IQ scores in the United States are falling for the first time since the early 20th century. Why is this happening? And what can we do about it? In this episode, we discuss the root cause, and why it may not be as simple as better education or more time in front of the computer as we used to think it was. We also talk about the growing problem of racial demographics and how that may be to blame for the decline in IQ scores, and how it could be a symptom of a larger problem. Today's episode is brought to you by The New York Times, Slate, and The Huffington Post. Subscribe to our new podcast, The Diff, to get notified when we deconstruct the most pressing news in American culture and politics every Monday morning. Want to become a Friend of The Diff? Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code POWER10 at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase when you become a member of the podcast and receive $10 or more in the iTunes store. Learn more about your ad choices. Rate/subscribe in Apple Podcasts! Rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast! Thanks for listening and share this episode with your fellow podcast go to gimlet.fm/TheNewScientist to help spread the word to your friends and family about The Diff. to other podcasting friends! and stay up to date with the latest episodes of The FiveThirtyEight Podcasts and more! to let them know what's going on in your feed and what's trending on your feed! in the next episode will be featured in next week on the FiveThirtyFiveThirtysomething s next episode on The Five Thirtysomething podcast will be the most important podcast episode on that episode on the next week's episode on this week's Monday s episode! Subscribe? Subscribe and subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform will be reviewed by FiveThirtyeight s most listened to by you'll get the most powerful podcast on the best podcast of the week's most influential podcast on what s going to be the biggest podcast on the podcast? and much more. on social media will be a review of the latest episode of FiveThirtyfour s next week will be reviewing the latest in the most profound podcast on that week's top podcast review? on this episode will also be reviewed on this podcast will have the most influential piece on that's going out next week s episode
00:00:00.000Okay, so Donald Trump's grand jury is back in session on Thursday.
00:00:03.000We're going to bring you all the kind of shocking and breaking news from that particular area momentarily.
00:00:08.000First, the kind of most important story of the day, and we tend to cover a lot of what's happening like right in the news, right this second.
00:00:14.000We're going to do a lot of that in just one second because there is a lot of stuff happening today.
00:00:17.000But The kind of broader trend lines in American society are the things that ripple under the surface and they tend to have the biggest impact.
00:00:24.000So there is a big story that has been kind of buried because, again, in news we tend to follow the urgent rather than the necessary.
00:00:31.000And the story should be somewhat troubling to everyone.
00:00:34.000The story is that IQ scores in the United States are actually beginning to drop.
00:00:39.000Now, the United States is not unique in this respect.
00:00:41.000You've seen IQ scores in a lot of westernized countries increase gradually over the course of the last century, and then kind of stagnate, and then finally start to drop a little.
00:00:48.000Actually, you've seen this in places like Norway as early as 2018.
00:00:51.000But now, for the first time, this is happening in the United States.
00:00:54.000According to Northwestern, IQ scores have substantially increased from 1932 through the 20th century, with differences ranging from 3 to 5 IQ points per decade, according to a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect.
00:01:04.000The Flynn effect is the gradual increase in IQ over time.
00:01:08.000And there are a lot of explanations for why that happened.
00:01:27.000sample between 2006 and 2018 in every category except for one.
00:01:31.000For the reverse Flynn effect, there are consistent negative slopes for three out of four cognitive domains.
00:01:36.000So what this means is that ability scores for verbal reasoning, that'd be logic and vocabulary, matrix reasoning, which would be visual problem solving and analogies, letter and number series, that'd be computational and mathematical, dropped during the study period.
00:01:46.000The only area in which the IQs apparently got better is scores of 3D rotation, spatial reasoning.
00:01:52.000Which would suggest that people are spending an awful lot of time on their cell phones.
00:01:56.000Compositability scores, which are sort of like your overall IQ scores, are also lower for more recent samples and the differences in scores are present regardless of age, education, or gender.
00:02:06.000So, something is happening in American society and it is actually driving the IQ scores down.
00:02:10.000Now, there are a bunch of theories as to why that is happening.
00:02:12.000None of them are particularly encouraging because they're all systemic.
00:02:16.000So the first one is the idea that education itself is beginning to fail.
00:02:19.000That you have over the course of the last century, and again true in all westernized countries, as more people get educated, as more people go to school, as more people go to high school, and then to college, overall IQ scores tend to rise.
00:02:30.000That as there are educational effects, IQ scores, particularly at the lower end of the spectrum, where people are undereducated, tend to rise.
00:02:35.000So for example, right now, Ashkenazic Jewish IQs are famously higher than average.
00:02:41.000But in the early 20th century, Ashkenazic Jewish IQs were actually lower than average because many of the people who were coming over from Europe were not actually educated.
00:02:48.000They were fifth grade graduates and they spoke Yiddish.
00:02:51.000And then over time, as they grew more and more educated, the IQ scores started to go up because the tests only measure what the tests measure.
00:02:58.000That's happened with entire populations.
00:03:00.000As the populations grow more educated, and as you focus in on a meritocracy, you're essentially incentivizing better IQ performance.
00:03:08.000So, it's possible that education has now petered out.
00:03:10.000And you can see this in higher education, where we have stopped focusing on exactly the sorts of skills that you would need in order to score high on IQ.
00:03:17.000We've stopped focusing on how verbally dexterous you are.
00:03:20.000We've stopped focusing in on your ability to use reason.
00:03:25.000All that has gone completely by the wayside and education in favor of other priorities like the sort of victimhood mentality and how well you can play the system.
00:03:33.000So when it comes to our IQ for playing the system, our IQ for playing the system, our incentive structures have totally changed in education over the course of the last 20 years.
00:03:41.000Then there's the problem of demographics.
