Ep. 2206 - Is There A Debt Bomb About To Drop?!
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All right, folks, tons to get to on today's show. We'll get into the big, beautiful bill passing the House, but what does it mean for our looming debt crisis? Plus, fallout from the terror attack against America.

a couple of Israelis in Washington, D.C., and Patricia Heaton stops by. But first, before you head into Memorial Day weekend, do not miss this. It's our DailyWire Plus Memorial Day sale. Get 40% off an annual membership with code DW40. Watch all your favorite daily shows ad-free from the most trusted voices in conservative media. People like me, Matt Walsh, Michael Moles, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and more. Plus, unlock our full entertainment library, including an all-new episode of Ben After Dark Tonight,

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Well, folks, President Trump has, in fact, moved the big, beautiful bill through the House of Representatives. President Trump took a victory lap yesterday over this particular move. He put out a statement on Truth Social, quote, The one big, beautiful bill has passed the House of Representatives. This is arguably the most significant piece of legislation that will ever be signed in the history of our country. The bill includes massive tax cuts, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime tax deductions,

When you purchase an American-made vehicle, along with strong border security measures, pay raises for our ICE and Border Patrol agents, funding for the Golden Dome, Trump savings account for newborn babies, and much more. Great job by Speaker Mike Johnson and the House leadership. And thank you to every Republican who voted yes on this historic bill. Now it's time for our friends in the U.S. Senate to get to work and send this bill to my desk as soon as possible, writes President Trump. There is no time to waste.

Thank you.

Again, so President Trump obviously and correctly happy about the passage of the big, beautiful bill in the House of Representatives. Now, as to the content of the big, beautiful bill, here is the reality. The American people are not in touch with reality when it comes to just fiscal reality.

So yes, it is good that taxes did not massively increase. And yes, we do need funding for border security. But if you are worried about the fiscal health of America, and if you're worried about the economic health of America, we need to explode many of the myths that currently surround the American economy. Myths like the idea that there's no American middle class. Not true. Myths like the idea that manufacturing productivity has gone down in the United States. It has not. Myths like the idea promoted by both parties that labor unions in the United States are

are the good guys as opposed to businesses that hire people who are sort of the bad guys. According to a brand new poll, Axios reporting, the Liberal Economic Policy Institute shows that the labor unions are now significantly more popular than so-called big business. Labor unions have a popularity rating of about 60% as opposed to big business, which is below 50% at this point.

The reason that's not good is because what that leads to is a populist economic policy. And now you get to argue between whether you want a government that spends a lot of money and has lower taxes or a government that spends even more money and has higher taxes. Those are the two options for the parties. And that's why you got a bill that looks like this. And let's be clear, this bill, it's a mess. There's some good stuff in it. The tax cuts, the border security stuff. And were I in Congress, I would have voted for it because the crap sandwich,

is still better than a massive tax increase in the middle of what is right now a pretty rocky economy. And there's still some economic problems out there. With that said, the reason we can't have nice things in this country is because the American people are fundamentally opposed to the things it would take for us to have actual nice things like good government policy.

So, for example, President Trump made sure that there were no significant restructurings of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. The Medicaid changes were on work requirements. Those will not cut in until December of 2026. No changes in Medicare, no changes in Social Security, the systemic drivers of America's debt. And the reason for that is because President Trump realizes a political reality. Again, President Trump is good at reality.

The political reality is that there is no desire from the American people to restructure entitlements. And so in order to avoid the sort of blowback from the Democrats, President Trump decided not to touch any of that stuff. This is why, for example, Claire McCaskill, when she says that millions of people are going to lose health care coverage, they actually will not. They're not going to lose health care coverage specifically because President Trump went out of his way to push what is by all measures a very high spending and lower tax bill.

A lot of folks don't know what the bond market means. The bond market is pretty simple. It means people don't want to buy our, don't want to loan us money anymore. When you buy a U.S. Treasury, you're loaning the United States government money. When we have to pay higher interest to get people to do that, that means they no longer see it as a safe bet.

And and that's the problem with this deficit inducing hurting poor people bill is that it doesn't help the deficit and causes a lot of pain to folks. There will be millions and millions of people that will lose their health care coverage in this bill. OK, the thing about this that she's saying that is hilarious is she's saying two mutually exclusive things. She's saying, I want to lower the deficit. And also, this bill is going to cut health care coverage.

Let's be clear. More and bigger social services mean a higher deficit. And the American people, Democrats and Republicans alike, do not want to come to grips with this. They simply do not. So when it comes to my sympathies, my political sympathies, there are a lot of reasons I'm not a huge Thomas Massey fan, the representative from Kentucky. But Thomas Massey is right that there are a gigantic amount

series of problems with the American debt. And this bill does not radically change the trajectory of that debt. It changes around the margins. It doesn't actually get to the core of the matter. That, by the way, is something that even proponents of the bill, including the OMB director, Russ Vogt, recognize that the best you can say about the bill is that it's better than it otherwise could have been. But nobody is making the case that this bill actually fundamentally restructures our debt in any serious way.

Well, I'd love to stand here and tell the American people, we can cut your taxes and we can increase spending and everything's going to be just fine. But I can't do that because I'm here to deliver a dose of reality. This bill dramatically increases deficits in the near term, but promises our government will be fiscally responsible five years from now. Where have we heard that before? How do you bind a future Congress to these promises? This bill is a debt bomb ticking.

Okay, this bill is not a debt bomb ticking.

Actually, just our government is a debt bomb ticking. Folks, when we talk about America's debt bomb, let's talk about the American debt to GDP ratio. Right now, we're already at around 100%. So I asked our friends and sponsors at Perplexity, what will our debt to GDP ratio be in 2035? And then compare that to some other countries. So according to Perplexity, U.S. debt to GDP ratio is projected to reach 118.5% by 2035 under current policies based on the CBO projections.

This would actually be higher than our post-World War II record of 106%, which, by the way, is psychotic. That's crazy, because World War II was really, really expensive. If the current legislation were to pass, then debt theoretically could climb even higher, maybe reaching almost 130% of GDP by 2034, according to Perplexity.

Well, how does that compare to other countries? Well, Japan is in serious trouble. Japan has a debt to GDP ratio of somewhere in the 250 to 270% range. And that is because of serious deflation and aging population. France will be about where we are, somewhere in the 120% range. Italy will be a little bit higher, Canada a little bit lower, Germany much lower because Germany is much more fiscally responsible than the United States.

