What a week. Welcome it is Verdict with Ted Cruz the Week in Review, Ben Ferguson with you as always, and there were some major stories this week that you may have missed that we talked about that I want to make sure you heard exactly what happened here on Verdict.
First up, Kamala decides to steal intellectual property from Donald Trump, you know, like his ideas, and act like they're her own, this time claiming that she is the one that is going to not tax tips, even though it was actually her idea, and she broke the tie in the Senate with her vote to actually have the irs go after people that were not reporting quote all of their taxes
on their tips. Up next, the media continues its massive billion dollar in kind donation to Kamala Harris by smearing this week Donald Trump and Elon Musk because they couldn't control the interview they did. Yeah, they sat down, had a nice conversation and the media lost their minds over it. And finally, more terrorists on the watch list coming across our southern border. This time the borders are didn't stop a Palestinian bomb maker and then she acts like nothing's wrong.
It's the Weekend Review, and it starts right now. Donald Trump seized on something that was very authentic and organic. He was out in Vegas. He was having a conversation with people in the service industry. He had an idea, apparently wrote it on a napkin. We shouldn't tax tips, help people survive, help people make a living. And he said it at a rally and it just work and it stuck and people loved it because he was a
guy looking out for the little guy. He was advocating for these hard working people that rely on tips as part of their income, and it obviously played well with many people in this country. Fast forward to a few days ago. Kama here says the same thing.
Well, and let me give a little more narrative on that. So Trump announced it at the Vegas rally. And and I think the next week he was in DC and I had lunch with him. He had lunch with all the Republican senators. He was actually telling us the backstory of it, and and and he said, well, you know, this was not an idea that came from a bunch of policy experts that had a bunch of white papers. He said, he was in Vegas, right before the rally, and he said he was having I think lunch or dinner.
I think it was lunch. And he said, there was a waitress who came up who complained about the really oppressive enforcement from Joe Biden Kamala Harris of their efforts to tax tips, and how it was really burdened some of the record keeping and it was really hard and and and Trump says, at dinner, pulled out a piece of paper and just wrote down, no taxes on tips. And then he said he went to the rally and he just said it, and he said, and they went wild,
They went wild. I got to say, there are moments I think of political genie, and I think that was one of them. So the next week I introduced legislation in the Senate to exempt tips from taxes because I heard that idea, and it's exactly right. And the reason I introduced legislation, there are a lot of reasons, but one right at the heart is for over a decade, for as long as I've been in the Senate, I have been advocating that the Republican Party, we should be
a blue collar party. We should be the party of waiters and waitresses. We should be the party of bartenders. We should be the party of hairdressers and nail salon workers and taxi cab drivers and and and everyone who has callouses on their hands because they're working hard. And it is a policy. The contrast is night and day. That's who we should be fighting for. And you know it's striking. I introduced that legislation. It's got a number
of co sponsors. You know who also joined it. Here's that both Democrat senators from Nevada, really Jackie rosen Uh and Catherine Cortez Masto both joined my legislation because about twenty five percent of the workers in Nevada are tipped workers. And I got to say my reaction when I heard him make that proposal, I said, Donald Trump will carry
Nevada on that policy issue. By the way, the culinary union has come out emphatically in support of Trump's proposal, emphatically in support of my legislation exempting tips from taxes. And so this week here's Kamala Harris. I want you to give a listen, first to Trump in Nevada announcing the policy proposal, and then Kamala just shamelessly copying him. Give a listen.
Because when I get to office, we are going to not charge taxes on tips people making.
Tips, eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.
I mean, that's just straight up stealing, but I do so.
June ninth is when Trump said it. August tenth is when she said it, and she didn't have the dignity to say, you know, I actually would have respected it more as she says, Look, there are lots of areas where I disagree with Donald Trump. I'm a left wing Democrat kook. He's not. However, he had an idea that's a really good one, and I'm here to tell you right now I would do the same that I could respect.