00:03:44.000When I talk about demographics, I'm not talking about racial demographics.
00:03:46.000Here, I'm talking about the simple fact that over time, higher IQ people tend to earn more money.
00:03:51.000People who earn more money tend to have fewer children.
00:03:54.000People who earn less money tend to have more children.
00:03:56.000And so what that means is that if you are having fewer people at the top of the IQ spectrum, and IQ is largely genetic, if you start to see people at the top of the IQ spectrum having fewer kids and people at the bottom of the IQ spectrum having more kids, then you end up with the sort of prophecy of idiocracy in which the people with the lower IQ tend to predominate.
00:04:14.000Now, again, that's changed over time because people who are low income earning, over time, when there was discrimination, that didn't correlate with IQ.
00:04:21.000A lot of people who didn't earn a high income 50 years ago, it's because the system actively was discriminating against them or because they were brand new immigrants, they'd not been assimilated.
00:04:29.000But as we are a very assimilative society, and as all of the restrictions have gone away on particular ethnic groups, for example, in the United States, what you're starting to see is the possibility of IQ breakdown.
00:04:39.000You've seen this happen again, not just in the United States, but also in Europe.
00:04:42.000So the demographic crisis that is about to break on Western shores, namely people not having enough kids, is going to have particularly market effect when it turns out that many of the people who are really not having kids are the people who are also the most likely to be at the top end of the IQ spectrum.
00:04:55.000Again, because income earning and IQ tend to have a very high overlap in free societies.
00:05:00.000And then there's the final theory here, which is that we are all addicted to our smartphones.
00:05:08.000That our reliance on machines makes us stupider.
00:05:11.000All of which suggests that America has a rough ride in store for it, and so does the rest of the West.
00:05:15.000Because the notion of continual progress relies, again, on continual human betterment.
00:05:20.000And that, in turn, relies on a set of incentives that actually is going to incentivize people to make good decisions and to create a better society.
00:05:29.000When all those incentive structures and all of those categories go away, you end up with a real problem on your hands.
00:05:34.000We'll talk about that in just one second.
00:05:36.000First, let's talk about the predations of Big Tech.
00:05:37.000So we'll get to more on Big Tech actually preying on your mind in just one second.
00:05:41.000But the fact of the matter is, Big Tech also monetizes you.
00:05:44.000Big Tech is there to ensure that you are taken advantage of in terms of your data.
00:05:49.000You think you're getting this stuff for free?
00:05:58.000You should have ExpressVPN because it's the best VPN on the market.
00:06:01.000ExpressVPN is an app that anonymizes your online presence, making it much more difficult for big tech companies to track and sell your data.
00:06:06.000ExpressVPN also encrypts 100% of your network's data to protect you from cyber criminals.
00:06:39.000Let's talk about some of those individual factors.
00:06:41.000So when it comes to the use of technology, we're deliberately making ourselves and our kids stupider through our use of technology.
00:06:48.000Our attention spans have now been reduced to essentially pea-sized attention spans.
00:06:52.000You literally cannot watch a YouTube show that does not cut every five seconds.
00:06:57.000And when you are watching, YouTube has essentially become a substitute for TV.
00:07:00.000So even sort of watching things for long periods of time, very, very difficult for people.
00:07:04.000If you look at the average amount of time that is spent on say Netflix or YouTube or TikTok, you can see that people like on an average day are spending two, three hours a day on these services.
00:07:17.000Is that going to generate any sort of any sort of serious skill set?
00:07:23.000Are people being made smarter by these apps?
00:07:25.000The answer obviously is going to be no.
00:07:27.000Americans are currently spending, according to Statista from 2020 to 2024, Americans are spending something like 45 minutes a day on TikTok and 45 minutes a day on YouTube and they're spending over 60 minutes a day on Netflix.
00:07:41.000And that doesn't include all the other apps that people are spending their time on.
00:07:43.000They're scrolling through Twitter or scrolling through Facebook.
00:07:46.000We are playing games with our brains that we just don't understand.
00:07:50.000And, you know, again, as somebody who tends to be sort of a technological optimist, I will say that hooking your brain into a machine that allows it to do all the work for you is going to make you dumber.
00:08:03.000The fact is that if you ask kids today to do sort of basic mathematical calculations, very few of them can do it.
00:08:09.000And one of the reasons that that is the case is because all you have to do is pull out your cell phone and the phone will do all the work for you.
00:08:14.000Now, does that excess brain power go toward growing in another area?
00:08:27.000Which is one of the reasons why China actually puts out a different version of TikTok in the United States than it puts out in China.
00:08:32.000The version of TikTok in China actually teaches kids math.
00:08:35.000The version of TikTok in the United States teaches kids to be trans.
00:08:39.000In fact, yesterday it came out that there was a TikTok employee named Bruce Sapp, he's a content manager, admitting that this algorithm is actually very good for China, the one that's been distributed in the United States.
00:08:49.000Uh, there's a lot of shit I don't agree with that happens, but... Like what?
00:09:44.000lawmakers are set to grill TikTok's chief executive on Thursday in a wide-ranging hearing that could not come at a more consequential moment for the embattled social media platform.
00:09:51.000TikTok CEO Xiao Chu will face the House Energy and Commerce Committee during his first appearance before Congress.
00:09:59.000He'll testify on TikTok's consumer privacy and data security practices.
00:10:04.000Platform's impact on kids is the biggest one.
00:10:07.000TikTok supposedly has restrictions on the amount of time that kids can spend on TikTok, but with a couple of clicks, kids can move right on past that.
00:10:14.000And, you know, the reality is that because the eyeballs are on TikTok, everybody is on TikTok.
00:10:17.000The incentive structures are not stacked up in favor of the American consumer.
