Speaker 1: Welcome.
Speaker 2: It is Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz week in Review.
Speaker 2: Ben Ferguson with you, and these are the stories that
Speaker 2: you may have missed that we talked about this week.
Speaker 2: The mayor of Dallas won a race. He had a
Speaker 2: D next to his name, so the question is after
Speaker 2: he changed to become a Republican, could he still win
Speaker 2: that same election. We'll break that down for you with
Speaker 2: our guests the Mayor of Dallas. Also, what will big
Speaker 2: tech look like and how much influence could it have
Speaker 2: over this country? I'm talking about politically, and with Ai
Speaker 2: we sit down with a tech expert to talk about
Speaker 2: the future of big tech in America. And finally, the
Speaker 2: White House Press Secretary Jean Pierre stands next to the
Speaker 2: President and demands that Republicans fix the border, even though
Speaker 2: they're the ones that destroyed it. So what do we
Speaker 2: do to fight back? We talk about that as well.
Speaker 2: It's Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz Weekend Review, and it
Speaker 2: starts right now. You were up for reelection right now,
Speaker 2: running as a Republican for mayor. Yes, your policies haven't changed.
Speaker 2: The only things changed is they d went to an R.
Speaker 3: Correct.
Speaker 4: Could you win I'd win overwhelmingly. I don't have any
Speaker 4: doubt about it, no doubt about it. And I'll tell
Speaker 4: you why I believe that. I'll tell you why I'm glad.
Speaker 4: Someone finally asked me that on the record. That's sort
Speaker 4: of the chatter as well.
Speaker 3: That's why I asked.
Speaker 2: The other going to say, oh, well, this guy I
Speaker 2: could never win, that's why he waited till the end
Speaker 2: of his serve and then switch parties.
Speaker 4: So here here's the reality that people have to ignore
Speaker 4: to even make that argument. But I understand why people
Speaker 4: need to make it. I mean I told someone, I said,
Speaker 4: you know, you don't switch parties in the two parties
Speaker 4: from one of the other. And I think the other
Speaker 4: party is going to say, well, you know, we wish
Speaker 4: him the best. He was great, and it's our loss.
Speaker 4: You know, they got to come up with something, and
Speaker 4: this is kind of These are the kinds of arguments
Speaker 4: they've come up with. But here's the reality I won
Speaker 4: my last election with. It wasn't ninety three percent. Dallas City,
Speaker 4: you know, has ordinances about how write in candidates get
Speaker 4: on the ballot, and if you write in a name
Speaker 4: other than the actual right in candidate's name that's there.
Speaker 4: You just essentially didn't vote. You threw your vote, your
Speaker 4: bollot in the trash of the cast votes, which were
Speaker 4: canvassed by the city and are the official records of
Speaker 4: the city. Ninety eight point seven percent of the vote.
Speaker 4: That's Democrats and Republicans in that group. That's a pretty
Speaker 4: hearty endorsement of the incumbent mayor.
Speaker 3: And I didn't run with a D or an R
Speaker 3: behind my name.
Speaker 4: I ran just with you, know, as Eric Johnson, because
Speaker 4: you don't run in Texas, in any city with a
Speaker 4: D or for folks who aren't from Texas, we don't
Speaker 4: actually have partisan elections in Texas for mayor. You just run,
Speaker 4: and you don't run with a party support. Now, what
Speaker 4: do I think would have actually happened if I had
Speaker 4: just come out and said six months before the election,
Speaker 4: I'm actually a Republican.
Speaker 3: Here's what would have happened.
Speaker 4: Some Democrats would have gotten together and said, well, this
Speaker 4: is an opportunity for us to run an ostensibly just
Speaker 4: overtly hartisan candidate. We're going to do something that's never
Speaker 4: been done in dabasmore, which is to just make it partisan,
Speaker 4: like to say Okay, we got an R running, and
Speaker 4: now we're going to run a D against them. The
Speaker 4: problem is that the R you're talking about for four
Speaker 4: years well enough to clear the field and win with
Speaker 4: ninety eight or seven percent of the vote.
Speaker 3: But that didn't happen yet.
Speaker 4: So let's just go back and say a Republican has
Speaker 4: been that effective who happens to also be African American
Speaker 4: and supported by the African American community. We think that
Speaker 4: that person would lose simply by saying I've become a Republican.
Speaker 4: I think what happens is is I won the first
Speaker 4: race in a contested nine person field that it went
Speaker 4: to a runoff with twelve percent of the vote. I
Speaker 4: wont you know, fifty six forty four. I think that
Speaker 4: goes down to the normal, you know, pretty solid win
Speaker 4: of a you know, fifty four fifty three percent win.
Speaker 3: But I still win.
