November 12, 2025 • 60 mins
Join Washington Examiner Senior Writer David Harsanyi and Federalist Editor-In-Chief Mollie Hemingway as they discuss the imminent end of the longest government shutdown, analyze what Republicans are doing about voters' discontent with the economy, debate H1-B visas and mass immigration, and explain the reaction to the BBC's deceptive editing of President Donald Trump. Mollie and David also review The Ten Commandments, Wick Is Pain, and Pluribus.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Welcome back, everyone to a new episode of Your Wrong
with Molly Hemingway, editor and chief of the Federalist and
David Harsani, senior writer at The Washington Examiner. Just as
a reminder, if you like to email the show, please
do so at radio at the Federalist dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
And boy, did people like to email the show this
last week. Like we're still getting emails.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
It might have been the most email, not the most,
but it was up there.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
We got a lot, a lot of email and all
over the map. People who love you, people who don't
love you, people who hate me, people who don't hate me.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
It was. It was definitely a diverse array of viewpoints
that came in on our discussion on the you know,
the the graper problem. I think on the right and anyway,
so we appreciate it. We read most I try to
read most of them. I don't read all of them.
If you're going to write just I.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Read every word.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
If you're going to write two thousand words, it's not
going to be read stop it.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Some of them have been really good, thoughtful. You need
to read them all.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
It's great anyway, the shutdowns over, Molly, how do you
feel you're right, did you make it?
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I mean, as of this taping, are we sure? I mean,
I think I'll be over right.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
I think the House has just or is going to
vote for it.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Okay. I I am glad the shutdown is over. And
I do a ton of air travel, so it was
definitely starting to negatively impact me on the air travel
part of things, including that I had to go up
to New York for Fox this week and I usually fly,
(01:59):
and I had to take the which for me is
not the most enjoyable mode of transport, just because I
get a little sick on the train. But this is
not that interesting. But point being, I'm starting to get annoyed.
And I also really want to see my in laws
for Thanksgiving because I haven't seen them for fifteen months,
and I was worried that the shutdown would keep me
(02:22):
from being able to fly out to Oregon to see them.
How about you?
Speaker 1 (02:27):
I do everything I cannot to fly, though I would
do occasionally, so I was not looking forward to that.
I am actually going to fly soon. But other than that,
I don't really think that it affected me in any way, honestly,
and I don't think it affected most people in any way.
What I think is interesting here, or what I think
needs to be stressed is this was the dumbest shutdown
(02:48):
we've ever had. There was no there was no real
reason for it. Now, I think Democrats are huge losers here.
I don't think that this affects elections in any huge way,
but it does. It showed that the Democrats are at
war with each other in a way, but also that
they have no real focused agenda. You know. So they
(03:14):
tried to convince everyone that millions of people were going
to start first, millions of people are going to lose
their health, and millions of people are going to start.
But now that a few I guess moderate Democrats decided
to cross over and open the government. That they're mad
that people aren't starving, you know what I mean. They're
mad that the government's opening up and people would be
(03:34):
getting their Snap and Obamacare subsidies and all of that.
So it just seemed very It just seemed useless, And
I think Chuck Schumer's just been one of the He's
just terrible, let's be honest. I think Democrats could do
a lot better. He constantly gives in to the far
left with these sort of formative fights that really gained
(03:58):
Democrats nothing, and I just think it was a disaster
politically for them. Okay, I think, yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Think I disagree. Number One, people in DC care a
lot about shutdowns, but I don't feel like other people
do that much in the sense that as painful as
this one was becoming, people will forget about it in
a few months. So the downsides of the shutdown aren't
that great. And if you think as I do, that
(04:31):
Chuck Schumer forced this shutdown so that Virginia elections in
particular would go really well for Democrats. Like the shutdown,
I think Paul showed that people were blaming Republicans for it,
which was of course very unfair because republic Republicans kept
voting to keep the government open and demo.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
But only slightly, not the usual overwhelming polling on that absolutely.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
True, but usually the shutdown is caused by the Republicans.
Is this one it wasn't. So the fact that the
polling showed that people were blaming Republicans for something that
they had zero fault with, and that it was also
I think showing up in approval for Trump right ahead
of an election where you need base voters to come
(05:15):
out and you want to energize your base if you're Democrats,
you want to demoralize your base if you're a Republican.
I think Democrats actually had a huge victory here. It
really helped them with the excitement ahead of the election.
I had kept telling Mark that I thought that the
shutdown would and days after the election, and it would
(05:39):
have actually ended on the Friday after the election if
Progressives hadn't become so emboldened by the mom Danni when
that they decided to push for what Schumer claimed the
shutdown was over. But I don't think the shutdown was
over anything other than invigorating a base ahead of an election,
and by that standard, they crushed it.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, I guess I just don't believe. I just don't
think that the I don't think Spamberger loses or the
elections any closer if there's no shutdown. I don't think
that that I don't.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Think would have changed the outcomes. But I do think
the margins matter, and as you know, David, in Virginia,
those margins are now leading to a super majority for
Democrats to be able to push through every gun ban
they want in Virginia. Redistricting like they're going to have
wonderful benefits to them for the next few years. Not
because people wondered if Democrats would win Virginia, but the
(06:33):
margins are so big.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
A lot of the folks who won in Virginia at
least pretend to be moderate. Svamberger among them. In a sense,
she was the one I think it was twenty twenty
who told Democrats that should never say the word socialist again.
In that she definitely portrays herself as somewhat moderate. Now,
I know people are going to tell me she's not,
and I agree, but I wonder if they're really going
(06:58):
to go through with all that, because I think you
could back a.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Listener could just remind us of this conversation when Abigail
Spaanberger is signing into law bills promoting euthanasia and taking
away guns. I just want that reminder for us that
it does not matter how she presented herself, but what
she is and what she is is in some ways
(07:21):
more dangerous than a mom Donnie, because she can fool
low information voters into thinking she's moderate.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
No, she portrays herself as a moderate. I agree she
is not. My only point is that governing in that
way could backfire, and that's what I'm saying. So we'll
see what she does. I wouldn't be surprised if she did.
But I wouldn't be surprised if they somewhat moderated their
governing style from last time, which costs them the state.
But you know, I could be wrong about that. So
(07:53):
you're saying, so okay, So you're saying the shutdown was
and I think this is true, was meant to motivate
Democratic votes, and clearly they were far more interested in
coming out and voting, which I think speaks to a
larger problem with a lot of Trump voters, people who
wear red hats, you know, they love him. Not sure
that they're as motivated to get out and vote for
(08:16):
other Republicans, which is going to be a problem post Trump.
That's not to say. And I see I think Donald
Trump said, you know, I wasn't on the ballot, and
we always lose when I'm not on the ballot. That's
not true. I mean, you know plenty of people, I mean,
what's his name, Youngkin one without Trump on the ballot,
and you know Kemp went one without Trump on the ballot,
(08:36):
and DeSantis one recently without Trump on the ballot, but
I think those are very competent people. So I don't know.
I don't know what that portends for Republicans coming soon,
but it is a problem when you have a party
built around one person rather than a set of maybe
you know, an agenda or set of ideas that are
(08:58):
that people are really excited about.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Well, I'm not denying that Donald Trump has an outsize
and beloved or hated personality. I agree with that, but
I think that one of the biggest failures that Republicans
have made is to accept the voters that Donald Trump
(09:20):
brings in without understanding who those voters are and without thinking,
without realizing, they sort of accept what Donald Trump's biggest
detractors say, which is that these dumb voters are only
interested in his personality, when in fact they're super interested
(09:44):
in the policies. Yes, they like the personality, or sometimes
they don't. Sometimes they vote for him despite his personality,
but the policies are what they like, and they are
very frustrated with things like in recent decades, such as
our immigration policy, or our bailouts for banks, or the
(10:05):
way that we had been fighting wars. And if you
think that people are voting for Trump because of his
TV personality and not at least in large part because
of his policy approaches to these things. You will continue
to operate your party as you have been. And that's
the problem for voters coming forward. Why would you vote
(10:28):
Republican right now?
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Like?
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Why what was the case for coming out and voting Republican?
If you had to sum it up, what would you say,
like from what was presented to voters? Yeah, why would
you vote I or win some earl sears.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
I should just think I wanted to quick step back.
I'll answer that question. I think though, that a lot
of the people have backfilled Donald Trump's you case ideologically
overestimate the popularity of a lot of things that they're saying.
So there was no real good reason to vote for
Republicans in Virginia because they did not offer any kind
(11:08):
of coherent case. It was all about the last election,
like transgender you know, high school athletes Now, I think
that's a super important issue. But the most important issues economics.
And I think that Donald Trump won this presidency last
time because most people remembered the good years of his
first term where the economy was doing very well, and
(11:29):
those issues were very traditional in a sense. He lowered regulations,
he cut taxes. He you know, he let businesses thrive,
and consumers didn't weren't paying. There was no real inflation
until COVID hit. So I think that that the economy
is the most important driver. I think every poll shows that,
(11:50):
and people are worried about that.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
I think the economy is just a major issue, and
people vote based on kitchen table issues. And Donald Trump
hasn't had a bad year in many ways. I mean,
(12:12):
in fact, he's had a good year in many ways,
and some of those successes have been domestic, like working
on the border, reinstituting his deregulatory approach, passing the One
Big Beautiful Bill, which includes extending his tax cuts. Right, Like,
(12:33):
some of these things are important and domestic. And then
some of them were very foreign policy focused, and I
think historically people don't vote based on foreign policy. And
also it can give Like if you're too focused on
(12:55):
foreign policy, whether it's bombing Venezuelan drug voats or bombing
Iran or working on all of the peace deals that
he worked on throughout the country, people can say that's good,
but they would far prefer inflation to be down or
be able to afford buying a house or their groceries.
And so his danger that he needs to deal with,
(13:16):
I think is that he has been a transformative president
in so many ways, but history is written by the winners,
and if he doesn't do more to make permanent this
reformation or revolution that he has instituted, the history is
going to be written by a bunch of people who
(13:37):
think he's hitler, and it will not be good for
the country. And so he should start being a little scared.
I think, not scared, but he should just understand that
things are not going in the direction that he wants
them to be going.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Yeah, I guess, I just I feel like a lot
of candidates and a lot of the institutions, political institutions
in das see these days, completely overestimate how much a
voter cares about neocons or global capitalism or all these
things that supposedly have destroyed the country and everything. Donald
(14:14):
Trump doesn't actually speak that way most of the time.
He speaks in a much more moderate language in my view,
and a lot of the candidates pick up on the
wrong cues. In Virginia, there was just a ton of
culture war ad at least the ads that I saw
it was just all about that, and again, important issue
(14:37):
in a certain way, but not the most important issue.
So what is the economic case? Tariffs are incredibly unpopular.
I think they cause inflation. So I see that Trump
is pulling back on some of that. Now, can we
talk a little bit about this. I saw Donald Trump
yesterday interviewed on Fox right Laur Ingram. I think, and yeah,
(14:59):
he was going on about how prices are going down.
I saw the Treasury Secretary say that prices are going down.