China's debt to GDP ratio is projected to be 96% in 2025. That's lower than the United States. It is currently rising. It could theoretically rise to 105 to 110%. However, let's be real about this. The Chinese debt to GDP ratio is skewed by the fact that they don't actually take on government debt directly. Very often what they do is they sell their government debt

to private citizens or they have localities that are selling bonds or whatever. The good news about China is because it's a dictatorship. If they ever get in trouble, they just screw their citizens. That's the good news for China. That's not something democracies can afford to do, obviously. Social Security and Medicare, if there were no changes here, would still be bringing our debt to GDP ratio to about 120 percent over the course of the next 10 years or so.

So let's just be real about this. The bill makes sure that your taxes didn't radically increase, which again, I think it's a good thing. You want economic growth. You want to be able to grow your way out of some of this. You are going to need lower taxes and lower regulation. And those two things, lower taxes, lower regulation, that is stuff that the Senate is in fact doing. Yesterday,

The Senate voted to end California's electric vehicle mandate, according to the Wall Street Journal. The GOP-led Senate voted to take away California's ability to set its own tailpipe emission standards, effectively killing the country's biggest driver of EV investment. It was 51 to 44 vote. Again, that's a good thing because, again, the goal here is to actually unleash America's car industry, not to regulate it out of existence. So deregulation is actually a good thing.

And of course, keeping taxes lower is a good thing. However, to pretend that we do not have a debt bomb coming, that is silly. Obviously we do. And this bill doesn't solve that.

This is something that the Wall Street Journal editorial board makes clear, quote, what should have been a routine auction for 20-year debt with a face value of $16 billion turned into a mini fiasco amid soft demand. This is from a couple of days ago. The auction produced a yield of 5.014%, slightly higher than expected and well above the roughly 4.6% benchmark set in a string of recent auctions. The yield on the 30-year bond drifted about 5% for the second time this week. The 10-year note was near 4.6% and inching higher. As the Wall Street Journal points out,

It's trendy to blame Washington for this market fracas and with cause, but first recognize the biggest problem that appears to be bothering markets, economic growth. Where will growth come from to buoy consumer sentiment or to generate enough revenue to help Uncle Sam pay the bills? Keep that question in mind as commentators and some politicians try to lay the blame for a bond self entirely at the feet of the Republican Congress. The rap is the budget bill will blow out the deficit by another three point three trillion dollars over 10 years.

That profligacy, according to the story, leaves bond investors at the end of their tether. But that argument is a trap. It features more spending restraint than the Biden Democrats ever offered. And you do, in fact, need lower taxes. But again, the reality is the American people are not willing to face up to what it would actually take to fix the economy for the long term.

And so what that means is you are likely to get a bunch of bad bills from here to eternity, or at least until the point at which the debt burden becomes so strong that it basically sinks the ship that we are all riding on together. Meanwhile, there are some other headwinds the economy is facing. I mean, let's be real about this. If the tax bill went down to flaming defeat, the economy would crash almost immediately. That's just the reality because the vast tax increase would mean investors see economic slowing and pull their money out. But there are some bad signs anyway.

Home sales in April fell for the second straight month, according to the Wall Street Journal. U.S. existing home sales fell slightly by 0.5% in April from the prior month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4 million, the slowest sales pace for any April since 2009, which of course was right at the tail end of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the recession. The spring months have been lackluster this year.

Home prices and mortgage rates remain too high for many buyers and concerns about the economy are making buyers nervous about making a big purchase. Plus, by the way, sellers are not actually selling because they don't want to have to then buy. So that's not a great sign. Meanwhile, it should be noted here that we still have a bunch of tariffs on the products coming into the country. There's sort of a funny situation yesterday when Howard Lutnick was at a consortium and he was talking to a reporter and they were talking about the tariffs. This is the Axios Forum.

And he turned to the audience and asked them if they were feeling the pain of tariffs. And he said, there is no pain. So he turned to the audience to ask them, and he did not get the answer that he wanted. Everything in the world's got 10%. You go to the store now, are you feeling the pain? No. Why not? Because there is no pain. Because what happens is the sellers, the producers, the sellers, and the currencies change.

And the price effectively mostly goes away. I'm not, you know, what's the inflation rate in America? Two odd percent. Okay. Two odd percent. But seriously, for the month of May, every product in the world's got 10% on it right now. With no exceptions, no exclusions. This that we have 25% on cars and that are coming in from out. Do any of you feel anything different?

Because I want you to understand, in the month of May, the United States of America is going to take in $35 billion towards our deficit of tariff revenue in the month of May. I think consumers will feel that. I said, it's already on. This is on since April. So, Glenn, it's not that the tariff is coming. It's on. Have any of you felt any of it? Seriously.

And the audience actually said yes. Well, of course, because it turns out that policy has consequences.

So here's what the Trump administration actually needs to do. Yes, the bill needs to pass. And yes, you need to radically deregulate. And yes, you need to pass a crypto bill and you need to pass a bill that unleashes AI. You need to do all of those things, all of the above. And then at some point, somebody is going to have to make the case. Somebody, somebody responsible is going to have to make the case that actually we need to curb our government debt. And that can't be done just by raising taxes on the rich. That is a lie the Democrats like to tell and the numbers just don't add up.

There's a reason why if you're looking at European countries that have a lower debt to GDP ratio, that is because they cut in their top tax brackets at like $60,000 a year, $50,000 a year. The bottom line is there's no such thing as a free lunch. And eventually America is going to find that out. Meanwhile, more fallout from the awful terror attack a couple of days ago.

At this party that was being put up, an event that was being put up by the American Jewish Committee. And everybody and their mother is coming out condemning anti-Semitism. Now, as you may have noted on yesterday's show, I never actually used the term anti-Semitism in discussing these sort of lies that have created a permission structure for violence. And there's a reason for that.

I'll get to that in a moment. Why I didn't put it in those terms. Muriel Bowser in Washington, D.C. is an example of somebody who's using this sort of language. She, of course, the mayor says, don't worry, we're not going to tolerate anti-Semitism. What I do know is that the horrific incident is going to frighten a lot of people in our city and in our country. And I want to be clear that we will not tolerate this violence or hate in our city.

We will not tolerate any acts of terrorism. And we're going to stand together as a community in the coming days and weeks to send the clear message that we will not tolerate anti-Semitism. OK, so no toleration for anti-Semitism. And again, this is the kind of line that's being repeated left and right. No toleration for anti-Semitism. Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, who has been a massive backer

of the pro-Hamas movement in the United States, up to and including weeping on the floor of the house over the house funding Iron Dome, which shoots down terrorist rockets.

