Chapter 1: What is the latest on the massive Medicaid fraud scam in Ohio?
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Chapter 2: How are the Democrats in California competing for radical successors?
I still think, was it Ann Coulter who referred to John Edwards as the Brett girl? Or was that Peggy?
Yeah, that was Ann. That was Ann, yep.
I want to make sure, so we still have Matt for 93 seconds, I think, which means this is Friendly Fire. Welcome, everybody, to Friendly Fire. Very, very excited to have all of you here, especially this week because The Daily Wire broke this major story thanks to our intrepid Luke Rosiak, where he discovered, I think, $150 gazillion worth of fraud coming out of Ohio.
This after the great exposés from Nick Shirley and Chris Ruffo. Minnesota fraud, California fraud. I guess what singles this one out a little bit is that this is a Republican state. It shows you just how bad the fraud was. And look, I'm actually speaking to some financial officers right now. Weirdly enough, that's why I'm on the road right now. And it occurred to me
When I was a kid, and you guys, you've all been in politics a very long time, I remember we would hear that waste, fraud, and abuse was actually not that bad. And you'd hear that from the Republicans because the Republicans wanted entitlement reform. And you heard it from the Democrats because they wanted to keep doing their waste, fraud, and abuse. Am I just innumerate or something?
Am I missing out on the magnitude? It seems to me that the waste, fraud, and abuse actually is that bad.
I'm going to wait for Matt to talk, because if he does not talk, then it's going to be a real problem.
Yeah, well, I've only got three minutes, so I'll give my spiel about Somali fraudsters, which is they're bad. I oppose them. I'm against it. We should deport them all. Here's what I think about the fraud, though.
The most shocking thing about it, the most infuriating thing about it is just how, and this is what you take from Luke Rosiak's report and from Nick Shirley's and from others who have looked into it, it's just how obvious it is. It's like it didn't require, you didn't have to go undercover
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Chapter 3: What happened during the gubernatorial debate in California?
Because you pay them to do their chores, now they feel like they're giving you a service in exchange for the thing. And so without the pay, they're going to stop doing the thing, right? It's a Pavlovian incentive structure. And so I think one of the things this comes down to is you guys have both seen Cinderella Man.
There's that great scene in Cinderella Man where Russell Crowe is James Braddock. He's a down-on-his-luck boxer. And he ends up on welfare and he goes and becomes champion and he goes back to the welfare office with a roll of bills and he puts it back through the slot and he gives it back. There is not a single human in America who would do that with any form of taxpayer benefit today.
It says something about our sort of collective morality. And I think it's also one of the reasons, one of the things that's sort of fascinating is that this story that Luke uncovered here has done outsized political work.
I mean, the reality is that it's, you know, you've got all these politicians, vice president on down, who are taking notice of this and saying they want to do something about it. But I will say that in terms of sort of spectacular traffic, you know, gigantic public attention, It hasn't done the same sort of numbers. And I think the reason for that is not because of the quality of the story.
The story is incredible. I think the reason for that is because people do not think of it anymore because of the size and scope of the government as a massive sin to defraud the government. They don't understand that when you're defrauding the government, you're defrauding your fellow taxpayers. That when you do this sort of stuff, What you are actually doing is robbing human beings.
There's a person on the other side of the check. And this is the problem with these gigantic social welfare systems. If you are a Republican and you're only going to make the case that they need to be more efficient, these social welfare systems, these social welfare systems, if we just could get them more efficient, then they would be good. Then you're arguing at the margins.
The reality is that many of these social welfare systems have actively deprived people of virtue. I mean, just to take a quick example, you know, Social Security, I understand why it exists. No one's arguing for it to go away on a practical level.
But one thing that Social Security has done is it has crowded out investment for the future for people because they believe they're getting a check from the federal government. And it has also crowded out people taking care of their parents and planning for the future in terms of their financial, making sure that their parents are taken care of.
And so what used to be a sort of familial aspect has turned into a governmental aspect. Now, you can argue that that's made elderly people more prosperous. That's fine. It is a gigantic social welfare system that's bankrupting the country. But it is true that governmental systems tend to crowd out individual virtue and social virtue. And so I think that's a huge component of this.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the federal raid on a Virginia Democrat?
And so it would move me. But do you think it will play or are people just so used to it?
