Ep. 2203 - The Democrat-Media Scandal That Won’t Go Away

This is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Watch Parenting, my new Daily Wire Plus series, May 20th. We're dealing with misbehaviors with our son. Our 13-year-old throws tantrums. Our son turned to some substance abuse. Go to dailywireplus.com today. Alrighty folks, tons to get to today, including all the fallout from the Joe Biden senility and now cancer scandal. We'll examine the latest with the big, beautiful bill and President Trump trying to get those Ukraine negotiations going. But first,

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and early access to major announcements before anyone else. Become an all access member today at dailywireplus.com. Plus, we filmed it, we edited it, and somehow no one stopped us from releasing it. Then after dark is what happens when I start saying the things that probably should have stayed in the group chat. We've got unfiltered takes, deeply questionable decisions, and clips like this. That was a former member of Congress right there. Sure is, Ben. Yep. You know who, though?

Well, I mean, I don't know what his name was when he was doing this, but that is former representative George Santos, is it not? It is. He was sentenced to seven years in prison this past week for wire fraud. We all have passed. And that is George's sentence. Now, will he be going to a men's or a women's prison? Also this, for reasons I'm still not clear on.

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Well, folks, the Joe Biden senility and cancer scandal is not going anywhere anytime soon. And the reason for that is because it's not just a scandal about the Joe Biden family and the people immediately surrounding Joe Biden. It is a scandal about the Democratic Party writ large, as well as the media. And that Democrat media complex has been the thing that has kept Democrats relevant and victorious.

for decades at this point in the public narrative. But time after time after time, particularly over the course of the last five years, the Democrat media narrative has fallen completely apart. Everything that they have labeled a conspiracy theory has turned out not only not to be a conspiracy theory, it's turned out to be largely true. So, just to go back briefly in history.

It was the Democrats in the media who claimed that Donald Trump was an actual cat's paw of the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, that he had been elected in 2016 on the basis. Russian gaming of the election. And this turned into a four years long investigation into Donald Trump and everyone surrounding him about how he was almost certainly on the Russian payroll.

And allegations were made about everything from money-changing hands to prostitutes urinating on President Trump. All this sort of stuff was trotted out by the media for four years as breaking news. I remember being in the gym for literally years. And every day, there'd be some sort of new breaking news on Wolf Blitzer about...

how Russiagate was going to break wide open. It turned out that was a conspiracy theory on their part. But they suggested, of course, that to say that there was in fact a deep state that was promulgating this lie, that that was a conspiracy theory. Then we moved into the COVID era. And when we got to COVID, again, it was labeled by the left a conspiracy theory to suggest that

the virus had originated at a Wuhan lab. That that was some sort of wild conspiracy theory that was rooted in conjecture. It was not rooted at all in relevant suspicion. Probably it was just some Chinese guy ate a bat. That was probably where this came from, a live market. And it turns out that that was not a conspiracy theory. It was actually probably true. And then there was the suggestion by people on the right. that it was conspiratorial.

at the top levels of government, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, to shut down dissent with regard to everything from masking to lockdowns. And it turns out that wasn't a conspiracy theory either. Anthony Fauci was, in fact, doing those things. He was literally attempting to use his power to quash narratives. ranging from the Wuhan lab leak to the so-called Great Barrington Declaration would have been put out by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya over at Stanford, among others.

Bhattacharya is now the head of the NIH under Donald Trump. Again, if you called out Fauci at the time, you were considered a conspiracy theorist, and it turned out that many of the allegations were true. If you suggested that the BLM narrative around George Floyd and Derek Chauvin, that that actually was false, that actually George Floyd, in all likelihood, died of some sort of pre-existing health condition.

that was triggered by the fact that he was arrested, that he didn't die because Derek Chauvin quote-unquote choked him out or anything like that, and that the overarching BLM narrative was a lie. That was a conspiracy theory as well, and the Democrats in the media labeled it as such. If you said, hey, wait a second, the statistics do not show that black people are being disproportionately targeted for death by the cops.

And that actually, if you remove cops from these particular areas, the crime rates are going to go up. That was considered a conspiracy theory, too. And then that entire narrative fell apart. And then, as if that weren't enough, Everybody could see Joe Biden degrading in real time in front of all of us. And we were told that that was a conspiracy theory as well, that if you pointed out that Joe Biden was obviously going senile, then that too was a conspiracy theory.

And then, all at once, it blew up. And it blew up on one day specifically, and that was the day that Joe Biden did a debate with Donald Trump. And it didn't just wreck Joe Biden's presidency. It didn't just wreck Joe Biden's legacy. It didn't just wreck Joe Biden's run for office and Kamala Harris' run for office. It wrecked the Democratic Party and the media wholesale.

Finally, all at once, you could see the myth-making apparatus exposed once and for all. And that is why the Biden senility scandal, and now likely the Biden cancer scandal, is actually a real scandal that is deeply damaging the Democrats right now. Democrats are once again now attempting to suggest that you are a conspiracy theorist if you are suspicious of the narrative that Joe Biden just found out five minutes ago that he has stage four cancer.

Stage 4 prostate cancer that is now metastasized to his bones. And again, the science suggests. that this was a long time coming. Prostate cancer is a very slow developing cancer. It beggars the imagination that the president of the United States, a man who was the vice president of the United States not all that long ago, never got a PSA test any time during this period. It just beggars the imagination. It makes no sense.

At all. The president is the most important person on planet Earth, politically speaking, and in terms of just pure power. The notion that you wouldn't do one of the most basic tests that is done during a physical for people above the age of 50 is ridiculous. And so suspicion about that is not, in fact, a conspiracy theory, but Democrats are still trying to trot out the idea that this is, in fact, a conspiracy theory.

So Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader in the House, says that it's a conspiracy theory to suspect that perhaps people knew more than they were talking about last year with regard to Joe Biden's condition, or even worse, by the way, they avoided giving a PSA test to Joe Biden because they were suspicious that he might actually be sick.

It seems to me entirely inappropriate that at this moment in time, when President Biden is dealing with a serious and aggressive form of cancer, There are Republicans who are peddling conspiracy theories and want us to look backward. They want us to look backward. Okay, let me just point this out. It's not a conspiracy theory if there is some evidence to support it. There is good evidence to suggest that his very late stage cancer did not develop overnight and was not diagnosed one moment ago.

And you have not earned the trust of the American people that you get to say things like, it's a conspiracy theory to wonder about that. That is not just asking questions. The medical evidence would suggest that it would be almost impossible for there to be no evidence of his cancer, medically speaking, unless you were actively not taking the test. Hey, Donald Trump, when he has his physicals, takes a PSA test. That is in his presidential record. Barack Obama had PSA tests.

Why did Joe Biden not have PSA tests? These are real questions. But the goal, as always for the Democrats, is not to actually stop conspiracy theories. It's to stop actual, real, relevant questions that point out actual conspiracies. The difference between a conspiracy theory and just a conspiracy is that a conspiracy theory has plausible evidence to suggest its truth.

like actual plausible evidence and a mechanism by which the conspiracy theory is actually effectuated. That turns it into an actual allegation of a conspiracy, or at least a plausible allegation of a conspiracy. A conspiracy theory is something where you can't connect points A and point B. You just jump immediately. to a conclusion without any intervening logic. You say, for example, the globalists

are responsible for the death of black men in the inner city. I need to see the chain of how that works. You need to show me the evidence of the people who are controlling the policy and why that policy is responsible for X, Y, or Z.

raising a question about whether or not people knew about Joe Biden's health situation when we know for a fact they covered up his senility. They actively covered up his senility. This is not speculation. That is real. That is being reported by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson of Axios. In the book Original Sin, it is being reported publicly now.

that everything people are asking about is true. You have not earned the trust of the American people that you get to now suggest that it's a conspiracy theory. What is this really about? It's about shutting down any questioning of any of it, on his senility, on his cancer, and go for the sympathy play.