Speaker 4: There's still question I still win that race because I'm
Speaker 4: the incumbent at that point. No incumbent if we've had
Speaker 4: Republican and Democrat mayors before.
Speaker 3: By the way, no.
Speaker 4: Incumbent mayor seeking re election in Dallas has ever lost ever.
Speaker 5: All Right, so let me ask a final question, which
Speaker 5: is you have started now a national organization, the Republican
Speaker 5: Mayors Association, and you have been out articulating that Republicans
Speaker 5: need to have an agenda for the cities, that we
Speaker 5: can't just write off big cities where an awful lot
Speaker 5: of Americans live. And I think that's a very important message.
Speaker 5: It's something and I want to ask you, what's your
Speaker 5: vision for the message Republicans should have in the cities
Speaker 5: and how do we end up with a lot more
Speaker 5: Republican mayors to big cities. What's the path forward there?
Speaker 3: I said this in the Wall Street Journale, and I
Speaker 3: meant it.
Speaker 4: It's a two way benefit for America and.
Speaker 3: For our party.
Speaker 4: America needs the leadership that Republicans provide at the local
Speaker 4: level because of the things we talked about just a
Speaker 4: few minutes ago. A Republican mayor is going to is
Speaker 4: going to because it's part of the DNA of the party,
Speaker 4: is going to be right on law and order issues,
Speaker 4: going to be right on public safety. People who've asked
Speaker 4: me about that, I've said, let me just quiz you
Speaker 4: very quickly. Every bad idea you can think of about
Speaker 4: public safety came from one side of the aisle. There's
Speaker 4: not even a mixed bag on this issue. If it's
Speaker 4: a bad idea. When it comes to public safety, you know,
Speaker 4: defund the police, don't prosecute, shop with whatever. Republicans don't
Speaker 4: propose ideas that undermine law and order.
Speaker 3: They not every.
Speaker 4: Democrat believes them, but they only emanate from the Democrat.
Speaker 3: That's just a factual statement.
Speaker 4: So a Republican is going to be right on law
Speaker 4: and order in public safety, a Republican mayor is going
Speaker 4: to be right on taxes. A Republican mayor ought to
Speaker 4: be right on infrastructure spending and investing prudently. And there's
Speaker 4: studies that show, I mean been they have proven that
Speaker 4: you actually have lower debt levels and issue less debt
Speaker 4: when you have a Republican may versus a Democrat when
Speaker 4: they've mit professor actually studied this and concluded that it
Speaker 4: is a statistically significant different level of debt associated with
Speaker 4: a city when there's a Republican charge and a Democrat
Speaker 4: in charge. So we actually need Republicans running our major
Speaker 4: cities because eighty percent of Americans live in cities. By
Speaker 4: twenty fifty, that number is going to be ninety percent.
Speaker 4: So the country actually needs the leadership. But I'm actually
Speaker 4: telling you, as a group of partisans, we actually have
Speaker 4: to pay attention to this.
Speaker 3: And I think we have to pay attention.
Speaker 4: To it because I, in my heart of hearts, believe
Speaker 4: that by being competitive in the cities, by basically re engaging,
Speaker 4: because we were once engaged. There was a Republican Mayor's
Speaker 4: Association at one time. It had a similar name. It
Speaker 4: was like the Republican Conference. It was during the Ford administration,
Speaker 4: and it's at some point we just lost interest in
Speaker 4: competing at that level and it sort of just faded away.
Speaker 4: But it was very active at one time, and we
Speaker 4: were more competitive in our cities at one time. We
Speaker 4: need to get more competitive there again, because the margin
Speaker 4: of victory at the state level in states like Wisconsin,
Speaker 4: in states like Michigan, states like Pennsylvania, is the difference
Speaker 4: between performing at the city level in You're ready, Madison,
Speaker 4: Green Bay, and in Detroit and in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh by.
Speaker 3: Just five or ten percentage points better.
Speaker 4: So, in other words, engaging in the cities in a
Speaker 4: more significant way and having the GOP brand associated with
Speaker 4: the things we're talking about at the local level, it
Speaker 4: doesn't take that many votes, and now all of a sudden,
Speaker 4: the whole state is no longer lockstock and barrel going
Speaker 4: one direction because of the advantage has been run up
Speaker 4: in the city.
Speaker 3: You've cut into the advantage that the cities have.
Speaker 5: You know, Eric, I'll tell you on that point. So,
Speaker 5: Heidi and I met twenty five years ago when we
Speaker 5: were both working on the George W. Bush campaign in
Speaker 5: two thousand, the presidential campaign. And actually in that campaign,
Speaker 5: you know, I was a young twenty nine year old staffer,
Speaker 5: but I wrote a memo urging that the campaign consider
Speaker 5: at the time Condolliza Rice as a VP nominee. And
Speaker 5: in the course of the memo, I laid out all
Speaker 5: sorts of reasons why I thought this was worth considering carefully.
