Ep. 2501 - The Looming Economic Disaster, Explained

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1:01after someone gets inside, after your phone buzzes, simply safe approach is different. It's designed to help stop a break in before it happens. They're AI powered outdoor cameras to detect suspicious activity around your home. Alert live, US based agents. Those agents can actually speak through the camera to scare off trespassers and if necessary, request 911 dispatch. Prevention beats reaction. Simply safe has been protecting your world for 20 years. Celebrate their anniversary with us and save 60% on your new Simply Safe system at simplysafe.com slash Shapiro at 60% off at simplysafe.com slash Shapiro plus when you order right in our show name and the how did you hear about a survey to let them know we say there is no safe like simply safe. Here are four stories that seem unrelated at first one. The bond markets are collapsing to 90% of Americans believe that the government is corrupt. Three Bernie Sanders wants to jail you for 20 years if you develop AI any further and four Russia is proud in NATO and China is proud in Japan. What is happening? Well, these four stories are part of the same big story. Nobody else in American politics will tell you this so I'm going to have to. There is in fact a uniparty. That uniparty

2:05is hell bent on bankrupting the country all in the name of populism. I'll explain all this in just one moment plus. Relief to the vice president defending his friend Tucker Carlson, Chris Rufo stops by to talk about corruption in California and run height fight infidels takes on the Venice film festival. This is the Ben Shapiro show. So, empires don't die empires generally commit suicide and empires die the same way by spending too much money now they may spend too much money in different ways but they all die kind of the same way which is they run out of the monies. So the United States we spent the monies and then we spent more of the monies and now we are spending all the monies for the rest of time. So this brings us to our first story our bond markets are right now in a state of total disarray as PBS reports interest rates on government bonds are rising again around the world making borrowing more expensive for consumers and businesses and heightening concerns about whether governments are issuing more debt than financial markets can handle on Tuesday the yield on the 10 year treasury which strongly influences mortgage rates reached

3:094.8% that's the highest since early 2025 the five year treasury which is a benchmark for auto loans touch to the highest level since October 2025 at 4.55% so for those who don't know the bond markets basically the way that it works is let us say that you buy a bond the bond returns 10% year on year that would be like an amazing bond but just make the math really really simple. Hey so you you play a hundred bucks for the bond every year you receive ten dollars. Hey so the bond yield is the difference between the price that you paid for the bond and what you receive for the bond and that's what the yield is so typically that means the price that you pay for the bond and the facial interest rate on the bond that is the bond yield so when we say that bond yields are rising we mean typically that the price for bonds is falling meaning that there's not a lot of demand for bonds or you're paying a lower price for bonds and the facial rate of interest is exactly the same what does that actually means it means if there's no market for bonds people will want to buy bonds now sometimes that's happening because people would rather invest in the stock market because things are just going awesome sometimes what it means is that people don't want to buy bonds

4:13because they are very nervous that anyone is ever going to be able to pay that off accept in inflated currency it is the latter thing that seems to be happening right now and this is having some broad spillover effect in the American economy mortgage rates have now hit their highest level in over a year according to Yahoo the average 30 year fixed mortgage rate was 6.71 percent this week through Wednesday that is the highest since June of 2025 and again all this is happening because people central banks other governments they are realizing that we in the United States are never going to stop spending ever now I'm old enough to remember when people actually cared about the topic in 2010 the Tea Party was very very into this topic but since then we've decided the American people are either too stupid or too greedy to actually handle the reality which is that we spend way too much money in this year United States here is a chart showing the US National debt as a percentage of GDP as you can see the actual extraordinary explosion

5:13in the US National debt really begins around not the Bush administration but the advent of the Obama administration it just explodes again this is the US federal debt projected as a percentage of our GDP and the source of the Congressional budget office and as you see it explodes from somewhere in the 35 percent range in the 2000s to what will be about 120 percent of our GDP by 2035 in 2024 it was almost 100 percent and the reason that our federal debt is increasing is because our spending looks kind of the same here is government spending here's what that looks like annually look at the growth in government spending my government spending has just increased and increased and increased and increased and it will continue to increase in this chart by the way cuts off in 2020 it's gotten way way worse since 2020 way worse we are never going to stop spending ever because we do have a uniparty both parties now agree the government is generally the solution to our problems neither

6:15party seems truly committed to the reality that free markets not only our fairer and better not only do they create prosperity and innovation but if you do the reverse if you regulate and you attacks and you welfare everything you destroy your own country and again this is a sea change in the nature of American politics that has happened over the course of the last couple of decades and won't enough to remember when this was not the case president from back in 2016 pretty famously changed the nature of the game in politics on the right side of the off by saying he would never touch the entitlement programs again he was doing that because he was a populist meaning it is always popular to tell people you're not going to touch the entitlement programs because people like their government checks but is that physically responsible of course not here is Trump in 2016 and we're going to become rich again and we're going to become great again and I'm not going to cut social security like every other Republican and I'm not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid every other Republican is going to cut and even if they wouldn't they don't know what to do because they don't know where the money is I do so again now is the case he made back in 2016 and now this is large scale embraced by most of

7:19the Republican party so much so that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez who wants to run for president in 2028 and is in fact a socialist she is looking forward to the Democrats taking Congress in the upcoming midterm election and she was asked what she thinks Democrats would be able to do with Trump and her first answer was maybe we can spend more on Medicaid is there anything you got you would think that Democrats could work with president Trump on these next two years I know defiance is a big priority but is there anything you think that you that Democrats a Democratic majority could work with president Trump on well you know maybe there's a world where we're able to restore a lot of the devastating cuts to Medicaid and I know that many people who considers who consider themselves maga rely on Medicaid and they don't deserve to suffer because of the horrifying cuts trillion dollar in cuts in health care and so I know that the House is more than willing should we take the majority to pass a reconciliation bill that fixes a lot of that

