Welcome.
It is Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz week in Review. Ben Ferguson with you, and these are the stories that you may have missed that we talked about this week. The mayor of Dallas won a race. He had a D next to his name, so the question is after he changed to become a Republican, could he still win that same election. We'll break that down for you with our guests the Mayor of Dallas. Also, what will big tech look like and how much influence could it have
over this country? I'm talking about politically, and with Ai we sit down with a tech expert to talk about the future of big tech in America. And finally, the White House Press Secretary Jean Pierre stands next to the President and demands that Republicans fix the border, even though they're the ones that destroyed it. So what do we do to fight back? We talk about that as well. It's Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz Weekend Review, and it starts right now. You were up for reelection right now,
running as a Republican for mayor. Yes, your policies haven't changed. The only things changed is they d went to an R.
Correct.
Could you win I'd win overwhelmingly. I don't have any doubt about it, no doubt about it. And I'll tell you why I believe that. I'll tell you why I'm glad. Someone finally asked me that on the record. That's sort of the chatter as well.
That's why I asked.
The other going to say, oh, well, this guy I could never win, that's why he waited till the end of his serve and then switch parties.
So here here's the reality that people have to ignore to even make that argument. But I understand why people need to make it. I mean I told someone, I said, you know, you don't switch parties in the two parties from one of the other. And I think the other party is going to say, well, you know, we wish him the best. He was great, and it's our loss. You know, they got to come up with something, and this is kind of These are the kinds of arguments they've come up with. But here's the reality I won
my last election with. It wasn't ninety three percent. Dallas City, you know, has ordinances about how write in candidates get on the ballot, and if you write in a name other than the actual right in candidate's name that's there. You just essentially didn't vote. You threw your vote, your bollot in the trash of the cast votes, which were canvassed by the city and are the official records of the city. Ninety eight point seven percent of the vote.
That's Democrats and Republicans in that group. That's a pretty hearty endorsement of the incumbent mayor.
And I didn't run with a D or an R behind my name.
I ran just with you, know, as Eric Johnson, because you don't run in Texas, in any city with a D or for folks who aren't from Texas, we don't actually have partisan elections in Texas for mayor. You just run, and you don't run with a party support. Now, what do I think would have actually happened if I had just come out and said six months before the election, I'm actually a Republican.
Here's what would have happened.
Some Democrats would have gotten together and said, well, this is an opportunity for us to run an ostensibly just overtly hartisan candidate. We're going to do something that's never been done in dabasmore, which is to just make it partisan, like to say Okay, we got an R running, and now we're going to run a D against them. The problem is that the R you're talking about for four years well enough to clear the field and win with ninety eight or seven percent of the vote.
But that didn't happen yet.
So let's just go back and say a Republican has been that effective who happens to also be African American and supported by the African American community. We think that that person would lose simply by saying I've become a Republican. I think what happens is is I won the first race in a contested nine person field that it went to a runoff with twelve percent of the vote. I
wont you know, fifty six forty four. I think that goes down to the normal, you know, pretty solid win of a you know, fifty four fifty three percent win.
But I still win.
There's still question I still win that race because I'm the incumbent at that point. No incumbent if we've had Republican and Democrat mayors before.
By the way, no.
Incumbent mayor seeking re election in Dallas has ever lost ever.
All Right, so let me ask a final question, which is you have started now a national organization, the Republican Mayors Association, and you have been out articulating that Republicans need to have an agenda for the cities, that we can't just write off big cities where an awful lot of Americans live. And I think that's a very important message. It's something and I want to ask you, what's your vision for the message Republicans should have in the cities and how do we end up with a lot more
Republican mayors to big cities. What's the path forward there?
I said this in the Wall Street Journale, and I meant it.
It's a two way benefit for America and.
For our party.
America needs the leadership that Republicans provide at the local level because of the things we talked about just a few minutes ago. A Republican mayor is going to is going to because it's part of the DNA of the party, is going to be right on law and order issues, going to be right on public safety. People who've asked me about that, I've said, let me just quiz you very quickly. Every bad idea you can think of about public safety came from one side of the aisle. There's
not even a mixed bag on this issue. If it's a bad idea. When it comes to public safety, you know, defund the police, don't prosecute, shop with whatever. Republicans don't propose ideas that undermine law and order.
