In this episode, Alex Blumberg takes a deep dive into the dark side of the media's obsession with misinformation, and how it's going to affect the 2020 election, and why it's a good thing that Joe Biden is running for president in 2024. Alex also discusses why the media should be worried about the spread of misinformation, especially in the lead-up to the mid-term elections, and what to look out for in order to prepare for the coming wave of disinformation and fake news that will flood the airwaves in advance of the next election. And why it s going to hurt both sides of the political aisle in 2020 and in the coming election, in particular, in terms of how the media and other news outlets treat it. Alex also points out that politicians are not the only ones who lie, they lie to themselves, and it's their own fault that makes them lie. And it's not your fault that they do it, it's the media s fault that it happens to be so often. This is also, by the way, a built-in excuse for why Joe Biden loses: he s a geriatric, doddering old man who has all the empathy of a kumquat, not a person who can spew terrible words from his face hole. And if Joe Biden doesn t win, it won t be your fault, it s not going to be the fault of the misinformation, it will be the lies, it'll be the people s fault, not the politicians' fault, and the lies they tell us all about how they're not being a good guy. It's a perfect storm of lies, and we can all blame each other for the election, not Joe Biden's failure to win the election. Alex takes a look at the latest piece from the Washington Post, by Cristiano Lima, and argues that it's all about the lies we've been getting right, because they don't know what they're lying about it's because they're just not that good at lying about things they're telling us about it, and they're really lying about something they really are lying about what they actually are, not that they're good at. (1:00). 2:00) 3: Why a Perfect Storm of Misinformation May Loom in 2024 (2:30) 3:00 4:30:00:00 Why politicians are the most serious threat to our political system (3:00): Is Joe Biden a bad politician?
00:00:00.000Well, in the last election cycle, there was an awful lot of talk about disinformation and misinformation.
00:00:05.000Remember, there was a conflation that occurred between 2016 and 2020.
00:00:08.000First, in 2020, the story was disinformation.
00:00:11.000This was the Russians were mainlining a bunch of foreign propaganda into America's election and thus twisting the election against the wonderful and innocent Hillary Clinton and for the evil Russian stooge, Donald Trump.
00:00:26.000And then it kind of bled away because it turns out the data wasn't there to suggest that.
00:00:30.000It looked like the Russians had a bunch of crappy Facebook pages that not all that many people saw.
00:00:33.000And so instead, the media turned to their new variant of disinformation, which was misinformation.
00:00:39.000Misinformation is just stuff the media doesn't like, because sometimes it's true and sometimes it's false.
00:00:44.000But you can't tell the difference in the way that the media treat misinformation.
00:00:47.000And thus, when it came to 2020, the argument was, for example, that the Hunter Biden laptop story Well, it wasn't quite disinformation because you couldn't tell if it came from the Russians, but it might be misinformation.
00:00:58.000And by misinformation, they just meant something we don't really want you to see.
00:01:01.000And ever since 2017, there's been all this talk in social media spheres about the stuff that you should see and the stuff that you shouldn't see.
00:01:07.000All this talk about the vast panoply of misinformation that is going to be crammed down upon you so that you won't know right from left, you won't be able to know right from wrong, you won't be able to know what's true and what is false.
00:01:18.000And this invariably ramps up just before a presidential election.
00:01:21.000Because what the media really want you to believe is that they are the arbiters of truth.
00:01:25.000They are the ones who will tell you what is misinformation and what is not misinformation.
00:01:29.000If it doesn't come courtesy of the Washington Post or the New York Times, if it comes courtesy instead of shows like this one, it must be misinformation.
00:01:36.000And to prove the point, the media and its various allied interest groups, they will lobby social media to shut down other outlets to reduce their reach.
00:01:45.000They'll use the slogan, well, you know, it's not freedom of speech, it's freedom of reach.
00:01:50.000There's no such thing as freedom of reach, so if we just downgrade the daily wire while upgrading the New York Times, well, we've fought back against misinformation.
00:01:57.000And once again, misinformation, sort of like hate speech, remains an undefined term.
00:02:01.000There's certain stuff that we can all agree would be misinformation.
00:02:04.000If you say, for example, that the world is flat, that would be misinformation.
00:02:10.000See, here's the beautiful thing about misinformation.
00:02:13.000It's possible to rebut virtually all misinformation with actual good information.
00:02:17.000The problem for the left, very often members of the mainstream media, is they don't want their bad information rebutted.
00:02:22.000They don't like the community notes feature on Twitter because it might smack them once in a while.
