The War of Art | Book 3 - Beyond Resistance: The Higher Realm

We'll get to more on this in just one second. First, you know, 20 years ago, and a lot has happened in my life. I was 22 years old. I was not yet married. And now, just think back over the past 20 years, wife, five kids, big business, all of it. Well, 20 years of long time, simply safe is now celebrating 20 years. Again, most companies don't make it that long unless they're actually solving a real problem. When you're picking a security system for your home, what you're looking for is peace of mind. The goal is not to obsess over your security. The goal is to never have to think about it again. And that's what I like about simply safe. Those home security systems are designed for after something goes wrong. After the window breaks, after someone gets inside, after your phone buzzes, simply safe approach is different. It's designed to help stop a break in before it happens. 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Nobody else in American politics will tell you this, so I'm going to have to. There is in fact a uniparty. That uniparty is hell bent on bankrupting the country all in the name of populism. I'll explain all of this in just one moment. Plus, believe to the vice president defending his friend Tucker Carlson, Chris Rufo stops by to talk about corruption in California and run height fight infidel takes on the Venice film festival. This is the Ben Shapiro show. So, empires don't die, empires generally commit suicide and empires die the same way by spending too much money. Now they may spend too much money in different ways, but they all die kind of the same way which is they run out of the monies. So the United States, we spent the monies and then we spent more of the monies. And now we are spending all the monies for the rest of time. So this brings us to our first story, our bond markets are right now in a state of total disarray, as PBS reports, interest rates on government bonds are rising again around the world, making borrowing more expensive for consumers and businesses and heightening concerns about whether governments are issuing more debt than financial markets can handle. On Tuesday, the yield on the 10 year treasury, which strongly influences mortgage rates reached 4.8%, that's the highest since early 2025, the five year treasury, which is a benchmark for auto loans, touched its highest level since October 2025 at 4.55%. So for those who don't know the bond markets, basically, the way that it works is, let us say that you buy a bond and the bond returns 10% a year on year. That would be like an amazing bond, but just make the math really, really simple. Hey, so you pay a hundred bucks for the bond every year you receive $10. Hey, so the bond yield is the difference between the price that you paid for the bond and what you receive for the bond and that's what the yield is. So typically that means the price that you pay for the bond and the facial interest rate on the bond, that is the bond yield. So when we say that bond yields are rising, we mean typically that the price for bonds is falling, meaning that there's not a lot of demand for bonds or you're paying a lower price for bonds and the facial rate of interest is exactly the same. What does that actually means? It means if there's no market for bonds, people don't want to buy bonds. Now, sometimes that's happening because people would rather invest in the stock market because things are just going awesome. Sometimes what it means is that people don't want to buy bonds because they are very nervous that anyone is ever going to be able to pay that off except in inflated currency. It is the latter thing that seems to be happening right now. And this is having some broad spillover effect in the American economy. Mortgage rates have now hit their highest level in over a year. According to Yahoo, the average 30 year fixed mortgage rate was 6.71% this week through Wednesday that is the highest since June of 2025. And again, all this is happening because people, central banks, other governments, they are realizing that we in the United States are never going to stop spending ever. Now, I'm old enough to remember when people actually cared about this topic in 2010. The Tea Party was very, very into this topic. But since then, we've decided the American people are either too stupid or too greedy to actually handle the reality, which is that we spend way too much money in this year United States. Here is a chart showing the US national debt as a percentage of GDP. As you can see, the actual extraordinary explosion in the US national debt really begins around not the Bush administration, but the advent of the Obama administration. It just explodes. Again, this is the US federal debt projected as a percentage of our GDP. And the source of the Congressional Budget Office. And as you see, it explodes from somewhere in the 35% range in the 2000s to what will be about 120% of our GDP by 2035 in 2024 was almost 100%. And the reason that our federal debt is increasing is because our spending looks kind of the same. Here is government spending. Here's what that looks like annually. Look at the growth in government spending. My government spending has just increased and increased and increased and it will continue to increase. And this chart, by the way, cuts off in 2020. It's gotten way, way worse since 2020, way worse. We are never going to stop spending. Ever. Because we do have a uniparty. Both parties now agree that government is generally the solution to our problems. Neither party seems truly committed to the reality that free markets not only are fairer and better. Not only do they create prosperity and innovation, but if you do the reverse, if you regulate and you tax and you welfare everything, you destroy your own country. And again, this is a sea change in the nature of American politics that has happened over the course of the last couple of decades and well enough to remember when this was not the case. President Trump back in 2016, pretty famously changed the nature of the game in politics on the right side of the off by saying he would never touch the entitlement programs. Again, he was doing that because he was a populist, meaning it is always popular to tell people you're not going to touch the entitlement programs because people like their government checks. But is that fiscally responsible? Of course not. He was Trump in 2016. And we're going to become rich again and we're going to become great again. And I'm not going to cut social security like every other Republican and I'm not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid. Every other Republican is going to cut. And even if they wouldn't, they don't know what to do because they don't know where the money is. I do. Hey, so again, that was the case he made back in 2016 and now this is large scale embraced by most of the Republican party. So much so that Alexander Ocasio-Cortez who wants to run for president in 2028 and is in fact a socialist, she is looking forward to the Democrats taking Congress in the upcoming midterm election. And she was asked what she thinks Democrats would be able to do with Trump and her first answer was maybe we can spend more on Medicaid. Is there anything you got you would think that Democrats could work with President Trump on these next two years? I know defiance is a big priority, but is there anything you think that you that Democrats, a Democratic majority could work with President Trump on? Well, you know, maybe there's a world where we're able to restore a lot of the devastation cuts to Medicaid. And I know that many people who consider themselves MAGA rely on Medicaid and they don't deserve to suffer because of the horrifying cuts, trillion dollar in cuts in healthcare. And so I know that the House is more than willing, should we take the majority to pass a reconciliation bill that fixes a lot of that? Again, the reason that she's pushing that is because she believes there will be serious pressure brought to bear on Republicans to spend more money on welfareism. And so I back in the 1990s, Republicans and Democrats agreed. We need to reign in the welfare state by doing some welfare reform. And now you're not even supposed to touch that stuff and so that's story number one. 