8:23again the reason that she's pushing that is because she believes there will be serious pressure brought to bear on Republicans to spend more money on well-fairism and so I back in the 1990s Republicans and Democrats agreed we need to reign in the welfare state by doing some welfare reform and now you're not even supposed to touch that stuff and so that's story number one if you are a pro-life person if you're a person who wishes to provide women the support they need to make the correct decision this is why you should help out the folks over at pre-born doctors told the woman named alba that pregnancy was impossible her husband's diagnosis confirmed it a child of their own simply wasn't going to happen and then the impossible happened alba was pregnant and that sounds like a miracle but to alba it didn't feel like one that positive pregnancy test felt like a mistake a cruel twist of science she didn't understand or one nothing added up she'd accepted the pregnancy wasn't possible the baby wasn't planned suddenly she was confused and afraid and overwhelmed what should have felt like a miracle felt like a crisis and then she walked into a pre-born network clinic she was welcomed with compassion and given a free ultrasound when she saw her baby and heard that tiny heartbeat everything changed fear of gave way to hope alba chose

9:24life today baby Laura is healthy and thriving reminder when god is writing the story impossible doesn't get the final word right now another mother needs that help and you can give it to her just 28 bucks helps provide one life saving ultrasound 140 bucks helps rescue five babies please give today down pound to 50 say baby that's pound 250 baby or visit pre-born.com slash pen that's pre-born.com slash pen if you're a business owner would you consider a larger donation to claim a write off a donation of a grand two thousand bucks ten grand fifteen grand that sponsors an ultrasound machine for a needy clinic helping save countless babies lives for years to come gifts are tax deductible and will reach eternity get involved today story number two 90 percent of the american public believes the government is corrupt according to gallop that numbers now 89 percent it is radically increased since 2006 when that number was 60 percent or so now our publicans have always largely agreed the government is corrupt democrats because trump is the president have now decided that government is corrupt but here's the thing the american people are not wrong government is in

10:25fact corrupt there's tremendous corruption in our current government not just at the top levels for years and years and years from the Biden crime family to the trump circle again lots of you'll clear in the bag in those circles that's just real but it is rampant throughout the system we're going to talk with Chris Rufo later from manhattan institute about the kinds of welfare fraud that are occurring in places like California here is the sad reality when you turn the federal government into the most powerful entity on planet earth capable of making people rich or poor of regulating and taxing you into submission and poverty or subsidizing and regulatory capturing you into great wealth the natural result is corruption i mean that's how it works john dillinger rob banks because that's where the money was and people do corruption because that's where the money is of course people believe the government is corrupt because it is corrupt no one in human history has ever worried about the corruption of a small powerless government because again if it's small powerless it can't do much but we have an overweaning government that is spending seven trillion

11:28dollars a year it turns out there's an awful lot of corruption and the american people know that but they don't want to recognize the correlation between the size of government and the size of corruption this brings us to our third story Bernie Sanders trying to destroy AI so let's assume that the national that is baked into the cake which at this point it is let's assume that we are very soon going to be paying more on the interest on the national that then we are paying for our military which is true let's assume that there is no desire on the part of the american public to radically inflate the currency or radically increase its own taxes or radically cut which are usually the three ways out of a massive fiscal disaster you should either have to inflate the currency and pay people back in meaningless dollars or you have to radically cut austerity measures which you don't want to do right or you have to somehow grow your way out of it right that would be the other thing right you could theoretically grow your way out of it and and this is a case that the GOP is making you can have your cake you need it too because we have this thing called the AI boom and the AI boom is going to allow our economy to grow so fast that tax expenditures will go up even faster than

12:32the amount of government spending hey that is the case that is being made and it's not a totally implausible case here's the treasury secretary Scott Besson to the g20 talking about growing our way out of this and avoiding global financial crisis to reiterate that our message of growth the world is a washing debt post gfc post covid and the only way for us to get out of this is to grow our way out of this and you know i'm confident that a lot of the leaders are very receptive to this and again this is the case being made by most of these smart people inside the Trump administration is that AI is going to radically increase productivity and efficiency and that itself is going to allow for radical increases in the rates of GDP growth instead of you're talking about government spend as a percentage of GDP you can either reduce the government spend or you can radically increase the GDP's the idea would be you radically increase growth rates Kevin Moore she was the fed chair

13:33he said the same thing back in april 2026 what we call AI in a couple years we'll just call business and AI is going to make almost everything cost less and the us can be a big winner and uh... and it's a hugely exciting moment if i were to step back for a minute i were the president what i'd be worried about is a central bank that doesn't see any of that a central bank that is stuck with models from 1978 governance from a prior period and don't recognize we could be at the front end of a productivity boom and if i were the president be worried that they might not see it and and again he is right about that also it happens to be that either we are going to win the AI race or China will win the i race a i is not going to disappear so either we capture those gains here in the United States or we are the consumers for the gains of others outside the United States president trump understands this again president trump i radically disagree with him when it comes to government spending but he's not wrong on innovation on the outside he's actually pretty good here's the president talking about this on gb news yesterday

14:37are you concerned about the future with a i are we doing enough to protect jobs what are the jobs going to be the jobs are going to be massive a i's going to be positive there's some negatives but that'll be straight now do you think and we're building uh plants data centers which you know data centers are actually fabulous thing hey so again this is why he has pro this thing is because he understands we're going to have to outgrow our expenditures and to be real AI is extraordinary i mean it's getting better and better and better day by day open AI put out an ad for chatchy pt6 and the the capacity of AI is extraordinary it's amazing and as i've said before i don't think that you ought to be afraid of AI i think that you ought to be treating AI like a tool it is a very sophisticated screwdriver it does things for you i think that beliefs in the immediate takeover of AI that it's going to be better than you at everything and that you will have nothing to add to the process i think that's overstated i don't think that's real but let's be clear AI is in fact a transformative technology