Speaker 5: But one of the things I did is I did
Speaker 5: an electoral analysis. I looked at the three preceding presidential elections,
Speaker 5: and I posited a series of hypotheticals. I said, what
Speaker 5: would have happened if Republicans had gotten five percent more,
Speaker 5: ten percent more, or fifteen percent more of the.
Speaker 3: African American and Hispanic vote.
Speaker 5: So I didn't posit what if we get fifty percent more?
Speaker 5: I did five, ten or fifteen, so goals that were achievable,
Speaker 5: I believe. And I ran through the numbers, and the
Speaker 5: one that was most that stood out the most was
Speaker 5: if Republicans had gotten an additional fifteen percent of the
Speaker 5: African American and Hispanic vote in nineteen ninety six, Republicans
Speaker 5: would have won an additional ninety six electoral votes. I mean,
Speaker 5: it clips the election dramatically. But to do that, we've
Speaker 5: got to compete.
Speaker 4: It's a whole different national conversation about the competitiveness of
Speaker 4: this party if we are a factor at the city level. Yep,
Speaker 4: because it's just where so many people are concentrated. It's
Speaker 4: getting hard and harder to figure out how to win
Speaker 4: elections where we're just not even playing there, and we
Speaker 4: just it's just not even we ought to be competing
Speaker 4: in every major city where we're currently just sort of saying,
Speaker 4: you know, a Democrat hasn't won. I mean, republic had
Speaker 4: won there a long time, so let's not try. We
Speaker 4: just flipped. Just in this last cycle, the mayor, the
Speaker 4: current mayor of I believe it's Charleston, South Carolina, is
Speaker 4: now a Republican. They hadn't elected a Republican mayor in
Speaker 4: Charleston in like one hundred and seventy five years. So
Speaker 4: it can happen. It can be done. You have to
Speaker 4: run the right candy. He was a former legislator like
Speaker 4: I was, and he ran a great campaign. Now they've
Speaker 4: got a Republican mayor. So what's going to happen next
Speaker 4: is he's going to do.
Speaker 3: A good job.
Speaker 4: And when he does a good job, these people who've
Speaker 4: been voting for Democrat mayors for one hundred and seventy
Speaker 4: five years are going to say, you know, when Republicans
Speaker 4: are in charge, the city just seems to be it's safer,
Speaker 4: we hire more cops, and crime goes down, and you
Speaker 4: know what, the taxes go down, and you.
Speaker 3: Know, things are just better.
Speaker 4: The brand means something to them at the local level,
Speaker 4: and not just the brand will always have a federal
Speaker 4: aspect to it. It will always have a state aspect
Speaker 4: to it. But right now in this party, we're missing
Speaker 4: a brand at the local level. It doesn't mean anything
Speaker 4: right now at the local level. And we get to
Speaker 4: decide what it means. And I'm saying we should be
Speaker 4: running solid conservatives at the local level, winning elections, running
Speaker 4: cities well, and then that makes people at the local
Speaker 4: level go, yeah, I'm actually a Republican. I love my
Speaker 4: Republican mayor, and so I'm a Republican and that has
Speaker 4: benefits for people running for US and running for president,
Speaker 4: running for governor. But we are right now just aren't
Speaker 4: doing anything. I mean, I was shocked to find that
Speaker 4: there was no.
Speaker 3: One even in this lane.
Speaker 4: I wasn't even stepping on anybody's toes by doing this.
Speaker 2: Now, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation,
Speaker 2: you can go back and listen to the full podcast
Speaker 2: from earlier this week. Now on too story number two.
Speaker 5: You know tech better than most people alive. Where are
Speaker 5: things going in terms of innovation ten years from now?
Speaker 5: What should we know now that we don't know? And
Speaker 5: how will the world be different in a decade.
Speaker 6: Well, the really positive thing that's happening right now. And
Speaker 6: I was never a uge trypto guy. I don't love
Speaker 6: FIAT current and see is I think there's a good
Speaker 6: use against like, you know, corrupt governments, But I was
Speaker 6: never that in a crypto AI actually to me is
Speaker 6: actually very real. Uh, the way to think about it.
Speaker 6: We can talk all about sorts of complicated things, but
Speaker 6: A simple thing to think about is productivity is just
Speaker 6: really key in our economy. The reason we have more
Speaker 6: wealth is we do more with less. And there's all
Speaker 6: these industries in our economy where this, this AI combined
Speaker 6: with operations can do things much more affordably, much cheaper.