It is just another form of what Joe Biden himself used to do as president. Every time he would get in a bad political situation, he would mention the tragic death of his son Beau from cancer. Anytime there's a bad situation, he would mention this, like a get out of jail free card. It was really quite gross.

Not that he would mention his son's death, but in the context in which he would mention his son's death. So after the Abbey Gate bombing, for example, he would bring up his son Beau's death as though that justified the activities that led to the Abbey Gate bombing in Afghanistan. Now Democrats are doing the same exact thing. They say, well, you have to have sympathy. You can have plenty of sympathy for Joe Biden as a human being who's ridden with likely terminal cancer.

You can have all sorts of sympathy for him. But that does not change the underlying question that must be asked. Who knew what when? Who was president of the United States for the last couple of years of his administration? But you can see how Democrats are attempting to spin this into stop asking questions at all. Here's David Axelrod doing that routine yesterday, the former Obama advisor.

Yeah, well, I think those conversations are going to happen, but they should be more muted and set aside for now as he's struggling through this. Why should they be more muted and set aside? Actually, it exacerbates the questions because if he is this far gone, if he is in this bad of a health condition,

Who knew what when? And none of those people should ever be trusted again in any political context. That is the issue. As the Wall Street Journal points out, latest revelation about Biden's acuity put Democrats in a tough spot. Yeah, no bleep. According to the Wall Street Journal, Continued revelations about Biden's mental capacity in office have led to awkward questions for prospective 2028 Democratic presidential candidates.

For Kamala Harris and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, both part of the administration, the topic is especially fraught. But everybody who is in a top position of power in the Democratic Party, Everybody who is dealing with Joe Biden, that includes Bernie Sanders, that includes Gretchen Whitmer, that includes Gavin Newsom, anyone who had dealings with Joe Biden on a personal level is now suspect as part of a broader cover-up of his senility.

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The days since Trump's election have been some of the most challenging Democrats have faced in decades as the party has struggled to land on a clear message or a leading messenger. The most recent Wall Street Journal poll showed just 37% of voters viewed the Democratic Party favorably compared to 45% for the GOP.

Not just that, by the way, Donald Trump's approval ratings, which had been kind of down in the dumps since Liberation Day, have actually increased over the course of the last several weeks, partially due to his Very productive trip to the Middle East and partially due to the fact that there is a lot of focus right now on the fact that Democrats covered up the senility of the president of the United States.

The latest Harvard-Caps-Harris poll shows that for the first time since July 2021, a majority of voters now believe the U.S. economy is strong, split about 50-50. 51% of voters say it's strong, 49% say it's weak. That is a major difference from just a few weeks ago when he declared that massive tariff war. Not only that, his overall approval rating has been jumping, like really spiking. According to one poll, the Insider Advantage poll,

He is currently at plus 11, like 55% approved, 44% disapproved. These are unbelievable numbers for President Trump. And that's partially about President Trump. And that is partially about the fact that his opponents are quite terrible at this. President Trump, for his part, as usual, is not going to be silenced about the speculation regarding Biden's senility or about his cancer. Here's President Trump yesterday saying, you know, it seems to me that somebody probably knew about this stuff early.

The other thing is you have to say, why did it take so long? I mean, when you... This takes a long time, can take years to get to this level of danger. So it's a look, it's a very, very sad situation. I feel very badly about it. And uh... I think people should try and find out what happened because I'll tell you, I don't know if it had anything to do with the hospital. Walter Reed is really good. They're some of the best doctors I've ever seen. I don't even know if they were involved.

But a doctor was involved in each case. Maybe it was the same doctor. And somebody is not telling the facts. That's a big problem. I mean, again, he is right about this. J.D. Vance is saying something very similar when he's talking not just about the cancer, but about the senility. Like, the president of the United States was not all there for years at a time. And that's not J.D. Vance's fault. That is the fault of the Democratic Party.

I will say, whether the right time to have this conversation is now or at some point in the future, we really do need to be honest about whether the former president was capable of doing the job. That's no, you know, you can separate the desire for him to have the right health outcome with a recognition that whether it was doctors or whether there were staffers around the former president. think he was able to do a good job for the American people.

I mean, that is just accurate. That is just correct. I mean, and Democrats can complain about that all they want. They can call it a conspiracy theory all they want. It doesn't matter. In the end, the American people understand that they were lied to for years while Joe Biden was president and that everyone was complicit in it. The Democrats, the media, they're all complicit in this lie. The media... The best you can say for that is maybe

act of omission rather than commission, meaning that they never would have taken Donald Trump's word for it if he were clearly losing his mind on camera. And everybody's like, he's totally fine. Behind closed doors, he's doing backhand springs and reciting the Gettysburg Address. in Swahili. Nobody would have taken that for granted if they were the media. They would have been asking serious questions.

Hey, so, with the Democrat media complex blown up, the Democrats are in real trouble here. They're in real trouble. They basically have two possibilities. One is wait for Donald Trump to fall down on the job. Maybe that happens. Maybe that doesn't. The second would be actually start saying things that are interesting and popular. They cannot do the latter. They're so wedded to their woke base that they are now stuck. I mean, truly stuck.

Let's take a few of their leaders as examples. So Tim Walz, who for the only reason Tim Walz was ever a vice presidential pick is because he wasn't the Jew from Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro was clearly a better vice presidential pick for Kamala Harris. Instead, they picked this oddball weirdo from Minnesota.

who has the affect of the Kool-Aid man if he had taken too much ecstasy. And they decided to trot this guy out as an example of American masculinity bopping around, making weird hand motions, doing jazz hands. While Tim Walz is still out there haunting the American political landscape and calling ICE, like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the modern-day Gestapo.

Donald Trump's modern-day guescapo is scooping folks up off the streets. They're in unmarked vans, wearing masks, being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons. No chance to mount a defense. not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye, just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans, and disappeared. To be clear, there's no way for us to know whether they were actually criminals or not because they refused to give them a trial. We're supposed to just take their word for it.

And when duly elected members of Congress tried to exercise their constitutional right of oversight at an ICE facility, they get shoved around and threatened with arrest. And when courts told them repeatedly to knock it off, they brazenly defiled. And so, again, Tim Walz claiming that ICE are like the Gestapo. Good luck with this argument. Like, this is the best you guys have. Really, this is the best you guys have.

How about Hillary Clinton? She's still out there. She's basically turned into a Charles Dickens character wandering around in her 2016 wedding dress. Like a ghost. She's the Miss Haversham of American politics, wandering around saying the same things over and over. Now she's calling female Trump voters handmaidens of the patriarchy. What advice do you have for the first female president of the United States? Well... First of all, Don't be a handmaiden to the patriarchy. Which kind of.

Eliminates every woman on the other side of the aisle, except for very few. Lisa Markowski. Liz Janie. Yeah, there's a few. handmaiden of the patriarchy. By God, this woman. I can't imagine why she lost to Donald Trump. Can you imagine, by the way, a woman in American history who's been more of a handmaiden to the patriarchy than Hillary Clinton?

Literally, she allegedly threatened accusers of her husband She had this marriage with her husband in which her husband was plausibly accused of sexual assault. rape, and other crimes against women, and she allegedly threatened them. in order so that she could be eventually a senator from New York and then secretary of state and then run for president. Hard to imagine a bigger handmaiden to the patriarchy than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

who is only famous because her last name is Clinton in the first place. But this is the best the Democrats can try it out. Well, then there's the actual resistance. mode of the Democratic Party now. The young resistors.

And while the problem is they're getting themselves arrested, so the Department of Justice charged Democratic Representative LaMonica McIvor with assaulting federal law enforcement during a chaotic melee that erupted outside of an ICE detention facility in New Jersey, according to acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba on Monday, according to CNN.

