Some on the left, like Taylor Lorenz, are cheering Thompson's murder because they view him as a symbol of an unjust healthcare system that denies coverage and causes suffering. They see his death as a form of resistance against perceived corporate malfeasance.
These words are commonly associated with tactics insurers use to avoid paying claims, suggesting the suspect's motive may be linked to grievances against the insurance industry's practices.
The left's response reflects a growing acceptance of revolutionary violence as a means to dismantle systems they perceive as oppressive. This mirrors historical Marxist-Leninist violence and the philosophy of groups like the Red Army Faction.
In a democracy, violence is not justified because it undermines the democratic process where citizens' say is part of the policy-making process. Revolution against tyranny is only justified if tyranny is real and violence is the last resort.
Trump 2.0 is more efficient and directed, with a focus on achieving a specific agenda rather than being distracted by rhetorical fights. This is partly due to Trump's experience and knowledge of the political landscape from his first term.
The Trump administration is pushing for federal employees to return to the office, emphasizing the need for accountability and efficiency in government operations.
Hegseth's nomination is controversial due to anonymous allegations about his personal life and supposed drinking habits, though these allegations are unsubstantiated and being litigated in the media.
The main argument is that minors lack the cognitive maturity to make life-altering decisions about their gender and that such treatments can lead to irreversible physical and psychological consequences.
The left's insistence on pushing transgender ideology, including the belief that young children can decide their gender, is increasingly alienating mainstream voters, potentially harming their electoral prospects.
Well, folks, we have updates in the search for the murderer of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson. He was assassinated, of course, on Wednesday. And there are some pretty deep ramifications for American society in all this. We'll get to that in a moment. First Time is running out. DailyWire Plus is 50% off, but not for much longer. Get a full year of uncensored shows, exclusive series, documentaries, and more, all at half the price. Head on over to dailywire.com slash cyberweek.
before it is too late. Alrighty, so on Wednesday, as we know, the UnitedHealth executive, Brian Thompson, was shot to death on the streets of New York
Authorities are still searching for the suspect at this point, according to the Wall Street Journal. Police are combing New York City for the suspect who used a Sharpie to write, deny, defend, and depose on cartridges that are believed to have come out of his gun when it jammed, according to law enforcement officials. Some of those words are commonly associated with tactics insurers use to avoid paying claims. Investigators believe that the suspect may be staying or may have stayed at a hostel on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The NYPD hasn't publicly identified the person who ambushed Brian Thompson.
However, they have released an image of the person quote-unquote wanted for questioning. They released his face. He's smiling and wearing a hood in one of the photos as he appears to lean on a counter. Authorities are offering a reward of up to 10 grand for information leading to an arrest in the case.
The real question in all of this is how Americans respond. So Taylor Lorenz, we talked about her yesterday. She is a psychotic former reporter for The Washington Post and The New York Times. She's totally insane. She was insane on COVID. She was insane when it came to the supposed predations of people on the right who ought to, she said, be shut out of media and particularly social media. Well, now she is full scale rallying in favor of the murderer.
So she tweeted yesterday on Blue Sky, which is a weird left-wing echo chamber form of Twitter. There was a post put out by Blue Cross Blue Shield all about whether it was going to pay for anesthesia under its healthcare coverage. And she then tweeted out, quote, and people wonder why we want these executives dead. So openly cheering the death of Brian Thompson. That wasn't her only post.
Somebody put out a statement saying, quote, legislation idea, healthcare executives and their families must be on the cheapest plan their company offers and they aren't allowed to seek other care. And she wrote in all capital letters, endorse. Then she put out a post that showed a graphic of a happy star, like a star with a happy face and balloons and the caption CEO down. And she wrote, woke up to see this spammed in my group chats.
And she said, I am not alone, that other people were doing the same thing. Then she reposted a post from left-wing agitator Ken Klippenstein saying, today we remember the legacy of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. And what exactly was that legacy? The claims and aisle rates by insurance companies. And of course, it's not just Taylor Lorenz. Socialist Nathan Robinson, a complete useless leech on the ass of society, said,
posted himself, quote, live your life in such a way that people will be sad when you die. That was above a screen cap of a New York Times headline that said torrent of hate for health insurance industry follows CEOs killing. That piece from the New York Times is all about people who apparently were perfectly fine with the murder of Brian Thompson on the streets of New York City.
According to the New York Times, none of this stopped social media commentators from leaping to conclusions and showing a blatant lack of sympathy over the death of a man who was a husband and father of two children. Thoughts and deductibles to the family read one comment underneath the video of the shooting posted online by CNN. Unfortunately, my condolences are out of network. A TikTok user wrote, quote, I'm an ER nurse and the things I've seen dying patients get denied for by insurance. It makes me physically sick. I just can't feel sympathy for him because of all those patients and their families.
And these sorts of messages were incredibly common across the Internet. We discussed yesterday a Columbia professor who wrote something very similar. Unfortunately, bubbling under the surface of all this is something very serious, really serious. What is that serious thing? The revolutionary left is creeping into the mainstream. Yesterday we talked about liberals versus the left. Liberals are people who disagree with me on public policy, but aren't in favor of, you know, the murder of their opponents. The left is a different thing.
