Tucker Carlson interviews all of the major Republican presidential candidates for president, but none of them show up to be interviewed by Donald Trump. Why does this happen? And why does it matter so much to the base of the Republican Party? In this episode of the podcast, I explain why it matters so much, and why Donald Trump's support is not based on an ideology, but on an issue set that has become a litmus test for the Republican base. And why is it important that the base Republican voters care more about Ukraine and less about other things that don't really matter to them, like the economy and other non-economic issues? And how did Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election because of that issue set? I break it down, and try to explain why this matters to so many people and why it could be so important to the future of the 2020 Republican primary race. And I don't think you'll be surprised to learn that it's not about the economy or the economy. It's about the issue set, which is what really matters to Donald Trump and his supporters, and not the economy, or immigration, or the deficit, or infrastructure, or anything else that matters to the average Republican voter. I think we'll all agree that Donald Trump is a giant, orange, pulsing middle finger to the left-wing media complex that doesn't understand what Donald Trump stood for in 2016 and why they should vote for him. Subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to our podcast, Podchaser. Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices and other links in our podcast choices. Send us your thoughts on the podcast recommendations and reviews on the latest episode of The FiveThirtyEight Podcasts podcast, and we'll be looking out for you in next week's New York Times bestselling book recommendations and more! Subscribe to our newest issue of the latest issue of The Six Sigma podcast, Six Sigma's newest podcast, The Six Figures Podcasts and much more! Subscribe and review our newest episode of Six Sigma s New York Magazine's newest issue will be out in the next issue of FiveThirtyThirtyEight s Six Figures is out on Tuesday! Subscribe on Six Figures, out on the Six Figures podcast on Tuesday, September 19th! Thanks for listening to Six Figures and Six Figures by Six Figures? Subscribe on Podcharity? Subscribe for a chance to win $50,000 and more? Learn more at Six Figures 2020?
00:00:00.000So, over the weekend at the Family Leadership Summit, Tucker Carlson had the opportunity to interview a bunch of Republican candidates for president.
00:00:08.000Essentially all the major Republican candidates for president, with the exception of maybe some minor candidates like Chris Christie, and of course one very big major national candidate, Donald Trump, who did not show up to be questioned by Tucker Carlson.
00:00:19.000Now, Tucker, of course, is very warm toward Trump.
00:00:20.000He's made that clear on a wide variety of podcasts of late.
00:00:24.000And so it's been interesting to see Tucker actually ask Trump some difficult questions, as we'll get to in just a minute.
00:00:28.000Trump actually stumbled over himself a little bit this weekend when he was on with Maria Bartiromo.
00:00:32.000But what was kind of fascinating about Tucker's interviews with the various candidates is how much Tucker and his issue set have become sort of national priorities, at least among Republicans in the primaries, apparently.
00:00:43.000The reason I say apparently is because there's not a ton of support to the idea, just statistically speaking, that the base Republican voter cares deeply about issues like, for example, the war in Ukraine.
00:00:52.000The base Republican voter may have some strong feelings about the war in Ukraine, but it doesn't make the top 10 list of priorities.
00:00:58.000It's become more of a litmus test in the same way that in 2016 support or opposition to the Iraq war became a litmus test.
00:01:04.000But it really isn't sort of the top issue, but it became a top issue in Iowa at this particular Family Leadership Council event.
00:01:12.000There are a couple of issues that became kind of key issues that the American public and Republicans...
00:01:18.000Which may be sort of Tucker's point, is the idea that domestic concerns ought to trump foreign concerns, but Ukraine took center stage at this event over the weekend in Iowa.
00:01:27.000And it was sort of fascinating to see how the race has launched for various candidates based on issues like this.
00:01:32.000Again, I'm gonna say that Ukraine is not a top issue for anyone, because by polling data, it isn't a top issue for nearly anyone.
00:01:37.000Here's the latest polling data from Gallup on Americans' top issues.
00:02:04.000But it became sort of the issue du jour.
00:02:06.000And I think the reason for this is because ever since Donald Trump, there's been an attempt inside the Republican Party to capture the issue set that Trump supposedly stood for.
00:02:14.000And there have been a thousand takes on what exactly drove Trump's success in 2016.
00:02:19.000I've always thought that these thousand takes are too sophisticated by half.
00:02:23.000Well, he had Rust Belt policy because he was going to reshore American jobs.
00:02:28.000Or he was more isolationist on foreign policy, and that's what really drove support inside the Republican Party for Donald Trump.
00:02:34.000I don't think it was any of those things, because Donald Trump actually, in certain areas, was rather interventionist.
00:02:38.000Remember that he fired a couple of missiles into Syria.
00:02:41.000For example, he assassinated Qasem Soleimani, who is one of the heads of the Iranian terror regime.
00:02:46.000But what it really was about was pretty simple and remains pretty simple.
00:03:18.000Everything that was Donald Trump was reactive to a media environment and a Democrat media complex that hates people who live in the middle of the country, particularly rust belt white people who have a high school degree.