00:02:27.000Well, they're starting to ramp up in anticipation of 2024.
00:02:30.000Because again, if you look outside the boundaries of traditional media, you might notice, for example, that Joe Biden is not an empathetic older character with a sterling history of wonderful honor in his office.
00:02:41.000Instead, he might look like a career corrupt politician who has plagiarized everybody in sight.
00:02:46.000and used his position of power in order to enrich himself and his family.
00:02:49.000He might look like that if you look at the quote-unquote misinformation sources.
00:02:53.000And so now the media are ramping up the calls, the hue and cry, for censorship in advance of the 2024 election.
00:03:00.000This is the same thing as 2020, they're just replaying it.
00:03:03.000The latest indicator of this is a long piece from Cristiano Lima from the Washington Post titled, Why a Perfect Storm of Misinformation May Loom in 2024.
00:03:11.000This is also, by the way, a built-in excuse for why Joe Biden loses.
00:03:14.000So if Biden loses, the answer is going to be not that he was a bad candidate, not that you ran a geriatric, doddering fool who can't spew sentences from his face hole, a person who has a terrible economic record, a person who has all the empathy of a kumquat, That's not going to be your fault.
00:03:29.000It's going to be the fault of all the misinformation.
00:03:31.000It's the, the corrupt situation wouldn't allow Joe Biden to win.
00:03:34.000They're already setting up for that narrative as well.
00:03:37.000A majority of researchers expect global misinformation to worsen in 2024, with politicians and social media posing the most serious threats, according to a new survey released Tuesday.
00:03:45.000So first of all, let me just point out, are you, are you saying that politicians lie sometimes?
00:03:54.000Speak not of such evils I mean, honestly, this is so stupid.
00:03:58.000The poll, which surveyed almost 300 researchers across 50 countries, found that only a small fraction, 12%, think the information environment in their countries will improve next year.
00:04:10.000The International Panel on Information Environment, the Swiss-based non-governmental organization behind the survey, said the results demonstrate significant pessimism among the experts.
00:04:22.000These would be the same experts who declared that Hunter Biden's laptop was actually just a Russian plant or something.
00:04:26.000The findings arrive as platforms including Meta and Elon Musk's ex rollback policies and scale back teams dedicated
00:04:32.000to combating misinformation Ahead of major elections in the United States Europe and
00:04:35.000India now it is worth noting at this point that authoritarian states like for example
00:04:40.000Venezuela or Borderline authoritarian states like say Mexico that are
00:04:46.000ruled by members of the left the the rule of Lula da Silva in Brazil
00:04:51.000These people are very friendly towards shutting down quote-unquote misinformation.
00:04:55.000Is the information environment in Brazil getting stronger or weaker over the course of the last couple years?
00:04:59.000Ever since Lula's election, by the way.
00:05:01.000The story, of course, was that Bolsonaro was the real authoritarian.
00:05:04.000Well, Lula hasn't been shy about shutting down his political opposition in Brazil.
00:05:07.000It's just the media doesn't care about that because they like Lula.
00:05:11.000Philip Howard says, he is the professor at University of Oxford and chair of the IPIE, said, quote, this has the potential to create a perfect storm next year.
00:05:18.000He says that staffing cuts to tech companies' moderation forces pose a huge risk.
00:05:24.000According to the survey, two-thirds of researchers said the inability to hold social media companies accountable over botched content moderation efforts posed a significant hurdle.
00:05:32.00055% reported poorly done automated moderation was another.
00:05:35.000So, in other words, they want to be able to sue.
00:05:37.000Governments want to be able to sue social media companies in order to get them to do the thing that they themselves are not allowed to do.
00:05:43.000So, the government of the United States is not allowed to shut you down on free speech terms.
00:05:53.000While a third of researchers globally flagged social media companies as one of the most serious threats to healthy discourse, those that specialize in regions with democratic governments said politicians themselves posed a bigger risk.
00:06:03.000And of course, here, they just mean right-wing politicians.
00:06:07.000These are the things that they care about.
00:06:09.000They're worried about right-wing politicians.
00:06:32.000You have to have a charger on hand at all times.
00:06:34.000You got that cracked screen that gives you glass splinters.
00:06:36.000It's time to put that old phone out to pasture.
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00:06:41.000Get a free 5G Samsung Galaxy with two-day battery life, edge-to-edge display, ultra-strong Gorilla Glass when you sign up for Pure Talk's unlimited talk text and 15-gig data plan for just $35 a month.
00:06:50.000Plus, it comes with mobile hotspot as well.
