The Michael Knowles Show - Friendly Fire: Terror, Trump, and the Worst Movie of the Year

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Andrew Klavan, and special guest Batya Ungar-Sargon debate the merits of Islamophobia, Europe’s security issues, and what the West is facing. They break down Trump’s first year back in office and roast the worst movies they sat through. Ep. 05 - - - Today's Sponsors: American Financing - Visit http://www.AmericanFinancing.net/FriendlyFire or call [phone] today! APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.196% for well qualified borrowers.  Call for details about credit costs and terms. NMLS 182334, https://nmlsconsumeraccess.org PreBorn! - Help save babies from abortion and donate today at https://preborn.com/FIRE or dial #250 and say keyword ‘BABY’ Balance of Nature - New and existing customers can go to https://balanceofnature.com/pages/lock-in-for-life and get 50% off the Whole Health System FOR LIFE. Kalshi - Visit https://kalshi.com/friendlyfire to see live prediction markets and sign up today to trade on the outcomes that matter most to you. Jeremy’s Razors - Visit https://jeremysrazors.com - - - 🎄✨ DAILY WIRE CHRISTMAS SALE IS HERE! ✨🎄 🎁 https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe ⭐️ 40% Off DailyWire+ New Annual Memberships ⭐️ 50% Off DailyWire+ Annual Upgrade Memberships ⭐️ 50% Off DailyWire+ Annual Gift Memberships - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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He knows, the Jews are fighting. Could you pam you say, yeah. Friends like these, coo-dee enemies. Friends like these, coo-deeemies. Welcome to Friendly Fire. I got great news for everybody today. Matt's not here. I don't know what Matt is doing.

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We will be discussing the threat of Islam to the West. A topic, 1,400 years in the making. Obviously, the Bondi Beach shooting, the Islamic threats all over Europe, shutting down Christmas markets and New Year's celebrations, killings in the United States. We will also be getting to President Trump's biggest wins and losses of the year. And if there is time, what is the worst? movie that we all saw this year. I think I only saw one movie this year and it was very bad.

So we will get to that and I already teased that we had a nice lady coming on this show. We will have Batya Ungar Sargon coming up. Did I say, I don't pronounce that in a beautiful way. Anyway, she's a beautiful lady and she'll be coming on the show. Gentlemen, good to see you.

Shall we talk about the Muslims? Wow, that is always a great bar opener, Michael. And you just walk into a bar and just drop that right on the table. Let's talk about the Muslim. Let somebody please. talk about the Muslims. Because they seem to, look, I'm very much in the old school Christian Hillare Belloc crusades view here that the Muslims have been a pretty consistent problem for a while.

Now it seems like Islamic terror is rearing its head again after having gone, I don't know, a little dormant or it wasn't on the front pages for a few years. You know, I don't think it was dormant. There have been too many acts of radical Islamic terror. and the reason I'm saying radical Islamic, just because obviously there are some Muslims who actually do not sympathize with radical Islamic terror. I will say that those numbers are higher

in terms of moderate Muslims, non-radical Muslims in the United States than they are in other places, including particularly Europe and certainly in the Middle East or Africa. But, you know, the steady drumbeat of radical Islamic terror, of course, is quite real and has been happening

for years on end. I mean, the Orlando Pulse massacre shooting, the Ford Hood massacre, the attack that happened just a couple of weeks ago on the National Guard members in Washington, D.C. Obviously, October 7th was a radical Islamic terror attack. I mean, this sort of stuff actually is really consistent. And it's been happening in Europe for a long time, too. I mean, there have been a bunch of attacks on various Christmas markets over the course of the last eight to ten years that have been truly insane. And I think that the West basically decided that this was an acceptable cost of doing business in a bizarre and ugly way. They basically were

like, well, you know, this is the cost of a multicultural society. And we're just going to pretend that There's no real problem here, but there does seem to be a pretty high correlation between importation of a certain number of people of a particular religion from particular areas of the world and a radical uptick in crime, a radical uptick in terror attacks directed against both Jews and Christians, obviously the one in Australia on Sunday was directed at Jews, but we've seen radical Muslim terror attacks against Christians throughout Europe over the course of the last decade or so. Yeah, I mean, this is a conversation. And that, by the way, that is the conversation that has driven the entire right-wing

movement in Europe over the course of the last 15 years and going all the way back to Michelle Hollaback writing submission. I mean, like this is nothing new. Drew, Salam al-a-a-a-a-a-com, your thoughts on the Muslims? Well, I think it goes beyond just, you know, ignoring the problem. I think they literally think they can ignore it out of existence. They have, the left especially, has taken the notion that you can erase anything that feels bad or causes problems by simply declaring it void. So that if you feel ashamed because you sleep around, that's just slut shaming. It's something that's being done to you. It's not something that's emanating from you because you know you're doing the wrong thing. And the biggest shock to most elites of 9-11 was that

anybody would do anything on behalf of their God. And they have basically said, you know, all roads lead to God and there's no real difference between one religion and another. And since there is no God, what difference does it make? The problem they have is just like shame, God. is real and it really does matter that you discuss and argue and kind of find the God who is the God, you know? And I think that when you have these guys who are been set off from even their own populations to develop this radical religion, you start to ask yourself, well, wait, maybe the Quran says some things that are not in keeping with our idea of God and maybe our idea of God is better than theirs. And so where, where, who came up with the idea?

that you can move masses of these people into Christian-based societies, and there was going to be no problem. It's an insane idea. The way you deal with God is the way you deal with life, and that's just written into things. If you believe there's no God that you're going to live life that way, if you believe that God is a loving God, a creative God, somebody who has put his image into us, you're going to deal another way, and if you believe that God wants you to slaughter the infidels, you're going to be a dangerous guy. And of course you're right. not all of them. There are millions of them who are good people and pious people, but it is a problem that emanates from the religion itself. Yeah, and I think, you know, to Ben's point, there is,

I actually have a number of Muslim friends, not a huge number, but a number of them, you know, and Muslim associates over the years. And the thing I notice about Islam, which separates it from other religions, is that the moderation of the people is directly in correlation with the less they practice the religion, the less rigorously they practice it. And the same cannot be said of Christianity or Judaism or Judaism or Shintoism or what have you. And I think that just tells you something about the qualitative difference. And there are, at the level of theology, real differences. It's a volunteerist religion. It posits a total transcendence of Allah with no real mediation between God and man. There are all these kind of interesting theological aspects. But brass tacks, I got into a debate once

with a French politico. The French guy, and he was involved in French politics. And he said, why do you American conservatives love Hungary so much? And I said, because Hungary is the freest country in Europe. And he said, what are you talking about? Hungary's not free. It's illiberal. It's authoritarian, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I said, let me tell you about Hungary. I can walk around Hungary at two o'clock in the morning in my birthday suit with gold watches on each hand. And no one's going to harm me. No one's going to rob me. This is the kind of place where you can walk freely and you can live your life and the people of Hungary can have their traditions that go back a thousand years. And this French Politico said, oh, that's not freedom, that's safety, that's

security, but that has nothing to do with freedom. I said, no, I think that that has to do with an exalted and political freedom. And then you find out just this week that Paris, France, is going to have to cancel its New Year's Eve celebration. They're still going to have fireworks at the Arc de Triumph. They're still going to have things on the Chamzilezé, but they're saying, please, Frenchmen, watch it on TV. We can't guarantee your safety from Muslims. That's the open point. You know, who's the one causing the problems? It's the Muslim radicals. We can't guarantee your safety. So sorry, we have to cancel your traditions. Go live in your pod and watch it on TV. What kind of free country is that? Not that France has been free for 250 years now. Batia, I want to