I saw other administration officials like Kevin Hassett say that
prices are going down. It's a very bad idea to
try to gaslight people on this. Prices have gone down
in certain areas, but in many they have not because
(15:20):
inflation is compounding. And just because it was nine percent
under Biden at one point doesn't mean over three percent
is any good either. I think it's better to say
we're trying to get this thing under control. It's better
than to temper that language, not to try to fool people.
And I think they're trying to fool people. Donald Trump said,
we Republicans should be telling me everyone prices are going down.
(15:43):
I don't think that most people who go to a
supermarket field that way. I certainly don't pay attention to
prices that much. That came off wrong, like I don't
care about them. I do. I'm not wealthy enough not
to care about what something costs. But I just don't
know what things usually cost. But according to the people
in my family, like meat and other things that we buy,
our grocery bill is like twice what it was let's say,
(16:05):
you know, five six years ago. And for people getting
by paycheck to paycheck, that's a huge issue, and that's
what should be the major focus of any Republican moving forward. Now.
I don't know, there's no you know, magic formula to
fix that. Times it's local government that causes problems, like
(16:29):
in housing. I don't know what Donald Trump can do
about housing costs. Maybe get a hold of inflation and
bring down interest rates, but other than that, I'm not sure.
So anyway, I just think sometimes people take away the
wrong lessons from their victory. Is there's no real evidence,
like you're saying there was a big revolution. But in
the end, aren't people just concerned about the same stuff.
They just want it to be done better. They're concerned
(16:51):
about the economy. They're concerned about, you know, not getting
dragged into a long war. But then when I look
at Trump's most popular policies, like peace and Gaza was
up there. The bombing of Iran is up there. You
know what I mean? Like people, I don't think people
care about this neokon isolationist thing. I just think they
want competent foreign policy that doesn't drag us into long
(17:14):
term conflicts. Right.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
No, yeah, I think you're wrong on all of it.
I think usually you're wrong on everything.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
You have everything.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
I don't mean it that way. What I mean is
like if you ask people what they thought of the
Iraq War, they gave it very high marks. And then
also it was so bad for George W. Bush's presidency
that he had gotten embroiled in this war and that
it was dragging on like that that you can't isolate
(17:45):
it into We took a poll and four hundred Americans
the weekend after the bombing, and they said they liked it.
It's like, I don't really care about polling like that.
You have to be smart enough to also like judge
the longer term, like the feeling of the people, and
it's something that polls can help illuminate, but you can't
rely too much on them. And historically speaking, interventionist wars
(18:11):
have been deeply unpopular. The other kind are not unpopular,
you know, the.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Wars, the other kind, the wars that are fought in.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
The national interest that people understand the case for them,
and that like they're willing to lay down their lives
for because it's like such an important cause. So not
just the George Bush example, but you know, we look
at Lyndon B. Johnson's popularity. People don't love People don't
(18:41):
love an interventionist foreign policy. People in DC love an
interventionist foreign policy, people in the arms industry love it.
And that does fuel a lot of our political debate.
But it's a good way to drag down a presidency.
And it's not about like any single act, but about
where your area of focus is. And as for Donald
(19:02):
Trump not being a transformational president, I just don't think
that's true. Like he's there's so many different things that
his presidency has caused people to rethink, whether it's our
posture toward China, our approach like even in the Republican Party,
toward war fighting tariffs, Like I'm not saying that they're popular,
(19:25):
but they have, but people have been forced to kind
of think through why they exist and what they're meant
to accomplish. That's one thing that tariffs are difficult, and
they do cause, you know, the idea behind them is
that you have a long term success for your country
that's painful in the short term. That's never going to
work in a political system like or it's going to
(19:46):
be very difficult to make work in a political system
like ours where you have elections every year to two
years to four years. But I just think if you
don't see that Donald Trump has reached shaped the way
people think about you know, we had crumbling institutions, but
no permission structure to really talk about it or to
(20:07):
act like there was something we could do about it.
And it's back to what I was saying, our immigration policy,
our foreign policy, our bailout of banks policy, where we
socialize losses and privatized gains, like really broken things that
I'm not saying he has fixed all of these things,
(20:27):
but definitely our conversation about them is very different now
than when he started. Wouldn't you agree with that?
Speaker 1 (20:33):
I think the conversation is different on some issues because
the world has changed from the last time. I don't
think Donald Trump does it. I don't see the not
bailing out bank thing. I think Trump is actually quite
friendly towards banks and stuff. I don't see him doing
any of that. Also, I don't know what an interventionist
war means was Vietnam was an interventionist war, correct, And
(20:54):
Nixon couldn't have been more popular in nineteen seventy two
when we had five hundred and fifty thousand troops there.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
But think about how he approached how he approached that
war too. It wasn't like he was happy to have
gotten into it. Definitely wanted to see successes and then
drew out.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Wow. Yeah. But I'm just saying that that if you
handle a war in the way that the American people
like you can, it doesn't ruin your political career. I
just think almost every war we've ever fought is interventionist.
I mean, you can make the same You could say
that nine to eleven caused the Iraq War in some way,
whether you agree with it or not. I think it
(21:35):
was unpopular because it was poorly fought in him because
we were I'm just saying I think it was I
think it was a mistake. Is Iran's an interventionist war.
We don't want them to have nuclear web war.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
There's not a war there, right exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
I mean, but if they had nuclear weapons or they
were on the cusp of it, the Americans would feel
compelled to stop that because they can.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
They were on the cusp of it, and we did
stop it, right so without without a war.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Though, but it's still intervention yeah, because the.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Behavior bombing and then we left again. I've always said
this about Afghanistan, that I wanted us to not land
the planes, and that we did that in Iran, is
you know much better what I thought was going to
happen started Well.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
We had an ally there to fight that war, but
also more than that we had in Afghanistan, we were
looking for certain people to get them, so it was
very difficult not to land there, whereas in Iran we
were after are.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
You saying we were looking for Osama bin Laden and others?
Speaker 1 (22:37):
I mean, I think I think we wanted to displace rules. Listen,
I agree. I think nation building was a massive disaster.
I don't think it's ever a good idea unless the
people there actually want our help. It's a different kind
of story.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
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Speaker 2 (23:30):
You mentioned the Laura Ingram interview with Donald Trump, and
I did think, first of all, I thought it was
a very good interview, and without hearkening back to the
recent unpleasantness of our last week's conversation, I think because
she was not cartoonishly hostile, it was in some ways
a more devastating interview than if she had been cartoonishly hostile,
(23:54):
like so many people in corporate media are when they
interview the bad Orange Man. And he had some answers
that were disconcerting to people. I mean, one thing is,
as you note, telling people that they're crazy to think
that the economy is not as great as they would like,
or that prices are higher than they would like. I mean,
(24:16):
it's just when Biden did it, and the media, of
course helped Biden do that, they kept on saying like,
who are you going to believe us? Or your lying eyes?
Prices are down, and it just seemed so crazy to me.
But now the Trump team is kind of doing that themselves,
and it just seems there hasn't been a great focus
(24:37):
to this recently, to this term, and his claim that
there aren't Americans to fill jobs and that's why we
need to import a bunch of people is probably not
a message that the base is going to be excited by.
And maybe he doesn't care and you don't care, and
you think that it's right that we need mass immigration
(25:00):
to deal with our stupid idiots here in the US
who can't get the jobs or whatever.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
But for a.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Populist movement that is doing so much on tariffs to
also send this message is there's just a conflict there,
don't you think.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Uh No, I think he was right, and he didn't
say it like you just did and framed it that way.
He said that bringing in the best talent from other
countries to help us work in certain industries is good
for America. He's right, of course, because the economy is
not a zero sum proposition, and it helps other Americans
when we have big industries. If you look at a
(25:39):
lot of our most successful sectors, there are people from
other countries who come here. It's like, so this person
put a picture up of the moon landing and everyone
flying the flags and saying, what did foreigners have to
do with this? Like von braun ran the program. But anyway,
you can bring people here who are great from other
countries to help us do things. I would if you
(26:00):
want to bring fewer of them that or whatever. I mean.
You know, you have to calibrate these things. I completely agree.
But this hostility towards towards immigration legal immigration now which
I knew is headed in this direction, is very off
putting to me, obviously because of my family history, but
I think is off putting to a lot of people.
You are not going to win any elections attacking people
(26:22):
with funny names all the time, which is a big
thing going on now among the you know, nat Con
heritage Americans. I think that we need better assimilation for immigration,
I think we need to diversify or immigration. We don't
want people coming here to say all those things. But
the idea that immigration is somehow destroying this country is ludicrous.
(26:42):
And so I like that Trump did that. I mean,
this proves to me that a lot of the people
who pretend to form his sort of intellectual firepower behind
him are actually out of touch with what Donald Trump
actually believes. That's what I think, and what most Americans
are not anti immag gration.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
I saw this thing about how Colorado ski resorts are
scrambling to find people to work because normally they just
have a bunch of people foreigners working at the ski slopes.
And I'm sure you think that's like an industry that
Americans can't work in or something they don't have the skills.
(27:23):
But it was cracking me up that ski resorts that
charge hundreds of dollars per lift ticket we're upset that
they might have to pay Americans more to work at
ski resorts.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
You deserve what a person wants to give you. That's
how the world works. I just can't even believe that
the rights embracing this nonsense that we have to that
profit margin should be lowered. Don't they understand that other
jobs are created by those profits. I mean, a person
who is punching a ticket cannot be making thirty dollars
an hour or whatever. I don't even know what what
(28:00):
they make. I mean, it's ridiculous, but that's fine. If
you want to shut it off. People are going to
pay more for things, and then they're going to complain
about that. So at some point, and by the way,
I think the tariff regime is a complete failure. Long term.
Short term won't matter. But I see that Donald Trump's
already pulling back on tariffs, and he has since since
(28:20):
Liberation Day because he understands that it causes inflation.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Back to this claim that you know, it's not a
zero sum game, I think that's the argument of the
people who think mass uncontrolled immigration has not been good
for the country.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
There is a mass, there's illegal mass. Are you are
you conflating the two. You're saying that our legal immigration
policy is mass and uncontrolled.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
I love hearing that you are a big fan of
our mass controlled legal immigration policies of recent decades. But
it has of course fundamentally changed the nature of the country.
I mean, you look at the what happened in New
York City with the election of Mom Donnie, a true
(29:10):
radical as mayor and among native born. So first of all,
New York City does not require citizenship to vote, So
I don't know, but I don't know what the percentage
of people who are not citizens who are voting in
New York City are. But for foreign born versus native
born populations, you had a completely different populace.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Right, and native born to New York not native born
to America.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
So well, I thought it was I thought it was
too America. But if you look at like Virginia, for instance,
native born voting population of Virginia versus foreign born voting
of population of Virginia, and I do believe that is
a metric that they judge based on born America, it
is again a dramatically different voting population. It's just true
(30:06):
that since the sixties we have not just brought in
a ton of people, but also had a very different
or non existent, non existent assimilation effort. If you can't see, like,
if you don't experience that just by your life of
seeing how different populations are different, Like the Somali population
(30:29):
in Minnesota is different than the native born population in Minnesota,
and it has an effect on who they're voting for
and what their culture is like. Like, just pretending it's
not happening is no answer to people's concerns.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Here. You are not debating with what I said. I
do think that our assimilation problem has because of the
left that doesn't want these people to assimilate. They want
multicultural America is a huge problem, prob I think that
we need more diversity in our immigration policy, and I
(31:05):
think that we need to bring in people.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
Who will be good diversity in our immigration.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
So we don't have a million people coming from one area.
