President Trump delivered a prime time address on affordability, but didn't make a dent. Plus, heritage Americans or creedal Americans to debate breaking out on the right first, and exactly one week on Christmas Day, episodes one and two of the Pendragon cycle rise of the Merlin, we can stream it for daily wire plus all access members. Here's the truth. No one else was ever going to make this.
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Become a daily wire plus member right now during our Christmas Day. We'll get 40% off new annual memberships at dailywire.com slash subscribe. President Trump last night attempted a reset of the first year of his presidency. Not really a reset in the sense that he's not actually redoing his policy, but a narrative reset.
An attempt to seize the narrative away from a left which keeps saying the word affordability after the victory of Zorn Mamdani in that New York mayoral election. He's trying to seize back the narrative. And last night, he successfully did that in one sense and unsuccessfully in another sense. Yes, Americans are now talking about affordability.
Yes, the President of the United States did address that head on in the speech. No, it wasn't an amazing performance. And all those things can be true at once. So first you sort of have to set the scene.
The President has been experiencing historically low approval ratings. The President obviously is looking forward to the midterm elections and Republicans are not in the mid-term elections. They're down on the generic congressional ballot by significant amount at this point. If the elections were held today, high likelihood that Republicans would lose somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 seats.
With that said, the President is attempting to convince Americans that things are getting better. And he happens to be right on that. He happens to be correct that the economy is indeed improving in market in obvious ways. And so last night, he announced that he was going to be doing a nationwide address, a national address.
Now, that is a kind of throwback. The reality is the President can now speak to the entire nation. Whenever he pleases, he could go live on the White House page anytime he wants. We no longer exist in the era of three networks in which the President declares a national address, all three networks go to him, and then everybody in America watches it.
So the ratings on these sorts of addresses just are not what they used to be. If the President wishes to get attention, he's a master at it. He doesn't have to do a national address. And so when someone does a national address, people sort of expect that there will be something groundbreaking happening.
And there were some outlandish predictions by podcasters who are generally inaccurate in the information they provide their audiences. Those predictions were taken quite seriously by many people in the online space. Predictions that Trump was calling a national address in order to announce that we were invading Venezuela or something. But that's not what happened.
The President instead did a national address about the state of the economy. And there were some very good things that he did here. I think it was great that he showed charts. It was sort of a Reagan-esque move.
President Reagan used to do this back in the 80s. He would do a national address. And he would take out actual charts and try to educate the American people about what was happening. And President Trump did that last night.
So for example, he showed Joe Biden's price increases and Trump's price decreases in a wide variety of areas ranging from hotel rates up 37.4% under Joe Biden down 5.1% under Donald Trump to propane rates 24.9% up under Biden down 4.2% under Trump gasoline up nearly 31% under Joe Biden down 7% under Trump sporting events up nearly 50% under Joe Biden down almost 10% under Trump. Those are all good things to show the American people. Now, there is one problem with that, which is that when you look at a chart like that, you think that the baseline price, the baseline price has gone down from where it was before Joe Biden. But that's not true if the price rises 40% under Joe Biden and then comes down 10% under Donald Trump.
Well, it's still way higher than it was before Joe Biden took office. And that's the embedded part of the economy that President Trump is not really going to be able to wipe away. Yours of inflation cannot be wiped away absent. Some sort of economic downturn.
But the President is right to point out wage increases. Real wage increases under his tenure. Wage decreases under Joe Biden. The Prime Minister wage growth average $1,048 since he returns to the White House versus losses of almost $3,000 under Joe Biden.
The President showed the new yearly mortgage cost increase under Joe Biden up almost $15,000 versus Trump's newly yearly mortgage cost decrease down almost $3,000. And when he points out Obamacare, he says it's not the Republicans fault. It's the Democrats fault. It's the unaffordable care act.
And that, of course, is true as well. So one of the questions is why Americans aren't feeling it. And this has been the big question. We've been asking it here on the program for a while.
Why do Americans not seem to be feeling it? So I think there are a few reasons. One obviously is that Americans expectations of what's going to happen. What the amounts they pay is that it's going to actively go markedly down, not just from where it was last year, but from where it was three or four years ago.
Because if you radically inflate prices and then you decrease them marginally, people are still going to feel pretty pressed. So that's number one. Number two, many of the items the President is citing as having dropped in price are not the items that Americans most commonly buy. The number one complaint you will hear from Americans right now about pricing is in the grocery markets.
Supermarkets are where people feel pressed. If you're going and you are shopping for a family of four for a week of food, you're now paying in some cases 30, 40% more than you were just three or four years ago. And if the places that you most often shop are the places where you feel the most inflation and most unaffordability, that's what's going to stick in your mind. Yes, mortgage rates might be down.