00:06:52.000If you're not using Pure Talk, you're simply paying too much money.
00:07:32.000Okay, so here is a perfect example of what the media would deem to be good information.
00:07:37.000So Philip Bump is a fact-checker for the Washington Post.
00:07:41.000I say fact-checker with a fair bit of scorn, because he is not exactly an unbiased source, is Philip Bump of the Washington Post.
00:07:51.000And he is a national columnist for their newspaper.
00:07:57.000He appeared on a podcast with a person named Noam Dworman, The Comedy Cellar Podcast.
00:08:03.000And Noam Dorman asked him a pretty simple question about Joe Biden's apparent corruption.
00:08:08.000His suggestion was that Joe Biden has been involved in Hunter's corruption pretty obviously for the past 20 years.
00:08:14.000Now again, hard to imagine that that's not the case.
00:08:17.000Given what we now know, up to and including the information from Hunter Biden's laptop talking about 10% to the big guy, all of the money that was obviously flowing to Hunter because Hunter was using Daddy's name, Joe Biden phoning into meetings even if only to talk about the weather just to demonstrate Hunter's connection to Joe Biden, apparently members of the upper staff at Burisma openly talking about the kind of corruption that they were able to effectuate with Joe Biden in office.
00:08:41.000Hey, but Noam Dorman, That's the biggest question of all, right?
00:08:45.000This is the one I've asked as well, which is, there's an actual text from Hunter to his own daughter, Naomi, literally saying that he paid half of his dad's bills.
00:10:17.000The honest answer there would be, well, you're right, that's suspicious.
00:10:21.000It's weird that Hunter would text his daughter that he's paying half of his dad's bills.
00:10:25.000There could be various explanations, ranging from he was paying literally half his dad's bills, to he was exaggerating to his daughter for a fact, to he was high as a kite.
00:10:34.000We'd have to await more evidence from actual bank records to prove whether that's true or not.
00:10:37.000But yeah, that's a weird thing for Hunter to say.
00:10:39.000Like, that'd be an honest take that still leaves the door open to Joe not being guilty.
00:10:43.000But he's not even willing to humor that.
00:11:12.000And so the catchphrase of the robots is, it doesn't look like anything to me.
00:11:17.000Every time they see a piece of data that doesn't match the world around them, so if they're in Westworld, and suddenly they see a car driving through, and somebody says, didn't you see that car?
00:11:24.000They'll say, it doesn't look like anything to me.
00:11:39.000And these are the people who are policing misinformation.
00:11:42.000These are the people who we have tasked with policing the flow of information in our society.
00:11:47.000Which says to me that they're not that worried all about misinformation.
00:11:51.000What instead they are worried deeply about is information that they don't like getting out there in the public sphere.
00:11:56.000By the way, Philip Bump writes routinely about quote-unquote misinformation.
00:12:01.000He wrote a column just Last week, titled, Why Do Republicans Disproportionately Believe Health Misinformation?
00:12:09.000A month and a half before that, he wrote another one, a deeply ironic reinforcement of right-wing misinformation.
00:12:14.000He's constantly writing about misinformation.
00:12:17.000Like, it's his favorite thing to write about.
00:12:19.000And yet, there he is, not even bothering to make any sort of legitimate argument about why the thing that is right in front of him is fake.
00:12:30.000It is in this world that misinformation truly does flourish, because it used to be, that at the very least, we could have arguments over what was true and what was false, and then we'd bring evidence, and we'd marshal that evidence, and then we'd agree, once, you know, the evidence had been marshaled, that something was true and something was false.
00:12:43.000But in a world where you just ignore the opposing argument utterly, where it just, it doesn't even compute, it just recedes into the wallpaper, how the hell am I supposed to believe anything you say?
00:12:56.000According to a recent study of hundreds of post-abortive women, 60% of women reported they would have preferred to give birth if they had received more support from others or had more financial security.
00:13:51.000Dial pound 250, say keyword baby, that's pound 250 baby, or go to preborn.com slash ben, that's preborn.com slash ben to help start saving lives right now with preborn.
00:14:25.000In order to maintain that narrative, however, we must make everybody feel very scared of COVID.
00:14:29.000Because if, as it turns out, COVID is not killing massive, massive numbers of people in the United States, if it turns out the risk factors that first attended to COVID at the very beginning aren't even the risk factors that attend to the latest bout of COVID that people are experiencing, if it turns out that a huge percentage of the population either has natural immunity or vaccine immunity, Or that our standards of care are way better and so the death rates are significantly lower than the original variant?