She tweeted out, absolutely nothing justifies the murder of innocents. I am devastated by the killing of two people outside an American Jewish committee global event here in Washington. Our prayers are with the victims, families, and loved ones of all impacted. As we await more details, we must be clear that hatred has no home here. Anti-Semitism is a threat to all we hold dear as a society. It must be confronted and rooted out everywhere. So she's going to root out anti-Semitism, says Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, she of the best friendship with Ilhan Omar. Mm-hmm.

Bernie Sanders put out his own statement. I'm appalled by the killing of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington last night and grateful for the quick response from law enforcement. We must all condemn this heinous act. Violence must have no place in politics. I mean, it turns out a lot of radical leftists who like Bernie Sanders don't feel the same way. There was a sort of fascinating tweet from the Bronx Anti-War Coalition, which called the terrorist attack on these two innocent people in D.C., at least one of whom was a Christian.

They tweeted what the shooter did, and again, I don't do shooter names on the show, is the highest expression of anti-Zionism. So why do I point that out? The reason that I'm not using the term anti-Semitism is because it seems to have lost any impact or definition. Truly, it has been deliberately obfuscated, obscured, turned into an empty vessel, and

And that's had a couple of pretty dire effects. One, actual Jew hatred goes by the wayside. And number two, a bunch of stuff that is cover for actual violence is then ignored. Permission structures are ignored. The problem here is the definition of anti-Semitism clearly. When you can have people who clearly, clearly have created permission structures for the free, free Palestine, globalize the Intifada crowd, claiming that they're fighting anti-Semitism,

definitions become a problem. We'll get to more on this in a moment. First, Pure Talk, my wireless company, a veteran-led company, believes every man and woman who have faithfully served this country deserves to proudly fly an American flag made in America. And that's why Pure Talk is on a mission to give an allegiance flag, the highest quality American flag, to 1,000 U.S. veterans in time for the patriotic holidays. Flag Day and the U.S. Army birthday are coming up June 14th

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So,

So what exactly is anti-Semitism? Well, as I've said before, anti-Semitism is essentially a conspiracy theory about the threat and power of Jews. That is why anti-Semitism, unlike most other isms that are targeted at a group, takes an enormous number of different forms. Usually, racism suggests the innate inferiority of a particular group. That's not anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory about a group.

And it takes a bunch of different forms, many of which oppose one another. So you will hear from a variety of people that Jews are cliquish and keep to themselves, and therefore they're a threat to the generalized body politic. And the same people will then claim the Jews are actually infiltrating interlopers and they are diluting the body politic. You'll hear from people that Jews are aggressively nationalistic and therefore separatists, and also the Jews are actually globalists and actually deracinating.

You hear the Jews are communists and therefore they are anti-capitalism and anti-Marcus. And also the Jews are capitalists and therefore they are selfish and anti-religious. You hear the Jews are weaklings and thereby weaken everybody or the Jews are too powerful and thereby exploit everybody, right? It takes all sorts of forms. It's a shapeshifter.

But when people hear the term anti-Semitism, they think that anti-Semitism is just another type of racism. It's just racism against Jews. So basically it's hatred against Jews specifically for being ethnically Jewish. But as we've seen, that's actually incomplete because you can claim all of the things anti-Semites actually claim. Jews are cliquish or globalist or at the same time both or whatever without technically hating Jews. And that's the game that is being played right now. This is why you see people who...

fall under an actual real definition of anti-Semitism, as I've laid it out, who get away with saying that they're fighting anti-Semitism. Ilhan Omar will say this sort of thing. So these overbroad terms used by politicians actually become counterproductive. So, for example, you can say that Israel is the fond head of all evil without technically hating Jews. You could say that, right? You can even say you have a Jewish friend.

That might not really be true, but you can say it or you can find some Jewish person who actually has no connection with Judaism and that person can be your standard. And this is the excuse that you'll hear from many of the people who say just this kind of stuff. And here's the problem with what Muriel Bowser and AOC and all these people are saying. It leaves open the possibility that so long as you talk about hatred of Israel and that results in people getting killed, it's totally fine.

And that's the cover that many people who actually do hate Jews use because it is, in fact, an easy cover. Say, oh, it's not about it's not about hatred of Jews. It's not about anti-Semitism. It's just about hatred of Israel. That's the game. So instead of focusing on whether people are doing and saying things because they hate Jews, what they feel inside, here's what we should do. We should instead have this conversation in the context of lies. We should be condemning lies.

Now, it is quite possible that many of the lies that you're hearing, Israel's committing a genocide, are rooted in actual hatred of Jews. Or maybe it's rooted in some other philosophy. In some cases, we can probably read what people feel on their insides. But sometimes that's not the case. And often it's not even useful because people who actually hate Jews often just aren't going to come out and say it. And there are some who will. I point to Nick Fuentes for honesty, but most people don't actually say it or Kanye West. At least they're honest.

Most people may tweet pretty obvious Jew-hating garbage and then delete it, but they can always claim their perspective isn't rooted in hatred of Jews, per se. And all of that offers an easy off-ramp for those who actually build a permission structure for actual evil and murder.

Instead of talking about anti-Semitism then, what we actually should do is we should talk about lies and the liars who tell those lies. Like, for example, it is a lie, as we discussed yesterday on the show, that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. It is just a lie. There's not only no data to back it, there's significant data to disprove it. Now, maybe some people are too ignorant to know that it's a lie and they're just repeating what they hear. Maybe they're just using the word genocide as a stand-in for a bad thing. Or maybe they're just dumb.

But for those who do know, it's a lie. It was a lie that the Palestinian cause is about a two-state solution. That's always been a lie. The Palestinians will tell you it's a lie. Now again, maybe some people who are pushing it are too ignorant or hopeful to know that it's a lie, but it is a lie and lies are bad. And the more they are told, the more dangerous they become. And that's why I think it's actually kind of useless at this point for politicians to talk about anti-Semitism and never the actual lies that matter.

Because if we actually had an honest conversation about what actually drove the feelings of shootings like this, lies and lies and more lies, then Muriel Bowser might have to call out the lies of her own side. And perhaps AOC wouldn't just be able to invoke anti-Semitism and get off scot-free while simultaneously making room for Ilhan Omar. She might actually have to call out the lies of her own side. And that's the thing they will never do. At a certain point, invocation of terms like anti-Semitism, it actually becomes counterproductive because AOC

Again, if that doesn't do the job of stopping people from lying about Jews, then what exactly is the point of the thing? Instead, if we are going to talk about the permission structure that led to the murder of these two young people in Washington, D.C., we have to talk about the actual lies and the people who tell those lies and what their worldview is. That's the thing that actually allows us clarity. That allows us to see who is pushing what and why.