They not every.
Democrat believes them, but they only emanate from the Democrat.
That's just a factual statement.
So a Republican is going to be right on law and order in public safety, a Republican mayor is going to be right on taxes. A Republican mayor ought to
be right on infrastructure spending and investing prudently. And there's studies that show, I mean been they have proven that you actually have lower debt levels and issue less debt when you have a Republican may versus a Democrat when they've mit professor actually studied this and concluded that it is a statistically significant different level of debt associated with a city when there's a Republican charge and a Democrat in charge. So we actually need Republicans running our major
cities because eighty percent of Americans live in cities. By twenty fifty, that number is going to be ninety percent. So the country actually needs the leadership. But I'm actually telling you, as a group of partisans, we actually have to pay attention to this.
And I think we have to pay attention.
To it because I, in my heart of hearts, believe that by being competitive in the cities, by basically re engaging, because we were once engaged. There was a Republican Mayor's Association at one time. It had a similar name. It was like the Republican Conference. It was during the Ford administration, and it's at some point we just lost interest in competing at that level and it sort of just faded away. But it was very active at one time, and we
were more competitive in our cities at one time. We need to get more competitive there again, because the margin of victory at the state level in states like Wisconsin, in states like Michigan, states like Pennsylvania, is the difference between performing at the city level in You're ready, Madison, Green Bay, and in Detroit and in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh by.
Just five or ten percentage points better.
So, in other words, engaging in the cities in a more significant way and having the GOP brand associated with the things we're talking about at the local level, it doesn't take that many votes, and now all of a sudden, the whole state is no longer lockstock and barrel going one direction because of the advantage has been run up in the city.
You've cut into the advantage that the cities have.
You know, Eric, I'll tell you on that point. So, Heidi and I met twenty five years ago when we were both working on the George W. Bush campaign in two thousand, the presidential campaign. And actually in that campaign, you know, I was a young twenty nine year old staffer, but I wrote a memo urging that the campaign consider at the time Condolliza Rice as a VP nominee. And in the course of the memo, I laid out all sorts of reasons why I thought this was worth considering carefully.
But one of the things I did is I did an electoral analysis. I looked at the three preceding presidential elections, and I posited a series of hypotheticals. I said, what would have happened if Republicans had gotten five percent more, ten percent more, or fifteen percent more of the.
African American and Hispanic vote.
So I didn't posit what if we get fifty percent more? I did five, ten or fifteen, so goals that were achievable, I believe. And I ran through the numbers, and the one that was most that stood out the most was if Republicans had gotten an additional fifteen percent of the African American and Hispanic vote in nineteen ninety six, Republicans would have won an additional ninety six electoral votes. I mean, it clips the election dramatically. But to do that, we've got to compete.
It's a whole different national conversation about the competitiveness of this party if we are a factor at the city level. Yep, because it's just where so many people are concentrated. It's getting hard and harder to figure out how to win elections where we're just not even playing there, and we just it's just not even we ought to be competing in every major city where we're currently just sort of saying, you know, a Democrat hasn't won. I mean, republic had
won there a long time, so let's not try. We just flipped. Just in this last cycle, the mayor, the current mayor of I believe it's Charleston, South Carolina, is now a Republican. They hadn't elected a Republican mayor in Charleston in like one hundred and seventy five years. So it can happen. It can be done. You have to run the right candy. He was a former legislator like I was, and he ran a great campaign. Now they've got a Republican mayor. So what's going to happen next is he's going to do.
A good job.
And when he does a good job, these people who've been voting for Democrat mayors for one hundred and seventy five years are going to say, you know, when Republicans are in charge, the city just seems to be it's safer, we hire more cops, and crime goes down, and you know what, the taxes go down, and you.
Know, things are just better.
