violently repelled and threatened. Well, I mean...

forcing your way off the plane that is deporting you will probably end with bad consequences for you, it seems. Meanwhile, again, left-wingers in the United States are still trying to figure out exactly how to deal with all of this. On the one hand, you have people who say that they will move along with the deportation of criminal illegal immigrants. On the other, you'll have people like Chicago alderman Byron Sigcho Lopez, who says that Trump's mass deportation is unconscionable.

The fear that we see by students, by children, by families, by our neighbors, it isn't called for. I'm conscious of our decision of targeting not only schools, churches. We saw they targeted one of our churches in our community by some MAGA fanatics.

coming harassing or pastor one of the local pastors we've seen also trying to target hospitals isn't conscious about the fear that is creating this is not making anyone safe is actually declined hurting our businesses hurting our city and it's unconscionable that we see this from the white house a president that should be called on actually addressing inflation addressing so many of the issues on the ground it is unconscionable that they are scapegoating and targeting immigrant communities and creating serious harm in our city

Okay, I mean, if this is the angle that Democrats take, good luck to them politically speaking. Meanwhile, in Florida, controversy has broken out because Governor Ron DeSantis wants to immediately apply new laws to help out ICE and the federal government. And Florida Republicans, some of them, are bucking him. According to the Washington Post, the GOP-led Florida House and Senate within 20 minutes ended a special session that DeSantis had called to review several immigration proposals. Instead, they called their own special session.

It was a remarkable turn of events in Tallahassee. The actions came as Republican lawmakers said they didn't want to do the special session. DeSantis had announced the special session before Trump took office, saying it was necessary to get the state in line with plans to address illegal immigration and carry out mass deportations.

What exactly was the purpose of the legislators' law? Well, they wanted to remove immigration enforcement from the governor's office and instead give it to the state's Agriculture Commission. There's only one problem. Wilton Simpson, who is the Florida State Commissioner of Agriculture, happens to be pretty soft on illegal immigration. So is this an attempt to sort of end around Trump enforcement powers? Theoretically, it absolutely could be.

So I hope that the Trump administration takes note of precisely who is opposing attempts by Governor DeSantis to actually implement what Trump would like with regard to compliance with federal immigration law. Again, there are many differences between DeSantis' session proposal and the Florida legislature and what they are actually pushing, including, for example, law enforcement compliance. The DeSantis proposal would have mandated maximum participation in the deportation with penalties for noncompliance,

The Florida legislature instead failed to put an enforceable duty on state and local law enforcement to fully cooperate, for example. So Florida localities would be left to their own devices. There's some significant differences right there. And meanwhile, in other modes of resistance, President Trump has now signed an executive order barring people with gender dysphoria from military service, which of course makes sense because if you are joining up so that the taxpayers can fund your hormone and genital mutilation,

then you really should not be in the U.S. military. Again, this is not a question about patriotism. There are lots of patriotic people who can't serve in the American military. If you suffer, for example, from clinical depression, you're not supposed to be taken into the U.S. military. There are plenty of mental conditions that prevent you from serving in the U.S. military. It seems that gender dysphoria should be one of those conditions.

President Trump signed executive orders on Monday barring trans people from enlisting and cracking down on D.I. initiatives in the military, according to NBC News. The order would update all D.O.D. medical standards to ensure they prioritize readiness and lethality. It would also end the use of invented and identification based pronouns in the military, prohibit people assigned male at birth from using women's sleeping, changing or bathing facilities and bar coverage of transition related medical care for currently enlisted service members and their family. Again,

All of this makes perfect sense. If the goal of the military is not to be a social engineering project, but to actually be the deadliest fighting force on planet Earth, there is no reason why you would, in fact, add to the mix of the U.S. military people who have significant DSM-diagnosable conditions.

This, of course, has led to the resistance. Again, one of the things that Trump is doing here is he's picking up 80-20 issues and he's clubbing Democrats with them and basically daring them to resist him. And Democrats are going for the dare. Here's State Representative Leigh Finke, who's transgender, meaning a man who believes he's a woman, suggesting that this makes us less ready, that barring men who say they are women from the military somehow makes us less ready militarily.