Speaker 6: And so if you look at this like healthcare building,
Speaker 6: for example, we spend probably over a quarter trillion dollars
Speaker 6: a year healthcare building and you can probably cut that
Speaker 6: in the third over the next five or six years.
Speaker 6: There's tons of areas like that.
Speaker 5: So there are lots of cassandras painting stories of impending
Speaker 5: doom from AI. Is AI gonna destroy us all? And
Speaker 5: do you know what year does Skynet go online?
Speaker 1: My do work a lot in defense, so I'm working
Speaker 1: on it.
Speaker 6: Said, but there's this, we can control all of you now,
Speaker 6: uh no, listen, there's there's two different conversations with AIS,
Speaker 6: my master, thank you, no downtown getting in trouble with
Speaker 6: there does in charge. There's two different conversations with AI.
Speaker 6: One of them is productivity and wealth creation, and it's
Speaker 6: actually extremely positive and that's really good. The other conversation
Speaker 6: with AI, it's very funny. A lot of people in
Speaker 6: the tech world are not religious. They've given up their religion,
Speaker 6: and so this is this is kind of like a
Speaker 6: form of their religion, the singularity, the taking over the
Speaker 6: world of AI.
Speaker 1: And it's very funny. It's a very missionic vision.
Speaker 6: It's very much like revelations in Judaism and Christianity, where
Speaker 6: this thing comes and it changes everything and it's effectively
Speaker 6: a new God because once it improves, itself keeps getting better,
Speaker 6: and so it's like it's like it's like a secular religion.
Speaker 6: In Silicon Valley, people are obsessed with it as they
Speaker 6: talk about end of times with it all the time.
Speaker 6: And it's funny because America has had a lot of
Speaker 6: other religious like revival movements over the last two hundred
Speaker 6: years where people were convinced that at times was coming
Speaker 6: very soon. This is quite a weird one based in
Speaker 6: Silicon Valley.
Speaker 5: All right, so we're going to wrap up momentarily, but
Speaker 5: I want to ask, so you are very engaged in policy,
Speaker 5: a policy question Washington is wrestling with right now. So
Speaker 5: as you know, I'm the ranking member on the Senate
Speaker 5: Commerce Committee, and AI is square within our jurisdiction. In fact,
Speaker 5: back in twenty fifteen, I shaired the first ever congressional
Speaker 5: hearing on AI and have been focused on it for
Speaker 5: a long time now. There are a lot of voices
Speaker 5: in Washington, most notably Chuck Schumer, but also including some
Speaker 5: Republicans that are eager for a very heavy hand of
Speaker 5: government when it comes to AI, and Schumer and Democrats
Speaker 5: are proposing literally prior government approval before innovations in AI.
Speaker 5: I've been very vocal in saying that it's catastrophically stupid
Speaker 5: and if we put government in the position of prior approval,
Speaker 5: we will seed leadership of AI to our enemies, to
Speaker 5: China and other countries, and we will kill American leadership.
Speaker 5: I'm interested in your views because this policy discussion. I
Speaker 5: got to tell you a lot of big tech, the
Speaker 5: Googles and facebooks of the world, are saying yes, yes,
Speaker 5: regulate us because they believe they can capture the government
Speaker 5: and use it to shut everyone down. What's your take
Speaker 5: on how government should approach AI, because this is as
Speaker 5: hot as any question in Washington right now.
Speaker 6: Well, you know, mister Sara, one hundred percent agree with you.
Speaker 6: I'm really glad you're taking that tactic. As you know,
Speaker 6: that big companies, allot of them know they're losing some
Speaker 6: of their best talent. They know it's going to be
Speaker 6: hard to compete. But you know what they have, Like,
Speaker 6: if I want to start a competitor, for example, to
Speaker 6: black Rock right now in New York, I've spend one
Speaker 6: hundred million dollars year on lawyers even just to do
Speaker 6: what they do. They love the fact there's tons of
Speaker 6: rules regulations. These big companies would love it to make
Speaker 6: it impossible to compete against them in AI. So number one,
Speaker 6: one hundred percent keuth regulations as small as possible. Now,
Speaker 6: the thing I will give them, and we have to
Speaker 6: be very careful because this it's not why they're doing it.
Speaker 6: The thing I will give them is there probably are
Speaker 6: ways that some people could figure out how to use
Speaker 6: AI in bioterror in other areas, and so we have
Speaker 6: to watch it.
Speaker 1: We have to be very careful. We have to see
Speaker 1: as it goes along.
Speaker 6: But let's not give them the ability to make the
Speaker 6: whole thing crony and break it well.