The brand means something to them at the local level, and not just the brand will always have a federal aspect to it. It will always have a state aspect to it. But right now in this party, we're missing a brand at the local level. It doesn't mean anything right now at the local level. And we get to decide what it means. And I'm saying we should be running solid conservatives at the local level, winning elections, running cities well, and then that makes people at the local
level go, yeah, I'm actually a Republican. I love my Republican mayor, and so I'm a Republican and that has benefits for people running for US and running for president, running for governor. But we are right now just aren't doing anything. I mean, I was shocked to find that there was no.
One even in this lane.
I wasn't even stepping on anybody's toes by doing this.
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 on too story number two.
You know tech better than most people alive. Where are things going in terms of innovation ten years from now? What should we know now that we don't know? And how will the world be different in a decade.
Well, the really positive thing that's happening right now. And I was never a uge trypto guy. I don't love FIAT current and see is I think there's a good use against like, you know, corrupt governments, But I was never that in a crypto AI actually to me is actually very real. Uh, the way to think about it. We can talk all about sorts of complicated things, but A simple thing to think about is productivity is just really key in our economy. The reason we have more
wealth is we do more with less. And there's all these industries in our economy where this, this AI combined with operations can do things much more affordably, much cheaper. And so if you look at this like healthcare building, for example, we spend probably over a quarter trillion dollars a year healthcare building and you can probably cut that in the third over the next five or six years. There's tons of areas like that.
So there are lots of cassandras painting stories of impending doom from AI. Is AI gonna destroy us all? And do you know what year does Skynet go online?
My do work a lot in defense, so I'm working on it.
Said, but there's this, we can control all of you now, uh no, listen, there's there's two different conversations with AIS, my master, thank you, no downtown getting in trouble with there does in charge. There's two different conversations with AI. One of them is productivity and wealth creation, and it's actually extremely positive and that's really good. The other conversation with AI, it's very funny. A lot of people in
the tech world are not religious. They've given up their religion, and so this is this is kind of like a form of their religion, the singularity, the taking over the world of AI.
And it's very funny. It's a very missionic vision.
It's very much like revelations in Judaism and Christianity, where this thing comes and it changes everything and it's effectively a new God because once it improves, itself keeps getting better, and so it's like it's like it's like a secular religion. In Silicon Valley, people are obsessed with it as they talk about end of times with it all the time.
And it's funny because America has had a lot of other religious like revival movements over the last two hundred years where people were convinced that at times was coming very soon. This is quite a weird one based in Silicon Valley.
All right, so we're going to wrap up momentarily, but I want to ask, so you are very engaged in policy, a policy question Washington is wrestling with right now. So as you know, I'm the ranking member on the Senate Commerce Committee, and AI is square within our jurisdiction. In fact, back in twenty fifteen, I shaired the first ever congressional hearing on AI and have been focused on it for
a long time now. There are a lot of voices in Washington, most notably Chuck Schumer, but also including some Republicans that are eager for a very heavy hand of government when it comes to AI, and Schumer and Democrats are proposing literally prior government approval before innovations in AI.
I've been very vocal in saying that it's catastrophically stupid and if we put government in the position of prior approval, we will seed leadership of AI to our enemies, to China and other countries, and we will kill American leadership. I'm interested in your views because this policy discussion. I got to tell you a lot of big tech, the Googles and facebooks of the world, are saying yes, yes, regulate us because they believe they can capture the government
and use it to shut everyone down. What's your take on how government should approach AI, because this is as hot as any question in Washington right now.
Well, you know, mister Sara, one hundred percent agree with you. I'm really glad you're taking that tactic. As you know, that big companies, allot of them know they're losing some of their best talent. They know it's going to be hard to compete. But you know what they have, Like, if I want to start a competitor, for example, to black Rock right now in New York, I've spend one hundred million dollars year on lawyers even just to do what they do. They love the fact there's tons of
rules regulations. These big companies would love it to make it impossible to compete against them in AI. So number one, one hundred percent keuth regulations as small as possible. Now, the thing I will give them, and we have to be very careful because this it's not why they're doing it. The thing I will give them is there probably are ways that some people could figure out how to use AI in bioterror in other areas, and so we have to watch it.
We have to be very careful. We have to see as it goes along.
But let's not give them the ability to make the whole thing crony and break it well.