I think that unless you connect it to a broader program of slashing these programs and restructuring these programs, it's very difficult to see it moving the needle. And this is kind of what I was referring to earlier. As long as the Republican Party is the party of, yeah, we should have these gigantic social welfare systems, but we'll just make them slightly more efficient.
And the Democratic Party is that's ungenerous and you should spend more money on them. I think you lose that argument every time. The whole point of the if you go back to the original sort of iteration of the pushback against the welfare state, which really had to wait until Ronald Reagan, the sort of welfare queen argument, right?
The idea that people are driving around Cadillacs based on welfare.
that was an argument that was not devoted to the idea that people were bilking the welfare system purely and so we should crack down on the fraud the idea was we may need to cut welfare entirely or we need to heavily chop into welfare we need to completely restructure the system as it works and that culminated of course in actual welfare reform in the 1990s under newt gingrich which is i still think one of the single most transformative things republicans have done over the course of the last half century well now you you look at what republicans are talking about and they're saying okay
You know, we'll do the Doge. Doge will save us all the money because we'll go and we'll eliminate this line item that shouldn't have happened. Or we'll do an investigation. We'll cut this little piece of fraud out. That's not going to get anybody animated. The argument here is that Medicaid itself has huge systemic flaws.
And you need to remove those gigantic systemic flaws because Medicaid has turned into a gigantic fraud program that is not helping the people it was set out to help and many of the people who set out to help.
don't actually need the help of Medicaid because, again, depending on where you are, you're talking about people who are many times over the actual poverty line who are receiving aid from the federal government. If you don't have a program on the Republican side to actually go small, this is why big government conservatism is never going to last very long.
You'll have spates of it in reaction to even bigger government liberalism, but I think that at a certain point, I know it's controversial, and I know it's falling out of fashion. At some point, conservatives may have to argue again for smaller government, not just quote-unquote more efficient government.
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Chapter 5: How does Trump’s recent win affect the Republican party?
He seemed awesome, but was he really that awesome in the room?
I mean, look, I was in there with, I don't know how many other reporters, so many. We were so crowded. It didn't smell good. I had people's arms in front of my face. Everyone was laughing at him. Everybody loved him. He was, as the youth say, he was rizzing the crowd. He enjoyed it. It was very clear that he did.
He worked in two different lines from popular music song that I'm a little too young to actually realize the references. Maybe you guys know them better than I do.
Insane in the membrane. I feel so old, man. Why are you going to throw that in there, Mary Margaret?
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
I have one question about it. Was he lying when he said that he didn't know the names of the people in the room?
Oh, he definitely didn't. I mean, think about it. He was on Capitol Hill. Capitol Hill press is very different than the White House press corps.
um someone like me i think i've interviewed him like years and years ago but it would have been like a one-off you know at cpac or something like that it's not like the white house press is spending a lot of time over on capitol hill or actually at the state department so the reporters that you would know were in the front row and i think i said this yesterday but uh he wasn't calling on the front row too much which as a member of the new media i kind of liked because uh he was calling on the aisles he was calling on people in the back he called on the guy right next to me so just
bouncing around the room he was clearly a little overstimulated by the vibe in there but anyone would be and i don't know ben i think i think he did a good job and i think he really enjoyed himself and for the first time i personally thought oh wow maybe it's going to be him there's no job he can't do yes true
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Chapter 6: What are the reactions to the Ohio fraud investigation?
The irony of this, though, is It actually could be something that could benefit Spanberger because she would get potentially a potentially a less radical Democrat leadership. And if Louise Lucas ends up going down over some kind of potential criminal activity, we'll have to wait.
Are we watching Ozark? Because that'd be that'd be awesome.
I mean, I feel like that very, very Ozark.
One of my favorite parts of the story. Gigantic weed farms would be great.
It would be amazing. One of my favorite parts of this story is the backlash online currently about Fox News being in the vicinity to document what was happening here. So I think it was Bill Malujan that was on the ground and clearly got a tip from the FBI that this was going to be happening.
All these liberals online, including Tim Miller, are complaining and saying, you know, oh, how did Fox know this was going on? And myself and a couple other people pointed out CNN got the exclusive when Roger Stone was arrested by the FBI. They were there with their cameras. Many, many other such instances. But now, you know, that Fox News happened to be on the scene documenting this raid.
