Welcome to today's podcast sponsored by Hillsdale College, All Things Hillsdale at Hillsdale dot edu or I encourage you to take advantage of the many free online courses there, and of course I'll listen to the Hillsdale dialogues, all of them at Hugh for Hillsdale dot com or just google, Apple, iTunes and Hillsdale.
Well.
That bumper music could not be more app I am guest host Kurt Schlicker, sitting in for the great Hugh Hewitt. That bumper music is, of course, the theme to the film Exodus, about a bunch of tough Jews who built a country and save to people. My next guest is Eli Lake. You know him as a Free Press contributor. You can follow him at at Eli Lake and he's also the author of the Breaking History podcast. Eli. Welcome to the hu Hewitt Show.
Oh Kurt, it's great to be here at Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and early happy New Year.
Well, thank you very much much. I appreciate it, and I also appreciate what you do on Breaking History because I just listened to your latest episode, Tough Jews, and it gave me something I love, which is a chance to learn some history I didn't learn. Tell me a little about meyer Lansky's contribution to punching Nazis.
Well, I would say he's the pioneer of punching Nazis because in the nineteen thirties meyer Lansky, at least according to meyer Lansky, we should say the historical records of its body, was approached by two very prominent leaders in the Jewish community at the time, Rabbi Stephen Wise and Nathan Perlman, a Republican congressman and judge, and was basically asked to say, listen, the American Bund, which is the main Nazi movement, is expanding. They are making a play
to try to win hearts and minds. They're intimidating Jews, and we would like you to gather some of your tough guys and do what you do best and beat him up. And that's what he did. And it wasn't just lands gae sets say. I mean, the history is really interesting because what I didn't realize that well, let me put it this, I didn't really know it in
the detail until I did the research. The Jewish organized criminal class was not only worked with the Italians, and we know them as the mafia, but they were in this period probably as powerful as the Italian Mob. And what it was was an effort to try to say, looking at Europe and the idea that you know, the fascists in Italy and Germany were not legitimate political ideologies that could coexist in a liberal democracy. Sometimes you have to, as I say in the in the in the podcast,
it takes a thug to beat a thug. And that is what happened. And so you know, there's the big showdown occurred in what is today the Upper East Side was then known as Yorkville, and there was Hitler's birthday. There was a big rally and Lansky had a couple guys infiltrating and a cother couple guys at the exits, and he caused the commotion and a lot of Brown Shirts ended up having a pretty bad day.
Well, you had kind of a throwaway line in your Breaking History podcast. The Italian Mob, who are famous if you've watched The Godfather, you know, not great guys, but famously Catholic. They came to Lansky and said, hey, we want.
To help, and Lansky said, no, it's something the Jews have to take care of. Themselves. Lansky is a very proud guy when it comes to this stuff. We should also say this is a part of this history is also that once America enters World War Two, Lanski and Lucky Luciani, who basically creates the Five Families, and you know, kind of is the modern version of the Mob. Although it's hard to say that the Mafi exists like that,
it really doesn't. But they were approached by the FBI and they were enlisted to basically use their network to help keep Nazi infiltrators and Nazi and out of the ports in New York and the Eastern seaboards. So that's
another part of that story. So you know, in a situation like World War Two, when you're facing the Nazis, even America's organized criminals, who of course were in their own war against the US government and the law at the time, but they were willing to cooperate in a moment like that, much the same way, you might add the way that you know, the United Kingdom and the United States had to had cooperated with Joseph Stalin, who was obviously one of the great villains of history.
Well, Eli, like you and your podcast, you begin it talking about Bondai Beach, and you know, it was evident that no one's coming to rescue you early on, and you close talking about Bondai Beach to reemphasize that, and you say, you know, I hope the next time they the haters come shooting, I hope they meet some Jews who are packing.
Tell me like that.