The scuffle outside the detention facility occurred as protesters, lawmakers, and homeland security officers pushed against each other. And that all happened, of course, as Democrats were outside a detention facility for illegal immigrants claiming that their rights were being violated. And now she's going to be prosecuted. So who's it going to be, guys? It's going to be Mr. Potato Head Cory Booker in 2028 shouting at the windows?

Is it going to be AOC and her oddball approach to politics backed by Bernie Sanders? Who you guys got? Seriously. And how do you presume to overcome the gigantic... boiling scandal at the heart of the Democratic Party, the cover-up of the former president's senility and possibly cancer.

Again, AOC actually is the best place for this. She can always claim that she was an outsider. She didn't have a lot of contact with Joe Biden. She hates the Democratic Party anyway. And there is something to that. So again, advantage AOC if you're looking at the 2028 Democratic primaries. But it is amazing how the Democrats are struggling for footing against President Trump. And it is all their own fault.

President Trump has a magical ability to draw the worst out of his opponents. Legitimately the worst. And Democrats are falling right into it. Speaking of the worst out of his opponents, James Comey is still wandering the landscape in search of relevance.

He's only in the headlines because he decided to take a photo of a shell array on a beach that said 8647, generating outsized questions about whether he was calling for violence against the president of the United States, while it did get him a slot on MSNBC, which is probably what he wanted in the first place. But just again and again and again, I really thought that I was done. I was in another life. I was a grandfather and an author wearing sweaters and jeans.

And then I went for a walk on the beach and posted a silly picture of shells that I thought was a clever way to express a political viewpoint. And actually, I still think it is. I don't see it the way some people are still saying it is. But again, I don't want any part of any violence. I've never been associated with violence, and so that's why I took it down.

So, yeah, it was very clever. Very, very clever, says James Comey. By the way, he's always a victim, according to James Comey, as always. Remember, this is the former FBI director who basically laundered into public view the... erroneous and disgusting Steele dossier targeting President Trump. Harry was suggesting the only reason he's under fire is for walking on the beach with his wife. You made this happen, my dude. This was you.

You are back in the middle of a political firestorm. Yeah, for walking on the beach with my wife, so I don't know how we ended up here. It never occurred to me that it was any kind of controversial thing, but that's the time we live in. Well, I mean, it happened because you did it. That's the reason why that happened.

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He then came out and he announced that some progress had been made. Now, again, it's kind of interesting to watch the shift in the tone, the vacillation in tone inside the Trump administration with regard to Putin and Ukraine. Vladimir Zelensky has been playing this much smarter over the course of the past few weeks. The leader of Ukraine has been basically doing whatever the White House wants him to do.

They say 30-day ceasefire. He says, no problem, 30-day ceasefire. They say, rare earth minerals deal. He's like, no problem, rare earth minerals deal. They say, why don't you go to Turkey and have direct conversations?

with Putin without a 30-day ceasefire. He's like, fine, I'm in there. I'm at Ankara. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is sitting there doing none of these things. Zero of these things. And you can start to see the irritation from the Trump administration, J.D. Vance, the other day. He said, listen, Vladimir Putin seems to be unable to end the war.

Here was the vice president of the United States, one of the bigger Ukraine support skeptics in the administration. I think honestly that President Putin, he doesn't quite know how to get out of the war. If you think about this, he's got a million men under arms. He's re-engineered his entire economy.

What used to be manufacturing facilities making products for people to use in their civilian life, they're now making tank shells and artillery shells and drones. And so this is a little bit of a guess, but I think the president would agree that part of this... I'm not sure that Vladimir Putin has a strategy himself for how to unwind the war of course that's been going on for a few years now.

And again, that happens to be correct. I mean, Putin does not know how to unwind this, nor does he really have an intention to unwind this. He just hopes to outlast. His goal is to outlast. So President Trump, after this very long phone call with Vladimir Putin, did not come away with any commitment by Putin to do anything.

Which, of course, is not a surprise. That's not Trump's fault. Vladimir Putin doesn't have an interest in actually negotiating an end to the war because he believes that if he just lasts long enough, the West will walk away from the war and he'll walk through Ukraine. That's what he's gambling on. Here's President Trump in the Rose Garden trying to suggest that some progress had indeed been made during the phone call.

Well I want to thank everybody. We just spent two and a half hours talking to Vladimir Putin. And I think some progress has been made. It's a terrible situation going on over there. 5,000 young people every single week are being killed. So hopefully we did something. We also spoke to the heads of most of the European nations and were trying to get that whole thing wrapped up. What a shame that it ever started in the first place.

Okay, it's not just a shame that it got started in the first place. It is Vladimir Putin invading a sovereign country. Trump said that he had spoken with Putin and he said, when are we going to end this, Vladimir? I said, when are we going to end this, Vladimir? I've known for a long time now. I said, when are we going to end this bloodshed, this bloodbath? It's a bloodbath. And I do believe he wants to end it.

Okay, so that's the part where I have some problems. What evidence do we have that Putin wants to end this? Like one shred of evidence. Seriously, one. I would love one shred of evidence that Vladimir Putin has any intention of ending this war.

Right now, there is no evidence of that. I understand President Trump is in deal-making mode and he wants deals, but in order for a deal to happen, both sides have to come to the table. President Trump is suggesting direct negotiations in Rome. He wants Pope Leo XIV to actually host the talk.

You mentioned that the Pope would like to take a role potentially in mediating his talks. Does that mean that the US is taking a step back from... No, no, no. I think it would be great to have it at the Vatican. Maybe it would have some extra significance. And I saw that it was discussed yesterday. And people told me that they'd be honored to do it. I would imagine they would be. So, no, I think it would be maybe helpful. There's tremendous bitterness.

anger and I think maybe that could help some of that anger so having it at the Vatican would be in Rome would be a very I think it would be a great idea. Okay, again, all that may be well and good. The question is, what does Vladimir Putin want? I did an episode a couple of weeks ago where we went through the writings of...

Vladimir Putin's so-called brain, Alexander Dugan. And what he makes very clear, and what Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, has made clear, and what Putin himself has made clear, is that the Russians see the existence of a sovereign Ukraine that could even possibly align with the West as an existential threat. to their imperial domination of the region. Which is their end goal.

The Russian end goal for Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov and Alexander Dugan is Russia as imperial state, not Russia as regional power. They explicitly reject that. They do not want to be hemmed in. They want domination of Eastern Europe. They want domination of Ukraine. They believe that NATO... is a sort of thorn in their side, that is a threat to their imperial aspirations for a Eurasian-dominated continent.

That is the problem. And what that means, the only way to get Russia to the table is to make very, very clear that the West is going nowhere. And that remains the open question here, because a lot of the verbiage from the Trump administration can be interpreted both ways. So, for example, President Trump told reporters at the White House, quote, I think something's going to happen. And if it doesn't, I just back away and they're going to have to keep going.

Well, I mean, don't threaten Vladimir Putin with a good time. There are two ways to interpret that. One is he backs away from the negotiations and we up our support for Ukraine. The Europeans up their support for Ukraine. And it just continues until Vladimir Putin gets the message. That would be the glass half full version of this. The glass half empty version of this is when he says, I just back away and they're going to have to keep going.

He doesn't just mean with regard to negotiations. He means with regard to any form of support for Ukraine at all, which basically damns Ukraine to a slow loss to the Russians because the Russians do have more manpower. The Russians do not care about casualties.

One of the amazing things about the way that Russia does war, and this has been true for several hundred years at this point, is that while the West cares very much about casualties among their own troops, the Russians just don't. This has been true since the Napoleonic era, and it was certainly true during the Stalin era. Vladimir Putin is perfectly willing to throw hundreds of thousands of men into the maw of death for the imperial ambitions of his country.

He's perfectly willing to do that. And one of the giant mistakes the West constantly makes, and it's over and over and over again with regard to all of our geopolitical opponents, is projection. We assume that their interests are the same as ours.

