Welcome in his verdict with Ted Cruz Weekend Review, Ben Ferguson with you, and these are the stories you may have missed that we talked about this week. First up, Senator Cruise's new book is out, Unwoke, How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America, And there's a very interesting conversation in this book about how Donald Trump broke the media up. Second, school choice a major issue and how big of an
issue should it be in this presidential election. Senator Cruse and I break that down and why Republicans should double down on the issue of school choice. And finally, the southern border. It is a question of national security. Now we bring in Rick Grenelle, who is in the job of dealing with national security under the Trump administration. So just how bad and how dangerous is our broken border? We deal with that as well. It's the week in
Review and it starts right now. You mentioned what we're up against in one of your chapters is about the new US room Revolution, and you start with a great story of a former colleague of mind that is hard to deal with, Jake Tapper in a fight as he's in essence calling you a liar. And this is the new thing that the media has done. They've become so sanctimonious that they are always looking for a moment to
tell you why you're wrong and why they're brilliant. We've seen this in the last several days as they've been demanding a ceasefire to protect the terrorists in Gaza. Who the who the Israelis are trying to eradicate from the face of this earth with good reason after what they did just one month ago.
And we talked about this on Verdict Israel.
We knew was on a on an artificial clock the day the terrorist attack happened, before the media, before the left started going to the aid of Hamas and the Palestinian people that were backing Hamas, many of them that were and saying, okay, all right, you had a few days now to go after these terrorists. Now you've got to stop it now. Now it's your your, your obligation to stop trying to protect yourself. And this is our media now. And it goes back to this idea that
they have, which is they're better than everyone else. They're not here to report news anymore. They're here to go after people like you and others. They don't like and in doctrinate a nation to believe in socialism and communism and Marxism.
Look that that is exactly right.
And the media has fundamentally changed. And so the chapter on journalism, I talk about how when I was first elected to the Senate eleven years ago, and I actually focus on CNN as really a case lesson eleven years ago CNN they aspired to be journalists. If you ask them, they'd say, we want to be journalists. We want to present both sides. We want to be fair and objective and balanced, and we want to focus on facts and not our opinion. Now, they were terrible at it. They
leaned hard left and they couldn't help themselves. But that was the object active Number one, they would articulate to you they were trying to achieve. But number two, I think they believed in their heart they were trying to do that. And so when I was first elected to the Senate. You may find this hard to believe, but
I went on CNN just about every week. I went on there over and over and over again, and they would give you a chance to lay out a conservative argument that they'd attack you from the left, and they'd be unfair and they'd play gotcha questions, but they would give you a chance to present the other side. And what happened is when Donald Trump became president, I think
it fundamentally broke the media. Their brains shattered. They hated him so much that today the media no longer views its vision as being journalists, as being fair and impartial and presenting both sides. Instead, they have embraced a vision that they are advocates. They are defenders of democracy, and what they mean by democracy is left wing radical policies.
And you know, so the story I tell in the very beginning of the journalism chapter is during the presidential race, I was out on the campaign till I was actually in our campaign bus and I was doing an interview with Jake Tapper. And look, I'll confess I like Jake. I've known Jake for over twenty years. I've known Jake since he was a CUB reporter on the George W. Bush two thousand campaign and I was a baby staffer on it, and so I've known him a long time.