And again, that's not me saying that none of the people who are pushing the lies hate Jews. Many of them, I'm sure, are not particularly fond of Jews or Judaism or anything like it. But it's a lot easier and more specific and more clarifying and more useful to talk about the lies themselves as opposed to a term like anti-Semitism, which again, at this point in time, has now become so semantically overloaded that people are able to escape the implications of their own lies. So for example, the New York Times will go out there

And they will say they don't know the motivation of the person who committed the shooting. That's a lie. It's a lie. He was literally shouting free, free Palestine right after murdering two people. He was also in January of 2024 tweeting out death to America, America, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK, KK,

It's not just about irrational Jew hatred in the same way that racism is about irrational hatred of blacks or Asians or whomever else. There is a broader worldview that is deeply damaging to Western society that lies at the root of all this. There's one on the right. There's one on the left. Listen to yesterday's show. I talk about it at length. This, by the way, is how the New York Times can make light of Mahmoud Khalil. Pretending that Mahmoud Khalil is totally fine. And this, of course, would be the student who was detained from Columbia University as a graduate student.

And he was detained for deportation. And he had an immigration court hearing to try and determine whether he would be deported or not. And the New York Times is a very sympathetic piece talking about what a wonderful person he is, the picture of his wife and his kid, completely ignoring the fact that Mahmoud Khalil was a chief member of a group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest. That group cheered the October 7th pogrom. They also lavished praise on Ismail Khania of Hamas, Hassan Asrala of Hezbollah,

The leadership of that group originally condemned a student who suggests Zionists don't deserve to live, but then thought better of it and issued an apology to the person they had condemned. So that's what Mahmoud Khalil believes. Is that a permission structure for the kind of thing we saw? Of course it is. Of course it is. When you are not specificity is the friend of truth. Specificity is the friend of truth and clarity. And vagary is the friend of lies.

If there is a rubric under which Ilhan Omar can somehow portray herself as an opponent of anti-Semitism, which is what she tried to do after suggesting the other, Ilhan Omar was literally asked, it's amazing. She was literally asked about the shooting on the street and she walked away. She said nothing to say about it.

Then she finally tweeted later in the day, I'm appalled by the deadly shooting at the Capitol Jewish Museum last night, holding the victims, their families and loved ones. And my thoughts and prayers, violence should have no place in our country. OK, if you let people off the hook just for saying violence is bad or anti-Semitism is bad, but you never ask specific questions about the belief systems that drive people to do evil things, then you're not doing your job. And that is why it is incumbent on, yes, Jewish organizations to actually get specific about the philosophies

that result in things like we saw in Washington, D.C. That's the thing I'm calling for. We'll get to more on this in a moment. First, when we started Daily Wire, it felt like we had to figure everything out with minimal help. Editorial guidelines, studio setup, production schedule, branding. It was overwhelming. New decisions were necessary literally daily. Finding the one tool that simplifies everything when starting a business becomes a game changer and a lifesaver for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify.

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Meanwhile, the Trump administration is taking yet another measure against Harvard University. On Thursday, they announced that they were halting Harvard's ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a critical funding source for Harvard. Now, Harvard doesn't just bring students in because they're, quote unquote, the best and the brightest from abroad. They also bring people in who are likely to pay full tuition, like 60 grand a year. There are about 6,800 international students attending Harvard this year. That's more than a quarter of the student body.

The Trump administration is using this as leverage to get Harvard to actually obey the Civil Rights Act. According to the letter sent by Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary to Harvard, quote, I'm writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University's student and exchange visitor program certification is revoked. A spokesperson for Harvard called the administration's action unlawful. In a news release,

The Department of Homeland Security said, quote, this means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status. And now as a method of getting Harvard to actually obey civil rights law, fine with me. However, this is actually not a Harvard specific problem. This is an immigration problem. This is something the Secretary of State Rubio has been very clear on.

The problem here is we should not be giving student visas to people who hate America, hate American values, sympathize with terror groups and all the like. You don't have free speech rights just because you want to come here. That is not the way that it works. Rights do not attach to you. You don't have a right to enter the United States believing any terrible thing that you want. That has never been the way any self-respecting country treats itself. And so what I would recommend is that it not just be targeted at students at Harvard, but

but that actually the immigration system that President Trump is taking control of take a much more solid and long-lasting look at how we give out student visas in the first place in general. It's not enough to shift some of these terrible people from Harvard University to Columbia or whatever. Many of them just shouldn't be in the country at all. And meanwhile, if you are worried about actual attacks on Jews, then probably you should worry internationally about making room for Iran.

So Iran continues to signal that it wants no deal with the Trump administration that would deny them the ability to enrich uranium. I don't know how many times the Iranians can say it. They've said it over and over and over and over. They are not going to give up their ability to enrich uranium, which is to say to build a nuclear weapon. Nonetheless, the negotiations continue apace. The Trump administration is apparently going to deploy Steve Whitcough once again, our special envoy, to negotiate with the Iranians, this time in Rome.

Now, again, the Iranians keep saying it over and over, like the quiet part out loud. They're basically just calling the Trump administration's bluff. They're saying, we're not going to give you anything you want. Are you still going to try and sign a deal? Awas Arachi, Iran's foreign minister, said, quote, we are witnessing completely unreasonable and illogical positions from the Americans. Ayatollah Khamenei said the United States should not try to talk nonsense and called it a big mistake for President Trump to demand an end to Iran's enrichment of uranium. Khamenei himself said, I don't think nuclear talks with the United States will bring results.

So again, totally unclear at this point whether the Trump administration stands tall. Obviously, they should, because the Iranians absolutely agree with the shooter of these two Israelis in Washington, D.C. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they're treated the same way the shooter treated his gun. And meanwhile, speaking of the Trump administration, Department of Justice, they're doing an amazing thing.

Our friend, Harmeet Dhillon, who actually served as a lawyer for The Daily Wire when we were suing the Biden administration. She's over at the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ now, and she is walking back a Biden-era DOJ policy targeting police departments. She joins us on the line yesterday. Harmeet, thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. Happy to be here, Ben. So let's talk about the DOJ and what you guys are now doing in the Civil Rights Division to actually allow the police to do their job. You're taking a very different position than the last administration, obviously.

Well, absolutely. And so for the last 30 years or so, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has been pursuing consent decrees on police departments throughout the United States. And what happens is

with any organization, there's one or two rogue officers or cops or people with just bad intention or malign motives who do something bad. And then the DOJ and a court imposes a consent decree on the entire city that typically keeps on average the city and the police department or the sheriff's department under a federal court's control for over a decade.