00:03:28.000Those people particularly felt dispossessed by the political system, and Donald Trump reached out to them on a personal level.
00:03:34.000And that's why Donald Trump's support among those folks is extremely durable.
00:03:39.000So what's sort of fascinating is to watch as intellectuals, including Tucker, try to cram an issue set into Trumpism.
00:03:45.000And that issue set supposedly is, for example, being anti-entitlement reform or being more isolationist on foreign policy.
00:03:53.000And what that makes for is this sort of bizarre dynamic where Republicans are trying to hit on the issue set that made Donald Trump Donald Trump.
00:03:59.000All the Republican candidates are trying to do this.
00:04:02.000And the answer is it ain't the issue set, guys.
00:04:04.000The thing that makes Donald Trump Donald Trump is Donald Trump.
00:04:10.000Now, you can also be a giant pulsating middle finger to the left, right?
00:04:14.000That is a thing you can do, but you can't do that with an issue set.
00:04:16.000You actually have to do that with a tremendous amount of aggressiveness in a space that is unfriendly to you.
00:04:21.000We'll get to that in just a little while, because when you see what the DeSantis campaign is intending on doing, it looks as though they're about to get much more aggressive.
00:04:37.000But one of the things that's fascinating about what Tucker did is Tucker is trying to essentially cudgel some of these candidates.
00:04:44.000Into taking up positions that he himself likes, but those issues aren't necessarily top issues for Republican voters, and watching as candidates scurry to try and avoid the wrath is fascinating.
00:05:57.000Puretalk.com slash Shapiro save an additional 50% off your very first month of coverage.
00:06:01.000Okay, so Tucker, there are a couple of big headlines that came out of the TuckerConFab over the weekend.
00:06:08.000Headline number one was the Tucker versus Mike Pence exchange.
00:06:12.000Now, as I say, one of the things that has obviously been happening right here is the attempt by Tucker to go after Mike Pence in particular ways.
00:06:26.000So Mike Pence is a candidate who really does not have a path.
00:06:30.000He does not have a path because Donald Trump frankly lied about him for two months in the aftermath of the 2020 election, suggesting that Mike Pence had the singular power vested in him by the Constitution to overturn the results of state certified elections.
00:06:47.000John's a nice guy, but that was a bizarre legal theory.
00:06:49.000John knew it was a French legal theory, and the idea that Mike Pence had the capacity single-handedly to overturn the election would be absurd.
00:06:58.000Let's say in the upcoming election, Donald Trump wins certified state votes across the country, and Kamala Harris just throws out the vote.
00:07:06.000Do you think that's what the Constitution does?
00:07:09.000That's not what the Constitution does.
00:07:10.000In any case, Donald Trump said that for like a couple of months.
00:07:13.000Mike Pence was the vice president at the time who certified the election and put a final stamp, which he had to do by constitutional duty.
00:07:19.000And ever since then, he has been enemy of sort of some parts of MAGA world.
00:07:24.000And so he doesn't really have a path toward the nomination.
00:07:27.000Well, Tucker decided to jump on that by going after Pence with regard to Ukraine.
00:07:34.000Now, again, I think that Ukraine is a litmus test for a lot of Republicans, because what Republicans are looking for from Ukraine is, what is America's national priority there?
00:07:42.000I've said all along, I don't think America's national priority is quote-unquote democracy in Ukraine, any more than America's national priority is democracy in Saudi Arabia.
00:07:51.000The simple fact is America has national interest in Ukraine because Ukraine provides an extraordinary amount of grain, because Ukraine is a gateway to Europe, because it is a pathway for natural gas flowing into Europe, because you do not want the Russians to be able to consolidate territory and then use that In its partnership with China, because you want to dissuade China from invading Taiwan, so you actually have to show some stones when it comes to sovereign giant countries invading surrounding countries to which they have territorial claims, supposedly.
00:08:19.000So there are a lot of American national interests in crippling the Russian military and preventing them from invading Ukraine again.
00:08:23.000I've also said That Zelensky isn't going to get what he wants, right?
00:08:26.000Zelensky is not going to get back all of Donbass.
00:08:30.000So the best thing that Joe Biden and the West could be doing right now is negotiating back channel with Putin and saying, listen, you're going to keep part of Donbass.
00:08:52.000And they keep putting the onus on Zelensky to somehow surrender territory, which he's not going to do.
00:08:56.000And on the other side, the people who are saying that we shouldn't be supporting Ukraine in the war.
00:08:59.000The question I have is, OK, so what do you mean by that?
00:09:02.000Like on a practical level, do you mean that America right now should stop providing military support to Ukraine at all?
00:09:08.000In which case the Russians walk into Kiev.
00:09:10.000Is that like a thing that you are OK with?
00:09:12.000Like, really, what are the alternatives?
00:09:14.000I just want to hear, like, a practical, on-the-ground alternative.
00:09:16.000I don't want to hear the pie-in-the-sky, winning, winning, winning, from one side.