15:42ad for chatchy pt6 create a yellow circle there can you draw me a small show me a circle sure done okay take this and make it the window of a rocket ship i like this but can you make it a lot more detailed your yellow circle is now the window on a rocket okay this is awesome now make it a 3d model in blender opening blender you guys have been again it's demonstrating that they you know you think it and and the and ask ruckian do it for next seasons rainwear for retailers make sure that it feels really high and and that it's colorful make it fun right i can help with that can you go to ebay and make

16:42this listing of this table i bought a few years ago to flea market it's this wild orange table sure okay yeah this is awesome i want you to make a 3d game where i'm ducking asteroids using the arrow keys to move around and i'm using space to boost yep i'm building the game also i'm a little hungry can you get me some beef and rice from that spot i ordered from last week looking into ordering food so my law firm needs a licensing agreement template can you generate a draft template it is incredible and it will make your life significantly more efficient now i do think that human expertise is going to be needed in order to make what they're doing better right you're gonna have to play with the a i meaning that it is a tool that you use and it has a feedback okay fine put all your questions about a i to the side just on an economic level for a second a i is the only thing the only thing that is currently on the horizon that allows us to at least theoretically outgrow the massive debt problems that we are currently incurring which means the Bernie Sanders communist immediately wants to just like china quash a i he wants to kill it so here is Bernie Sanders an old man who doesn't know what a computer is explaining that the government should

17:46stop all of this if the leaders of the major a i companies acknowledge that they are losing control of their extremely dangerous technology to my mind it is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced and even more dangerous we need an immediate pause on advanced a i development and a permanent ban on super intelligence an artificial mind smarter than any human capable of operating independently beyond our control okay so what he's actually proposing apparently is a ban on what he calls so-called artificial super intelligence saying that a hum summer hacking spree by rogue open a agents had revealed the dangers of the technology getting out of control well again it was then brought under control and he said quote i understand that people will call me a logite that they will call me an alamist

18:50but i would rather be called an alamist and somebody fell asleep at the switch dude you're falling asleep in the middle of your oatmeal and the idea that Bernie Sanders is going to restrict innovation this person was not developed a useful thing his entire life and has been as i have said one million times at this point a leech on the ass of american society is astonishing it's astonishing unfortunately the anti tech blowback is quite real people are concerned about the future they they're used to the status quo where we can just spend money endlessly without ever having to pay for anything or increase productivity and so the anti tech backlash is very real it is reflecting in everything from opposition to data centers to a mythological issues with with flock and again flock is its own issue but what you are seeing is Republicans are trying to do a routine where they both support data centers but also are trying to find ways to rhetorically oppose data centers because again populism is the idea that the people are always right when in reality it turns out the people made tub something by tumble one by hit so sometimes the people are wrong in any case you were Senator Bernie Moreno doing this they're going to raise our electricity prices they're going to

19:56eventually put us out of work and our taxpayer dollars are going to support the construction of these things i mean the worst sales pitch in the history of sales bitches right who would be for that so we have to acknowledge that and say we screwed up that's not what this is about number one no tax incentives i don't want a single taxpayer dollar going to support a data center period i mean that's fine with me i'm fine with the taxpayer dollars but again the the kind of we have to we have to humor everybody in their opposition to data centers is a bad idea because what you're actually doing is you're incentivizing people to stop the development of the technologies that theoretically could save the economy so our politicians keep telling us that actually the way to fix the economy is not through deregulation or through innovation but through government subsidization subsidization and regulation and then politicians again on all sides of the out the state bipartisan issue the state uniparty thing now erects straw men in our in order to argue in favor of government involvement in the economy when in reality innovation and free

20:56markets are in fact the only way out yes that does not mean that capitalism is all pure joy because again Joseph Schumpeter the economist he's correct when he says there is creative destruction that when you build something new the old thing basically falls apart that when you build the car then all the wheel rights go unemployed but that is also the only roads for productivity and future growth and better things and better lifestyles and yes supporting gigantic welfare states so instead we have politicians who are basically just pandering and claiming that free markets are an elephant that you can ride and you can direct those free markets and again this is not unique to the left the right is doing this as well and i like secretary of state marco rubio quite a lot as i've made clear but when marco rubio says the democratic capitalism deindustrialized america what deindustrialized america was actually the machine the vast majority of jobs that were lost in the united states in the industrial sector were technology to away the reason that factories

21:57relocated was not because the worker in bangladesh is better than the worker in the united states is because we unionized capitalism in other words was not the problem it was the anti capitalism that was the problem here is secretary of state rubio there was this fantasy really that the whole world would become a free enterprise democracies and that everyone would look like us that ran into reality the reality that that is not how human events have ever worked that the nation states still does matter nationalism is still real national borders still matter and that countries are going to always act in their best interest but the result of it is that it deindustrialized america we lost our ability and our capacity to make things and not just big things not just the the kinds of big machinery and things that we normally identify with industry but even some of the most basic components that are necessary that underpin economic life especially in the 21st century again one of the big lies that you hear about the industrialization yes we deindustrialized in terms of fewer jobs in heavy manufacturing but we still make things we have an extraordinary