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Now our publicans have always largely agreed that government is corrupt, Democrats, because Trump is the president have now decided that government is corrupt. But here's the thing, the American people are not wrong. Government is, in fact, corrupt. There's tremendous corruption in our current government, not just of the top levels for years and years and years from the Biden crime family to the Trump circle. Again, lots of people clear in the bag in those circles. That's just real. But it is rampant throughout the system. We're going to talk with Chris Rufo later from Manhattan Institute about the kinds of welfare fraud that are occurring in places like California. Here is the sad reality. When you turn the federal government into the most powerful entity on planet Earth, capable of making people rich or poor, of regulating and taxing you into submission and poverty or upsubsidizing and regulatory capturing you into great wealth, the natural result is corruption. I mean, that's how it works. John Dillinger robbed banks because that's where the money was and people do corruption because that's where the money is. Of course, people believe the government is corrupt because it is corrupt. No one in human history has ever worried about the corruption of a small powerless government because again, if it's small and powerless, it can't do much. But when you have an overweening government that is spending seven trillion dollars a year, it turns out there's an awful lot of corruption. And the American people know that but they don't want to recognize the correlation between the size of government and the size of corruption. This brings us to our third story. Bernie Sanders trying to destroy AI. So let's assume that the national that is baked into the cake, which at this point it is. Let's assume that we are very soon going to be paying more on the interest on the national debt than we are paying for our military, which is true. Let's assume that there is no desire on the part of the American public to radically inflate the currency or radically increase its own taxes or radically cut, which are usually the three ways out of a massive fiscal disaster. You either have to inflate the currency and pay people back in meaningless dollars or you have to radically cut austerity measures which you don't want to do. Or you have to somehow grow your way out of it. That would be the other thing. You could theoretically grow your way out of it. And this is a case that the GOP is making. You can have your cake you needed to because we have this thing called the AI boom. And the AI boom is going to allow our economy to grow so fast that tax expenditures will go up even faster than the amount of government spending. Hey, that is the case that is being made. And it's not a totally implausible case. Here's the Treasury Secretary. Scott Besson to the G20 talking about growing our way out of this and avoiding global financial crisis. To reiterate that our message of growth, the world is a washing debt post GFC post COVID. And the only way for us to get out of this is to grow our way out of this. And you know, I'm confident that a lot of the leaders are very receptive to this. And again, this is the case being made by most of the smart people in inside the Trump administration is that AI is going to radically increase productivity and efficiency. And that itself is going to allow for radical increases in the rates of GDP growth. And so if you're talking about government spend as a percentage of GDP, you can either reduce the government spend or you can radically increase the GDP. So the idea would be you radically increase growth rates. Kevin Moore, she was the Fed chair. He said the same thing back in April, 2026. What we call AI in a couple of years, we'll just call business. And AI is going to make almost everything cost less. And the US can be a big winner. And it's a hugely exciting moment. If I were to step back for a minute, I were the president. What I'd be worried about is a central bank that doesn't see any of that. A central bank that is stuck with models from 1978 governance from a prior period and don't recognize we could be at the front end of a productivity boom. And if I were the president, I'd be worried that they might not see him. And again, he is right about that. Also, it happens to be that either we are going to win the AI race or China will win the AI race. AI is not going to disappear. So either we capture those gains here in the United States or we are the consumers for the gains of others outside the United States. President Trump understands this. Again, President Trump, I radically disagree with him when it comes to government spending, but he's not wrong on innovation. On that side, he's actually pretty good. Here's the president talking about this on GB News yesterday. Are you concerned about the future with AI? Are we doing enough to protect jobs? One of the jobs is going to be massive. AI is going to be positive. There's some negatives, but that'll be straight enough. Do you think? And we're building plants and data centers, which you know, data centers are actually fabulous. Hey, so again, this is why he is pro this thing is because he understands we're going to have to outgrow our expenditures. And to be real, AI is extraordinary. I mean, it's getting better and better and better day by day. Open AI, put out an ad for Chatchy PT 6. And the capacity of AI is extraordinary. It's amazing. And as I've said before, I don't think that you ought to be afraid of AI. I think that you ought to be treating AI like a tool. It is a very sophisticated screwdriver. It does things for you. I think that beliefs in the immediate takeover of AI that it's going to be better than you at everything. And then you will have nothing to add to the process. I think that's overstated. I don't think that's real, but let's be clear. AI is in fact a transformative technology. Here is the ad for Chatchy PT 6. Create a yellow circle there. Can you draw me a small triangle? Sure. Done. Okay, take this and make it the window of a rocket ship. I like this, but can you make it a lot more detail? Your yellow circle is now the window on a rocket. Okay, this is awesome. Now make it a 3D model in Blender. Opening Blender. Okay, so I mean again, it's demonstrating that you think it and the and Astra can do it. For next season's rain wear for retailers, make sure that it feels really high-end and that it's colorful. Make it fun. Right, I can help with that. Can you go to eBay and make this listing of this table I bought a few years ago at a flea market? It's this wild orange table. Sure. Okay, yeah, this is awesome. I want you to make a 3D game where I'm ducking asteroids. Using the arrow keys to move around and I'm using space to boost. Yep, I'm building the game. Also, I'm a little hungry. Can you get me some beef and rice from that spot I ordered from last week? Looking into ordering food. So my law firm needs a licensing agreement