And he was interviewing me for his Sunday show and we did an interview and it was I don't remember, probably ten minutes or so, and I had learned a lesson. It's something that I do with every Sunday show, which is that I insist that the Sunday Show either be
live or it'd be live to tape. And the reason I learned that is I had done just a few weeks earlier in an interview with Bob Scheffer at CBS, and Bob Scheffer I hadn't insisted on that, and he'd done the interview, and then afterwards his show had edited it and it basically cut out every good argument I made and just put this slash job where he decimated me because he excluded all my good answers and just edited it in a way that was really deceptive. And
I said, okay, never again. If we do one of these, they must air what I actually say. And I said, look, if you want to give you five minutes or six or eight or ten or twelve or whatever, you can pick the time. But when we film it, you air
exactly what happens during that time. So we had agreed with that with CNN, and in the course of the interview, we were talking about the shooting at Fort Hood and Nadal Hassan, who was the radical Islamist who had walked through and murdered fourteen innocent souls, yelling at luhawk Bar, and I mentioned that the Obama administration knew that Hassan
was a radical jahadist. They knew that he had been in email communication with Anwaar al Alaki, who was the Islamist cleric, the radical that he'd asked al Alaki about the permissibility of waging jahad on his fellow soldiers, and yet the Obama administration did nothing until he committed that act of mass murder. And when I said all of that, Jake immediately interrupted and he said, that's not true. No, that's not right, and he said, what you're saying is
fundamentally false. That's a lie, it's not true, and you know, I just kind of smiled, and I said, well, you know, Jake, as John Adams said, facts are stubborn things, and what I'm saying is entirely accurate, and you know, when you research the issue, that's exactly what you're going to find out. So we do the interview, Jake and his production team leaves the bus, and I don't know five ten minutes later, there's a knock on the door of the bus and
we open it. It's Jake and he's very sheepish, and he said, hey, can come in and talk for a second. I said, yeah, sure, come on in, and he said, look, after we did the interview, he said, I went and got on the internet and I researched it, and actually, you were right, he said. I didn't know that I had missed. I just had not seen the revelation that the Obama administration knew it. It just I couldn't believe it. But turns out you were right. I was wrong, And
Jake said, listen, I'll give you a choice. We can do it one of two ways. He said, I agreed we would do this live to tape, and so if you want, I will air it exactly as it happened, and then after I air it, will I will come on live and I'll say after the interview, I researched it, and it turns out I was wrong, and.
Cruz was right.
What he said was exactly right, and I was in error when I said he was not telling the truth. He said, that's option number one.
He said.
Option number two, which he said, I'd really much prefer it, is that we just edit out that segment, we just remove it from the interview and we air everything else and just not include that segment. And I describe in the book that you know, I thought about it, and it was obviously in my self interest to pick option number one. That like having CNN having Tapper admit he was full of crap. And I was right, that was
a big political victory. But I also expected that I would be doing a whole lot more interviews with Tapper and with CNN, and I frankly respected how he approached it. That he came to me and he admitted he was wrong, and he gave me that option I thought was an honorable way to handle it. And so I made what I would say is a long term play rather than a short term play, and I said, Okay, you can go ahead and cut the segment out, and so they did, so the story I recount in the book that segment
never aired because CNN cut the segment out. I focus on Tapper in particular because I think he's a smart guy, and I think he wants to be a journalist, and I think in his heart right now he knows that he's not that Trump broke Tapper that now CNN will have a panel of five experts there to discuss true or not Donald Trump is the devil, and all five of them agree, of course he's the devil.
No, he's worse than the devil. That's the whole debate.
And you know, look, CNN used to be a place if you go back to twenty seventeen. In twenty seventeen, I did three town hall debates on CNN with Bernie Sanders. We did one on healthcare and two on tax policy, and they were great debates. I think they were among, if not the highest rated shows on CNN that whole year. They were ninety minutes. Bernie is an unapologetic defender of socialism.
I'm an unapologic defender of capitalism. And we had a real and substm debate that CNN doesn't exist anymore, and it's bad for America, it's bad for the world that
we don't have functioning journalism. And I describe all of this in the book, but I also describe how because journalism corporate media is broken, It's part of what makes the radical Democrats so extreme, why they vote for such ridiculous policy positions that are so out of the mainstream, because they know they will never ever ever get asked about it by reporters back home. They will never have to defend it, and so it's radical the Democrat Party in Washington.
Last question for you, a little comedy and congratulations. Jimmy Kimmel is promoting your book, Senator. I'm very excited about this. I also am waiting for the restraining order because he's absolutely obsessed with you. Your new book that is out, Unwoke, How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America. He gave it a prime time promotion on his show last night. Here's what it sounded like.
Ted Cruz has a new book. It's called Unwoke. It's uh, he's you know what, he's so cool, he's you can tell it's Ted's book because the dust jacket doesn't quite fit.