23:00productivity growth right the productivity growth in manufacturing is quite real manufacturing output from 1990 to 2024 grew at an average of 1.2 percent per year manufacturing hours worked declined 0.9 percent per year which means that manufacturing labor productivity grew 2.1 percent annually so fewer workers more things is actually what happened nowadays we have all these different tools and gadgets to optimize sleep trackers and apps rooms of users mouth tape supplements elaborate nighttime routines people are monitoring 17 different metrics to determine whether they successfully went unconscious for eight hours so maybe some of that has value but before you redesign your entire life around sleep you might want to consider what you're actually lying in every night you're betting this is why I continue to tell you about bull and branch they're betting makes your bed noticeably better without requiring you to develop a new lifestyle around it their sheets are made from 100 percent organic cotton they are woven specifically for airflow there's no synthetic cooling technology is simply the way the cotton is woven bull and branch sheets are incredibly soft breathable the quality is evident the moment you get into bed again I'm on bull and branch

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25:05try it for free at zippercrooter.com slash daily wire at zip recruiter dot com slash daily wire meet your match over at zippercrooter again try it for free right now zippercrooter.com slash daily wire if you need a better employees the best way to do it is zippercrooter why we use it here at daily where go check them out now zippercrooter.com slash daily wire but again if you keep saying that the government is the solution and that capitalism is the problem you end up in a position where you end up regulating away the innovation in the name of your preferred factory rebuilt in your in your dying industrial town or whatever this is what jade vans is promoting yesterday again jade vans and and mark will be very much on the same page economically actually in some ways you need of course a healthy financial sector to get investments into the right industries into the right companies to support the amazing entrepreneurs some of whom we have here today but you cannot run an economy entirely on services and finance you have to have a foundation and that foundation is always going to be making stuff and that's of course what manufacturing is

26:11that principle has really underlined i would say all of the trump administration's economic policies okay but when you keep saying that sort of stuff you know what's not making stuff in the way that you like people not working with their hands not people not working with their hands data centers right so basically our fiscal house is on fire and we've already decided that we as a country not going to put out that fire by restructuring our entitlements right we are not going to put water on that fire no way and now we are going to lock all the doors and borrow the windows and burn alive in the house because we know that if we open the windows or open the doors that might mean technological developments that we can't control and this brings us to our fourth story challenges on the foreign front so according to the associated press the european union on Wednesday weighed how to best respond to an attempted drone attack at a german airport blamed on russia but struggle to find new ways to meet the challenge without resorting to military means yeah it turns out when people attack you sometimes have to use your military the german government said Tuesday russia was responsible for a failed attack at life sick at heli airport on august 4th using a drone

27:15laden with explosives they announced they would shut down a russian consulate among other measures the drone was found near a ukrainian cargo plane the device was diffused the airport is a major international freight hub used for providing support to ukrain so the french and the germans are protesting strongly while i'm sure that the russians will take that under advisement meanwhile the leader of the uk conservative party says that russia could certainly attack a natal country's kemy badknock russia could certainly attack a natal country by 2030 russia could launch an attack on natal as soon as 2030 not enough politicians in parliament have fully appreciated what that means and by that of course i mean labor politicians what this means is that within the next four years the uk could be at war with the world's biggest nuclear armed state because under article five and attack on any natal country is an attack on all of them

28:19and she's not wrong about that obviously russia is pushing back against nato in the belief that the united states is not going to answer the article five call or in the belief that basically if you attack any of the balltex if you attack latvia lithua lithonia estonia then everybody will just go well you know that's a thing that happens meanwhile the chinese are harassing japan according to the wall street journal japanese surveillance has recorded chinese destroyers passing through the straight near amami oshimai at least ten times this year that follows zero such transit in twenty twenty five it is on pace to exceed the fifteen recorded in twenty twenty four japan is facing what it's official describe as the most severe security environment since world war two china is flexing its growing military might pressing its maritime claims across eastern asia and pushing deep or into the western pacific where the united states has held sway for years so here's the thing our enemies since our weakness china russia they believe we're vulnerable and they're challenging us because of it well what's the reason for that well first of all we kind of made ourselves vulnerable we decided to fund our entire welfare state on the basis of debt

29:22china owns about six hundred billion dollars of our bond if they even threatened to sell them tomorrow guess what happens to the bond markets they crater still further a russia and china and a ron all of our enemies in the end are banking on something else that united states we make the same choice that the british empire once made and essentially we decide to embrace declining welfare is instead of economic and military health so as i said right at the top empires typically die because they run out of money but that can happen in a couple of ways you can run out of money a couple of ways before the advent of democracy and capitalism empires were very largely supported by their imperialism you invade a foreign state you strip it of its resources you bring that back home so roam would conquer foreign lands in order to spread the money around at home or extended territorial holdings empires like spain would do so not because they wanted a welfare state at home but because they felt a divine duty to extend territorial holdings catholics at expense of protestant or against the Ottoman empire or growing in the new world right and then you overextend you run out

30:24of money since the advent of democratic capitalism that's not necessarily how it works in essence empires now choose suicide by welfare is so the uk is a great example of this right the british empire the son never set on it presiding over territories literally all across the world ranging from the far east to the new world well after world wars one and two the uk basically decided to trade in a tempire for welfare is at home it wasn't fully intentional they thought they could create as former british prime minister climate at least at a welfare commonwealth but it turns out that's unaffordable because you can't run endless guns and endless butter and it turns out the butter is actually way more expensive than guns wealth herism is unaffordable and this means that the uk is at best a second rate power this is what poet philip larkin described in his poem homage to a government he wrote next year we are to bring all the soldiers home for lack of money and it is all right places they guarded or kept orderly must guard themselves and keep themselves orderly we want the money for

31:25ourselves at home instead of working and this is all right it's hard to say who wanted it to happen but now it's been decided nobody minds the places are a long way off not here which is all right and from what we hear the soldiers there only made trouble happen next year we shall be easier in our minds next year we shall be living in a country that brought its soldiers home for lack of money the stash is will still be standing in the same tree muffled squares and look nearly the same our children will not know it's a different country all we can hope to leave them now is money now as it turns out you can't even hope to leave the money because when you let the welfare is in conquer your society you end up with low growth rates over regulation no one's working and so you end up importing gigantic swaths of people who hate your society and that is the story of great written now again i'll go back to one of those charts that we looked at at the very beginning here government spending in the united states look at the spending by category look at the spending by category so we have been told that national defense is where we spent all my right it was the wars is where we spent all of our money nope wrongo and on this chart it is the gigantic yellow line that is the vast increase in spending look at the size of that line in 1962