template. Can you generate a draft template? Again, I mean, it is incredible and it will make your life significantly more efficient. Now, I do think that human expertise is going to be needed in order to make what they're doing better, right? You're gonna have to play with the AI, meaning that it is a tool that you use and it has a feedback. Okay, fine. Put all of your questions about AI to the side. Just on an economic level for a second, AI is the only thing. The only thing that is currently on the horizon that allows us to at least theoretically outgrow the massive debt problems that we are currently incurring, which means the Bernie Sanders communist immediately wants to just like China. Quash AI. He wants to kill it. So here is Bernie Sanders, an old man who doesn't know what a computer is explaining that the government should stop all of this. If the leaders of the major AI companies acknowledge that they are losing control of their extremely dangerous technology, to my mind, it is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced and even more dangerous. We need an immediate pause on advanced AI development and a permanent ban on super intelligence, an artificial mind smarter than any human, capable of operating independently beyond our control. Okay, so what he's actually proposing, apparently, is a ban on what he calls so-called artificial super intelligence, saying that a summer hacking spree by rogue open AI agents had revealed the dangers of the technology getting out of control. Well, again, it was then brought under control. And he said, quote, I understand that people will call me a lover, that they will call me an alumnus, but I would rather be called an alumnus. And somebody fell asleep at the switch, dude, you're falling asleep in the middle of your oatmeal. And the idea that Bernie Sanders is going to restrict innovation. This person was not developed a useful thing his entire life and has been, as I have said, one million times at this point, a leech on the ass of American society is astonishing. It's astonishing. Unfortunately, the anti-tech blowback is quite real. People are concerned about the future. They are used to the status quo, where we can just spend money endlessly without ever having to pay for anything or increase productivity. And so the anti-tech backlash is very real. It is reflecting in everything from opposition to data centers to mythological issues with flock, and again, flock is its own issue. But what you are seeing is Republicans are trying to do a routine where they both support data centers, but also are trying to find ways to rhetorically oppose data centers, because again, populism is the idea that the people are always right. When in reality, it turns out that people made tub thumping by Trump a one-by-hit. So sometimes the people are wrong. In any case, you were Senator Bernie Moreno doing this. They're going to raise our electricity prices. They're going to eventually put us out of work, and our taxpayer dollars are going to support the construction of these things. I mean, the worst sales pitch in the history of sales pitches. I mean, who would be for that? So we have to acknowledge that and say we screwed up. That's not what this is about. Number one, no tax incentives. I don't want a single taxpayer dollar going to support a data center period. I mean, that's fine with me. I'm fine with those taxpayer dollars. But again, the kind of we have to we have to humor everybody in their opposition to data centers is a bad idea. because what you're actually doing is you're incentivizing people to stop the development of the technologies that theoretically could save the economy. So our politicians keep telling us that actually the way to fix the economy is not through deregulation or through innovation, but through government subsidization and regulation. And then politicians again on all sides of the aisle, this is a bipartisan issue, this is a uniparty thing now, a wrecked straw man in order to argue in favor of government involvement in the economy when in reality innovation and free markets are in fact the only way out. Yes, that does not mean that capitalism is all pure joy because again, Joseph Schumpeter, the economist, he's correct when he says there is creative destruction that when you build something new, the old thing basically falls apart that when you build the car, then all the wheel rides go unemployed. But that is also the only road to productivity and future growth and better things and better lifestyles. And yes, supporting gigantic welfare states. So instead we have politicians who are basically just pandering and claiming that free markets are an elephant that you can ride and you can direct those free markets and again, this is not unique to the left. The right is doing this as well and I like Secretary of State Marco Rubio quite a lot as I've made clear. But when Marco Rubio says the democratic capitalism deindustrialized America, what deindustrialized America was actually the machines, the vast majority of jobs that were lost in the United States in the industrial sector were technology to away, the reason that factories relocated was not because the worker in Bangladesh is better than the worker in the United States is because we unionized capitalism in other words was not the problem, it was the anti-capitalism that was the problem. Here's Secretary of State Rubio. There was this fantasy really that the whole world would become a free enterprise democracies and that everyone would look like us. That ran into reality, the reality that that is not how human events have ever worked that the nation states still does matter, nationalism is still real, national borders still matter and that countries are going to always act in their best interest. But the result of it is that it deindustrialized America. We lost our ability and our capacity to make things and not just big things, not just the kinds of big machinery and things that we normally identify with industry. But even some of the most basic components that are necessary that underpin economic life, especially in the 21st century. Again, one of the big lies that you hear about the industrialization, yes, we deindustrialized in terms of fewer jobs in heavy manufacturing, but we still will make things. We have an extraordinary productivity growth, right? The productivity growth in manufacturing is quite real. Manufacturing output from 1990 to 2024 grew at an average of 1.2% per year. Many hours worked declined at 0.9%, per year, which means that manufacturing labor productivity grew 2.1% annually. So fewer workers, more things, is actually what happened. Nowadays we have all these different tools and gadgets to optimize sleep, sleep trackers and apps, rooms of users, mouth tapes, supplements, elaborate nighttime routines. 