Speaker 5: And look, there is no doubt there will need to
Speaker 5: be regulations applied to AI like to any other industry. Now,
Speaker 5: many of our existing laws can apply. So are there
Speaker 5: risks of fraud, are the risk of deception?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 5: So do you see things like like Taylor Swift had
Speaker 5: the AI fake porn put put on, and because she
Speaker 5: was Taylor Swift and had such a prominence, she was
Speaker 5: able to get it pulled down. Well, what happened is
Speaker 5: if that's.
Speaker 1: Your kids, you yeah, and.
Speaker 5: Nobody would watch that. That's all right, that the market
Speaker 5: forces would take care of that all on its own.
Speaker 2: I was so ready to get in there, so ready.
Speaker 1: That was my moment, and you knew it and you
Speaker 1: jumped in beforehand. I'm okay, keep going, folks, go ahead.
Speaker 5: But there's no doubt there are going to be need
Speaker 5: to apply laws and rules, whether fraud, whether deception. The
Speaker 5: legal system will have to be applied. But but I
Speaker 5: think we should move slowly and understand what we're doing
Speaker 5: because the productivity benefits potentially are are are massive. And
Speaker 5: I will say, when you know, you talked a minute
Speaker 5: ago about how how the big tech companies want barriers
Speaker 5: to entry, and that is the most common.
Speaker 7: One of the.
Speaker 5: Great lies of politics is the idea that conservatives are
Speaker 5: pro big business. The reality is big business loves big government.
Speaker 5: Big business usually gets in bed with big government, and
Speaker 5: big business loves when government puts barriers to entry to
Speaker 5: stop the next generation of entrepreneurs. And I'll say this, look,
Speaker 5: I have nothing for her against big business, but I
Speaker 5: am interested in the little guys, the next group of
Speaker 5: entrepreneurs what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. And
Speaker 5: one of my favorite images on the Internet is a
Speaker 5: picture of the founders of Microsoft in nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 5: And you have Paul Allen with long hair and a beard,
Speaker 5: and he looks like one of the begs. You've got
Speaker 5: Bill Gates with glasses the size of hip hubcaps and on.
Speaker 5: It's just that picture of a bunch of college dropouts,
Speaker 5: and it just asks would you invent money with these guys?
Speaker 5: And that is and they were taking on IBM, Big Blue,
Speaker 5: the giant behemoth, and they were the creative destruction. Now
Speaker 5: they're the giant. And I will say, let's do this
Speaker 5: to wrap up, talk about the importance of disruptors, of
Speaker 5: the innovation of the next generation, driving techs, driving productivity,
Speaker 5: driving our countries.
Speaker 6: I mean, this is one hundred percent how America works,
Speaker 6: as you say, And by the way, it's our biggest
Speaker 6: advantage against China as our adversary in China right now,
Speaker 6: the CCP, aside from just having killed a bunch of
Speaker 6: our billionaire Chinese tech friends, so everyone's terrified to build
Speaker 6: more tech if you're alady successful in China the other
Speaker 6: thing they have going against them.
Speaker 5: Hold on say that again.
Speaker 6: A lot of our tech friends died in the last
Speaker 6: or died und or fled in the last five years
Speaker 6: out of China. There and a lot of them were
Speaker 6: taken away and disappeared and then came back, and they
Speaker 6: won't talk about it anymore.
Speaker 5: So do we know names of people who are killed?
Speaker 3: Because I don't.
Speaker 1: I'll give you a friend.
Speaker 6: And Andy Tandran an Asian innovations group forty seven years old,
Speaker 6: about to go public last year after working hard for
Speaker 6: eleven years, and they told them they wanted to do
Speaker 6: things differently with the data and going in China. He said,
Speaker 6: I'm gonna go talk to him Beijing. Next I heard
Speaker 6: he died in his sleep that night at forty seven
Speaker 6: years old.
Speaker 1: Wow. And there's a lot of stories like this.
Speaker 6: There's a lot of guys who built a lot of it,
Speaker 6: who fled and who are very sketish usingeing. But I'll
Speaker 6: tell you the other big advantage we have though against them,
Speaker 6: other than them strewing that up, is basically all this
Speaker 6: productivity coming from AI.
Speaker 1: It's gonna disrupt healthcare.
Speaker 6: It's gonna change of healthcare works, it's gonna change how logistics,
Speaker 6: or it's gonna change all these industries work. In China,
Speaker 6: the government people and their cronies they own those industries.
Speaker 6: They are not going to allow those to be disrupted.
Speaker 6: The question is is in America are we still able
Speaker 6: to disrupt things? Are we still going to be allowed
Speaker 6: by our government to go in and change how those
Speaker 6: things work? And it's gonna be about because we have
Speaker 6: regulatory agencies that also want to slow it down with
Speaker 6: the big companies. But I still believe in America, with
Speaker 6: the right leadership, we actually can disrupt these things and
Speaker 6: we can grow.