The city has to pay for the compliance costs of this, which often amount to over $10 million a year over a decade. And then on top of that, they have to pay a law firm or a police monitor who is a solo another million dollars a year on average. And crime goes up.

Public safety goes down, police satisfaction goes down, and overall, these consent decrees have been found to be relatively ineffective. And so what we're doing at the Civil Rights Division is we're withdrawing

we dismissed yesterday two consent decree filings that the Biden administration had done in the waning days of their administration in Louisville, Kentucky, where the Breonna Taylor situation happened in the prior Trump administration. She was shot and killed as a result of, according to the investigation, a no-knock warrant having been obtained by two detectives who lied to obtain that no-knock warrant. So we're prosecuting those detectives today

and the officers involved in these incidents that I'm mentioning, we're prosecuting them for their individual offenses. And I think that's important, individual accountability. In the other one that we dismissed in Minneapolis, this stems from the George Floyd incident, where, of course, both state and federal prosecutions occurred of the officers involved in those incidents. And

what we have found in these types of consent decree situations is that, you know, public safety goes down. And so we don't want that to happen in these cities. In each of these cities, Louisville has already agreed to hire its own police monitor to help improve its practices overall. And Minneapolis has negotiated a settlement with their state human rights commission, putting them under a consent decree already. And so

Louisville didn't oppose our attempts to kick this out while we looked at it, and Minneapolis did oppose our attempts and has publicly criticized our decision. But in addition to the ones that I mentioned, Ben, we also dismissed six factual findings in different cities. And what the Biden administration attempted to do, and as you probably are aware, my predecessor was an avid defund the police activist, and that is also the view of several of the

prior lawyers in our special litigation section who've now moved on to other pastures. But we had findings, some of which were unsigned by any attorney. So no attorney was willing to put their name behind this, but very detailed findings that basically accused the police in six different cities of

racism, and inappropriate practices, we don't have confidence that those findings are based in facts, appropriate, full consideration of all the facts and appropriate statistics. And so we're dismissing those factual findings in Memphis and Oklahoma City and Mississippi State Police and

and Trenton, New Jersey, and, sorry, Louisiana, and Trenton, New Jersey, and Mount Vernon, New York, and Phoenix, Arizona. So pretty broad range of different types of issues, but we did not have confidence in those outcomes. And so that's why we took those actions yesterday.

So, Harmeet, when people kind of colloquially hear about a consent decree, they tend to think, well, you know, that's a police department getting together with the federal government and figuring out a better way to do policing. What are the sorts of things that are in these consent decrees that really hamstring the police and prevent them from doing their jobs? And why do police departments accept that it's consent decrees in the first place if they're so bad for policing?

Well, great question. So the police departments themselves are usually not the decision makers. It's usually the city council or a mayor. And as we've seen a trend in the United States over the last two decades, those are often anti-police themselves and very progressive, if you will.

These consent decrees can run to hundreds of pages long, and they basically minutely control the extent to which hiring, training, reporting, practices like the types of holds that can be used on suspects, whether police will be punished effectively for misconduct.

We call them DEI statistics, the extent to which arrest or stop and question or stop and frisk encounters with the public are in any way different statistically from the population of that community without considering the extent to which crime may be higher in certain neighborhoods. I mean, one of the ones that really struck me was the Memphis factual findings report.

So first of all, as we know, Memphis is a fairly crime-ridden city. It's also majority African-American. The police force is majority African-American. The homeless population is 75% African-American. And yet the African-American police in Memphis, Tennessee were being faulted for their encounters with homeless people who are largely of the same background as themselves. And that was somehow racist. I mean, this is ludicrous on its face and only

privileged lawyers sitting in D.C. or sitting on their sofas throughout the United States working from home would come up with this. It defies common sense, and it's unfair. And so, you know, I had the privilege of calling some governors and attorneys general and United States attorneys yesterday and informing them that...

On these eight cases, the Department of Justice would not be micromanaging them. Policing and these types of policy decisions are always best made at the local level, Ben. And that's where the local accountability is and where the local demand and resources are for spending appropriately and training.

That said, United States Department of Justice does have training resources for police departments. And one thing we offer is if a police department or sheriff's department is concerned that its practices may be out of whack or not modern, we offer an audit process for them and we'll go through and provide some consultation. And there's even funds available for police departments that have a need. And so overall, I think, um,

We've made a step today to make Americans safer in those cities. And I want to assure other cities that are under consent decrees currently, either monitored by a judge or by a voluntary agreement with the Department of Justice that we're reviewing all of them. Because consent decrees that go on for 12, 14, 15, even over 20 years, something is broken in that system. The taxpayers are paying a tax effectively for a broken system, and that is wrong, and we're going to fix that.

You know, Harmeet, I think one of the things that is so astonishing to members of the left about what the Trump administration is doing is that they look at at things like the civil rights division of the U.S. DOJ, which for as long as I've been alive, has been used as a tool to foster anti-police sentiment, to to go after institutions that are actually charged with keeping the peace. I mean, that's that was true in the Obama administration. It was certainly true in the Biden administration.

as well. And the Trump administration, very differently than other Republican administrations of the past, is not pandering to that sort of history. Instead, you're using the tools at your disposal to actually protect the actual civil rights of citizens, namely the civil right to be free of crime. Well, that's the job. And it was my vision. And I discussed this with the attorney general and the president before I was nominated. And my vision was that

I believe in civil rights. I think you believe in civil rights too, but these civil rights are much more broadly defined than the progressive version of civil rights. We all have rights as parents and families to determine how children are educated and their exposure to sexualized content in the schools. That's a civil right. Civil right to pray and be free of violence on the basis of your religious identification and beliefs.

The right of a citizen to be free from crime, I think, is a promise that every basic society dating back to ancient times, even before we had the Internet and the Civil Rights Division promises people. And so these are all civil rights that we're standing up for at the Department of Justice. And I do believe they're consistent with our statutory framework and certainly the vision of our founders. But.

I think it's our job to affirmably use these tools for the benefit of the American people. That's what President Trump promised, and that's what we're delivering. Well, that is Harmeet Dhillon. She, of course, is the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. DOJ. Harmeet, thanks so much for your hard work, and thanks so much for taking the time. Thank you, Ben. I'm going to get to more on this in a moment. First, we've got to change gears for a minute and talk about Israel. Obviously, the attack in Washington, D.C., a couple of days ago, killing a couple of Israelis,

The fight continues against people who hate the state of Israel, who hate Jews. It is May now, exactly 80 years ago this month. The horrors of the Holocaust, the final solution, finally came to an end. But did you know that half of all Holocaust survivors actually live in Israel? Think about that for a moment. These elderly survivors, who already endured unimaginable trauma decades ago, are now facing renewed pain from the October 7th attacks and the troubling rise of anti-Semitism we've been seeing worldwide. What makes this even more heartbreaking is that thousands of elderly Jewish survivors in Israel are living below the poverty line.