That's kind of a you know, there is an impression of Jewish Americans is very, very liberal. My personal experience is a little different, but people have that impression and the idea of Jews carrying guns in America. And we're going to talk a little more about with Saul Litvak, who directed a movie called Guns and Moses later in the show. But that seems a little unusual. Are Jewish Americans starting to say, wait a minute, we were on first, we got their first responders.
I mean, first of all, Australia, as you know, confiscated its fire arm, yes, nearly thirty years ago after a mass shooting. And I mean, I still would like to find out how this father and son Syrian refugees managed to get special dispensation to own long guns. I'd really like to know the answer to that. How did that happen because apparently they were licensed. But in America, I am hearing anecdotally and I didn't put it in because it's not you know, I don't have statistics on it.
I'm hearing anecdotally a number of Jews who have applied for firearms permits for the first time, and I have to say that I don't think it should take it to eleven. I think that there are I wouldn't recommend at this point, you know, recreating America Hanna's Jewish Defense League. They did things that were clearly over the line, entirely illegal. But if there are these new groups, and the Hebrew word is cho mariem it means guardians, and they're like
young guys largely who organize. Sometimes they coordinate with a local police, but they're like a self defense group. If you're gonna even if it's not a lethal encounter, if you have these examples that we saw about four or five weeks ago in the Upper East Side at Park East Synagogue, they were swarmed. They were mobbed by a bunch of Palestine Solidarity activists who falsely claimed there was
a Palestine land sale involved in the synagogue. If you're going to target synagogues and you're going to make it impossible for Jews to worship when they want to worship at their temple, Well, then there ought to be people not starting a fight. I'm not talking about vigilantism. I'm saying just a cordon, a physical cordon that says no make way. These people are here. You know, we're not going to be part of your Instagram. You know, protest
here and get out of here. And I actually think if you send the right message, because the end result was the American bund didn't take off. After Lanski sent his guys to break up those meetings, they learned that there were that the Jews, at least in America, were not going to be easy targets. And I think that when you're dealing with a threat like that, when you're dealing with pure hatred, that that is a different matter
than like trying to win an argument. I'm a great believer in civil society, as you are as well, but you have some experience in the military, and when you are looking evil in the face, whether it's an American Nazi or it's somebody who is motivated by the kind of absolutely extreme Jihattist ideology that says that Israel shouldn't exist at a certain point. You know, you have to certify fire with fire.
That's my view.
Elilaka the Free Press. Go listen to his Breaking History podcast, particularly the last one. They're all good, but this last one was fascinating. I had no idea about any of this history. Thank you Eli Lake for joining us on the Hugh Hewitt Show. I'm guess host Kurt Schlichter, We're going to be right back with a lot more.
To come, Sail of Seventh Seed.
With Oh boy, Kirk Schwier is back. Look, I was an Army colonel, but I'm the green sheep of the family. My entire family was US Navy. I'm being joined by John Conrad, who has qualified to talk about some of his Navy stuff, but he was from what a professional would tell you maybe the most important component of American seapower, the United States Merchant Marine. Because John, I'm gonna throw you a softball. Professionals talk operations. I'm sorry, amateur's talk operations.
What did professionals talk?
Logistics?
Always logistics?
Card Oh, you're the best. You have been a huge voice out there, particularly in the last few days since Stnald Trump presented his idea for a new battleship, and a lot of people have the impression we're talking the old New Jersey or Iowa, which were amazing in their time, and of course their time extended to my time. They were off the coast of Kuwait during desert storm and I was there. Why battleships?
Why?
Now?
I love those ships too, But the world has changed, right the eighty years since World War Two, since there's Iowa class were built.
There are new threats now.
And you know, there's enormous pushback against this battleship idea. I've never seen anything like it in my twenty years reporting on that. It's just massive amount of pushback, mainly from the left, but some professionals too.
They don't realize what this is.
This isn't a reincarnation of the old, but it has some of those features like that sure bombardment that you know Army and Marine Corps loves so much.
But what this is really about.