The West does this all the time. And because we are projecting our own sort of moral viewpoint on the world, our worldview, on other people, we then can't understand why they don't do the things we want them to do. And the answer is they are working from an entirely different framework.

This is why, for example, in the Middle East, the idea of a two-state solution was always ridiculous. It was always nonsense because it turns out that the people who are not the Israelis in that equation do not want a two-state solution. They want a one-state solution that involves the destruction of Israel and the death of the Jews. And it turns out that in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is not looking for some sort of territorial off-ramp where everybody...

kind of goes weapons down and Ukraine becomes more pro-European and the eastern parts of Ukraine become more pro-Russian. That's not what they're looking for. They're looking for a Ukraine that is turned into... a sort of Belarusian proxy state for the Russian regime. That is the goal of the Russians. In the same way, the goal of the Chinese. was misinterpreted.

For literally decades, by the United States, we assumed, okay, we will help open up their economy, we will make them richer, and then, in sort of gratitude at them being richer, they will reorient toward the West, they'll liberalize their regime.

And China will eventually become our global friend. And it turns out that's not what the Chinese are about at all. It turns out the Chinese leadership is about hegemonic domination of an entire region of the world and a completely different vision opposed to that of the West. It turns out that Contra, many of these so-called foreign policy experts on both left and right,

People in the world have their own independent interests that are not in fact aligned with those of the United States. Not everybody wants peace, security, and material prosperity in the way that we in the West interpret that. Many have other aspirations that are different. Just completely different. And those aspirations range from the spiritual to the religious to the geopolitical to the imperial.

And those ambitions exist, whether or not the United States exists. It's just that we are the gigantic roadblock in the way of those ambitions extending to people who don't want to be part of a regime that does that sort of thing.

Well, meanwhile, again, we're talking about geopolitical regimes that are opposed to the United States. China, of course, is the big one. President Trump has been right on this, totally right on this. You're talking about areas where President Trump really has shifted the sort of global consensus. China is one of those places.

So before Donald Trump, there was sort of a bipartisan consensus that China was a strategic competitor, possible future friend. President Trump came along and said, hold up. They steal our IP. They engage in some of the grossest human rights violations. They are seeking to box us out of particular markets. They have basically artificially boosted areas of their economy so as to hollow out our manufacturing base.

They're not our friends. They're actually our geopolitical opponents. And members of both parties actually now agree on this. This is one of the rare areas of bipartisan consensus between Republicans and Democrats. In the same way that Republicans and Democrats for a long time actually both believed, at least the mainstream of the parties, that the Soviet Union was an enemy.

Republicans and Democrats now understand that China is, in fact, a rising threat. The problem, of course, is that China is moving very quickly to consolidate its power, and they are dumping resources into key areas so as to outcompete the United States.

He's by Kyle Chan, researcher at Princeton University who focuses on Chinese industrial policy over at the New York Times, and he points out that China may in fact be winning, for example, the AI race. He says, China's trajectory is very different from that of the United States He says that President Trump's sort of autarkic ambitions with regard to his tariff wars attempt to reshore manufacturing through tariffs not on China, but on all sorts of other countries as well.

He's not going to run down to our benefit. China is doing something different, he says. China already leads global production in multiple industries. Steel, aluminum, shipbuilding, batteries, solar power, electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, 5G equipment, consumer electronics, active pharmaceutical ingredients, and bullet trains. It is projected to account for 45%, nearly half, of all global manufacturing by 2030.

Beijing is laser-focused on winning the future. In March, it announced a $138 billion national venture capital fund that will make long-term investments in cutting-edge technologies like quantum computing and robotics and increase its own budget for public research and development. And he points out that China is fast catching up on the technological front.

When the Chinese startup DeepSeek, he writes, launched its artificial intelligence chatbot in January, many Americans suddenly realized China could compete in AI. The Chinese electric car maker BYD, which Mr. Trump's political ally Elon Musk once laughed off as a joke, overtook Tesla last year in global sales. And they're building new factories around the world.

In March, they reached a market value greater than that of Ford, GM, and Volkswagen combined. China is charging ahead in drug discoveries, especially cancer treatment, and they've installed more industrial robots in 2023 than the rest of the world combined. Meanwhile, in semiconductors, where China's weak because, of course, Taiwan is the chief producer of semiconductors and they don't own China, they're building a self-reliant supply chain led by recent breakthroughs by Huawei.

So the question is, what does the United States do to fight all of this? I mean, the big problem right now is that the way that you actually fight China is by isolating China and creating massive network effects with everybody else. The entire theory of Hayekian capitalism, the theories of F.A. Hayek, the famous Vienna school economist.

And the basic capitalist theory is that diffuse knowledge among a thousand sources in the aggregate is significantly higher than any sort of centralized knowledge in one place. This is why, for example, the centralized economy of the Soviet Union, which was directed from above, setting prices, setting goals, was never going to be able to outcompete the rest of the world combined.

Through its trade systems, its diffuse knowledge systems, the movement of goods, services, people, and knowledge meant much higher competitiveness. And this is why in virtually any situation, you are going to choose the field versus, say, one company in terms of how will things go over the next 10 years in any field.

You can say, okay, I'm going to take Facebook. I'm not going to take the rest of the field. But the reality is that it is actually quite rare for any company in the United States to maintain market dominance for longer than 10 years, certainly for longer than 20 years. The constituency of the so-called Magnificent Seven, for example, like the Magnificent Seven, which are these high-tech stocks, Those stocks, would you have imagined, for even half a heartbeat?

That, for example, Nvidia would be among the Magnificent Seven 15 years ago? Highly unlikely. Tesla, would that be among the Magnificent Seven 10 years ago? These are all newer companies that have developed. And why is that? Why is there such churn in, for example, Fortune 500 companies? The answer is because the sort of competitive, roiling, chaotic nature of capitalism means that new insights can come from anywhere and can network with other insights.

The biggest problem that you have with regard to the new approach by the United States pursuing a sort of autarkic view of the economy, is that if you cut America off, what you end up doing is actually giving the advantage to other autarkic states that are larger and more command and control. Yet the worst of both worlds. The magic of the American economy, historically speaking, was free movement in terms of goods, services, and knowledge.

And we saw it the best. We saw it the best immigrants. They're the people who actually knew the most. Elon Musk, immigrant. Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, immigrant. These are all people who come to the United States.

Or their parents come to the United States and then they build amazing things. If you want to out-compete China, you actually do need those people here. Or at the very least, you need to trade with those people if they're not located in the United States. You need to actually lower your trade barriers. with other countries that are competing with China. Because otherwise, China is simply going to take its gigantic share of the world economy Suck it dry and channel it.

toward one purpose. Now, maybe China makes a mistake. Maybe China has some sort of path dependency mistake where, for example, they go down the wrong path in AI and they end up in a box canyon. And we, because we are more diffuse, we are able to kind of move around that. Maybe. That's what happened with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, because it went down so many bad pathways in the economic maze.

ended up cut off at every front, and eventually, they just couldn't compete anymore. They were relegated to stealing American technology. But China is not working like that right now. China is a deep competitor. And again, China has systemic problems. I did a YouTube video maybe a year and a half ago talking about the problems with China. They range from the demographic to the debt driven.

But in order for the United States to continue to out-compete China, we have to do the thing that made America an economic powerhouse in the first place. One of the key aspects of making America into the world's hegemon was the fact that we were an empire of economic liberty. Meaning that we built an entire world system involving free trade, freedom of navigation in the seas, freedom of movement in knowledge. If we cut ourselves off from that, we're not doing ourselves.

any real favors. That also means we have to keep our own economy less regulated. One of the things China can do that the United States can't, China does not care whatsoever at all about any sort of regulations that are designed as a hamper. on business or development. They don't care. This is why they're developing energy way outstripping that of the United States.