Thank you.

Just head on over to Ben for the fellowship.org. That's all one word. Your contribution will directly impact the lives of these survivors who've already been through so much again. That's Ben for the fellowship.org to make a donation today. This is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Watch parenting available exclusively on daily wire. Plus we're dealing with misbehaviors with our son, our 13 year old throws tantrums. Her son turned to some substance abuse. Go to daily wire plus.com today.

Meanwhile, members of the media are very perturbed with President Trump for calling out the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, a couple of days ago in the Oval Office. There's a piece in the New York Times by a journalist and filmmaker named Richard Poplak complaining about President Trump's treatment of Ramaphosa.

Why? Well, because according to this journalist, it is totally fine to racially discriminate with regard to land ownership in response to the apartheid past of the country of South Africa. Quote, to this day, the bulk of South Africa's private wealth remains in white hands. And while life is demonstrably better for the black majority, South Africa is by many measures the most unequal society on earth. The white minority is the major beneficiary of this arrangement, but there is a caveat. Even within this cohort, wealth distribution is lumpy.

The decline of the middle class is a global phenomenon, but in South Africa, it takes on unambiguously racial characteristics. There is no question that many rural South Africans, like many urban South Africans, have experienced almost wartime levels of violence. South Africa's gruesome rates of inequality almost ensure this. The police are often useless or worse. Organized gangsterism and industrial-scale stock theft reduce rural areas to occasional battlefields. But to allege government complicity in the murder of white farmers, let alone genocide, is a falsehood that verges on full-scale rewrite of South Africa's history.

So what is the point of this column? The point is that you should ignore all the problems in South Africa because after all, the whites kind of deserve whatever they get. Quote, South Africa helped define and perfect white supremacy. So take it from an expert. This is an effort to flip the narrative of apartheid and cast former oppressors as victims. You see the idea here? The idea here is that if white farmers are about to have their land expropriated, that's okay because they're actually former oppressors.

It's an attempt to invalidate the end of legislated white minority rule in South Africa and render white Afrikaners as victims of reverse racism to say nothing of targeted mass murder. It's about spreading the global white replacement conspiracy theory. Okay, well, hold up a second. If there are 141 laws in South Africa that target white people, apparently, and if the Land Appropriation Act in South Africa is designed to actually expropriate land from white people, which it appears to be, then I'm confused as to how the people victimized by that law are not in fact victims.

This columnist says, make no mistake, democratic South Africa is in many respects a failed, violent and corrupt state. But the forgiveness extended to the white minority at the end of apartheid is one of the most exceptionally human and humane moments of our species' bloody history. By turning their backs on this, by accepting refugee status and claiming the mantle of exceptional victimhood, right-wing Afrikaners have become bit players in MAGA's noisy but empty scam. They leave nothing behind them except their home. Well, so you admit that the state is a complete fail.

But as long as apartheid was bad, that means that everything that's happening now is justified. Seems to be the logic here, which is absurd on its face and the essence of a sort of DEI-driven immorality. A turnabout is somehow fair play. Meanwhile, in other news, the Supreme Court yesterday deadlocked on the question of whether public religious charter schools violate the separation of church and state. So in the state of Oklahoma,

There was a Catholic virtual school that filed for charter status, public charter status, and the Supreme Court was supposed to decide on this. A ruling in favor of St. Isidore would have allowed for the first time, according to the Washington Post, direct and complete taxpayer funding to establish a faith-based charter school, legalizing government sponsorship of a curriculum that calls for students to adhere to Catholic beliefs and the church's religious mission.

Instead, the current landscape of government funding for religious schools remains intact. Now, a lot of people are all over Amy Coney Barrett because she recused herself in this case. That's not her fault. Okay, Amy Coney Barrett recused herself in this particular case because of her ties to Notre Dame Law School and its Religious Liberties Legal Clinic, which represented the school in this particular case. So she recused herself. She, again, did not vote against the religious charter school. Obviously, the religious charter school should be funded.

The idea of separation of church and state was never meant to say that no dollar can flow to a religious institution from the state, especially if the state is basically taking the view that it can flow to both secular and religious institutions and religious institutions of every form and fashion. It says that the state cannot prefer one religion above all the other religions. That is what the separation of church and state suggests.

But if you are making the funding available to all of these various public charter schools, what exactly is the problem? Now, it's unclear exactly how people voted. The court split four to four. And because Coney Barrett recused herself, there's no actual outcome in the case. However, I think it is probably fair to say that you would imagine that it was Chief Justice Roberts who voted the wrong way on this. Hard to imagine that it was Kavanaugh or even Gorsuch who voted this way on this particular decision. It's not the end of the story.

There will be another case, I'm sure, that's brought by an institution unaffiliated with Amy Coney Barrett, at which point she will indeed rule. And meanwhile, President Trump had a dinner at his golf club in Virginia for investors in his meme coin. And again, this sort of stuff is not going to redound to his benefit. It's just not. It isn't. It's hard to see the political upside to this. According to the New York Times, a group of 220 cryptocurrency enthusiasts who won a dinner with President Trump gathered at his golf course in Virginia.

Mr. Trump and his business partners in the venture announced the event last month, calling it the most exclusive invitation in the world. They framed it as a contest in which the top 220 buyers of the coin would dine with the president at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, while the top 25 would join him at a more intimate cocktail reception and go on a tour of the White House the very next day. There was a leaderboard that was put up on the website. This, of course, would be the dollar sign Trump crypto. It allowed investors to see how much they needed to purchase to move up the rankings and win a spot.

And again, the claim has been made that this is effectively an emolument. They can have foreign powers that invest in the crypto coin in order to curry favor with the Trump administration, with President Trump. Apparently, the final list includes investors from Singapore, Australia, and the United States. Some of those investors have even said they hope to use the dinner as an opportunity to press Mr. Trump on crypto policy. So again, not a good look. Not a good look. Forget about the morality or even allegations of corruption, whatever there is there.

It is not a smart look for the president of the United States to appear to be involved in influence brokering like this. And all of this stuff is fun and games so long as the economy continues to function, so long as things are sailing along. The minute that they are not or the minute the Democrats take the Congress in 2026, all this stuff comes to a crashing halt and it is used as a club to wield against the Republican Party writ large.

