’You're Wrong' With Mollie Hemingway And David Harsanyi, Ep. 175: The Longest Shutdown Ever

Welcome back, everyone, to a new episode of You're Wrong with Molly Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, and David Harsani, senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Just as a reminder, if you'd like to email the show, please do so at Radio at the Federalist.com. And boy, did people like to email the show this last week. Like, we're still getting emails. It might have been the most. Not the most, but it was up there. 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. It was definitely a diverse array of viewpoints that came in on our discussion on the, you know, the Groyper problem, I think, on the right. 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 read every word. If you're going to write 2,000 words, it's not going to be read. Stop it. Some of them have been really good, thoughtful. You need to read them all. It's great. Anyway. The shutdown's over, Molly. How do you feel? You're right? Did you make it? I mean, as of this taping, are we sure. I mean, I think I'll be over here, right? I think the house has just or is going to vote for it. Okay. I, I. I'm glad that 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, and I had to take the train, 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 15 months. And I was worried that the shutdown would keep me from being able to fly out to Oregon to see them. How about you? Oh. I do everything I can not 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 we've ever had. 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 tried to convince everyone that.

millions of people were going to starve. First, millions of people are going to lose their health care. And then millions of people are going to starve. But now that a few, I guess, moderate Democrats decide 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 getting their snap. And, uh, 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 reformative fights that really gained Democrats nothing. And I just think it was a disaster politically for them. I think the Republicans lost anything, yeah. I think I disagree. Number one, people in D.C. 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 Chuck Schumer forced this shutdown so that... Virginia elections in particular would go really well for Democrats. Like the shutdown, I think polls showed that people were blaming Republicans for it, which was, of course, very unfair because Republicans kept voting to keep the government open and Democrats. But only slightly, not the usual overwhelming polling on that. Absolutely true, but usually the shutdown is caused by the Republicans, whereas this one 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 out and you want to energize your base if you're Democrats. You want to demoralize your base if you're 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 end days after the election. And it would have actually ended on the Friday after the election if progressives hadn't become so emboldened by the Zohran Mamdani win that they decided to push for what Chuck 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. Yeah, I guess I just don't believe, I just don't think that the... I don't think Abigail Spanberger loses or the elections any closer if there's no shutdown. I don't think that that's what's really good. I don't think we've 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 margins are so big. A lot of the folks who won in Virginia at least pretend to be moderate. Samberger among them, in a sense, she was the one, I think it was 2020, who told Democrats that she should never say the word socialist again, and 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 to go through with all that because I think you could backfire. You think a listener could just remind us of this conversation when Abigail Spanberger 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, is in some ways, more dangerous than a Zohran Mamdani because she can fool. low information voters into thinking she's moderate. No, I, I, she's a let she, she portrays herself as a moderate. I agree she is not. My only point is that governing in that way could backfire. 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 we'll, you know, I could, I could be wrong about that. Um, So you're saying so, okay, so you're saying the shutdown was, and I think this is true, was meant to motivate Democratic voters. 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 other Republicans. which is going to be a problem post-Trump. That's not to say an IPCC, 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? Glenn Youngkin won without Trump on the ballot and, you know, Brian Kemp won one without Trump on the ballot. And Ron DeSantis won 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 that people are really excited about. So we'll see. 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 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 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 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 Republican right now? Like, 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 for, I mean, I, I, I, I want to take quick step back. I'll answer that question. I think, though, that a lot of the people have backfilled Donald Trump's. you know, 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 of coherent case. It was all about. the last election, like transgendered, you know, high school athletes. Now, I think that's a super important issue, but the most important issue is 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 those issues were very traditional in a sense. He lowered regulations. He cut taxes. He, you know, he let. businesses thrive and consumers weren't paying, there was no real inflation until COVID hit. So I think that the economy is the most important driver. I think every poll shows that and people are worried about that. I think the economy is just a major issue and people vote based on kitchen table issues. Donald Trump hasn't had a bad year in many ways. I mean, 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 some of these things are important and domestic and then some of them were very foreign policy focused um and i think historically people don't vote based on foreign policy and

Also, it can give, like if you're too focused on foreign policy, whether it's bombing Venezuelan drug boats 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, 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 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. I am. I guess I just, I feel like a lot of candidates and a lot of the institutions, political institutions in D.C. 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 Trump doesn't actually speak that way most of the time he speaks in a much more um moderate language in my view and um A lot of the candidates pick up on the wrong cues. In Virginia, there was just a ton of culture war ads, at least the ads that I saw. It was just all about that. And again, important issue 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, Laura Ingraham, I think. And yeah, he was going on about how prices are going down. I saw the Treasury Secretary say that prices are going down. I saw, you know, 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 inflation is compounding. And just because it was 9% under Biden at one point doesn't mean over 3% is any good either. I think it's better to say we're trying to get this thing under control. It's better than it was 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 everyone prices are going down. I don't think that most.