And look, there is no doubt there will need to be regulations applied to AI like to any other industry. Now, many of our existing laws can apply. So are there risks of fraud, are the risk of deception?
Yes?
So do you see things like like Taylor Swift had the AI fake porn put put on, and because she was Taylor Swift and had such a prominence, she was able to get it pulled down. Well, what happened is if that's.
Your kids, you yeah, and.
Nobody would watch that. That's all right, that the market forces would take care of that all on its own.
I was so ready to get in there, so ready.
That was my moment, and you knew it and you jumped in beforehand. I'm okay, keep going, folks, go ahead.
But there's no doubt there are going to be need to apply laws and rules, whether fraud, whether deception. The legal system will have to be applied. But but I think we should move slowly and understand what we're doing because the productivity benefits potentially are are are massive. And I will say, when you know, you talked a minute ago about how how the big tech companies want barriers to entry, and that is the most common.
One of the.
Great lies of politics is the idea that conservatives are pro big business. The reality is big business loves big government. Big business usually gets in bed with big government, and big business loves when government puts barriers to entry to stop the next generation of entrepreneurs. And I'll say this, look, I have nothing for her against big business, but I am interested in the little guys, the next group of
entrepreneurs what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. And one of my favorite images on the Internet is a picture of the founders of Microsoft in nineteen seventy eight. And you have Paul Allen with long hair and a beard, and he looks like one of the begs. You've got Bill Gates with glasses the size of hip hubcaps and on. It's just that picture of a bunch of college dropouts, and it just asks would you invent money with these guys?
And that is and they were taking on IBM, Big Blue, the giant behemoth, and they were the creative destruction. Now they're the giant. And I will say, let's do this to wrap up, talk about the importance of disruptors, of the innovation of the next generation, driving techs, driving productivity, driving our countries.
I mean, this is one hundred percent how America works, as you say, And by the way, it's our biggest advantage against China as our adversary in China right now, the CCP, aside from just having killed a bunch of our billionaire Chinese tech friends, so everyone's terrified to build more tech if you're alady successful in China the other thing they have going against them.
Hold on say that again.
A lot of our tech friends died in the last or died und or fled in the last five years out of China. There and a lot of them were taken away and disappeared and then came back, and they won't talk about it anymore.
So do we know names of people who are killed?
Because I don't.
I'll give you a friend.
And Andy Tandran an Asian innovations group forty seven years old, about to go public last year after working hard for eleven years, and they told them they wanted to do things differently with the data and going in China. He said, I'm gonna go talk to him Beijing. Next I heard he died in his sleep that night at forty seven years old.
Wow. And there's a lot of stories like this.
There's a lot of guys who built a lot of it, who fled and who are very sketish usingeing. But I'll tell you the other big advantage we have though against them, other than them strewing that up, is basically all this productivity coming from AI.
It's gonna disrupt healthcare.
It's gonna change of healthcare works, it's gonna change how logistics, or it's gonna change all these industries work. In China, the government people and their cronies they own those industries. They are not going to allow those to be disrupted. The question is is in America are we still able to disrupt things? Are we still going to be allowed by our government to go in and change how those
things work? And it's gonna be about because we have regulatory agencies that also want to slow it down with the big companies. But I still believe in America, with the right leadership, we actually can disrupt these things and we can grow.
Well.
Look, when AI replace this podcast, I hope that the computer that takes my place does a really fine job.
Fine, Yah, final question for you, and I want to go back to the university because there's gonna be a lot of kids that listen to this, a lot of parents, grandparents. They're gonna and maybe even professors that may want to reach out. What does next year's class look like? Is there a cap on that if someone says I want
more information. If there's a professor that's listening to this and says, hey, I want to leave this great institution that I'm at because of I'm being stifled or silence, I want to talk to you, how can they do that?
So we're bidding our first class right now. This is just as competitive to get into as the other top ten schools. But if you have a really bright, young young student who's a founding personality, entrepreneuri personality, it's pretty much one of the coolest places you can go. We have a hundred of my top tech friends who put their names on and advising it. We have all these tall academics. It's going to be very competitive to get in,
but yes, please please please apply. You can go to you Austin dot org and Strich University of Austin online professors there.