bring you in here. First of all, thank you so much for coming on the show. Oh my gosh. I'm so honored to be here with you guys. I love this. show. I watch it all the time, and it's just like a dream come true to be one of the boxes. That's very kind. It's very sweet. Flattery will get you very, very far about here. Yeah, that's about the whole key to the show is what I'm concerned. Welcome to our Islamophobia fest. Do you have any hatred to add? You know, to me, what I'm really experiencing right now is a renewed appreciation for American exceptionalism, because I really don't disagree with anything you guys have said, but I don't

think any of it is at all applicable to the United States. We just do not have the same problem as they're facing in Europe. And I think there's a sort of number of reasons for that. For starters, I think that a lot of what is happening there vis-a-vis the Muslim community, the problems being caused by their Muslims has to do with the class of Muslims who immigrated there. They're poor and they're refugees and they stay in their enclaves and they don't assimilate. Our Muslim community is much smaller. It tends to be middle class because it costs a lot more money to get here. And they assimilate. I mean, we just don't have that same problem. And I think what's happening in Europe is a fundamental crisis in confidence. You have these enclaves and then you have

cops like refusing to police them. And to me, this is just like unimaginable. Can you imagine if like the NYPD decided, oh yeah, Bay Ridge, we don't go there. You know, like it's unthinkable because our cops are men, you know, like they know what it means to have the confidence of being Americans. And so I think we're really sort of short-selling the exceptional nature of this country of capitalism, people who migrate here want into the system by and large. And then also just the exceptional way in which America has always treated its Jews. The founding fathers really saw Jews as having been the harbingers of the civilization they were trying to create here. the inheritors of the Hebrew Bible in which they found, you know, the source material for everything

they believe this country should be built on. And so I do still feel that that is at play in a really big way and how the average American feels about Jews no matter what we're talking about here. And that to a large extent, the Muslims who come here, they imbibe that the way that they imbibed the love of capitalism and the desire to be middle class and to get along with their Jewish neighbors. So I'm a little bit, you know, more I guess sanguine. very, very cheerleader-e about America in this context as well. I can. Ben, please depress this. I'll totally disagree with it with probably half of that.

I think that obviously you do see radical Islamic enclaves that arrived in places like Minneapolis. You've seen it arriving in places like Dearborn, Michigan. And this is brought about by an open borders attitude toward what America is and should be. You've talked about assimilation. We've had a massive problem of assimilation in the United States across the board, actually, since about 1965 when we decided to change our entire immigration system and just accept huge numbers of migrants from places that did not have any sort of traditional relationship with a lot of the underlying values that unite Europe and the United States. And so you're starting to see that change in some pretty radical ways. And you're starting to see that ushered in even more so by a left that is making common cause with radical Islam. That is a common factor that you're seeing in Europe and in the United States. It's a left that is perfectly willing to fellow travel with Islamic terrorism. In fact, this terror attack that was just thwarted by the FBI and the DOJ in California was a group of people who were a united group of people who said that they were pro-free Palestine,

that they were anti-America and pro-trans, right? So it was sort of the entire agglomeration of left-wing causes. And whenever you look at that cause, you say, well, none of these people, you put them in a room together and most of them will end up dead if you leave them in the room long enough because they hate each other so much. But the one thing they can agree on is they don't like America, They don't like our civilization. They don't particularly like Jews. And so they sort of are able to unite under that rubric. I'm very concerned about the possibility of something like what happened in Australia

happening in the United States. Of course, I don't think that the threats to the Jewish community are relegated only to radical Muslims. I think that you've seen attacks on Jewish communities by white supremacists as well. And to pretend that that doesn't exist is to just whistle past the graveyard, literally speaking. But when you talk about the kind of widespread civilizational threat of radical Islam, the biggest reason you don't see it in the United States, the way you see it in Europe,

is a pure percentage question. That is all. It is just a question of what is the population of Muslims in the United States. The population of Muslims in the United States is approximately somewhere between 6 and 7 million Muslims in the United States by most of the census data that I've seen. And so you're talking about 2% of the population at most. When you're talking about places in Europe like London, you're talking well in excess of 15% of the entire population of London.

If you're talking about France, you're talking about in Paris something. the same, you know, 15, 20 percent of the population. If you're talking about Sydney, Australia, you've seen a radical increase in the number of Muslims in Australia, most of whom live in Sydney. There used to be very few Muslims in Australia. Now there are about 813,000 Muslims in Australia, and about 6.5% of the population of Sydney is Muslim, which is why you saw people in the streets chanting gas the Jews right after October 7th in Australia. To pretend that this ideology doesn't have anything to do with what's going on, I know by you're not doing that, but to pretend that the ideology doesn't have anything to do with what's going on. That's my bugaboo, right? Sunny

Austin said something that it's the kind of thing people say when they really don't want to understand how the world works. Why is there just so much evil happening right now? Why is there so much bad stuff happening right now? Because she looked at Brown University and then she looked at Sydney and she said, all this terrible stuff, all this oppositionality and anger happening right now. It's like those are not all the same thing. Not every shooting happens for the same reason. Not every terror attack happens for the same reason. You have to take each ideology on its own merits as to how much violence and evil it's going to generate. And to pretend that radical Islam generates the same amount of violence as other ideologies is, of course, incredibly silly. Islam

famously has bloody borders and has since it was initiated. And again, that doesn't mean every Muslim is bad because, you know, you can pick any group and find people who are not bad. The question is, what is the outgrowth of the civilization? What is the outgrowth of the ideology? And is there a strain of ideology that we could combat that would actually be more effective in preventing Okay, but what do you make of the proposal that you've seen in some quarters of the American right, which is to say, look, in many ways, we conservatives have more in common with religious Muslims, at least the more Americanized ones, than we do with secularists. We value family, we believe in the existence of God, we like modesty in some quarters. So, you know, you saw President

Trump going after Muslim votes in 2024. I think that did work. You know, there are some people who are saying really the battle is not Christian versus Muslim, but it's the religious, broadly, Christians, Jews, Muslims, whatever else, Zoroastrians, versus these secularist, materialist. Does that work? Does that does that have any salient? I think that it depends on which battle you're fighting. So if the battle you're fighting is against radical transgender ideology, then obviously you're going to find alliance with religious Muslims who agree on these issues, which always puzzled the left, right? The left is always confused when Muslim places like Dearborn would say, we don't want drag queen story hour for for example but if you're talking about civilizationally and and you're talking

about a system that is built on human freedom and individual rights are you more in conflict with you know people who vote democrat or are you more in conflict with radical Muslims i mean i think that you're you're you're you're more in conflict with radical Muslims on that particular matter even if you disagree on really important in waiting matters that do matter like drag queen's story hour uh you know like the the the the attempts to merge civilizations with or pretends away conflict between, say, Pakistan and the United States, or to say, you know, the Taliban, they do a really good job with their drug policing. You can do this with literally any evil civilization on planet Earth.

You can look at Venezuela and talk about how they're really, really good when it comes to abortion and still recognize, hey, maybe that's not a civilizational idea that we ought to adopt as an allied civilization. And so, you know, again, I think some of it's issue-based, but in general, do we have more in common with kind of secular left-wing Americans than we do with radical Muslims? I would say, yes. If you're talking about mainstream Muslims who, again, like Baia is talking about, many of whom are sort of middle class have assimilated to American values, then sure. I mean, those are those who just be called in many cases normie conservatives who happen to go to mosque.