00:10:21.000I mean, it's why even members of the government who theoretically should be talking about banning TikTok are still using TikTok.
00:10:26.000In fact, yesterday, John Kirby, who's the national security spokesperson for the Biden administration, he was asked about the fact that right now there are serious considerations as to whether TikTok is a national security threat and Joe Biden continues to use it.
00:11:19.000I mean, our government is obviously not doing its job nor protect American citizens.
00:11:23.000Now, again, if you are a business like we here at Daily Wire, we put stuff on TikTok specifically because that is where the eyeballs are.
00:11:29.000So you either abandon the platform entirely to the world's worst actors or you try to get on there.
00:11:33.000But this is why the government actually should be stepping in with regard to TikTok.
00:11:36.000The problem is that if you're a politician, the way that you're cool with the kids is by basically incentivizing them to continue using mental crack, which is why you have representative Jamal Bowman of New York saying that the reason the Republicans want to ban TikTok is because they quote unquote ain't got no swag.
00:11:50.000You know, Robert, I just realized something.
00:13:33.000And you can see that the people who develop the apps, they're really good at this, right?
00:13:36.000My three-year-old can control YouTube.
00:13:39.000They are developed for ease of use, and that also means addictiveness, and that does actually have an impact on the formation of kids' brains.
00:13:46.000We are playing games with kids' brains that we really should not be playing with kids' brains, which is why my kids are not going to have internet access for a very long time.
00:13:52.000It's also why they're not allowed to watch TV.
00:13:54.000If you want your kids' brains to develop properly, then you should be cutting them off from a lot of the social media upon which they've become reliant.
00:14:00.000You have an educational system, particularly the public school educational system, which is not geared toward the interests of your children.
00:15:50.000Well, it turns out the janitors are in fact underpaid at LAUSD.
00:15:53.000But it's all being eaten up by administrative costs because you have a bunch of DEI and inclusion officials at these schools who are well overpaid.
00:16:00.000By the way, only 40% of LAUSD students are currently reading at grade level.
00:16:03.000Only 28.5% were on grade level in math.
00:16:08.000The reason, by the way, that so many families are leaving LAUSD is because people are not sending their kids to pre-k or kindergarten knowing that it's a giant waste of time.
00:16:18.000Instead, they are homeschooling or they are moving out of the city entirely.
00:16:21.000One of the reasons they're doing that is because the public schools kind of suck.
00:16:25.000The public schools have not been doing their jobs for a very long time because, again, the public schools are directed at payoffs to public sector unions.
00:16:31.000They're not directed toward educating your children.
00:16:34.000Even what the union is striking for right now has very little to do with student services.
00:16:40.000It's about wages for various school custodians, or cafeteria workers, or bus drivers, or other support staff.
00:16:46.000They stopped classes for more than a half million students in the nation's second largest school system in order to strike for all of this.
00:16:52.000By the way, you know what they've already been offered by the LAUSD school district?
00:16:55.000A 23% recurring pay increase plus 3% cash-in-hand bonus, a $20 an hour minimum wage, and full healthcare benefits for those working at least four hours a day.
00:17:05.000Those are the latest offers, and the SEIU is still out on strike.
00:17:09.000Does this sound like it's in the interest of students?
00:17:14.000Karen Bass, who's the new mayor of Los Angeles, she opened up City Hall on Wednesday to host contract negotiations that had been stalled for weeks.
00:17:20.000And this will end, of course, with more concessions by taxpayer representatives to the unions.
00:17:25.000It's not going to end with the with the LAUSD students actually getting better performance out of any of this.
00:17:31.000So the combination of deliberately making our kids dumber by hooking them into the mind poison that is the internet very often, the failures of our education system, which have been constructed on public school level in order to please public sector unions on the one hand, and then to indoctrinate them in foolish theories on the other, is making our kids a lot dumber.
00:17:49.000And you combine that with the fact that we now have an entire society that is directing people not to have children, and what you end up with is overall a dumber society.
00:17:57.000Now, what is that going to mean for the future?
00:17:58.000Well, it's going to mean greater dependence on technology, but it also is going to mean less innovation in the technological space.
00:18:04.000It's going to mean that the progress that we have seen in terms of innovation is going to slow.
00:18:10.000If you sort of hit stasis point in terms of IQ, then what you end up with is again stasis in terms of innovation.
00:18:19.000If we're going to focus on the future, what we should be focusing on is increasing educational benefit for kids, which means presumably giving parents greater choice because competition in the marketplace is going to allow them to send their kids to better schools, too.
00:18:30.000Really incentivizing parents to shut off the phone for their kids and get their kids out there in the real world and performing mental tasks that, yes, a calculator could do, but that your brain should also be able to do.
00:18:40.000And finally, we should be incentivizing people of all stripes to actually be having children.
00:18:44.000And that means re-inculcating in them a sense that it is a communal responsibility for you to have kids.
00:18:49.000The radical individualism that is predominated in the West has had some salutary effects in terms of freeing people from the stringencies of the state economically.
00:19:00.000However, it's had some really negative effects in terms of liberating people from the social groups that originally created A culture of childbearing and childrearing in healthy ways.
00:19:12.000And we haven't even felt the beginning of the impacts of any of that yet.
00:19:15.000Okay, meanwhile, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, the grand jury has now been brought back on.
00:19:21.000It was called off on Wednesday for Donald Trump.
00:19:23.000We'll bring you the latest on the grand jury in just one second.
00:19:25.000First, I like to think the people who watch this show are some of the people with the highest IQs, some of the people who are best and brightest in the nation.
00:19:31.000Well, if you're informed, you know that when a supply chain breaks down, when you got a real problem out there, you need to have the medicines that you need in your house.