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This is what JD Vance is promoting yesterday, again, JD Vance and Marco Ruby are very much on the same page economically actually in some ways. You need of course a healthy financial sector to get investments into the right industries into the right companies to support the amazing entrepreneurs, some of whom we have here today, but you cannot run an economy entirely on services and finance. You have to have a foundation and that foundation is always going to be making stuff and that's of course what manufacturing is. That principle has really underlined, I would say all of the Trump administration's economic policies. Okay, but when you keep saying that sort of stuff, you know what's not making stuff in the way that people not working with their hands, not people, not working with their hands, data centers, right? So basically our fiscal house is on fire and we've already decided that we as a country are not going to put out that fire by restructuring our entitlements, right? We are not going to put water on that fire, no way. And now we are going to lock all the doors and borrow the windows and burn alive in the house because we know that if we open the windows or open the doors, that might mean technological developments that we can't control. And this brings us to our fourth story, challenges on the foreign front. So according to the Associated Press, the European Union on Wednesday weighed how to best respond to an attempted drone attack at a German airport, blamed on Russia, a struggle to find new ways to meet the challenge without resorting to military means. Yeah, it turns out when people attack you sometimes have to use your military, the German government said Tuesday, Russia was responsible for a failed attack at Leipzig, a highly airport on August 4th using a drone laden with explosives. They announced they would shut down a Russian consulate among other measures. The drone was found near a Ukrainian cargo plane that advice was diffused. The airport is a major international freight hub used for providing support to Ukraine. So the French and the Germans are protesting strongly while I'm sure that the Russians will take that under advisement. Meanwhile, the leader of the UK Conservative Party says that Russia could certainly attack a NATO country as Kimmy Badenak, Russia could certainly attack a NATO country by 2030. Russia could launch an attack on NATO as soon as 2030. Not enough politicians in parliament have fully appreciated what that means, and by that of course I mean Labour politicians. What this means is that within the next four years, the UK could be at war with the world's biggest nuclear-armed state. Because under Article 5, an attack on any NATO country is an attack on all of them. And she's not wrong about that, obviously Russia is pushing back against NATO in the belief that the United States is not going to answer the Article 5 call, or in the belief that basically if you attack any of the Baltics, if you attack Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, then everybody will just go, "Oh well, you know that's a thing that happens." Meanwhile, the Chinese are harassing Japan. According to the Wall Street Journal, Japanese surveillance has recorded Chinese destroyers passing through the strait near Amami, Oshima, at least ten times this year. That follows zero such transit in 2025. It is on pace to exceed the 15 recorded in 2024. Japan is facing what its officials describe as the most severe security environment since World War II. China is flexing its growing military might, pressing its maritime claims across Eastern Asia and pushing deeper into the western Pacific, where the United States has held sway for years. So here's the thing, our enemies, since our weakness China, Russia, they believe we're vulnerable, and they're challenging us because of it. Well, what's the reason for that? Well, first of all, we kind of made ourselves vulnerable. We decided to fund our entire welfare state on the basis of debt. China owns about $600 billion of our bond. If they even threaten to sell them tomorrow, guess what happens to the bond markets? They crater still further. But Russia and China and Iran, all of our enemies in the end are banking on something else, that the United States, we make the same choice that the British Empire once made. And essentially, we decided to embrace declining welfareism instead of economic and military health. So as I said, right at the top, empires typically die because they run out of money. But that can happen in a couple of ways. You can run out of money a couple of ways. Before the advent of democracy and capitalism, empires were very largely supported by their imperialism. You invade a foreign state, you strip it of its resources, you bring that back home. So Rome would conquer foreign lands in order to spread the money around at home or extend its territorial holdings. Empires like Spain would do so not because they wanted a welfare state at home, but because they felt a divine duty to extend territorial holdings, Catholics at expense of Protestants or against the Ottoman Empire or growing in the new world, right? And then you overextend, you run out of money. Since the advent of democratic capitalism, that's not necessarily how it works. And essence, empires now choose suicide by welfareism. So the UK is a great example of this, right? The British Empire, the Sun never set on it, presiding over territories literally all across the world, ranging from the far east to the new world. Well, after world wars one and two, the UK basically decided to trade in a empire for welfareism at home. It wasn't fully intentional. They thought they could create as former British Prime Minister Clement at least had a welfare commonwealth, but it turns out that's unaffordable. Because you can't run endless guns and endless butter. And it turns out the butter is actually way more expensive than guns. Welfareism is unaffordable. And this means that the UK is at best a second rate power. This is what poet Philip Larkin described in his poem "Omage to a Government". He wrote, "Next year, we are to bring all the soldiers home for lack of money. And it is alright. Places they guarded or kept orderly must guard themselves and keep themselves orderly. We want the money for ourselves at home instead of working. And this is alright. It's hard to say who wanted it to happen, but now it's been decided nobody minds. The places are a long way off, not here, which is alright. And from what we hear, the soldiers there only made trouble happen. Next year, we shall be easier in our minds. Next year, we shall be living in a country that brought its soldiers home for lack of money. The statues will still be standing in the same tree muffled squares and look nearly the same. Our children will not know it's a different country. All we can hope to leave them now is money. Now, as it turns out, you can't even hope to leave the money because when you let the welfareism conquer your society, you end up with low growth rates, over regulation. No one's working and so you end up importing gigantic swathes of people who hate your society. And that is the story of Great Britain. Now, again, I'll go back to one of those charts that we looked at at the very beginning here, government spending in the United States. Look at the spending by category. So we have been told that national defense is where we spent all our money. Right? It was the wars. Is where we spent all our money. Nope. Long ago, on this chart, it is the gigantic yellow line that is the vast increase in spending. Look at the size of that line in 1962. Look at the size of that line in 2020. The vast expansion of our welfare state is the thing that is bankrupting us. This, by the way, is historically true in the United States. And during the Vietnam War, LBJ was actually told by his own cabinet that he would eventually have to choose between guns like the Vietnam War and butter the war on poverty. He told his cabinet to lie and say that we actually didn't have to choose. There's no choice. Right? This is what populism is about. Populism is about telling you the lie that you never have to make a choice. You have everything. You can have no innovation, high rates of welfare. You can have all the things. You can have a strong military without having to pay for it. Nothing will ever end up coming home to roost when asked publicly during the Vietnam War about the choice between guns and