I would say that there is no evidence anywhere that has been presented that transgender service members are anything but qualified to be a part of our military service. The military is the largest

largest employer of transgender Americans. You heard up to 14,000, 15,000 members identify as trans, and 56 of our retired generals have said that our trans members are ready to serve. They are fit to serve. This will only make our military less ready to serve by taking 15,000 people who volunteered out of service.

Really? Really? I'm going to believe you. Uh-huh. Sure. What we need is more admirals like Rachel Levine. Probably. Speaking of which, the Biden administration policies with regard to spending on the military and on the State Department, totally insane. According to the Washington Free Beacon, the Biden administration quietly awarded $15 million in taxpayer funds to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to help distribute oral contraceptives and condoms, according to a non-public congressional funding notice reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

I can't imagine why Donald Trump is now reviewing all foreign aid, including to the U.S. Agency for International Development. We'll get to more on that in just one second. First, it's no secret legacy media is collapsing. Why? Because Americans are waking up. They're tired of being lied to, tired of the spin, tired of the narratives of the Daily Wire.

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to the insanity that was the Biden administration policy. Whether you're talking about Biden administration giving $15 million to the Taliban for contraceptives, or whether you're talking about the insane amount of foreign aid that is poured out to these dictatorships all over the world that they used to just line their own pocketbooks and coffers.

The Trump administration is now stopping all of this. According to Politico, the Trump administration's sudden halt on U.S. foreign aid is causing chaos inside groups ranging from health providers to landmine removers, interrupting life-saving programs as officials struggle to understand the scope of the directive. So there was an order on Friday from Secretary of State Marco Rubio to cut all of this. Leaders of aid organizations are looking at which programs to stop and whether to immediately cut staff or even shut down. As they seek waivers, aid groups are scrambling to adjust. Now, again,

An enormous amount of the coverage of this stuff is going to be that malicious compliance kind of stuff that I'm talking about. The United States is still going to give foreign aid to prevent, for example, HIV from spreading in high-risk areas. That's not going to go away in all likelihood. Anything that creates a bad headline is likely to remain on the books. But the goal for many people in the deep state is going to be to suggest that no cuts can ever be done because if you do any cuts, then bad things might happen. Well, yeah, anytime you cut, bad things could happen, and then you deal with it on a case-by-case basis.

And some people have likened what Trump is doing to the federal government's chemotherapy for cancer. That's probably right. It'll do some damage to things that you might like, but it'll also take out the cancer. And that, of course, is the goal. Among the aid groups that appear affected are ones that remove landmines from conflict zones by testing and treatment for people with HIV in African countries through the president's emergency plans for aid, relief, tackling food security worldwide. But again, how much of that aid is actually necessary?

How much of that aid is actually useful? That would be the big question. Because it turns out we got some problems here at home, as well as many people have noted in the past. If it's not a core American interest, then us spending billions of dollars handing it to dictators all over the world seems like a very, very bad plan. Meanwhile, the State Department,

has been urged to observe the spirit of President Trump's anti-DEI order during Black History Month, according to The Wall Street Journal. The State Department should observe the spirit of the Trump administration's elimination of DEI and its public messaging, according to a Monday directive viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Apparently, public diplomacy staff should highlight the valuable contribution of individual Americans throughout U.S. history while ensuring our public communications maintain the spirit of the directive eliminating DEI programs.

There'd be no restrictions on content or programming related to accessibility or people with disabilities. The goal, of course, was to stop, for example, the propagandizing of Black History Month in the State Department. Because again, the idea is that when you divide Americans by group and then you promote Americans by group, that is generally a bad thing. Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent cables last week to staff. There's great talent in the department, but quote, upholding strict meritocracy is essential to securing our nation's future. And he even opened an email account

D-E-I-A truth at opm.gov to monitor the possibility of people trying to shift DEI programs into sort of old wine into new bottles, so to speak. Meanwhile, President Trump is making strong moves inside the DOJ and with regard to inspectors in general.

Apparently, according to the Associated Press, the Justice Department said Monday it had fired more than a dozen employees who worked on criminal prosecutions of President Trump, moving rapidly to pursue retribution against lawyers involved in the investigations. Now, let's be clear about this. Firing lawyers when you come into the presidency is a pretty well-established precedent. You don't want lawyers in the DOJ who are going to target things that you don't find to be actual law enforcement priorities.