00:19:38.000And sometimes you just can't get to the CVS.
00:19:40.000Or sometimes you can get to the CVS, but they don't actually have the medicine that you need.
00:19:43.000This is why you should have the JACE case from JACE Medical.
00:19:45.000It is the five most common antibiotics that you will need in case of emergency.
00:19:48.000You have it in your house ready to go.
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00:19:52.000My friends right now at JACE Medical are offering my audience a free e-book that every family needs in their emergency preparedness kit.
00:19:57.000The e-book is maybe a five-minute read.
00:19:59.000I want you to download and save it so you have it when you need it.
00:20:01.000The guide provides valuable information regarding emergency wound care, proper first aid, and how to safely use antibiotics when necessary.
00:20:08.000Get this free e-book today at JaceMedical.com forward slash Ben.
00:20:27.000Alrighty, so the grand jury is going to come back and meet on Thursday.
00:20:33.000It is unclear exactly what's going to be happening behind those closed doors.
00:20:36.000Because again, it is a closed door situation.
00:20:38.000However, there is some bad news that appears to have emerged for the possible prosecution in this Trump indictment in Manhattan.
00:20:47.000Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney, who's thinking about bringing this frivolous indictment, what appears to be a frivolous indictment.
00:20:52.000He said that his office couldn't comment on grand jury matters.
00:20:54.000But on Wednesday, they were supposed to meet.
00:20:58.000And one of the crucial issues is that it appears that there is a resurfacing of a letter that Michael Cohen, who's the chief witness against Trump in this particular case, wrote in 2018, according to the UK Daily Mail.
00:21:09.000In that letter, Michael Cohen claimed that he was not reimbursed by Donald Trump or his organization for hush money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels.
00:21:17.000That 2018 letter to the federal authorities contradicts his recent grand jury testimony, which is sworn testimony.
00:21:23.000The bombshell document was exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com and it could throw a wrench in the works for prosecutors pursuing criminal charges against Trump over the payments.
00:21:30.000Cohen claims that Trump got him to pay $130,000 to Daniels to keep her quiet about the alleged affair right before the 2016 election.
00:21:37.000And this is supposedly a campaign contribution that was essentially laundered.
00:21:42.000And he says Trump reimbursed him with personal funds and then later pled guilty to violating federal campaign finance law over the hush money.
00:21:48.000But now there's a letter from 2018 and that letter literally says that Michael Cohen did not actually get reimbursed by the Trump organization or the Trump campaign.
00:22:00.000Quote, neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms.
00:22:10.000Neither reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the payment directly or indirectly.
00:22:13.000Contrary to the allegations in the complaint, which are entirely speculative, neither Mr. Cohen nor a central consultant's LLC made any in-kind contributions to Donald J. Trump for a president.
00:22:21.000Again, that letter was written in response to an FEC probe that was launched after complaints of campaign finance violation.
00:22:28.000So, you know, that is that is indirect contradiction to the testimony that he is currently giving, which may be the reason why the grand jury got canceled yesterday.
00:22:36.000It also may mean new witnesses in the grand jury.
00:22:39.000So we are awaiting sort of more information on the grand jury.
00:22:43.000But, you know, everything is sort of up in the air.
00:22:47.000With regard to that, meanwhile, again, there are other cases that are militating against Donald Trump in the legal system.
00:22:52.000Apparently, a federal judge has now concluded that Trump likely misled his own lawyers on classified documents.
00:22:58.000According to the Wall Street Journal, a federal judge found that special counsel Jack Smith's team presented convincing evidence that Trump misled his own lawyers about the retention of classified documents after leaving the White House, which meant that he doesn't have attorney-client privilege.
00:23:10.000If you mislead your own attorney, then attorney-client privilege allows for the bypassing of it.
00:23:15.000Judge Beryl Howell made that finding Friday in a sealed decision siding with federal prosecutors in their bid to bypass attorney-client privilege claims.
00:23:22.000Raised by one of Trump's lawyers to compel him to provide more testimony.
00:23:26.000So it is possible that classified documents case, which should be dead, given the fact that, again, Joe Biden had a bunch of classified documents sitting around his house, sitting around his offices.
00:23:35.000And these classified documents cases can now be brought apparently against nearly every American public official.
00:23:39.000That case should be dead, but that one's not dead either.
00:23:41.000There are a lot of these issues that are just sort of like lurking out there.
00:23:44.000And here is the weird math that is now cropped up in this Republican primary 2024.
00:23:49.000Every time Trump is unjustly attacked, there's a rally around the Trump effect.
00:23:53.000All the Republicans come out of the woodwork and they say, we don't like that he is being specifically targeted, which is right.
00:23:59.000We're talking about frivolous charges in pretty much all of these cases.
00:24:03.000The Democrats have been trying to say that he's dead to rights since literally 2016.
00:24:39.000I also understand that the left is not fully stupid, and one of the things that they would like more than anything is to make sure that the person they think is most vulnerable is the guy who ends up as the Republican nominee.
00:24:49.000Which is precisely why, presumably, you have people like former U.S.
00:24:54.000Representative David Jolly, who is a former Republican who is now part of the sort of Lincoln Project club.
00:25:04.000Promoting all of the left-wing attacks on Ron DeSantis and also promoting Trump's attacks on DeSantis.
00:25:10.000I mean, I'm noticing a wide variety of reporters who supposedly think that Donald Trump is Hitler resonating to his attacks on DeSantis because they would rather have Trump than DeSantis, not because they love Trump, but because they think Trump is more defeatable in 2024 than they think DeSantis is.
00:25:24.000Trump, for his part, is just attacking DeSantis endlessly.