In the Red Sea, we threw everything at the Hoothy's Army, Air Force, Navy, submarines, two aircraft carriers at once. The only thing that was effective in protecting those logistics change at the choke point where our destroyers they did great, but they ran out of ule and ammunition too quick. So really think about this as a hybrid between that Iowa class and a larger destroyer that can stay on station for longer.
Well, you're not talking something with twelve eighteen inch guns. You are talking someone with firepower that can be delivered onto the shore. And fire support is the main infantry killing system. It's not our rifles. It's calling in fire on things. So I love that, But what you're really saying, tell me if I'm wrong. I'm just a land lubber. Ships that are bigger tend to be able to go faster.
They also tend to be more survivable. They also tend to be able to hold more ordnance and that makes that absolutely a fort.
Absolutely, that's a great way of thinking forward fort. But that fort has to be resupplied.
Right. We have the underway logistics where the best in the world that underway replenishment of our carriers given that aviation fuel to.
To the carriers.
But because of this, you know, bad decisions by previous administrations, plus this UN International Maritime Organization all their green rules are oilers we have too few of them, and they have all this environmental junk on it that's limiting their effectiveness. So we're tapping into our merchant marine tankers, but they are slower and less effective, so the underway replenishment isn't
as good as they used to be. Plus these vertical launch cells, they can't be replenished at sea, so the destroyers in the Red Sea had to go all the way back to Bahrain to get resupplied.
On top of all that, the destroyers.
We have new leaser weapons, we have new electronic warfare weapons. Man, there is we're trying to fit ten pounds of you know what in a five pound bag here with these destroyers, there's no room for this extra stuff. Battleship gives you that whole space to store more fuel, ammunition, but also so add new capabilities.
Well look the old battleships and I've been to the uss IOWA here in Los Angeles. Unbelievable, a real it is a real eye opener to walk around on that. And they saw I was a colonel, so they kind of took me in the back and showed me around a little more. Very impressive, but you were talking fifteen hundred or so crew. Would you have a giant crew on one of these or would you be able to leverage the AI and automation to have a much smaller manning footprint for these new vessels.
Well, the Navy came out with the initial specs. They're thinking six hundred to eight hundred people. And this is another question. You know, we can't a carrier group of the carrier alone as over five thousand people plus the destroyer screen in the submarine. That's a very vulnerable threat to send out there to a choke point or to
start inching closer to China. Because this is a fortress and has amazing defensive capability, you can put it out there at a little more risky areas than a carrier and instead of losing five thousand people, you'll lose six hundred. You know this myth, and this is what happened with our frigate program, which was just canceled.
We tried to make it survivable.
Against anything where you could throw a nuke at this thing and it may still float. That's great, but in a war, things are going to sync, people are going to die. We have to accept more risk, and I would rather risk six hundred and eight hundred people than five thousand and a carrier. But if you send this out, this can be a missile sponge. You know, the Chinese are going to shoot a lot of hypersonics and drones. Everyone says, well, what's going to happen? Well, bring it on.
Do you deplete those.
Stockpiles of those things and let these amazing new weapons systems, the laser, the integrated seawiz, the deck guns handle this, deplete some of those ammunitions and hold.
Strategic choke points.
So now it also is a command and control for drone swarms too, which people are forgetting.
Now, Captain John Conrad, your CEO of gcaptain dot com and you follow John and you should at John Conrad with a K on Twitter. You know, a last civilians out there are gonna be going You mean you're gonna draw fire? Yeah? Yeah, that's that's how we as officers think. You you you have to fight, and sometimes you move out and draw fire so the other guy can take you down. But these aren't pushovers. Like I said before, and again I'm just gonna lay a lubber. But a
bigger ship tends to go faster. You tend to be. You have the power to go quick, you can move, you've got laser defenses, you got missile defenses. This isn't a pushover, this is a floating fortress. We have about fifteen seconds.
Yeah, and then here's another, a crazy thing that we're just putting on this.
It's called armor. You know all of.
These Navy ships they're very thin steeler like the LCS aluminum.
Hey, how about some of these missiles are going to get through? But to have it?