China right now has something like triple or quadruple the energy capacity of the United States because they've built all of it in the last 10 years, and they don't care if it gets a little dirty out there. They don't care. The United States, meanwhile, is dealing with regulatory overreach. Also, our tax system is Screwy Louie.

It has been for a long time. Now, China, they don't really have a tax system in the same way that we do, in the sense that the party just controls everything. So they suck money out of the private sector, they put it in the public sector, and then they ram it back into certain areas of the private sector. It's pure economic fascism over in China. It's a sort of mercantilistic approach to the economy.

In the United States, the complexity of things like our tax code, the fact that we've run up massive debt, that makes it very difficult in the future for us to... sell our debt, raise new capital in the bonds market, for example. That is a real problem. And this is why the United States, if we wish to outcompete China, we need lower taxes, lower regulation, higher productivity. That is the way out of this mess. And yes, eventually a restructuring, a serious restructuring of entitlements.

Well, joining us online is Congressman Seth Moulton, Democrat from Massachusetts. He currently serves on the Armed Services Committee, Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and the Select Committee on China. Seth, thanks so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. Yeah, great to be here, Pat. Thanks for having me.

So obviously a lot going on in the news. Going to start with some domestic politics and then move on to the sort of foreign arena. So obviously the big question for Democrats right now, President Trump's approval ratings remain pretty high at this point. Democrats in Congress have a pretty low approval rating.

One of the issues, obviously, that seems to be hovering over the Democratic Party at this point is all the questions surrounding what people knew, when they knew it regarding Joe Biden's mental health, now questions about his physical health. What do you make of that? How should Democrats deal with Americans' lingering questions about what everybody knew and when they knew it about Joe Biden's declining mental health during the last couple of years of his presidency?

I think the lesson for Democrats is that we've clearly lost trust. And there are a lot of Americans who felt that Trump was a bit crazy. I don't want to vote for this guy. But I can't trust the Democratic Party. They're so out of touch. And so I think we need to make some corrections there. Now, let's be honest.

At 100 days, Trump had the lowest approval ratings of any president in modern history. Democrats in Congress, Congress across the board is looking pretty bad. The opportunity for Democrats is to show that we're willing to change.

And then we can do things better. We can do things differently. But ultimately, we have to prove to the American people that we're not just going to preach to you about what we think our liberal beliefs are. We want to listen to you and gain your trust. We have a lot of work to do there.

So let's talk about that. Where are the issues you think the Democrats can actually change? Because obviously, a lot of what's happened over the past several years has been culture war driven. A lot of talk about intersectionality and race and sex and various sort of hot button cultural issues that Democrats. pushed into the public view and then Republicans responded to, and those culture war issues obviously have been sort of

front and center. But, you know, as we move into a new era as President Trump is president, as Democrats look forward, it seems there's a bit of a split inside the Democratic Party along a wide variety of lines. Where do you hope the Democratic Party puts its focus? I hope we focus on the issues that really matter to American voters, you know, like the economy, right? People are pretty frustrated with the tariffs. They don't want a trade war. They don't want prices to go up.

Democrats have a generational opportunity to win back leadership on the economy. Republicans this week are going to try to push through, and they'll probably succeed because they'll all cave at the end of the day, this massive bill that will cut taxes for the rich. slash Medicare and ultimately dramatically raise our deficit. So we shouldn't trust Republicans, at least under Trump, on the economy. And yet, if you look at American voters,

Going back to Reagan, they really trust the Republican Party overall. So I think Democrats have a chance. to actually win back leadership on the economy. I think we have a chance to win back leadership on national security. Trump is crushing our allies. He's kissing up to dictators. You saw what he did in the Oval Office with Zelensky. He basically echoes the Kremlin talking points.

This is a generational opportunity for Democrats to be the party of the flag, Democrats to be the party that supports the troops, Democrats to be the party that stands with our allies and stands up to dictators.

But these are things that we have to show the American people, hey, we're going to change. We're not just going to be obsessed over cultural issues. Whether Republicans bring up the issues and make us talk about them, or whether we just think that you can't even be a part of our party if you don't check all these boxes.

on these litmus test social issues. We want to be a majority, and we're going to be a majority by welcoming more people into the party and showing that we can lead on issues that really matter to American voters.

So, Congressman, I want to talk about the economy, and then I want to talk about the foreign policy and things that you've just mentioned. So when it comes to the economy and the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, it seems to me that the big gap between the parties seems to be the tax rates, not the spending.

I mean, just realistically speaking, the Republicans are spending a boatload of money in this bill. They're not radically bending the cost curve. If they do bend the cost curve, it is kind of at the margins, which with things like work requirements for Medicaid, which may phase in in three years or may phase in in four years.

Democrats, I've yet to see a serious cut to anything that Democrats have ever proposed in my entire lifetime. It's always an expansion of government benefits and government spending. And then the only difference is that Democrats suggest higher taxes and Republicans suggest lower taxes. So what is the Democratic plan for solving what appears to be a looming debt crisis that both parties seem to be running toward a cliff with regard to?

Well, first of all, Ben, I mean, I agree with you in large part. I mean, the big thing about this bill that people aren't talking about is what it does to the deficit. You know, this reconciliation plan will add over five trillion dollars. to the deficit trump added eight trillion dollars for the national debt in his first term We're not just kicking a can down the road for our kids. We're throwing a bomb down the road.

for our kids, and this is really bad for our country. And I, by the way, will admit that Democrats need to do a better job of talking about the deficit, admitting that it's important. But don't tell me that Democrats have never made cuts. I mean, under Clinton, you're alive for Clinton. Clinton and Gore cut government by $250 billion, about twice as much as what Elon Musk has achieved. And they cut a lot of government red tape. They made welfare reforms.

By the way, some of those work requirements didn't work out all that well, but they did this before. Democrats have made cuts before. But we've also done things like expand health care. We've gotten health care to a lot of Americans, including a lot of red state Republicans who are very grateful for Obamacare, who supported Medicaid expansion, which Republicans want to. cut back right now. The bottom line is, can we afford these tax cuts for the 1%?

Can we afford tax cuts for corporations like Amazon that are barely paying any taxes at all? And I think the harsh reality that we have to come to terms with as Americans, if we do care about the debt and the deficit, is that we can't afford them. I mean, I think that the big debate is going to be in the future, and it's going to have to be between...

either raising taxes, inflating the currency, or cutting a lot of these services. I mean, that is really the only way to do this. And the truth is that you can't just tax the people at the top end of the spectrum and hope to actually fix this. The United States has perhaps the most progressive. income tax system in the world. The reality is that the highest tax rates apply in Europe. Ben, our tax system isn't nearly as progressive as it was in the 1950s.

Trump wants to take us back to this mythical time in the 1950s. Well, we actually paid for things back then. I fought four tours in a war in Iraq and Bush told everyone to go shopping. It was the first war in American history where we didn't raise taxes to actually pay for the war and pay for all the veterans benefits that those of us who came back from that war need today.

So we do have to have this honest conversation. And, you know, I'm standing in my office here on Capitol Hill right now. I've had hundreds of people come in, sit on this couch. and tell me about things they want government to spend more on. Sometimes they bring in their kids who are suffering from horrific diseases and they want more money for research. I mean, really, really good things.

But how many people do you think have come in here and said, hey, I've got an idea for how to increase revenues so that we can actually pay for all this stuff. Ben, you could still be the first, right? So the point is that we do have an honest discussion about this.

What's that? I mean, we can have an honest discussion, but I think the real honest discussion is not about the top marginal tax rate of the 1950s. The true honest discussion is if you want European-style social services, you need European-style taxes. And that means that the top tax brackets kick in at $60,000 a year in Denmark. They're kicking it around that in France, in England. So the reality is that increasing tax is at the top specter.