But Michael, I think you've sort of identified one of the limits of the term Christian nationalism. Because in the, again, to be like just totally jingoistic, you know, this country developed a very unique type of Christianity that did believe. that civil liberties and freedom were religious imperatives. Most religions don't have that. Islam certainly does not have that as a core component of what it means to worship God. I mean, the founding fathers really believed that you defended the religious liberty of your neighbor, not because you were tolerant, but because that was the covenant you made with your God. And I think that just saying we're Christian nationalists like in this country, it doesn't quite do justice to what that means. It means a very specific American thing that is deeply tied to the concept of

freedom, the concept of protecting the rights of our neighbors, their property, you know, their bodily autonomy and all of these things that are so fundamental to what it means to be an American. And I think what it means probably to you to be a Christian. I do want to say, I don't disagree with much of what you said, Ben. I basically am at this like immigration should be zero right now until we figure out what's going on. I think many, many Americans feel like we've been completely fleeced on so many fronts by millions and millions of fake asylum cases, by immigrants flooding the marketplace, undercutting American wages, living off of American taxpayers. It's despicable. But I do think that because of the nature of American capitalism, our problems

with immigration have largely been on the economic front, on the front of sort of dignity for working Americans and less so on the cultural front, just because a lot of the people who are here illegally even, these people are Christians. I mean, they're very similar to us, you know, culturally on that front. So just a very small distinction there. I only get to more on the fleecing of Americans by talking about American financing because the thing is right now, you do not want to fall out of favor financially. You just don't want to be in a bad position financially. And that's why American financing is really important. The Fed has now dropped rates for the fourth time. If you are a homeowner, you should call our sponsor American financing today.

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That's 866891-3262. Or you can visit Americanfinancing.net slash friendly fire. While we're talking about sponsors, I want to talk about one of my absolute favorite sponsors which is pre-born. this Christmas you could help give a mother and her baby a real chance at life. If you think about a young woman who just found out she's pregnant and she wasn't expecting it, she can be absolutely terrified, she may not have any support. She doesn't really even know what her options are and she needs someone in her corner

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dial pound $2.50 and save baby. That's pound $2.50 and save baby. or visit preborn.com slash fire. So to Batia, to your point, I think it's important when we think about what Christian nationalism means, yes, it's obviously within an American context. There's this funny story, I don't know if you guys saw it, where this USA Today journalist, he posted a picture of the pine tree flag. It was flying at the Department of Education or something.

And it was the pine tree flag. This is white standard pine tree. It says an appeal to heaven. And he says, this is evidence of January. sixth, insurrectionist Christian nationalism. And people quickly pointed out, the flag was commissioned by George Washington,

and it's one of the earliest American flags. And furthermore, the phrase, an appeal to heaven, comes from John Locke's second treatise of government, which is the foundational text of political liberalism. So I actually like that he called it Christian nationalist, because I said, well, okay,

if that's Christian nationalism, then what does that tell you about George Washington and the founding, and even the founder's views of John Locke is it was understood through the lens of a Christian nation. And so to your point, Batia, yes, you know, it's kind of weird. We've been tolerant for a long time. They even tolerated Catholics in Maryland. They tolerate them so much now. We have a Catholic VP. Washington famously wrote his letter to the Jews and said, hey, we like you guys. You're welcome here. There were Jews who fought in the American Revolution. But there are limits

to these things. And I think the way to understand these limits is not necessarily ideologically, this abstract idea, you know, that diversity is our strength and were open to everyone. I would just point out that, yeah, all these different Christian groups were constituent in the country. Washington writes his letter to the Jews. Washington doesn't write his letter to the Shiites. And maybe there are some groups that just like don't totally fit. Drew, am I a bigot? Well, you're definitely a bigot, but that doesn't mean you're always in the wrong. You know, I do think, look, I agree with Botty that America has a better. record at assimilating and should have a better record as assimilating because it's part of our

original thesis where it's not part of England's thesis. England is for English people and French is for the Franks or the descendants of the Franks and they just do not have the systems in place that we have. But I do think, look, this is part of a bigger movement that's going on. What Ben said about Muslims, radical Muslims making common cause with leftists, the anti-Semitism that's now on the rise, on the right. I have long, argued that anti-Semitism is the devil's flagpole, that it's a sign that evil is uprising because I believe that people hate the Jews because they hate the God the Jews represent. That's what I think it comes down to. I think every other explanation doesn't hold water. And I think it's a spiritual

crisis. And these come about when you have what you have right now, which is this tremendous cultural shift that is in process. And we don't know where it's going to end, but we know it leaves a lot of opening for the bugs that crawl out from under the rocks to crawl up and see if can get themselves in place to be the next generation. And I think this means something for everybody. I think all of us have this obligation now to actually just stand fast and actually be very clear about what it is we believe and not play footsie with these guys on any side. And I think this idea that there's some kind of delicacy that we have to show to Islamic

people is absurd by not calling out the evil people among them. We make it harder for the nice, decent Muslims among them and for not calling out. when people took to the street after October 7th to condemn the Jews, which happened instantaneously after October 7th before the blood was dry, I think it's time for people to like step up, you know, and I don't think there's any kind of room for, you know, I don't know, for dithering. I think that one of the things that's happened here is there's an attempt to ideologically parse issues that people don't actually understand on a practical level ideologically. And so you'll see a lot of discussion in kind of our spaces about the difference.

between anti-Zionism or dislike of Israel and anti-Semitism and all this kind of stuff. And it's like, well, yeah, I mean, you can play those games all the time. And some of them are important. You know, some of those discussions are important. Where is the line and all the rest of this? But let's just be clear, 99% of people who hate Jews, hate Israel, and tell lies about it. Okay, that's just a reality. Okay, and pretending that when you go out there and you have hundreds of thousands of people

who are telling lies about Israel in the streets, and that's going to have no impact on how those people think about Jews, and that's not going to present any threat to Jews as a sort of after effect is just as silly as if you had hundreds of thousands of people protesting against Americans in other places in the world, and you think that's not going to lead to anti-Americanism in danger to Americans in those places. But does it go the other way then? In other words, does it go, you know, if 99, yeah, certainly, 100% of the people who hate the Jews hate Israel and will come up with all sorts of reasons to criticize Israel.

But does it go, does it go the other way that, you know, 99% of the people who criticize Israel? No, 99, no, 99, no. I criticize Israel. Okay, everyone criticizes Israel because Israel is a state, and we're all in the business of criticizing various states for various policies. We all criticize France. We all criticize Germany. It doesn't make us anti-French or anti-German.

And if you criticize Israel, obviously, that's just part of the process of trying to get too honest answers about what public policy should look like. But I will say this, 95% of the people who lie about Israel hate the Jews. Because if you lie about people, typically it's because you hate them. It is not because you are seeking a true and honest solution. to a problem. If I were to just tell lies about Michael every single day. You've done it for 10 years.

Every day you do it. And you're just proving my point because I hate you. This is the actual logic. But no, wait, I think you can hate Michael and tell the absolute truth about it. In fact, I think it's conducive. This is the topic that we were. I have to point out.

The protests against Israel after October 7th happened on college campuses, okay? I'm not saying that we don't have a problem with anti-Zionism in this country. I'm just saying it's not coming from like Muslims. It's coming from elite leftists, okay? You look at someone like Mamdani, people out here calling him a jihadist. This guy's not a jihadi.