Didn't the Sheffield have? Did the Sheffield which was taken up by an exo set off the Falklands having him? Wasn't that aluminum? And didn't we learn from that?
Absolutely?
And then Trump wants to bring back the steel industry with this. So we get the armor and we get more steel.
Capacity from manufacturing.
That's a win win win. John Conrad, Captain John Conrad, CEO of G Captain follow at John Conrad, another guy who wants in America strong and powerful. We all do here at the Hue Hewitt Show. Guest goes Kurt Schlickter. Stick around. We're back on the Hugh Hewitt Show. I'm guest host Kurt Schlickter, Senior Corominisotownhall dot com trial lawyer,
retired Army colonel, author of Panama. Read the new novel it's number nine, and I'll tell you it's fantastic, and you can believe me because I was an LA trial lawyer. My next yes, used to be a lawyer too. He's also recovering from it. I just I just met Salivac recently after watching his movie Guns and Moses, which is out now. It's available on Amazon for free, and I gotta tell you it's a lot of fun. So I thought I invite him on here to talk a little
more with us. Sal Welcome to the Hugh Hewitt Show.
All right, wonderful to be with you.
Well, look, you've done something that I don't think anybody's ever done before, which is make a a let's say, pro Second Amendment, very pro Jewish action film that's in the conservative sphere and doesn't look like it was made in somebody's barn. It is a real movie, and I want to say congratulations. I truly enjoyed it.
Thank you so much, really appreciated.
And just today we found out that Religion Unplugged. Wonderful Publication issued its list of the top ten Faith based Films of twenty twenty five, which included some big titles like Angel Studios, The Last Rodeo and David and number one on the list of top ten faith based films of twenty twenty five, Guns and Moses, and the writer Joseph Holmes, a Great film critic, mentioned exactly what you're saying, Kurt, that it used to be that films.
In the faith based space look kind of cheesy.
They weren't at the same quality level as Hollywood, but they've come a long way and now you can find films that are right up there in terms of production value, star power, and sheer entertainment, and thank god Guns and Moses is number one on that list.
Well, look, you've got some great stars on it, don'tant Monroney, Neil McDonough who people remember from Justified and Band of Brothers. He's always effect they're great in this thing. But your star, the main character is a very nice, very kind, seems like maybe even on a little liberal rabbi in a small community, and he undergoes some changes and ends up being a you know, packing heat, and the actor is so fantastic you buy the entire transition of this character,
and he's a lot of fun to be around. He's not a cardboard cutout, though.
Not at all.
So the actor Mark Forrestein plays the character Rabbi mo Zaltzman. And I know a lot of people in the audience, you know, served in the armed forces, or serve in law enforcement, and they take seriously the idea of using a firearm. You know, in Hollywood, it's so ridiculous. When somebody needs to learn how to shoot. They put a few tin cans on a fence. He misses the first one, hits the next one, and you know, in fifteen seconds he's a dead shot.
That's not the real world. It's very difficult to.
Handle a firearm properly and safely and effectively under that kind of pressure.
God forbid.
And so we take the Rabbi through real training in the movie, based on my own real world training. I didn't grow up around guns, but you know, in the threat level to the Jewish people has been rising so fast and so hard in recent years. I joined the volunteer security organization. I learned how to use and carry a firearm. I have my concealed carry permit. Please God, none of us should ever have a need to use these skills, but if we do, we will not be
a soft target. And we depict that on screen for the big screen with Rabbi Mo and Guns and Moses.
Well solid back again, director of Guns and Moses. What I thought was interesting, Well, look, all the problems don't get solved with a gun, Okay. I mean, it's not like Panama Rat where everything gets sold with a gun. I thought was very interesting the way the character interacted with a young man who had embraced radical hate group ideology, and I found that interaction was actually very moving.
Yeah.
So the way it is a murder mystery guns to most is the murder mystery, and there's a killing at it at a synagogue.
Event right in the first scene, and.