Like you can't have millions of Mexicans coming over with
border and then clustering in a city because that is
they're not going to assimilate. They're here legally, many of them.
That's wrong. Or if you bring a bunch of people
from Islamic countries who are not assimilating and integrating and
then bunch up in places, it's a bad that's a problem.
(31:32):
But since the sixties, I'm here because of the stuff
that happened since the sixties. I think my families are
great Americans. Like, so they assimilated, you're not here because
of stay. Yeah. My parents came in here in nineteen
sixty nine, right, and they had funny names too, and
they came here with nothing like a lot of people,
and they integrated and were successful. I don't understand why
we can't have any more of that.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Where were you born?
Speaker 1 (31:54):
I was born here, but barely so I would be
one of the people who is a problem in this country.
I don't think so. I think I'm a great asset
to this great nation, right, I mean some days, but
I say, cool and quick thing about this. By the way, Okay,
(32:15):
let's say you're right. Let's say we cut off immigration tomorrow. Right.
You're never going to win elections if you don't start
making a case to people who are here already in
citizens like this idea. I see online that you're going
to start revoking O the door.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
David Harsani just made an argument based on whether it's
politically palatable. No, it's I thought you didn't do that.
You don't care about winning coalitions or political success.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
I'm giving you an argument, a theoretical that we shut
off immigration, which I don't think we'll do. I don't
think anyone actually wants or most people don't want that completely,
but let's say we lower it whatever it is. You're
not going to win elections if you don't appeal to
immigrants and the children of immigrants. I think most times,
after a few generations, immigrants become like everyone else essentially.
(33:04):
But you can't be an anti immigrant party in a
country that has a ton of immigrants in a lot
of places that you need to win. That's just the
fact of politics. I think we should be trying to
integrate and assimilate these people.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
But I actually just want to put a pin in
that because my friends and family, who are themselves immigrants,
tend to be the most anti current immigration policy of
people I.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Know immigration or illegal immigration.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Yes, so definitely they're anti illegal immigration. They worked really
hard to become citizens or to come here. There are
lots of complaints they have about the difficulty of becoming
a citizen. But they also are not necessarily super fans
of mess migration. I'm just pointing that out.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
I don't know if that's what is What is mass immigration? Like?
What number? What number would you say, how many people
do think we should let in every year?
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Well? I think I tend to be less pro mass
immigration than a lot of people on the right. I'm
not sure if I'm for anywhere near the numbers that
we're having actually, or like, maybe a better way to
put it is, we've had so many people in the
last sixty years that it would be okay to kind
(34:29):
of ease way up now. Okay, but I don't have numbers.
I'm just saying I think wages are way too low
for people who live here. Not enough is being done
to make us a cohesive society. We are vulnerable to
attack from outsiders. And I understand that there can be
(34:51):
need for particular areas. I don't think the ski resorts
of Colorado need mass migration to make themselves operate well.
I do have family members who work in that industry,
and they would you know, that is a thing you
can be employed in and the wages are kept artificially
low I think through too many work visas for that area.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Wages are dramatically high in this country, the highest in
the world per capita.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
On the idea relative to the prices that you were
just complaining about.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
Okay, you don't think that there's inflation in European countries
that have that close off their borders like we have.
Far better economic success with immigration that grows the economy
and actually bring the salaries up. I'm not saying in
every single I'm not saying that in I don't know
enough about the Colorado ski industry, okay, but in general,
the idea that our wages are depressed because people come
(35:47):
here is just simply not true. I'm sorry. I know everyone,
I'm going to get a million letters, angry letters, but
that's not how the economy works.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
By the way, I'm going to go skiing here soon
over Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
And are you a skier?
Speaker 2 (36:01):
So I can't say that I am because I literally
have not skied in twenty years. But I certainly used
to be a skier, and I failed to raise my
children to be skiers. They were taught some snowboarding by
some family members because Mark, of course is a snowboarder.
(36:21):
But I think we're going to do some light skiing
here over Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
We got off track there, We're talking about skiing Colorado.
What is next on our agenda here?
Speaker 2 (36:33):
How about the BBC? Did you hear that story?
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Yeah? I'm kind of taken aback by the anger because
I just assumed everyone knew this is what the bbccy
has been doing forever right. So essentially, at least the
claim is I don't I believe it. The claim I'm
just saying that this is the claim is that the
BBC basically doctored Donald Trump's Well, first of there's a
(37:00):
numerous things that they have done. They had to correct
every week at least once, so we correct a story
that they had about Gaza for being completely.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Wrong or was it too Twice a week, I think
twice a week on average, twice a week they had
to correct errors that went one percent in the direction
of pro Hamas.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Then they doctored on the January sixth speech of Donald Trump.
They took out the words where they were what did
he say like peacefully? They doctored out the part where
he says push back peacefully and patriotically. I think it
was so they took out that part.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
It's so much worse than that. They took like a
few words from the beginning of the speech and a
few words at the sec at the very end with
like it was an hour long speech, as any of
us who suffered through it knows, and they took out
like an hour to make it sound like he was
telling people to go riot I mean, it wasn't like
a whoopsie. It was a full on, malicious, deceptive edit,
(38:01):
as understood also by an internal review that they had
which detailed the problems journalistically with the propaganda that they
were pushing.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
The States should never run media organizations. It is preposterous
because the role of media is to keep One of
the roles of media is to keep government honest. So
how could to keep government honest? But I think Donald
Trump has demanded a full and fair retraction and is
going to sue if not, is going to sue the
(38:31):
BBC for a billion dollars.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
Well, I just think it's interesting because unlike in the
United States, the British libel laws are so much easier
to sue under and people can and do win huge
awards for stuff nowhere even near this bad. And this
(38:56):
was not an editing error. This was against licing together
two small sections an hour apart in a speech, or
fifty four minutes apart in a speech, to make it
appear that he said something he never said, and he
would definitely have a good case. I have found it
interesting how people have responded to it. So first of
(39:19):
all the fact that Trump or his supporters were upset
with what was done is appalling some people they're like,
how dare he notice what we did? This is why
we have to have state media, which doesn't even make sense,
as you point out for an argument. Other people are
trying to defend what the BBC did or point out
(39:43):
that the BBC puts together some excellent TV shows, like
drama shows, and they're like, well, if he went after
the BBC for lying about him for political gain, then
that might hurt our stories.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
Just like again, I hadn't thought of that. I don't
want their story is limited. I like the bb but you.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Could get stories through a million other ways. There's a
political issue coming on, which is that an alternate TV
network has just shot up in the last year, gb News,
which is sort of like I think you could kind
of call it the Fox News of Great Britain, and
(40:25):
Nigel Farage is involved in that, and he of course
is doing like really well in the polls for Prime Minister,
and so there's that kind of component in there. The
Telegraph was the one that exposed the BBC and exposed
that there was this internal review that showed just how
intentional and deceptive this was, and that there's an institutional
(40:47):
bias problem at the BBC. Again to your point, David,
anyone with two brain cells can watch the BBC and
be like, whoa are they biased? But somehow this is
big news, which makes you wonder how stupid the Brits are, Like,
I never knew that that the BBC had a problem
Herely it's a release awesome accident.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Yeah hello, the uh the uh. The BBC is has
you know, supposedly independent, but the the board that regulates
the BBC charter is appointed by the government and every
brit I think maybe poor people don't have to has
(41:31):
to pay like one hundred and seventy five pounds a
year for the for a TV you know, the TV license.
So it seems to me like that is a way
to set up a corrupt, a corrupt network, especially for news.
I've always said this and I think it's true here too,
like PBS and NPR was that. Yes, I do think
(41:53):
the BBC will make educational programming or interesting programming that
doesn't have as much commercial viability because because they're helped
by the state. But I don't understand why rich people
can't fund that. I you know, the whole thing is
a news section of it is corrupt. So none of
these networks let Donald Trump win. They always give in
(42:15):
and then set right. I mean like CBS didn't take
it all the way to trial, right, I think you
sued someone else. It doesn't seem like they would allow
allow this to go to trial, right. They would probably
work something out.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
I don't know. I don't know enough about the British
legal system. I just have observed over many years that
people are frequently winning defamation suits against British media in
a way that would never work in the US because
we have, oddly enough artificially high standards for suing for defamation.
(42:50):
Some really interesting jurisp or some legal analysis out there
about how our New York Times Versus ruling makes it
so that it is more difficult to sue the media
than it was at the time of the American founding,
(43:10):
when we inverted the situation where it used to be
that the more prominent you were, the better case you
had for defamation, and the less prominent you were it
was more difficult to win a suit that way. And
New York Times versus Sullivan just flips it on its head,
where if you are a person of any renown you
basically can't go after the media if they lie about you,
(43:33):
And so a lot of people have been talking about
the need to revisit that, including Justice Thomas has mentioned
that in some of his descents. Lawrence Silberman, the Great
Lower Court judge, wrote beautifully about that as well. So
(43:53):
it's definitely something that needs revisiting because it just has
no basis in our common law history. It's not an
originalist argument for it. But it also makes media people
nervous because you don't want, you know, we do so
well in our situation with having great protections for those
who practice journalism. Obviously the abuse of that puts everybody
(44:16):
at risk. But I do agree it's time to revisit
a bad decision, which New York Times versus Sullivan is
a bad decision.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
I kind of worry about the chilling of speech if
we were like Britain, where every you know, people are
constantly being sued, Journalists are constant being sued, and for
good reasons, but sometimes just for reasons of I don't
remember specific cases, but just for reasons to kind of
shut down investigations, which also happens. But yeah, it is
(44:47):
a lot easier in Britain. To sue for defamation. Finally,
let's talk about the antifa violence at Berkeley during a
TPUSA event. It seemed pretty bad. Actually, even though people
(45:07):
tell me antifa is not violent, they're only anti fascist,
They're not terroristic whatsoever. There's no leadership, Molly, how could
they be terrorists?
Speaker 2 (45:15):
I mean, antifa is just an idea, is what I
hear from Democrat politicians. It doesn't have any manifestation at
all in the form of rioters who kill people. Yeah,
there was a TPUSA event at Berkeley. Berkeley has had
a history of violence against speech events. During the first
(45:35):
Trump presidency, there was an event there that turned into
an absolute riot. The media blamed the victims of the
riot for that riot. Trump said something about how if
this continued, then UC Berkeley would lose its federal subsidies
and taxpayer funding. That never happened, and UC Berkeley is
(45:59):
as bad as as it ever was. And you know,
someone motivated by antifa ideology, according to you know, the
bullets that he engraved and other things he said, murdered
Charlie Kirk. Assassinated him on a college campus two months ago,
and very little to nothing has been done to protect
(46:23):
speech on campus to go after the adherents of the
murderous ideology. You know, that's targeting people on the right.