He's your typical over-credentialed careerist. He sounds like every other college-educated leftist. Like he's just a pure careerism. And he'll say anything when it was, you know, important to say, I hate Israel to be a careerist to move up the ladder. He said that. When it was important to shake hands with Trump, he did that. And I'm just saying it's really important that we understand where it's coming from. Oh, I totally disagree with this. I totally disagree. I think that if you look at Zoramandani, Zora Mamdani's fundamental through line, his entire career is the radical Islamic side of Israel

hatred. The students, he started off as a students for justice and Palestine guy. Every single argument that he made for years and years and years. Yeah, yes. But those are not, those are not mutually exclusive. But they're very different, Ben. They are very different, okay? This guy, you look at his wife, like this is not a religious person. His mom's a Hindu. Ben, okay, I got a PhD at Berkeley, okay? These people don't sound like jihadists.

I'm not saying that makes it bad. They hate Israel with an equal passion. I'm just saying it stems from that. The Jews are fighting. Could you hand me a cigar please? Yeah, yeah. Because this could go on forever. It's just told our synagogue. I mean, this is like every Friday night.

I was going to say, I was going to be, You ever hear Jews fight? He's going on for 2,000 years. The reason, the only reason I say that any of this is important on an ideological level is because if you are going to fight an evil that springs from an ideology, you have to actually discuss the ideology. Totally. And if that ideology is radical Islam, it's radical Islam.

And if that ideology is far leftism, it's far leftism. And they can hold hands in one person the way that they do in Zara and Mamdani pretty clearly. But, you know, when we talk, the thing that drives me a bit up a wall is when we pretend that certain ideologies either don't exist, and this is true on all sides of the aisle. If you just pretend things don't exist because you don't like them, they are likely to grow. And then there's also this tendency on the part of public policymakers who are perfectly happy to allow those ideologies to grow, to then look to some sort of distraction, some shiny bubble out here. Usually it's gun control, right? So if you're Australia and you decide they're going to import

hundreds of thousands of Muslims from places like Syria and that you are going to tolerate people in your streets shouting for the murder of Jews for years on end and an a huge spike in the number of anti-Semitic attacks in your country. And then a bunch of Jews get shot on a beach. And your first move is, hey, we got a gun problem there. Clearly, it's a gun problem. That was even, you missed Chuck Schumer because he was, that was the biggest laugh. The only laugh I had after this bloody weekend was he said, I've got to talk about the

terrible atrocity that took place in Australia. But first, go bills. Go bills. Go bills. He's rooting for the Buffalo Bill. I thought this guy is, he's the most powerful Jew in the country, I think, you know, Chuck Schumer. I just thought like, go bill.

I'm sorry. Did I actually hear that? So I'm glad that somebody, listen, I love the Buffalo Bills and I would never say. For crying out loud, you know. Yes. You know, I do wonder if, you know, to bring back this through line of, isn't it so weird, you know, you got the radical leftists on one hand, you got the Islamists on the other. You have Mamdani, I guess, is the intersection. But they don't seem to share a lot, you know, and people scratch their heads.

They say, well, don't the liberals know that those Muslims would, they don't. like homosexuals or they don't like women or they make them wear hijabs or whatever. And you think, yeah, but their coalition actually does make sense because all political coalitions, all political campaigns are defined by their enemy, by who they're trying to beat. So yeah, you get a lot of weird people who probably kind of hate each other in the mix, but they have a common enemy so they go fight the enemy. And then once they defeat the enemy, maybe they form new coalitions and fight themselves. To me, it makes perfect sense. But there's a very important difference, right? Like the leftists, they worship the Palestinian cause because they have this like worship of weakness of abjection.

They have oppression envy, okay? It's a bunch of rich kids who have nothing to whine about, but they live in a context in which the only virtue is how powerless you are. And they have this like envy of oppression. And so they outsource their virtue to people who they consider to be like, you know, less powerful, which is, you know, means darker skin, right? That's, that's wokeness, right? that's one thing. That's one sort of psychological, philosophical, political mindset. The jihadis want power so they could kill people, right? Like it's like a very different, and you fight them in very different ways. So, and I just worry that like, this is the threat in America. This is really not

because this is such a great country. And even with all of our problems with immigration, we somehow manage to avoid this problem and should still keep doing that and avoid even more problems by having zero immigration. But to misunderstand where it's coming there, I think, will actually let these people off the hook and get us to that place because they have that crisis of confidence that we talked about in the beginning. And I think it's guys like you and the Daily Wire that are really, really trying to say to the American people, you have to love what you are. Otherwise, it's like it's finished. Yeah, I got to say, I'm a little bit with Ben here on this spot here because I think we do have this. We're really huge. You know, Britain is the size of

Oregon. We are a huge country. So we can dilute this a lot better. But when you look at Dearborn, Michigan. You think there is some magical number where suddenly, you know, things are not so great. So I think that we may, you may be overlooking the power of an ideology. I mean, people do not just come here and give up their religion. They, you know, especially if they hang together, especially if they're refugees and they're not even called upon to assimilate. So I think that it's a matter of time. If we, if we were to leave the border open, as the left obviously, clearly would happily do. I think we'd be in a European jam pretty quickly. I think, you know, what Europe has done is so absurd to let that many people in relation to their populations come in.

But, you know, it's a lot harder for us to do that. But if we did it, we'd be in the same fix there. But then the question is, so what do we do now? You know, I mean, my ideal solution, of course, would be raise an army, retake, acre, and Antioch and, you know, reestablish a Baldwin's Kingdom or something. But assuming we're not going to do that, within the context of America, what are we supposed to do? This, you know, if you have a purely creedal idea of identity, then, you know, I don't know, half of the people we went to college with would not be American, even if their parents came on the Mayflower. And, you know, if we have this, I don't know, we don't really have a purely racial basis for America, certainly having a long time. And so what, you know, what do you do about the problem? What do you do about the total collapse of social solidarity that this problem represents? I'm for assimilation. I'm for like, yeah. Yeah, I mean, again, I think that we are, in fact, a creedal, country and there is no other definition of Americanism that tends to hold historical water.

The notion that we are, you know, a heritage-based country, meaning that you're more American because you're great, great, great, great, great, great-great-great-grandparents got here, as opposed to your great, great, great-great-great-grandparents got here. That is going to be a very, very difficult proposition to sustain. I don't know. I mean, what is John Jay saying federalist, too? In federalist, he says, I take it as a mark of providence that he doesn't discount the creole, But he says, we all come from the same ancestors.

We all had the same experience of the revolution. We all believe in the same religion, roughly. You know, it's kind of heterodox religion. And that was, I mean, Michael, that was true in 1785 when the country was founded. And let's just be clear that if we were actually going to go by that standard, if we were going to go by the full heritage American standard, the first people get kicked out of the papists. Yeah.

No, obviously. No, the heritage would be, you know, the, look. Oh, no. Oh, no. The heritage would not go in your favor, my sister. No, it certainly would. I have a cigar company called Mayflower's Cigars. And I guess this actually gets to Drew's point, which is, look, we've had the largest demographic shift that's ever taken place anywhere in history has taken place since the Hartzeller Act in 1965. And so you have a major upturning of the demographics of the country. And now, when we talk about, you know, a much larger white share of the population, to your point, Ben, when we talk about white people in the 20th century, we're largely not talking about the Mayflower or Massachusetts Bay colony. We're talking about people who came in later from other parts of Europe.