The cops arrest a young white nationalist who has made harassing remarks to the rabbi and his people in the past. They find the murder weapon in his car. It's obvious he did it. Case closed, but it doesn't smell right to the rabbi, and since the cops won't investigate, he does. And so you have this incredibly unusual situation that it's a rabbi who's the only one who believes in the innocence of a young white nationalist and who goes out
to find the real killer. And this kid, who you know, ends up hating Jews has probably never met a Jew in his life, and so much of that is going on. There are people out there who benefit by stoking hatred, and the kid was radicalized online. But the Rabbi can see past, you know, this kind of superficial hatred and see, you know, there's a young man there, there's a real kid there.
He's got a heart and he can be reached.
You know.
So often I think when people break bread together, they can get past kind of superficial isms that can separate them.
And that's an important theme in the movie.
Well, look in Guns and Moses, there's a lot more going on than in a lot of mainstream Hollywood entertainment. Unfortunately, this wasn't put out by a big studio. I think it could have been, it should have been. It's certainly higher quality. And then a lot of the nonsense, the woke garbage that we see tell us a little about your journey as a conservative filmmaker and some of the challenges you faced.
Well, I'm glad you put it that way. I mean Hollywood is a godless town. Let's just start with that. This place is lacking in values. I know you spent some time here in southern California. You know it as well as any Uddy Kurt. There's just a lack of good values, traditional values in this town. They've got their woke ideology. It infects everything that they do. And getting a movie like Guns and Moses made, I mean, it just wasn't going to be possible in the normal routes.
Through the studios, etc.
So we were able, thank god, to raise the money, to attract top tier talent to.
The story, to the script, to the movie.
The difference when people like you said, when you watch our movie, it looks like any studio movie. The difference is we shot it in four weeks instead of twelve weeks like Hollywood would have done, and that required that everybody be on board. Trust me, as a director, work a million hours a day. Thank god we got it done. But where the other big difference is is that when Hollywood releases a movie, they spent as much or more as they spent on making it to.
Market it that we didn't have. Okay, we didn't.
Have you know, five or ten or twenty million dollars to market the movie, and so it's been a challenge getting the word out there. We're so blessed and thankful that the movie's becoming a word of mouth hit. People are telling their friends, they're having watch parties. I mean, it's a really fun movie. Forget the belief system of it,
and you know, all the values which are important. But at the end of the day, my job as a director is to entertain the viewer, and people are entertained, but it's just.
Taking time to get the word out.
And one other thing, which maybe you've encountered along the way, is there are people out there who oppose any kind of conservative ideology, any kind of traditional value, and just a few and they make it so difficult. I mean, we got word that The New York Times had a good review of the movie and killed it.
They wouldn't run.
Such a review because it's pro Second Amendment, it's pro faith, etc. You know, we have a ninety three audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. We even have a seventy three critics score. It's like that's perfect, twenty points higher on the audience. But we don't have as many reviews as we should. Have because they will just bury anything that isn't in line with the woke ideology.
And we have to.
Find alternative, alternative means to get to the audience. I mean, there's been a robust conservative radio network for a long time, but we're in a culture war. We are in a culture war, and we got to have movies that reflect our values. And when such a movie comes along, people got to support it with their feet, with their wallet.
Watch it. I mean it's easy to watch it home now.
We're free with subscription on Prime or you can rent or buy on other platforms.
It's not such a big deal to get it. So get it. Watch our movie. You're gonna enjoy it.
Yeah, you really are. You had reached out to me, I hadn't a chance to get back to you. I saw I was skipping around Amazon. It takes me twenty minutes to find something. I saw guns and most that says, I'll give it a shot. And we watched the whole thing and we legit enjoyed it because, as Andrew Andrew Bridebart said, two important things. First, politics is downstream from culture,
so we got to do our own culture stuff. But also it's got to be good you can't ask people to watch junk sal litfac director of Guns and Moses. Thank you for joining me on the Hugh Hewitt Show. Everybody, Guns and Moses. Go out and get it, go out and check it out. I'm Kurt Schlickter. I'm guest host for the Great Hugh Hewitt. We've still got more to come to stick around the bubye suck.