But how many people are actually taking out a new mortgage this year in the United States? The answer is not all that many. So I asked our friends, our sponsors, over at Combat Project of Proplexity, what are the items Americans shop for most frequently? Because this is a great way of trying to determine how Americans are feeling.
If the thing you buy most frequently is up in price, you're going to feel pressed. If the thing you buy once every 20 years is down in price, you're not going to feel that quite as much because your last comp wasn't last year. Your last comp was probably 10 years ago or 15 or 20 years ago. If your last mortgage was taken out at 2.5% under the George W.
Bush administration. And your new mortgage is being taken out at 5.75% under the Trump administration. You're going to feel like things are more expensive. Even though the mortgage rates are down from where they were a year or two ago.
So asking comment, what are the items Americans shop for most frequently? Americans most frequently shop for everyday staples like groceries, basic household supplies, personal care items, and clothing, both in-store and online. Not coincidentally, those are the areas where you have seen an elevation in prices with groceries and particularly with clothing. When you take a look at mortgages, the question is, because the President's sighted mortgage rates coming down, which is true, what percentage of Americans take out a mortgage every year?
There's no official statistic for what percentage of Americans take out a mortgage each year according to our friends over a comment, but available data implied that only a small single digit share of adults do so in a typical year. Using recent mortgage origination counts and population figures, a reasonable ballpark is roughly 2 to 3% of US population every year. So if you're citing as an example of costs going down, mortgage rates going down. Only a small percentage of Americans are actually going to feel that in the moment and even the ones who are feeling it are not comparing the mortgage rates they could have gotten last year to this year.
They're comparing many of them. The mortgage rate that they took out 10 years ago to when they're getting this year and it was 10 years ago. That's why Americans are feeling pressed. With that said, it is good for the President to get specific.
I've been urging the President to get specific. I think it's very good that he did. Truly. And again, the delivery is another question.
I don't think it was his best delivery last night. But I've been saying for a while that affordability is a weasel word. Affordability is vague. Affordability is a feeling.
You can't go around to people and ask them, are things affordable and expect them to say yes. Virtually no one who is not quite wealthy and doesn't think about costs thinks of things as affordable. For most of my life, everything felt unaffordable. And then at a certain point, we achieved a certain level of income where everything felt affordable.
But you kind of have to move way up in the income ladder in order for things to feel affordable, generally speaking. Where you're not really thinking about it. Because when you think about whether things are affordable or not, what you mean is, am I thinking about the price of the thing that I'm buying? Are there certain areas of your life?
We're not thinking about the price of the thing that you're buying. Affordability is a feeling. It's not a statistical fact. So the President trying to drill down and get into the stats, which is sort of counterintuitive.
He doesn't like to do this too much. I think it's actually quite good. We'll get to more on this in a moment. First, this episode is sponsored by our friends over at Birch Gold.
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PureTalk.com. So you guys started. So the president last night led off by saying that he inherited a mess and he's fixing it. This is true.
Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess and I'm fixing it. When I took office, inflation was the worst in 48 years and some would say in the history of our country, which caused prices to be higher than ever before, making life unaffordable for millions and millions of Americans. This happened during a Democrat administration. And it's when we first began hearing the word affordability.
Our border was open and because of this, our country was being invaded by an army of 25 million people. And President Trump then went on to go after the left. Here it was. For the last four years, the United States was ruled by politicians who fought only for insiders, illegal aliens, career criminals, corporate lobbyists, prisoners, terrorists, and above all foreign nations, which took advantage of us at levels never seen before.
They flooded your cities and towns with illegal aliens. They decimated your hard-earned savings. They indoctrinated your children with hate for America. Really?
I mean, they just released a level of violent felons that we had never seen to prey on innocent. They caused war. They caused mayhem. They caused a horrible situation all over the globe.
But now you have a president who fights for the law-abiding hard-working people of our country, the ones who make this nation run. Now, again, the president is right about all this. I know there was a lot of criticism of the president last night. This was pointless.
Why are we doing this? What are we watching? Okay, that's true. But the question is, are you talking about the thing that he said?
So maybe you're talking about the way in which he said it fine, but are you talking about the things that he actually said? If so, then it actually is a political victory. And this is something that I've had to learn. It's a political observer over the course of Trump's two terms now.
Because I also tend to look at the framework of how did he say it? Was it beautifully performed? And one of the things you realize in watching President Trump is that President Trump is fine with giving a mediocre performance as long as the spotlight is on him. And so bringing the spotlight back to him to talk about things he wants to talk about, even if you don't like the performance, is a way of redirecting the attention to a topic that he wants to talk about, which is what he did successfully last night.
So President Trump started talking about his tax cuts, which of course are in economic victory. Next year, you will also see the results of the largest tax cuts in American history that were really accomplished through our great big, beautiful bill, perhaps the most sweeping legislation ever passed in Congress. We wrapped 12 different bills up into one beautiful bill. That includes no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors.