And we talked earlier about like why would you vote Republican?
And the complete and utter impotence of Republicans who are
(46:44):
in power in Congress and the presidency right now to
do anything to protect the tens of millions of conservatives
in the country is just an abomination. I think.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
It is ironic that the free speech movement of the sixties.
I think in nineteen sixty four began at UC Berkeley
when the administration wouldn't let some student groups put out
tables for their information or whatever it was, and that's
where it blew up. And now you have the students
themselves shutting down. You know, minority voices there, but legitimate
(47:19):
political voice. I mean, all political voices are legitimate to
be heard. I don't know. I guess I just don't
you say Republicans are incompetent here or whatever or impotent.
I would say that there's only so much they can
really do to force UC Berkeley to change, and one
of them would be to strip them of federal funding.
(47:40):
President can do that too. By the way, they have
a seven point four billion dollar endowment. I'm not sure
why we should be giving federal funds to any of
these schools anyway, I have zero I don't want my
tax dollars going to places that teach radicalism, teach people
to hate America, teach people to hate Jewish people, people
(48:00):
walk around with kafeas and stuff, like, my money is
going to subsidize their educations. Now, if a school needs
that money for science and all of that, that's great.
So get you know, make sure that minority voices can
be heard in those schools, or strip them of their funding.
So I hope Donald Trump thinks about that. The amount
(48:21):
of money these institutions get from the federal government is
mind boggling to me sometimes, especially schools like Harvard and Columbia.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
In that interview that you love Donald Trump, what he
said Laura Ingram was asking why he's handing out hundreds
of thousands of visas to Chinese students, and he was like,
and how is that maga? And he was like, well,
it's maga because if I didn't do that, then half
of the colleges out there would fail. I was like,
(48:50):
what's the problem, you know, like this idea that we
need to insulate colleges from any market forces, which is
all we do through our federal loan programs, and otherwise
it's insane And what good have they done the country.
I mean, yeah, they're training a lot of Chinese students
to go cause harm to the US. Good good for them.
(49:12):
But yeah, they absolutely should be required to protect speech
on campus.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
On foreign students and visas, I am not against the
United States having an immigration policy that helps us. I
think immigrants help us in general, but as far as
schools go, I would not give visas out to anyone
who isn't getting like a STEM degree, And I think
you could put a stipulation on those visas that you
have to stay in the United States for a certain
(49:41):
amount of time or something that helps this country. There's
no schools love foreign students because they pay full freight
and they're paying cash. A lot of times it's usually rich,
rich kids who get to come here from other countries.
So I have no problem making having some limitation on that.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
A million years ago, when I was in college and
I was studying economics, we had a bunch of students
paying bulk right from other countries. Usually it was like
former Soviet Republic countries and they were always cheating, and
the professors were told that they had different cultural like,
(50:22):
they had a different culture in which cheating wasn't a problem,
and so they should corrupt culture shouldn't be marked down.
And I was friends with some of my professors and
they were just like utterly appalled at the lowering of standards.
So that these kids who see.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
That's what I'm talking about right there, that kind of
thinking undermind's assimilation. We should be holding these people to
the same standards everyone else has in this country, and
kind of moral relativism over what culture is good or
how people view culture or the things that they do.
I mean, I've been to Eastern and in Central Europe
(51:01):
and I was there years ago, and yeah, it's a
much I don't know if Americans realized how corrupt a
lot of these places are in how every people deal
with everyday life. We should not be importing that, we
should be lifting up people who come here. I completely agree.
I think Eastern Europeans, though, are pretty good immigrants in general.
I think they love America. Let me tell you another thing,
(51:24):
just quick thing about immigrants, just from my own experience
in my own life. I think that the immigrants I
knew who were connected to me and my family, who
came mostly from Hungary in places like that, were more
patriotic than a lot of these students. I'll tell you
they're probably more patriotic than ninety nine percent of the
students that are on the UC Berkeley campus. I think
they were very grateful to be here. I think they
love this country and they embraced the ideals of this country,
(51:46):
and that's what we want. Who was online saying this,
I mean confitting, what's that?
Speaker 2 (51:51):
Who are these people who love America more?
Speaker 1 (51:53):
Just the people that I knew growing up, who were
immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe that I knew. I
think they were happy escape communism. I think they love
this country. I don't think they wanted to go back.
I don't think they wanted to import those ideas here. Yeah. Sure,
some of their cultural things they brought with them, but
I don't think the political aspect of that world was
brought here. I think they were happy for a fair
(52:15):
shot meritocratic world that they lived in here, which you
don't get elsewhere. I'm just saying, you know, the.
Speaker 2 (52:23):
Culture that you're from actually does matter a lot for
the ease with which you will assimilate to a new country.
And I was thinking about this with someone saying that
all these people are coping with the Mom Donnie lost
by being like, oh, well, when he institutes his policies,
things will get worse and then they'll vote him out.
(52:43):
And someone was like, a lot of these people are
coming from third world countries, Like things could get much, much,
much worse and they would still be better than the
country that they're from. And so like the idea that
they're gonna things are gonna get so bad that people
will vote differently suggest that peopeople don't understand, you know,
the nature of where they're from or why they're trying
(53:05):
to escape.
Speaker 1 (53:06):
Blaming immigrants for that. And I do think a lot
of non natives obviously voted for Mom Donnie, though there
were areas and people who did not. The biggest immigrant
who helped him win in New York was the socialist, white,
upwardly mobile couple who lives in rich neighborhoods in Brooklyn
and Manhattan. And we have to come to terms with
(53:29):
that a lot, that this is only a success because
of them as well, and stop pretending those are heritage Americans.
I'm sure a lot of their last names are Waspy
or whatever, and we just kind of want to blame
the immigrant for this when there are a lot of
other people involved in this. The biggest voting block for
the Socialists seems to be single women and Pumpkins need
(53:52):
to find a way. I get that it's easy to
make fun of Karen's and all that, I don't actually
love it, and I think there has to be a
way to reach out to those people as well, to
try to bring them over. They're more important than Greiper's,
you know, and we have them on our podcasts like
Why Not.
Speaker 2 (54:07):
I wrote about this issue in like twenty fourteen, and
this situation has gotten so much worse since then. People
blame women for the stupid way they vote, but really
it's single women who vote stupidly. Married women tend to
vote in a much more reasonable way. Clearly, marriage is
(54:30):
an important thing for the health of the country, including
because it affects the way women vote, and also young
men not being able to get married is causing problems
for them as well. Trying to solve these things politically
is just not going to work. There needs to be
(54:51):
a mass movement to encourage marriage at younger ages. It's
just good for everybody. It's good for the happiness of
men and women, for society, for the children they produce.
Like everyone should be talking about it all the time
with their family, just encouraging good, strong, solid marriages.
Speaker 1 (55:08):
I mean, it's people might not like to hear it,
but this all began when women went into the workforce,
and that you know, they work, women they go to college.
Speaker 2 (55:17):
Well, that message is going to not work well for the.
Speaker 1 (55:20):
No, I'm not saying this is I'm not even saying
it's a bad thing, honestly, I'm just saying that that
because of that, people get married later. People have started
having children later, so they have few of them, and
that is the kind of one of the core issues.
I'm not sure there's going to be any way to
change that dynamic. So I agree. I think a lot
(55:41):
of young people choose not to get married because they
they think they can't or it's too expensive, or the
career is more important or whatever. It's never going to
be the same, you know, it's never going to be
the same as it was when women weren't in the workforce.
Speaker 2 (55:56):
I don't know. I was just thinking, how so desperately
I'd like to be out of the workforce right now.
I would make such a good stay at home life.
My house would be in a much better situation.
Speaker 1 (56:13):
I tell you, I agree, I would like to get
out of the workforce myself. I do notice, though, that
whenever i'm I need to take time off, I'm stressed out. Stupidly,
I stress myself out with what's going on. But I'm
like I need. I am far more stressed out when
I'm not working than when I am, like I feel
like I need to do something. I don't know that
I could ever retire. I'm not sure everyone anyone will
(56:34):
pay me when I get older. How long that's going
going to happen. But I cannot sit around and be
on vacation like it. I get very fidgety.
Speaker 2 (56:44):
I can I cannot wait for Thanksgiving? Okay, So any
cultural things of note?
Speaker 1 (56:52):
Yeah somewhere, oh here, Yeah, I have three things. The
first is I watch with my wife The Ten Commandments.
Speaker 2 (57:03):
The movie.
Speaker 1 (57:04):
Yeah, I haven't seen it in a long time. With
Charlton Heston wanted to see how how you know, how
how faithful it was to the to the Bible and
I would say it is not but more than I
thought it would be. You know, there's there's a love
story involved and stuff that didn't happen. But the reason
(57:26):
we watched it was my wife had read this piece
about the special effects that we're using the movie and
how revolutionary they were at the time, and when you
see them, they're actually pretty cool. You know. There was
a lot of innovations there, and it was it's it's
just a fun movie. I'm sure most people have seen it.
I have watched a documentary on Netflix called Wickest Pain.
(57:49):
It's about the John Wick movies, but it's actually about
the innovations and stunts and the people who do them.
I thought it was interesting if you're into that. And
then I have my most important cultural piece here. I
watched a new show on Apple called Pluribus. It is
(58:09):
made by the person who did Breaking Bad. It stars
I think her name is Rhea Seahorn, who was in
Better Call Saul. I don't how can I put this.
I was it's so intrigued. The show is incredibly intriguing.
I can't even tell you what the plot is because
I would ruin a very big surprise off the bat.
It's science fiction y, it's kind of a little edgy.
(58:33):
It's She's amazing in it. I watched two episode episodes.
I believe this, this show is I'm not one thousand
percent sold on it. I need a few more episodes,
but right right now, I think it's one of the
best things I've seen in a very long time. Like,
I highly recommend it, highly recommend it.
Speaker 2 (58:55):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (58:56):
Yeah, it has kind of a little bit of a
it's kind of a conflict, a mix of X Files
and bad Breaking.
Speaker 2 (59:07):
Bad love it, love hearing.
Speaker 1 (59:10):
Yeah, it has the potential to be one of the
when you know, just one of the great shows I
think that I've seen in many, many years.
Speaker 2 (59:19):
Okay, Like you're over selling it though.
Speaker 1 (59:20):
Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, I don't I'm not. It's like it,
you know, there are a lot of shows, right they
have a premise and they set up the show and
you're completely intrigued and and and it's compelling and you
want to watch more, and then it really has no
place to go. I worry about that here, But so
far it's been great. Let's just put that way.
Speaker 2 (59:41):
Okay, great, and yourself nothing, okay, great. I just have
been busy with all sorts of things, and one of
the kids was in a play. Oh do that.
Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
You make me feel like a loser when I'm like,
here are the fifteen things that I watched like I
was too busy working and.
Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Does remind me that One of the kids was telling
me that they had a friend who listened to us,
and the kid was like, I don't know why you
listen to my mom. That is so boring.
Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
Oh my gosh. You can email the show and yell
at us or me about the immigration stuff at radio.
At the Federalist dot com, Molly loves to hear from you.
Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
It was back next week and I.