But I guess to Drew's point, what we used to do is we used to assimilate. I think of this even in like the Book of Ruth, like your people will be my people, your God will be my God. People used to kind of marry into that. There was intermingling. There was a sense that there is an old American stock. but people kind of get grafted in and they move in and out. And it seems to me that's totally gone. And to say that there is no people, you know, that have been here for a long time going back to the Revolution or the Civil War or the Mayflower or what have you. To me, that seems to undercut a really important part of what a nation is. Oh, no, I'm not saying that it's not part of a nation, but to pretend that the chief definition by which we determine Americanism is. Is ancestry is, of course, silly. And not only is it silly, it's historically inaccurate. And if you're going to go back to the original foundations of the country, There were heavy divisions between the states based on the actual ancestry. I mean, that was even when John Jay was writing that, that was glossing over some pretty

significant distinctions between, say, the Scotch, Irish, and the English. There were real conflicts that have existed since the foundation of the country over exactly this sort of stuff. And now we say white, but for a while, there was some pretty, you know, significant anger about Swedish imports and German imports and Italian imports and Irish imports. And if you go back to the no-nothings of the 1840s, they were not protesting against Muslim immigration or Jewish immigration. They were protesting in large part against Catholic.

immigration coming from places like Ireland and Italy. And so, or in pre-Italy, Italy, right? The Italian areas, because there's surge of Mento hadn't happened yet. I call it North Africa in Sicily. This is what's so distorting about the left's racial play that they've made and they've imposed on all of us really well is that, you know, we're a British country. We're a British-based country. And people like me and Ben and Baccio, who are not British-based are perfectly happy to say, yeah, that was a good idea. We will take that idea. But when you say, oh, it's a white person's You know, the British are white, and therefore it's a problem. I mean, you're talking nonsense to begin with, but it also is, you know, it's debilitating to the assimilating process.

You know, the assimilation process is, yeah, we have a British means of politics, a British way of thinking. It goes back to Rome and Greece and Jerusalem. And, you know, it all comes through Britain to us. We're proud of that. We should be proud of that. And we should learn it that way. We should be thankful to the British. We should be thankful to our idea.

ancestry and believe, we have to believe, we have no choice but to believe that that ancestry can be passed down to people of all different colors and backgrounds. And that's why, I mean, I'm with Ben on this. I don't really care what color of my American neighbor is. I do care very deeply that he is on board with the American project, with a very specific project. It is not just any project. It is a constitutional individualist, you know, project. And it is, to some degree, a Christian project in the broadest sense of that word and the Enlightenment sense of that word. But it's not a racial project.

This is the thing that I think really matters about the Constitution and Declaration, particularly, which are the sort of secular hallmark of Americanism. The reason that that's important is because if you look at how the left treats these documents, they treat them as an outgrowth of whiteness and therefore bad. They make the argument that these documents are white people documents and they were written by white people

for the preservation. I mean, this is Nicole Hannah-Jones' entire argument in the 1619 project. is that all these ideas are just an outgrowth of domineering patriarchal whiteness, and therefore they are inherently bad. And so when you grant the argument that they are, quote, unquote, an outgrowth of whiteness, as opposed to an outgrowth of great human brains coming from a particular culture, for sure, and coming from a particular place, but applicable to people who can, in fact, join the team,

then the country can't grow in any other way, and you can't create a definition of Americanism that isn't going to end up, first of all, I'm not sure I see the pragmatic solution here. I think that you're basically throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It seems to me that we can absolutely hold by a creedal country and keep people out we don't want here on the basis of that creed. Whereas I think that if you go to a sort of more heritage American ancestry-based system for determining Americanism, first of all, you will never win an election just on a pragmatic level. There aren't enough people who are like that. And, I mean, the number of descendants of the Mayflower is a very, very small percentage of the population of the United States.

It just is. It's a 10 million probably, yeah. Which is small percentage. smaller than the, that is smaller than the Muslim population of the United States or close to it, right? So now you're talking in fractions of percentages here. You're talking about 3% of the population is a Mayflower descendant. So if you want to build an entire political movement on the descendants of the Mayflower, I congratulate you on never winning an election for the next to time. No, here, listen, I'll clarify my point before, before Batty gives us the real answer to everything.

I guess my point is, the reason I recoil from this idea that we're a creedal country is that America did not understand herself that way for a long time. There was a creedal aspect to it without question. But this is why I keep going back to the Bible, and I think that Ruth joining the Israelites is so important to it. I obviously believe in assimilation and intermarriage. Ruth is in the genealogy of Christ, you know, and then they go to Bethlehem, actually, you know, right after she leaves the Moabite. So, like, I'm a big believer in that, but it just seems to me that you need to have three aspects to a country. Yes, you need to have some kind of creed, some kind of common belief. Yes, you have to have common sacrifice. This is what Boaz says to Ruth,

actually. He says, you know, the reason that I, who's calling me? Is this Boaz? This is what happens when you don't turn your phone off on your show. You have what Boaz says to Ruth, which is, look, I'm accepting you because of what you've done for your mother-in-law, what you've done for us. So there's a sacrificial component. People Americanized through wars and all that kind of stuff. But there is a people component to it too. And I guess the reason a lot of people recoil from this purely abstract creedal aspect is because I think we all know if you just totally swapped out the people and you put a bunch of Tibetans in America with the same geography and the same founding documents, you'd get a different country. And the way we know this is we tried it. We tried it in Liberia,

we tried it in Mexico and it doesn't work. It's not about the color of your skin or something like that. It's about the traditions that are passed through people that are ineffable, that are not just abstract and ideological. And I think that part's important and that's been downplayed in liberal modernity. Batia, am I 100% right about that? I hear both sides. I think the reason that the heritage argument is gaining traction is because white people, white men have been spoken about in such a disgusting way by the left who control the culture and the media for so long. And so people feel that if they belong to that group, they've been disinherited. And in a large part, if that is, you know, to the extent

that you're a white man who happens to be working class, it's my view that you have been by the elites of this country. So I understand why that conversation is on the rise. To me, a nation is, I think you're right, Michael, there's a shared set of cultural practices. There's a shared set of values, but there's also has to be a sense of obligation. And again, I think this is why it comes back off into this question of who the people are. Like, obviously, it's very easy to feel a sense of obligation to your own children, to your husband, to your parents, to your siblings. It's much harder to feel a sense of obligation to people who live very far away. And it's supposed to be that way.

That got perverted by the left. They find it much easier to feel a sense of obligation to strangers across the world than here. And that's perverse. That's disgusting, right? That's the problem with this country that we had for so long, is no one felt a sense of responsibility to the heartland, to the working class. And because of that challenge, I think people feel that if you just have a creed, how could you possibly have a nation?

it's not enough to bind people together. This country really proved, I think, that that was not the case for a long time. And until 1965, when suddenly you went from 4% of the country being foreign-born to right now, it's the highest it's ever been in American history, 16% foreign-born. That's bad. That's too much. That's why I think we need to have zero immigration. But to me, it's a lot more about the dignity of the average American who was forgotten for so long.

And to what extent is that dignity coextensive with? importing, you know, a slave cast to undercut their wages. It has less to do with the cultural pieces because I do see in immigrants this real desire to join the amazing project. I mean, people who immigrate here legally, they often talk about like being granted the greatest privilege on earth, which they have been. And I think the real problem comes from just this immense lack of gratitude that you hear from so many immigrants today that is such a turnoff to people. It's just appalling to have been given this gift. And, feel ungrateful. And so when you hear people talking like that, I think that really triggers a lot of

people, including the president. So yeah, I guess that's shared sense of obligation. And the question is how much immigration is that coextensive with? And I think we've really reached the limit. You know, I think I agree with you, Batchie. I think Americans have gotten a raw deal. But if you want to get a good deal, you need to go to Dailywire.com right now because you can get 40% off your Christmas sale membership. And you get everything. You get ordinarily, I'd say you just get us schlubs. But now you're getting Batya on this episode of this show. It's very exciting. You get a full year of premium entertainment. You get culture shaping documentaries. You get all of the great shows, the Michael Knowles show, but you get the other shows too.