people who go to a supermarket feel 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, you know, like meat and other things that we buy, our grocery bill is like twice what it was, let's say, 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, there's no. you know, magic formula to fix that. Sometimes it's, it's local government that causes problems like 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 victories. 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 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 making peace in 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 neo-con isolationist thing. I just think they want competent foreign policy that doesn't drag us into long-term conflicts, right? No, yeah, I think you're wrong on all of it. I think usually you're wrong on everything. Everything. No, I don't mean it that way. What I mean is like, if you asked people what they thought of the Iraq War, they gave it very high marks. And then also it... It was so bad for George W. Bush's presidency that he had gotten embroiled in this war and that it was dragging on and something like that. That you can't isolate it into, we took a poll of 400 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, 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 have been deeply unpopular. The other kind are not unpopular. What's the other kind? The wars that are fought in 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 an interventionist foreign policy. People in D.C. 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. As for Donald Trump not being a transformational president, I just don't think that's true. 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, 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 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 reshaped the way people think about, you know, we had crumbling institutions but no permission structure to really talk about it or to act like there was something we could do about it. And it's, you know, 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, but definitely our conversation about them is very different now than when he started. Wouldn't you agree with that? I think the conversation is different on some issues because the world has changed from the last time. I don't, I don't think Donald Trump doesn't, 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. Vietnam was an interventionist war, correct? And Nixon couldn't have been more popular in 1972 when we had 550,000 troops there. But think about 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. Well, yeah, but I'm just saying 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 as interventionist. I mean, you can make the same, you could say that 9-11 caused the Iraq war in some way, whether you agree with it or not. I think it was unpopular because it was poorly fought. I'm just saying. I think it was a mistake. is iran's an interventionist war we don't want them to have nuclear weapons there right exactly i mean we but if they had nuclear weapons or they were on the cusp of it the americans would feel compelled to stop that because they control they were on the cusp of it and we did stop it right so without without a war though i would just but it's still intervention yeah because a major bombing and then we left Yeah. 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 than what I thought was going to happen when it started. Well, 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 you saying we were looking for Osama bin Laden? And others. I mean, I think we wanted to displace. I think we wanted to displace. 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. Should social media influencers register like lobbyists? The Watchdog on Wall Street podcast with Chris Lisa Murkowski. 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. Whether it's happening in D.C. or down on Wall Street, it's affecting you financially. Be informed. Check out the Watchedart on Wall Street podcast with Chris Lisa Murkowski on Apple, Spotify. wherever you get your podcast. 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, 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 know, 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, it's just when I, 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 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 to deal with our stupid idiots here in the U.S. who can't get the jobs or whatever. But for a 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? No, I think he was right. And he didn't say it like you just did and framed it in 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 lot of our most successful sectors, there are people from other countries who come here. It's like. I saw this person put a picture up of the moon landing and everyone flying the, you know, flags and saying, what did foreigners have to do with this? I'm 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 want to bring fewer of them or whatever, I mean, you know, you have to calibrate these things. I completely agree. But this hostility towards immigration, legal immigration now, which I knew was headed in this direction, is very off-putting to me, obviously, because of my family history, but I think it's off-putting to a lot of people. You are not going to win any elections attacking people 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 our immigration. We don't want people coming here and say all those things. But the idea that immigration is somehow destroying this country is ludicrous. 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 most Americans are not anti-immigration. 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.