32:32look at the size of that line in 2020 hit the vast expansion of our welfare state is the thing that is bankrupting us this by the way is historically true in the united states and during the Vietnam war lbj was actually told by his own cabinet that he would eventually have to choose between guns like the Vietnam war and butter the war on poverty he told his cabinet to lie and say that we actually didn't have to choose there's no choice right this is what populism is about populism is about telling you the lie that you never have to make a choice you have everything you can have no innovation high rates of welfare you can have all the things you can have a strong military without having to pay for it nothing will ever end up coming home to roost when asked publicly during the Vietnam war about the choice between guns and butter lbj literally said there is no choice we don't have to choose who's asked this in july 1965 do you have any idea right now though that down the road of peace the american people may have to face the problem of guns or butter i have not the size

33:37doubt with whatever it's necessary to face the american people will face i think that all of us know that we are now in the 52nd month of the prosperity that's been unequaled in this nation and i see no reason for declaring a national emergency and i did not i rejected that course of action earlier today when i made my decision i cannot foresee what next year the following year the following the whole i only know that the americans will do whatever's necessary and uh at the moment we enjoy the good fortune of having an unparalleled period of prosperity with us and this government is going to do all it came to see it continue so never making a choice here's what ends up happening here's what government spending looked like percentage change year over year during the lbj term 11% average year over year increase and by the way most of the consequences for that were actually pushed off beyond lbj's term in the 1970s sucked they were really bad massive stagflation meaning

34:39stagnation and inflation military defeat again he was able to delay it but then it hit and by the way we're still paying for both today because all of lbj's welfare programs that he put in place in the 60s are way bigger today and we still have a Vietnam syndrome with regard to american military might which is why we have not won a hot war since we're still mired in all of this so no what's happening right now isn't that we're spending too much on our military we need to bring it back home and spend it at home that is again populist crap it's untrue to fundamental level what's happening is that there are a lot of people on all sides are perfectly willing to give up on american global leadership destroy the freedom of the seas facilitate the rise of russia and china and to it all in the name of a corrupt bankrupt welfare state they'll run out of money and throttle the economy sooner rather than later i know it's depressing but this is why we need to talk truth here we need to talk some turkey now the founders new hall this this is not a shot because they knew their history read the federalist papers references to roman history about and they would have been appalled by

35:41all of this it's why they opposed governmental welfareism on a federal level it's why it is not a delegated power of the federal government it's why they also opposed the rule of the mob because they knew that he got three guys in a room and two vote to rob the other guy that's still not okay and they knew that the rule of the mob and welfareism and decline are two sides of the same coin so i james madison said i go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse and in a representative government a greater than and any other so i penchantman franklin said think what you do when you run into that you give another power over your liberty it's why jeferson said i sincerely believe the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of is but swindling futurity on a large scale it's why washington in his famous fair well address said avoid likewise the accumulation of debt not only by shunning occasions of expense but by visorix vigorous exertions in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may evocation not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear

36:44again this is why we are fundamentally unserious about politics right now so paul ryan i know a lot of people upset about paul ryan former speaker of the house he wasn't sufficiently pro-trump okay there are many areas in which i disagree with paul ryan but paul ryan may have been the last actual fiscal conservative in a position of power in the united states government he was not remotely wrong about our spending addiction and he is not remotely wrong now and he says that our politics is fundamentally unserious here he was on cnbc yesterday is the overtoned window in our politics is open for all these crazy ideas but it's closed for like things like debt reduction yep yep so when people talk about the uniparty let us be clear there is in fact a uniparty the only question right now in american politics when it comes to the future of size and scope of america government seems to be how we ought to rearrange the debt chairs on the titanic the democrats want to stack all those debt chairs directly at the firm of the boat in front of the iceberg and republicans seem to want to pack them nearer the back of the boat and delay it a little bit but nobody is arguing that we ought to change course even as the titanic clouds into the

37:48iceberg that turns out all the passengers are cheering because populism now when we talk about governmental corruption one of the best reporters on the scene today is chris rufo from man had an institute has a brand report talking about how california's medicaid system medical basically was built for some forty million dollars allegedly by some fraudsters here's part of his report this is a brand new twenty eight million dollar mansion in hidden hills california next to the Kardashian house but the man who owns this property isn't a pop star or CEO he's a respiratory therapist named kirtis kirk kovah and he got rich by bill in california's medicaid system more than forty million dollars and as his business raked in the cash kirtis and his husband christian flaunted their new wealth online they bought these houses flew on these jets and partied in the most exclusive places in the world we spent months following the money trail and found

38:53something very strange there's no evidence that their company even exists john mjelline is chris rufo senior fellow over at man had an institute and probably the nation's chief investigative reporter on all matters involving governmental fraud chris thanks much for taking time to appreciate it it's great to be with you so you have this extraordinary story out today about the defrauding of the california government again and not gigantically shocking that the california government is being defrauded this story is pretty extraordinary however yeah that's right i mean it's no surprise now that california is riddled with fraud are reporting from earlier this year indicates that there might be as much as fifty billion dollars a year from the california budget just disappearing to organized criminal gangs but in this case the the scale of the fraud and the brazeness was really shocking a respiratory therapist someone selling breathing tubes plastic products bills medicaid forty million dollars and then spends millions of dollars on private jets luxury cars resort travel