Under these cuts, many families will be saving between $11,000 and $20,000 a year, and next spring is projected to be the largest tax refund season of all time. Okay, he also went on to discuss bringing the economy back by bringing prices down, which is the thing most people are concerned about right now. Here at home, we're bringing our economy back from the brink of ruin to last administration and their allies in Congress looted our treasury for trillions of dollars, driving up prices and everything at levels never seen before. I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast.
Okay, so again, this was an attempt to shift the conversation. And I think that it will be the beginning of a sustained campaign to do precisely that. Now, of course, all of that relies on the economy continuing to hold up, the economy continuing to be good. It relies on economic growth, it relies on wage increases, it relies on a continued flattening of the cost curve when it comes to inflation.
Right now, a lot of Republicans in purple districts quite worry because they're looking at the polls and they can see themselves losing their seats. And this resulted yesterday in four vulnerable House Republicans rebelling against Speaker Mike Johnson, and backing a Democratic effort to force a vote on extending ACA subsidies that will be Obamacare, exposing GOP fractures over surging health care costs headed into next year's midterm elections as a courting to the Wall Street Journal. And of course, when we talk about surging costs, what we mean is that Joe Biden put into place subsidies that expired, those subsidies in expiring jack up costs. But the subsidies never should have been in place in the first place.
The subsidies were actually part of the jacking up of the cost because when you subsidize a thing, what you get typically is a higher price. This is true anywhere and everywhere that the government pours money on a fire. Representative Mike Lawler of New York joined three Republicans from Pennsylvania swing districts in signing a petition led by House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, that forced a vote on a three-year extension of enhanced Obamacare subsidies. The lawmakers acted after GOP leaders blocked votes on compromise measures aimed at extending and trimming the subsidies, saying the needs of their voters were urgent.
And again, the reason for that presumably is these purple district Republicans need to go back home and say, listen, I worked in bipartisan fashion to try to avoid that spike in your Obamacare premiums. And if we get it done, it's not my fault. So you can see why they did it. Now, it's not going to matter because it will go to the Senate and it will presumably die in the Senate.
They're not 60 votes to push for the Obamacare subsidies, but it will be added impetus for some sort of compromise deal, which is the most likely outcome of what happens here. It's some sort of compromise deal with an extension of the Obamacare subsidies for not three years, but maybe a year or two years, while other measures pushed by Republicans start to eat away at the costs. That I think is where this ends up. There's been an attempt to say that this is a blow to Mike Johnson's leadership, but again, I'm not sure exactly what you expect from the speaker.
Speaker Johnson, I think, has done an extraordinary job in navigating an incredibly fractious and tough caucus. He has a majority, essentially, of one vote. And so it's not a shock that a few people are going to defect and move over to the Democrats in order to preserve their own districts. Johnson had said he would not hold any vote on subsidies this week, saying widespread objections from Republicans who call Obamacare a failed program that has done nothing to rein in healthcare costs.
In a TV appearance early on Wednesday, Speaker Johnson warned colleagues against trying to bypass leadership, and he said the party would tackle broader health care policy changes in the new year. But if you're one of these four Republicans, again, the goal presumably is to be able to go back to your district and say, listen, I did my best. The Democrats, you have to admire the goal. Their basic move here was do nothing.
Obstruct. Don't come to a compromise. Don't come to an agreement. Don't try to fix things.
According to Axios, that was the strategy. Don't give an inch for Republican moderates looking for an escape hatch. And it worked by following that simple strategy. Jeffries got everything he wanted.
A house vote on a three-year extension of the subsidies without income caps or cost offsets. Now, Jeffries was pressed by several of his centrist members to throw his support behind one or two-year extensions, as we were talking about. But instead, he held for a Republican's game. In the end, it's not going to help.
In the end, there will be some sort of compromise deal that gets cut, which is, again, not a shock. The Wall Street Journal editorial pages are very critical of these four Republicans. They say, quote, they did so even though Mr. Johnson suggested they could have a vote on an amendment to his bill.
If they could find spending cuts to offset a cost at the extension. This would have required proposing other reforms, and the Republican renegades said, no, their sole aim is to protect themselves from democratic attacks, but signing the petition is unlikely to provide much insulation. It will instead give Democrats more confidence. They have Republicans on the run, and Truxima more leverage to scare GOP senators to revolt as well.
Now, one of the problems here is that in Congress, there's always temptation to push things off until the crisis moment. Republicans should have been figuring this out six months ago. Republicans should have been attempting to push some sort of compromise solution six months ago, so that they could say, Democrats are the ones who are allowing the subsidies to expire. That would have been the thing to do.