Speaker 8: Well.
Speaker 5: Look, when AI replace this podcast, I hope that the
Speaker 5: computer that takes my place does a really fine job.
Speaker 2: Fine, Yah, final question for you, and I want to
Speaker 2: go back to the university because there's gonna be a
Speaker 2: lot of kids that listen to this, a lot of parents, grandparents.
Speaker 2: They're gonna and maybe even professors that may want to
Speaker 2: reach out. What does next year's class look like? Is
Speaker 2: there a cap on that if someone says I want
Speaker 2: more information. If there's a professor that's listening to this
Speaker 2: and says, hey, I want to leave this great institution
Speaker 2: that I'm at because of I'm being stifled or silence,
Speaker 2: I want to talk to you, how can they do that?
Speaker 6: So we're bidding our first class right now. This is
Speaker 6: just as competitive to get into as the other top
Speaker 6: ten schools. But if you have a really bright, young
Speaker 6: young student who's a founding personality, entrepreneuri personality, it's pretty
Speaker 6: much one of the coolest places you can go. We
Speaker 6: have a hundred of my top tech friends who put
Speaker 6: their names on and advising it. We have all these
Speaker 6: tall academics. It's going to be very competitive to get in,
Speaker 6: but yes, please please please apply. You can go to
Speaker 6: you Austin dot org and Strich University of Austin online
Speaker 6: professors there.
Speaker 1: They're welcome to the email. Obviously.
Speaker 6: If they're amazing, we'll love to talk to them. We
Speaker 6: have a pretty big line of people trying to get
Speaker 6: in as professors right now. But obviously it's very, very
Speaker 6: interested in meeting great people.
Speaker 2: As before. If you want to hear the rest of
Speaker 2: this conversation on this topic, you can go back and
Speaker 2: dow the podcast from earlier this week to hear the
Speaker 2: entire thing. I want to get back to the big
Speaker 2: story number three of the week.
Speaker 3: You may have missed.
Speaker 2: White House Press Sretory Jean Pierre asked about it on CNN.
Speaker 2: Here's what she said about it at the White House
Speaker 2: this morning.
Speaker 9: One of the things that some Americans are focused on
Speaker 9: are crimes that are allegedly being committed by migrants who
Speaker 9: are in the country illegally. There was the death of
Speaker 9: Lake and Riley in Georgia. There's been an arrest made there.
Speaker 9: Republicans are directly blaming President Biden for this. Republican Senator
Speaker 9: Josh Holly said, quote, these deaths are on him. What's
Speaker 9: the White House response to that?
Speaker 8: So, first of all, I want to offer our condolences
Speaker 8: to the family of Lincoln. I mean, this is a horrific,
Speaker 8: horrific loss for any family and obviously any if whoever
Speaker 8: is found guilty, we need to make sure that make
Speaker 8: sure that that happens. And obviously we don't want to
Speaker 8: we don't want to see anything happen like that again.
Speaker 8: But here's the thing. We have done the work to
Speaker 8: make sure we're dealing with a broken immigration system.
Speaker 2: Senator, Have they done the work, because that's news to me.
Speaker 2: We've done the work to make sure we're dealing with
Speaker 2: a broken immigration system. Did they or did they not
Speaker 2: break the system on purpose to flood the country with
Speaker 2: millions of illegal immigrants.
Speaker 5: So look, at some level, yes, they did the work.
Speaker 5: They did the work to break the system. Why is
Speaker 5: the system broken because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and
Speaker 5: the congressional Democrats wanted to break it. Understand, when Joe
Speaker 5: Biden came into office just over three years ago, he
Speaker 5: inherited the lowest rate of illegal immigration in forty five years.
Speaker 5: All he had to do was do nothing, simply sit there,
Speaker 5: don't screw it up. And Donald Trump. I worked hand
Speaker 5: in hand with Donald Trump. We had made enormous progress
Speaker 5: securing the border. Joe Biden does nothing. He could have
Speaker 5: a victory, but instead he deliberately caused this crisis.
Speaker 1: He broke the border.
Speaker 5: Three decisions caused this crisis. He halted construction of the
Speaker 5: border wall, he reinstated catch and release at the border,
Speaker 5: and he pulled out of the amazingly successful Remain in
Speaker 5: Mexico agreement. That was deliberate. He knew what he was doing,
Speaker 5: and the consequence was this invasion at our southern border.