Speaker 1 (01:00:43):
Told them be lotters of freedom. I'm anxious for the friend.
Welcome back, everyone to a new episode of Your Wrong
with Molly Hemingway, editor and chief of the Federalist and
David Harsani, senior writer at The Washington Examiner. Just as
a reminder, if you like to email the show, please
do so at radio at the Federalist dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
And boy, did people like to email the show this
last week. Like we're still getting emails.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
It might have been the most email, not the most,
but it was up there.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
We got a lot, a lot of email and all
over the map. People who love you, people who don't
love you, people who hate me, people who don't hate me.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
It was. It was definitely a diverse array of viewpoints
that came in on our discussion on the you know,
the the graper problem. I think on the right and anyway,
so we appreciate it. We read most I try to
read most of them. I don't read all of them.
If you're going to write just I.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Read every word.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
If you're going to write two thousand words, it's not
going to be read stop it.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Some of them have been really good, thoughtful. You need
to read them all.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
It's great anyway, the shutdowns over, Molly, how do you
feel you're right, did you make it?
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I mean, as of this taping, are we sure? I mean,
I think I'll be over right.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
I think the House has just or is going to
vote for it.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Okay. I I am glad the shutdown is over. And
I do a ton of air travel, so it was
definitely starting to negatively impact me on the air travel
part of things, including that I had to go up
to New York for Fox this week and I usually fly,
(01:59):
and I had to take the which for me is
not the most enjoyable mode of transport, just because I
get a little sick on the train. But this is
not that interesting. But point being, I'm starting to get annoyed.
And I also really want to see my in laws
for Thanksgiving because I haven't seen them for fifteen months,
and I was worried that the shutdown would keep me
(02:22):
from being able to fly out to Oregon to see them.
How about you?
Speaker 1 (02:27):
I do everything I cannot to fly, though I would
do occasionally, so I was not looking forward to that.
I am actually going to fly soon. But other than that,
I don't really think that it affected me in any way, honestly,
and I don't think it affected most people in any way.
What I think is interesting here, or what I think
needs to be stressed is this was the dumbest shutdown
(02:48):
we've ever had. There was no there was no real
reason for it. Now, I think Democrats are huge losers here.
I don't think that this affects elections in any huge way,
but it does. It showed that the Democrats are at
war with each other in a way, but also that
they have no real focused agenda. You know. So they
(03:14):
tried to convince everyone that millions of people were going
to start first, millions of people are going to lose
their health, and millions of people are going to start.
But now that a few I guess moderate Democrats decided
to cross over and open the government. That they're mad
that people aren't starving, you know what I mean. They're
mad that the government's opening up and people would be
(03:34):
getting their Snap and Obamacare subsidies and all of that.
So it just seemed very It just seemed useless, And
I think Chuck Schumer's just been one of the He's
just terrible, let's be honest. I think Democrats could do
a lot better. He constantly gives in to the far
left with these sort of formative fights that really gained
(03:58):
Democrats nothing, and I just think it was a disaster
politically for them. Okay, I think, yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Think I disagree. Number One, people in DC care a
lot about shutdowns, but I don't feel like other people
do that much in the sense that as painful as
this one was becoming, people will forget about it in
a few months. So the downsides of the shutdown aren't
that great. And if you think as I do, that
(04:31):
Chuck Schumer forced this shutdown so that Virginia elections in
particular would go really well for Democrats. Like the shutdown,
I think Paul showed that people were blaming Republicans for it,
which was of course very unfair because republic Republicans kept
voting to keep the government open and demo.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
But only slightly, not the usual overwhelming polling on that absolutely.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
True, but usually the shutdown is caused by the Republicans.
Is this one it wasn't. So the fact that the
polling showed that people were blaming Republicans for something that
they had zero fault with, and that it was also
I think showing up in approval for Trump right ahead
of an election where you need base voters to come
(05:15):
out and you want to energize your base if you're Democrats,
you want to demoralize your base if you're a Republican.
I think Democrats actually had a huge victory here. It
really helped them with the excitement ahead of the election.
I had kept telling Mark that I thought that the
shutdown would and days after the election, and it would
(05:39):
have actually ended on the Friday after the election if
Progressives hadn't become so emboldened by the mom Danni when
that they decided to push for what Schumer claimed the
shutdown was over. But I don't think the shutdown was
over anything other than invigorating a base ahead of an election,
and by that standard, they crushed it.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, I guess I just don't believe. I just don't
think that the I don't think Spamberger loses or the
elections any closer if there's no shutdown. I don't think
that that I don't.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Think would have changed the outcomes. But I do think
the margins matter, and as you know, David, in Virginia,
those margins are now leading to a super majority for
Democrats to be able to push through every gun ban
they want in Virginia. Redistricting like they're going to have
wonderful benefits to them for the next few years. Not
because people wondered if Democrats would win Virginia, but the
(06:33):
margins are so big.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
A lot of the folks who won in Virginia at
least pretend to be moderate. Svamberger among them. In a sense,
she was the one I think it was twenty twenty
who told Democrats that should never say the word socialist again.
In that she definitely portrays herself as somewhat moderate. Now,
I know people are going to tell me she's not,
and I agree, but I wonder if they're really going
(06:58):
to go through with all that, because I think you
could back a.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Listener could just remind us of this conversation when Abigail
Spaanberger is signing into law bills promoting euthanasia and taking
away guns. I just want that reminder for us that
it does not matter how she presented herself, but what
she is and what she is is in some ways
(07:21):
more dangerous than a mom Donnie, because she can fool
low information voters into thinking she's moderate.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
No, she portrays herself as a moderate. I agree she
is not. My only point is that governing in that
way could backfire, and that's what I'm saying. So we'll
see what she does. I wouldn't be surprised if she did.
But I wouldn't be surprised if they somewhat moderated their
governing style from last time, which costs them the state.
But you know, I could be wrong about that. So
(07:53):
you're saying, so okay, So you're saying the shutdown was
and I think this is true, was meant to motivate
Democratic votes, and clearly they were far more interested in
coming out and voting, which I think speaks to a
larger problem with a lot of Trump voters, people who
wear red hats, you know, they love him. Not sure
that they're as motivated to get out and vote for
(08:16):
other Republicans, which is going to be a problem post Trump.
That's not to say. And I see I think Donald
Trump said, you know, I wasn't on the ballot, and
we always lose when I'm not on the ballot. That's
not true. I mean, you know plenty of people, I mean,
what's his name, Youngkin one without Trump on the ballot,
and you know Kemp went one without Trump on the ballot,
(08:36):
and DeSantis one recently without Trump on the ballot, but
I think those are very competent people. So I don't know.
I don't know what that portends for Republicans coming soon,
but it is a problem when you have a party
built around one person rather than a set of maybe
you know, an agenda or set of ideas that are
(08:58):
that people are really excited about.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Well, I'm not denying that Donald Trump has an outsize
and beloved or hated personality. I agree with that, but
I think that one of the biggest failures that Republicans
have made is to accept the voters that Donald Trump
(09:20):
brings in without understanding who those voters are and without thinking,
without realizing, they sort of accept what Donald Trump's biggest
detractors say, which is that these dumb voters are only
interested in his personality, when in fact they're super interested
(09:44):
in the policies. Yes, they like the personality, or sometimes
they don't. Sometimes they vote for him despite his personality,
but the policies are what they like, and they are
very frustrated with things like in recent decades, such as
our immigration policy, or our bailouts for banks, or the
(10:05):
way that we had been fighting wars. And if you
think that people are voting for Trump because of his
TV personality and not at least in large part because
of his policy approaches to these things. You will continue
to operate your party as you have been. And that's
the problem for voters coming forward. Why would you vote
(10:28):
Republican right now?
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Like?
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Why what was the case for coming out and voting Republican?
If you had to sum it up, what would you say,
like from what was presented to voters? Yeah, why would
you vote I or win some earl sears.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
I should just think I wanted to quick step back.
I'll answer that question. I think though, that a lot
of the people have backfilled Donald Trump's you case ideologically
overestimate the popularity of a lot of things that they're saying.
So there was no real good reason to vote for
Republicans in Virginia because they did not offer any kind
(11:08):
of coherent case. It was all about the last election,
like transgender you know, high school athletes Now, I think
that's a super important issue. But the most important issues economics.
And I think that Donald Trump won this presidency last
time because most people remembered the good years of his
first term where the economy was doing very well, and
(11:29):
those issues were very traditional in a sense. He lowered regulations,
he cut taxes. He you know, he let businesses thrive,
and consumers didn't weren't paying. There was no real inflation
until COVID hit. So I think that that the economy
is the most important driver. I think every poll shows that,
(11:50):
and people are worried about that.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
I think the economy is just a major issue, and
people vote based on kitchen table issues. And Donald Trump
hasn't had a bad year in many ways. I mean,
(12:12):
in fact, he's had a good year in many ways,
and some of those successes have been domestic, like working
on the border, reinstituting his deregulatory approach, passing the One
Big Beautiful Bill, which includes extending his tax cuts. Right, Like,
(12:33):
some of these things are important and domestic. And then
some of them were very foreign policy focused, and I
think historically people don't vote based on foreign policy. And
also it can give Like if you're too focused on
(12:55):
foreign policy, whether it's bombing Venezuelan drug voats or bombing
Iran or working on all of the peace deals that
he worked on throughout the country, people can say that's good,
but they would far prefer inflation to be down or
be able to afford buying a house or their groceries.
And so his danger that he needs to deal with,
(13:16):
I think is that he has been a transformative president
in so many ways, but history is written by the winners,
and if he doesn't do more to make permanent this
reformation or revolution that he has instituted, the history is
going to be written by a bunch of people who
(13:37):
think he's hitler, and it will not be good for
the country. And so he should start being a little scared.
I think, not scared, but he should just understand that
things are not going in the direction that he wants
them to be going.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Yeah, I guess, I just I feel like a lot
of candidates and a lot of the institutions, political institutions
in das see these days, completely overestimate how much a
voter cares about neocons or global capitalism or all these
things that supposedly have destroyed the country and everything. Donald
(14:14):
Trump doesn't actually speak that way most of the time.
He speaks in a much more moderate language in my view,
and a lot of the candidates pick up on the
wrong cues. In Virginia, there was just a ton of
culture war ad at least the ads that I saw
it was just all about that, and again, important issue
(14:37):
in a certain way, but not the most important issue.
So what is the economic case? Tariffs are incredibly unpopular.
I think they cause inflation. So I see that Trump
is pulling back on some of that. Now, can we
talk a little bit about this. I saw Donald Trump
yesterday interviewed on Fox right Laur Ingram. I think, and yeah,
(14:59):
he was going on about how prices are going down.
I saw the Treasury Secretary say that prices are going down.
I saw other administration officials like Kevin Hassett say that
prices are going down. It's a very bad idea to
try to gaslight people on this. Prices have gone down
in certain areas, but in many they have not because
(15:20):
inflation is compounding. And just because it was nine percent
under Biden at one point doesn't mean over three percent
is any good either. I think it's better to say
we're trying to get this thing under control. It's better
than to temper that language, not to try to fool people.