00:14:51.000Then people are going to look at Joe Biden wearing a mask around and be like, what's he doing?
00:14:55.000Isn't this just an excuse for him not to be in the public eye?
00:14:56.000Okay, well yesterday, Jill Biden tested positive for COVID.
00:15:01.000According to Axios, she's experiencing only mild symptoms.
00:15:04.000She's going to remain at home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
00:15:06.000President Biden tested negative for the virus.
00:15:09.000He's going to test at a regular cadence this week and monitor for symptoms.
00:15:12.000He's supposed to leave Thursday for a G20 summit in India.
00:15:17.000The First Lady's positive test results, says Axios, come amid a surge in COVID infections across the United States after the emergence of new variants over the summer.
00:15:24.000Now, I mean, we're also getting back into fall territory.
00:15:29.000You're going to see a surge in a lot of virus, like an awful lot of virus over the course of the summer and also the fall.
00:15:36.000Like, for example, my kid recently, because I have kids and my kids are constantly sick, basically it's just a juggling act as to which one of them is going to be sick at any given time.
00:15:43.000One of my kids came down with strep last week, went into the doctor's, like, yeah, it's a huge percentage this year.
00:15:48.000Is that because of the evils of COVID or is it just because kids are associating with one another freely again?
00:15:53.000The immunity is a little down because they spent the last couple of years bubbled, depending on where you live and all that.
00:15:57.000In any case, they're already setting up the predicate for Joe Biden to hide in the basement.
00:16:00.000So here's Karine Jean-Pierre, world's worst press secretary, explaining that Joe Biden is now going to mask up indoors because you should mask up indoors because it's so dangerous, guys.
00:16:09.000President Biden tested negative last night for COVID-19 and tested negative again today.
00:16:17.000As far as the steps he is taking, since the President was with the First Lady yesterday, he will be masking while indoors and around people in alignment with CDC guidance.
00:16:28.000And as has been the practice in the past, the President will remove his mask when sufficiently distanced from others indoors and while outside as well.
00:16:38.000So much sciencing happening right here.
00:16:42.000Joe Biden is going to, he'll be socially distancing and he'll be wearing his mask on occasion, a surgical mask, I assume, not an N95, which would be the thing to actually protect him, a man his age, or any of the rest.
00:16:54.000All of this is part and parcel of a broader COVID alarmism that is about to spring onto the scene so we can have this culture, this stupid culture war all over again, thanks to a left that continues to maintain that they did all the right things during the COVID pandemic.
00:17:07.000is seeing a late-summer spike in COVID cases, prompting some schools, hospitals, and businesses to encourage or even require people to start masking up again.
00:17:14.000The most recent CDC data from earlier this month shows nationwide COVID hospitalizations increased by nearly 19% in a single week and deaths by more than 21%.
00:17:22.000Now, this is what we call fun with base rates.
00:17:25.000This is where you have a pretty low rate, it increases slightly, and that looks like a 21% increase.
00:17:30.000If I make $1 a day and then suddenly I make $1.21 a day, it doesn't mean I got rich.
00:17:37.000That's like, depending on what your base rate is, that might mean a lot or it might not mean very much at all.
00:17:45.000According to CDC Director Mandy Cohen, she said up to 10,000 people a week have been hospitalized with COVID, but that is far fewer than the 40,000 such hospitalizations a week the United States had at its highest point last August.
00:17:57.000She said we're at a much different, better place this August of 2023, but she says COVID remains risky for people who are unvaccinated, so now they're going to start pushing the vaxes again.
00:18:06.000Apparently, the latest version, which is nicknamed Eris, right, it was Omicron, but Omicron has now been dispensed with, so now it's Eris!
00:18:16.000It has become dominant in the United States.
00:18:18.000Apparently, it's more transmissible, but it doesn't cause more severe disease.
00:18:21.000So, for the vast majority of people, it looks like a cold.
00:18:24.000For, like, the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of people, it looks like a cold.
00:18:27.000We're still gonna talk about how everybody needs to mask up again.
00:18:30.000Speaking of health misinformation, this is pretty amazing stuff.
00:18:32.000So, Anthony Fauci was finally asked about masking.
00:18:34.000And he was asked by someone on CNN, believe it or not.
00:18:38.000This is Michael Smirconish, who's like, uh, you noticed that those giant mask mandates didn't do anything to lower the rates of transmission?
00:18:43.000And Fauci just tries to futz his way— This is not misinformation when Fauci says it, because he is, of course, the science.