butter. LBJ literally said there is no choice we don't have to choose. Who's asked this in July 1965? Do you have any idea right now, though, that down the road apiece, the American people may have to face the problem of guns or butter? I have not the slightest doubt, but whatever it's necessary to face, the American people will face. I think that all of us know that we are now in the 52nd month of the prosperity that's been unequal in this nation. And I see no reason for declaring a national emergency. And I rejected that course of action earlier today when I made my decision. I cannot foresee what next year, the following year, the following year, the whole. I only know that the Americans will do whatever is necessary. And at the moment, we enjoy the good fortune of having an unparalleled period of prosperity with us. And this government is going to do all it came to see it continue. So never making a choice. Here's what ends up happening. Here's what government spending looked like percentage change year over year during the LBJ term, 11% average year over year increase. And by the way, most of the consequences for that were actually pushed off beyond LBJ's term, the 1970s sucked, they were really bad, massive stagflation, meaning stagnation and inflation, military defeat. Again, he was able to delay it, but then it hit. And by the way, we're still paying for both today because all of LBJ's welfare programs that he put in place in the 60s are way bigger today. And we still have a Vietnam syndrome with regard to American military might, which is why we have not won a hot war since. We're still mired in all of this. So no, what's happening right now isn't that we're spending too much on our military meaning to bring it back home and spend it at home. That is, again, populist crap. It's untrue to fundamental level. What's happening is that there are a lot of people on all sides are perfectly willing to give up on American global leadership, destroy the freedom of the seas, facilitate the rise of Russia and China and to it all in the name of a corrupt, bankrupt welfare state. They'll run out of money and throttle the economy sooner rather than later. I know it's depressing, but this is why we need to talk truth here. We need to talk some turkey. Now, the founders knew how this. This is not a shock because they knew their history, read the Federalist papers, references to Roman history about and they would have been appalled by all of this. It's why they opposed governmental welfareism on a federal level. It's why it is not a delegated power of the federal government. It's why they also opposed the rule of the mob because they knew that if you got three guys in a room and two vote to rob the other guy, that's still not okay. And they knew that the rule of the mob and welfareism and decline are two sides of the same coin. It's why James Madison said, "I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse." And in a representative government, a greater than and any other, it's why Benjamin Franklin said, "Think what you do when you run in debt. You give another power over your liberty." It's why Jefferson said, "I sincerely believe the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale." It's why Washington, in his famous farewell address, said, "Avoid likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertions in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear." Again, this is why we are fundamentally unserious about politics right now. So Paul Ryan, I know a lot of people upset about Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House, he wasn't sufficiently pro-Trump. Okay, there are many areas in which I had disagreed with Paul Ryan, but Paul Ryan may have been the last actual fiscal conservative in a position of power in the United States government. He was not remotely wrong about our spending addiction, and he is not remotely wrong now, and he says that our politics is fundamentally unserious if there he was on CNBC yesterday. "The Overton window in our politics has opened for all these crazy ideas, but it's closed for things like debt reduction." Yep, yep. So when people talk about the unipartee, let us be clear. There is in fact a unipartee. The only question right now in American politics, when it comes to the future of size and scope of American government, seems to be how we ought to rearrange the debt chairs on the Titanic. The Democrats want to stack all those debt chairs directly at the front of the boat in front of the iceberg, and Republicans seem to want to pack them nearer the back of the boat and delay it a little bit. But nobody is arguing that we ought to change course. Even as the Titanic plows into the iceberg, it turns out all the passengers are cheering because the populism now. When we talk about governmental corruption, one of the best reporters on the scene today is Chris Rufo from Manhattan Institute as a brand report talking about how California's Medicaid system, Medi-Cal, basically was built for some $40 million allegedly by some fraudsters. Here's part of his report. This is a brand new $28 million mansion in Hidden Hills, California, next to the Kardashian House, but the man who owns this property isn't a pop star or CEO. He's a respiratory therapist named Curtis Kirkova, and he got rich by building California's Medicaid system more than $40 million. And as his business raked in the cash, Curtis and his husband Christian flaunted their new wealth online. They bought these houses, flew on these jets, and partied in the most exclusive places in the world. We spent months following the money trail and found something very strange. There's no evidence that their company even exists. Joining me online is Chris Rufo, senior fellow over at Manhattan Institute, and probably the nation's chief investigative reporter on all matters involving governmental fraud. Chris, thanks so much for taking time to really appreciate it. That's great to be with you. So you have this extraordinary story out today about the defrauding of the California government again, not gigantically shocking that the California government is being defrauded. This story is pretty extraordinary, however. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's no surprise now that California is riddled with fraud, reporting from earlier this year indicates that there might be as much as $50 billion a year from the California budget just disappearing to organized criminal gangs, but in this case, the scale of the fraud and the brazenness was really shocking. A respiratory therapist, someone selling breathing tubes, plastic products, bills Medicaid $40 million, and then spends millions of dollars on private jets, luxury cars, resort travel, and a $28 million mansion next door to the Kardashians and post all of it on social media, the experts told us it has all the red flags for Medicaid fraud. So what are those red flags that people ought to be looking for? Because again, it's very easy for people who engage in defrauding the government to claim that they're actually providing services. The system seems incredibly easy to game, frankly. So what are the red flags that you were looking for? So what we did is the federal government under the Trump administration. and released all Medicaid data for a certain number of years. And we used AI tools to find outliers. So businesses that had irregular patterns had the possibility of double billing, had huge ramp-ups in revenues. So for example, in this case with the Kerkova business, it's a business called HeroCare. They went from something like $7,000 to $17 million in a very short time frame. And then after we had that initial