Trump and Musk sit down with Sean Hannity as the White House rolls out a new set of executive orders; negotiations over the end of the Ukraine war get heated; and the left loses their minds over our national parks supposedly closing. Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/3WDjgHE Ep.2141 - - - Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings - - - DailyWire+: Don’t just watch CPAC—be part of it LIVE with Daily Wire Backstage this Thursday night, February 20, on DailyWire+! Now is the time to join the fight. Watch the hit movies, documentaries, and series reshaping our culture. Go to https://dailywire.com/subscribe today. Get your Ben Shapiro merch here: https://bit.ly/3TAu2cw - - - Today's Sponsors: Birch Gold - Text BEN to 989898 for your free info kit and copy of the Ultimate Guide for Gold in the Trump Era. Tax Network USA - For a complimentary consultation, call today at 1 (800) 958-1000 or visit their website at https://TNUSA.com/SHAPIRO Policygenius - Head to https://policygenius.com/SHAPIRO to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. Ramp - Get $250 when you join Ramp. Go to https://ramp.com/SHAPIRO - - - Socials: Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3cXUn53 Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3QtuibJ Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3TTirqd Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPyBiB
Chapter 1: What are the key highlights of the Trump-Musk interview on Hannity?
Folks, tons of news to get to today. We're gonna get to the Trump-Elon interview on Sean Hannity's show. We're also going to be talking about negotiations over Ukraine, which are getting quite fraught. And of course, Hamas has now announced that the Bibas family is dead, which many people had suspected, but is going to be a sort of earth-shattering piece of news over in Israel.
But begin today with a fascinating realization by Derek Thompson over at The Atlantic, talking about the radical shift that has happened with young people in the United States as far as their voting patterns. What he finds is that COVID and BLM basically shoved an entire generation of people to the right. Quote, for decades, America's young voters have been deeply and famously progressive.
In 2008, a youth quake sent Barack Obama to the White House. In 2016, voters ages 18 to 29 broke for Hillary Clinton by 18 points. In 2020, they voted for Biden by 24 points. But in 2024, Donald Trump closed most of the gap, losing voters under 30 by a 51 to 47 margin. In one recent CBS poll, Americans under 30 weren't just evenly split between the parties.
They were even more pro-Trump than boomers over the age of 65. So what exactly is happening? Well, Derek Thompson suggests that essentially this is a reaction to the government overreach during COVID.
that the bizarre institutional failures during COVID, ranging from the suggestion that you got to riot in the streets if you had the proper political credentials and COVID wouldn't attack you, to the idea that kids had to be locked out of schools, shoved an entire generation of young people to the right and radicalized them. And this, of course, is true.
But this does demonstrate, again, this is the warning, that people are incredibly variable and vacillating when it comes to their politics. Exogenous events can shove entire generations of people one way or another. And this has happened several times over the course of my lifetime.
I remember after 2001, a whole new security boom happened in which people, particularly suburban moms who had traditionally voted Democrat, suddenly were voting Republican. And then COVID apparently shoved a bunch of young people to the right. Wokeness shoved a bunch of young people to the right.
That is a good reminder to everyone in politics that while you think that the pendulum will never shift back over to the other side, it absolutely will. And so two things ought to be taken from that. One, you ought to be very careful in how you use your political power. That doesn't mean you shouldn't move fast and break things.
It means that you should be very careful that you don't set into motion a tripwire that is going to blow you up. And number two, it means that you actually do have to move with alacrity while I got to power because the left always does and the right rarely does. This is one of the differences between MAGA and prior conservative Republican movements.
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Chapter 2: What political shifts are happening with young voters in the US?
Moreover, these regulatory agencies have been permitted to promulgate significant regulations without review by the president.
Therefore, in order to improve the administration of the executive branch and to increase regulatory officials' accountability to the American people, it shall be the policy of the executive branch to ensure presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch. And again, this is a restatement of the constitutional principle that the president runs the executive branch.