00:18:48.000It is also not misinformation when he overtly says to his colleagues at the beginning of the pandemic that this might have been produced in a Chinese lab, and then immediately reverses field and tries to get them to attest to the idea that it was natural-made.
00:19:00.000In any case, here was Anthony Fauci distributing misinformation.
00:19:05.000If in fact we get to the point where the volume of cases is such and organizations like the CDC recommend, CDC doesn't mandate anything, I mean recommends that people wear masks, I would hope that they abide by the recommendation and take into account the risk to themselves And to their families.
00:19:26.000And again, we're not talking about forcing anybody to do anything.
00:19:29.000Okay, they always say they're not talking about forcing anybody to do anything, and then the next thing that happens is an attempt at force.
00:19:34.000I also love that he was asked, actually, by Michael Smirconish, so the mask mandates didn't actually do anything.
00:19:38.000He's like, well, but for individuals, they might.
00:20:09.000If we've learned one thing over the past few years where the experts have screwed the pooch in every available way, from economics to health policy to electoral policy, it's trust the experts.
00:22:00.000The left has decided, again, because they are our moral arbiters and the arbiters of our truth, that you can simply ban Donald Trump from the ballot and magically he will just go away.
00:22:09.000And what's really driving that is, of course, how much they hate Trump.
00:22:12.000I mean, the idea here is that if we ban Trump from the ballot, we never have to think about him again.
00:22:15.000What does it matter what the actual law says?
00:22:17.000That, at least, is the perspective of Sunny Hostin of The View.
00:22:21.000Again, one of our resident geniuses over there.
00:22:47.000Now, there are these legal, and Alyssa and I were talking about it earlier, there are conservative legal minds and experts that are saying that under the 14th Amendment, he is not even allowed to run, even though he hasn't been convicted yet.
00:23:00.000Because the 14th Amendment says if you've participated in public office after taking an oath to this country in an insurrection, you're ineligible to run.
00:24:03.000Meanwhile, on the legal front, Donald Trump is facing some pretty dire legal peril.
00:24:08.000Apparently, some of his co-defendants are starting to turn on him, according to Politico.
00:24:13.000As his four criminal cases march toward trial, some of his aides, allies, and co-defendants are pointing at the former president.
00:24:17.000In court documents and hearings, lawyers for people in Trump's orbit are starting to reveal glimmers of a tried-and-true strategy in cases with many defendants.
00:24:23.000Portray yourself as a hapless pawn while piling blame on the apparent kingpin.
00:24:28.000Then they go ahead and quote Michael Cohen, which again, not a misinformation when you quote Michael Cohen, but Michael Cohen is a convicted liar.
00:24:33.000I should point out at this at this point.
00:24:35.000But it does happen to be the case that there are a bunch of people surrounding Donald Trump who have started making motions like they might turn on Trump.
00:24:43.000Last week, Trump's former White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, signaled his defense is likely to include blaming the former president as the primary driver of the effort.
00:24:51.000By the way, it would not be surprising to me if Walton Aouda did the same thing.
00:24:54.000Walton Aouda is the aide in the classified documents case who was moving around giant boxes of classified documents at Donald Trump's behest, apparently.
00:25:01.000Trump actually put it out on Truth Social that Walton Aouda never would have done that.
00:25:05.000He never would have moved, like, if he had known there were classified documents in the boxes, he never would have moved them, which of course suggests that if there were classified documents in the boxes, Well, that is to blame.
00:25:14.000Again, I'm not sure what Trump's strategy there is with regard to the people who actually have to stand up for him in order for him to escape criminal liability here.
00:25:22.000During a hearing in Atlanta, a defense attorney for Meadows called attention to Trump's prominent role in what is certain to be a crucial element of the prosecutor's case there, that infamous January 2nd, 2021 phone call in which Trump demanded that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, find enough votes to declare Trump the winner.
00:25:38.000It's a strategy that could sharpen as the Georgia case moves closer to a jury.
00:25:42.000And, again, would it not be a giant shock?
00:25:44.000This is one of the risks of Donald Trump not paying the legal bills for all of his aides.
00:25:48.000If you are a Donald Trump aide, if you're somebody who worked with Donald Trump and he's not paying your legal bills, and you now face jail time while Trump is out there defending himself, I don't know, do you want to spend the next 10 years in jail while Donald Trump blames you for all of your problems?
00:26:01.000John Lauer, Trump's attorney in the federal election case, signaled recently he intends to file a sweeping immunity claim to attempt to derail charges.