But she doesn't acknowledge it, and and the irony is she also doesn't acknowledge what prompted it, which is that her administration, the Biden Harris administration, she was the tie breaking vote on the legislation that provided millions for the I R S to go after waiters and waitresses and and and and and everyone who's who's making tips, and to enforce it vigorously and and to hammer on them. And yet she doesn't acknowledge any of that. This is gaslighting. One on one.
This is why, by the way, I love doing the show. And I will say to everybody that right now listening or watching, this is when I ask you share it. And here's why. Know when the media is going to tell you this in February, because what you're just said is not something ten years ago. And then she had a change of heart. Okay, it's not like it was a polic ten years ago and there was some magive effects came out of it that you didn't realize, and then you're like, hey, look that was a long time ago,
decade ago. In February of twenty twenty three, it came to light that Biden's IRS planned to crack down on the service industries reporting on tips. The Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement Program was to be a voluntary tip reporting system in which the IRS and the service industry companies cooperated, which is where they would crack down on the actual workers.
The program was meant to quote improve tip reporting compliance, reduce administrative burdens, and provide more transparency and certainty to tax payers again going after the little guy here, and the program feature included quote monitoring of employer compliance based on actual annual tip revenue, So big brother watching you and charge tip data from an employer's point of sales system,
so now the computer's tracking you. And allowance for adjustments and tipping practices from year to year to protect the employer from getting in trouble by turning in in essence their employees. And who did this Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. And now she's out there saying I want you to not have to pay taxes on your tips, when again, twenty twenty three February wasn't that long ago.
Yeah, and look, this is a standard practice and pattern of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris siding with the big guy, siding with giant corporations, whether it's big tech or giant corporations against the little guy. You know, there was an interesting story the same lunch where Trump was telling the
backstory of this proposal. The day before the lunch, uh, Trump and Lindsey Graham had played golf, and Lindsey told everyone, he said, look, the two of us were playing golf, and they're both big golfers, and you know, look, your son is one of the best golfers in the world. But Lindsey described how midway through the golf game. He said, their two caddies came up and hugged Donald Trump because he had just made the proposal of no taxes on tips.
And listen, golf caddies like barbers, like bartenders. There there were all sorts of professions where a big chunk of their revenue and many of them were just barely making ends meet. They're just starting to climb the economic ladder, and they literally came and hugged him for that proposal. And so Kamala Harris is now trying to pretend, look, I'm glad she's supporting my legislation. I got to say,
this is a first. I do not believe Kamala Harris has ever before publicly endorsed legislation that I filed the lead author of. Now, she didn't mention it was my legislation. She didn't mention it was Trump's idea. And to be clear, I took the idea from Trump. It was his idea, and you ran with it. I just had the sense of saying, that's a damn good idea, let's do it. And so I went and put pen to paper to actually draft it to make it happen. But I readily
credit it was Trump's idea. Kamala could not be bothered to acknowledge anything other than pretending this has always been her view.
Finally, Senator, there's also something else that's been happening over the last couple of weeks, and that is the media is trying to make Harris and her running mate look like they're moderates, like they're not extremists, they're not radicals, even though their entire history says that's exactly what they are.
Look, I want you to listen to two clips that really sums up just how extreme they are. The first is from Tim Waltz and he's talking about his fellow Minnesota Ilhan Omar. And to be clear, Ilhan Omar is one of the founding members of the Squad. She is a radical anti she hates Israel. She is extreme. Listen to what Tim Waltz thinks about her.
Something I'll never get tired of saying. I think all of you, Congresswoman Omar, wonderful.
And that's up.
When I'm having a tough day, or I'm out on about mile five of my run and I'm feeling kind of down and the world's pressing on me, I think ilhan Omar is a congresswoman and it just brightens you up. So thank you.
I just wonder like mile three is he's sitting there thinking about that's the same congressman that said that the terrorists that attacked us on nine eleven were some people that did some things.
Look, ilhan Omar is a congresswoman, and that's something that just brightens you up. That's what he said. This is everyone will acknowledge one of the most radical and extreme is zealous, and that brightens his day. That tells you who he is. Now, if you think that's bad, I got something worse. Do you like Christmas?
Love Christmas?
Okay, well you're not Kamala Harris. Give a listen to Kamala.