And I think they're trying to fool people. Donald Trump said,
we Republicans should be telling me everyone prices are going down.
(15:43):
I don't think that most people who go to a
supermarket field that way. I certainly don't pay attention to
prices that much. That came off wrong, like I don't
care about them. I do. I'm not wealthy enough not
to care about what something costs. But I just don't
know what things usually cost. But according to the people
in my family, like meat and other things that we buy,
our grocery bill is like twice what it was let's say,
(16:05):
you know, five six years ago. And for people getting
by paycheck to paycheck, that's a huge issue, and that's
what should be the major focus of any Republican moving forward. Now.
I don't know, there's no you know, magic formula to
fix that. Times it's local government that causes problems, like
(16:29):
in housing. I don't know what Donald Trump can do
about housing costs. Maybe get a hold of inflation and
bring down interest rates, but other than that, I'm not sure.
So anyway, I just think sometimes people take away the
wrong lessons from their victory. Is there's no real evidence,
like you're saying there was a big revolution. But in
the end, aren't people just concerned about the same stuff.
They just want it to be done better. They're concerned
(16:51):
about the economy. They're concerned about, you know, not getting
dragged into a long war. But then when I look
at Trump's most popular policies, like peace and Gaza was
up there. The bombing of Iran is up there. You
know what I mean? Like people, I don't think people
care about this neokon isolationist thing. I just think they
want competent foreign policy that doesn't drag us into long
(17:14):
term conflicts. Right.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
No, yeah, I think you're wrong on all of it.
I think usually you're wrong on everything.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
You have everything.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
I don't mean it that way. What I mean is
like if you ask people what they thought of the
Iraq War, they gave it very high marks. And then
also it was so bad for George W. Bush's presidency
that he had gotten embroiled in this war and that
it was dragging on like that that you can't isolate
(17:45):
it into We took a poll and four hundred Americans
the weekend after the bombing, and they said they liked it.
It's like, I don't really care about polling like that.
You have to be smart enough to also like judge
the longer term, like the feeling of the people, and
it's something that polls can help illuminate, but you can't
rely too much on them. And historically speaking, interventionist wars
(18:11):
have been deeply unpopular. The other kind are not unpopular,
you know, the.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Wars, the other kind, the wars that are fought in.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
The national interest that people understand the case for them,
and that like they're willing to lay down their lives
for because it's like such an important cause. So not
just the George Bush example, but you know, we look
at Lyndon B. Johnson's popularity. People don't love People don't
(18:41):
love an interventionist foreign policy. People in DC love an
interventionist foreign policy, people in the arms industry love it.
And that does fuel a lot of our political debate.
But it's a good way to drag down a presidency.
And it's not about like any single act, but about
where your area of focus is. And as for Donald
(19:02):
Trump not being a transformational president, I just don't think
that's true. Like he's there's so many different things that
his presidency has caused people to rethink, whether it's our
posture toward China, our approach like even in the Republican Party,
toward war fighting tariffs, Like I'm not saying that they're popular,
(19:25):
but they have, but people have been forced to kind
of think through why they exist and what they're meant
to accomplish. That's one thing that tariffs are difficult, and
they do cause, you know, the idea behind them is
that you have a long term success for your country
that's painful in the short term. That's never going to
work in a political system like or it's going to
(19:46):
be very difficult to make work in a political system
like ours where you have elections every year to two
years to four years. But I just think if you
don't see that Donald Trump has reached shaped the way
people think about you know, we had crumbling institutions, but
no permission structure to really talk about it or to
(20:07):
act like there was something we could do about it.
And it's back to what I was saying, our immigration policy,
our foreign policy, our bailout of banks policy, where we
socialize losses and privatized gains, like really broken things that
I'm not saying he has fixed all of these things,
(20:27):
but definitely our conversation about them is very different now
than when he started. Wouldn't you agree with that?
Speaker 1 (20:33):
I think the conversation is different on some issues because
the world has changed from the last time. I don't
think Donald Trump does it. I don't see the not
bailing out bank thing. I think Trump is actually quite
friendly towards banks and stuff. I don't see him doing
any of that. Also, I don't know what an interventionist
war means was Vietnam was an interventionist war, correct, And
(20:54):
Nixon couldn't have been more popular in nineteen seventy two
when we had five hundred and fifty thousand troops there.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
But think about how he approached how he approached that
war too. It wasn't like he was happy to have
gotten into it. Definitely wanted to see successes and then
drew out.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Wow. Yeah. But I'm just saying that that if you
handle a war in the way that the American people
like you can, it doesn't ruin your political career. I
just think almost every war we've ever fought is interventionist.
I mean, you can make the same You could say
that nine to eleven caused the Iraq War in some way,
whether you agree with it or not. I think it
(21:35):
was unpopular because it was poorly fought in him because
we were I'm just saying I think it was I
think it was a mistake. Is Iran's an interventionist war.
We don't want them to have nuclear web war.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
There's not a war there, right exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
I mean, but if they had nuclear weapons or they
were on the cusp of it, the Americans would feel
compelled to stop that because they can.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
They were on the cusp of it, and we did
stop it, right so without without a war.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Though, but it's still intervention yeah, because the.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Behavior bombing and then we left again. I've always said
this about Afghanistan, that I wanted us to not land
the planes, and that we did that in Iran, is
you know much better what I thought was going to
happen started Well.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
We had an ally there to fight that war, but
also more than that we had in Afghanistan, we were
looking for certain people to get them, so it was
very difficult not to land there, whereas in Iran we
were after are.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
You saying we were looking for Osama bin Laden and others?
Speaker 1 (22:37):
I mean, I think I think we wanted to displace rules. Listen,
I agree. I think nation building was a massive disaster.
I don't think it's ever a good idea unless the
people there actually want our help. It's a different kind
of story.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
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Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day Chris helps
unpack the connection between politics and the economy and how
it affects your wallet. Some in Congress are proposing that
paid social media influencers publicly disclose who they represent, especially
if they're being paid by foreign countries for their causes.
(23:17):
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it's affecting you financially.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Be informed.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
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Markowski on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
You mentioned the Laura Ingram interview with Donald Trump, and
I did think, first of all, I thought it was
a very good interview, and without hearkening back to the
recent unpleasantness of our last week's conversation, I think because
she was not cartoonishly hostile, it was in some ways
a more devastating interview than if she had been cartoonishly hostile,
(23:54):
like so many people in corporate media are when they
interview the bad Orange Man. And he had some answers
that were disconcerting to people. I mean, one thing is,
as you note, telling people that they're crazy to think
that the economy is not as great as they would like,
or that prices are higher than they would like. I mean,
(24:16):
it's just when Biden did it, and the media, of
course helped Biden do that, they kept on saying like,
who are you going to believe us? Or your lying eyes?
Prices are down, and it just seemed so crazy to me.
But now the Trump team is kind of doing that themselves,
and it just seems there hasn't been a great focus
(24:37):
to this recently, to this term, and his claim that
there aren't Americans to fill jobs and that's why we
need to import a bunch of people is probably not
a message that the base is going to be excited by.
And maybe he doesn't care and you don't care, and
you think that it's right that we need mass immigration
(25:00):
to deal with our stupid idiots here in the US
who can't get the jobs or whatever.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
But for a.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Populist movement that is doing so much on tariffs to
also send this message is there's just a conflict there,
don't you think.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Uh No, I think he was right, and he didn't
say it like you just did and framed it that way.
He said that bringing in the best talent from other
countries to help us work in certain industries is good
for America. He's right, of course, because the economy is
not a zero sum proposition, and it helps other Americans
when we have big industries. If you look at a
(25:39):
lot of our most successful sectors, there are people from
other countries who come here. It's like, so this person
put a picture up of the moon landing and everyone
flying the flags and saying, what did foreigners have to
do with this? Like von braun ran the program. But anyway,
you can bring people here who are great from other
countries to help us do things. I would if you
(26:00):
want to bring fewer of them that or whatever. I mean.
You know, you have to calibrate these things. I completely agree.
But this hostility towards towards immigration legal immigration now which
I knew is headed in this direction, is very off
putting to me, obviously because of my family history, but
I think is off putting to a lot of people.
You are not going to win any elections attacking people
(26:22):
with funny names all the time, which is a big
thing going on now among the you know, nat Con
heritage Americans. I think that we need better assimilation for immigration,
I think we need to diversify or immigration. We don't
want people coming here to say all those things. But
the idea that immigration is somehow destroying this country is ludicrous.
(26:42):
And so I like that Trump did that. I mean,
this proves to me that a lot of the people
who pretend to form his sort of intellectual firepower behind
him are actually out of touch with what Donald Trump
actually believes. That's what I think, and what most Americans
are not anti immag gration.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
I saw this thing about how Colorado ski resorts are
scrambling to find people to work because normally they just
have a bunch of people foreigners working at the ski slopes.
And I'm sure you think that's like an industry that
Americans can't work in or something they don't have the skills.
(27:23):
But it was cracking me up that ski resorts that
charge hundreds of dollars per lift ticket we're upset that
they might have to pay Americans more to work at
ski resorts.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
You deserve what a person wants to give you. That's
how the world works. I just can't even believe that
the rights embracing this nonsense that we have to that
profit margin should be lowered. Don't they understand that other
jobs are created by those profits. I mean, a person
who is punching a ticket cannot be making thirty dollars
an hour or whatever. I don't even know what what
(28:00):
they make. I mean, it's ridiculous, but that's fine. If
you want to shut it off. People are going to
pay more for things, and then they're going to complain
about that. So at some point, and by the way,
I think the tariff regime is a complete failure. Long term.
Short term won't matter. But I see that Donald Trump's
already pulling back on tariffs, and he has since since
(28:20):
Liberation Day because he understands that it causes inflation.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Back to this claim that you know, it's not a
zero sum game, I think that's the argument of the
people who think mass uncontrolled immigration has not been good
for the country.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
There is a mass, there's illegal mass. Are you are
you conflating the two. You're saying that our legal immigration
policy is mass and uncontrolled.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
I love hearing that you are a big fan of
our mass controlled legal immigration policies of recent decades. But
it has of course fundamentally changed the nature of the country.
I mean, you look at the what happened in New
York City with the election of Mom Donnie, a true
(29:10):
radical as mayor and among native born. So first of all,
New York City does not require citizenship to vote, So
I don't know, but I don't know what the percentage
of people who are not citizens who are voting in
New York City are. But for foreign born versus native
born populations, you had a completely different populace.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Right, and native born to New York not native born
to America.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
So well, I thought it was I thought it was
too America. But if you look at like Virginia, for instance,
native born voting population of Virginia versus foreign born voting
of population of Virginia, and I do believe that is
a metric that they judge based on born America, it
is again a dramatically different voting population. It's just true
(30:06):
that since the sixties we have not just brought in
a ton of people, but also had a very different
or non existent, non existent assimilation effort. If you can't see, like,
if you don't experience that just by your life of
seeing how different populations are different, Like the Somali population
(30:29):
in Minnesota is different than the native born population in Minnesota,
and it has an effect on who they're voting for
and what their culture is like. Like, just pretending it's
not happening is no answer to people's concerns.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Here. You are not debating with what I said. I
do think that our assimilation problem has because of the
left that doesn't want these people to assimilate. They want
multicultural America is a huge problem, prob I think that
we need more diversity in our immigration policy, and I
(31:05):
think that we need to bring in people.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
Who will be good diversity in our immigration.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
So we don't have a million people coming from one area.