00:26:08.000Many of the defendants in Georgia have already begun maneuvering for individual advantage.
00:26:12.000Prosecutors are also raising questions about funding that Trump political committees are providing for defendants as well.
00:26:17.000So, you know, again, things are going to get messy for Trump before they're not going to get messy for Trump.
00:26:22.000But with all of that said, is Trump ineligible for the ballot?
00:26:45.000For Republicans, it's no way we're going to lose to Joe Biden.
00:26:48.000Joe Biden's poll numbers continue to be absolutely crap.
00:26:50.000CNN's Breonna Keillor, she says, you know, he keeps trying to say the economy's good and nobody actually believes him.
00:26:57.000Yet not everybody is sold on Biden's plan.
00:27:00.000In fact, he is struggling to convince voters that his administration has been good for the economy.
00:27:06.000A new poll from the Wall Street Journal finds 58% of voters say the economy has gotten worse over the past two years.
00:27:13.000Just 28% say it's gotten better, which is why today President Biden tried to hammer home the point that he is better for jobs than his predecessor and potential 2024 competitor.
00:27:25.000You know what I will tell you is not a winning strategy in politics.
00:27:27.000If everybody feels really bad about a thing, stop telling them that they're wrong to feel bad about the thing.
00:28:01.000Now look, my point is that you can barely get Americans, 80% of Americans, to agree on anything.
00:28:07.000And here they are, line after line, agreeing about the importance of the components of Bidenomics.
00:28:14.000So I think it's an inaccurate narrative to declare that somehow Bidenomics isn't working or that it's not favorably received by people when you drill down into what it actually is.
00:28:43.000The same thing happens to be true when it comes to, you know, the life that people are living right now, where they've experienced wage to inflation actual declines over the course of the last couple of years in very significant ways.
00:28:55.000Everyday things are costing much, much more money.
00:28:57.000The Washington Post, in fact, has a piece today talking about auto insurance costs that have soared across the United States.
00:29:02.000Like, these are real-world problems people are having, and a lot of it has to do with inflation.
00:29:07.000Premiums, according to the Washington Post, have kept climbing even as other types of inflation have cooled.
00:29:11.000According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, car insurance for U.S.
00:29:13.000drivers in July was 16% more expensive than in July 2022.
00:29:15.000more expensive than in July 2022. 70% more expensive than in 2013. Frank Palmer, the chief
00:29:23.000insurance officer at Root Insurance says car repair costs, body shop wages, used car prices have all
00:29:28.000The entire industry has had to raise rates to keep up with these trends.
00:29:31.000Motor vehicle maintenance costs are up 13% from July of last year alone.
00:29:35.000If your car breaks down right now, it costs you an absolute freaking fortune to fix the thing.
00:29:39.000David Woodall, a mechanic at Metro Motors says, it's more expensive to diagnose newer vehicles.
00:29:43.000The parts aren't a whole lot more expensive, but the frequency of repair on them is more than it used to be.
00:29:46.000If an airbag goes off, that's thousands of dollars.
00:29:48.000A new car might have eight airbags in it.
00:29:51.000This is also an attempt by insurers to make up for big payouts driven by floods and natural disasters, which insurers categorize as catastrophe losses as well.
00:30:00.000And there's no escape from the higher premiums.
00:30:02.000Because, again, when it comes to car insurance, you are mandated to get your car insurance or you cannot drive on the public roads.
00:30:09.000All of this, people are attributing to Biden's economy.
00:30:13.000Because even as all of this is going on, Joe Biden is spilling billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars, into green boondoggles.
00:30:19.000As the Wall Street Journal points out, according to a report late last month by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, large offshore wind developers are asking for an average 48% price adjustment in their contracts to cover rising costs.
00:30:32.000The Alliance for Clean Energy New York is requesting an average 64% price increase on 86 solar and wind projects.
00:30:39.000The IRA, which is the Inflation Reduction Act, which has nothing to do with inflation reduction, includes federal tax credits that can offset 50% of a project's cost, but renewable developers say their costs are increasing faster than inflation.
00:30:51.000And the projects won't be economically viable, and will be unable to proceed to construction and operation under their existing pricing.
00:30:58.000So, again, the way that's going to be solved, you would imagine, is by the federal government coming in and spending an awful lot of money.
00:31:05.000Or by energy production coming to a screeching halt.
00:31:08.000Joe Biden, again, really a weak candidate, but there are a couple things that Biden has going in his favor.
00:31:14.000Thing number one that Biden has going in his favor, he's absolutely stone dead boring.