The shooting of Thompson has unleashed a wave of evil from members of the left. Thompson was not a criminal. He wasn't even an advocate of death the way, for example, abortion or euthanasia advocates are. And by the way, murdering an abortionist or an advocate of euthanasia would be unjustifiable morally in a democratic system. Brian Thompson's great sin, according to these people, is that he was the head of a company that exists within a mixed private public health care framework and that he did his job because that's how health insurance actually works. Some things are covered.
And some things are not. And you may not like the application of the coverage, and it may be bad. That is not an excuse for murder. But for the left, if you hate the system, you are morally justified in murdering anyone who acts within
within the system. That means that if, like one Bernie Sanders follower did, you believe that private healthcare kills Americans, you can go around murdering Congress people. I know we buried that one. Media pretended it never happened. Steve Scalise is still limping today because he was nearly shot to death by a Bernie Sanders fan who believed that being part of the quote-unquote system that didn't nationalize healthcare meant you were a murderer.
This stuff means that if you don't like that health insurers often deny coverage for certain pre-existing conditions or non-covered doctors or medication, you can then murder the CEO of a health insurance company. This is revolutionary leftist evil.
And it's evil for a couple of reasons. First, violence is not justified in a democracy where your say is part of the process. This is why democracies are generally good, because they outsource the violence to the government. Revolution to overthrow tyranny is justified, but tyranny has to be actually real and violence has to be the last resort. I didn't like public policy in California, so I picked up my family and my company and we left.
Okay, tyranny is not real in the case of healthcare in the United States. And violence is not being used as last resort in this particular case. If you perceive America to be a tyranny and violence to be the proper response, that is a call for unending violence until the system itself is changed. It's a call for revolution. When you say it's okay to murder CEOs on the street, that is a call for revolution. Second, violence against members of private industry, that isn't even a protest to public policy. Let's be fair about this. That isn't even shooting politicians, which would be evil enough.
It's even a different level of evil because it's a protest against the very system of free markets themselves. Brian Thompson isn't responsible for America's healthcare system any more than the head of CVS is responsible for America's trade system. Directing hatred against Brian Thompson is not about shaping public policy because you could shoot every CEO in America and it wouldn't shape public policy. It turns out that it's about trying to threaten anyone who engages in free markets at all. This is simply Marxist leftist radical evil.
This person could just as easily have shot a doctor who decided not to perform a surgery or shot a bank CEO who denied a loan application for a home. It would have fallen under the same category. This, by the way, is not uncommon, unfortunately, in modern Western history. This was all the philosophy of the Red Army faction in Germany in the 1970s. That was known as the Beider-Meinhof gang. They weren't seeking a better world. They were seeking to tear down the world of capitalism on behalf of Marxist revolutionary evil. These are people who routinely quoted Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Gramsci.
They called for revolution. Ulrike Meinhof, a left-wing radical journalist, led the way. She famously said, quote, protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more. And that language is replete with echoes in today's society from college campuses to left-wing media. That philosophy led the Beider-Meinhof gang to engage in routine assassination of everyone from industrialists like Hans Martin Schleyer to Dresdner bank head Jürgen Ponto to American soldiers in Germany.
These people also sometimes become the tools of enemy regimes. Beider-Meinhof certainly was. They worked with the Stasi, the East German Stasi, other Soviet agents to foment chaos. They coordinated with terrorist groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestine Liberation Organization itself. The origins of Beider-Meinhof came from the 1968 student protests in Germany. Does any of this sound familiar?
They were Marxist in orientation. They were actually influenced by the 1965 Watts riots in the United States, radical race riots in the United States, in which violence was somehow justified. They allied with radicals all over the globe. They would read Che Guevara. They wrote essays defending the Munich massacre of Israeli Olympians by Palestinian terrorists.
Stephen Ost is an author who literally wrote the book on the Beidermannhoff gang. And he pointed out, quote, the Beidermannhoff gang drew a measure of support that violent leftists in the United States, like the Weather Underground, never enjoyed. A poll at the time showed a quarter of West Germans under 40 felt sympathy for the gang. One-tenth said they would hide a gang member from the police.
Prominent intellectuals spoke up for the gang's righteousness as Germany, even into the 1970s, was still a guilt-ridden society. When the gang started robbing banks, newscasts compared its members to Bonnie and Clyde. Andreas Bader, a charismatic action man indulged in the imagery, told people his favorite movies were Bonnie and Clyde, which had recently come out, and The Battle of Algiers, which is an anti-colonial...
propaganda piece on behalf of actual groups that would end up with an Islamic fascist regime in Algeria. The pop poster of Che Guevara hung on his wall. He paid a designer to make a red army faction logo, a drawing of a machine gun against a red star. So with all this backdrop, what exactly are we supposed to make of journalists, pseudo journalists like Taylor Lorenz or academics like that Columbia professor who proclaimed soft support for the murder of Brian Thompson?