The bottom line is that the real honest conversation about taxes would involve past increases on the middle class, not just on the top. Look, we do not need to pursue this tax plan that's before us this week. This is what's on the table, right?

that will disproportionately benefit the 1%. I think Americans get the idea that we should have fairness in our tax system. And when Warren Buffett says that his assistant, his secretary, pays a higher tax rate than he does, that doesn't seem very fair to Americans. So I'm not saying that we get all our revenue from the top 1%. I'm not saying we should just crush people who are billionaires and millionaires. You know, I'd love to be a billionaire someday. Wouldn't we all, right?

But I do think that everyone should pay their fair share. And it doesn't really seem like that's the case when the Republicans have a bill that disproportionately benefits the top 1%. You know, successful companies in America... went from a tax rate of about 22% to 12%. under these first tax cuts that they want to repeat now.

That doesn't seem fair. I mean, you and I pay a higher tax rate than 12%. So why is it that a trillion-dollar corporation, almost like Amazon, has a lower tax rate than you and I? I don't know. As an advocate of a 0% corporate tax rate, because the reality is that all that money ends up being paid to somebody who then has to pay an income tax on it, we can agree to disagree on this approach. But the reality is that...

Bottom line is, both parties are really throwing that deficit and debt bomb down the road without any real solutions being offered. And I think we can agree that there need to be some serious conversations in which people actually acknowledge that there are trade-offs to these policies. and in which actually some pain is going to have to be suffered by somebody. That's right. So I agree with that. We should have a serious conversation.

That's why we should actually have a bipartisan discussion and debate about this legislation. instead of just passing it in a completely partisan way through reconciliation. Let's have that discussion. Let's make Democrats come to the table and say, here are some cuts that we reasonably can agree to. Let's make Republicans come to the table and say, here are some taxes that we could actually raise to pay for this stuff.

But instead, like you said, we are throwing a bomb down the road to our kids. And it actually is not. The same between the two parties, because the deficit has consistently gone down under most Democratic presidents of the last 50 years and has consistently gone up. under most Republican presidents, because Republicans always cut taxes by saying that, oh, the economy will pay for them.

But it hasn't. The economy did not pay for the Bush tax cuts. The economy did not pay for the Trump tax cuts. And the economy is not going to pay for these tax cuts either. That's just the math. Well, I mean, and one of the reasons for that is because every time we cut the taxes and then grow the economy, then also increase our social spending. So the social spending always goes in one direction faster than the tax revenues taken into the government.

continue to increase overall except for again the clinton era which is when you actually had a republican congress and a democrat president who are talking about all this stuff together exactly when we're talking about areas that bipartisanship is actually necessary uh you know the challenge of china is a very real one And you and I have talked off air about this before. Obviously, this is one area where President Trump actually did shift a lot of the debates.

During the Obama era, during the Bush era, there was sort of a bipartisan idea that China was a strategic competitor, maybe even a possible friend in the future. But that has pretty radically changed. China obviously has taken an incredibly oppositional viewpoint with regard. to america they've been spreading their tentacles outward and they are racing toward ai supremacy they are racing toward manufacturing

supremacy, what do you think would be the best way to work toward containing China and defeating China in the battle for the future? Because, again, if you look right now at China's energy production, if you look at their shipbuilding, if you look at their AI production, if you look at their microchip production, And if you look at the possibility of a serious threat to Taiwan, all of those are very much on the table, and it feels like we're playing catch-up.

I totally agree. I mean, we're playing catch up. We're behind them in technology. We haven't been making the investments that we need to really focus on this threat. And of all the things you listed, Ben, the fact that Xi Jinping has promised. to invade Taiwan, staked his reputation on it. I mean, that's the most serious because it could literally start World War III.

And I'm amazed by the number of Americans, including very, very well-educated Americans that you and I see places where we go. They don't understand this threat. And if China invades Taiwan, it will ruin the economy. We're talking about Great Depression again. If we get into that war, I'm confident the US will win, but we're talking about Vietnam-level casualties. So the point is, with all of this stuff, we have to be focused on deterrence.

We have to convince Xi Jinping that it is a very bad idea to think about starting a war in the Pacific. And Obama was actually the first president to say we're going to strategically shift to the Pacific, get out of wars in the Middle East. focus on the Pacific. Trump has doubled down on that strategy. I agree with a lot of what Matt Pottinger did when he was on the NSC, leading the China policy in the first Trump administration. But we've got to be serious about this threat.

And that's why I'm proud to serve on the bipartisan China committee. It's a very bipartisan committee. We do a lot of good stuff together. Mike Gallagher was a chairman before. We've passed some important pieces of legislation. Like the TikTok bet. I mean, we might love TikTok.

But the fact that China, the Chinese Communist Party can influence the minds of our kids because they run the algorithms that run TikTok, which 100 million, I don't know how many, 100 million Americans have on their phones. That's a real problem. And by the way, it's a real problem that this bipartisan piece of legislation passed into law.

is not being implemented by the president. I mean, he is violating the law by not implementing the TikTok bill and saying that we just need to control the algorithm if TikTok is going to continue living on our phone.

Well, that is Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat from Massachusetts. Perhaps one of the last vestiges of a Democratic Party that might regain its sanity. Congressman Moulton, really appreciate your time. Good to see you, Matt. Well, the Republicans are still trying to figure out how to get this House bill passed.

There are a lot of factions in the Republican Party. Some are on the more tax cut side, but also big spending side. Some are deficit hawks. Trying to cobble all of that together is the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.

According to the Wall Street Journal, House Republicans set course Monday for a midweek vote on passing President Trump's agenda of tax cuts and spending reductions, giving them just days to work out deep disagreements among members of their fractious conference. They're banking on President Trump to help them.

Trump on Monday met with GOP lawmakers one-on-one. He is planning to speak to the broader House Republican conference today on Capitol Hill, according to people familiar with the matter. The House Rules Committee is planning to meet shortly after midnight on Wednesday morning to try to then send the package later that day. to the house floor

Speaker Johnson says of the Wednesday target, that is the plan. But fiscal conservatives like Chip Roy of Texas are very concerned. They're pointing out, of course, that we have basically a debt time bomb here in the United States. That is something that Moody's has been pointing out as well. The House Republican leadership have said that there are still major disagreements over cutting clean energy tax breaks. There are a bunch of sort of green tax breaks that

need to be phased out sooner. Lifting the SALT cap, again, a bunch of Republicans in purple districts want a SALT cap deduction increased, basically. Again, the amount of your state taxes that you pay should be taken off your income before you pay federal taxes. That's what they want. And also, there's a big debate over how quickly to start new work requirements for people receiving Medicaid. One House GOP leadership aide told reporters Monday, everything is on the table right now.

And this is extraordinarily difficult. Andy Harris, chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said on Steve Bannon's show that passage of the bill is not 100% guaranteed. It is far from it. He said the bottom line is if we don't get significant spending reduction, this bill is not going anywhere this week.

And again, even if you're talking about significant spending reduction, the reality is until you completely restructure the entitlements, everything is trimming around the edges. Everything. But these debt concerns are quite real. The possibility of serious downgrades in the future of American debt, that is quite real. Ralph Norman, Republican from South Carolina, he said, if we don't have a wake-up call now, all of us, Democrats, Republicans, I don't know what it's going to take.

Trump's National Economic Council director, Kevin Hassett. Said the downgrade by Moody's in our bond rating reflected former President Joe Biden's fiscal policies. He argued tax cuts in the megabill would position the United States for further growth. And he also cited increased tax revenue from tariffs. And the problem with that, of course, is that the tariffs are, in fact, going to slow the economy somewhat. This is a point that Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was making just yesterday.

I look at the things being up including trade, trade in general, because not just tariffs. has created a lot of risk out there and that we should be prepared for it. My own view is where people feel pretty good because you haven't seen an effect of terror. The market came down 10% is back on 10%. I think that's an extraordinary amount of complacency. That's my own view.