00:31:21.000Every time I mention Joe Biden, everybody who is watching or listening to this show immediately goes into a coma.
00:31:28.000If you say Beetlejuice three times, then he appears, and if you say Biden three times, cars fly off freeways all over the United States as the drivers go comatose, their foot hits the gas, and the steering wheel careens to the right.
00:31:42.000Mass carnage every time you've mentioned Joe Biden just because people go narcoleptic the minute you mention the guy.
00:31:48.000He's old, he's boring, and that old and boring is a real asset for him.
00:31:52.000I've been saying this since 2015, by the way.
00:31:55.000That Joe Biden, if he had run in 2016, would have been a formidable candidate because he's boring.
00:32:07.000Because, again, all the metrics say so.
00:32:09.000For example, no one wants to buy a book about Joe Biden.
00:32:11.000According to Politico, NBC News' Jonathan Allen went on a multi-stop national tour when he co-wrote a book on how Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.
00:32:20.000Shattered inside Hillary Clinton's doomed campaign sold more than 125,000 copies.
00:32:25.000But for the pandemic-era book that he wrote on Joe Biden, Allen didn't even get the satisfaction of seeing a copy in stores.
00:32:53.000My former editor over at HarperCollins, really good editor, said Biden never does anything interesting.
00:32:57.000The Hunter Biden stuff has done pretty well because he's appropriately interesting, but Hunter isn't the president.
00:33:01.000If your nickname is Sleepy Joe, you have to kind of simultaneously say this person is ruining everything and also is supremely evil, but also he's inept.
00:33:07.000And that's sort of a challenging combination, added one major conservative publisher.
00:33:12.000And other books about the Bidens have been doing terrible business.
00:33:16.000And some of these books, by the way, are very good.
00:33:17.000I've mentioned before Politico's Ben Schreckinger and his book The Bidens Inside the First Family's 50-Year Rise to Power.
00:33:24.000That's as opposed to Michael Wolff's garbage book about Donald Trump, Fire and Fury, which sold almost a million copies.
00:33:30.000Or Woodward's book Peril about Trump that sold 400,000 copies.
00:33:34.000And the great The great irony of Joe Biden is that his boredom and his senility is blocking out the fact that he's unbelievably radical and bad at his job.
00:33:46.000His advantage continues to be that he is so much less interesting than Donald Trump.
00:33:49.000In just one second, we'll get into what that's hiding, and it turns out it's hiding some really unbelievably bad policy.
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00:34:57.000Also, we have a huge offer coming up for all Daily Wire members.
00:35:01.000Early access to a first look at the highly anticipated 10-part original series starring Candace Owens, Convicting a Murderer.
00:35:07.000Early access to view the series is September 7th only on Daily Wire+.
00:35:11.000If you remember Making a Murderer, that was a big Netflix documentary about Stephen Avery, which sort of portrayed him as a victim of corrupt law enforcement.
00:35:16.000Candace blows that narrative wide open.
00:36:39.000So because Joe Biden is so unbelievably boring, and also because he won't talk to the media, and also because he lies a lot, and also because the media have, you know, a full investment in pretending that he's not doing any of those things, they simply don't cover all that much when full-scale disasters happen on his watch.
00:36:53.000How do you know a full-scale disaster is happening on his watch?
00:36:55.000Because his own party is now attacking him on immigration.
00:36:57.000According to Axios, tensions between the Biden administration and local Democrats are coming to a head as shelters around the country overflow and thousands of immigrants arrive in major cities.
00:37:06.000President Biden is stuck between growing calls to help the Democratic-controlled cities, the politics of the vulnerable issue, and what the administration views as legal handcuffs prohibiting much action.
00:37:14.000In cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago, a humanitarian crisis for people hoping for new lives in the United States has become desperate.
00:37:20.000Business leaders and lawmakers at various levels of government are demanding the administration do more to help accommodate migrants that are frustrated by what they say is Biden's lack of response.
00:37:28.000Senator Dick Durbin, who's a very strong ally to Biden, says, quote, I wrote to him in May.
00:37:38.000You've seen Mayor Eric Adams of New York City and New York Governor Kathy Hochul publicly feuding with Adams demanding the rest of the state receive migrants and Hochul being like, nah, it's Biden's fault.
00:37:48.000Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey shot down the Biden administration's reported idea of relocating migrants to Atlantic City International Airport.
00:37:55.000As per Politico, Federal officials view many of the demands as political posturing, not realistic solutions, because they all face legal or practical challenges.