Well, I mean, I think that we should take it as a leading bleeding edge indicator that we are on the verge of something terrible. After all, these acts of violence, they're not quite as sporadic as they used to be. This follows hard on the Black Lives Matter riots, which burned cities, did two billion dollars in property damage and were indulged and even celebrated by many on the left. The Hamas takeover of college campuses, again, indulged and celebrated by the left wing elite, up to and including the Democratic presidential candidate for the United States.
And now the not-so-quiet applause for the assassination of a private healthcare CEO. The toxic brew of radicalism and violence that characterized the 70s in Germany and the United States, actually, because it happened in the U.S. too. Enormous number of terror bombings in the United States in the 1970s. All that stuff is bubbling again. And why not? Many of the people who engaged in precisely that sort of violence
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Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn, they found high positions in academia. They used to hang out with Barack Obama after spending years planting bombs with the Weather Underground.
Certainly today, a desperate left spurred to action by constant talk of the fascistic takeover of Donald Trump. They can be counted on to increase their support for violence. I mean, there were two assassination attempts against Donald Trump in the last six months. That's an indicator of just how deeply this rot is spreading. And it has to be stopped. It has to be stopped. It can only be stopped by a widespread rejection on all sides of the aisle for this type of violence and for support of this type of violence.
The shooter in this case we can only hope is arrested and should be given the death penalty. Seed beds for Marxist-Leninist violence on college campuses. I hope the incoming Department of Education defunds all of it. Defunds all of it. Pseudo-journalists like Taylor Lorenz should not only be rejected from polite society, all of the publications that hired her knowing she was a nut and then promoted her knowing she was a nut should be called on the carpet by the American public.
The Brian Thompson shooting is a bleeding edge indicator of where the country could be going. It's the reason why there were security professionals who were wondering why he was walking around without security. That says something about the American body politic. A lot of people that I know now have to have 24-7 security just because of the climate of violence that is bubbling under the surface.
All it takes is somebody with some organizational capacity on the left to launch America into a new era of domestic terrorism with the tacit moral support of much of the journalistic establishment. Meanwhile, of course, many of those people in the journalistic establishment will claim it's the right that's violent in the United States. That is not the story of the last 10, 15 years in American life.
And certainly is not the story today. And it's something we need to watch out for because this has happened in the West before. And once that can of violence is open, it is very difficult to close again without concerted action, not just by law enforcement, but by an American public that decides it doesn't want to have anything to do with these people.
It's something deeply disturbing and scary that there are so many people who are blasé about the murder of a private healthcare CEO because they don't like the way the healthcare system works in the United States. It can be done with literally any business in the country, any business, name an industry, and you can make the case
That something unfair is happening in the industry. This is why socialist leech scavenger lingo used by people like Bernie Sanders. If you want to talk about stochastic terrorism, if you want to talk about rhetoric that leads to a higher possibility of violence, when you suggest that everything in American life is unfair and bad and rigged by the system, when you suggest that, and then you suggest that anybody who does business is merely an apparatchik of that system, the result is a support for revolutionary violence
You're raising that temperature. It's going to stop bubbling. It's going to start bursting out into the open. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is moving forward. It's interesting to watch because Trump 2.0, I will say, is much more
Efficient, significantly more directed than Trump 1.0, which makes sense. Donald Trump had never held public office before he was elected president in 2016. Now he's been president once. He knows where the bodies are buried. He knows what needs to get done. And the biggest threat to the Trump presidency is being distracted by shiny baubles. It's being distracted by sort of dumb rhetorical fights.
But Donald Trump is set for a historic presidency right now. And you're seeing the people surrounding him encouraging him in the right way, I think, toward that. Laura Trump, of course, is the head of the RNC. She pointed out that Donald Trump is not seeking revenge. Now, by the way, I think this is true. I think that the Donald Trump is seeking revenge narrative is something that Democrats are promoting as an excuse to blanket pardon all of their friends.
But the reality is Donald Trump did not seek revenge his first time around. And it is not revenge to fire people who are involved in things like Russiagate. That is not revenge. That is the proper response to blowing it on your job. Here's Laura Trump yesterday.
We remember how he was the first term in office. He didn't start World War III. He was actually the first president in 82 years not to start a new war, not to get America into a new war. And much in the same way, I think people are going to see very quickly that this is a man who really just wants to go in there and take charge of this country as the American people mandated. You know, secure our border, bring down inflation, get us out of wars, and do the right things for America. He has no intention on retribution or revenge.
Again, he has things to do. And I think that is the point. And you're starting to see corporate CEOs, people who were not friendly to Donald Trump, realize this. So Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, and also tangentially the Washington Post, because who cares about the Washington Post? Bezos says that he thinks that Donald Trump is calmer and more settled now that he actually has an agenda.
I'm super optimistic about this president. I'm very optimistic that President Trump is serious about this regulatory agenda. And I think he has a good chance of succeeding. What about the idea that he thinks that the press is the enemy? Well, I think he, I'm going to try to talk him out of that idea.
I don't think the press is the enemy. And I don't think, you know, he's also, you've probably grown in the last eight years. He has too. Like it's, you know, this is not the case. The press is not the enemy. I hope you're right. I hope I'm right too. Have you told him? Let's go persuade him of this. No, but you and I should go. Let's go talk to him. If we could try. I really don't. I think that this is absolutely wrong.