From them.
We are back on the Hugh Hewrett radio program. I'm guests Ho's Kurt Schlichter and there are two books that I want to show you. First, Panama, read the new Kurt Schlichter novel. It is a lot of fun. You should get it. But I also want to show you A Rage to Conquer. It's the newest history book from my buddy Michael Walsh, who is now my guest. Michael, Welcome to the Hugh Hewitt Show.
Nice you church a pleasure to be with you here from soon to be a foot of snow in northwestern Connecticut.
Well, I'm about to float away here in southern California. I blame global warming because it's never snowed or rained before.
No snow in December in New England is unheard of. So you can just see how much damage we've done to the climate. Well, let's face it.
Well, of course we're relying on history, and your book, of Course, is an ode to history. I love it because it's twelve battles that changed the Western world. It's amazing. Our friends on the left, they're not not so big on history. Why is that? Why do they hate history?
Yeah? I think history that teaches them that what they believe isn't true. That is to say, the minute you start looking at it seriously, you realize that their premises are false, and therefore you move away from the narrative that they keep trying to impose. Howard's in the History
of unquote is the arc of all this. But there have been a lot of leftist historians in the first half and twentieth century into the second half of the century that pushed this narrative America, bad slavery reparations, bigotry, races. You know, all their buzzwords come from that. And when you learn to not be afraid of their buzzwords anymore, because they're not true. First of all, that's the number one reason, and that sticks and stones can break your bones,
but names will never hurt you. Then you can fight back. So what I try to do in this book, and did in previous book called Last Stands, and now in the new book I'm writing, The Wrath of God, is to go back to the historical sources and say, here's what happened. This is the best summary of all of the eyewitnesses and first primary sources that I can find, and this is my interpretation of them, and this is what I believe to be the truth. That's what historians do.
You know, Michael Walsh. I you know, I'm on social media once in a while, and it seems that people are not only ignorant of facts, they're immune to them. They simply believe things that aren't true and refuse to believe things that are manifestly and obviously true. And it's almost Orwellian in the way that they can convince themselves that what they're seeing and hearing are not actually what they're seeing and hearing.
Well they want to believe. You know, what's happened is that sports has now become the identifying terable for everything we do. We choose up sides, and we love our Red Sox and we hate those Yankees no matter what.
That the teams change players, that the city's changed, you change, but most diehard sports fans immediately go to the tribe and begin to fight the rival tribe.
It's like the monkey tribe in two thousand and the one at the beginning, and we've now.
Applied that to politics.
So it's Trump is the lightning rod, and so whatever he does is either the worst thing ever or he's great. And there's no interpretation, there's no middle ground, there's no time for nuanced it's all this emotion driven hysteria. Mostly I'm afraid on ex Twitter, some on Facebook as well, which I also am on, But I really think this is bad for the country, and I think people should mostly calm down and shut up. That's what I mostly think.
Well, look, I think so much, so much is emotion, so much is preconceived notions, and then you bend the facts to support them your pre existing conclusions. What that does is eliminate the whole concept of argument, which presumes the chance to change someone's mind. And if you don't resolve let's talk history. If you're not resolving arguments through debate, what does that leave you to resume resolved arguments?
Well, I would say fisticuffs and clubs mostly, which is the direction that we're heading. You see, the left has now basically given permission to shoot us. They obviously did it with our friend Charlie Kirk. They've taken shots at the president. The left killed three of the four presidents who have been assassinated, three of the Republicans. The Democrats killed three of the first six Republican presidents. They just
assassinated them. So this is not anything new, but it's their go to default mode and we really have to be on our guard against us. They don't like debate because they're going to lose. That's the problem.
I think their challenge is they have trained a generation of conservatives and patriots to respond to what they're doing. And of course we got all the guns. So as Chairman maw who normally they listen to, said, all power comes from the barrel of a gun. At the end of the day, if if the currency is pure power, I kind of like our odds.