00:25:31.000Just, if you're a Republican, And you are sympathetic to Donald Trump and you're sympathetic to the fact that he's being attacked frivolously by a bunch of legal authorities who are overreaching their boundaries.
00:25:41.000Then wouldn't you want Trump to fight back against them?
00:25:44.000Wouldn't you want Trump to be focusing all of his ire not on fellow Republican candidates, but on, say, Alvin Bragg?
00:25:52.000Trump is taking this opportunity to swivel the sympathy for him into an attack on his Republican opponents 2024, which does not suggest that he has the best interest of the Republican Party in mind or the best interest of the right in general in attacking the left on his mind.
00:26:06.000It suggests that everything is an opportunity for Donald Trump.
00:26:08.000And that if he has the opportunity to swivel and just club Ron DeSantis in the moment where he has a little bit of momentum, then he will.
00:26:18.000If the people who you think are the real danger to the American Republic are rogue prosecutors like Alvin Bragg going after Republicans for no reason other than they are Republicans and he wants to get his face on the cover of Time magazine.
00:26:29.000If that's the real threat, then why are you up for Donald Trump attacking fellow Republican candidates in the middle of that?
00:26:35.000His ire should be on the prosecutors, but that's not where he's spending his ire.
00:26:38.000He's spending his ire on Ron DeSantis.
00:26:39.000And again, this galaxy brain take started last week.
00:26:42.000As soon as Trump started talking about the indictment, there was an immediate call from Republican commentators who were very Trumpy.
00:26:51.000It was very reminiscent of the Taylor Swift silence is deafening.
00:26:55.000What does Ron DeSantis have to do with any of this?
00:26:57.000If you're talking about a list of people responsible for Donald Trump's possible indictment in New York, the list goes something like this.
00:27:14.000And yet Ron DeSantis is somehow at the center of the indictment story.
00:27:17.000The only reason is because Donald Trump decided to drag him into the center of that indictment story in order to attack him, which does not speak particularly well of the former president of the United States or his intentions with regard to the campaign.
00:27:30.000And you see that breaking out into public yesterday.
00:27:32.000So Ron DeSantis decided not again to attack Alvin Bragg, the guy who was trying to put him in jail.
00:27:37.000That is not where he's actually placing his ire.
00:27:38.000Instead, he's putting out statements like this, quote, Now that Ron DeSanctimonious is finally admitting he's in the race by beginning to fight back, and now that his polls have crashed so he has no other choice, let me explain the facts.
00:27:49.000He is, for a Republican, an average governor.
00:27:52.000Trump is about to unleash one of the dumber attacks on DeSantis.
00:27:56.000So far, all of his attacks on DeSantis, frankly, have been quite stupid.
00:27:59.000His attacks on DeSantis have been that he's a George Soros plant.
00:28:20.000By the way, his other accusations so far have also been repeating a crap story that is entirely debunked about Ron DeSantis hitting on high school students back when he was like a 23-year-old high school teacher.
00:28:33.000And then implying without any evidence whatsoever that maybe he was hitting on males.
00:28:37.000So far, that has been the extent of Donald Trump's attacks on Ron DeSantis.
00:28:40.000Now he's going to get into just down the line.
00:28:42.000I mean, these attacks are so bad that Nikki Freed, who's the head of the Florida Democratic Party, was retweeting Donald Trump and saying, oh, it's all true.
00:31:10.000In education, Florida ranks among the worst in the country.
00:31:12.000On crime statistics, Florida ranked third worst in murder, third worst in rape, third worst in aggravated assault.
00:31:16.000For 2022, Jacksonville ranked as one of the top 25 major crime cities in the country, with Tampa and Orlando not doing much better.
00:31:22.000On education, Florida ranks number 39 in health and safety in the country, number 50 in affordability, number 30 in education and childcare.
00:32:03.000Florida's age-adjusted COVID death rate per capita is below the national average.
00:32:06.000Florida's gun deaths per capita are below the national average.
00:32:08.000Florida currently has a 50-year low in its crime rate.
00:32:12.000Florida had insurance spikes because it had the third costliest hurricane in history in 2022.
00:32:18.000So again, Trump is just putting out a bunch of garbage.
00:32:22.000And I guess if this is what you want, this is what you're going to get.
00:32:26.000And this very irritating notion that Donald Trump can basically run this election by hitting people in the back of the head with a hammer randomly, and everybody else is supposed to just never engage.
00:32:36.000And that if you do engage, it's a sign of disloyalty to the party.
00:32:40.000If Trump is the party, he's going to win the nomination.
00:32:49.000But if Republicans are going to think about who they believe is most likely to win the 2024 presidential race, not who they are most sympathetic to because he's being attacked wrongfully, I agree with that.
00:32:57.000But if they are talking about who is most likely to win a presidential race, question, is it the guy who is likely to be under even false charges of indictment?
00:33:06.000Is it the guy who's likely to be embroiled in 2020 issues and legal battles from 2006?
00:33:11.000And the person who is just kind of ranting and spewing stuff into the ether on Truth Social?
00:33:17.000Or is the person who's meticulously attacking Joe Biden on an issue-by-issue basis?
00:33:21.000By the way, we already have some answers to this question.
00:33:23.000Because in 2022, Ron DeSantis is great in Florida.
00:33:35.000Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the situation with the Federal Reserve, which is likely to sink the economy.
00:33:40.000Again, the opportunities for Republicans here, in terms of electoral opportunities, are nearly endless, but never... Republicans apparently never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
00:33:50.000Okay, first, many of us have lost faith in the government, media, and the schools.
00:33:52.000The good news is there is something you can do to help get the country back on track.