When I've seen all these things adding up that are on the fringes of extreme kind of thing, I don't think we could predict the outcome, and I think the chance of inflation going up and stagflation is a little higher than other people think. There are too many things out there. And I think you're going to see the effect. Even if these low levels, you know, they stay where they are today, that's pretty extreme terror.

Again, these are all real problems. The answer for President Trump, if he wants to keep those approval ratings up, which obviously he does, deregulation of the economy, movement toward a more free trade system than those 10% tariffs. The network effect of free market capitalism across the globe directed, oriented against China and oriented toward defeating China. And yes, that tax bill does in fact have to pass. And meanwhile,

The Supreme Court has now declared that President Trump can, in fact, revoke the temporary protected status for Venezuelan immigrants that President Biden put into place. According to NBC News, The Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the green light on Monday to revoke special legal protections for thousands of Venezuelan immigrants which could pave the way for at least some of them to be deported. This of course is the proper answer.

The only person who would have denied the application is the terrible Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson, who's utterly incompetent, the worst justice on the bench at this point. That's saying a lot because Sonia Sotomayor is still on the Supreme Court. And the reality, of course, is that if you sign an executive order granting TPS, temporary protected status, to Venezuelan migrants en masse, the next president can undo that. That is the nature of executive power.

This also gives the lie to the idea, by the way, that the Supreme Court is deeply oriented against President Trump in some way. I've heard this from people on the right. No it's not. It's not. I'm sorry. Again, you may disagree, I may disagree with some of the decisions coming out of the Supreme Court of the United States, but this idea that overall the Supreme Court is basically like a David Souter Supreme Court or Sandra Day O'Connor Supreme Court, that is just not true.

The Supreme Court is a more originalist, conservative Supreme Court than any Supreme Court of my lifetime. And what that means is that President Trump...

And his team should, in fact, be very meticulous and careful about how they go about doing policy, because if they go about doing policy correctly, they will likely get what they want out of the Supreme Court. If, however, they rush headlong into a wall, the Supreme Court will probably tell them no. That seems to be the way all of this is operating. And meanwhile, in sort of fraught legal questions, There's a pretty horrifying story out of Georgia.

The story that's horrifying is not what the state is actually doing there. It's just a horrifying story because of the human tragedy involved, according to the Washington Post. A pregnant woman declared brain dead months ago is being kept on life support in Georgia until her baby can be delivered, a decision doctors made to obey the strict state abortion ban, according to her family. Now, again, this makes some sense, honestly, like just on a pure pro-life level.

Adriana Smith, 30-year-old Atlanta nurse, was about nine weeks pregnant when she was declared brain dead in February according to her family. Doctors said that maintaining life support was the only legal option because Georgia outlaws abortion after cardiac activity can be detected in a fetus at around six weeks of pregnancy. And the state's law says that a fetus is a person with legal rights. The hospital has plans to keep Smith alive until the fetus is at least 32 weeks old.

The family says the decision should have been left to us, but really, It's unlikely that the decision should have been left to them. Now, it's unclear at this point. whether the baby's status is going to, whether the baby survives, whether the baby does not survive. According to the Washington Post, medical experts said they know of no cases in which maintaining life support for a fetus

whose mother was declared brain dead, so early in pregnancy, has led to a healthy, successful delivery. Usually this happens in the second trimester or early during the third trimester. But, obviously, this is a tragic situation. But just on a pure moral level, I'm not sure why, on a pure moral level, it would be better for two people to die instead of one. The pro-life position, of course, is that rights attach at conception.

And so if you do wish to protect the baby with all sympathy for the family, obviously it's horrifying on an emotional level for everybody involved. But I'm not sure why the death of the baby somehow improves the situation. Certainly not for the baby, but for the family in general as well. So, again, a very fraught situation. These sorts of edge cases are very often used to argue against pro-life laws.

But I think that the case in this particular case on a moral level is quite strong. If the baby has a chance at survival, why you would kill mother, pull the plug on the mom, knowing that it will also kill the baby. And I'd like to hear the sort of moral justification for that, assuming that there is a chance that the baby actually lives and goes on to lead a life. That's, I think, the question at issue here. Meanwhile, in media news,

CBS News' president has now been forced out amid tensions with President Trump. So CBS News has been having a very difficult time lately. The reason being that CBS News is, of course, owned by Viacom. They merged back in 2019. Viacom has sort of been on the sales block for a while. Sherry Redstone is the controlling shareholder who wants to sell Viacom. And she also would like for the company not to be in sort of open... wars with the Trump administration while that is happening.

The president of CBS News, Wendy McMahon, has now been forced out of her post on Monday, according to the New York Times. Ms. McMahon told her staff in a memo, It's become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward. Executives at Paramount informed McMahon on Saturday they wanted her to step down.

Paramount is currently in talks to settle a $20 billion lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump that accused 60 Minutes of deceptively editing an interview with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. Sherry Redstone has been saying that she wants to settle the case. Now again, settlements do not mean, for example, that you are admitting guilt. It is quite possible that what Sherry Redstone here is saying is, hey guys,

If this goes to trial, we might lose the case, and then we might have to owe billions of dollars. Let's just settle this thing out of court and basically be done. But the situation prompted the executive producer of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, to resign last month. And so what you're seeing now is sort of a media resistance to Sherry Bradstone. Here's the thing. She owns the company. If you don't like it, you can go work someplace else. 60 Minutes has been targeting the Trump

Team and administration for years on end and 60 Minutes happens to be a particularly biased program for a very, very long time. It is not Sherry Redstone's obligation to keep hiring people. who she feels are going to report falsely or in radically biased ways against the Trump administration.

It's always amusing to me to see people who believe that they are owed jobs. You are not owed a job. It is not, in fact, censorship for somebody to say, you do not agree with my vision at this company. You don't work here anymore. That's not censorship. That's just called real life. And it happens in companies literally all the time. So should Wendy McMahon have been fired? I mean, listen, if Sherry Redstone believes she should have been fired, then I suppose that she should have been fired.

Apparently, McMahon is going to remain at the network for a few weeks to support the transition. She's going to be succeeded for now by a pair of veteran network executives. But of course, the media are playing this as a deep wrong. It is not, in fact, a deep wrong. It is just the normal way that business is done. If the boss doesn't like the job you're doing, you're likely to find yourself out on your butt.

Meanwhile, it's kind of fun to watch people who are on the left suddenly discover conservatism as reality sets in. So, the peace of the day. that is sort of dedicated to this proposition is a piece by Christine Emba. To be fair, Christine Emba, who writes over at the New York Times, has made a habit of this. She'll say conservative things that she sort of discovered. She'll be like, oh, hey, you know what's great?

marriage. Marriage is kind of great. Well, she has a piece today at the New York Times titled The Delusion of Porn's Harmlessness. Glad to see people on the left finally actually realizing that porn is bad for you. Some of us have been saying this literally our entire careers. I read a book when I was 20 called Porn Generation, all about the evils of pornography. So that was like 2005.

And I was calling for local regulations on pornography and warning of the consequences to American society should porn become ubiquitous. And I was mocked at the time. I was treated as some sort of Puritan pariah for pointing out that pornography might in fact be bad. It has in fact crippled an entire generation of men, pornography.

It's also crippled women who have fallen into the trap of believing that they need to subject themselves to awful treatment by men in the name of quote-unquote consent, in the name of being sexy. So Christine Ember has this fascinating piece. in which she struggles with the fact that the left's only value is consent. And it turns out that actually human beings need more than consent to feel good about their own actions. They actually need a sense of spirituality and fulfillment.

So she has this entire piece pointing out pornography floods the internet. A 2023 report from Brigham Young University estimated pornography could be found on 12% of websites. Pornbots regularly surface on X, on Instagram, in comment sections, and in unsolicited direct messages. Defenders of pornography tend to cite the existence of so-called ethical porn, but that is not what the majority of users are watching.