hit, what we did is we hit the ground. And so we went to every named business. We searched every possible record. We went through all of the real estate filings. And we started knocking on doors and every place where they had listed a business, when we went there, the business was gone. And so by the end of our reporting, which took a number of months, we saw this business that in theory was pulling in $20 million a year. There was no sign of the business. There was no working phone number. There was no working website. There was not even a trace of economic activity that we could find. The whole thing was kind of a ghost that was funding this lifestyle. And now the White House Task Force on Fraud has opened an inquiry to this. And so I'm anticipating that if our reporting pans out, our suspicions are proven by prosecutors, we may see these people end up in a jail cell. - Now what's amazing about all of this, as you point out, is that this couple's gay couple that was pushing this business behind this business, they were flaunting this stuff online. There's an actual meme of them on Instagram, showing one of the members of the couple opening a box of shoes while malding a meme quote, it's when you buy something for your business and the government pays you back for it, which I mean, pretty brazen stuff. Did they just think that nobody was ever gonna notice this? I mean, that is indicative of how widespread the fraud is. - Yeah, I think one of the commonalities in all these fraud investigations we've done is that people may start with a little bit of fraud, but then they go a little bit more, they go a little bit more, and then they really blow it out in year two or year three, because they figured out the dirty little secret of Medicaid, which is that the government is not checking, is not prosecuting, is not putting people in jail. And so they have a series of these Easter eggs and their social media, including one where they're sitting in a private jet and the caption reads something like, it's giving narcos vibes, but the money's clean. And so you have to think, if you are scamming or potentially allegedly scamming the government, the last thing you wanna do is be posting your luxurious lifestyle on social media and yet in so many cases, and in cases that we're reporting on right now, they're doing precisely that. There's almost no effort to conceal what is at best a scam and at worst outright theft. Now, one of the things that's incredible about all of this is of course the rates on Medicare fraud and state level Medicare fraud and medical, for example, enormous. So city journal has reported that HHS sources estimate Medicaid's fraud rate, which is the state version, is 25% to one quarter of all dollars are just going to fraud in Medicaid since 2019. And part of this, Chris, is the fact that you have an incentive structure where if you are a member of the infrastructure at Medicaid, the way that you brag to the public about what you're doing is by saying how much money you've expended. You don't actually have to show that there's any actual outcome from the expenditure of the money. You don't have to show better health outcomes from Medicaid or from Medicaid. You say, we spent this much money which shows how much we care. Number of dollars equals amount that we care. - Yeah, I guess you could have it on the Kardashian scale. How many Kardashian mansions did you fund? And therefore, the outcome is good. But listen to the numbers in California under Gavin Newsome. When he took office, it was about $100 billion a year on his medical program. And then now he's leaving office. It's about $200 billion per year. So the program has doubled while California's population for the first time ever has slightly declined. And so you're asking, are health care outcomes in California twice as good as they were before? No, and some measures they're slightly worse. And so what this really means is that when you hear DSA politicians saying Medicare for all, it may sound good, it may feel good, it may have in some cases good intentions. But what happens on the other side of that is a government run, health care system is a magnet for fraud, not just for people in the United States, but people all over the world. One of the amazing things I heard from an investigator as we were reporting out this story is that he estimates that the majority of funds that are stolen from Medicaid at some point exit the United States of America. And so we're making people rich all around the world. We're not improving health outcomes for Americans. And politicians like Gavin Newsom just kind of skate on the top of it hoping that no one will notice. - Now, 'cause one of the things that we've been talking about a lot on the show is that there's a poll that came out this week that shows 90% of Americans is totally bipartisan, believe that the government has corrupt. And there's massive corruption in the government. And of course they are 100% right. I'm shocked that that number isn't actually higher because there is extraordinary corruption in the government. But I think that people separate off in their own minds between the size of government and the amount of corruption in government. And that is not logically possible to do. The reality is that when you have government become a giant grab bag of cash, subsidies, regulations. Of course you're increasing the possible scope of corruption. If you had a small, real, de-government that you were capable of actually directing in its proper channels, no one cares about trying, you rob the bank as John Dellinger said because that's where the money is. And you go to corruption because that's where you can actually get away with it. And the reality is that when the government is this big and this intrusive and this rich, 'cause they have a bunch of taxpayer dollars in the coffers or they're just building future taxpayers, of course it's gonna be corrupt. - Yeah, that's a really important point. And there's an old Milton Friedman line that I think summarizes this dynamic very well. He says, "In effect, when person A uses the money of person B to pay person C, the incentives all across that transmission line become skewed." And then people don't have a personal sense of interest. Like if it's money coming into my bank account, I'm gonna actually be pretty careful about it and pretty concerned about it. But if I take your money and give it to this person and I never see that line of transmission, I'm gonna have little invested in keeping that system accountable. And so when you have a rapid scaling up with the size of government, you're inevitably going to have a rapid scaling up in fraud. And so we're seeing that throughout the system. And look, the left is very shrewdly pivoted from woke one to woke two. The cultural frame on race and gender to this economic frame on affordability, Medicare for all, et cetera. The right has to come up with a powerful counterargument. I think that's counterargument is to show exactly where that money ends up. It ends up in the hands of people like Curtis Kerkova or Nigerian fraudsters or Somali autism scammers. And so that, to me, is a really important storyline that we have to be hammering on. I know you guys have been covering it at the Daily Wire, great reporting from Luke Rosiac. And I think nothing is more important in this fight that's coming now than reanimating some of these economic arguments, adapting them to the current times, current conditions, current preferences, but never giving in on this idea that we want to have unlimited government, unlimited spending, that's the road to ruin. Well, that's Christopher Rufo, probably again, the