I don't think he's going to see it the same way. But maybe I'll be wrong. Was that always your thought, by the way? What I've seen so far is that he is calmer than he was the first time and more confident, more settled. I mean, first of all, that's actually true. And the reason that's true is because Donald Trump is oriented toward victory. He just won the last victory he can win in the political sphere.
Like he won. It's over. There's not gonna be a third term for President Trump. It's not constitutional. So that means that he now knows that he has won. And that gives him a feeling of solidity for sure. And a feeling that now he just has to pursue his agenda. That there's nothing that can be done to take that victory away from him. He is right about all of that in here. Andrew Ross Sorkin from the New York Times being very skeptical about that. But again, I think that's a buildup in the head of people who tend to be on the left. Oh my gosh, it's just gonna be chaos and terror. Here's the thing. It wasn't even during the first administration.
The second administration is going to be a lot more pointed than that. Bezos then said that he was optimistic that Donald Trump is going to cut the red tape, which of course should be good for everybody. By the way, it points to John Fetterman, who came out and said that he's in favor of Elon Musk over at Doge. Like this should be a bipartisan thing going through and ripping away the red tape and ripping away the useless government spending. If we're talking about Trump, I think it's very interesting. I'm actually very optimistic this time around that
We're going to see. I'm very hopeful about this. He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. And my point of view, if I can help him do that, I'm going to help him. Because we do have too much regulation in this country. This country is so set up. Right.
To grow, by the way, all of our problems, all of our economic problems, like if you look at the deficit and I mean, you know, the debt, the national debt and how gigantic it is as a portion of GDP. These are real problems and they're real long term problems. And the way you get out of them is by outgrowing them.
You're going to get you're going to you're going to solve the problem of the national debt by making it a smaller percentage of GDP, not by shrinking the national debt, but by growing the GDP. You have to grow the denominator. He is right about that. And that is something that Donald Trump is, in fact, focused on, because here's the actual reality of politics in the United States. There will be cuts around the edges. There should be cuts around the edges.
It's going to be very difficult to convince the American people that the giant systemic drivers of American debt, namely Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which are the giant drivers of American debt, that those are going to be radically restructured. Trump knows this, which is why he ruled it off the table in the middle of the campaign. And so what that means is that you're going to have to grow your way out of this. You're going to have to have robust GDP growth. That's something that Donald Trump absolutely wants. Well, this is something that the Republican Congress is going to be pursuing amidst a bevy of cuts.
So a report from Luke Rosiak, quoting a Senate investigation over at Daily Wire, says, quote, only 6% of federal employees work from an office full time. A third are fully remote. Some aren't actually working when they, quote, unquote, work at home. According to a Senate investigation, Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa says Washington is still operating as of March 2020. She's chair of the Senate Doge Caucus. That's the Department of Governmental Efficiency.
She said just 3% of the federal workforce teleworked daily prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, 6% of workers report in person on a full-time basis. Nearly one third are entirely remote. Government office buildings have an occupancy rate of 12%, even though the government is spending $16 billion a year to operate them.
Well, your hard-earned taxpayer dollars are being spent in a wide variety of stupid places, but here is the thing. If you don't pay your taxes, you got a problem. The October 15th deadline has now passed. Are you prepared for what's coming? Do you owe back taxes? Are your tax returns still unfiled? Did you miss the deadline to file for an extension? Well, now that October 15th is behind us, the IRS may be ramping up enforcement. Let me tell you, they don't play around. You could face wage garnishments, frozen bank accounts, even property seizures if you haven't taken action yet. Here's the good news.
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This election season, I visited a bunch of states. Between campaign stops, media hits, and other podcasts, our very own election coverage in Nashville, I was on the go all the time. Somewhere in between all of that travel, I needed to maintain my health, hit the gym, spend time with the family. When I was younger, I used to think I could just power through on the pure conservative willpower and caffeine. I learned pretty quickly, peak performance requires peak nutrition, and that means eating veggies. Well, I don't like veggies, so I'm thankful to have balance of nature.
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Go to balanceofnature.com, use promo code Shapiro for 35% off your first order as a preferred customer and get a free bottle of fiber and spice. That's balanceofnature.com, promo code Shapiro. Elon Musk has signaled federal employees should have to work from the office. They should have to return to the office. That's also something that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson suggested is going to be mandatory from now on. Here was Johnson yesterday.
One of the first things that I think you'll see is a demand from the new administration and from all of us in Congress that federal workers return to their desks and get back to the work that they're supposed to be doing. I think that is common sense. What you're going to see here, the overriding theme here, is a return to common sense and a return to accountability and efficiency in government. I think that's going to serve the people well.
That is absolutely correct. Meanwhile, Democrats, of course, are trying to fight back against this. It's hysterical. I mean, this should be the most bipartisan thing in the world. Efficiency from the government that you pay for should be a bipartisan thing. The fact that Democrats are upset about it demonstrates something about their view of government. Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren of California says that actually the Department of Governmental Efficiency is unconstitutional and illegal, which is weird since it totally isn't. They're issuing recommendations and then they don't have the actual power to enforce those recommendations.