It won't won't button in the front. But this is Cruse's fifth book.
The last one was called Ted Cruz A Time for Truth seem there without the beard. He also wrote Ted Cruz head Ooze. He wrote Glued Pubes, the Guy from Isaac Damguro Bearing of course, the New York Times bestseller, A partially Digested.
Rat, and other things. I found my chin pouse there.
Are many interesting musings and revelations in the books. He says The Princess Bride is his favorite movie and he's seen it hundreds of times, which is definitely not true. No one's seen anything hundreds of times. And apparently he's not a big fan of late night television. This is an excerpt, real excerpt. He wrote a late on TV is virtually unwatchable. I love comedy, but watching angry leftists scream about how much they hate Donald Trump, is it remotely funny?
It's pitiful.
Well, all I'll say is it's an honor to be called pitiful by a man who abandoned his dog in an ice storm to go to Mexico.
But congrat and not seriously doesn't want to say, you know, writing writing a book like this is a huge accomplishment, especially for him.
You know, it's very difficult to type with hoofs, I mean cider. It doesn't it prove your point that you just wrote in your book. That was the part that made me laugh is as he's forcing this comedy on the audience and there's some awkward laughter, It's like, yeah, thanks for proving the point of what that you just wrote about in your book.
Sure, look, I mean it was when when he did that last night. I actually tweeted his monologue out this morning and I said, hey, thank thanks for pitching my book.
You forgot the link to where you can buy it, and I sent the link and I did something that that that is is fairly obligatory also, which is Kimmel regularly blasts me in his late night monologues, and every time he does, I respond and I point out that that that ever since I whipped Jimmy Kimmel's ass in one on one hoops, it seems that I'm living rent free in his head.
Uh.
And so I sent a video of me scoring on him and blocking him, just to remind him of that moment that I think he probably still wakes up in tremors about. But I thought it was hysterical what he read there was an actual excerpt from the book, and then he put put up the book book cover, and I, I think that's fabulous. But I do wish the substanti point that Late Night Humor I wish was actually funny.
I love comedy. I grew up watching SNL. I like real comedians who are funny, and they used to be funny. And now it's one of the many examples that I discussed it at length in the book Unwoke, How How Trump broke the media, Trump broke the Democrat Party, and Trump broke late night comedy because they just it's a partisan, primal skeet scream instead of good comedy, makes fun of both sides. I'm perfectly fine with making fun of me, but they never ever make fun of the Democrats. It's
purely a I am leftist. Hear me, roar 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.
Before we get into Q and A, I want to ask you one other thing, and it's it's the issue, and I have a feeling a lot of people are.
Going to like this idea here choice. I am a huge proponent of school choice. It's been something that.
You have been a champion of for years, but it's also become in many circles they say a third rail. Don't touch it, don't talk about it, don't deal with in politics. Do you believe in this next election cycle that conservatives can win on the issue of school choice? And how would they best do that nationwide?
Look, I think absolutely, yes, I am. There is no domestic issue I care about more than school choice. I think school choice is the civil rights issue of the twenty first century. And listen, it is worth noting that school choice has been around from the dawn of time. The rich and the middle class have always had school choice.
If you were a student at the Bethesda Public Schools in Maryland, Bethesa's this very wealthy suburb of Washington, DC, if that school had a fifty percent dropout rate, if among the students that remained there fewer than half of them graduated reading at grade level, If drug dealers were walking in the hallways, if little girls were getting sexually assaulted in the bathrooms, the Bethesda Public schools would be empty immediately. Because the parents, they are rich, so they
would do one of two things. They would either write checks and pay tuition at a private school, or they would move to another neighborhood that had a better public school, and they would exercise choice through choosing where to live. That's what the rich have always been able to do. That's what the upper middle class have always been able to do. It is low income Americans. It is single moms in inner cities who were trapped with failing schools.
And those numbers I've described are true in school after school after school in this country, and it dominantly hurts low income kids, It hurts African American kids, it hurts Hispanic kids. And the Democrat Party is bought and paid for by the teachers unions. If you look at African American communities or Hispanic communities, systematically, sixty seventy as much as eighty percent of African American parents, as much as sixty seventy eighty percent of Hispanic parents support school choice.