00:33:55.000PragerU is an educational nonprofit that is fighting with us to save the future of the country.
00:34:00.000Daily Wire is basically sister companies with PragerU.
00:34:02.000We've worked with them for a very, very long time.
00:34:04.000Dennis Prager is a good friend of mine, good friend of Jeremy Boring's.
00:34:06.000I've known Dennis for pretty much my whole life, actually.
00:34:40.000I've done a bunch of videos myself for PragerU.
00:34:42.000They're doing just tremendous stuff accessing the minds of people who need to have their minds opened every single day.
00:34:47.000Go to PragerU.com, make your tax-deductible donation today, and once again, whatever you give will be tripled.
00:34:53.000A lot of people would say science and religion are not linked.
00:34:56.000If you paid attention to history, however, you would know that this is a lie.
00:34:59.000Science and religion are in fact deeply linked.
00:35:01.000Watch Jordan Peterson explain how the pursuit of science began in religious institutions in his special Logos and Literacy.
00:35:07.000Well, one thing that's quite striking about modern rational culture is this insistence that the religious tradition of the West and the scientific tradition are somehow at fundamental odds.
00:35:18.000I mean, I used to believe that, I think, when I was young, at least to some degree.
00:35:22.000Although now I'm very curious about where that idea came from.
00:35:25.000Because it's absolutely clear, first of all, that the universities themselves emerged out of the monasteries.
00:35:30.000That's just completely unquestionable.
00:35:32.000Oxford and Cambridge are monasteries for all intents and purposes.
00:35:37.000The whole university idea emerged out of the church, and then the notion that the universe is in fact intelligible and that the pursuit of truth would be redemptive.
00:35:45.000That's a fundamentally religious idea.
00:35:47.000And then the scientific endeavor itself, given figures like Newton, for example, was embedded inside that religious tradition.
00:35:53.000Jordan is bringing unparalleled wisdom to a lot of people.
00:35:57.000Now, this is the part where I'd normally tell you Logos & Literacy is only available for DailyWirePlus members.
00:36:01.000We are making it available for free for everyone right now at DailyWirePlus.com only for a limited time.
00:36:05.000So, watch Logos & Literacy today at DailyWirePlus.
00:36:10.000Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve caught between a rock and a hard place.
00:36:13.000They decided yesterday to attempt to walk that tightrope between inflation and bank turmoil by gradually raising those interest rates.
00:36:19.000They're raising them again, 25 basis points.
00:36:23.000Now, again, the reason that they're not raising it more than that is not because they think inflation is going away, but it's because they believe that if they raise it more than that, it will reverse the sense that inflation is going away.
00:36:32.000There'll be a problem in the stock market.
00:36:34.000They're also signaling they might taper out completely, that they're afraid that if they continue to raise those interest rates, it's going to sink the bond markets.
00:36:40.000If it sinks the bond markets, then a bunch of banks that have been buying bonds for the past several years are going to see their asset base decrease.
00:36:45.000They won't be able to go liquid in case there's a run on the bank.
00:36:50.000The reason that Silicon Valley Bank essentially went bankrupt is because there's a run on the bank.
00:36:53.000At the same time, they couldn't liquidate their assets because all of their bond holdings had been decreased in value by the increase in subsequent interest rates.
00:37:00.000And as in one sentence, essentially what happened with SVB, it's going to happen with a lot of institutions if the interest rates keep going up in order to fight inflation.
00:37:07.000But if the Federal Reserve allows inflation to keep going up, the economy is going to continue to tank.
00:37:10.000So the Federal Reserve took that middle road yesterday.
00:37:14.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the Fed recognized that something was breaking.
00:37:18.000Recent data had pointed to economic growth accelerating and underlying inflation remaining stubbornly high.
00:37:22.000Fed Chairman Jerome Powell indicated to Congress earlier this month that trends likely would require rates to rise above 5.25 percent, perhaps by a lot.
00:37:29.000The projections released on Wednesday show that Powell and his colleagues have abandoned those plans.
00:37:32.000Now they say that they think that the target range is going to end up at 5 to 5.25 percent.
00:37:38.000But they're tapering out too early, which means inflation is now going to be endemic.
00:37:42.000Which is one of the reasons why you're seeing the stock market begin to tumble a little bit.
00:37:48.000As Market Watch points out, the yield curve inversion has likely peaked, which is usually bad news for stocks.
00:37:54.000People are going to start investing presumably in bonds again, thinking that the interest rates are not going to go up any further, which means that the stock market is going to go down.
00:38:02.000Money is going to be a lot more expensive.
00:38:05.000And so, again, They created this mess for themselves.
00:38:09.000They're stuck between a rock and a hard place.
00:38:10.000They really need to raise those interest rates higher in order to quash the inflation.
00:38:13.000Inflation is going to remain stubbornly high.
00:38:15.000The interest rates are going to remain stubbornly high.
00:38:17.000But if they go any higher, then they're really undercutting themselves.
00:38:20.000Here's Jay Powell yesterday at the Federal Reserve announcing that 25 basis point increase.
00:38:24.000We are highly attentive to the risks that high inflation poses to both sides of our mandate, and we are strongly committed to returning inflation to our 2% objective.
00:38:34.000At today's meeting, the committee raised the target range for the federal funds rate by a quarter percentage point, bringing the target range to four and three quarters to five percent.
00:38:44.000Now, Powell was trying to make clear to everybody that more spending isn't going to hurt the problem, but more spending, of course, is going to be a real problem.
00:38:52.000He said runaway spending is not driving the story on inflation, which is weird because it seems like runaway spending is entirely driving the story on inflation, or at least in large part.
00:39:01.000The spending that's happened is working against what you are doing, right?