Well, you know, obviously we don't want to get to that point and we would prefer reason debate. I mean, this changed my mind on some issues after delving more deeply into the world, and you're Irish different Georgian and I'm irish. That means I'm stubborn and stupid. So if I can do it, anybody can do it. But if you can't engage in an argument of intellectual argument, then what's left, as you just said, but a resort to force, and left loves force.
Well, let's love it. Well, let's let's look at what's happening in Europe right now. We have the Europeans saying we love free speech. We're just against hate speech and irresponsible speech and disinformation, which will all be defined by us. And coincidentally, we'll support our regime and undermine any challenge to our regime.
Well, their regime is what I call the EUSSR. By the way, let's all let's take a brief moment of silence to more in the passing of the Soviet Union on this date in nineteen ninety one. And I had left that benighted country about six months before, just before the coup against Gorbachev, and you can see the country was on its last legs and it collapsed just out of the blue. Now we have the EUSSR, which is headed for the same fate, hopefully more quickly.
EUSSR do you think that the Europeans have enough manhood that wasn't bled out on the psalm, didn't die on a you know the fields of Europe in World War Two. And of course they're disarmed, and you can't be a man if you don't have a weapon. How are they going to fight this nanty dictatorship? We have about thirty seconds.
Yeah, they'll get real quick. The Europeans don't define freedom the way we do.
Clearly.
When I first moved to Germany in nineteen eighty nine, they said, yeah, America, Yeah, it's okay, Yeah, you become a millionaire here, but you could also sleep under the bridge. And I said, yes, but Americans think we could end up sleeping under the bridge, but we're going to be a millionaire. So this is the difference in how they think. For them, freedom means Napoleon author wow, dominant wow, top down authority well as freedom.
As my Scottish mother said, all the good ones left. Michael Walsh always great to talk to. You go get a rage to conquer. It is fan fantastic. I'm Kurt Schlicker. This is a hugh you would show stick around.
We got more to come, folks.
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The huit U program. I am guest Ho's Kirk Schlicker. And of course that's Motorhead covering David Bowie's Heroes. That's my walk out music.
Baby.
I love it. Ah, this is great. I love Guessosa on the Hugh Hewett Shoe. I love being able to promote my new book, Panama Read, the ninth Kelly Turnbull novel. Go get Panama Read right now. But what I love most of all is I get to bring interesting people on. And there's few people more interesting than Mark Capudo, who's axios is White House Reporter. You should follow him at Mark the k Capudo with a C. Mark, Welcome to the Hugh Huge Show.
That I like what you said.
Hold on, hold on, I'm gonna do the glasses thing. We're gonna we're gonna vibe on the same glasses.
What do you think?
I love it? I love it?
Yeah, I got that.
Uh.
Look look Mark, I'm writing. I've already written a column for town Hall for Monday. Uh, and it's called can You Feel the vibe shift. I think there is a vibe shift after you know, we had about seven great months with Donald Trump at getting things done. Then things kind of slowed down. People are kind of asking, hey, when's this economy going to turn around? We cat, you know, the administration kind of stepped on its own feet a
few times. But I think in the last week or so, with the GDP and the inflation numbers and US sending his Loniss to hell in Nigeria, which is awesome, I think we have a vibe shift. I think we're turning around. I think people are looking around going, you know, maybe things aren't that bad. Am I crazy?
I don't think you're crazy. I don't know if you're premature or not. Let's give it a few more months.
But one of the things that Trump, Scott Best and the Treasury Secretary Howard Latnik to a degree, have been saying is the end of quarter one, beginning of quarter two of twenty twenty six, you're going to start to see this confluence of events of lower interest rates, the effect of the as they call it, the Big Beautiful Bill, all the tax provisions start to kick in, not just no tax on tips, but also various depreciation rules, which are going to enable corporations to hire more, the borrowing
costs are going to be cheaper, and on and on, and people are going to start to really feel it. That's their hope. And to your point, so far, so good. The inflation numbers look good. GDP was certainly better than expected, and this is what they've been saying all along.