When we all sing happy tunes and sing Merry Christmas and wish each other merry Christmas, these children are not going to have a merry Christmas. How dare we speak merry Christmas? How dare we?
I haven't seen somebody get that crazy about hating Christmas in a long time.
And understand what she's saying. They're in context. She's talking about illegal immigrants, and she's saying illegal immigrants are having a lousy time. So how dare we say Merry Christmas when illegal immigrants? I mean it is. This is a woman whose entire career has been siding with criminals and with illegal immigrants, and in her mind even saying Marry Christmas is unacceptable as long as there is one illegal immigrant who was not backs basking in luxury.
Now, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation, you can go back and listen to the full podcast from earlier this week. Now onto story number two. We've seen this happen now multiple times over the last couple of weeks. We saw them say that jd Vance is weird, right and everybody we played that montage of the media
saying it over and over again every outlet. Then we had this the same montage with Kamwa Harris's campaign, except it was positive news for her that she's surging, surging, surging. Everybody use that word over the weekend. Clearly it's coming I think from the Hairs campaign. And now you have the same headlines written fifty different ways of Sunday with this conversation between Trump and must It wasn't true and a lie? How is this not an in kind donation? The Hairs campaign.
Look, I think it's worse than that. It's not even an inkind donation. They are the Harris campaign. Understand, there is a political strategy, a decision that has been made to hide Kamala Harris to locker in the basement. I don't know if she's in the same basement with Joe Biden or not. But she does no media interviews. It's been three weeks that she's been the presumptive nominee. She
hasn't done a single media interview. She doesn't answer questions, she reads from a teleprompter, and she doesn't add lib on anything. And the reason they're doing that, what is their campaign? Their campaign is the media. Those headlines, they are the media. And I want to play in particular one excerpt from CNN because it reveals just the lengths they will go to lie. So play initially how CNN covered a small segment of the Trump elon Musk interview. Play.
I want to play one exchange that was kind of classic. Well, there were a lot of changes that were exchanges that were classic Donald Trump. This one really stuck out to.
Us and Naishaki were bombed. But now that they're like full cities again, so it's likely not that's something that you know, it's scarious people think basically, So.
That was more Elon Musk than Donald Trump talking about sort of suggesting that what happened almost eighty years ago, I think eighty years ago next year, the bombing of Hiroshima Nagasaki. Now it's okay, kind of trying to blow off the impact of that.
So let me say a couple of things. Number one, let's let's start with with CNN's perspective that that apparently they think America winning World War Two was a bad thing, and and and that are bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They're they're not crediting that that saved enormous number of lives and then the war, World War two would have gone on for much much longer without those bombs. CNN takes it as a given that America was in the wrong.
That is horrible. But but that being said, Look, if you didn't listen to the Elon Musk Trump interview, if you just heard that little segment, if all you get your news from is CNN, I understand you're being a little startled, going, huh, that's weird. Trump is like going out of his way, so to say, hey, no big deal that that that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked, that that's a wonderful thing. That the natural inference from that little segment is apparently Trump, if he's president, is going
to nuke other cities. That's that. That's it's not not a big deal, no problem, Let's just let's just drop Adam bombs all over the world. That's that's clearly where where CNN wants your inference to go. Now, I want you to listen to the full conversation in context, because it is wildly different from the little segment CNN played. Listen to the full conversation in context.
Yeah, actually there's the there's the bad side of nuclear which is a nuclear war, very bad side, but there is also I think nuclear electricity is underrated and it's actually you know, people have the sphere of nuclear nuclear electricity generation, but but it's actually one of the safest forms of electricity generation. It's it's just a huge misunderstanding.
And if you look at the injuries and desks, you know, caused by say, I mean, I'm not going to pick on a call money if it's just any kind of mining operation, and this is certain number of injuries desk per year, and you compare that to nuclear, nuclear is actually way better. So it's it's underrated as a as an electricity source, and I think it's it's something that's worth reconsidering. But there's so much regulation that people can't get it done so that you know.