I'm sure you think that's like an industry that Americans can't work in or something. They don't have the skills, 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. 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 lower. Don't they understand that other jobs are created by those profits? I mean, a person who is punching a ticket cannot be making $30 an hour or whatever. I don't even know what 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 Liberation Day because he understands that it causes inflation. 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. There is no mass on, there's illegal mass on. Are you conflating the two? You're saying that our legal immigration policy is mass and uncontrolled. I love hearing that you were 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 Zohran Mamdani, a true 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, right? Native born to New York, not native born to America. I thought it was, I thought it was into 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 in America. It is, again, a dramatically different voting population. It's just true that since the 60s, 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 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. Just pretending it's not happening is no answer to people's concerns 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. I think that we need more diversity in our immigration policy. And I think that we need to bring in people who will be good Americans. Diversity in our immigration. So we don't have a million people coming from one area. Like you can't have. millions of Mexicans coming over the border and then clustering in a city because that that is they're not going to assimilate they're here illegally 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. But since the 60s, I'm here because of the stuff that happened since the 60s. I think my family's are great Americans. So they assimilated. You're not here because of stuff. Yeah. My parents came in here in 1969, 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 more of that. Where were you born? I was born here, but barely. Huh. 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 can I say cool and quick thing about this, by the way? Okay. 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. Let's hold the door. David Harsani just made an argument based on whether it's politically palatable. No, it's not. I thought you didn't do that. You don't care about winning coalitions or political success. I don't. I'm telling 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, 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. 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. I don't know if 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 know. Immigration or illegal immigration. 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 mass migration. I'm just pointing that out. 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 you think we should let in every year well i 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 60 years that it would be okay to kind 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 need for particular... 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. Wages are dramatically high in this country, the highest in the world per capita, the idea. Relative to the prices that you were just complaining about, okay? You don't think that there's inflation in European countries that have that close off their borders? We have far better economic success with immigration that grows the economy and actually brings salaries up. I'm not saying in every single, I'm not saying that in car, I don't know enough about the Colorado ski industry, okay? But in general, the idea that our wages are depressed because people come here is just simply not true. I'm sorry. I know everyone going to get a million letters, angry letters, but that's not how the economy works.

By the way, I'm going to go skiing here soon over Thanksgiving. Are you a skier? So I can't say that I am because I literally have not skied in 20 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. But I think we're going to do some. some light skiing here over Thanksgiving. We got off track there. We're talking about skiing Colorado. What is next on our agenda here? How about the BBC? Did you hear that story? Yeah. I'm kind of taken aback by the anger because I just assumed everyone knew this is what the BBC 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 all, there's numerous things that they have done. They had to correct every week, at least once a week correct a story that they had about Gaza for being completely wrong. Or was it two? Twice a week, I think. Twice a week. On average, twice a week they had to correct errors that went 100% in the direction of pro Hamas. Then they doctored the January 6th 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 pushback peacefully and patriotically, I think it was. So they took out that part, right? 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 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, as understood also by an internal review that they had, which detailed the problems, journalistically with the propaganda that they were pushing. The state 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 it 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 BBC for a billion dollars. Well, I just think it's interesting because unlike in the United States, the... British libel laws are so much easier to sue under. Yeah. And people can and do win huge awards for stuff nowhere even near this bad. And this was not an editing error. This was, again, splicing together two small sections, an hour apart in a speech or 54 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 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 that the BBC puts together some excellent TV shows, like drama shows. And they're like, well, if he... If he went after the BBC for lying about him for political gain, then that might hurt our stories, which is like, again. I hadn't thought of that. I don't want their stories limited. I like the BBC. But also, like, you could get stories to 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, G.B. News, which is sort of like... I think you could kind of call it the Fox News of Great Britain. And 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 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, they're like, I never knew that the BBC had a problem here. Like, it's like, really? Awesome accent, yeah. Hello.

The BBC is, is, has, you know, supposedly independent, but the, um, 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 to pay like 175 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 a corrupt, a corrupt network, especially for news. I've always said this, and I think it's true here to, like, PBS and NPR, was that, yes, I do think the BBC will make educational programming or interesting programming that doesn't have as much commercial viability because they're... helped by the state. But I don't understand why rich people can't fund that. The whole thing is, a new section of it is corrupt. So none of these networks let Donald Trump win. They always give in and then, right? I mean, like CBS didn't take it all the way to trial, right? I think he sued someone else. It doesn't seem like they would allow this to go to trial, right? They would probably work something out. 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 U.S. because we have, oddly enough, artificially high standards for suing for defamation. There's some really interesting jurisprud or some legal analysis out there about how our... New York Times versus Dan Sullivan ruling makes it so that it is more difficult to sue the media than it was at the time of the American founding. 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 v. Dan Sullivan just flips it on its head where if you were a person of any renown, you basically can't go after the media if they lie about you. And so a lot of people have been talking about the need to revisit that, including Clarence Thomas has mentioned that in some of his dissents. Lawrence Silberman, the great lower court judge. wrote beautifully about that as well. So 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 we do so well in our situation with having great protections for those who practice journalism. Obviously, the abuse of that puts everybody at risk. But I do agree it's time to revisit a bad decision, which New York Times versus Dan Sullivan is a bad decision. I kind of worry about the chilling of speech. If we were like Britain, where people are constantly being sued, journalists are constantly 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 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 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? 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. Yes, there was a TPP USA event at Berkeley. Berkeley has had a history of violence against speech events. During the first 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, you know, federal subsidies and taxpayer funding. That never happened. And UC Berkeley is as bad 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. very little to nothing has been done to protect speech on campus to go after the adherence of the murderous ideology 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 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. It is ironic that the free speech movement of the 60s, I think in 1964, 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 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. 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. The president can do that too, by the way. They have a $7.4 billion 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 who walk around with kaffia's and stuff like my money is going to subsidize their educations now if a school um 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 of money these institutions get from the federal government is mind boggling to me sometimes, especially schools like Harvard and Columbia. In that interview that you love Donald Trump, what do you say? I don't know. 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. It was like, 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 U.S. Good for them. But yeah, they absolutely should be required to protect speech on campus. And they should fund it. 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 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 kids who get to come here from other countries. So I have no problem making, having some limitation on that. A million years ago when I was in college and I was studying economics, we had a bunch of students paying full freight 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, they had a different culture in which cheating wasn't a problem. It's called 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, that's what I'm talking about. Right there. That kind of thinking undermines assimilation. We should be holding these people to the same standards everyone else has in this country. And...