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All right. Moving on, President Trump's first year of his second term, heading into, obviously, the second year, third year, fourth year, then the first year of the third term. And we got a lot of runway ahead of us. What are the biggest dubs and the biggest L's, Mr. Shapiro? Okay, so biggest W is, number one, shutting the border. Obviously, I've been talking about it, but shutting the border is the biggest win because it's something that he could just do. and it also happened to debunk the gigantic lie that we need a huge gigantic piece of legislation to legalize 20 million people in order for us to shut the southern border. And he just did it like day one and it hasn't been a problem since.

It's actually turned into a bit of a problem for the Republicans that he solved the problem because it's no longer an issue Americans are worried about. So it's kind of dropped off of their list of issues that they care about as it's become less of a threat to them in their daily lives. That's obviously his biggest W. I would obviously add his bombing of the nuclear reactor at Fordo, which I think is one of the great historic. foreign policy moves of my lifetime, the greatest actually, because it was a single strike that basically destroyed the Iranian nuclear program and it required nothing more than a bomb coming from a plane. And that was our intervention. And I really like those sorts of interventions. I think those interventions are great. His biggest L. So I will give him an L on the tariff policy.

I know Bouti, totally disagrees with me on this. I'll give him an L on the tariff policy, mainly because not because it's been as bad as I think everybody was fearful that it could be. The GDP last quarter was excellent. I think that it has created a sense of disquiet in the investment community and among regular Americans because they don't know kind of what's coming next. And obviously that's very Trumpian is that you don't know what's going to happen. But when it comes to an economy, you actually kind of do want to know what's going to happen. And so a lot of the dyspepsia about affordability is really not his fault.

It's Joe Biden's fault because of the massive inflation under Biden. but people are reading the disquiet that they're feeling about what happens next into things like tariff policy. And then I will say, I think that what he said about Rob Reiner this week was truly one of the low points of his presidency. I thought it was really, really, really bad. I thought that, you know, most people don't think of Rob Reiner as a political figure. They think of Rob Reiner as the guy from when Harry met Sally. When you have a case of Rob Reiner and his wife who were found slain in their home allegedly murdered by their own son, I mean, not a great time to start mouthing off about, you know, how terrible.

while Rob Reiner was politically. And so the president's comments on that I thought were, again, I'm very much used to the president's mode of speaking. We've been doing this for a decade. And I am not a person who jumps to outrage as stuff the president tweets. I'm the guy who's constantly saying that on his epitaph, it will say Donald Trump 45th and 47th president, the guy said a lot. So like I get it. But that one was uniquely pretty egregiously bad. And I don't think that that helps him in any serious way, either morally or politically. about you? Well, I'm so glad I'm here for this episode so that the Daily Wire viewers will understand how wrong Ben is about the tariffs.

Because otherwise, who knows, they might get the really wrong impression. This is like a high point of American policy of use of the executive branch. I mean, come on, reversal of six decades of terrible, terrible economic policy that sold out the American working class and robbed them of their dignity. reversed in a single day, April 2nd, Liberation Day. I know that I feel very liberated. On a more serious note, I do think the tariffs are incredible. I mean, you have these trade deals with Japan. Who thought Japan's market would ever open to our cars?

South Korea, the EU. You have $20 trillion committed from the Middle East into manufacturing, reshoring here. Factories are being built. You've got Pfizer, which was $4.000. forced to give us for the first time most favored nation prices on drugs, which will save vulnerable senior citizens thousands of dollars because of tariffs. The close border that you love, Ben, you know how we got that? We got that because of tariffs because he threatened Mexico and Scheinbaum had to put up or shut up and they started policing their side. We cannot control that

border without the help from the Mexican side. It just doesn't work. So I just think that this was just somebody, I was on a CNN panel and one of the panelists was like, like besmirching Trump. And she goes, he thinks tariffs are like a Swiss Army knife. Oh, you got a corkscrew. Oh, you got a scissors. Oh, you got a knife. And I was like, exactly. It does everything.

So I got to say the tariffs, incredible. And I think the basis for so much of the stuff that we like on other fronts. And then for me, the L I would say is I don't really understand how he's using pardons. I just think that he'll often use them in a way that undercarriage. cuts the things that I think he's doing so well, whether it's, you know, pardoning this Honduran drug lord or I think, you know, the J-Sixers who hit cops, you know, he's so pro-law in order, he's so back the blue. So I don't really understand. I have to say how he uses the power of the pardon. I think probably between him and Joe Biden, we're kind of understanding that this was like

kind of a weird thing to have like no limits on in the first place. But I don't like that. I don't like how he's been doing that. Drew? Well, I completely agree with Batcha about the tariffs. I think the whole thing was an active hysteria. And he's used them very well. He used them as a bargaining tool and he did the right thing. I agree with Ben that the border is so fantastic that we don't even think about it anymore. I mean, it's just so amazing. For me, the biggest win with Trump is cultural. I mean, the fact that this guy, because, you know, I wrote a novel called true crime in which only the person who had no manners could get to the truth. Only the person who had kind of lax morals could. get to the truth because the left had so wrapped the truth in politeness. And that was like all great art. It was predictive of Donald Trump before Donald Trump created Donald Trump. And I think that because this guy is rude, because he's aggressive, because he's overly aggressive, and says the thing that everybody else is thinking but won't say he has broken the monopoly of the left. With the help of people like us at the Daily Wire and all the other rebel media, he has broken the grip of the left on our

communications and on what we're allowed to say and the political correctness which had become a stranglehold on our thought and on our free speech. And I think that's beautiful. And I think it's one of the reasons that what he said about Rob Reiner was so bad because he makes that toxic. He makes his freedom to say things toxic when he says something that actually should not have been said. All he had to do was keep silent. For me, his biggest loss, and I truly do not understand what he's up to here and why people aren't thinking this through is this state capitalism where the government is supposed to own a piece of private businesses. I understand the benefits of that, but it seems to me obvious that it's a train coming down the track to free enterprise.

Because ultimately, if the government owns 10% of Intel and I'm in my garage and I invent something better than Intel has, I can't build a business like Facebook or something that just comes out of a guy's mind. I can't build that business if the government is thinking, hey, I don't want you to take my profits that I'm getting from Intel. I should be able to compete with Intel just by the virtue of having a brilliant idea. And he's making that less likely. And of course, since it is a fascist thing, the left is going to love it and they're going to use it against us. But so I just think, I think the border and the culture have been immeasurably improved by Donald Trump. But I think he sometimes does things without quite thinking through the consequences once we lose power.

And I think state capitalism is one. I'm just glad that none of you took my answers. I agree with much of what we said. I think the biggest W of the first year was the personnel. Because there were so many personnel problems in the first administration. In his defense, he had not really been in politics before he was getting some good advice, some bad advice. But there were some real clunkers in that first term. I think the machine is working much, much better now.