Maybe they'll happen to The name is is a rough name. There are some areas likely, like when you see what happened writing to rebrand it, we'll have to give it a good name. We'll name it after you or something. You know, No, it has hey, it has the branding problem. You know when you see what happened does have a branding problem. When you see what happened in Japan where they say you won't be able to go in the land for about three thousand years, did you ever see that?
And in Russia where they had the problem where they you know, there's a lot of bad things happened and they have a problem and they say that in two thousand years people will start to occupy the land again. You know, you realize it's pretty bad, but you're right about it.
It's basically it's actually not that bad. So so like after Pokushima happened in Japan, Like people were asking me in California, you know, are we worried about like a nuclear cloud coming from Japan. I'm like, no, that's crazy, it's it's actually, it's not even dangerous in Pokushima. I actually flew there and and and ate locally grown vegetables on TV to prove it. And I donated a solar water treatment a solar power system for a water treatment plant. And yeah, but you haven't been.
Failing so well lately, and I'm worried about it.
No, No, but I'm only.
Getting on mine.
You know.
It's it's like, you know, here Wishment and Knightshuck were bombed, but now that they're like full cities again. So it's sadly not that's something that you know, it's not as scary as people think.
Basically, not even close to how SINN presented their conversation and clearly edited to make it seem like that Elon Musk and Donald Trump were basically insane, when if you put the conversation in context the way that we just played it right unedited, you know, now Scenan just straight up lied to you. They said, hey, find something in there and we'll just make crap up and tell everybody that this guy's unhinged. By the way, he wasn't slurring
his words there. I think everybody heard Donald Trump, and he sounded just like Donald Trump always sounds well.
And the whole conversation was about nuclear power, and the point they were saying is that nuclear power is very reliable, that it is safe, that that you have fewer fatalities,
fewer accidents than other sources of power generation. That if you care about the environment, nuclear power has by far the least emissions, the least carbon emissions, the least pollution, and that point is absolutely right and the left, and it's one of the points you know, the radical left, the climate alarmists, they talk about carbon emissions, but then they're rapidly anti nuclear because they give in to alarmist fear.
And in that point Elon Musk was making the context that even when you have cities, he said, first of all Fukushima, where they had a nuclear accident in Japan. Yes, it was an unfortunate accident, but the fallout has not been that severe. They also were talking about Chernobyl in Russia. But the point he made about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is even there. They are now people living, and it's come through.
He's obviously not advocating for nuking cities. He's saying that the risks of nuclear power generation are overstated by alarmists. Now CNN knows that they listen to the same interview you and I listen to, But they are being deliberately dishonest when they cut out that little tiny snippet, and I notice they only played what like fifteen twenty seconds of it. They cut out that tiny snippet with the deliberate purpose of creating a false and misleading impression because
they're not engaged in news. They are propagandists. And it's the same thing the Kamala Harris campaign would have done, because CNN, like the rest of the corporate media, is effectively the communication arm of the Kamala Harris campaign.
Senator, finally, let me ask you, and if you put all of this show into contexts, especially if you look at what they're having to do to lie about this conversation with Musk and Trump, is this just what we can expect from now until eternity with the media when
they lose control. They have am out down. They lie to you about whether it's jd Vance, or they lie to you about Kamwa Harrison what she actually does the border and she's not the borders are, or they lie about President Trump's soaring his words and saying, hey, that worked with Joe Biden getting him out of the race. Maybe we can attack Donald Trump the same way. Is this the reality of the world we now live in?
So I don't think it is. And we are seeing in America across the world massive disintermediation. The mediators, the middlemen are being removed from the transmission of ideas. We saw that powerfully this week with Elon Musk and Donald Trump going directly to a billion people on x without the reporters being able to block it. But we see that on this podcast. Listen, Why do you and I do the podcast often at eleven o'clock at night or midnight or even one or two in the morning. Why
do we do it three days a week. We do it because if your only source of news is the corporate media, if you only watch CNN or MSNBC, RA, ABCNBCCBS, you do not know what is happening. They are lying to you. And the reason this podcast, we've got roughly a million unique listeners, is because people find it valuable.