So it's the same as me issuing a recommendation or something. Here she was. What are your thoughts on Elon Musk and Ramaswamy deciding or trying to decide what stays and what goes in the federal government?
Well, it's illegal. You know, they haven't asked to meet with me. But the impoundment of funds that have been appropriated by the Congress is unconstitutional and illegal. There is no such Department of Government Efficiency. It's made up.
So, good luck to them. I mean, if there is a plan that President Trump wants to propose to the Congress, he should send it to us. But the Constitution does not permit the president to simply avoid what the Congress has done. That power of the purse is with the legislative branch, not the president.
Wow. It's really fun to hear Democrats suddenly standing up for the congressional power of the purse after Barack Obama declared years ago that he had a pen and he had a phone and therefore he could do anything he wanted to do. But there is so much dead wood that needs to be cut within the federal government and restructured within the federal government. So there's a little notice hearing yesterday from the House Oversight Committee over the census. It's the Census Bureau in 2020 utterly blew it. The census of 2020 was an absolute mess.
I've talked about this on the show before. The census of 2020 dramatically undercounted red states. It dramatically overcounted blue states. If the population count in 2020 had been done properly, Donald Trump could have won the 2024 election without winning any of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or Michigan. Any of them. Because that's how many votes would have shifted in the Electoral College South to states that he definitely was going to win, like Arizona, Texas, and Florida.
The balance in the United States Congress would be much more Republican because it turns out many people like me and my family and my company, we all move from a blue state to a red state. And that is the story of migration internally in the United States over the course of the last 10 years or so. And it was done totally wrong. There's a point made by Representative James Comer yesterday, the chair of the House Oversight Committee. It's imperative that we understand what went wrong in the 2020 census and take action to mitigate the risk of those similar errors in the 2030 census.
Mitigating these risks is even more important because there are major demographic changes happening across the country as citizens of blue states flee from those high-tax sanctuary jurisdictions for red states to enjoy lower taxes, a safer environment, and to exercise more freedom.
He is right about all this, and it has really significant electoral ramifications. Meanwhile, Democrats are, of course, upset that while people are migrating down to the South, that means that Republicans are winning more seats. Here's Representative Jasmine Crockett somehow turning this into an issue of racism. We know that specifically Texas added four million people. Of those four million people, do you want to take a guess at how many were Anglos? Just a guess. I'd say a majority.
180,000. That's it of 4 million. 95% of the people that were added. And we know that when it comes to minority populations, they tend to be undercounted. So get this. We added 4 million people. They were people of color. Texas got two new seats. So they took those black and brown and Asian bodies. And guess what? Do you think that we got a new black, brown or Asian seat? No.
Somehow, the way that they do their Republican math in the state of Texas, that amounted to two new white seats. Guess what? White Republican seats. We got two new Republican seats out of four million people of color. So let me tell you, they love to use our bodies to apportion us in an inaccurate way.
That's not an inaccurate apportionment. It turns out that Hispanics voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in places like Texas. That is a very, very weird statement. But again, it always comes down to race for Democrats. What it really is about is the census failing. It's also true for the Secret Service. The Secret Service dramatically failed throughout this election cycle when the current president-elect of the United States missed assassination, literally through the grace of God. God took his hand, put it on Donald Trump's head, and turned it slightly.
And if not for that, Trump's brains would have been all over the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, in front of the entire nation. That is a thing that nearly happened. The Secret Service dramatically failed. But again, accountability in so many of these government agencies is in abeyance. Yesterday, there was a big shouting match
in Congress during a hearing with the acting Secret Service director. They got into it because the congressperson, Pat Fallon, he was questioning the acting Secret Service director about the fact that they had not gone, the Secret Service, to Butler, Pennsylvania, to investigate in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt in Butler. Instead, Ronald Roe had gone to the 9-11 memorial with Donald Trump and the suggestion by Pat Fallon is he was there to sort of appeal to both Biden and Trump and things got a bit fraught.
Who is usually at an event like this closest to the president of the United States, security-wise? The sack of the detail. Special agent in charge of the detail. Were you the special agent in charge of the detail that day? Actually, let me address this. Could you please, staff, leave that... Oh, no, leave that one up with the circle around me. Thank you. So actually, Congressman, what you're not seeing is the sack of the detail off, out of the picture's view. And that is the day where we remember...
the more than 3,000 people that have died on 9/11. I actually responded to Ground Zero.
I was there going through the ashes of the World Trade Center. I was there at Fresh Kills. I'm not asking you that. I'm asking you if you were the realest vessel I didn't charge. I was there to show respect for a Secret Service member that died on 9-11. Do not invoke 9-11 for political purposes. Oh, I'm not. I'm invoking this. You are, sir. Gentlemen, I would like to ask him a question. You are out of line, Congressman. Don't try to bully me.
You know why you were there? Because you wanted to be visible because you were auditioning for this job. I was there to pay respect for a fallen member of this agency. You were out of line, Congressman. You are out of line. Because you put those agents out of position. Mr. Chairman. Mr. Fallon, you're just... I did, sir, and you are out of line.