And presumably, the Republicans will spend the next month doing that, coming up with some sort of compromise solution that they propose, and the Democrats keep voting down over and over and over. But, for the moment again, all this goes to is the reality for a lot of Republicans in purple states and purple districts that if they continue to kind of double down, as opposed to making moves to when their districts, they are likely to lose their seats. President Trump's coattails are not endless, and President Trump's approval rings are not that high. And so a lot of these people are thinking, how do I preserve my job?
And that is absolutely normal in the world of electoral politics. We'll get to more on this in a moment. First of all, the IRS more than 5,000 bucks in back taxes. I want to tell you about our sponsor, Priority Tax Relief.
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But across America, that is exactly what has been happening. Men are being allowed to compete in women's sports, robbing girls of scholarships, medals, titles, and safety. Now, for the first time in history, the US Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases, West Virginia versus BPG, and Little versus Heatcox on January 13th, that could decide the future of women's sports nationwide. It could be a watershed moment in the fight to protect biological reality and fairness.
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Alliance Defending Freedom. Meanwhile, a shock pole is out showing. Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, defeating JD Vance in a presidential race, 2028 presidential race. 51 to 49.
Now that is inside the margin of error, but that in and of itself should scare the hell out of Republicans if the pole is in any way accurate. Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, of course, I've said, is being underrated as a candidate. She also happens to be the most radical Democrat in the possible field. The fact that she is even spitting distance of the vice-president of the United States suggests either that Republicans are in for a rough ride generally in 2028, or that there needs to be some course correction politically for Vice President Vance's incipient campaign.
AOC was asked directly about this, and she said, of course, I would not have been, which, of course, would expect her to say. Do you think the OB that you could beat JD Vance in, head to head race for president as polling success in 2028? Listen, these polls, like, three years out are, you know, they are what they are, but let the record show. I was talking, I was talking to him.
Okay, now, of course, she's sort of half-joking. With that said, she's not the front-runner for the Democratic nomination right now by the polling data. She is clocking in in the real-clear politics polling average, and of course it's very early right now. She's clocking in in the real-clear politics polling average, and in most of the polls in fourth place in the Democratic primary general vote.
Gavin Newsom right now is the heavy favorite. Kamala Harris is still polling high, but that's for a hot moment because she was the last nominee. She's not going to end up as the Democratic nominee. The California governor has been running very obviously for president for at least a couple of years now.
Pete Buttigieg is holding down that third-place slot, but he has a ceiling. He's probably not going any higher than where he currently is. Ocasio-Cortez could theoretically pick up more of the Bernie Sanders vote, which is kind of sitting outside and waiting to see who runs at this point. With that said, if the Democrats are that competitive with Republicans already, that, of course, is a very bad sign and it shows the necessity for a sort of political change.
And this does mean, this does mean that on the right side of the aisle, there needs to be some reckoning with the idea that the era of Donald Trump running at the top of the ticket is now in the middle of the world. And the reason that the top of the ticket is now over. He is not going to be on the ballot in 2026 and he will not be on the ballot in 2028, despite the most fond wishes of some people who I generally like, Alan Dershow, today and having. The president of the United States is constitutionally forbidden from running right there term.
And so that means that the next candidate will not be Donald Trump and whoever that candidate is is going to have to craft his own coalition. I'm going to say this over and over and over again. No one inherits someone else's coalition. If they do, it is usually a smaller coalition.
George H.W. Bush in 1988 inherited the Reagan coalition and he performed less well than Reagan did in 1984. In 2016, Hillary Clinton tried to inherit the Obama coalition and she significantly underperformed Barack Obama. If you take somebody else's coalition and you shrink it, you are likely to lose or at least not to perform as well, obviously.
And that's particularly true in our very tight elections. We've been having tight elections in this country for basically the last 24 years. Going all the way back to 2000. It's been a long time since we've had a true blowout election.
You can say that 2008 was kind of a blowout election for Barack Obama. That's an exception to the rule. 2012, while it was a solid victory for Obama in the electoral college, was a fairly tight race the entire way. And obviously, 2000 was extraordinarily tight race, 2004 was a very tight race.
2016 was incredibly tight race, 2020 was a tight race, 2024 was a tight race. None of these races could be considered blowouts. Republicans can't afford to drop even two percentage points and win national elections. And so that means that Vice President Vance is going to have to look at his own coalition building skills and figure out what coalition he believes he will be able to bring to the ballot box.
And that is why I think a lot of the very online chatter that's been happening right now on the right is sort of triumphalist attempts to transform the nature of how Americans think about Americanism. It is politically in act. What I mean by this is there's a big conversation that's currently happening on the right about what is an American. Now, traditionally, when I was growing up, and I think for most modern conservative history, the answer to what is American is a person who lives in America was born here traditionally or immembrates to the United States imbibes from the well of and assimilates to the values of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
That would be sort of the very short synopsis of what is an American. There's been an attempt because people are rebelling now against the sort of creedal motion of Americanism. That idea has had anything to do with being an American. And I think that is a response to the fact that the left basically said that what is an American anyone who's here?