Chao. It turns out that an enormous number of people who are watching pornography are now engaging in activities in pornography that are pretty vile. in real life, she points out it's hard not to see a connection between porn-trained behaviors like choking, slapping, and spitting that have become the norm even in early sexual encounters and young women's distrust in young men.

In the future, porn will become only more addictive and effective as a teacher, as virtual reality makes it more immersive and artificial intelligence allows it to be customizable. And then she cites a book titled Girl on Girl, How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by a woman named Sophie Gilbert. who pointed out that the mass objectification of women in the 1990s and 2000s was bad. And she points out that easy to access hardcore pornography

Quote, trained a good amount of our popular culture to see women as objects, as things to silence, restrain, fetishize, or brutalize, and it's helped train women, too. But here's the part that Emma points out that's quite fascinating. She says, while Ms. Gilbert is unsparing in her descriptions of pornography's warping effect on culture and its consumers, she's curiously reluctant to acknowledge what seems obvious. Porn hasn't been good for us.

While her descriptions of the cultural landscape imply the mainstreaming of hardcore porn has been a bad thing, she pulls her punches. So she writes, quote, I'm not interested in kink shaming and I'm not remotely opposed to porn. Immediately after describing a 2019 study that found 38% of British women under 40 reported having experienced unwanted slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during sex.

That data point came at the tail end of a chapter that draws a disturbing and convincing line from the emergence and popularization of violent extreme pornography in the late 1990s to photos that emerged from Abu Ghraib in 2004 of prisoners being sexually humiliated.

And here is the central point that EMBA makes, and this is totally right. Criticizing porn goes against the norm of non-judgmentalism for people who like to consider themselves forward-thinking, thoughtful, and open-minded. There's a dread of seeming prudish, boring, and uncool.

More generously, there's a desire not to indict the choices of individuals who create sexual content out of need or personal desire or allow legislation to harm those who depend on it to survive. But a lack of judgment sometimes comes at the expense of discernment. Yes, we call this conservatism and traditional values. Yes, it turns out that nonjudgmentalism is in fact a value system all its own.

And it turns out quite rapidly and actually is identical with moral relativism, suggesting that we cannot judge people's quote-unquote kinks. Well, it depends what the kink is. Some kinks are bad, as it turns out. Bad for them, bad for their partners. Yes, you can judge other people's activities. Doesn't mean there needs to be legislation directed against it. But the popularization of such activities in the mainstream obviously is going to have an impact on how people live.

Emba points out, most recently, the only people who seem willing to openly criticize the widespread availability of pornography tend to be right-leaning or religious, and so are instantly discounted, often by being disparaged as such. But cracks are beginning to appear in the wall, as shown by sources as varied as the recent of quiet revile of the anti-porn feminist Andrea Dworkin and the heartfelt podcast of Theo Vaughn, who frequently discusses his decision to stop watching porn.

and members of Gen Z seem more willing to openly criticize it than their careful elders. Yes, but I have a question. Why is it? Here's the problem. This is actually a real problem. She says, well, it's really bad because, you know, it's kind of awkward because the only people who have been consistently anti-pornography, like from the beginning to now, the only people who have been right on this stuff are people who are right-leaning or religious.

That's true. That's true. Literally my entire career I've been anti-pornography. All the new converts that I'm seeing on the right or on the kind of heterodox center or left are like, hey, you know what's bad? I never had to go through a period of my life where I thought pornography was good or decent or... amoral even. I always thought pornography was wrong because I have a traditional worldview which suggests that the human soul is besmirched by this sort of activity.

That it makes people treat women worse and see women in a worse way. And it is bad for men and it is bad for women to treat them as sexualized objects only. That people have souls and ought to be treated as holistic human beings.

But a left that said, hey, but you believe in gods. That's bad. You can't say that anymore. So now it's like, oh, well, we're rediscovering that porn is bad. First of all, thanks for that 20 years in the wilderness. Really enjoyed that. That worked out great. But second of all,

I noticed that when you strip the traditional values worldview from this argument, it's like you have to reprove every element of the traditional values worldview. This is a broader problem that's happening, not just on the left, but also on the right. It turns out the traditional values worldview has a bunch of positions that are rooted in basic human nature. That's why they developed over the course of 2,000 years.

This is why the biblical values that undergird Western civilization and were guarded by the religious are the basis for our civilization today. And when you strip out the religious values, and when you say, well, let's just explode all of that, we'll rediscover from the beginning. Well, what you end up with is an awful lot of chaos and suffering before those values are rediscovered. and also no language with which to discuss why this stuff is bad. Religious people can explain to you.

At length, why pornography is wrong, why it is bad, and why consent is not the only indicator of whether something is good or bad. Religious people have the language to describe this. People with traditional value systems have the language to describe why something might be bad outside of the sort of classically liberal consent context.

But the kind of nouveau right doesn't really have the ability to do that because they didn't grow up with any of this worldview. Like, have them explain why pornography is bad for them. They'll say it's because it feels icky. Okay, but for a lot of people, it doesn't feel icky until it does.

Or they'll say, you know, it made my life materially worse, sort of a utilitarian approach. But what if it was bad even if it didn't make your life worse in a utilitarian way? What if some things are just morally wrong? What if it doesn't have to be all about you? It turns out that sin is sin. What is that?

When you discard the entire religious, traditional, moral framework, you end up having to rebuild it ersatz, and it doesn't have the same binding effect as a traditional view of God, sin, and human nature have. Those are holistic. comprehensive worldviews that define how people live. And kind of trying to parachute into these various issues. Hey, you know what? We just found out that pornography is not all that great.

Okay, on what basis? For you personally? Or like on a utilitarian social level? How do you define the good, right? Why is it bad if people act in... atomistic individual isolation sexually. Why is that bad? A religious person can explain why that's bad because that's not what you're meant to do. God did not create you to do that thing. God created you. to leave your father and mother and cleave to your wife and form a new family unit.

And he says so in the book of Genesis. And I understand, oh my God, you're citing that terrible book. You're citing the Bible. How could you possibly cite, you know, that book about the big sky, man? Well, here's the deal. If you don't have a premise, that says that things are moral or immoral on the basis of some objective reality.

And what you end up with is a utilitarian calculus about, well, maybe pornography is okay. And maybe it's okay for some. And maybe violent pornography is okay. And now we have to prove all over again the things that human nature have already shown us to be true.

Let's take the perfectly secular view of what the Bible is for a second. Okay, perfectly secular. Let's take God out of the picture. Just assume for a second that what the Bible actually is and the biblical corpus and doctrines that spring from the Bible, we won't talk about God. Let's just assume. that those are pieces of time-tested wisdom that have lasted the ages because they are true.

Forget about the miracles. Forget about God on a mountain. Or if you're a Christian, God taking human form. Forget about any of that. Just look at the moral principles that are spelled out by this religion. and the biblical corpus that have lasted into today's world. Why have they done so? Thomas Sowell, who is, as far as I'm aware, an agnostic or an atheist, says that treating the only form of data as like sociology studies is idiocy.

Another form of data is the received wisdom of the past and if you have to keep remaking the wheel every generation You know what you end up with an awful lot of lost young people I'm sorry the people who are now discovering and pornography is bad are not people you should have trusted in the first place I'm just telling you this

I know that there is this attachment among young men particularly to this, well, you know, we're all on a journey now and we're all discovering together. But you know what? Maybe the person who is telling you, the people who are telling you pornography was wrong all along, maybe they were right. Maybe you should turn to them, not the people who said, you know, let's experiment with pornography and we'll determine maybe later whether it was a good idea or a bad idea.

Maybe those people shouldn't be trusted because their worldview was deeply flawed. And if you spend your entire life trying to remake the moral wheel just because you didn't trust your grandfather, maybe you're doing it wrong. Maybe our civilization is doing it wrong. Maybe grandpa had some interesting things to say. And yeah, maybe him sitting over the fire reading the Bible won the worst thing in the world.

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