I believe every child in America deserves a right to have access to an excellent education, regardless of their race, of their ethnicity, of their wealth, of their zip codes. So to say, we are sitting in actually an extraordinary place because I want to say to the men and women here, thank you for your leadership. Arizona has led
the nation in providing choice to your students. It has been extraordinary, it has been inspirational, it has been powerful, and the Goldwater Institute has been pivotal in making that happen. And if you look nationally, the two states at the front of this fight have been Arizona and Florida. And I will say something. You and I are both Texans, and look Texans. We are known for being quiet and for our humility. Look Aus Texans. I hate that there is anything Texans are not leading on, but when it
comes to school choice, Texans have been lagging behind. And I can tell you there's a major battle playing out in the Texas legislature right now. We have the single best moment we have ever had in our lifetimes to pass real and meaningful school choice in Texas. The Governor Greg Abbott has said he's going to keep pat calling special sessions until they pass it. And I'll tell you something that I do in Texas that is unusual. Ben So, virtually every US Senator stays out of state primaries in
their own state. And the reason is getting involved in a primary in your own state is just stupid. It hurts you that if you make an endorsement in your own primary. In a primary in your state, the rule of thumb is you get half of their friends and you get all of their enemies. I don't do that. I regularly endorse in primaries. To the best of my knowledge. I don't know another US senator that does. To the best of my knowledge, ninety nine of my colleagues do not.
And I endorse in lots of primaries in Texas. And here's how I have my staff prepare an Excel spreadsheet of every vote that a state legislator has cast.
On school choice.
And my rule is, if you voted in favor of school choice, and you're otherwise relatively conservative, you're quite likely to get my support. If you've voted against choice, the chances of getting my support are essentially zero, And it is very likely that I will indorse your primary opponents. And when I do that, I don't do it gently. I come in and I cut radio and TV ads and I come in.
You're accus of a lot of things. You going gently into political time is not one of them.
So the stakes are too high. And so we had last election cycle seven runoffs with the teachers unions on one side and me on the other, and we beat them in a majority of those races. And the reason I do that, and listen, it hurts me politically to do that. I am losing votes when I do that. But the reason I'm doing that is that I want for the state legislators when they're thinking about what do I do on this for it to be a carrot and stick that if there is a Republican house member
that's on the fence, do I support it? Do I not? I want them to say, you know, I really don't want Cruise to screw around in my primary. So maybe I'll just do the right thing and I'll tell you something. And it's something why I'm so inspired by the men and women in this room. When I was first elected to the Senate in twenty twelve, here's what I told Heidi.
I said, sweetheart, if when I die, if my tombstone says Ted played a meaningful role in bringing about school choice to every child in Texas and every child in America, I will die a very very happy man.
As before, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation on this topic, you can go back and down 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 ask you about another question that deals with the southern border, and I want to go back to putting your you know, taking the ambassador head Off.
Going back to national intelligence, you look at our southern border right now, and it doesn't take a very bright human being to understand that an open border the way it is now is a national security threat.
There are more and more people that are saying this.
We saw the FBI Director Ray saying that we're at the highest level in his opinion, since nine to eleven for the prospect of an attack in this country.
We know that terrorists are coming across the border.
Though on the terrorists watch lists that have been caught, these terrorists are not trying to turn themselves into border patrol agents. They're trying to become guidaways. We have no idea how many terrorists have made it into this country
undetected so far. But when you look at the warnings now, and you look at what just happened, and you look at the warnings of possibilities of the same type of style attack that we just saw in Israel, and yet we still have an open border and we still have my orcas before Congress, was that yesterday day before saying that no, he doesn't believe we need a border wall. What is your reaction from an intelligence standpoint.