And so what members of the writer now saying is it's no, it's not anyone who's here. It's people who historically are from here. But neither of those answers is correct. The actual answer is people who wish to join the American experiment and then assimilate to Anglo-American traditions and Judeo-Christian values.
Those are traditionally the people who become Americans and the history of America is which people can come here and do that. And that is why the genetic heritage of the United States is quite diverse. It's why only a very small percentage of Americans can trace their ancestry all the way back to the Mayflower. Well, this is all coming to a head because there are a lot of Republicans again who are starting to push the idea that that creedal idea, declaration of independence, constitution of the independence, and that is why the genetic heritage of the United States is quite diverse.
People are starting to push the idea that that creedal idea, declaration of independence, constitution of the United States, Anglo-American values in terms of legality, property rights, general religious tenor, that all of that ought to be pushed to the side in favor of some sort of quote unquote heritage Americanism. And again, that's pretty ill-defined because it's difficult to explain why because your great, great, great, great grandfather got here. That is somehow better than someone else's great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather getting here. As though the more greats you have in the grandfather, the more American you are.
To a certain extent, it's not a stolen valor because you're not the one who got here. It was one of your ancestors who got here. But the reality is that that is a losing political proposition. Forget about the morality of it or even the ideology of it.
That is a losing political proposition that radically shrinks your base. It does. President Trump won a historic number of Hispanic votes for a Republican in the last election cycle. Many of his Hispanic voters that he's winning are first generation or second generation Americans.
If you say that the longer you're in the country, the more American you are, you are alienating your potential voters. Because it turns out a lot of people in the United States got here in the course of the last 150 years. Again, it is a mistake to do the routine that you are now seeing on a political level. And the more you talk about it, the more you're alienating people.
And if JD Vance loses Latino votes from President Trump, if he loses Black votes from President Trump, if he loses female votes from President Trump, if he loses blue collar votes from President Trump, he needs to make all this up somewhere. Vivek Rama Swami is running for Governor of Ohio. Has what I think is a truly good piece at the New York Times titled What is American? And he says there are two competing visions now emerging on the American right and they're incompatible.
One vision of American identity is based on lineage, blood and soil inherited attributes matter most. The purest form of Americans is a so-called heritage American, one whose ancestry traces back to the founding of the United States or earlier. This view is now popularized by the Griper Wright, a rapidly ascendant on my movement that argues for the creation of a white central identity. This is a predictable response, one that I anticipated in my 2022 book Nation of Victims to anti-white discrimination over the last half decade.
And it is no longer just a French viewpoint. The alternative, and it says Vivek Rama Swami in my view correct vision of American identity is based on ideals. Americanness isn't a scalar quality that varies based on your ancestry, it's binary. Either you're an American or you're not.
You're an American if you believe in the rule of law, in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, in colorblind at meritocracy, in the US Constitution, in the American Dream. And if you're a citizen who swears exclusive allegiance to our nation, as Ronald Reagan quipped, you can go live in France, but you can't become a Frenchman. But anyone from any corner of the world can come to live in the United States and become an American. Now, what Vivek is saying here is correct.
The attack on so-called Credo Americanism has been the idea that you can't shut the door based on creed. That's not true. Of course you can. That's why it matters where immigrants are coming from.
And so I, I'm very much a fan of Credo Americanism because America is exceptional and different. When I say American exceptionalism, I don't mean like Barack Obama, that Americans believe in American exceptionalism like Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism or Japanese believe in Japanese exceptionalism. America is in fact different. It is a nation based on an idea.
Not an idea based on a nation. It is the only state that was literally formed based on a set of ideas. Now, of course, many of the people who formed those ideas had a common ancestry. Many didn't, by the way.
We now tend to obliterate all those differences because they seem minor in comparison to the sort of ethnic diversity of the United States. But there's some pretty significant conflict between say, Scotch Irish immigrants to the United States at the founding and English immigrants to the United States at the founding or Dutch immigrants to the United States at the founding for that matter. New York was originally a new Amsterdam, of course. But of course, Credo Americanism can serve as a litmus test as to whether someone ought to become American.
And we can measure that and we can bar people are unlikely to assimilate. Vivek says, no matter your ancestry, if you wait your turn to obtain citizenship, your every bit as American is a mayflower descendant. As long as you subscribe to the creed of the American founding and the culture that was born of it. This is what makes American exceptional impossible.
This is right. This is correct. One of the reasons that America is in fact so powerful is specifically because we can bring drain everywhere else. We can values drain everywhere else.