It's just so efficient. Stuff is really getting done. Trump is not getting credit for it. Even on the deportations, he's being criticized from the right, and it's bogus. They're using bogus numbers. The official number on formal deportations is well over half a million. When you factor in the easily measurable self-deportations, you're getting up toward two million or more people who were here, who should not have been here or foreign born,

before Trump entered office, into leaving now. And that's very, very impressive. But the way that works, it's, look, Stephen Miller was in the first term, too. But there's just a machine that is working a lot better now. So I think the personnel improvements have been really great. The biggest L to me, I'm actually surprised no one brought this up. The Epstein rollout, the binders. And I just felt it was, I don't, I don't see any evidence whatsoever that Trump is seriously implicated in Epstein or he's trying to cover up for himself or any, I think that's totally bogus from the left. I just think that the PR rollout of that was so egregiously mishandled. It was this complete

unforced error. And I think it really mattered with the base because what a lot of people will say is, well, this Epstein thing, it's a side issue, it's no big deal. There's no people over promised and under-delivered. And, you know, why do you care about this, who done it? But I think for the base, Epstein

represents this symbol of corruption, of elite corruption. You got Bill Clinton hang on this guy, Bill Gates, all these people. And, you know, the way it's described is truly out of a cartoon villain, you know, this creepy petto island where all the elites are gathering to sleep with teenage girls. And it's just, you know, horrifying. And the fact that we keep being promised there's going to be this rollout of it and then that doesn't deliver, that I think

was an unforced error. And obviously, they're trying to make up for that now, and I suspect they will. But in terms of messaging that was rough, that said, though, compared to everything else it was going on, it's a relatively minor error. I think it was a very, very successful first year. I think he way outperformed expectations on the economy, on the tariffs, on basically everything. Before Ben rips me a new one on tariffs, can I defend the president on the Intel and on the Epstein very quickly? We gave Intel, was it $50 billion in the Chips and Science Act? So, Andrew, I'm sure you probably don't like that. Like, you would probably consider that to be maybe too much or what have you. Like, you'll probably see that as crony capitalism. Like, the government

shouldn't have given it to them in the first place. But to me, it's like, we gave you $50 billion and all we're asking in return is 10% stake. Like, that seems pretty fair to me. I mean, that's, that's a better deal than you get on Shark Tank. That's for sure. So I feel like that's, and I think it is important that we, I love the chips and science act, because we have to compete with China on chips. So we have to be involved in this. I'm happy as a taxpayer to subsidize it, but I want to make sure I have a say in what happens, and I want to see some returns on that. On the Epstein thing, I got to tell you, Michael, this is a great story.

I tell people this a lot because it happened to me so many times, but I remember the first time this started bubbling up in the content creator's sphere. And I had a guy ask me, this guy, like, works in a bar, middle-aged guy, lifetime Republican, loves Trump, former cop. He was like, wait a minute, who is this Epstein and why am I supposed to care about him? And like that is exactly how I feel like normies, like the normie, like working class person feels about like they just do not care about Jeffrey. Yeah, I'm talking about the base, really. I agree. I think a lot of norms. But that is the base. I mean, that that is the base. It's not the people who are like writing a comment on every YouTube video and on Twitter all day. You know what I mean? Like I feel like there's a real divide between people who make money off content and then like working class people who are the base of the Republican.

party. And I feel like Trump knows how these people think and he knew that they didn't care about Epstein, which is why he was like, I don't care about it either. I don't know. I actually agree with Batya on this. And I did since the beginning and I got in trouble with my listeners for it because I said. With your base. With your base. There you go. Well, because Trump, because Trump came out and he said, I just don't think Americans care very much about this. And by the polling data, he was right. I also agree with you, Michael, that it was a botched rollout because the reality is that when you have a buildup of such conspiratorial size, And then what you basically do is you kind of in the dead of night, drop a note.

By the way, no one else getting prosecuted, and we're done here. Like, you actually do have to, that was Pam Bondi screw up and really she should own it. I mean, the reality she should have done a full Q&A, an explanation of what had happened, where there was over-promising, where there was under-delivery and all the rest of it. As far as the terrorist by, listen, I hope that you're right. I mean, honestly, for the sake of the country, I hope that you're right, and that the terror policy ends up being, you know, a net benefit as opposed to what I think it likely will be, which is a blip. I think that it's a misuse of executive power.

that's power that was given to the legislative branch, not the executive. I think that it's very likely the Supreme Court strikes it down. I also think that if you are going to negotiate better trade deals, which I'm very much in favor of, then you ought to negotiate those on a nation-to-nation basis as opposed to blanket tariffing the entire world at once, and then having to sort of walk back your tariffs against China and then ratchet them back up and ratchet them back down. And so, in other words, I'm not saying that every tariff ever is a bad idea. I do think that the notion that we're going to reshore manufacturing has not been borne out by the evidence. The big gain from the tariffs, financially speaking, has been the amount of tariff revenue that the United States government has taken in.

We'll see how much of that has to be kicked back to the companies or how all of that's going to get dealt with if the Supreme Court strikes it down. It has not destroyed the economy in the way that I think a lot of people were fearful of. It's created a sort of a temporary spike in some segments of price inflation, but that seems to be outpaced by the deregulation that Trump is doing in the AI sphere, which is generating extraordinary returns in the stock market right now. And so it's always very difficult to kind of find like a single factor analysis. in the economy and say this is responsible for everything. We're doing great because of tariffs or we're doing great because of AI. It's all a bunch of factors that are going in.

The point that I'm saying is that there's a disconnect in the American mind between how people feel about the economy and then the numbers on the economy, which continue to be pretty strong, right? We have a 4.4% unemployment rate. Inflation is down from 11% under Biden to 3%. We are seeing massive GDP growth in Q3. And yet Americans are feeling kind of sketchy about the economy. And I think a lot of that is because of the uncertainty.

and all of this leads up to the midterms next year where my prediction is that Republicans are going to absolutely hammer. I think Republicans are going to do quite poorly next year in the midterms. And I think that Republicans who are sort of pretending that away or pretending that that's not a significant possibility

at the very least are not doing us a favor. And I think that that makes a difference because according to the Cali She markets, right, Kauci is one of our sponsors. The chances that President Trump gets impeached by 2028 are above 50%. That's a referendum about whether Democrats win Congress? Because obviously if Democrats are not in charge of Congress, then he is not

going to be impeached. If they are in charge of Congress, he is in charge of Congress. I think that's a strong possibility right now that, you know, right now things look bad. But it really, and you've been saying this for a long time, Ben, it really depends on where the economy is when we get there. It's a long time out. And I think you're right. The economy is doing well. The one thing you never want to do as a politician is to tell the people that they don't see what they see and they don't feel what they feel. I suspect that the high prices, which of course haven't gone down, you know, has the effect of higher wages, because wages, are actually outstripping the rise of prices hasn't been felt yet.

And I think as we get closer to that, it may well be. And I think Trump has got to get on board with the messaging and tell people, you know, take a look at this and take a look at that because I think things are getting better. And there's a good chance they'll get a lot better before the election, in which case I think it's just too early to say that the Republicans get pasted like that. Okay, before we go, I do want to know, because I have an answer on this and I never go see the movies. what was the worst movie of the year? I didn't know that...

When did they even stop making movies? In my view, it was like 2016. They just essentially stopped making movies. Did you... One, did you all go to the movies this year? And two, what was your least favorite? Bataia. I went to the movies.