kind of moral relativism over 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 and i was there years ago and yeah it's a much i don't know if americans realize how corrupt a lot of these places are and 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. Just a quick thing about immigrants, just from my own experience in my own life, I think that the immigrants I knew were connected to me and my family who came mostly from Hungary and places like that were more patriotic than a lot of these students. I'll tell you, they're probably more patriotic than 99% 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. And that's what we want? I forgot who was online saying this. I mean, a confitting, what's that? Who are these people who love America more than America? Just the people that I knew growing up who were immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe that I knew. I think they were happy to 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 shot, meritocratic. you know, world that they lived in here, which you don't get elsewhere. I'm just saying, you know. The 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 Zohran Mamdani loss by being like, oh, well, when he institutes his policies, things will get worse, and then they'll vote him out. 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 things are going to get so bad that people will vote differently, suggest that people don't understand. you know, the nature of where they're from or what they're trying to escape. Blaming immigrants for that. And I do think a lot of non-natives obviously voted for Zohran Mamdani, though there were areas and people who did not. The, the. The biggest immigrant who helped him win in New York was the socialist, white, upwardly mobile couple who lives in, you know, rich neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Manhattan. And we have to come to terms with that a lot, that this is only a success because of them as well and stop pretending. And 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 socialists seems to be a single women. And Republicans need to find a way. I get that it's easy to make fun of Cairns 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 Groypers, you know, and we have them on our podcasts. Like, why not? I wrote about this issue in like 2014. And the 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 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... 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. 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 well that message is going to not work well for the no i'm not i'm not saying this is i'm not even saying it's a bad thing honestly i'm just saying that that that because of that People get married later. People start having children later, so they have a few of them. And that is 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 of young people choose not to get married because 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. 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 wife. My house would be in a much better situation. I'll 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 without what's going on. But I'm like, 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 anyone will pay me when I get old. I know how long that's going to happen. But I cannot sit around and be on vacation. Like, I get very fidgety. I can. I cannot wait for Thanksgiving.

Okay. So any cultural things of note? Yeah. Somewhere. Oh, here. Yeah. I have three things. The first is I watched with my wife, The Ten Commandments. The movie? Yeah. I haven't seen it in a long time with Charlton Heston. Wanted to see how, you know, 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 a love story involved and stuff that didn't happen. But the reason we watched it was my wife had read this piece about the special effects that were used in 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 just a fun movie. I'm sure most people have seen it. I have watched a documentary on Netflix called Steve Witkoff is Pain. It's about the John Steve Witkoff 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, uh, is made by the person who did Breaking Bad. It stars, I think her name's Ria 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 fictiony. It's kind of a little edgy. It's, she's amazing in it. I watch two episodes. I believe this, this show is, I'm not a 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. Interesting. Yeah. It has kind of a little bit of a, it's kind of a mix of X-Files and Bad, Breaking Bad. Love it. Love hearing. Yeah. It has the potential to be one of the, you know, just one of the great shows, I think that I've seen in many, many years. Okay. I feel like you're overselling it, though. Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry. I don't. 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 you, 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 it that way. 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. Aw. Do that.

You make me feel like a loser when I'm like, here are the 15 things that I watched this week. And you're like, I was too busy working. This 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. Oh my gosh. You can email the show and yell at us or me about the immigration stuff at Radio at the Federalist.com. Molly loves to hear from you. We'll go back next week. And I'll tell them the letters of freedom and anxious for the bread.