39:59and a twenty eight million dollar mansion next door to the cardations and post all of it on social media uh... the experts told us it has all the red flags for medicaid fraud so you know what are those red flags that people ought to be looking for because again it's very easy for for people who engage into fronting the government to claim that they're actually providing services the system seems incredibly easy to game frankly so what are the red flags that you were looking for so what we did is the federal government under the trump administration released all medicaid data for a certain number of years and we used ai tools to find outliers so businesses that had irregular patterns had the possibility of double billing had huge ramp ups in in revenues so for example in this case with the curcove a business uh... it's a business called hero care they went from something like seven thousand dollars to seventeen million dollars uh... in a very short time frame and then after we had that initial hit what we did is we hit the ground and so we went to every named business we searched every possible record we went through all of the real estate

41:04filings and we started knocking on doors and every place where they had listed a business when we went there the business was gone and so by the end of our reporting which took a number of months uh... you know we saw this business that in theory was pulling in twenty million dollars a year there was no sign of the business there was no working phone number there was no working website there was not even a trace of economic activity that we could find uh... the whole thing was kind of a ghost that was funding this lifestyle and now the white house task force on fraud has opened an inquiry to this and so i'm anticipating that if our reporting pans out our suspicions are proven uh... by prosecutors we may see these people uh... end up in a jail so now what's amazing about all this is you as you point out is that this couple's gay couple that was that was pushing this business behind this business they were they were flaunting this stuff online there there's an actual meme of them on instagram showing one of the members of the couple opening a box of shoes while malding a meme quote it's when you buy something for your business

42:07and the government pays you back for it which um... i mean pretty pretty brazen stuff did they just think that nobody was ever going to notice this i mean that that is indicative of how widespread the fraud is yeah i i think one of the commonalities in all these fraud investigations we've done is that people may start with a little bit of fraud uh... but then they go a little bit more they go a little bit more and then they really blow it out in year two or year three because they figured out the dirty little secret of medicaid which is that the government is not checking is not prosecuting is not putting people in jail and so they have a series of these easter eggs and their social media including one where they're uh... sitting in a private jet and the caption reads something like it's giving narcos vibes but the money's clean and so you have to think if you are scamming or potentially allegedly scamming the government um... the last thing you want to do is be posting your luxurious lifestyle on social media and yet in so many cases and in cases that we're reporting on right now

43:10they're doing precisely that there's almost no effort to conceal what is at best a scam and at worst outright theft now one of the things that's incredible about all this is of course the rates on medicare fraud and state level medicare fraud medicale for example enormous so city journal has reported that hhs sources estimate medicales fraud rate which is the state version is twenty five percent one quarter of all dollars are just going to fraud in medicales since 2019 and part of this Chris is the fact that you have an incentive structure where if you are a member of the infrastructure at medicale or medicaid the way that you brag to the public about what you're doing is by saying how much money you've expended you don't actually have to show that there's any actual outcome from the expenditure of the money you don't have to show better health outcomes for medicade or from medicare you say we spent this much money which shows how much we care number of dollars equals amount that we care yeah I guess you could have it on the Kardashian scale how many Kardashian mansions did you fund and therefore the outcome is good but listen to

44:12the numbers in california under gavin newsome when he took office it was about a hundred billion dollars a year on his medical program and then now he's leaving office it's about two hundred billion dollars per year so the program has doubled while california's population for the first time ever has slightly declined and so you're asking is our health care outcomes in california twice as good as they were before no and some measures they're slightly worse and so what this really means is that when you hear dsa politician saying medicare for all it may sound good it may feel good it may have in some cases good intentions but what happens on the other side of that is a government run health care system is a magnet for fraud not just for people in the united states but people all over the world one of the amazing things I heard from an investigator as we were reporting out this story is that he estimates that the majority of funds that are stolen from medicade at some point exit the united states of america and so we're making people rich all around the world

45:17we're not improving health outcomes for americans and politicians like gavin news some just kind of skate on the top of it hoping that no one will notice now because one of the things that we've been talking about a lot on the show is that there's a poll that came out this week that shows 90 percent of americans is totally bipartisan believe that the government is corrupt and there's massive corruption in the government and of course they are one hundred percent right i'm shocked that that number isn't actually higher because there is extraordinary corruption in the government but i think that people separate off in their own minds between the size of government and the amount of corruption in government and that is not logically possible to do the reality is that when you have government become a giant grab bag of cash subsidies regulations of course you're increasing the possible scope of corruption if you had a small wheeled government that you were capable of actually directing in its proper channels no one cares about trying to you rob the bank as john delinja said because that's where the money is and you go to corruption because that's where you can actually get away with it and the reality is that when the government is this big and this intrusive and this rich because they have a bunch of taxpayer dollars in the coffers or they're just building future

46:20taxpayers of course it's going to be corrupt yeah that's a really important point and there's an old Milton Friedman line that i think summarizes this dynamic very well he says in effect when person a uses the money of person b to pay person c the incentives all across that transmission line becomes skewed and then people don't have a personal sense of interest like if it's money coming into my bank account i'm going to actually be pretty careful about it and pretty concerned about it but if i take your money and give it to this person and i never see that line of transmission i'm going to have little invested in keeping that system accountable and so when you have a rapid scaling up of the size of government you're inevitably going to have a rapid scaling up in fraud and so we're seeing that throughout the system and look the left is very shrewdly pivoted from woke one to woke two the cultural frame on race and gender to this economic frame on affordability Medicare for all etc the right has to come up with a powerful counter argument i think that's