We give you facts that CNN will never air. We play the full segment of what Elon and Trump said about here Shima and Nagasaki instead of their dishonestly edited snippet that was designed to mislead you and lie to you. And this podcast goes right around the corporate media, and in fact, just about every podcast we put out drives stories in the corporate media. That is going to accelerate.
People are going to podcast, people are going to social media, people are going to x. Elon's buying Twitter remains I think the single most important step for free speech in decades, and I think that's only gonna accelerate. And you're gonna see a panic as the corporate media they want a monopoly on what we know, what we hear, what we understand, and they're losing their monopoly. So I predict more and more frantic panic, but also more and more power to the people, which is a very good thing.
As before, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation on this topic, you can go back and dow the podcast from earlier this week to hear the entire thing. I want to get back to the big story number three of the week you may have missed. I want to switch to another topic, Senator, we mentioned earlier, and this is another cautionary tell a warning, and the borders are doesn't seem to give a crap. A Palestinian on the terror watch list was arrested on the southern US border.
That's exactly right. It's an individual named Omar Shahida who is accused of explosives and arms used and was caught in sant Resa, New Mexico. Amar Shajeda is a Palestinian from Juday and Samaria, and he is on the terror watch list for alleged prior use of explosives at arms. He was arrested. The New York Post reported, and let me read from the memo that has been leaked showing
the arrest notification of the suspected Palestinian terrorist. The arrest notification says, on August twelfth, twenty twenty four, Border Patrol agents assigned to the Sanatresa Border Patrol Station encountered a person with a terror screening data sent record At approximately one ten am. Agents apprehended a group of seven individuals who illegally entered the United States from Mexico near Santa Theresa,
New Mexico. During processing, research revealed that Omar nowaf Issa Shaheda was a possible match to a terror watch list record. Border patrol agents at the National Targeting Center generated an NTC event. Jeta was confirmed to be a positive match and his watch listed as a Category fifteen used explosives
slash arms. Global appis revealed that Scheheda traveled from Madrid, Spain to Bogota, Columbia on a flight with a connecting flight to Panama City, and that Shijeda arrived in San Salvador, El Salvador on a flight and Shaheeda is currently being held. He was encountered as a single adult. Now this is a pattern. Weeks earlier, three other suspected Palestinian terrorists were caught at the California border. Those and we talked about
that those three on this podcast previously. One of them had a photo on their phone including pictures of a masked man holding an AK forty seven rifle Kamala Harris.
The borders are responsible for an open border that continues to be a magnet inviting terrorists to come into this country and and and in fact, an alert UH that was issued by the Border Patrol said, quote individuals inspired by or reacting to the current Israel Hamas conflict may attempt to travel to or from the area of hostilities in the Middle East via circuitous transit across the southwest border. This is what Kamala Harris's open border is doing to us.
You you look at this and you put it together with the fact that they say she's not the borders are, and then she says, oh, I'm doing everything I can to protect you at the border. It doesn't match up. It's just lie after lie after lie after lie. And you look at these these gang leaders that are arrested. You look at there that are being assaulted. Unfortunately, now
it's on a weekly basis. We also know, and I think we should just remind people that the system is so broken now that the administration has just been busted handing kids over to non family members, okay, non family members a lost track. Within a month, a third of the kids are hand over to their quote sponsors who are non family members, with no response and no follow up from the federal government. So, in other words, a handed child over to a non family member. They call
thirty days later to check in. No one answers, no one's talking to them, and they can't find the kid. And that's apparently happening with at least a third of the kids that they're bringing into this country. That is pure evil.