We can become the world center of commerce and the world center of small our republicanism. We can do all those things because we can be a magnet for those things that divide between these two views. Since Obama's army is more foundational than policy divides between Republicans and Democrats. Older Republicans who made doubt the rising prevalence of the blood and soil you should think again.
My social media fees are littered with hundreds of slurs, most of my accounts that I don't recognize about the pajits and street bleabers and calls to deport me back to India. I was born and raised in Cincinnati and have never resided outside the United States. This new online movement doesn't represent the views of most real world republican voters. Take it from the son of Indian immigrants who's dominating polling in Ohio's GOP primary for governor.
That is one of the most vocal opponents of left-wing identity politics. I now see a real reluctance for my former anti-warpiers to criticize the new identity politics on the right. And good for the thanks for writing this because this is exactly right. He says this pattern early mirrors the hesitance of prominent Democrats to criticize woke access in the run up to the 2024 presidential elections, of course, is exactly right.
So what's the solution? Says, Second, I don't think that a I think that an inspired vision for Americans is the dream, the dream, the American dream is the inspiring thing. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. And let's be real about young Americans.
The opportunity is in fact in your hands. There are people out there who are going to lie to you, they're going to tell you can't succeed in the United States. They're going to tell you that because it makes them stronger and then more powerful in them richer. But it's going to make your life worse and poorer.
You can in fact, you've been handed the opportunity, an opportunity that hundreds of millions of people worldwide would kill to get. That is an opportunity that you were born into in the United States or immigrated to. And to pretend that this system is what is holding you down, absent, a specific policy that you would like to change and then we can all get on board. But a generalized grievance is not going to make your life better.
And people who pander to you by telling you that failure is a result of generalized grievance without a solution. They are making your life actively worse. They're destroying your opportunity and they're destroying the American spirit. We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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Cars4kids.org. Alrighty, last night the President of the United States, there were people online again who were predicting that he was going to declare war with Venezuela or something that turned out to be untrue as our menu of their predictions. It is true, however, that the President is creating more of a blockade on Venezuela. The President is basically trying to stop the shipping of so-called go-ships out of Venezuela that are loaded with oil for illegal climbs in violation of international law.
President Trump is very much focused on the oil in Venezuela, which by the way is correct. I know there are people who are outside about this. Why? Venezuela was reliant largely on American companies to build their oil industry and then they nationalized their oil industry and ran their country directly into the ground.
And President Trump says, you know, we built it and you took it and you destroyed your country in the process. The President is not wrong here. The President is not wrong here. The President is not wrong here.
We're just going to let anybody go in through this, shouldn't be going through. You remember they took all of our energy rights, they took all of our oil from not that long ago. And we wanted back, but they took it. They illegally took it.
The President put out a statement on true social quote, Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the history of South America. It will only get bigger. And the shots of them will be like nothing they've ever seen before. He added his ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela.
And he argued that Maduro's government is using oil revenue to finance and illicit operations, including drug terrorism. The United States has already sanctioned three of Maduro's nephews according to NBC News and repeatedly conducted deadly military strikes against boats from the Caribbean that alleges are carrying drugs. Venezuela responded by accusing Trump of violating international law, free trade and the principle of free navigation. Okay, Venezuela, you commies.
You call me Iranian dictatorship loving horror show. It added on in social media. He assumes that Venezuela's oil and in mineral wealth are his property. No, actually, he assumes that if we drilled for the oil and helped your industry and then you nationalized it and stole it on behalf of your communist dictatorship, that's a bad thing.
Maduro's government plans to denounce the situation before the United Nations. Well, so glad for you guys. Congrats. Now, there are a lot of people who are claiming that President Trump is going to launch a full-scale military invasion of Venezuela.
No, he's not. No, he's not. Stop it. Stop it.
Stupid. Representative Jason Crowe, Democrat of Colorado is saying that. As the president has talked about US involvement in land, is it clear to you what that would look like to you, US involvement in a land war in Venezuela, how that would play out? That would be complete insanity.
We've spent the last 25 years, trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, tens of thousands of Americans wounded with stress and invisible invisible scars of violence. Hundreds of thousands of people died around the world in these conflicts and most of these conflicts ended poorly. Terrorism is still alive and well. We pulled out of Afghanistan.
We saw how poorly that went. Iraq did not go well. The United States needs to get out of the regime change business. Actually, I don't think the United States needs to get out of the regime change business.
If by that he means that we should not root for certain regimes to change. We certainly should not invade Venezuela with hundreds of thousands of troops that we're talking about, but I really don't think that President Trump is going for that. Why are you guys standing for the Venezuelan regime? And what President Trump is pretty obviously doing is cutting off the lifeblood of the Venezuelan economy and creating internal pressures inside the country for some sort of military coup or for a popular uprising to depose the dictator.