47:23counter argument is to show exactly where that money ends up it ends up in the hands of people like you know Curtis Kirkkova or Nigerian fraudsters or Somali autism scammers and so that to me is a really important storyline that we have to be hammering on i know you guys have been covering it at the daily wire great reporting from lucroziac and i think nothing is more important in this fight that's coming now then reanimating some of these economic arguments adapting them to the current times current conditions current preferences but never never giving in on this idea that we want to have unlimited government unlimited spending that's the road to ruin last christopher roofo probably again the nations and most most impressive political reporter when it comes to uncovering waste fraud and views christ thanks so much for the time you check out all of his work over at manhattan institute city journal thanks ben meanwhile the other big story of the day springs from tucker carlsson so as we've been discussing for years at this point tucker carlsson is not a

48:26conservative not in any market way at all and of course this week he came out and basically back to obdu al-saia the pro jihadi america hating democratic senate candidate in michigan a jadee vans is very closely aligned with tucker carlsson of course very close friends with tucker carlsson is repeated this ad nauseam who's asked yesterday at the white house about his relationship with tucker carlsson and here is his answer tucker is a friend despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things and i'm not going to play the game where i throw friends under the bus because i have political disagreements with them i think that is a terrible place for the united states to go okay nobody is saying you have to quote unquote throw a friend under the bus because you have a political disagreement as we'll discuss in a moment i'm not sure that when your friend is standing for nazi historians or alternatively cheering for comedians who mock arica kirk or bringing on guests who call your wife a jeet i'm not sure that that is a person that you just

49:27have a political disagreement with but on a political level this is totally inept again i'll get to the more alain is second but it's totally inept because what vans is doing here is totally defanging the entire campaign against lsi ed connecting him with the son piker because lsi ed is exactly the same thing about his on piker that jade vans is saying about tucker carlsson like exactly the same thing here is lsi ed on piker you know on steven a smith show the idea that you just categorically disavow an individual that to me doesn't make sense given that there are going to be things that people say that you deeply disagree with even one of those things america port 9-11 on itself and then he is about it and then he just abouted himself steven like this not a consistent reading of what the man actually thinks again this taking that campaign away from republicans because you have a personal relationship with a public figure tucker carlsson is a wild thing to do and again if jade vans thinks that this is somehow going to not come up all the way from here until 2028 he's

50:30delusional and now he's giving almost word for word the same defenses of tucker carlsson and his nut jobery the paracobama gave about psychotic reverend cherimai right back in 2008 and this helps explain perhaps my relationship with reverend right as imperfect as he may be he has been like family to me he strengthens my faith officiated my wedding and baptized my children i can no more disown him than i can disown the black community i can no more disown him than i can disown my white grandmother i mean that was insane at the time and now we got jade vans doing the same thing again this is politically enough it's politically enough okay but actually then there's the moral question okay so the question here is not whether jade vans hangs out with tucker and

51:30goes on fishing trips he can see jade vans trying to avoid the question i say well i'm personal friends of tucker i'm not going to announce my friends hey lots of people have lots of nutty friends nobody's asking that i mean some people care about that there's some people who make the argument that at a certain point you probably should stop being friends with people because what you have with them is not a political disagreement but a moral disagreement that sure you could have a friend who believes things so morally egregious you probably shouldn't be friends with them so for example if your friend were to be the world's most sympathetic ear to not the apologist i don't know that's maybe a reason not to be friends with them i think i just want to i can tell you hit compliments but i just want to say i think you are the most important popular historian working in the United States today or let's say that your friend were to laugh at conspiracy theories implicating the widow of charlie kirk in charlie's murder but you're really good friends with charlie but your other friend was laughing at conspiracy theories and bolstering them implicating tpsa

52:34and all the rest in charlie kirk i don't know that might not be like a person you definitely need to be friends with takes the gun apart leaves the screwdriver there puts it under a tile spider man's his way off the top of a building runs across campus with the gun apparently under towel nobody sees this he runs into the woods puts the gun back together again without the screwdrivers irregular reggaver this guy and then he hides the gun in the backyard of a house owned by palanter and if you think anything else besides that you're a crazy Jew hating conspiracy nut i mean like if your friend i don't know we're to host say america's most famous pro nazi streamer you know a person who labeled your own wife adirty jeet and were to actually say that that person is a better person than Ted Cruz because Ted Cruz supports it i don't know do you have yeah i'm not gonna tell you you can't be friends but that person but i mean sometimes it's not just a political disagreement who do you think is more morally repulsive Ted Cruz

53:38who do you think it's more morally repulsive Ted Cruz Ted Cruz is a sitting US senator who has called for the killing of people who did nothing wrong whole populations who advocated for this war nick frentis is like a kid he's like 26 or 70 he has no power except his words now again you might say that these are not just mere political disagreements that this person seems like not a great person with whom you should be friends but here is the thing about me on a personal level i don't actually care very much about the friendship thing i don't care whether the vice president and tucker goes square dancing or barn raising in main or demon hunting in the forest together i don't care it makes no difference to me i said the same exact thing to Megan Kelly when she defended cannis oland on the basis of friendship well cannis oland's was slandering erica curts you give me friends with whoever you want but not every one of your friends ought to be a nationally important voice here's what i do care about i care if the vp things the tucker

54:39Carlson is a valuable voice in the movement that i inhabit because here's the thing the vp has been extraordinarily praiseworthy of tucker Carlson views throughout the last few years where he was in twenty twenty one talking about his meeting with tucker Carlson i'll never forget the the first time that i ever met tucker Carlson was at a jp morgan event where he's favorite yeah where i listened to what he said and then he listened to what i said and we like both found each other and were like oh my god you're the guy who's exactly right about what's going on in the country and i ever since then have thought to myself the person who is most challenging to the world view of people who i think are harming communities like mine is is tucker hey that's back in twenty twenty one and of course more recently in December twenty twenty five when i suggested that perhaps there ought to be some ideological border control in conservatism specifically mentioning tucker both heritage foundation