Like you can't have millions of Mexicans coming over with
border and then clustering in a city because that is
they're not going to assimilate. They're here legally, many of them.
That's wrong. Or if you bring a bunch of people
from Islamic countries who are not assimilating and integrating and
then bunch up in places, it's a bad that's a problem.
(31:32):
But since the sixties, I'm here because of the stuff
that happened since the sixties. I think my families are
great Americans. Like, so they assimilated, you're not here because
of stay. Yeah. My parents came in here in nineteen
sixty nine, right, and they had funny names too, and
they came here with nothing like a lot of people,
and they integrated and were successful. I don't understand why
we can't have any more of that.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Where were you born?
Speaker 1 (31:54):
I was born here, but barely so I would be
one of the people who is a problem in this country.
I don't think so. I think I'm a great asset
to this great nation, right, I mean some days, but
I say, cool and quick thing about this. By the way, Okay,
(32:15):
let's say you're right. Let's say we cut off immigration tomorrow. Right.
You're never going to win elections if you don't start
making a case to people who are here already in
citizens like this idea. I see online that you're going
to start revoking O the door.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
David Harsani just made an argument based on whether it's
politically palatable. No, it's I thought you didn't do that.
You don't care about winning coalitions or political success.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
I'm giving you an argument, a theoretical that we shut
off immigration, which I don't think we'll do. I don't
think anyone actually wants or most people don't want that completely,
but let's say we lower it whatever it is. You're
not going to win elections if you don't appeal to
immigrants and the children of immigrants. I think most times,
after a few generations, immigrants become like everyone else essentially.
(33:04):
But you can't be an anti immigrant party in a
country that has a ton of immigrants in a lot
of places that you need to win. That's just the
fact of politics. I think we should be trying to
integrate and assimilate these people.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
But I actually just want to put a pin in
that because my friends and family, who are themselves immigrants,
tend to be the most anti current immigration policy of
people I.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Know immigration or illegal immigration.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Yes, so definitely they're anti illegal immigration. They worked really
hard to become citizens or to come here. There are
lots of complaints they have about the difficulty of becoming
a citizen. But they also are not necessarily super fans
of mess migration. I'm just pointing that out.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
I don't know if that's what is What is mass immigration? Like?
What number? What number would you say, how many people
do think we should let in every year?
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Well? I think I tend to be less pro mass
immigration than a lot of people on the right. I'm
not sure if I'm for anywhere near the numbers that
we're having actually, or like, maybe a better way to
put it is, we've had so many people in the
last sixty years that it would be okay to kind
(34:29):
of ease way up now. Okay, but I don't have numbers.
I'm just saying I think wages are way too low
for people who live here. Not enough is being done
to make us a cohesive society. We are vulnerable to
attack from outsiders. And I understand that there can be
(34:51):
need for particular areas. I don't think the ski resorts
of Colorado need mass migration to make themselves operate well.
I do have family members who work in that industry,
and they would you know, that is a thing you
can be employed in and the wages are kept artificially
low I think through too many work visas for that area.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Wages are dramatically high in this country, the highest in
the world per capita.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
On the idea relative to the prices that you were
just complaining about.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
Okay, you don't think that there's inflation in European countries
that have that close off their borders like we have.
Far better economic success with immigration that grows the economy
and actually bring the salaries up. I'm not saying in
every single I'm not saying that in I don't know
enough about the Colorado ski industry, okay, but in general,
the idea that our wages are depressed because people come
(35:47):
here is just simply not true. I'm sorry. I know everyone,
I'm going to get a million letters, angry letters, but
that's not how the economy works.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
By the way, I'm going to go skiing here soon
over Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
And are you a skier?
Speaker 2 (36:01):
So I can't say that I am because I literally
have not skied in twenty years. But I certainly used
to be a skier, and I failed to raise my
children to be skiers. They were taught some snowboarding by
some family members because Mark, of course is a snowboarder.
(36:21):
But I think we're going to do some light skiing
here over Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
We got off track there, We're talking about skiing Colorado.
What is next on our agenda here?
Speaker 2 (36:33):
How about the BBC? Did you hear that story?
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Yeah? I'm kind of taken aback by the anger because
I just assumed everyone knew this is what the bbccy
has been doing forever right. So essentially, at least the
claim is I don't I believe it. The claim I'm
just saying that this is the claim is that the
BBC basically doctored Donald Trump's Well, first of there's a
(37:00):
numerous things that they have done. They had to correct
every week at least once, so we correct a story
that they had about Gaza for being completely.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Wrong or was it too Twice a week, I think
twice a week on average, twice a week they had
to correct errors that went one percent in the direction
of pro Hamas.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Then they doctored on the January sixth speech of Donald Trump.
They took out the words where they were what did
he say like peacefully? They doctored out the part where
he says push back peacefully and patriotically. I think it
was so they took out that part.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
It's so much worse than that. They took like a
few words from the beginning of the speech and a
few words at the sec at the very end with
like it was an hour long speech, as any of
us who suffered through it knows, and they took out
like an hour to make it sound like he was
telling people to go riot I mean, it wasn't like
a whoopsie. It was a full on, malicious, deceptive edit,
(38:01):
as understood also by an internal review that they had
which detailed the problems journalistically with the propaganda that they
were pushing.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
The States should never run media organizations. It is preposterous
because the role of media is to keep One of
the roles of media is to keep government honest. So
how could to keep government honest? But I think Donald
Trump has demanded a full and fair retraction and is
going to sue if not, is going to sue the
(38:31):
BBC for a billion dollars.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
Well, I just think it's interesting because unlike in the
United States, the British libel laws are so much easier
to sue under and people can and do win huge
awards for stuff nowhere even near this bad. And this
(38:56):
was not an editing error. This was against licing together
two small sections an hour apart in a speech, or
fifty four minutes apart in a speech, to make it
appear that he said something he never said, and he
would definitely have a good case. I have found it
interesting how people have responded to it. So first of
(39:19):
all the fact that Trump or his supporters were upset
with what was done is appalling some people they're like,
how dare he notice what we did? This is why
we have to have state media, which doesn't even make sense,
as you point out for an argument. Other people are
trying to defend what the BBC did or point out
(39:43):
that the BBC puts together some excellent TV shows, like
drama shows, and they're like, well, if he went after
the BBC for lying about him for political gain, then
that might hurt our stories.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
Just like again, I hadn't thought of that. I don't
want their story is limited. I like the bb but you.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Could get stories through a million other ways. There's a
political issue coming on, which is that an alternate TV
network has just shot up in the last year, gb News,
which is sort of like I think you could kind
of call it the Fox News of Great Britain, and
(40:25):
Nigel Farage is involved in that, and he of course
is doing like really well in the polls for Prime Minister,
and so there's that kind of component in there. The
Telegraph was the one that exposed the BBC and exposed
that there was this internal review that showed just how
intentional and deceptive this was, and that there's an institutional
(40:47):
bias problem at the BBC. Again to your point, David,
anyone with two brain cells can watch the BBC and
be like, whoa are they biased? But somehow this is
big news, which makes you wonder how stupid the Brits are, Like,
I never knew that that the BBC had a problem
Herely it's a release awesome accident.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Yeah hello, the uh the uh. The BBC is has
you know, supposedly independent, but the the board that regulates
the BBC charter is appointed by the government and every
brit I think maybe poor people don't have to has
(41:31):
to pay like one hundred and seventy five pounds a
year for the for a TV you know, the TV license.
So it seems to me like that is a way
to set up a corrupt, a corrupt network, especially for news.
I've always said this and I think it's true here too,
like PBS and NPR was that. Yes, I do think
(41:53):
the BBC will make educational programming or interesting programming that
doesn't have as much commercial viability because because they're helped
by the state. But I don't understand why rich people
can't fund that. I you know, the whole thing is
a news section of it is corrupt. So none of
these networks let Donald Trump win. They always give in
(42:15):
and then set right. I mean like CBS didn't take
it all the way to trial, right, I think you
sued someone else. It doesn't seem like they would allow
allow this to go to trial, right. They would probably
work something out.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
I don't know. I don't know enough about the British
legal system. I just have observed over many years that
people are frequently winning defamation suits against British media in
a way that would never work in the US because
we have, oddly enough artificially high standards for suing for defamation.
(42:50):
Some really interesting jurisp or some legal analysis out there
about how our New York Times Versus ruling makes it
so that it is more difficult to sue the media
than it was at the time of the American founding,
(43:10):
when we inverted the situation where it used to be
that the more prominent you were, the better case you
had for defamation, and the less prominent you were it
was more difficult to win a suit that way. And
New York Times versus Sullivan just flips it on its head,
where if you are a person of any renown you
basically can't go after the media if they lie about you,
(43:33):
And so a lot of people have been talking about
the need to revisit that, including Justice Thomas has mentioned
that in some of his descents. Lawrence Silberman, the Great
Lower Court judge, wrote beautifully about that as well. So
(43:53):
it's definitely something that needs revisiting because it just has
no basis in our common law history. It's not an
originalist argument for it. But it also makes media people
nervous because you don't want, you know, we do so
well in our situation with having great protections for those
who practice journalism. Obviously the abuse of that puts everybody
(44:16):
at risk. But I do agree it's time to revisit
a bad decision, which New York Times versus Sullivan is
a bad decision.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
I kind of worry about the chilling of speech if
we were like Britain, where every you know, people are
constantly being sued, Journalists are constant being sued, and for
good reasons, but sometimes just for reasons of I don't
remember specific cases, but just for reasons to kind of
shut down investigations, which also happens. But yeah, it is
(44:47):
a lot easier in Britain. To sue for defamation. Finally,
let's talk about the antifa violence at Berkeley during a
TPUSA event. It seemed pretty bad. Actually, even though people
(45:07):
tell me antifa is not violent, they're only anti fascist,
They're not terroristic whatsoever. There's no leadership, Molly, how could
they be terrorists?
Speaker 2 (45:15):
I mean, antifa is just an idea, is what I
hear from Democrat politicians. It doesn't have any manifestation at
all in the form of rioters who kill people. Yeah,
there was a TPUSA event at Berkeley. Berkeley has had
a history of violence against speech events. During the first
(45:35):
Trump presidency, there was an event there that turned into
an absolute riot. The media blamed the victims of the
riot for that riot. Trump said something about how if
this continued, then UC Berkeley would lose its federal subsidies
and taxpayer funding. That never happened, and UC Berkeley is
(45:59):
as bad as as it ever was. And you know,
someone motivated by antifa ideology, according to you know, the
bullets that he engraved and other things he said, murdered
Charlie Kirk. Assassinated him on a college campus two months ago,
and very little to nothing has been done to protect
(46:23):
speech on campus to go after the adherents of the
murderous ideology. You know, that's targeting people on the right.
And we talked earlier about like why would you vote Republican?