00:09:19.000And I don't want to hear the pie-in-the-sky, Ukraine is really bad and we should just stop support, because I don't think that's what you mean.
00:09:25.000I don't even think Tucker wants Russia to take over Kiev.
00:09:29.000I mean, I've never heard him say so, so I'd be surprised if he actually wants that to be the case.
00:09:33.000Okay, so, he's questioning Mike Pence about Ukraine.
00:09:36.000What does he actually wish to get from Mike Pence?
00:09:38.000So, a lot of this primary with regard to Ukraine is about the idea that you have to show that you care more about America than Ukraine.
00:09:46.000Now, of course you should care more about America than Ukraine.
00:10:00.000Okay, there's a clip that was going around, it was out of context, and there are some people, I won't name names here, who deliberately took this clip out of context and then tried to suggest that what Mike Pence was saying here is that he doesn't care about American cities.
00:10:12.000That is clearly not what he is saying here.
00:10:14.000Again, I don't totally agree with Mike Pence on Ukraine, but that's not what he is saying here.
00:10:18.000And so this attempt that has now been made to kind of cram one issue set into the Trump phenomenon and then to suggest that everybody who disagrees with you doesn't care about America full scale, I think that's ugly stuff and I don't like it very much.
00:11:16.000Tucker, I've heard that routine from you before, but that's not my concern.
00:11:20.000I'm running for president of the United States because I think this country's in a lot of trouble.
00:11:24.000I think Joe Biden has weakened America at home and abroad.
00:11:28.000And as President of the United States, we're going to restore law and order in our cities, we're going to secure our border, we're going to get this economy moving again, and we're going to make sure that we have men and women on our courts at every level that will stand for the right to life and defend all the God-given liberties enshrined in our Constitution.
00:11:47.000Anybody that says that we can't be the leader of the free world, and solve our problems at home has a pretty small view of the greatest nation on earth.
00:11:57.000Okay, so what was taken out of context here is that Tucker says to him, your concern is not about the cities, your concern is about the tanks in Ukraine.
00:12:05.000And Pence says, that's not my concern.
00:12:08.000OK, so the way that was read and it was deliberately promoted in the media this way, and it's just not true, was that Mike Pence isn't concerned about American cities.
00:12:20.000You're proclaiming I don't care about what happens in the cities.
00:12:22.000So here is where I start to have a bit of a problem.
00:12:26.000I think that part of the movement inside the Republican Party to cram an issue set into Trumpism is dishonest.
00:12:33.000It is dishonest to suggest that if we took the money that we are using in Ukraine and we poured it into Detroit, Detroit would be a blooming place filled with joy and wonder.
00:12:42.000We've poured trillions of dollars into poor cities in the United States over the course of the last 50 years.
00:12:46.000That is not the chief problem that is happening in America's inner cities.
00:12:49.000Now, you can make the case we shouldn't be giving the aid to Ukraine, but these two things do not have to do with one another.
00:12:53.000The aid that we are giving you to Ukraine is not money that would otherwise be flowing into the great font of joy and wisdom that is the governance of the city of Chicago.
00:14:55.000Go check them out right now or donate by dialing pound 250 and saying keyword baby.
00:15:00.000Now when I say that the Trump issue set is not.
00:15:04.000We need to cut off aid to Ukraine so that we can pay for the cities at home.
00:15:09.000And that spending money, that's actually not a Trump thing.
00:15:11.000Let me point out, that's actually not a Trump thing.
00:15:13.000Trump was deliberately asked about this by Maria Bargaromo over the weekend.
00:15:17.000He was specifically asked how he would stop the Ukraine war because Trump's been going around saying he would stop the Ukraine war in one day.
00:15:22.000You will notice something that Trump says here.
00:15:24.000He says the exact same thing that every practical politician has been saying.
00:15:28.000Keep the aid flowing to Ukraine so as to keep the pressure up on Russia.
00:15:32.000So at the same time that Trumpism is being reinterpreted, Trump is saying a different thing than many of his great expositors and interpreters.
00:15:39.000Here is Donald Trump asked how he would stop the war in Ukraine in one day.
00:15:42.000Notice it's actually no different than Lindsey Graham.
00:15:45.000You said you could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours.
00:17:01.000I asked a self-appointed Christian leader about that, and I said, what do you think, as someone who spent his life advocating for religious freedom, about raiding nunneries and throwing priests in jail?
00:17:16.000And he said with a straight face, well, they, you know, they had the wrong views.
00:17:21.000Oh, so, oh, that, okay, I'm sorry, I didn't realize what the boundaries were.
00:17:24.000So you have religious freedom, or freedom of speech, or freedom of assembly, As long as you stay within the lines, but if you express an unapproved view, then you go to jail.
00:17:42.000It's bigoted to notice that Christian clergy are being imprisoned in Ukraine.
00:17:49.000And my view would be, you know, maybe you care, maybe you don't, but if you're a Christian leader and Christians are going to jail for their views, you are required to say something.