Yeah, Ben's good question, because you know, I got to believe that all of the intelligence officials who are collecting raw intelligence see it on a daily basis. They're seeing I mean, how else do we know that someone from the terrorist watch list is crossing the border. It's because of raw intelligence. We're figuring it out. But I think that it's being hidden when they report it. It's not being analyzed and talked about, it's not being put into
the president's daily briefing. All of that information is completely being suppressed. And once again we should be asking these questions of Avril Haynes. You know, what are you seeing at the border? What are you hearing at the border? And you know, she's just not getting pushed on it, but it's clearly extremely dangerous. Everybody knows that you're not going to have a country if you have an open border.
We all know that.
But I find the most outrageous thing is that the media are complicit in this problem, because Democrats would have to face the music if they were hearing from the media in their home states, if they were being pushed and held to account like they used to when I would sit around and watch the news with my dad as a kid. The News was kind of holding both sides to account.
Well, Rick, this is a point that we've made a lot on this podcast and that I make in my brand new book, Unwoke, which is that the corruption of the media and Donald Trump, I believe broke the media, he shattered their brains. That has played a critical role in driving today's Democrat party to such extremes and go so crazy left because they never ever, ever get questioned on any of it. So there's no down side to
giving in to the radical extreme in their party. They never fear that they will get a hard question at home, they never fear they'll get a bad story at home. And and so I think the abandonment of any effort at journalism by the corporate media has been one of the most destructive developments in recent years.
I totally agree, because it's unleashed, right, there's no consequences, there's no downside, so they get to do and say anything they want. As I watch April Haynes, and you know, she got into office and immediately in order to please Iran, one of the first things she did was manipulate past intelligence to pretend like it was real, and they went after the Saudis and the Kushogi issue all over again. They literally there was nothing new in that report. It
was repackaged to hit the Saudis hard. We had basically looked at them and tried to make some changes. Uh, And we're trying to heal that relationship.
She opened it up or on the verge of signing the Abraham Acord. Yes, and until Biden screwed that up.
True, and and they I look back now, and it makes sense to me. The reason they did it is because they wanted to show the Iranians that somehow that they were going to play more fair and that they were going to be nicer to the Iranians by beating up on the Saudis. Right, And then why aren't we talking about the fact that they took the Houthis off the terrorist watch list? And the Huthis are the ones who just shot down the drone?
Why were they taken off that list? To me explain the politics behind.
That, Well, I think again, it's a it's a gift to the Iranians. They're they're trying to please them because they want to get back and you know, they will spin that somehow the international sanctions was pressure were pressuring the Iranians and therefore they were closer to a nuclear bomb because of the sanctions and the grip that we had. And again this is the same strategy that they had
with Russia. When you go and you see Democrat senators making the case for dropping the sanctions on Nordstream too, it is in summary they keep saying, well, we don't want to stick it in the eye of the Russians this pipeline in US. Sanctioning in it, making it not come online is creating problems. So we must therefore let the pipeline flow through with gas, because things are going to be better if we don't stick it in the eye of Putin.
This is this was appeasement always, always, always fails. It invites bullies and tyrants to be aggressive to invade it. It call war absolutely. I mean Joe Biden inherited peace and prosperity. We now have the biggest land war in Europe since World War Two and the biggest war in the Middle East of our lifetimes. I mean, I mean
that is and and you know you're talking about the Saudis. Look, in my view, the dominant foreign policy objective of Joe Biden and his team has been to re enter an even worse Iran nuclear deal, and everything in the Middle East hinges on. Why do they go after the Saudis so ferociously For the same reason that I am largely pro Saudi, which is that the Saudis are the most
important regional counterweight other than Israel to Iran. Now, look, the Saudis have lots of problems, so I describe the Saudi's as a problematic ally, but we want them to be an ally and we want them to be strong as a counterbalance to Iran. That's precisely why the Biden administration wants the Saudis to be weak, because everything is subservient to getting in another deal with Iran, including in
the middle of this Ukraine War. After Biden's weakness causes the war in Ukraine, it has now become the ultimate Democrat virtue signal to wear a Ukrainian flag and commit that we must be in the war until the end of time. And even while they say that, they continue to flow now roughly one hundred billion dollars into Iran, much of which goes into Iranian drones. That Iran becomes the top weapon supplier to Russia and so Biden is funding both sides of the Ukraine War.