00:39:29.000OK, but the decrease in the in the funding.
00:39:32.000has still retained a level of funding that is extraordinarily high.
00:39:36.000And when you inject extraordinary liquidity into the system by basically backstopping all FDIC deposits, and not only FDIC deposits, but unsecured deposits, well, that's a whole bag of liquidity that you're injecting into the system.
00:39:49.000Now, he says, quote, we're looking at what's happening among the banks and asking, is there going to be some tightening in credit conditions in a way that substitutes for rate hikes?
00:39:55.000But why would there be a tightening in credit conditions when you're explicitly saying that you're going to backstop any bank that goes bankrupt?
00:40:04.000So you're going to end up with this lukewarm policy that is neither going to quash inflation, nor is it going to actually prevent the impacts of a higher interest rate.
00:40:12.000It's sort of the worst of both worlds.
00:40:14.000Meanwhile, again, you have all of these federal appointees like Janet Yellen over at the Treasury Department who refuses to acknowledge that if we just keep spending money, it's a problem.
00:40:24.000What debt as a percentage of our GDP is too much?
00:40:29.000So it depends on what interest rates are.
00:40:33.000And real interest rates have been extremely low.
00:40:38.000This budget and previous budgets have projected that they would move up toward more normal levels over time.
00:40:49.000Certainly not the levels that we saw several decades ago.
00:40:55.000Could you just answer my question, Madam Secretary?
00:40:58.000What percentage of our debt of our GDP is too much?
00:41:07.000Well, this budget has debt held by the public moving up to around 109% of GDP.
00:41:20.000And that's not too much, in your opinion.
00:41:28.000And the bottom line is that all the same people who brought you 40-year inflation are still in power.
00:41:32.000And by the way, they're angry that the interest rates are increasing.
00:41:35.000So Elizabeth Warren, after suggesting that money is free, right, she bought into the modern monetary theory lie that you can just continue to blow out the debt with no consequences whatsoever, that spending will never have any impact, that inflation will never hit home.
00:41:45.000Now she's calling for Jerome Powell's ouster, not because he's been too loose with the money, but because he's too tight with the money.
00:41:51.000Here's Elizabeth Warren, who's been wrong on every single topic for the last several years.
00:41:55.000Have you ever directly told President Biden that you think he should fire the chair, fire Jerome Powell?
00:42:03.000And who would you like to see replace him?
00:42:06.000So I'm not going to talk about private conversations.
00:42:09.000But what I will say is I've made it very clear as publicly as humanly possible that I didn't think that he should be reconfirmed as chair of the Fed.
00:42:22.000And I think he's doing a really terrible job.
00:42:25.000Okay, why does she think that he's doing a really terrible job?
00:42:27.000Because, of course, he's being too hawkish, according to Elizabeth Warren.
00:42:30.000And this is going to be the going take among Democrats, is that if the economy goes down, it's because the Federal Reserve got too hawkish.
00:42:35.000They should have continued the inflationary policy.
00:42:38.000Anyway, they used to say this pretty openly.
00:42:39.000Ezra Klein once said that one of the sad things about the inflation spiral is that it was killing his dream of basically inflating the economy at the bottom rungs.
00:42:47.000He said that was supposed to be part of the plan.
00:42:49.000Meanwhile, the Biden administration trying to walk its way through the dark here.
00:42:52.000Karine Jean-Pierre, world's worst press secretary, says, guys, don't worry, the economy is super strong because of Joe Biden.
00:42:58.000On the economy, does the President still have the same level of confidence that he's had that the U.S.
00:43:02.000will get through this banking crisis, get through this high inflation, without going into a recession?
00:43:07.000The President has complete confidence in the process, in his economic policy, if you think about it.
00:43:16.000When we look at how strong the economy is, it's because of the President's work, what he's been able to do, building an economy from the bottom up, middle out.
00:45:10.000Yesterday, Xavier Becerra, who is the head of the Health and Human Services Department, He admitted that he literally has no idea how many HHS employees actually even go to work.
00:45:27.000Can you give a breakdown of how many full-time employees are at their desk in one of these buildings every day?
00:45:37.000Senator, when you take a look at the workforce at HHS and we're close to 90,000, throughout the country, and working in various parts of the country, some here in headquarters.
00:45:50.000By the way, headquarters, we have an underground... I got limited time, so this may be misleading.
00:45:56.000So tell me, of what percent of the employees are at their desk, full-time employees are at the desk on any given day?
00:46:01.000And I don't mean to be rude, it's just so limited time.
00:46:12.000What we make sure we care about is that they're performing and they're delivering and that's why... Well, that's not really answering my question.
00:46:19.000Well, not only is it not answering the question, they're not performing and delivering.
00:46:22.000According to the New York Times, the vast breach of the American southern border by illegal immigrants and the bringing across of small children via smugglers The HHS is actually designated the task of following up on kids who are released to adults.
00:46:39.000So under the current law, kids can be released to adult caretakers once they get over the borders, they're not being held in custody.
00:46:46.000But according to the New York Times, as more and more children have arrived, the Biden White House has ramped up demands on staffers to move children quickly out of shelters and release them to adults.
00:46:53.000Caseworkers say they rushed through vetting sponsors.
00:46:55.000While HHS checks on all minors by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors, data obtained by the Times showed That over the last two years alone, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children.
00:47:06.000The HHS literally lost 85,000 child migrants.
00:47:10.000Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with one third of migrant children.
00:47:14.000Great job protecting the kiddos right there.
00:47:19.000Probably all the people working from coffee shops are doing an amazing job.
00:47:23.000Every week I get briefed by my team sometimes two or three times a week on this situation with the unaccompanied migrant kids and where we stand.