00:18:00.000And if you don't, you're not much of a Christian leader.
00:18:07.000Okay, so this was presumably Tucker going after Pence because he asked Pence specifically about the attempts by the Ukrainian government to shut down the Russian Orthodox Church inside Ukraine because the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia is actually a Putin ally and has been preaching the war in Ukraine and many of the churches in Ukraine have actually been mirroring all that.
00:18:27.000Now again, I get Tucker's point with regard to the shutdown of religious freedom in Ukraine and the targeting of some of the Russian Orthodox churches or many of the Russian Orthodox churches in Ukraine.
00:18:36.000It is a little bit more complex than the idea that Mike Pence just doesn't care about Christians around the world.
00:18:40.000I'm just not a huge fan of the attempt to paint everybody who opposes a particular policy position as an enemy of freedom or as an enemy of the American people or as opposition.
00:18:52.000I just I don't think that that's true about many of these candidates.
00:18:56.000I disagree with a wide variety of these candidates, including Mike Pence on a lot of these issues.
00:18:59.000I actually agree with Tucker more than I agree with Mike Pence with regard to the Russian Orthodox Church inside Ukraine.
00:19:04.000But the attempt to sort of paint various candidates as malevolent forces in the world, I don't like very much.
00:19:09.000And you can sort of see this happening across the Republican Party.
00:19:16.000And one of the kind of weird dynamics about what it is that we do for a living, commenting about politics, is the easiest thing in the world is to say things that people want to hear, and the hardest thing in the world is to say things that people do not want to hear.
00:19:27.000And what I'm seeing increasingly is an attempt to sort of say things that people want to hear, but present it as though you're saying something that nobody wants to hear.
00:19:35.000So to take another example from over the weekend, then we'll get back to sort of this presidential forum, because some of the answers are really interesting.
00:19:53.000Hillbilly Elegy is largely about how the entitlement state perverts the incentive structure for middle class and lower class white Americans in terms of income In the Midwest of the country.
00:20:16.000says here is so patently sort of ridiculous that I think that it's worth noting.
00:20:22.000Because again, it ties into this whole idea that if you disagree with a particular policy position, it must be because you oppose the interests of Americans.
00:21:51.000Vance, again, the reason I'm pointing out J.D., he's not running for president, but is this perspective that is now being promoted, which is that if you disagree with a particular policy position inside sort of the supposed MAGA right, even though, again, Donald Trump doesn't even believe a lot of this sort of stuff, That this means that you have you have exposed your disloyalty.
00:22:11.000I don't buy it and I think it's rather demagogic.
00:22:13.000So here is JD Vance over the weekend talking about Ukraine and entitlements and what he's about to say does not make any logical sense.
00:22:22.000There's no issue that these people with Ukrainian flags in their bio are more obsessed with what they call an entitlement reform, but of course what they're saying is that they want to cut social security for the people who paid into it for a generation so that we can send more money to Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine.
00:22:44.000Okay, can I just point out that the people with Ukrainian flags in their bios and the crossover with people who want entitlement reform, that Venn diagram is two separate circles.
00:23:12.000Vance was writing, this is a piece from J.D.
00:23:14.000Vance, December of 2010, talking about the federal budget, quote, Social Security, and especially Medicare, grow rapidly relative to tax revenue increases.
00:23:23.000Some policy experts estimate that Medicare will consume well over half of the budget by itself before my generation sees any benefits.
00:23:29.000Basically, our budget situation is bleak and it grows worse over time.
00:23:32.000The political obstacles intimidate more than the practical problems.
00:23:34.000The party of, um, limited government, the Republican Party, is also the party of the aging white person.
00:23:39.000The party's only solid constituency thus depends on the Medicare and Social Security benefits that are the biggest roadblocks to any kind of real fiscal sanity.
00:23:52.000J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy, quote, if you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard.
00:23:56.000If you think it's hard to get ahead, even when you try, then why try at all?
00:23:59.000Similarly, when people do fail, this mindset allows them to look outward.
00:24:02.000I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he'd recently quit his job
00:24:06.000because he was sick of waking up early.
00:24:08.000I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the Obama economy and how it affected his life.
00:24:12.000I don't doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them.
00:24:16.000His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he's made, and his life will improve only through better decisions.
00:24:21.000But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself.
00:24:26.000There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherence by the day.
00:24:35.000Vance and the book that made him famous, Hillbilly Elegy.
00:24:38.000And you can make the case that Medicare, Social Security, that, you know, the changes that are going to have to happen should happen gradually.
00:24:45.000You can make the case against spending with the war in Ukraine.
00:24:48.000But to link the two as though if you want some sort of entitlement reform, this is because inherently what you actually want to do is build a city in Ukraine.
00:25:19.000I think there are a lot of candidates in this race and they disagree about a wide variety of issues.
00:25:22.000And on the Republican side, I think by and large, they really care about the country.
00:25:26.000And I think it's a category error to pretend that the people who are talking to you in the ways that you like the best are therefore the people who are telling you the truth.