God forbid this happens. So I've been amused by that from a media criticism perspective because everyone's up in arms about it. And they're all trying to say that she wasn't close to Spanberger, which is not true, as Ben just pointed out.
Yeah, yeah. The truth is that Spanberger, if you know the makeup of her coalition, she's a Northern Virginia person. She needed the support of people like Lucas to bring along the black vote that was a little more skeptical about Spanberger being such a kind of Nova Karen type when that sort of portion of the vote is so critical to winning in Virginia.
Now, turning from the East Coast over to the West Coast, one story we talked about at the top of the show a little bit that I totally missed last night. Because I was doing my little debate over in Dartmouth. There was a much bigger debate going on in California between the candidates for governor. And it was all the looniest Democrats minus Eric Swalwell, who we don't need to get into any of.
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Chapter 7: How are the Democrats responding to the upcoming midterm elections?
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There's no reason. This is really unfair that Michael Knowles has apparently checked the tag on our mattress in our house without my knowledge. But yes, we do actually have a Helix mattress. So anyway, look, the truth is that. She says that because she loves California. She lived in L.A. for quite a while. You know, I'm sure, Ben, you love California, too, on some base level.
You know, I'm not one of these people on the right who says, screw them, you know, with their beautiful weather and their relaxed mentality and, you know, everything like that. It's more that I would like California to be a place that people could do business again, could make movies again, for crying out loud, since they can't afford to make them there anymore.
And unfortunately, I think they're just going to double down. They're just going to do the same dumb crap again.
And they're probably going to choose somebody like Becerra, who is one of the worst cabinet appointees, by the way, when he actually was at when he was at HHS, something that he had no business being in just because of the politics of the situation, because he was put there basically to screw over pro-lifers and to do whatever the Biden White House wanted him to do.
He's one of the most radical pro-abortion members of President Joe Biden's administration. And he was also, you know, Kamala Harris, when she was attorney general of California, she started that whole persecution of David Daleiden, but he really picked it up and carried it throughout the rest of his tenure there and was absolutely part of persecuting David Daleiden to this day.
So incredibly radical pro-abortion individual. And, you know, Californians may have forgotten that over the past, I don't know, decade, but it is one of his top issues.
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Chapter 8: What does the future hold for the Republican party in light of recent events?
You already hear them starting to say this stuff. So the question is, are we going to be that? Are we going to say, well, you know, I'll tell you, I have a strange new respect for Gavin Newsom. Or no, is Newsom as bad as it gets?
Yeah, no, no, no. I think you'll get the stranger respect for Gavin Newsom because they're psychotic. I mean, Xavier Becerra is quite terrible. Gavin Newsom, he still has his eye on the presidency. So he actually has threatened to veto some things from the California state legislature. Becerra will just veto. We'll just let every single part of it through.
By the way, according to our sponsors over at CalSheet, the CalSheet market suggests 47% of people think Becerra is going to be the governor. 37% think Tom Steyer. Man, what the hell is wrong with that state? Tom Steyer, seriously? Yoke. Can I short that? Only 10% thinks Steve Hilton.
I mean, by the way, the one that I think would be also very amusing, I have to say, would be Antonio Villaraigosa. Villaraigosa would be really, really amusing because Villaraigosa is legitimately one of the dumbest people in America. He is truly a not smart human. And so the sort of Steve Carell of it would be incredible.
And watching him just bump into walls for four years would be... So basically, I'm rooting for all of the underdogs, all of the underdogs, because I think that it will end up being Becerra. It'll be terrible. And I feel bad for my friends in California. I really do. And businesses are going to flee.
One of the best parts of the debate is Katie Porter said we need illegal immigration because that's the only way that we've actually received net population increase in California. You're not supposed to say that part out loud. You're not supposed to say that part out loud.
And it's also one of those things where, you know, and this is something that I think Republicans need to be putting more of a front foot on going forward, is the only reason these states are holding on to the kind of flow of taxpayer dollars that they have received through all these programs is because of that, is because they welcome these illegals into their state to replace the American citizens who are
fleeing for very logical and obvious reasons, going to places like Texas, going to places like Nashville. They are moving out of those blue states because of those terrible policies.
But the blue states are able to hold on to both congressional seats and the flow of taxpayer money because they import all of these illegals and basically say, we're just going to run our programs in order to feed more and more people this type of taxpayer dollars and keep more and more bureaucrats employed.
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