Speaker 5: But let me tell you every dead body Lake and
Speaker 5: Riley Lake and Riley her parents ought to say, why,
Speaker 5: why why didn't Joe Biden take that damn murderer, put
Speaker 5: him on a plane and send him the hell out
Speaker 5: of here. He should have. The law provides that he
Speaker 5: needed to. And yet his politics, his partisan interests, said,
Speaker 5: you know what, I don't care if I'm releasing a murderer.
Speaker 5: If Americans die, it doesn't matter if it keeps Democrats
Speaker 5: in power. And I got to tell you, Ben, that
Speaker 5: pisces me off because I don't believe a word I
Speaker 5: just said. There is hyperbole. I think these people all
Speaker 5: they care about is political power, and if more Americans die,
Speaker 5: that is perfectly acceptable to them.
Speaker 2: Senator lastly White out spread Secretary Jean Pierre on Biden's
Speaker 2: trip to the border. She said, this is not about politics,
Speaker 2: which made me about fall out of my seat.
Speaker 9: What does it tell you that both President Biden and
Speaker 9: Donald Trump are going to be out the border on.
Speaker 3: The same day.
Speaker 8: Here there's a difference here, and I want to be
Speaker 8: very clear about this, because the President is going to
Speaker 8: as you just said, Brownsville, Texas, to hear directly from
Speaker 8: the border patrol agents, to hear directly from the frontline
Speaker 8: personnel on what is going on on the ground. And
Speaker 8: let's not forget the President was at the border just
Speaker 8: about a year ago in January of twenty twenty three,
Speaker 8: to do the same.
Speaker 2: This is not about politics for the President center. This
Speaker 2: is all about politics.
Speaker 3: He's seen the poll numbers.
Speaker 2: Yes, you and I have seen.
Speaker 5: Everything this White House does is about politics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they know it. And the majority of Americans
Speaker 2: right now believe that the President United States of America
Speaker 2: doesn't know how to fix the border, can't fix the border.
Speaker 2: And the majority of Americans now say that Donald Trump
Speaker 2: is the only one that can do it.
Speaker 5: So look, it's worse than that. I actually don't think
Speaker 5: it's right that Biden and the White House doesn't know
Speaker 5: how to fix the border. They don't want to fix
Speaker 5: the border. They made three decisions the first week in office.
Speaker 5: They halted the border wall, they reinstated catch and release,
Speaker 5: they pulled out of remain in Mexico. If you want
Speaker 5: to fix the border, it's not rock and science. I've
Speaker 5: said this a thousand times in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Speaker 5: I've said this a thousand times. On the floor of
Speaker 5: the Senate. I said this is a thousand times on
Speaker 5: national television. Reverse those three decisions, build the wall, and
Speaker 5: catch and release, return to the remain in Mexico agreement
Speaker 5: that would work. Understand, Joe Biden and the Democrats do
Speaker 5: not want it to work. They are making the most
Speaker 5: cynical political decision I have seen in my lifetime because
Speaker 5: they are allowing people to die. We've talked about the
Speaker 5: people who've been murdered, We've talked about the children who've
Speaker 5: been raped, and by the way, we've talked not on
Speaker 5: this podcast, but many times before about the risk of
Speaker 5: a major terrorist attack. God forbid, ben I don't want
Speaker 5: to wake up tomorrow or the next day or the
Speaker 5: next day and find out that we've had another nine
Speaker 5: to eleven here in the United States, that we've had
Speaker 5: another mass murder by violent terrorists. But I have been
Speaker 5: very explicit. I believe the risks of another major terrorist
Speaker 5: attack are greater today than they've been any time since
Speaker 5: September eleventh, two thousand and one. And it is not
Speaker 5: that the Democrat Party is oblivious to this, it's they
Speaker 5: simply don't give a damn.
Speaker 2: They're the first to know about it. By the way,
Speaker 2: FIRS to know my market is the first to know.
Speaker 2: They know before you know, where I know or anybody
Speaker 2: else knows how many on the Arras squatch lists are
Speaker 2: getting caught coming across the southern border. And we know
Speaker 2: how many were caught in September, October, November and December
Speaker 2: of last year at record numbers, more than the last
Speaker 2: four years combined when Trump was the president.