Why is that bad? Like, let's be real about what he's doing. He is not talking about using F-16s to take out Maduro. He's not talking about unleashing the 101st airborne.
That's not what he's talking about. Elhan Omar, of course, another big defender of the Marxist regime in Venezuela. The answer is that this is not about drugs. This is about regime change.
And we also have the White House Chief of Staff on record saying that this is about regime change. It has nothing to do with drugs. Well, I assume that it has to do with both. regime change and drugs.
But again, this notion that the United States is about to launch some sort of massive ground-scale invasion into Venezuela is not correct. That, of course, is not correct. But economic pressure on Venezuela? I really don't see the problem, to be quite honest with you.
Meanwhile, Democrats continue to focus like a laser beam on the fact that Pete Hagg Seth's Department of Defense launched a second strike at a drug boat in international waters. Representative Penny Thompson, who was last seen, claiming that the shooting of a couple of national guard members was a sort of bizarre accident. Well, now he's back and he's claiming that Trump's boat bombings are illegal. We are a nation of laws.
The Trump administration's boat bombings are illegal under U.S. and international laws. Simply put, these are war crimes. Further, the administration has failed to provide Congress with basic information, even as Trump directs a massive buildup of U.S.
forces and threatens war. And I might add, Mr. Speaker, those of us who have been in so-called classified briefings still have not received any additional information beyond what's already in the eyes of the public and on TV. It's our duty as a Congress to ring in the lawless administration and prevent an illegal war.
Also, meanwhile, Chuck Schumer is claiming that the video of the boat strike turned his stomach. It turned his stomach. Okay, I mean, you want to go with blowing up drug boats as bad? I guess that's a take.
The unedited video of what happened on September 2nd, I've seen it. It turns your stomach. It is awful. And people should see it.
What the hell is hexified? Is excuse about classification? It's false. Okay, all right.
I guess if they want to run with this, they can. The Senate did pass a Pentagon bill pressing PXF to disclose a boat strike evidence on Wednesday according to the Washington Post. It was an intense element to the $900 billion defense policy bill in advance to $77 to $20. So I assume that at some point the footage will come out and then we'll find out whether in fact the people on the boat were signaling others to be picked up.
That's sort of the question at issue legally speaking is is somebody considered or to combat when their boat gets racked or could they get back in the fight by getting on another boat calling somebody as the boat salvageable and whatnot. By the way, the original accusation, which was that PXF said kill everyone and then stood there while they nuked these people is false. And that was already reported by the New York Times. So the original report from the Washington Post made a claim that has already been specifically debunked by the New York Times.
Meanwhile, in other Trump administration news, Dan Banjino says he will step down from the FBI in January. According to the New York Times, he said on Wednesday he would step down next month bringing an ensues brief but tumultuous stint at the Bureau. He wrote on social media. I will be leaving my position with the FBI in January.
He announced this. He said I want to thank President Trump, A.G. Bonny and Director Patel for the opportunity to serve the purpose. Most importantly, I want to thank you my fellow Americans for the privilege to serve you, that was America and all those who defender.
Now, again, I think that Dan deserves extraordinary praise for what he's done over the course of the last year. He gave up legitimately tens of millions of dollars to go into public service for no reason other than his own patriotism. You can't name a reason why he would do it other than he wanted to help the country. He certainly didn't do it for the money.
He certainly didn't do it for the love. And Dan has taken some real hits from dishonest people claiming that he abandoned his position as a person who wants to get to the truth. And by the way, full credit to Dan for telling the truth even when it was not in his political interest to do so. I mean, Dan had been one of the lead purveyors of much of the questioning surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, but it was Dan who had to do that investigation and look into all the evidence and then tell the truth to the American people.
That's a hard job. Telling the truth to the American people is a much more difficult job as it turns out than lying to them and telling them what they want to hear, particularly if they're in your base. Dan deserves enormous credit for that. Dan deserves huge credit for being instrumental in the arrest of the January 6th.
Pypop Bonner. Again, the iron that you see for Dan online, I think a lot of it is sort of competitive hatred for Dan. It's coming from other people who are afraid he's going to come back to his podcast and do really well. I hope he comes back to his podcast and I hope he does do really well because Dan is a very talented guy.
But again, what Dan deserves most of all is thanks for having put aside his own personal interest on behalf of the country, even if it was for a year. Most people don't do that. And that is not an easy decision to make. Well, in other news, Zorn Mommsane's tenure is going exactly how you thought it would.
According to the New York Post, Mommsane has now tapped a controversial lawyer who defends it in all kind of terrorist and a radical anti-Israel campus leader at Columbia for a high-ranking position at City Hall. How exciting. Ramesy Kasem, who is also a law professor at City University of New York and a member of Mommsane's transition team for legal affairs, is the top candidate for Chief Counsel, the most important advisory role in the mayor's office. Can't see how this would go wrong.