They're welcome to the email. Obviously.
If they're amazing, we'll love to talk to them. We have a pretty big line of people trying to get in as professors right now. But obviously it's very, very interested in meeting great people.
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.
White House Press Sretory Jean Pierre asked about it on CNN. Here's what she said about it at the White House this morning.
One of the things that some Americans are focused on are crimes that are allegedly being committed by migrants who are in the country illegally. There was the death of Lake and Riley in Georgia. There's been an arrest made there. Republicans are directly blaming President Biden for this. Republican Senator Josh Holly said, quote, these deaths are on him. What's the White House response to that?
So, first of all, I want to offer our condolences to the family of Lincoln. I mean, this is a horrific, horrific loss for any family and obviously any if whoever is found guilty, we need to make sure that make sure that that happens. And obviously we don't want to we don't want to see anything happen like that again. But here's the thing. We have done the work to make sure we're dealing with a broken immigration system.
Senator, Have they done the work, because that's news to me. We've done the work to make sure we're dealing with a broken immigration system. Did they or did they not break the system on purpose to flood the country with millions of illegal immigrants.
So look, at some level, yes, they did the work. They did the work to break the system. Why is the system broken because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the congressional Democrats wanted to break it. Understand, when Joe Biden came into office just over three years ago, he inherited the lowest rate of illegal immigration in forty five years. All he had to do was do nothing, simply sit there, don't screw it up. And Donald Trump. I worked hand
in hand with Donald Trump. We had made enormous progress securing the border. Joe Biden does nothing. He could have a victory, but instead he deliberately caused this crisis.
He broke the border.
Three decisions caused this crisis. He halted construction of the border wall, he reinstated catch and release at the border, and he pulled out of the amazingly successful Remain in Mexico agreement. That was deliberate. He knew what he was doing, and the consequence was this invasion at our southern border.
But let me tell you every dead body Lake and Riley Lake and Riley her parents ought to say, why, why why didn't Joe Biden take that damn murderer, put him on a plane and send him the hell out of here. He should have. The law provides that he needed to. And yet his politics, his partisan interests, said, you know what, I don't care if I'm releasing a murderer. If Americans die, it doesn't matter if it keeps Democrats
in power. And I got to tell you, Ben, that pisces me off because I don't believe a word I just said. There is hyperbole. I think these people all they care about is political power, and if more Americans die, that is perfectly acceptable to them.
Senator lastly White out spread Secretary Jean Pierre on Biden's trip to the border. She said, this is not about politics, which made me about fall out of my seat.
What does it tell you that both President Biden and Donald Trump are going to be out the border on.
The same day.
Here there's a difference here, and I want to be very clear about this, because the President is going to as you just said, Brownsville, Texas, to hear directly from the border patrol agents, to hear directly from the frontline personnel on what is going on on the ground. And let's not forget the President was at the border just about a year ago in January of twenty twenty three, to do the same.
This is not about politics for the President center. This is all about politics.
He's seen the poll numbers.
Yes, you and I have seen.
Everything this White House does is about politics.
Yeah, and they know it. And the majority of Americans right now believe that the President United States of America doesn't know how to fix the border, can't fix the border. And the majority of Americans now say that Donald Trump is the only one that can do it.
So look, it's worse than that. I actually don't think it's right that Biden and the White House doesn't know how to fix the border. They don't want to fix the border. They made three decisions the first week in office. They halted the border wall, they reinstated catch and release, they pulled out of remain in Mexico. If you want to fix the border, it's not rock and science. I've said this a thousand times in the Senate Judiciary Committee. I've said this a thousand times. On the floor of
the Senate. I said this is a thousand times on national television. Reverse those three decisions, build the wall, and catch and release, return to the remain in Mexico agreement that would work. Understand, Joe Biden and the Democrats do not want it to work. They are making the most cynical political decision I have seen in my lifetime because
they are allowing people to die. We've talked about the people who've been murdered, We've talked about the children who've been raped, and by the way, we've talked not on this podcast, but many times before about the risk of a major terrorist attack. God forbid, ben I don't want to wake up tomorrow or the next day or the next day and find out that we've had another nine to eleven here in the United States, that we've had another mass murder by violent terrorists. But I have been
very explicit. I believe the risks of another major terrorist attack are greater today than they've been any time since September eleventh, two thousand and one. And it is not that the Democrat Party is oblivious to this, it's they simply don't give a damn.