Meanwhile, the questions continue to mount over Joe Biden and the insane conspiracy to try to ensure that he remained president despite the fact that he did not have a functional brain. Interview between Sally Quinn, the Washington Post columnist and longtime Washington, D.C. insider and Tara Palmieri, in which Sally Quinn accuses Joe Biden of elder abuse. Well, I felt I felt sorry for Joe Biden because I didn't think she was protecting him.

She wasn't protecting him from himself. And after that hideous debate, right after the debate, they're in the spin room and she's got his hand up and they're victory, victory. We won. We won. It was great. Right. And the next day he's off in North Carolina and making a victory speech. I thought, what were they watching? It was I thought it was just elder abuse, really, what they were. Wow.

Sally Quinn is sort of an ultimate D.C. insider. She spent years kind of hanging out with the hoi polloi inside the Washington, D.C. Beltway. She said everybody thought he shouldn't run. People were just distraught that he was running and thought it was terrible for the party. I think everybody was horrified. He was put in a position where he was allowed to run by both his staff and his wife. People felt sorry for him. Quinn said, listen, look like dementia to everybody.

Well, it looks like the beginning of dementia to me. My husband had dementia. He was diagnosed eight years before he died. And it didn't really get severe until the last two years of his life. But it was clear that, you know, he would... I would see him. He'd be making a speech and he'd forget where he was. And he would stumble. And I finally just said...

No, no more speeches. I told everybody in his office, no more speeches, no more public appearances. Now, again, she ain't wrong. Meanwhile, the GOP is starting to look into the possibility of investigating how the White House actually handled Joe Biden's health. Senator Ron Johnson is now launching an investigation, according to Axios, into former President Biden's health.

Apparently, he's going to try to find out who knew what when, which, of course, is fully warranted given the national security implications of having a dementia patient as president of the United States. That's also a point made by Senator John Cornyn of Texas. Here he was.

We're talking about the leader of the free world, the commander in chief. This is a national security issue. And to have a completely dysfunctional president as apparently President Biden appeared to be. And now with those latest revelations of his other health issues kept from the American people, this is something that needs to be investigated. That's the reason for the letter. And I look forward to getting the results from the Attorney General and the FBI.

Well, he ain't wrong. He ain't wrong. Joining us on the line to discuss this and more is the executive editor of The Daily Wire and host of The Morning Wire, my friend John Bickley.

So, John, a lot going on in the news, obviously. A continued cover-up of the Biden medical decline. It's a pretty amazing thing. Obviously, this week we saw new details emerge, not just from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's book regarding President Biden's senility, but also the Biden family announcing that the president has probably fatal cancer. What did you guys make of it?

Yeah, you know, I step back every now and then this week. I've stopped and just said, look, we're witnessing the biggest presidential scandal in American history. This is this is massive. And the breadth of it.

The depth of it, the significance of it, it can't be overstated. And yet the media is trying to cover this up. They want us to move on from it. They obviously were part of the cover-up from the beginning, now have downplayed it significantly, and want us to move on now to the rest of the news cycle. And on our show, we've been trying to really emphasize this and not let this go. I know part of your vision for your show is to bring some balance here to the national conversation. We're trying to do that on Morning Wire.

And so we're hammering this pretty hard. But the Media Research Center just released a study that is really stunning. So we have, again, the biggest scandal we've ever seen. And yet the major, the big three spent a total of, from May 13th through the 19th, a total of seven minutes covering the absolutely jaw-dropping discoveries of

about what actually took place behind the scenes where we had a fake president. We had a politburo running the country. The media is not interested in this. Six minutes of that seven total minutes, seven total minutes was from NBC. ABC, 37 seconds, 37 seconds from May 13th through the 19th on this story. CBS, 22 seconds on it. PBS NewsHour, MRC found.

No, no seconds on this story. And again, what we've seen here is the media's complicity, complicity in this this cover up. It's more a media scandal than anything else, I would argue. And they want us now to move on. We're not going to do that. So one of the things that's come out in the last couple of days, that's just stunning. The Biden campaign put on a fake town hall.

It was a 90-minute town hall. They spent millions on this. And the point of this was to astroturf it.

put, you know, chosen people in the audience, paying a lot of folks here, and it was going to make Biden look good. He was so inept. He was so incoherent that they didn't release a single second of this million, multimillion dollar project, 90 minutes, not a single second of it came out. This is how incapacitated he was in his final year. And

And we know that this now the revelations from the book, again, that the media is not covering. This goes back from day one of his presidency. Laura Trump called this out in 2022 and 2020 was shamed by Jake Tapper for doing so. We all saw it. The American people witnessed this. It was very obvious way back in 2020 by 2021. Who was running the country?

We don't know. We've learned a little bit. It's a it's a Politburo, again, of, you know, close advisors to the president, a group of four men. And then Jill Biden's enforcer increasingly took over. Hunter Biden increasingly took over. Extremely alarming. Even Jake Tapper, you know, to his credit, you know, he's releasing this stuff and doing some apologizing there.

But he understated, I think, the fact that we learned that Hunter Biden played such a role. He said, you know, this is problematic, you know, because he's not the best guy. This is shocking stuff. Everyone should be outraged.

I mean, one of the things that I think is fascinating about the way that this story is now being covered is there really a few different strains. There are people who continue to maintain that everything was fine above board and hunky dory. That includes people like Joe Scarborough, who's maintained that over at MSNBC. Whoopi Goldberg, of course, is doing that over at The View. Then you have members of the media like Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, who actually are doing some very good reporting now. And so the big question for the right is why were they not doing this sort of reporting when it was happening since we did have

a president whose brain was not functional for the last year and a half of his presidency at minimum, maybe more than that. And so that sort of question, I think, is going to hang over the media for a very, very long time to come. And then you have, again, the members of the media who sort of claim that they didn't have anything to do with this, that they were completely bamboozled. And it's that last group that I have some trouble believing. The sort of group where it's like, well, I wasn't suspicious at all. I was just completely taken in. I mean, all of us could see in real time that the president was degrading.

And it's absolutely unbelievable to be told by, again, a lot of those same folks that there was no way for them to see it other than for us to just recognize that they were viewing all of this through a political lens. And the political lens was stop Donald Trump at any cost. And if that means covering up the infirmity of the president of the United States that his drug addled son can run the country, then sure, I guess that's what it means. Yeah.

You know, we did an interview with Batia Ungar Sargon. She's a real force on this. And she has the sort of class perspective that I think is fascinating. And we asked her that, you know, why why is the media so willfully ignorant and then actively covering up this situation? And she said, you know, in the end, it is it is the the class of elites. They come from a similar background. They're they're.