Good times in Congress. Bottom line is a lot of these government agencies, they ain't working the way they are supposed to be working, which is precisely why Donald Trump is now trying to nominate people who are going to come in and clean out the deadwood.
That includes Pete Hegseth. So Hegseth's nomination is still up for grabs at this point. It's unclear exactly how much support Hegseth has inside the United States Senate for his nomination. There are some Republicans who are on the fence, given all of the allegations that have been made, mostly anonymously, about his nomination.
and prior personal life and supposed drinking habits and all the rest of this stuff. Again, as I said yesterday on the show, all of that is anonymous. All of that is being litigated in the media. And much of it is being directed against Hegseth specifically because Hegseth knows that he has to come in and cut.
Hegseth is going to come in and he's going to take a lot of political generals and he's going to have them fired. Hegseth is going to come in and he's going to completely redo how weapon systems are actually approved. Hegseth is going to come in and he is going to completely rejigger how recruitment is done to the United States military. The woke is gone. The DEI is gone. It's going to be about making America's Department of Defense the most lethal fighting machine on planet Earth ever.
staffed up, re-teched, all of it. And that's a threat to a lot of people within the system because I haven't heard any substantiated allegations thus far that should be sinking his nomination. I think that Pete will make a fantastic Secretary of Defense. Here was Hegseth yesterday saying, listen, we're not going to try this one in the media. I'm proud of what I fought for. I'm not going to back down from them one bit. I will answer all of these senators' questions, but this will not be a process tried in the media. I don't answer to anyone in this group, none of you, not to that camera at all.
I answer to President Trump, who received 76 million votes on behalf and a mandate for change. I answer to the 50, the 100 senators who are part of this process and those in the committee. And I answer to my Lord and Savior and my wife and my family. I'm proud to be here. And as long as Donald Trump wants me in this fight, I'm going to be standing right here in this fight, fighting to bring our Pentagon back to what it needs to be.
Well, President Trump, for his part, put out a statement this morning on Truth Social saying Pete Hegseth is doing very well. His support is strong and deep, much more so than the fake news would have you believe. He's a great student, Princeton, Harvard educated with a military state of mind. He'll be a fantastic high energy secretary of defense, one who leads with charisma and skill. Pete is a winner and there's nothing that can be done to change that. So, so far, he still has Trump's support. Again, that seems perfectly appropriate at this point since the allegations are unsubstantiated.
They are anonymous in nature. And the police report that, for example, was issued about his supposed possible rape of a woman at a conference in California, that police report tended to show the woman was telling a very sketchy story, shall we say. Again, there are some senators who are on the fence, but they seem to be leaning toward Hegseth. That includes Senator Kevin Cramer. Cramer, of course, is a representative from North Dakota. Here he was saying that, you know, it's probable that he'll support him.
I'm ready to be supportive of getting him to that point. I'm ready to get him in front of the committee. I did warn him. I said, you know, not everybody on the committee is as friendly as I am.
which I don't think surprised him, but I also said there's nobody on the committee that doesn't earn our respect. And certainly there are people like Joni Ernst and Tammy Duckworth who earn more than all I've ever earned, given their history. So I was very favorably impressed, quite honestly. So I see no reason at this point to not be supportive of him.
So that, of course, is exactly, I think, the appropriate response to Pete Hagseth. I'm still very hopeful that he gets confirmed. All right, in just one second, we'll get to the left's continued nonsense on trans. The radicalism of the left on this issue is not going away, not anytime soon. We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Meanwhile, the Democrats continue to be unable to divorce themselves from the radicals within their caucus. We talked about this a little bit earlier with regard to the murder of Brian Thompson.
The CEO of UnitedHealthcare. But it's true with many of the radical contingents in their caucus. The most radical contingent ideologically in the Democratic caucus is, of course, the contingent that suggests that boys can be girls and girls can be boys. There's a case before the Supreme Court right now that we discussed at length yesterday discussing whether the Constitution of the United States mandates that girls be given testosterone if they have gender dysphoria.
or whether boys should be given estrogen if they have gender dysphoria, or that can be banned by states, which, of course, it should not only can it be banned by states, it should be banned by states. But the left can't let go of this. So you have members of the radical left in the media who just promulgate lies. Why? Because it's all a power game. If they can get you to say things that are wildly untrue, well, then they've got you where they want you. Yesterday, MSNBC's Joy Reid, in what can only be described as an Orwellian tone,
turn of logic, suggested that Tennessee banning giving cross-sex hormones to children was somehow akin to Nazi Germany, which is weird. Because if you were talking about Mengele-like experiments on young children, that would be what transgender medicine is. Anyway, here is Joy Reid not knowing either history or biology.
Targeting trans people isn't new. It is an age-old tradition, which Nazi Germany did with brutally violent ends in the 1930s. While the Supreme Court refuses to do anything about weapons of war in schools, today they seemed inclined to uphold Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors. While the decision is not expected for months, a majority of the justices parroted a string of debunked talking points, all under the guise of protecting the kids. Just not every kid.