But again, we want to focus too much on the blip. Let's check out the trend line.
Well, Mark, I think I think we've had an interesting couple of weeks. In some other areas. We apparently have pretty high public support for the campaign against the drug boats. Now we're blowing up Islamis who are murdering Christians in Nigeria. It does seem and again I fully support destroying drug dealers and Islamis fanatics. I'm totally in on it. But there are a lot of Conservatives who are out there saying, hey, we were promised no more wars. These are kind of
like wars. Do you think that's going to have a major drag on the Republican Party over the next year.
I mean, I don't know.
What I do know is that there were a lot of predictions of how the Republican Party was going to come apart with the seams, how Maga was divided if Donald Trump would join Netanyahu's bombing campaign of Iran.
Trump did.
It was successful for what Trump set out to do, and there was no divisions afterward. Republicans to thegreed that they weren't sort of in line and behind the president, fell in line, got behind the president.
So it depends on what it looks like.
Is if I think if Venezuela is a real sort of hot war with an invasion, that might tend to really divide the party and cause problems. But I just don't get the feeling that that's really on the table.
Trump is saying everything's.
Down the table, but some things are more likely to be on the table than others. And a full on invasion hot war isn't you know? You plug your book Panama read. One of the things I've been stressing to people when they talk about US adventures in Latin America and how they failed. The one success that they point to that US policymakers or Trump supporters or the Trump administration points to is in Panama. In nineteen eighty nine, there was an indicted leader the Menuel Noriega. He had
stolen his election, his last election. He was therefore declared a dictator, and the United States engaged in a hot war. They invaded the United States, invaded, snatched him, took him back to the United States, he was convicted, and the like. And now Panama is a flourishing democracy.
Now we'll let as well look exactly like that.
I can't say that, but there is a template for the United States engaging these sorts of regime change operations in a very hot and aggressive way and not having it become sort of a.
Post Iraq invasion hellhole.
Well, Mark Ipudo is the look. We've had some problems within the conservative movement. We've had some people who were formerly part of it who saying incredibly stupid things Candae owns and some incredibly crazy things, and we've been told that this is going to tear the Republican Party apart. I'm interested in whether the White House worries about that. Are they afraid we're gonna ideologically tear ourselves to shreds.
If they are really worried about it, they're not really leading it on.
The main thing I get out of the White House here is just sort of a frustration the Epstein files has been sort of just sort of.
A drag administration Trump.
Yeah, well they haven't been sort of been they haven't been able to get from behind the eight ball on sort of the messaging of it. But that aside, and that's just causing a level of frustration at the media coverage. You know, there's a lot of commentary set, especially on social media.
I don't want to just say media, but the.
Sort of the broader conversation on social media, factoring in a lot of liberals is that Donald Trumps in damage control.
She was about to drop. Why was he lying and hiding things?
But the reality is that what we've seen so far, we've been at this for about a decade. I wrote about this the other day in Axios for our piece about how there was still a lot of time and a lot of documents to go before everything was fully disclosed.
That after a decade of media coverage and public awareness of Jeffrey Epstein, after countless investigative reports that have been issued, and scores of lawsuits and complainants victims who have gone public, and thousands, tens of thousands of emails and now documents in some cases, documents that normally would not have seen the light of day, and pictures, photographs, thousands, tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands of photographs. After all this totality of everything we've seen, we haven't yet seen any credible evidence that Donald Trump engaged in sex trafficking with Jeffrey Epstein or sex with a minor. It's just sort of not there. So currently where we are now, there are maybe a million more documents to go, and then there's the stuff
that the Epstein estate has. Maybe that'll change, maybe something will come out, but it's starting to seem like that's not going to be the case at least as of now.
Well, Mark Computo, you are the Axios White House reporter. You can follow him on Mark at Mark Capudo, Mark with a CE, Caputo with a C, and uh, thank you for coming on the Hugh hewittt Show. Happy New Year. I'm Kurt Schlichter. We'll be right back.