It is pure evil. And I'll tell you that The New York Times is even reporting on this, and they're reporting Javier Bessera, who is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. He has no background in healthcare, he has no background. He's not a physician, he doesn't know anything about healthcare. But what he is is a radical left wing lawyer who was the Attorney General of California. And that's who Joe Biden Kamala Harris wanted in charge of HHS, and AHHS is the one that that that that deals
with with unaccompanied miners. And we've seen an explosion of unaccompanied miners coming into this country because Joe Biden Kamala Harris opened up the border and it ended up with a lot of little boys and a lot of little girls being trafficked in by human traffickers, being abused, many of them physically, many of them sexually. But then when they get here. Uh, the Biden administration had a problem, and they had a problem because they wanted to avoid
kids in cages. They had made a huge deal of it under Donald Trump. Never mind that that that the the actual cages were built by Barack Obama. But they wanted to avoid the bad optics of having kids in cages under under Joe Biden. So what they did is they began really these sing young people and releasing them to adults who who couldn't pass basic background checks. And when people in the system said, wait, we don't know who these adults are. We don't know if they're bad people.
We don't know if they're looking for kids to work in child labor and slave labor. We don't know if they're violent. We don't know if they want to abuse the kids. You know, what have you hear? Bessera said, shut up and release them faster. And so let me read from the Wall Street Journal. This is an article on July eighth and the Wall Street Journal in twenty twenty one, when the new Biden administration was struggling to cope with a sudden influx of unaccompanied migrant children at
the US Mexico border. The government repeatedly overrode the concerns of lower level workers who warned about placing them in certain households. Documents and interviews show, quote, it does not appear safe for the minor to be released to a home environment that was not fully assessed. A case worker wrote about a child slated to live in a hostile like home in Florida with at least three adults. A few days later, unofficial dismissed the recommendation to reject the
proposed guardian. According to internal government memos, at another facility in Pomona, California, about thirty miles east of Los Angeles, more than one hundred children that summer were sent to temporary guardians who were issued denials early in the process
by case coordinators. According to a review of internal government data that tracks on accompanied children, emails and other communications and interviews with caseworkers, about two dozen more denials were overturned because of clerical errors or issues such as missing fingerprints that were resolved. Record show, but many of the others were approved with scant details explaining why, and stunningly, the Wall Street Journal couldn't determine what happened to the
children after they left the facility. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have lost over eighty thousand children that came as unaccompanied miters to this country. They don't know where they are, they don't know who has them, they don't know what has happened to the kids. And you know what, Kamala Harris has zero interest in finding the answer to that.
She will never talk about it. Mind you, she was the borders are, she still is, and yet losing eighty thousand children apparently doesn't concern her at all.
Yeah, and there doesn't seem to be accountability for this either. Is there anything that Congress can do now? Knowing what we just learned in that report.
There's a lot Congress can do, but in the Senate, the Senate will do none of it. And the reason is the Democrats, who are in the majority of the Senate do not care. I've raised this issue repeatedly in the Judiciary Committee. You know what, Democrats in charge Judiciary. We have not had a single hearing in four years on the crisis at our southern border. We've had multiple hearings on the Democrats desire to grant amnesty to illegal aliens.
We have not had a hearing in judiciary on the eighty thousand kids that Joe Biden Kamala Harris has lost because the Democrats want to cover it up and listen, we know that some significant number of those individuals are in child labor work sites, are being abused, or being
physically abused, or being sexually abused. If you look for example, I'm gonna go back to the Wall Street Journal article that says, following an internal investigation, the Inspector General for the US Department of Health and Human Services, which oversaw a network of shelters caring for an accompanied minors, found
gaps in the process to screen temporary guardians. It's said in February that sixteen percent sixteen percent of records for children who were released to sponsors in March and April twenty twenty one lacked evidence that a required safety check was conducted. Quote. Although well intentioned, the these sites were unregulated and unsafed, said Neiha Desai, the senior director of
Immigration at the National Center for Youth Law. There was enormous pressure placed on the sites to rapidly release children from custody, and the Biden Harris administration pressed them to
release at these emergency shelters. Case workers were told to discharge children within ten to fourteen days, and so they released kids without knowing if the people they were giving them too were dangerous, without knowing what was happening, and yet tragically the result is many kids suffered horrific mistreatment.
As always, thank you for listening to Verdict with Center Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you don't forget to deal with my podcast, and you can listen to my podcast every other day you're not listening to Verdict or each day when you listen to Verdict. Afterwards, I'd love to have you as a listener to again, Ben Ferguson Podcasts, and we will see you back here on Monday morning.