Ridiculous. These people are just ridiculous. By the way, gender affirming care, we're not talking about orwelling in phrases. So let me just ask a question. If your genitals don't establish your gender, then why does cutting them off affirm your gender? It's a pretty simple question. If you've got a and that means that you're not a boy, you might be a girl, then why does cutting off your make you more of a girl? Why? Explain. Use small words, please, and short sentences.
My goodness. Anyway, CNN's Breonna Keillor did the same thing. She was out there propagandizing for the idea that three-year-olds can know that they are trans. Can I explain something to you? Three-year-olds don't know. I have four children. One of them right now is four. One of them is one. They don't know things. They're adorable and they're wonderful and they don't know things. And if you're a parent who's allowing your three-year-old child to dictate to you what their quote-unquote gender is, it's because you are engaging in child abuse.
Here's CNN engaging in stupidity. What kid, what girl knows whether she's going to want to have a baby long term or what testosterone will do to her uterus or that she will increase her risk of heart attacks by taking these drugs? Some of them do.
No, no, none of them. No, I don't. None of them. None of them do. Eighty five percent. What we know from the science. And again, it's about not putting ideology over evidence. And that's what's happening here. Eighty five percent of all kids that are able to grow through puberty who say they're gender confused. Over eighty five percent of those kids live at peace with their bodies and consistent with their sex.
That is Kristen Wagoner, president of the Alliance Defending Freedom. They do a wonderful job over there. And that is Breonna Keillor suggesting that three-year-olds know whether they wish to be sterilized or not. That is how insane some members of the left are. Annette Bening,
who is the wife of Warren Beatty and who has a child, who is a girl who believes that she is a boy, was outside the Supreme Court speaking and talked about what really is driving a lot of this. And that is the absolute narcissism of the parents. Here is Annette Bening. I think the greatest gift of my life
is to have kids and to have a transgender child has made me so much more interesting. So much more wise.
So for the Supreme Court justices, I encourage them to talk to their kids, their grandkids, their nieces and nephews, because I'll bet if they really sit down and ask them, "Do you know trans kids around you? Do you have any non-binary friends?" They're going to say yes. And they're going to say that this is part of the beautiful rainbow of human beings everywhere.
absolute, ridiculous, narcissistic nonsense. By the way, my sister actually went to a theater camp when she was younger with the person who had become Stephen Beatty when this was a girl named Kat. And she was a girl. I mean, like, it's ridiculous. It's just ridiculous. But unfortunately, the left has decided that ridiculousness is the name of the game. And if the left refuses to let go of this stuff, by the way,
Then there is an extremely good shot that they'll continue to lose elections because no one is buying into the lie that small children have the capacity to decide that they are not members of their own biological sex. But they're going to keep pushing it, man. I don't think they can let go of it. I really don't. I think it is too part and parcel of their entire philosophy. Their philosophy is that human beings ought to be equivalent in every single way. Unfortunately, nature and nature's God objected to this.
But that's not going to stop them from continuing to push the lie because you have to assume that in order to get to the Marxist redistributionist point of view. Ibram X. Kendi, racialist fool, said it best. He suggested that if there is any disparity in life, it must be due to discrimination. He said any disparity. Now, for anybody who has a shred of logic or common sense, you understand that that's not true, that there are tons of disparities in life and many of them are natural.
I, for example, cannot defeat LeBron James at basketball. That is a natural disparity. He, in turn, cannot defeat me in a spelling bee. Again, a natural disparity. Like not everybody's the same smart. Not everybody's the same athletic. Not everybody's the same well-read. All of that is true. But for the left, the entire predicate of redistributionism is that that inherent disparity is mean and nasty by the universe. And now we are going to correct for all of it.
And most people understand that's stupid. So instead, they have to make the argument that all human beings are innately exactly the same. Male, female, young, old, smart, stupid, all exactly the same. Good luck with that argument. Most Americans don't buy it, nor should most Americans buy it. Again, they're not going to stop pushing it. Here's sex education consultant Nora Gelperin talking about how kids as young as three can know that they are transgender.
So if you ask any child at the ages of three, four or five, what gender are they? They will clearly be able to tell you. They have been inundated with messages about gender. If you think about the Halloween costumes, if you think about the careers that kids are exposed to, if you think about the cartoon characters in their TV shows, the books that they're reading, there are messages about gender and gender role stereotypes and gender identity from when they are very, very young. And kids are able to identify what their gender is at a very early age.
These people, my goodness. You know what? You know what? Keep pushing it. Keep pushing it. Let's see how it goes for you. It's a bold strategy, Cotton. We'll see how it works for you electorally. Pretty soon, it's not going to be legislation like Tennessee's in 25 states. It'll be legislation like Tennessee's in 45 states. The only exception is going to be places that are insane, like Massachusetts, New York, and California. Okay?
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All righty. Joining us on the line is Jonathan Paggio, French-Canadian liturgical artist, writer, and public speaker on religious philosophy, symbolism, and Orthodox Christianity. You can see all of his commentary on his YouTube channel, The Symbolic World. And of course, you can see Jonathan in our brand new series here at Daily Wire Plus, The Gospels with Jordan B. Peterson, where Jordan brought together a bunch of great minds to talk about the New Testament. Jonathan, great to talk to you. It's good to see you, Ben.