I saw Wicked One and Wicked Two, but they were both great. I just thought they were both fantastic for what they were. The message was, like, really powerful. I saw a really bad Netflix movie that I felt like embodied the terribleness of Netflix and what will probably be the terribleness of all movies if it's

able to make this big acquisition of, is it Warner Brothers? Yes. Which it was called Electric State. And I don't know if you guys saw it, but it was basically about how robots become sentient, and then they round them up and put them in a concentration camp because they wreak destruction and havoc and did terrorism, but somehow the movie was still on the side of the robots. And then, but it was also like, you know, the premise is fine. It's like you could have a whole movie with, and the theme is, well, what makes you a human? You know, they wanted you to sympathize with the robots, right? Like, okay, well, what makes you worthy of sympathy as a human being? Like, it could have been this big theme and this big analysis. And it was just like, no, you're supposed to sympathize with the robots because they make them look like illegal immigrants, you know, like the way that they're like. And it was just so lazy and empty and, you know, snide remarks instead of grand themes that are like of real importance to human beings, you know, like what are the limits

of sympathy? Like, what do you owe each other? What do you owe a thing that has, what is sentience? Nobody cares because it's a Netflix movie, you know? So I just feel really, really upset about this merger and like what's going to happen to like entertainment. Thank God we have the Daily Wire, which is making wonderful, wonderful culture. Okay, so, I mean, first of all, we could have stopped all of that movie.

If only we had tariffed the robots, clearly. That was obviously the necessity. The quirk screw in the Swiss Army knife to stop all of that from happening. The worst movie that I personally saw this year is very likely to win best picture, according to the Cali markets. Again, one of our sponsors.

Right now, one battle after another is coming in at 77% in the Calshree markets to win Best Picture, which makes me super sad. I hated it. I thought it was horrifyingly bad. I thought it was really, really bad.

I like Paul Thomas Anderson generally. I won't say that I love him. I'm not like a giant PTA stand, I really love aspects of their will be blood, but I don't love the movie overall. I really love aspects of the master, but I don't love the movie overall. I hate one battle after another with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns. I think that it is horrifyingly bad. I think that every character is pasteboard.

I think that the entire plot is ridiculous. I think that the acting is really one note. I think the script is just trash. And the whole thing is basically just about how America is a white supremacist nation that's secretly being run by a cadre. of a polo shirt wearing white people who are trying to harm illegal immigrants and black people. And in a sort of 1973 era ripoff, the basic idea is that there's a terrorist group that's run by a black radical who's straight from the Black Panthers, essentially. And she at the very outset is pregnant with either Leonardo DiCaprio's child or she also has an affair with Sean Penn, who of course is the lead white supremacist agent, who also has a fetish for black ladies.

and it's just, it really is ugly and stupid, frankly. There's, I think, one beautifully sort of shot scene that's a chase scene near the end. But otherwise, I really despise this movie. I think that it was crap. And the fact that it's likely to win Best Picture, you know, just another black mark on the Oscars here. The best movie that I saw this year, I haven't seen anything that I loved loved. I was fine with Wicked 2. I really liked Wicked 1.

I thought Wicked 2 and it was fine. I wasn't in love with it, mainly because I think that the second action, to the musical is deeply flawed as a musical theater nut. And so there wasn't much they could do there. There was a movie that I watched that, again, there were certain aspects of it that I really, really enjoyed. That was Blue Moon with Ethan Amok, which I enjoyed just as sort of a person who really knows Rogers and Hammerstein in musical theater really well, because the whole thing is about Lorenz Hart, who is the lyric writing partner of Richard Rogers before Rogers started, the most successful collaboration in the history of musical theater with Hammerstein. And so the basic

idea is it's the night that Oklahoma is released and Lorenz Hart is realizing that he's now on the back burner. And the whole movie is basically him struggling with his now senescence, like the fact that his career is coming to an end and that he isn't, you know, the kind of toast of the town anymore. Ethan Hawke is really good in it. It's over long. There are parts of it that are talky. They spend too much time with Margot Quali's character who isn't real and they should be spending more time with both Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein. But if you're a musical theater person, the way that I am and you know all the references, it's like a big in joke and it's kind of enjoyable from that angle.

Well, I love action pictures and I went to see Running Man. And literally by the time I got outside into the lobby to validate my parking ticket, I had forgotten what movie I was up. It was such a piece of garbage. And like every movie to me, it's like a remate. It has gorgeous visuals. It is clearly made by somebody who knows how to make movies. And then it falls apart because the guy doesn't know what he believes or what he can say,

what he's allowed to say. And it's just, he hates, you know, corporations. He hates, you know, scarves. He hates reality TV. He doesn't know what to blame for the problems in life. And so that was just complete nonsense. I didn't think one battle after another was as bad as bended, except morally. I thought it was a moral atrocity as so was sinners, which was a deeply well, another

well-made, beautiful movie that was incredibly filled with hatred and racism. I have to say two things. I want to talk about two things that I love very briefly. this weekend my wife and I went to see a very well done reboot of guys and dolls in the theater and I'm in this thing for 10 minutes and a lot of times I think that I'm hypercritical you know I pick everything apart and young people like to think everything is a classic and everything is the greatest thing ever and I think I gee why am I always picking on these things

and I'm sitting there for 10 minutes I turned to my wife and said this is fantastic I mean this is one of the greatest things it's the greatest musical and from one end of it to the other guys and dolls is just one of the great piece of works that has ever come out of the American musical theater, which itself is one of the greatest works that ever come out of America. And I just thought, like, no, it's not me. It's actually, everything is crap. And the other thing I just want to mention because it was completely overlooked. And a lot of people in the critical, you know, a lot of the critics disliked it and dismissed it. But I thought it was really good. It was a film called Mountain Head, which I believe was on Max. I think it was Max or, no, it was Max. And it was written by the

guy who wrote secession, Jesse Armstrong, and it's just a play, essentially. It's a filmed play, and it's just five Silicon Valley guys in a, you know, a kind of retreat in Mountainhead. And it's, I found it really funny, really smart. I don't want to give any of it away, but it's just them trying to figure out how to make their businesses go forward and just absolutely making fun of all of everybody in Silicon Valley in this really smart way. I didn't think it was brilliant. I don't think anything was brilliant that I saw this year except for Guys and Dolls. But I thought, if you can find it, you should take a look at it.

It's really good. Did the Superman movie come out this year? Was that 20-25? Yes, it was. Yeah, that was, now I don't see any movie. They made me see it. Yeah. D.W. did.

And I watched it and it's bad. And if you were just watching it half paying attention, it was just bad because it just wasn't good, you know, it was kind of boring and it was just bad. But if you think about it for five seconds, it was satanically bad. It was like really, like I mean that without a hint of exaggeration, because Superman is, spoiler alert, Superman is a Christ figure in the story. And, you know, he's sent by his dad, whatever, and he, you know, he like does all the good stuff. And but anyway, here is the big twist. We find out the dad, the super dad, is evil. He's really bad. And He sends Superman to go enslaved the whole human race, which means that the story goes from being

this figure of Christianity, this Christian myth, to being a Marcionite myth, to being like heretical, evil, satanic inversion of the religion. And so I hated it. That's all. I mean, we've now discussed many things that we dislike, but friendly fire, which is another thing you may have disliked this. But not because of Batya, Ungar Sargan, who's great. We should charge more for it with Batya here.

We definitely should. We need to upcharge. But Friendly Fire is, in fact, sponsored by Jeremy's Razors, the only Razor brand built on knowing the difference between men and women. Head on over to Jeremy'sraisers.com

for exclusive year-end deals today. I think that's our show. Is that our whole show? I think that is. I think we can be here all the time, please? Sure. We get rid of Ben and Drew, and Ben, me, actually, probably.

I would love that. Okay, thank you to all of you for watching. This Friendly Fire. See you next time. God bless. Ryan Reynolds here for MintMobil. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities.

So do like I did and have one of your assistants assistants to switch you to MintMobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at midmobile.com slash switch. Up front payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. at mintmobile.com.