55:43and then also a tpu essay jade vans then went on stage at tpu essay and said no no one must no one there there are no lines must ever be drawn and then he went on sarba maris podcast on unheard and sarba marie asked him quote a lot of people want you to weigh in on one side of that they want you to denounce directly the grippers and maybe tucker carlson friends retaining the grippers will you and um vans for it said first of all i don't think tucker carlson is a gripper okay and he says tucker's a friend of mine and do i have disagreements with tucker carlson sure i have disagreements with most of my friends especially those who work in politics you know this most people who know me know this i'm also a very loyal person i'm not going to get into the business of throwing friends under the bus right same exact stick that he used yesterday here's the important part quote i can express substantive disagreements with them but i find the idea that tucker carlson was one of the largest podcasts in the world was millions of listeners who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election who supported me in the 2024 election the idea that his views are completely anathema to conservatism that he has no place in the conservative movement is frankly absurd and i don't think

56:45anybody actually believes it that is a direct quote that is a direct quote from jade vans and then he goes on to say that you know if you are if you are anti-Semitic or promoting anti-Semitism you don't have a place in the conservative movement which i'm okay i mean it's a little weird it's a little weird because you know like is tucker carlson still a vital voice in the conservative move i don't care whether he is going to dinner with tucker carlson in his off hours and other people didn't ask whether you ought to have friends who pursue the same kinds of bullshit that tucker does on a regular basis but that's your problem lots of people have lots of crazy friends do you think tucker carlson is a vital voice inside conservatism and if you do why considering that this is the same man who says that israelis and zionis and neocons run the american government that the president is literally a slave to the zionis that he ought to be impatient that in fact the president jade vans is boss and running mate might in fact be the anti-Christ

57:45here's a leader who's mocking the gods of his ancestors mocking the god of gods and insulting himself above them could this be the anti-Christ well who knows i mean i don't know is he is he an important voice in conservatism you know the guy who actively is campaigning now for pro jihad the america haters in actual elections today why are they running him again anybody wants only that microtures this really uh i would i wouldn't vote for microtures at gunpoint there's no one who should be farther from a position of power than microtures i mean is this an important voice in conservat right that's the question and jade vans knows that's the question so that's why he's avoiding the question by talking about friendship no one cares dude i don't care where they grab coffee i don't care where they go shopping together i don't care if you smoke cigars in the back room doesn't matter to me is he an important voice that you think ought to be a crucial part of your coalition going forward in terms of

58:46defining the policy you know the guy who says openly the america ought to swivel toward towards multi polarity and seed global power to russia and china and then you know heads off to russia to blow Vladimir Putin and to a russian grocery stores there we go so i guess you put in ten rubles here and you get it back when you put the card back so it's free but there's an incentive to return it and not just bring it to your homeless in camp okay this is the uh grocery card escalator this is designed i'm figuring this out now where the wheels don't move they lock on the grocery card escalator look mod no hands this is some vital conservatism we're watching right now is vital conservatism or is it really vital to the conservative movement to have people who say that they're they would not support the republican party because it's not loyal to the united states you're the current republican vice president of the united states running for the nomination of the republican party that's the question i would not support the republican party there's no

59:51chance i would support the republican party not to support the democratic party i don't know what i'm going to do but at this point you know how could you support how could i or any american voter support a political party that's not loyal to the united states that puts the interest of a foreign country above those of its own citizens like i think that's that's you know it's not possible to vote for people like that so um is tucker carolson still a vital voice that's the question for the VP and if so how so and if why then why why those are the questions that jd vans is going to face from now until the twenty twenty eight election and here's the thing maybe he is doing this truly out of friendship maybe tucker is just such an awesome hang that he wishes to put his own political career online for a person who has no problem harming him again put aside the primaries where again the vice president is right now the prohibitive favorite but if you think that the media isn't going to notice that jd vans has super glued himself to tucker carolson your nuts and that is going to

1:00:51come along with a political and yes a moral cost okay meanwhile over in venez just in case you are unaware of how wildly left these film festivals are over the venez film festival everybody there started chanting free Palestine which again you know who loves you know who loves left wing movies glorifying homosexuality and transgenderism is the people of gaza love it they're super into it just to air drop all those movies from the venez film festival into the gaza strip and people they'll just drop any of these actors into the gaza strip and they they will do great here's how it was going in the venez film festival all the suicidal west here the suicidal artist community but this is what venez is i mean not a shock not a shock over at the venez film festival i can't imagine how they made their selection i'll tell you what will not be appearing at the venez film

1:01:54festival because it actually says that for example radical islam is bad our film coming in just a couple of weeks it's going to be awesome run hide fight infidel it's awesome we just launched the epic final trailer for run hide fight infidel so if you watch the studio film in the last decade or so you'll recognize something that you haven't seen in a while you know a story about red blooded american good guys fighting the bad guys it's big it's loud it has heroes you can root for and of course it takes on the invasion of the united states by radical islam it's streaming on the daily wire september 16 here's the trailer take a look every significant movement in history started with protesting this is our generation civil rights have no idea what the protest is about bingo given the current climate should have figured as polarizing as place founders even be allowed on pants okay hear me okay thought this is a close personal friend of chancellor freeman this is a decision i cannot find islam will conquer the west

1:02:57are we paying attention they've taken over the building their downstairs and they've blocked the doors i seek forgiveness from ala vio miti we cannot run and hide mohamid is the messenger of god there is no god but ala what do you say we turn those vessel bees into a fine red mist as we move one man will cover while the other guys go they call that leave prog stretch them out with listen you need a course in safe weapons handling but you don't so again don't expect to see it in Venice but you can see it only at daily wire because we are making the entertainment no one else well the movie's fun it's awesome you're going to enjoy the friends and it's some things no one else is going to say already folks who reached the end of the show will be back here tomorrow with much more i'm bench bro this is the bench bro show