Well, there's no question about that. And this goes back to what my original point on Iran. It sounds crazy, but they trust the Iranians. There's some belief Jake Sullivan. Maybe it's just a white paper intellectual exercise that if you're nicer to them, somehow they're going to give up a nuclear weapon.
And they really believe that.
In the NGO community totally supports that, and we call it a peacement. But they they're trying once again engagement. And this is one of my problems with the foreign policy community is that we should be able to try engagement, try sanctions, try all sorts of things, but we should quickly evaluate whether it's working or not. We could talk all day about Venezuela, because I think that's a failure of a policy.
It is, you know, it's worth also underscoring that the Biden administration's top Iran diplomat, Rob Malley, who's been fired and had his security clearance pulled and is nonetheless than a cushy job at Mi alma Mater at Princeton, which
is really disgraceful. His inner circle included three individuals who were Iranian operatives recruited by the Iranian government, reporting directly to the Iranian Foreign Minister and advancing Iranian policy agendas within the United States government, within the Biden administration, one of whom, as far as we know, is still a chief of staff in the Department of Defense to this day.
Yeah, and they've been caught asking the Iranian diplomats for sign off, yes, for speaking engagements. It's really so outrageous, so treasonous. But once again, you don't see any of these national security reporters at the New York Times of the Washington Post or Politico or anywhere else putting pressure asking the questions.
They get away with it.
So let me ask you another question. So you were the Director of National Intelligence under Trump. You were acting DNA for how long? It was a short period of time.
A short period of time supposed to be three months, but it was about four and a half.
So it's four and a half months. It was the most consequential tenure at DNA that I have seen, and you really shook that place up in a very short time period. And I guess what I would ask is number one, how did you do that? How did you take on the deep state, which, which is real throughout government, but especially in the intelligence community, is a persistent problem. And and lots of conservatives sometimes feel frustrated and say, well, you can't take on the deep state. And I think
you managed to do it remarkably during that tenure. And what I would say as a second part of the question is what advice would you give to the next Republican Cabinet member coming into office and facing career bureaucrats that are ideologically and passionately opposed to the next Republican president and the agenda of the next White House.
Well, let me take the second part first. I think the reality is is you can't hire someone who's life fleehood is Washington, d C. If you're hiring somebody who needs a job later in the Washington system, where reporters go to church with politicians and lobbyists, they live in the same communities, they're never going to make big, bold decisions because they'll have the ire of their friends and
their church acquaintances. What I believe that you have to do is hire people also who really don't care about their New York Times profile piece, who somehow have the ability to make the right decisions. I've told President Trump we're going to fix the personnel problem when he's president. And the first thing is is to look at every resume and if the resume has a Washington, d C. Address on it, throw it away. We can hire people from outside of Washington, d C. What happened with me
at DNI is actually pretty simple. When I came into DNA, one of the first things they did is they gave me four reports that had been done over the last ten years of how to fix the intelligence system. I read the reports and I thought, well, a lot of this makes sense. We've got duplicitous programs, We've got people who it's supposed to be a coordinating body, and yet it's no longer a coordinating body. It's actually a competitive body. It ballooned to more than two thousand people. It should
be like two hundred people. And so I just started sending people back to their home agencies d and I, the OD and I had become the wasteland. If intelligence agency didn't like somebody, rather than fire them, they sent them over to OD and I, and so I just started sending people back and getting rid of every possible person that we could freezing hiring this in Germany as well and forcing people to rethink this.
You've got to be able to play the system.
But you got to know the system. And I've worked at the State Department, and I knew how the federal government works to where you can come in and manipulate it and start using its own rules against it. I do think though, that in order for us to make big, bold decisions, Congress is going to have to somehow change the way the labor force is legally allowed to be cut.
As you know, and I'm preaching to the choir here, but when we come up with new technologies and we decide to spend on a different program, by definition, other things should fall. People should be fired, the program should be eliminated, and that's not happening.
As always, thank you for listening to Verdict with Center Ted Cruz ben Ferguson with you don't forget to down with my podcast and you can listen 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,