They're the first to know about it. By the way, FIRS to know my market is the first to know. They know before you know, where I know or anybody else knows how many on the Arras squatch lists are getting caught coming across the southern border. And we know how many were caught in September, October, November and December of last year at record numbers, more than the last four years combined when Trump was the president.
That is exactly right, And the only only way this problem is going to be solved is to re elect a Republican president. To reelect Donald Trump, put him in
the White House. And understand, this crisis will be solved not over the course of a year, not over the course of six months, but literally within days because the driving factor, So what determines whether you have an eelil immigration crisis and what happens when people cross over the border, Almost all of them have a cell phone with them, and right now they look for border patrol agents, they turn themselves in they're not caught. They go. When I'm
on midnight patrol, they turn themselves into me. They have a cell phone, and if you ask them. The last time I was down at the border, I asked multipleliminrants, do you believe you get to stay in America now that you're here? And they all said, every single one said yes, yes, yes, yes yes. As long as that's the case, we will have an invasion. Every one of
them has a cell phone. They pick up the phones, they call their friends, they call their family, they call their loved ones and they say, you know what, come to America. When you get here, they let you go. You get to stay. If that is the result, we will continue to have a full scale invasion. The only only only way to stop it is when people come here illegally, you put them on a plane and you send them back to where they came from. And again they have a cell phone, so they call their friends.
If you deport them, they say, oh crap, you could spend months and thousands of dollars and be horribly brutalized by traffickers, and you get here and they send you home. Don't do it. And it's why I'm going to make a prediction January of twenty twenty five, the numbers of Elie immigrants are going to plummet massively. And it's not like it takes a year long program from the president.
All it takes Donald Trump as president. When you cross illegally, will deport you and that will cause that single fact will cause the numbers to plummet.
If there's anything that maybe turning the tide here, and that seems to actually be media covering the stories that you mentioned in the tragedies, KABBTV in San Antonio actually ran this on the local news listen.
Ask for the question of why now. Political experts have suggested to me that's because the president has kind of had his oh shoot moment, meaning that Biden and his campaign staff have realized that the immigration issue is important to the American people and it isn't going away. That fact only further out evidenced by numerous recent polls that show that immigration is a top three issue for voters this election cycle, and for many it's the number one issue, I mean centater.
Lastly, you look at this and that's on local TV. We have not seen that type of scrutiny of this president ever. And when we go back over the traveling seas that are happening in all these different states around the country. Just in the last week, there are so many illegal immigrants. Millions and millions have come across the border. They are in every state in America, and there are a lot of bad actors committing heinous crimes in every state in America. There's no way now that you can't
hold this president, I think, accountable. If you're in the media telling these stories, tell the truth.
That is all that is needed right now. Tell the truth about what is happening at the border. Tell the truth about how Joe Biden and the Democrats are deliberately, willfully allowing this in invasion. The reason Biden and Commonal end the Democrats don't go to the border is because when they come, they bring the TV reporters. Their entire strategy is not to defend this. Look understand. On Senate Judiciary Committee, I lay out these facts day after day
after day. No Democrat jumps up and says, you know what Ted's wrong. He doesn't understand it. Let me tell you the alternative. It's not like reasonable minds can differ. Their strategy is simple, shut their mouths because they know CNN will never cover what's said, they know MSNBC will never cover they know ABC, CBS, NBC will never cover it. And so the most powerful thing we can do is simply tell the stories of the death, of the rape, of the suffering, of the misery that Joe Biden and
the Democrats are causing. That is the most powerful tool to turn it around and stop it.
As always, thank you. We're listening to Verdict with Sentner, 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 the Ben Ferguson podcasts, and we will see you back here on Monday morning.