nation's the most impressive political reporter when it comes to uncovering waste fraud and abuse. Chris, thanks so much for the time. You check out all of his work over at Manhattan Institute City Journal. Thanks, Ben. Meanwhile, the other big story of the day springs from Tucker Carlson. So as we've been discussing for years at this point, Tucker Carlson is not a conservative, not in any market way at all. And of course, this week he came out and basically back to Abdul Al-Sahia, the pro-Jihadi, America hating Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan. Now, JD Vance is very closely aligned with Tucker Carlson. Of course, very close friends with Tucker Carlson is repeated this ad nauseam who's asked yesterday at the White House about his relationship with Tucker Carlson and here was his answer. Tucker is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things. And I'm not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with him. I think that is a terrible place for the United States to go. Okay, nobody is saying you have to quote unquote throw a friend under the bus because you have a political disagreement. As we'll discuss in a moment, I'm not sure that when your friend is standing for Nazi historians or alternatively cheering for comedians who mock Erica Kirk or bringing on guests who call your wife a cheat, I'm not sure that that is a person that you just have a political disagreement with. But on a political level, this is totally inept. Again, I'll get to the morality in a second, but it's totally inept because what Vance is doing here is totally defanguing the entire campaign against El Sayed, connecting him with the Sunpiker. Because El Sayed is saying exactly the same thing about his Sunpiker that JD Vance is saying about Tucker Carlson, like exactly the same thing. Here is El Sayed on Piker, you know, on Stephen A Smith's show. - The idea that you just categorically disavow an individual, that to me doesn't make sense given that there are gonna be things that people say that you deeply disagree with. - Even one of those things. - The America port 9/11 on itself. - And then he just about it himself. Stephen A, like this, not a consistent reading of what the man actually thinks. - Yeah, again, this, taking that campaign away from Republicans because you have a personal relationship with a public figure, Tucker Carlson, is a wild thing to do. And again, if JD Vance thinks that this is somehow going to not come up all the way from here, until twenty twenty eight he's delusional and now he's giving almost word for word the same defenses of tucker carlson and is not jobbery that Barack obama gave about psychotic reverend chair my right back in two thousand eight and this helps explain perhaps my relationship with reverend right as imperfect as he may be he has been like family to me he strengthens my faith officiated my wedding and baptize my children i can no more disown him that i can disown the black community i can no more disown him that i can disown my white grandmother i mean that was insane at the time and now i got jade vans doing the same thing again this is politically enough it's politically enough okay but actually then there's the more question okay so the question here is not whether jade vans hangs out with tucker and goes on fishing trips you can see jade vans trying to avoid the question i say well i'm personal friends of tucker i'm not going to announce my friends a lot of people have lots of naughty friends nobody's asking that i mean some people care about that there's some people who make the argument that at a certain point you probably should stop being friends with people because what you have with them is not a political disagreement but a moral disagreement that sure you could have a friend who believes things so morally egregious you probably shouldn't be friends with them so for example if your friend where to be the world's most sympathetic ear to not the apologists i know that's maybe a reason not to be friends with them i think i just want to i can tell you hit compliments but i just want to say i think you are the most important popular historian working in the United States today or let's say that your friend were to laugh at conspiracy theories implicating the widow of charlie kirk in charlie's murder but you're really good friends with charlie but your other friend was laughing at conspiracy theories and bolstering them implicating t_p_s_a and all the rest in charlie kirk i don't know that might not be like a person you definitely need to be friends with takes the gun apart leaves the screwdriver there puts it under a towel spider man's his way off the top of a building runs across campus with the gun apparently under towel nobody sees this he runs into the woods puts the gun back together again without the screwdrivers irregular mcgiver this guy and then he hides the gun in the back yard of a house owned by palantir and if you think anything else besides that you're a crazy Jew hating conspiracy nut i mean like if your friend i don't know where to host say america's most famous pro nazi streamer you know a person labeled your own wife a dirty jeet and where to actually say that that person is a better person than Ted Cruz because Ted Cruz supports is i don't know would you have yeah i'm not gonna tell you can't be friends with that person but i mean sometimes it's not just a political disagreement who do you think is more morally repulsive Ted Cruz who do you think it's more morally repulsive Ted Cruz Ted Cruz is a sitting u_s_ senator who has called for the killing of people who did nothing wrong whole populations who advocated for this war nick frentice is like a kid he's like twenty six or seven he has no power except his words now again you might say that these are not just mere political disagreements that this person seems like not a great person with whom you should be friends but here is the thing about me on a personal level i don't actually care very much about the friendship thing i don't care whether the vice president and tucker go square dancing or barn raising in main or demon hunting in the forest together i don't care it makes no difference to me i said the same exact thing to Megan Kelley when she defended kandas Owens on the basis of friendship well kandas Owens was slandering Erica Kirk you give me friends with whoever you want but not every one of your friends ought to be a nationally important voice here's what i do care about i care if the VP thinks the tucker Carlson is a valuable voice in the movement that i inhabit because here's the thing the VP has been extraordinarily praiseworthy of tucker Carlson views throughout the last few years where he was in twenty twenty one talking about his meeting with tucker Carlson i'll never forget the the first time that i ever met tucker Carlson was at a JP Morgan event uh. where his favorite yeah um where i listened to what he said and then he listened to what i said and we like both found each other and we're like oh my god you're the guy who's exactly right about what's going on in the country uh. and i ever since then have thought to myself the person who is most challenging to the world view of people who i think are harming communities like mine is is tucker hey that's back in twenty twenty one and of course more recently in december twenty twenty five when i suggested that perhaps there ought to be some ideological border control in conservatism specifically mentioning tucker about heritage foundation and then also a tpu sa jd vans then went on stage at tpu sa and said no no one must no one there there are no lines must ever be drawn and then he went