00:25:36.000Very often, it is precisely the opposite.
00:25:38.000Let me give you another example of somebody who's been doing this.
00:25:41.000Again, this is a person that I personally like.
00:26:17.000And what Vivek says about January 6th, when people say that what people say in primaries might affect how things go in a general election, this would be a case in point.
00:26:26.000Anyway, here is Tucker asking Vivek about January 6th.
00:26:29.000And what Vivek says here is sort of half true.
00:26:32.000And it's half true in a particular way.
00:27:10.000People like me have said that while I don't believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump in the sense that there were like big boxes, pallets of votes that were being shipped into Fulton County in the middle of the night, that the election was rigged in the informal sense, in the sense that you create all sorts of rules that benefit Democrats, including early mail-in voting, universal mail-in balloting, and ballot harvesting, and all this kind of, and then you shut down the media for a month before the election about Hunter Biden, and that's going to have an impact on the election.
00:27:36.000But one of the things that no one would say on the stage is one of the reasons the January 6th happened is because Donald Trump said for two months that Mike Pence could unilaterally decide to overturn the election.
00:27:46.000Which is a bad thing, and Donald Trump should not have said it.
00:27:49.000He was not telling the truth about that stuff.
00:27:53.000And now, the dynamic here apparently is, again this is politics, I get it, tell people what they want to hear, but I don't think that telling people what they want to hear is actually going to get you where you need to go.
00:28:03.000Because in the end, we're still going to have to live in a country together and we're still going to have to govern that country.
00:28:08.000And I think that you can walk and chew gum at the same time.
00:28:10.000I think you can say, censorship in the media was egregious and terrible and social media participated in it, that's going to need a real solution.
00:28:18.000I mean, listen, I run a company that is directly opposed to the outrageous kind of behavior that social media has played in affecting elections on behalf of Democrats.
00:28:52.000Another piece of posturing that happened over the weekend.
00:28:54.000So, Tucker asked Asa Hutchinson about COVID.
00:28:57.000And he was asking him how many COVID shots he took.
00:28:58.000Now, Tucker had been asked in the past about how many shots he took, and he said, you know, that's none of your business.
00:29:02.000Which, by the way, is the proper response.
00:29:04.000None of your business is the proper response to how many shots did you take, because that is personal medical information, obviously.
00:29:10.000But here's Tucker going after Asa Hutchinson.
00:29:12.000Now, there are lots of reasons to go after Asa Hutchinson.
00:29:14.000I think Asa Hutchinson is a terrible candidate.
00:29:15.000I think Asa Hutchinson is weak as hell.
00:29:17.000I think Asa Hutchinson is awful on a wide variety of issues.
00:29:19.000I think there's a reason he's completely stalled out in this campaign and no one cares about him.
00:29:23.000This particular exchange, I think, is kind of interesting, however.
00:29:28.000One of the powers that government did usurp over the past several years is the right to decide what medicine you take in the form of COVID mandates.
00:29:51.000But I think it's fair, and I can see that you recoiled when I asked you that question.
00:29:57.000And I don't think, honestly, you should be asking people about their medical care, but that became a matter of public policy.
00:30:03.000Okay, now, he said I don't think you should be asking people about their medical care directly after he asked Asa Hutchinson about his, about the number of shots.
00:30:12.000Now, Tucker says he took no shots, and that's fine.
00:30:38.000I was a 37-year-old man in good physical condition, and we were lied to by the pharmaceutical companies and by the federal government.
00:30:45.000With that said, my company literally sued the federal government to prevent our own employees from vaxing if they did not want to.
00:30:51.000We sued the federal government, and we committed that we would never force an employee to vax.
00:30:56.000Now Tucker can talk about how he didn't get vaxed, that's fine for him, but he didn't say one word on the air about Fox News' mandates on vaccination.
00:31:04.000Listen, again, I think Tucker says a lot of wonderful and brilliant things.
00:31:07.000I think Tucker's one of the most talented people in modern media history, for sure.
00:31:12.000I also think that some of the virtue signaling that's happening right now with regard to the Republican primary and with regards to the Republican Party in general, is just not telling people the truth about what exactly is going on, and I find that a little bit of a problem.
00:31:25.000Okay, but all of that is beside the point, because the question really is, in the Republican Party, how this Republican nominating race is going to go.
00:31:30.000The reason all of this is relevant, by the way, is because this dynamic shapes how the Republican race is run.
00:31:35.000The way the Republican race should be won is actually very simple.
00:31:38.000Who is most likely to beat Joe Biden and to promote the conservative values that you want?
00:31:44.000Those are the two questions that matter.
00:31:46.000Who is the person who is most likely to promote the values you want in office and is likely to win?
00:31:50.000That's all, which means that theoretically people should be asked about the policies that actually matter to the American people most in, for example, a general election.
00:31:57.000This is one of the reasons why I'm sort of objecting to all the focus on Ukraine, for example, because the American people, by and large, do not care.