Their goals are the same as the Democratic Party's goals. And that's really what's what's operating here. And, you know, it's funny. And it's like you're saying the the the group in the media that say, oh, man, we had no idea that every American watching their television at any point when Biden was on it for a second saw this. So you're you're asking us what we're really saying here. This is damning is that you're either an idiot.

You have no common sense or you're lying to us. Either one of those prospects is really damning for legacy media outlets. How can we trust you? Your credibility, either you're deceptive and manipulative or you're really that dumb. Either way, I should turn you off and turn on shows like The Ben Shapiro Show.

And like The Morning Wire, which is now available on video wherever your video podcasts are available. It is a beautiful looking show, by the way, and really some fantastic information every single morning. John Bickley, executive editor of The Daily Wire and host of The Morning Wire. Really appreciate it, John. Thanks a lot, Ben. Well, meanwhile, this week's episode of Ben After Dark has a very special guest and a wonderful person. My friend, Patricia Heaton, she joined us online a few days ago to talk about everything going on in the world. Patricia Heaton, thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.

Thanks. Thanks for having me, Ben. So obviously you've done enormous amounts of amazing work in Hollywood and you have this long and storied career, but you've also been doing tremendous work in the charitable world. One of the things you've been working on is something called O7C. Yeah, that's correct. It's called October 7th Coalition, or as we call it, O7C. And it was born out of my dismay at seeing a lack of response on the part of Christians who

to what happened on October 7th. We saw a huge response from all the pro-Humas people in major cities and on campuses across the country, which were incredibly well-financed, well-organized,

It's interesting that on October 8th, suddenly everyone had printed signs. Everyone had a keffiyeh. I mean, it clearly was planned prior to October 7th. So that's something interesting to look into. But at any rate, I was outraged and I just thought I would see our whole country up in arms as to what had happened. And it was crickets.

I live in Nashville and I know many, many people here have been to Israel a number of times. I know they support Israel. So I was confused as to why there wasn't any more of an outpouring. I think as far as churches go, I think pastors are afraid it's too political. They don't want to be seen as anti-Muslim.

But I don't think that's a strong enough excuse. There's something going on here that's not about Muslims, it's about radical Islam. And I think you should be able to speak up against it, just like a few pastors did during World War II, who spoke up against the Nazis. And again, there were only a few that also did that.

So I guess it's not a surprise. But we put the October 7th coalition together to try to activate Christians to be visibly and vocally supportive of the Jewish people, of Israel's right to exist, and to fight anti-Semitism. And we started right here in Nashville, reaching out to the Jewish Federation and to all the rabbis and Jewish leaders, sent a letter of support,

We did a unity dinner with 250 Christian pastors and leaders to just say we're here and to just get to know each other. That's part of the thing. A lot of people will go to Israel, say, I love Israel. They'll come back. They don't know any Jewish people in their hometown. So I think it's really important now that we see that this radical Islamist plan for the world is unfolding, that we all need to be vigilant and get to know each other better.

with each other. And we also have to really get on social media. I know you don't go on TikTok, but that's where a lot of this war is being waged for the minds of people. So that's a big part of it. Well,

Well, I mean, you've been doing amazing work on this. And I do appreciate the fact that you're reaching out to Christians on this because it is kind of astonishing that the feelings have changed with regard to Israel in some parts of the Christian community. When I was growing up, obviously, evangelical Christianity was wildly pro-Israel. Obviously, a lot of Catholics are extremely pro-Israel also. But there has been a larger split

in the last couple of years among the Christians that I know on overt support for Israel in its war against Hamas, for example? - Yes, it's interesting.

and I think, and we're seeing that on the right now more in people that you and I know who are asking questions, as they like to put it, about Jewish people. They've suddenly discovered the word Ashkenazi and suddenly Ashkenazi means that you're not really Jewish or that you're actually in charge of everything or that you're like, it's, it's this new found way of being able to be anti-Semitic you know,

you know, without saying you don't like Jewish people or you hate Jews. So it's this, it's this really nefarious kind of thing that's creeping in, you know, Ben, when you look at the history of the church, there, there are some early church fathers that are revered for their theology, St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, all these people, there was elements of nefariousness,

mild and then really extreme anti-Semitism in those early church fathers, but it was really theological. It was all about the theology. What we're seeing today is a whole different thing about race and

And it's such bigotry. It's such uninformed bigotry. It's such uneducated, ignorant bigotry. And it's very, very frustrating when you see people that you thought were smart and you thought were intelligent and thought were educated spewing this just ignorant garbage. Well, thanks for what you're doing with the O7C group that you've put together. And then to shift topics to something wildly more

entertaining. And obviously you're extremely successful in Hollywood. You have been for decades at this point. One of the things that's been fascinating to watch in Hollywood is sort of a newfound capacity for people to mention that they have heterodox politics.

And when you and I first met, that was certainly not the case. I mean, both you and I were members of a group in Hollywood that was called Friends of Abe. That was basically the underground Hollywood conservative organization where everybody sort of kept it secret in their place of work about what their politics were. How much has President Trump, do you think, shifted the conversation in Hollywood and made it broader and easier to talk about this sort of stuff? I don't know it was Trump as much as the...

the instigator of this move was really about the extremism of the left. The Democrats allowed very extremist people with, um, to take over the party. And when you're forced to say things, you don't believe when you're forced to say things that are not true, or you'll lose your job. Like men can get pregnant. Um, that's crazy. And people started recognizing the crazy. I

I think, and then you have, you know, Trump comes back in as the candidate, which I was so shocked by. I never thought that would happen. And, and,

seems to be just talking common sense. And it's like the scales are falling from people's eyes. And when I see what's going on now, I know none of this is being done in an elegant way, but I think you had to bulldoze a lot of what was going on in our federal government because it was just sclerotic. It was just frozen, calcified. Nobody could make a dent in anything. And as RFK Jr., who like, I don't know

about that. I'm still not sure, but I think what he's doing right now, he said, I got rid of those dyes in 100 days. You had this department for 40 years. You never got rid of those dyes. Give me some credit. I think that's what is, even if the tariffs make

prices go up, I don't think people are going to care because stuff is being taken care of that should have been done 40, 50 years ago. Well, that's Patricia Heaton. Patricia, really, thank you so much for what you're doing. Thanks so much for your time. And of course, you are the unfortunate victim of having to be a guest on Ben After Dark. Thanks so much. Great to see you. Thanks for having me, Ben.

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