on sorba maris podcast on unheard and sorba marie asked him quote a lot of people want you to weigh in on one side of that they want you to denounce directly the grippers and maybe tucker Carlson for entertaining the grippers will you and um vans for said first of all i don't think tucker Carlson is a gripper okay and he says tucker is a friend of mine and do i have disagreements with tucker Carlson sure i have disagreements with most of my friends especially those who work in politics you know this most people who know me know this i'm also a very loyal person i'm not going to get into the business of throwing friends on the bus right same exact stick that he used yesterday here's the important part quote i can express substantive disagreements with them but i find the idea that tucker Carlson was one of the largest podcasts in the world was millions of listeners who supported Donald Trump in the twenty twenty four election who supported me in the twenty twenty four election the idea his views are completely anathema to conservatism that he has no place in the conservative movement is frankly absurd and i don't think anybody actually believes it that is a direct quote that is a direct quote from jade vans and then he goes on to say that you know if you are if you are anti-semitic or promoting anti-semitism you don't have a place in the conservative movement which i'm okay i mean it's a little weird it's a little weird because you know like is tucker Carlson still a vital voice in the conservative move i don't care whether he is going to dinner with tucker Carlson in his off hours and other people that ask whether you ought to have friends who pursue the same kinds of bullshit that tucker does on a regular basis but that's your problem lots of people have lots of crazy friends do you think tucker Carlson is a vital voice inside conservatism and if you do why considering that this is the same man who says that israelis and zionis and neocons run the american government that the president is literally a slave to the zionis that he ought to be impatient that in fact the president jade vans his boss and running mate might in fact be the anti christ here's a leader who's mocking the gods of his ancestors mocking the god of gods and insulting himself above them could this be the anti christ well who knows i mean i don't know is he is he an important voice in conservatism you know the guy who actively is campaigning now for pro jihadi america haters in actual elections today why are they running him again anybody wants to talk about microtures this really i would i wouldn't vote for microtures at gunpoint there's no one who should be farther from a position of power than microtures i mean is this an important voice in concert right that's the question and jade vans knows that's the question so that's why he's avoiding the question by talking about friendship no one cares dude i don't care where they grab coffee i don't care if we go shopping together i don't care if you smoke cigars in the back room doesn't matter to me is he an important voice that you think ought to be a crucial part of your coalition going forward in terms of defining the policy you know the guy who says openly the america ought to swivel toward multi polarity and seed global power to russia and china and then you know heads off to russia to blow Vladimir Putin and to a russian grocery stores here we go so i guess you put in ten rubles here and you get it back when you put the card back so it's free but there's an incentive to return it and not just bring it to your homeless in camp okay this is the grocery card escalator this is designed i'm figuring this out now where the wheels don't move they lock on the grocery card escalator look ma no hands this is some vital conservatism we're watching right now is vital conservatism or is it really vital to the conservative movement to have people who say that they're they would not support the republican party because it's not loyal to the united states you're the current republican vice president of the united states running for the nomination of the republican party that's the question i would not support the republican party there's no chance i would support the republican party not to support the democratic party i don't know what i'm going to do but at this point you know how could you support how could i or any american voters support a political party that's not loyal to the united states that puts the interests of a foreign country above those of its own citizens like like that's that's you know it's not possible to vote for people like that so i'm is technocros and still a vital voice that's the question for the vp and if so how so and if why then why why those are the questions that jadey vans is going to face from now until the twenty twenty eight election and here's the thing maybe he is doing this out of friendship. Maybe Tucker is just such an awesome hang that he wishes to put his own political career online for a person who has no problem harming him. Again, put aside the primaries, where again, the vice president is right now the prohibitive favorite. But if you think that the media isn't going to notice that JD Vance has super glued himself to Tucker Carlson, your nuts, and that is going to come along with a political and yes, a moral cost. Okay, meanwhile, over in Venice, just in case you are unaware of how wildly left these film festivals are, over at the Venice Film Festival, everybody there started chanting free Palestine, which again, you know who loves, you know who loves left wing movies, glorifying homosexuality and transgenderism is the people of Gaza. Love it. They're super into it. Just to air drop all those movies from the Venice Film Festival into the Gaza Strip and people that just drop any of these actors into the Gaza Strip and they will do great. Here's how it was going at the Venice Film Festival. Oh, the suicidal West there. The suicidal artist community. But this is what Venice is. I mean, not a shock. Not a shock. Over at the Venice Film Festival, I can't imagine how they made their selections. I'll tell you what will not be appearing at the Venice Film Festival because it actually says that for example, radical Islam is bad. Our film coming in just a couple of weeks, it's going to be awesome. Run Hide Fight Infinals. It's awesome. We just launched the epic final trailer for Run Hide Fight Infinals. So if you watch the studio film in the last decade or so, you'll recognize something that you haven't seen in a while. You know a story about red-blooded American good guys fighting the bad guys. It's big. It's loud. It has heroes you can root for. And of course, it takes on the invasion of the United States by radical Islam. It's streaming on the daily wire September 16th. Here's the trailer. Take a look. We'll conquer the West. Some more nickel. Are we paying attention? They've taken over the building. They're downstairs and they've blocked the doors. I seek forgiveness from Allah, the Almighty. We cannot run and hide. Muhammad is the messenger of God. There is no God but Allah. What do you say? We turn those vessel bees into a fine red mist. As we move, one man will cover while the other guys go. You need a course in safe weapons handling. So again, don't expect to see it at Venice, but you can see it only at daily wire because we are making the entertainment no one else. Well, the movie's fun. It's awesome. You're going to enjoy the friends and it says some things. No one else is going to say already. Folks, for the end of the show, we'll be back here tomorrow with much more. I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show.