00:32:03.000As long as you'd say, and as long as it is true, that you care more about America than Ukraine, which is, I would imagine, virtually everybody in the Republican race, if not everybody in the Republican race, then all the rest of this is sort of irrelevant.
00:32:14.000But this became sort of a big topic over the weekend.
00:32:17.000Here was Tucker grilling, for example, Tim Scott on Ukraine.
00:32:21.000Our primary objective should only be to engage with America's vital national interests are being engaged in.
00:32:28.000Unfortunately, President Biden has no ability to understand and appreciate what that looks like.
00:32:36.000So you're saying that it's in our national interest, vital national interest to degrade the Russian military, in other words, to fight Russia with other people's soldiers.
00:34:22.000Okay, so that means that really, if we're going to talk about which Republican candidate is best to take on Biden, you know what would be great?
00:34:28.000Is to ask the candidates How they would best take on Joe Biden.
00:34:32.000Because that seems like the real question.
00:34:33.000We'll get to that in a moment because that question is being answered.
00:34:36.000And we're, you know, we're going to answer that question before these primaries are over.
00:34:39.000So we'll get to that momentarily first.
00:34:41.000If you're hiring, you're probably dealing with economic uncertainty because everybody's dealing with economic uncertainty at this point.
00:34:44.000Now more than ever, it's important to hire the right people faster and more efficiently to keep overall costs down.
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00:36:32.000If we are looking at the Republican primary, now the Republican primary is down to a really simple question.
00:36:36.000And it really is not about the internal policies here, because again, I believe that virtually all of the Republican candidates on the stage with Tucker or with anybody else, Trump, by the way, did not show up.
00:37:35.000That is, you know, a drop in the bucket compared to the $20 million that DeSantis raised and the $17 million that Trump raised.
00:37:41.000Ron DeSantis is now shaking up his campaign as he should.
00:37:44.000He's shaking up his campaign because he has not gained traction yet in the polls.
00:37:47.000He's sort of been steady in the polls for a couple of months here.
00:37:51.000There's this big jump that everybody is comparing his current poll numbers to right after the 2022 election when, for just a second, Republicans realized that Donald Trump is very, very bad at picking Senate candidates and had Caused a lot of Republican electoral losses in 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022.
00:38:03.000And so they're like, okay, who else is out there who did really well?
00:38:06.000Oh, Ron DeSantis did great in Florida.
00:38:08.000So the polls spiked for DeSantis for a moment, and then everybody sort of went back to their original positions.
00:38:23.000And he is also going to be going into unfriendly territory.
00:38:26.000So according to Mediaite, He is going to do a one-on-one with Jake Tapper over at CNN.
00:38:33.000I assume this will be a little bit of rock'em, sock'em robots, which is necessary for DeSantis' campaign.
00:38:37.000Again, if the appeal of Donald Trump is he goes into unfriendly territory and he punches people in a debate, he says things to Hillary Clinton like, you'd be in jail, right?
00:38:44.000If that's the appeal, then you need somebody who will do that, who will go into unfriendly territory and will knock heads together.
00:38:50.000And has the actual track record to prove it.
00:38:51.000I mean, there are some Republican candidates who are going into unfriendly territory and doing a good job.
00:38:55.000I mentioned Vivek Ramaswamy a little bit earlier on, was critical of him.
00:38:57.000In this arena, Vivek has been very good.
00:38:59.000He's gone on a bunch of shows that are very unfriendly to him, and he has really taken aggressive positions.
00:39:03.000DeSantis is going to have to do the same, and now he is going to.
00:39:06.000So apparently he is getting ready to do a spate of interviews with sort of legacy media outlets.
00:39:13.000And again, I think he's going to treat these more as debate settings than as actual honest interview settings, which is what he should do because they're going to come after him with a hammer and with a hatchet.
00:39:22.000And how DeSantis performs in these interviews is going to be very critical to his pathway going forward.
00:39:27.000Because again, the question is going to be who can fight the media on the one hand and Joe Biden on the other.
00:39:32.000Meanwhile, Donald Trump is avoiding debate, which, again, it is his prerogative, but he is also setting himself up, I will say.
00:39:39.000He made a comment about Joe Biden dodging early debates against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he's actually setting the predicate for Biden also dodging a debate against him.
00:39:47.000I think a lot of Republicans are counting on the idea that Trump will get into a general election scenario with Biden and that the economy will tank, which maybe it will, maybe it won't.
00:39:56.000And then there will be a debate between Trump and Biden in which Biden basically is a corpse and Trump does a good job.
00:40:02.000I'm highly doubtful that Biden even debates Trump.
00:40:05.000I think there is every possibility that Biden says, I'm not going to debate an insurrectionist.
00:40:11.000And he just refuses outright to debate Trump.
00:40:13.000And Trump kind of set the predicate here.
00:40:15.000Here is Trump talking about why it's OK for Biden not to debate RFK Jr.
00:40:18.000and why he is not debating all the other Republicans.
00:40:21.000The Democrats don't want to do debates.