And when people say, how dare President Trump weaponize the DOJ? All I can say is the DOJ was weaponized under Joe Biden against Donald Trump directly. The abrupt termination targeted career prosecutors who worked on Jack Smith's team, which of course makes perfect sense because if you believe that Jack Smith was a political player, then you could have simply recused yourself from engaging in those particular investigations. Nonetheless, the sort of self-righteousness of so many of the people in the federal government

Their weird belief that the world rests on their shoulders and their shoulders alone is pretty amazing. Here, for example, is one inspector general fired by President Trump named Mark Greenblatt. He's talking about the email that he received from the Trump administration.

You were appointed by Donald Trump or named to this position by Donald Trump back in 2019. Do you have any sense of why he would put you on this list? No, I don't know. And all that was stated was the changing priorities in that email, which I understand the other IGs who were removed, the 17 or 18 of us, were still sifting through the rubble, frankly, to find out how many IGs were removed. But

But as far as I know, all of us got essentially the same email that said changing priorities. The real arrogance was shown by one inspector general named Mike Ware, who suggested, hey, we did wonders for the wonders inspector. Yes, you did wonders. We have done a stellar job. That is that is the case with almost all the ideas that have been removed.

These people have stood on business. They've done their job in a fair and balanced way that have done wonders for our country.

Really, Wonders? Name the Wonders, please. I'd love to hear the Wonders.

Meanwhile, President Trump has a bunch of nominees who are up for confirmation this week. One won on Tuesday. That'd be Scott Besson. He is now your new Treasury Secretary. He was ushered in 68 to 29 to confirm Besson to lead the Treasury Department. That is not a shock. His confirmation hearings were fairly uncontroversial. Meanwhile, there are two very, very controversial nominees who are up this week. Maybe three if you count Tulsi Gabbard. One, of course, is RFK Jr.,

RFK Jr., again, I like RFK Jr. a lot personally. I've had him on the show.

He has expressed support for policies that I think are really troubling, including apparently, according to Politico, openness to adopting a key progressive proposal for lowering drug prices in a closed-door meeting with Senate Finance Committee staffers. What exactly was that measure? He indicated that he would consider authorizing the government to seize the patents of high-priced medicines from manufacturers and sharing them with other drug makers as a way to force down costs. Okay, that is a great way to destroy research and investment in drugs.

the medical industry. If you just seize patents, which are actual private property, and then you just distribute them out there, who is going to put the money into research and development, into R&D, to develop a drug knowing it could be seized at any moment by the federal government and just redistributed to a bunch of people who never produced the drug in the first place? Again, that approach was long supported by progressive Democrats. It was supported a little bit by Joe Biden,

who'd use executive authority to take certain drug patents developed using taxpayer money and license them to other manufacturers that might make and sell them for less. You know, that is going to generate some pretty significant pushback from Republicans, you would imagine. Big backers of that policy include Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. And then, of course, RFK Jr. is going to have to face down questions about his formerly pro-choice positions. Now, Katie Miller, who's Kennedy's spokesperson, disputed the characterization. She said, quote, this is once again another example of Politico carrying Democrats' water.

After Politico is told this did not occur the way Democrats have described it, they're seeking to publish it in an attempt to denigrate Bobby Kennedy and create a story where there is not one. The fact remains this did not occur. This is a smear campaign against Donald J. Trump. So, you know, apparently, I hope that's right because I like RFK Jr. a lot on a personal level, and I hope that he did not back any policy like that. One truly egregious nominee, and this is a really bad nominee, is Lori Chavez de Remmer for Labor Secretary.

She is just a stand-in for union-based labor for these very, very corrupt private and public sector unions who should presumably use government power in order to cram down on private industry a wide variety of bad regulations. Senator Rand Paul, who's a libertarian,

said he's a no on Lori Chavez at Dremmer. It'd be kind of surprising if she got through. She could lose 15 more Republicans. At the same time, a bunch of Democrats could vote for her, so maybe they pick her up. Question is whether she makes it out of committee in the first place. All right, you guys, in one second, we're gonna get to the most insane media story of the day, courtesy of the New Yorker magazine. First, if you're not a member, become a member, use code Shapira, check out for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.