And the complete and utter impotence of Republicans who are
(46:44):
in power in Congress and the presidency right now to
do anything to protect the tens of millions of conservatives
in the country is just an abomination. I think.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
It is ironic that the free speech movement of the sixties.
I think in nineteen sixty four began at UC Berkeley
when the administration wouldn't let some student groups put out
tables for their information or whatever it was, and that's
where it blew up. And now you have the students
themselves shutting down. You know, minority voices there, but legitimate
(47:19):
political voice. I mean, all political voices are legitimate to
be heard. I don't know. I guess I just don't
you say Republicans are incompetent here or whatever or impotent.
I would say that there's only so much they can
really do to force UC Berkeley to change, and one
of them would be to strip them of federal funding.
(47:40):
President can do that too. By the way, they have
a seven point four billion dollar endowment. I'm not sure
why we should be giving federal funds to any of
these schools anyway, I have zero I don't want my
tax dollars going to places that teach radicalism, teach people
to hate America, teach people to hate Jewish people, people
(48:00):
walk around with kafeas and stuff, like, my money is
going to subsidize their educations. Now, if a school needs
that money for science and all of that, that's great.
So get you know, make sure that minority voices can
be heard in those schools, or strip them of their funding.
So I hope Donald Trump thinks about that. The amount
(48:21):
of money these institutions get from the federal government is
mind boggling to me sometimes, especially schools like Harvard and Columbia.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
In that interview that you love Donald Trump, what he
said Laura Ingram was asking why he's handing out hundreds
of thousands of visas to Chinese students, and he was like,
and how is that maga? And he was like, well,
it's maga because if I didn't do that, then half
of the colleges out there would fail. I was like,
(48:50):
what's the problem, you know, like this idea that we
need to insulate colleges from any market forces, which is
all we do through our federal loan programs, and otherwise
it's insane And what good have they done the country.
I mean, yeah, they're training a lot of Chinese students
to go cause harm to the US. Good good for them.
(49:12):
But yeah, they absolutely should be required to protect speech
on campus.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
On foreign students and visas, I am not against the
United States having an immigration policy that helps us. I
think immigrants help us in general, but as far as
schools go, I would not give visas out to anyone
who isn't getting like a STEM degree, And I think
you could put a stipulation on those visas that you
have to stay in the United States for a certain
(49:41):
amount of time or something that helps this country. There's
no schools love foreign students because they pay full freight
and they're paying cash. A lot of times it's usually rich,
rich kids who get to come here from other countries.
So I have no problem making having some limitation on that.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
A million years ago, when I was in college and
I was studying economics, we had a bunch of students
paying bulk right from other countries. Usually it was like
former Soviet Republic countries and they were always cheating, and
the professors were told that they had different cultural like,
(50:22):
they had a different culture in which cheating wasn't a problem,
and so they should corrupt culture shouldn't be marked down.
And I was friends with some of my professors and
they were just like utterly appalled at the lowering of standards.
So that these kids who see.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
That's what I'm talking about right there, that kind of
thinking undermind's assimilation. We should be holding these people to
the same standards everyone else has in this country, and
kind of moral relativism over what culture is good or
how people view culture or the things that they do.
I mean, I've been to Eastern and in Central Europe
(51:01):
and I was there years ago, and yeah, it's a
much I don't know if Americans realized how corrupt a
lot of these places are in how every people deal
with everyday life. We should not be importing that, we
should be lifting up people who come here. I completely agree.
I think Eastern Europeans, though, are pretty good immigrants in general.
I think they love America. Let me tell you another thing,
(51:24):
just quick thing about immigrants, just from my own experience
in my own life. I think that the immigrants I
knew who were connected to me and my family, who
came mostly from Hungary in places like that, were more
patriotic than a lot of these students. I'll tell you
they're probably more patriotic than ninety nine percent of the
students that are on the UC Berkeley campus. I think
they were very grateful to be here. I think they
love this country and they embraced the ideals of this country,
(51:46):
and that's what we want. Who was online saying this,
I mean confitting, what's that?
Speaker 2 (51:51):
Who are these people who love America more?
Speaker 1 (51:53):
Just the people that I knew growing up, who were
immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe that I knew. I
think they were happy escape communism. I think they love
this country. I don't think they wanted to go back.
I don't think they wanted to import those ideas here. Yeah. Sure,
some of their cultural things they brought with them, but
I don't think the political aspect of that world was
brought here. I think they were happy for a fair
(52:15):
shot meritocratic world that they lived in here, which you
don't get elsewhere. I'm just saying, you know, the.
Speaker 2 (52:23):
Culture that you're from actually does matter a lot for
the ease with which you will assimilate to a new country.
And I was thinking about this with someone saying that
all these people are coping with the Mom Donnie lost
by being like, oh, well, when he institutes his policies,
things will get worse and then they'll vote him out.
(52:43):
And someone was like, a lot of these people are
coming from third world countries, Like things could get much, much,
much worse and they would still be better than the
country that they're from. And so like the idea that
they're gonna things are gonna get so bad that people
will vote differently suggest that peopeople don't understand, you know,
the nature of where they're from or why they're trying
(53:05):
to escape.
Speaker 1 (53:06):
Blaming immigrants for that. And I do think a lot
of non natives obviously voted for Mom Donnie, though there
were areas and people who did not. The biggest immigrant
who helped him win in New York was the socialist, white,
upwardly mobile couple who lives in rich neighborhoods in Brooklyn
and Manhattan. And we have to come to terms with
(53:29):
that a lot, that this is only a success because
of them as well, and stop pretending those are heritage Americans.
I'm sure a lot of their last names are Waspy
or whatever, and we just kind of want to blame
the immigrant for this when there are a lot of
other people involved in this. The biggest voting block for
the Socialists seems to be single women and Pumpkins need
(53:52):
to find a way. I get that it's easy to
make fun of Karen's and all that, I don't actually
love it, and I think there has to be a
way to reach out to those people as well, to
try to bring them over. They're more important than Greiper's,
you know, and we have them on our podcasts like
Why Not.
Speaker 2 (54:07):
I wrote about this issue in like twenty fourteen, and
this situation has gotten so much worse since then. People
blame women for the stupid way they vote, but really
it's single women who vote stupidly. Married women tend to
vote in a much more reasonable way. Clearly, marriage is
(54:30):
an important thing for the health of the country, including
because it affects the way women vote, and also young
men not being able to get married is causing problems
for them as well. Trying to solve these things politically
is just not going to work. There needs to be
(54:51):
a mass movement to encourage marriage at younger ages. It's
just good for everybody. It's good for the happiness of
men and women, for society, for the children they produce.
Like everyone should be talking about it all the time
with their family, just encouraging good, strong, solid marriages.
Speaker 1 (55:08):
I mean, it's people might not like to hear it,
but this all began when women went into the workforce,
and that you know, they work, women they go to college.
Speaker 2 (55:17):
Well, that message is going to not work well for the.
Speaker 1 (55:20):
No, I'm not saying this is I'm not even saying
it's a bad thing, honestly, I'm just saying that that
because of that, people get married later. People have started
having children later, so they have few of them, and
that is the kind of one of the core issues.
I'm not sure there's going to be any way to
change that dynamic. So I agree. I think a lot
(55:41):
of young people choose not to get married because they
they think they can't or it's too expensive, or the
career is more important or whatever. It's never going to
be the same, you know, it's never going to be
the same as it was when women weren't in the workforce.
Speaker 2 (55:56):
I don't know. I was just thinking, how so desperately
I'd like to be out of the workforce right now.
I would make such a good stay at home life.
My house would be in a much better situation.
Speaker 1 (56:13):
I tell you, I agree, I would like to get
out of the workforce myself. I do notice, though, that
whenever i'm I need to take time off, I'm stressed out. Stupidly,
I stress myself out with what's going on. But I'm
like I need. I am far more stressed out when
I'm not working than when I am, like I feel
like I need to do something. I don't know that
I could ever retire. I'm not sure everyone anyone will
(56:34):
pay me when I get older. How long that's going
going to happen. But I cannot sit around and be
on vacation like it. I get very fidgety.
Speaker 2 (56:44):
I can I cannot wait for Thanksgiving? Okay, So any
cultural things of note?
Speaker 1 (56:52):
Yeah somewhere, oh here, Yeah, I have three things. The
first is I watch with my wife The Ten Commandments.
Speaker 2 (57:03):
The movie.
Speaker 1 (57:04):
Yeah, I haven't seen it in a long time. With
Charlton Heston wanted to see how how you know, how
how faithful it was to the to the Bible and
I would say it is not but more than I
thought it would be. You know, there's there's a love
story involved and stuff that didn't happen. But the reason
(57:26):
we watched it was my wife had read this piece
about the special effects that we're using the movie and
how revolutionary they were at the time, and when you
see them, they're actually pretty cool. You know. There was
a lot of innovations there, and it was it's it's
just a fun movie. I'm sure most people have seen it.
I have watched a documentary on Netflix called Wickest Pain.
(57:49):
It's about the John Wick movies, but it's actually about
the innovations and stunts and the people who do them.
I thought it was interesting if you're into that. And
then I have my most important cultural piece here. I
watched a new show on Apple called Pluribus. It is
(58:09):
made by the person who did Breaking Bad. It stars
I think her name is Rhea Seahorn, who was in
Better Call Saul. I don't how can I put this.
I was it's so intrigued. The show is incredibly intriguing.
I can't even tell you what the plot is because
I would ruin a very big surprise off the bat.
It's science fiction y, it's kind of a little edgy.
(58:33):
It's She's amazing in it. I watched two episode episodes.
I believe this, this show is I'm not one thousand
percent sold on it. I need a few more episodes,
but right right now, I think it's one of the
best things I've seen in a very long time. Like,
I highly recommend it, highly recommend it.
Speaker 2 (58:55):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (58:56):
Yeah, it has kind of a little bit of a
it's kind of a conflict, a mix of X Files
and bad Breaking.
Speaker 2 (59:07):
Bad love it, love hearing.
Speaker 1 (59:10):
Yeah, it has the potential to be one of the
when you know, just one of the great shows I
think that I've seen in many, many years.
Speaker 2 (59:19):
Okay, Like you're over selling it though.
Speaker 1 (59:20):
Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, I don't I'm not. It's like it,
you know, there are a lot of shows, right they
have a premise and they set up the show and
you're completely intrigued and and and it's compelling and you
want to watch more, and then it really has no
place to go. I worry about that here, But so
far it's been great. Let's just put that way.
Speaker 2 (59:41):
Okay, great, and yourself nothing, okay, great. I just have
been busy with all sorts of things, and one of
the kids was in a play. Oh do that.
Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
You make me feel like a loser when I'm like,
here are the fifteen things that I watched like I
was too busy working and.
Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Does remind me that One of the kids was telling
me that they had a friend who listened to us,
and the kid was like, I don't know why you
listen to my mom. That is so boring.
Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
Oh my gosh. You can email the show and yell
at us or me about the immigration stuff at radio.
At the Federalist dot com, Molly loves to hear from you.
Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
It was back next week and I.
Speaker 1 (01:00:43):
Told them be lotters of freedom. I'm anxious for the friend.
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