00:38:04.000Nobody ever considers the possibility, maybe you should work on closing the border, because that would, you know, run up against all of the favored left-wing nostrums about, give me your tired, your poor, yearning masses, desiring freedom, and all of this.
00:38:19.000Then the reality hits and they're like, oh my god, what do we do with all these people?
00:38:22.000I'll tell you what Massachusetts is doing.
00:38:24.000Massachusetts officials, overwhelmed by arriving migrants, have now activated the National Guard as they scramble for more housing.
00:38:30.000Governor Maura Healey mobilized 250 members of the Massachusetts National Guard to help transport the latest wave of asylum seekers.
00:39:09.000Protesters claim the state has prioritized the need of migrants over the need of its own homeless residents, including veterans.
00:39:14.000Many at a rally were flashing signs that read Vets and Cape Homeless First.
00:39:20.000Apparently, there are about 6,000 families, more than 20,000 people currently residing in Massachusetts state shelters, according to officials.
00:39:29.000All of this flying well under the... Remember, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the greatest and most wondrous, so fresh, so face, fresh-faced, McFace-fresh Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, congressperson from Twitch.
00:39:42.000She does stuff with the Instant Pot and then she also does social media.
00:39:46.000You remember, she went down to the border while Donald Trump was president and fake cried in an empty parking lot.
00:39:51.000Directly to camera, you remember that.
00:39:53.000Now, she's not doing any of those things, I noticed.
00:39:56.000Which is weird, because I thought that she was truly committed to this bit.
00:41:08.000And the New York Times reporter says, why haven't you used your considerable clout as a Latino leader to visit the border and highlight the ongoing issues there?
00:41:15.000And she says, well, this is something we're like actively planning on.
00:41:17.000I've done tours of our New York area facilities.
00:41:47.000Okay, meanwhile, China continues to be on the edge of an economic cataclysm.
00:41:54.000According to the New York Times, China's biggest home builder is now reeling as the economy slows.
00:42:00.000When Country Garden, the biggest developer in China's increasingly troubled real estate sector, published its annual report in April, the cover design exuded hope, a phoenix spreading its wings.
00:42:09.000Shortly after the report's release, China's nascent economic recovery lost steam, and already sluggish real estate markets started to collapse.
00:42:15.000At Country Garden, presales of unfinished apartments, a crucial indicator of future revenue, plunged more than 50% in June and July, twice the rate of decline in the preceding five months.
00:42:24.000For the past three years, as dozens of major property developers defaulted after years of excessive borrowing, Country Garden was an outlier.
00:42:30.000Last month, it missed two interest payments, signaling that it too was at risk of financial collapse with $187 billion in debt.
00:43:36.000At a certain point, the carousel stopped.
00:43:38.000The same thing is true in the United States, which is why it is so puzzling and stupid that the United States continues to follow China down the primrose path on this one.
00:43:45.000It really is kind of an amazing thing.
00:43:47.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:45:41.000And I remember I went public school and this was what you were taught.
00:45:43.000And it was considered a good thing. And now all of a sudden it's the reverse.
00:45:46.000Mar also slammed Black Lives Matter pointing out, it's only certain black lives that matter to BLM.
00:45:51.000In Minnesota, for example, I think it was Minneapolis.
00:45:55.000After the George Floyd murder and the riots, I think there was
00:46:04.000a movement to disband a lot of the police and they did.
00:46:10.000I think a lot of the police were let go or somehow the police force was was a lesser force than it was.
00:46:18.000And what happened was, of course, crime went up in certain areas.
00:46:21.000And a lot of the officers who had been Fired, or let go, or quit, or for whatever reason they weren't on the force anymore, they were hired as private security.
00:46:38.000So that wasn't exactly, I thought, a victory for liberalism.
00:46:42.000Murders have been happening way out of control in Chicago among the African-American community for far too long, and not really reported in the way that they should be.
00:46:53.000It's amazing how black lives don't seem to matter when they're taken by
00:47:53.000According to Fox News, Austin police in Texas are asking residents to call 3-1-1 if they get robbed near an ATM, as the department struggles amid an increase in urban crime.
00:48:01.0003-1-1 is a number usually used for non-emergency requests.
00:48:12.000So, um, apparently they now don't want you to call 911 even if you're being robbed, like, right this second because they're just overwhelmed.
00:48:19.000Austin Police Department wrote, quote, Even if you are cautious and follow all safety advice, you may still become the unfortunate victim of a robbery.
00:48:24.000Do you know what your next steps should be?