And so all of these sort of pseudo shock that you are seeing from Democrats on this particular point is because they had always assumed that an independent agency means it's run by Democrats. They'd always assumed the career bureaucrat means Democrat. There was, in fact, a deep state.
It was permanent political appointees who were supposedly insulated from any Republican president who would take power, and Trump is saying, nope, that's not the way this is going to work. As part and parcel of that, President Trump announced on Truth Social last night, quote, over the past four years, the Department of Justice has been politicized like never before.
Therefore, I've instructed the termination of all remaining Biden-era U.S. attorneys. We must clean house immediately and restore confidence. America's golden age must have a fair justice system. That begins today. And again, there's a lot of hue and cry over this, but this is not, in fact, a rarity.
Barack Obama, when he came into office, cleared out the justice system of a bunch of people who were appointed by George W. Bush. The sort of changeover of career bureaucrats in these particular agencies, including the DOJ, is not a rarity. It is a regular part of American government. It's only Republicans who are chided about this.
Well, one of the driving forces behind the sort of radical transparency slash and burn approach that Trump has taken so far is, of course, Elon Musk. Elon has really contributed a huge amount to the government so far, again, with zero pay.
And he has done so because he feels that it is necessary, presumably, to cut the regulatory burdens on the American people and on business, to get rid of the wasteful spending, the waste, fraud, and abuse, and to reorient the American people toward the idea that they don't actually need the government to take care of all of their problems. And President Trump, to his great credit as a human being,
has allowed Elon to take sort of a front-leading role in doing all this. Now, that is smart politics by President Trump, because it means that Elon is both going to get the credit and also mostly take the slings and arrows, which is what has happened so far. Also, President Trump does not actually have to fear for any reason, that Elon Musk is a threat to him.
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Chapter 3: How are Trump's new executive orders aiming for government transparency?
President Trump calls it the Trump effect, and of course that is exactly right. The kind of notion that this is all a coincidence is clearly wrong. Meanwhile, Democrats are freaking out because it turns out that actually it's pretty popular for illegal immigrants not to mass immigrate to America.
According to Politico, the close relationship between congressional Democrats and immigration advocacy groups has grown strained since last year's election as lawmakers shift rightward on border issues. Now those groups are asserting themselves as Republicans prepare to pursue a crackdown on so-called sanctuary cities.
Failing to rally together in opposition to planned GOP legislation, they say, would risk a more profound break between the Democratic Party and its progressive base. So it's fun to watch Democrats.
They're now caught between a rock and a hard place, the rock of reality in which Americans really do not like illegal immigration and the hard place of all of these interest advocacy groups that they have been feeding for literally decades who now are angry at them. Again, this administration continues to be incredibly aggressive about its approach to all of these issues.
Meanwhile, in other international news, horrifying news, Hamas has now announced, as was suspected, that that it would release dead bodies, four dead bodies. In exchange for these four dead bodies, Israel is going to release all Palestinian women and minors under the age of 19 who were detained in Gaza after October 8th and who, quote unquote, weren't involved in the fighting.
But again, those are detentions. When they say under 19, you're talking about 16, 17, 18-year-old people and recognized. And in the Gaza Strip for Hamas, those are like military age recruits. Many women are also involved militarily with Hamas.
The bodies that are being released include the bodies of Shiri Bibas, who's 33, and her two children, Ariel and Kfir, who were four years old and nine months old when they were kidnapped, not by Hamas. Okay, this is important. They were not kidnapped by Hamas. They were kidnapped by Palestinian civilians who joined in on the murder spree of October 7th.
The reason this is important is because the great lie that there is a vast gap between the civilian population in the Gaza Strip and Hamas, that has always been a lie. It remains a lie. That does not mean that Israel and any other military power shouldn't attempt to distinguish between members of Hamas and civilians.
Israel has expended hundreds of its own soldiers in efforts to do precisely that, which is why it's achieved such a signally successful kill ratio in terms of terrorists killed to civilians killed in battle. With that said, the civilians in the Gaza Strip supported Hamas. They supported the agenda of Hamas for a year, for a year.
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