Speaker 5: That is exactly right, And the only only way this
Speaker 5: problem is going to be solved is to re elect
Speaker 5: a Republican president. To reelect Donald Trump, put him in
Speaker 5: the White House. And understand, this crisis will be solved
Speaker 5: not over the course of a year, not over the
Speaker 5: course of six months, but literally within days because the
Speaker 5: driving factor, So what determines whether you have an eelil
Speaker 5: immigration crisis and what happens when people cross over the border,
Speaker 5: Almost all of them have a cell phone with them,
Speaker 5: and right now they look for border patrol agents, they
Speaker 5: turn themselves in they're not caught. They go. When I'm
Speaker 5: on midnight patrol, they turn themselves into me. They have
Speaker 5: a cell phone, and if you ask them. The last
Speaker 5: time I was down at the border, I asked multipleliminrants,
Speaker 5: do you believe you get to stay in America now
Speaker 5: that you're here? And they all said, every single one
Speaker 5: said yes, yes, yes, yes yes. As long as that's
Speaker 5: the case, we will have an invasion. Every one of
Speaker 5: them has a cell phone. They pick up the phones,
Speaker 5: they call their friends, they call their family, they call
Speaker 5: their loved ones and they say, you know what, come
Speaker 5: to America. When you get here, they let you go.
Speaker 5: You get to stay. If that is the result, we
Speaker 5: will continue to have a full scale invasion. The only
Speaker 5: only only way to stop it is when people come
Speaker 5: here illegally, you put them on a plane and you
Speaker 5: send them back to where they came from. And again
Speaker 5: they have a cell phone, so they call their friends.
Speaker 5: If you deport them, they say, oh crap, you could
Speaker 5: spend months and thousands of dollars and be horribly brutalized
Speaker 5: by traffickers, and you get here and they send you home.
Speaker 5: Don't do it. And it's why I'm going to make
Speaker 5: a prediction January of twenty twenty five, the numbers of
Speaker 5: Elie immigrants are going to plummet massively. And it's not
Speaker 5: like it takes a year long program from the president.
Speaker 5: All it takes Donald Trump as president. When you cross illegally,
Speaker 5: will deport you and that will cause that single fact
Speaker 5: will cause the numbers to plummet.
Speaker 2: If there's anything that maybe turning the tide here, and
Speaker 2: that seems to actually be media covering the stories that
Speaker 2: you mentioned in the tragedies, KABBTV in San Antonio actually
Speaker 2: ran this on the local news listen.
Speaker 7: Ask for the question of why now. Political experts have
Speaker 7: suggested to me that's because the president has kind of
Speaker 7: had his oh shoot moment, meaning that Biden and his
Speaker 7: campaign staff have realized that the immigration issue is important
Speaker 7: to the American people and it isn't going away. That
Speaker 7: fact only further out evidenced by numerous recent polls that
Speaker 7: show that immigration is a top three issue for voters
Speaker 7: this election cycle, and for many it's the number one issue,
Speaker 7: I mean centater.
Speaker 2: Lastly, you look at this and that's on local TV.
Speaker 2: We have not seen that type of scrutiny of this
Speaker 2: president ever. And when we go back over the traveling
Speaker 2: seas that are happening in all these different states around
Speaker 2: the country. Just in the last week, there are so
Speaker 2: many illegal immigrants. Millions and millions have come across the border.
Speaker 2: They are in every state in America, and there are
Speaker 2: a lot of bad actors committing heinous crimes in every
Speaker 2: state in America. There's no way now that you can't
Speaker 2: hold this president, I think, accountable. If you're in the
Speaker 2: media telling these stories, tell the truth.
Speaker 5: That is all that is needed right now. Tell the
Speaker 5: truth about what is happening at the border. Tell the
Speaker 5: truth about how Joe Biden and the Democrats are deliberately,
Speaker 5: willfully allowing this in invasion. The reason Biden and Commonal
Speaker 5: end the Democrats don't go to the border is because
Speaker 5: when they come, they bring the TV reporters. Their entire
Speaker 5: strategy is not to defend this. Look understand. On Senate
Speaker 5: Judiciary Committee, I lay out these facts day after day
Speaker 5: after day. No Democrat jumps up and says, you know
Speaker 5: what Ted's wrong. He doesn't understand it. Let me tell
Speaker 5: you the alternative. It's not like reasonable minds can differ.
Speaker 5: Their strategy is simple, shut their mouths because they know
Speaker 5: CNN will never cover what's said, they know MSNBC will
Speaker 5: never cover they know ABC, CBS, NBC will never cover it.
Speaker 5: And so the most powerful thing we can do is
Speaker 5: simply tell the stories of the death, of the rape,
Speaker 5: of the suffering, of the misery that Joe Biden and
Speaker 5: the Democrats are causing. That is the most powerful tool
Speaker 5: to turn it around and stop it.
Speaker 2: As always, thank you. We're listening to Verdict with Sentner,
Speaker 2: Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you don't forget to deal
Speaker 2: with my podcast and you can listen to my podcast
Speaker 2: every other day you're not listening to Verdict or each
Speaker 2: day when you listen to Verdict. Afterwards, I'd love to
Speaker 2: have you as a listener to again the Ben Ferguson podcasts,
Speaker 2: and we will see you back here on Monday morning.