00:40:23.000I know Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr.
00:41:19.000He's talking about himself and the rest of the Republican field.
00:41:22.000Just be careful what you wish for, because I think that Joe Biden could use similar logic with regard to Trump.
00:41:27.000And again, a lot of people on the Republican side, including people like me, if Trump is the nominee, I want to see them debate, obviously.
00:41:33.000Here's Bartiromo asking him, like, you didn't drain the swamp.
00:41:35.000You didn't clean the executive branch.
00:41:36.000You said you were going to do all these things, and then none of them happened.
00:41:39.000I know the people now better than anybody's ever known the people.
00:41:42.000I know the good ones, the bad ones, the dumb ones, the smart ones.
00:41:47.000Oh, you didn't drain the swamp like you said you would.
00:42:34.000There's massive expansives still there.
00:42:37.000He said he was going to eliminate the national debt.
00:42:40.000They added almost eight trillion dollars to the debt in four years and of course in 2020 he turned the country over to Dr. Fauci and those lockdowns and the borrowing and printing really sent us on a bad course.
00:42:57.000So bet which Republican is going to be best tailored to take on Biden.
00:43:00.000That's going to be the story of the rest of this race.
00:43:01.000Don't get distracted in the weeds with all the rest of this, including anything that's attempted to draw support for positions that are not particularly honest.
00:43:10.000All that matters is who's going to be most conservative in office and who can beat Joe Biden.
00:43:18.000But the kinds of questions that are being asked to the candidates need to be tailored to that specific take, not to any other ancillary issues that benefit some at the expense of others.
00:43:27.000Meanwhile, on the Democratic side of the aisle, RFK Jr.
00:43:30.000is freaking out a lot of people in the media because he's actually polling fairly decently against Joe Biden.
00:43:49.000So he was on tape and he was talking specifically about COVID.
00:43:53.000And he suggested that COVID might have been a bioweapon engineered by the Chinese that was made less deadly for people of particular ethnicities.
00:44:01.000And this was touted as though he was suggesting that, for example, Jews had created COVID in order to avoid the targeting of Ashkenaz Jews.
00:44:08.000That's not actually what he is saying right here, I'll point out.
00:44:11.000So here are his comments and then here is what he was actually talking about.
00:44:15.000COVID-19, there's an argument that it is ethnically targeted.
00:44:20.000COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately.
00:44:27.000The races that are most immune to COVID-19 are because of the structure, the genetic structure, genetic differentials among different races.
00:44:42.000Of the receptors, of the ACE2 receptor.
00:44:49.000COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people.
00:44:58.000The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.
00:45:05.000So he was actually citing a study that was published in July 2020 that suggested that one particular receptor for the virus was not present in certain populations.
00:45:15.000Now, it appears that that study was misread by RFK Jr., but he was not Again, I'm rather attuned to anti-Semitism.
00:45:24.000I do not think he was making the claim that the Jews engineered COVID to avoid the deaths of Ashkenazi Jews.
00:45:30.000I'm pretty sure that's not what he was saying right there.
00:45:34.000I think that he is a conspiratorial thinker.
00:45:36.000I've pointed out when I think that he is overstating the case.
00:45:39.000For example, he's constantly making the case that if it's not autism, that if it's not vaccines that are increasing the risk of autism, then what is it?
00:45:46.000Which is a really, really bad scientific argument.
00:45:48.000That's like me saying to my wife, If it wasn't a robber who created this giant pile of dishes in the sink last night, who was it?
00:45:59.000So don't count me among Robert F. Kennedy Jr.' 's most ardent defenders.
00:46:03.000I've been more critical of him than many, but the notion that what he was saying there was like explicitly anti-Semitic or it was a conspiracy theory about Jews creating COVID or something, I think one of the things that's happening now is now the media, who are fairly warm to RFK Jr.
00:46:14.000for years and years and years, see him as a threat to Biden, and so they're starting to turn on him.
00:46:18.000You'll also notice that those comments didn't get any sort of the same sort of coverage as comments that he made to Shmuley Boteach, who leads the World Values Network, And in this particular interview, you'll hear RFK Jr.
00:46:32.000talking about strong support for Israel.
00:46:34.000And so again, what the media are focused on like a laser beam is anti-Semitism,
00:47:14.000It's core to the values that I was raised with.
00:47:17.000My father was a key commitment of my father during his lifetime, to President Kennedy, to my Uncle Teddy, who played such a key role in assisting the Soviet Jewry to leave the Soviet Union during the 1980s to get to the United States and safe harbors in Israel.
00:47:39.000And that friendship with Israel and making the case for the moral case for Israel will be a key part of my presidency.
00:47:49.000Okay, so let me just point out here that, again, the media are very attuned to RFK Jr.
00:47:52.000He must have said something super antisemitic right there in that comment over dinner.
00:48:06.000She was at Netroots Nation, which is a place for crazy people, and she was speaking about Israel, and she just calls it openly, just, it's a racist state.