In addition to defending Mommsane's colloquial, the Columbia University, protest leader who was also engaged in trespass and violation of law, because some help to defend terrorist, Ahmed O'Darby, an al-Qaeda member who was convicted in 2017 of bombing a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen in 2002. All this supports files of patent for Zorn Mommsane, who was supposed to be a moderate, yeah, that's not happening this much, not really using it. Meanwhile, he appeared with Trevor Noah, who apparently is still in the media. I didn't even realize that Trevor was still active, but for you, Trevor.
And he declared that free buses are going to lower crime. Okay, Charlie, we'll see how that works out for you. When we made those bus drivers free after a year, assaults on bus drivers dropped by 38.9%. Call the bus drivers.
Because unlike the train, the act of fair collection on the bus happens on the bus. It's dead. And bus drivers and unions have shared anecdotally that about 50% of assaults happen around the fare box. So when you eliminate the fare box, you make for a safer experience for the bus driver, for everyone on the bus.
It's going to be so safe when nobody has to worry about the fares and when people are just riding around the buses and using them as homeless encampments. If there's one thing that Zorn Mommsane is going to bring to be safety to New York City, man, you guys, you voted for this and you're going to get a good and hard. That's the theory of democracy in a nutshell. He also describes you Trevor Knoll at Socialism Means.
You'll notice that he doesn't actually define what socialism means. A favorite habit of socialists is to say things like, if socialism means that everybody lives a better life and is richer than I'm a socialist, it's like, well, no, that's not what socialism means. It actually has a definition. Here's Zorn Mommsane doing his best.
But I think, you know, many people have caricatures in their head as to what it means. I often turn to Dr. King to describe socialism. He said, call it democracy or call it democratic socialism.
There must be a better distribution of wealth for all of God's children in this country. It comes back to dignity. It comes back to ensuring that whatever you need to live a dignified life, that you have that. You should not be priced out of a necessity.
We're not talking about want, we're talking about need. You should not be priced out of being able to have a home to call your own, of being able to send your kid to school or either ride the bus. And I've found actually that when you're speaking to New Yorkers one to one, they've actually had far fewer questions of how I describe my politics and far more of does my politics include them? Are their struggles part of my focus?
And I've found that there are many people who might describe themselves in a different way, but when I speak about what this would mean for New York City, they start to see themselves in that vision. And that's I think the key of this is how is this a politics that actually reflects the struggles of working people? The irritation of people like this crap, I mean, I'm Donnie and Sanders, they all do this routine. The routine is here's something I wish everybody had.
And if I believe that everybody should have it, then they should have it. Now, they never tell you how they're going to get from point A to point A because what socialists actually believe is if everyone deserves a house, then what that means is we should seize the means of production. And we should either tax a living out of people and then build houses and just give them to people, which was called the affordable housing projects of the 1960s and 70s gigantic failure. Or we should seize current housing stock and just put people in those houses.
And these programs invariably end with failure. I want people to have houses too. And the way that you get more people in more houses is with additional supply. And you know what's a great way to create better houses, additional houses with more amenities, houses that aren't the crap boxes that your grandparents own in the middle of Peoria in 1952, which were just brick structures with no internal air conditioning and half the time to oil it.
You know what's about to do that? Market economics, market economics. So no, socialism isn't just a quote unquote call for you to have things. It's a natural program for how to achieve that.
And that program is always ugly and always failure. And we'll see how it works out for New Yorkers. And if honestly, Montani's saving race is that he's not going to be able to do all the things that he says he wants to do already coming up. We're going to jump into the wanted Ben Shapiro show.
Now, remember you have to be a subscriber in order to access the mailbag and become part of the show. Head on over to dailywire.com right now to subscribe. The magic of the hillfolk and druids come forth at his easy command. They say he's through hundreds.
Hundreds do here. At the world burned and trembled at his wrath. Burn and died long before you and I were born. Murden Emerus has returned to the land of the living.
Walter Guinness gone. The room is gone. The Saxon is here. Saxon hangus disassembled the greatest war host ever seen in the island of the mighty.
Before the summer is through, he means to take the throne. And he will have it. If we are too busy swabbling amongst ourselves to take up arms against him. Here is your hope.
May King Will arise to hold all Britain in his hand. A high king who would be the wonder of the world. You. To a future of peace.
There'll be no peace in these lands till we are all dust. Men of the island of the mighty. You stand together. You stand as Britain's.
You stand as one. Great darkness is falling upon this land. These brothers are only hope to stand against it. Not our only hope.
I say Murden to lose 17 men with his own hands. I could say he slew 500. No man has capable of such a thing. No mortal man.