So let's talk about this brand new series. Take me through kind of what it was like behind the scenes, because obviously you have a bunch of different perspectives on the New Testament. How do you discuss that? You're a deeply religious person, obviously. So how do you discuss that from a variety of viewpoints and keep the conversation flowing with all those viewpoints?
Yeah, definitely. We were very nervous. I was nervous about it for sure. I mean, talking about Exodus is one thing, but talking about the gospels, like there are literally wars based on interpretation of the gospel. But what I found is I think Jordan, the way he opens up,
The discussion and his deep respect for the people around made the conversation actually quite amazing. We really did come into a groove and it was crazy the difference between the people that were there. But the capacity we had to respect each other and to enter the conversation, just for that, for the capacity to model a conversation, I think it's worth people checking it out because it's quite impressive.
So, you know, Jordan decides to take on the Gospels. That obviously is a huge topic. What do you think are sort of the what were your favorite episodes of this? What are your favorite themes to discuss in the Gospels with everybody?
Well, I think the idea of looking at the Gospels in a way that is almost with fresh eyes, I think that's what everybody kind of came to the table in that way. So basically, the idea of sitting even around a table and reading the entire Gospels within a week is something that I don't think I've ever done in my life. And so what it did is it cast a different light on the entire story and opened it up in ways that were surprising. And I think that's what I love the most about it, is what
how even people who have read it over and over for, you know, 20 years, 30 years, we still found some jewels of surprise and connection maybe we hadn't seen before. And that was really enlightening.
One of the things that Jordan does when he examines biblical texts is he sort of puts aside many of the questions that tend to come up in seminars like this where people go into the historicity or people tend to go into the archaeology. And instead, he really focuses on the meaning of the actual text, which I think is a wonderful way to go about looking at these things because the truth is that while many people who are believers –
are very interested in the historical nature of the text. The truth is that for most people who are first engaging with the text, it's the meaning of it that they actually care about because the truth is that in our lives, as you've talked about in terms of symbolism, the way we live our lives is through a prism of meaning, not through a prism of historicity per se. And so this isn't making any claims here. I'm not making any claims about historicity, but I think that it's the meaning centrality of this that actually makes it different.
I think you're absolutely right. Because even if we ask the question of historicity, the reason why we ask it is because it's something that it's important. And it's the importance of the text, the stories that are brought about, which are more important than, let's say, the literal historical details of what happened in the first century. Not that that's completely uninteresting, but dealing with it as a story that presents itself to us and that people have cared about now for 2000 years, that's really the way to go. And that's why in some ways,
Looking at it as a story, first of all, is why it was so easy to have the conversation because even someone like Greg Hurwitz, who's secular Jewish, could enter into it as a story and talk about what he's seeing there in the narrative. So that's what made it very, very good. So a couple of episodes are already available. It's a 10-part series. A couple of episodes are already available over at Daily Wire+. What was your favorite episode to film?
Um, it's hard to know because it's all a blur in the sense that we sat there for four hours a day. Can you imagine? We said like two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. You know, I think that for sure, as it as it went forward, you know, and we kind of entered into this groove, I think that around towards the end, it was the time where I liked it the most because we had all kind of taken we understood each other's perspective and we were in this almost like
conversation dance. And that's when it's almost like this flowing experience of discussing something that important. I think that that's the thing that, that I get the most out of the, out of the experience that I remember the most. So did you have to do any research for this or did you just kind of walk in with an open mind and sort of a, your, your set of knowledge? I mean, obviously you've studied these texts for a very, very long time. So it's not as though you have to sit there, you know, with Wikipedia or something. But did you sort of just come in sort of, and then tabula rasa, everybody just started discussing?
I think that most of us did. I definitely did reread the gospel before we started. And one of the things I did also is because we had just come out of the Exodus seminar, I spent quite a bit of time trying to see how the story in the gospel connects to the Exodus narrative in order to help people kind of bridge into the gospels. So that's the work that I did saying like, okay, what's the relationship between, let's say, the massacre of the innocents in the story of
of Jesus and the Pharaoh killing the Israelite babies in Egypt. Like what's the connection between those stories, et cetera, et cetera. There are many parallels between the two stories. And I tried to kind of bring that forward in order to help people connect it together.
Well, again, the series is well worth the watch. The Gospel is available over at Daily Wire Plus right now. Jonathan Paggio is a key part of that, as he is with a lot of the series that Jordan does, ranging from the Western Civilization series that we did to the Exodus series. Jonathan, really appreciate the time. It's worth checking out the series and check out his YouTube channel, The Symbolic World as well. Jonathan, appreciate it. Thank you so much. And thanks to Daily Wire for taking this risk. It's a huge risk to do something like that, and it's really appreciated.
Alrighty, guys, coming up, we'll get to the chaos in Syria. Is Bashar Assad's regime about to fall? If you're not a member, become a member. Use code Shapiro. Check out for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.