00:47:32.000I've never heard that number of 85,000.
00:47:34.000I don't know where it comes from and so I can't attest.
00:47:38.000I would say it doesn't sound at all to be realistic and what we do is we try to follow up as best we can with these kids.
00:47:47.000Congress has given us certain authorities.
00:47:49.000Our authorities essentially And the moment we have found a suitable sponsor to place that child with, we try to do some follow-up, but neither the child or the sponsor is actually obligated to follow up with us.
00:48:07.000Again, they're doing an amazing job over there.
00:48:10.000The State Department also doing an extraordinary job handing over the Middle East to China, not really facilitating any sort of serious discussion in Ukraine.
00:48:19.000The good news is that the State Department is in fact being modernized because they are now including diversity, equity, and inclusion.
00:48:25.000This follows hard on Sean Kirby explaining yesterday that LGBTQIA plus minus divided by sign issues are the tip of America's foreign policy spear.
00:48:34.000Here is a Tony Blinken explaining that the State Department is being modernized by injecting equity principles The budget will advance our efforts to modernize the State Department, including by expanding our training flow, updating our technology, carrying out diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility initiatives, including to make our overseas missions more accessible.
00:48:54.000I'm grateful for the progress we've already made together, including Congress's support in updating the Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act and Accountability Review Board to give us some of the flexibility that we need to open new missions and better manage the risks that we face.
00:49:09.000Great, I'm so glad that we're doing all those things while the world enters into meltdown mode.
00:49:14.000But I think the most important news of the day, however, is that Merrick Garland, our current Attorney General, when he's not targeting the police departments across the country and or school parents, he is also a huge Taylor Swift fan, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:49:28.000Apparently at a congressional hearing on Wednesday, senators grilled Merrick Garland on the DOJ's investigation into Ticketmaster.
00:49:34.000And Garland started just name-dropping titles of Taylor Swift songs, because there's nothing quite as charming as a man of Merica Garland's age and reputation.
00:50:28.000You know, being a woman and all, she's not allowed to point that out.
00:50:31.000And so this drove tweets like this one from Alejandra Caraballo, who is in fact a biological man, saying, Cole, oh, F off with this stupid made up BS.
00:50:39.000Trans folks are having their existence criminalized in state after state, and you want to whine about this bleep?
00:50:44.000Well that seems like a lot of male aggression there being taken out by Alejandra Caraballo on Anna Kasparian.
00:50:50.000Again, you must not go against the Borg.
00:50:56.000And I'm pleased that Anna has done this a few times.
00:51:01.000She's on my show talking about the fact that the homelessness crisis in California is very real, the crime crisis in California is very real, and that it is not anti-liberal or even anti-leftist, to point that out.
00:51:11.000She's been ripped up and down by the left for doing all of that now for the simple fact that she has said that women exist and that they are not, in fact, just birthing persons or persons with uteruses.
00:51:19.000And now she's getting ripped up and down by the left.
00:51:21.000Good for Anna for taking the incoming on that.
00:51:23.000By the way, you know, one quick point here.
00:51:26.000There's an argument made by people like AOC.
00:51:27.000Well, you know, you say, you say that women, biological women exist, but I tell you that there are certain that you say that men can't give birth.
00:51:35.000Well, there are certain women who can't give birth.
00:51:37.000There's a commentator online who made an excellent point about this.
00:51:40.000When you tell a biological woman that she cannot give birth, this is the most devastating day of her life for the vast majority of women who hear that.
00:51:46.000And they tell her that she's infertile.
00:53:52.000And I'm getting very, very tired of people making this a priority, and then when we notice and we say no, you say, well, why are you even noticing?
00:54:02.000How about if you want to have the guns conversation, and the defense conversation, we have that conversation, and then we also have a conversation about why it seems so important to a bunch of grown-ass men to expose themselves to small children.
00:54:12.000Why does that seem so important to you?
00:54:13.000Why is it so important that you expose cross-dressing to kids?
00:54:16.000I have a feeling it has nothing to do with the kids and everything to do with you.
00:54:19.000It also has to do with a class of parents who are much more interested in the clicks and giggles of a bunch of morons online than they are in the well-being of their own children in order to facilitate this.
00:54:29.000So one of those people is apparently Maren Morris.
00:54:31.000So I will admit to not knowing who Maren Morris was, but Maren Morris is apparently some sort of country singer.
00:54:38.000And she was doing a speech at an LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign, happy face emoji, sad face emoji, poop emoji festival.
00:54:45.000And she explained that she had brought her toddler to meet a bunch of drag queens.
00:55:04.000Now you can't explain how it is for the good of the children.
00:55:06.000Without also presumably having to explain that gender fluidity is good for kids, that lack of standards is good for kids, that confusion is good for kids.
00:55:15.000Now you can't explain any of that in rational fashion, so it's just a cult.
00:55:17.000But here she is explaining, you know, if I'm in Tennessee and they're going to prosecute me, well then go for it.
00:55:21.000First of all, that's not what Tennessee law says.
00:55:23.000What it says, Tennessee law and Florida law and laws that are like it say, that the person who is exposing drag, the people who are performing the drag shows for the children are the ones who would be prosecutable, not the parents.
00:55:35.000But put that aside, here she is virtue signaling.
00:55:38.000And then when the kid gets screwed up, it'll be like, oh, how did this happen?
00:57:25.000military bases blasted the idea of waiting before injecting kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria with puberty blockers and hormones.
00:57:31.000The DoD provider said in the March edition of the American Journal of Public Health, the only pathway for children of military members who present with gender dysphoria is to immediately move toward gender-affirming health care such as puberty suppression and affirming hormones.
00:57:41.000This is coming from the health providers of U.S.