00:48:12.000I mean, like, full, full anti-Semitic rant here from Pramila Jayapal.
00:48:18.000And inside the Democratic Party halls of power, like, they're going to, like, kind of tut-tut her, but they'll basically let it go, of course.
00:48:25.000Can I say something as somebody that's been in the streets and has participated in a lot of demonstrations?
00:48:32.000I think I want you to know that we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state.
00:48:40.000That the Palestinian people deserve self-determination and autonomy.
00:48:46.000That the dream of a two-state solution is slipping away from us.
00:49:00.000And I want you to know that while you may have arguments with whether or not some of us on stage are fighting hard enough, I do want you to know that there is an organized opposition on the other side, and it isn't the people that are on this stage.
00:49:21.000Right, so Israel is a racist state, says the lady about the country that has a 20% Arab population, where Arabs are fully a part of every part of the Israeli economy and fully part of everyday Israeli life.
00:49:30.000Meanwhile, the Palestinians, where there are literally no Jews, Jews do not live there because they will be murdered, they're doing just fine.
00:49:36.000The Democratic Party is generally okay with this.
00:49:39.000Over the weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris Tweeted out a picture of herself with Reverend Jesse Jackson, saying, Reverend Jesse Jackson, you're one of our nation's greatest patriots.
00:49:47.000Thank you for widening the path for generations to come.
00:49:49.000In this moment, let us all model your lifelong commitment to progress and remain committed to the fight for freedom and justice.
00:49:53.000Jesse Jackson is a lifelong anti-Semite.
00:49:55.000He famously, in the 1980s, called New York, Hymietown, filled with Hymies.
00:50:00.000And he suggested, when Barack Obama was running for president, that he was going to finally wipe away the Zionist conspiracy inside the government and all the rest of this kind of stuff.
00:50:07.000The Democratic Party is not only okay with that.
00:50:08.000The Vice President of the United States tweets out her friendship and support for Jesse Jackson, who of course is also very close with Louis Farrakhan.
00:51:27.000So one of my favorite things is when people have this very self-flattering view that is just not true.
00:51:31.000So MSNBC's Ali Velshi over the weekend, he uttered a comment that I could not let pass without comment.
00:51:36.000He said that there are no conspiracy theorists in the MSNBC audience, which is weird since if you poll the MSNBC audience as to how many of them believe that the Russians basically stole the 2016 election for Trump, I guarantee you it's a very, very high percentage.
00:51:47.000Here's Ali Velshi packing himself on the back.
00:51:51.000Two segments ago I talked about red states and Bidenomics.
00:51:55.000Again, my audience doesn't have conspiracy theorists in it.
00:52:29.000Okay, meanwhile, this is the dumbest story of the day.
00:52:32.000I don't know why Disney wishes to destroy its own intellectual property, but if they're going to do so, then, you know, more power to them, I suppose.
00:52:40.000So they've now decided that apparently every redhead in the Disney universe will be recast as a racially diverse person.
00:52:47.000And this is how, for example, the Little Mermaid ended up as a person of color.
00:55:25.000And one of the most characteristic things about the dwarves in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is that they are short because they are dwarves.
00:55:32.000Well, we have decided that this is very, very insulting.
00:55:35.000And so, the seven dwarves, so that's six racially diverse tall people, and one person who is a little person.
00:55:43.000All of this, yeah, so one of the dwarves is also a woman.
00:55:47.000So that's, that's, you know, again makes for a very weird dynamic.
00:55:50.000Because as you recall from the original Seven White and the Snow Dwarves, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, as you recall from the original, they all live in one room together.
00:55:58.000This is, Apparently this is all because of Peter Dinklage, the guy from Game of Thrones, who at one point was like, they're casting a racially diverse Snow White, but you're still telling the story of Snow White and the seven dwarves?
00:56:12.000You're still making that effing backward story about seven dwarves living in a cave together?
00:56:15.000First of all, they're the heroes of the story, you'll recall.
00:56:19.000And then Disney said it was taking a different approach to avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original.
00:58:24.000Hispanic person, six large people of racially diverse background, and a little person, sounds like a different story than Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
00:58:35.000It truly is an astonishing thing and yeah, I'm...
00:59:36.000What they do is they take all their good IP and they cannibalize it and destroy it in favor of crappy new IP that nobody cares about.
00:59:44.000Meanwhile, they won't even sell the old IP.
00:59:47.000If they really didn't like Aladdin or Snow White, they really thought these things were racist, they could put that IP up on the sales block, or they could just take it down entirely from their platform.
00:59:54.000They won't do that because they understand that what we're actually subscribing to Disney Plus for, if you're still subscribing, is for the old IP.
01:00:01.000So I just slow clap for all the morons in charge of marketing because, again, you know what would have happened?
01:00:06.000What would have happened if, for example, they just cast a talented white lady as Snow White and seven dwarves?
01:00:17.000But they're so interested in virtue signaling.
01:00:19.000They're so interested in cramming down on you, their version of what the world should be, that they are they are destroying their own IP in the process.