A mass shooting in Maine leaves at least 22 dead and over 60 injured. Gunman was released from a mental health facility and is now on the loose. Meanwhile, on campus, there are anti-American protests by Queers for Palestine. Why do they exist and where do they come from? Is it related to their anti-West agenda? And what does it have to do with radical leftist author Frantz Fanon and his call for violence and decolonization? And why is it that on campus there is such a thing as a "Queer for Palestine" group? And where does it come from, exactly? And how does it relate to anti-colonialism and anti-Westernism? All of these questions and more are answered in today's episode of the podcast, hosted by John Rocha and Matt Knost, and brought to you by LaCie. . Subscribe to our new podcast, The Anthropology Project, wherever you get your podcasts, to get notified when we deconstruct the latest news and discuss the most interesting topics in culture, politics, culture, and pop culture. Produced in Baltimore, MD. Subscribe today using our podcast s RSS feed! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Become a supporter of our new sponsor, Rate/subscribe in Apple Podcasts and become a supporter by becoming a patron! Rate, review and subscribe to our podcast! Thank you for supporting our new episodes in iTunes and leave us a review on your favorite streaming platform! Music by Ian Dorsch Music by Skynet by Crackle and the Electric Lighthearted Libra We'll be looking out for your thoughts and reviews on this podcast in the next episode of this week's next episode on the latest issue of The Vagrant on Sunday, November 15th, 2019, coming out on Tuesday, November 19th, 2020, by The Wretched of the Earth Podcasts by The Wards of the Wretched Of The Earth by John Fennessey Thank You! by Alyssa Grauso Thanks for listening to this podcast? , John Ferell & the Wounded by the Wards Of The Nation and The Warshaw - in this podcast by , and , and "The Wretched is @ at 2019,
00:00:05.000The gunman, we don't mention the name of the mass shooters on this show, but the gunman had been committed to a mental hospital after hearing voices apparently and then he was set free.
00:00:15.000So once again we have a situation with a mass shooting where presumably law-abiding gun owners will now be blamed.
00:00:19.000It'll be an attempt, widespread attempt, by members of the media, by members of our political class to take guns away from the law-abiding Because they didn't take a gun away from somebody who literally was not supposed to have a gun.
00:00:30.000Apparently, according to the UK Daily Mail, this person who grappled with mental health issues recently reported hearing voices and threatening to shoot up the military base where he served.
00:00:38.000He was committed to a mental health facility over the summer for a couple of weeks.
00:00:42.000He also had a criminal background check.
00:00:45.000In 2007, he was charged with a misdemeanor offense for DUI.
00:00:56.000It is not clear where exactly he is politically at this point.
00:01:02.000I mean people are gonna try and link it to his politics because in March he liked a social media post from Donald Trump Jr.
00:01:09.000and he posted some memes from March talking about how How gun ownership was not the problem.
00:01:16.000He liked a post by Dinesh D'Souza at one point that talks about how banning assault weapons was a bad idea.
00:01:21.000This obviously was a person with mental illness, and I'm not saying that because it serves a particular agenda, but just because that happens to be the fact.
00:01:30.000That was, by the way, the notice that was put out by the main information and analysis center, that's law enforcement over there, calling for his capture.
00:01:37.000While he was still at large, they put out a notice saying, quote, According to law enforcement, the shooter recently reported mental health issues, including hearing voices and threats to shoot up the National Guard base in Saco, Maine.
00:01:49.000This person was reported to have been committed to a mental health facility.
00:01:51.000The person is a trained firearms instructor and army reservist stationed out of that particular city.
00:01:57.000Apparently, he opened fire at two separate locations, killing at least 22 people and injuring over 60.
00:02:04.000So we'll bring you the latest on that as it continues to develop.
00:02:08.000And meanwhile, big question has arrived in American politics at this point, and that is, why is it that on campus there is such a thing as, like, Queers for Palestine?
00:02:32.000They are, in the words of radical revolutionary author Frantz Fanon, the wretched of the earth, rising up to smite the hierarchies of power.
00:02:39.000In 1961, Frantz Fanon, a black radical member of the Algerian National Liberation Front, put forth a shockingly violent treatise calling for the revolution of the colonized.
00:02:48.000Pointing out the evils of colonial administration, Fanon didn't merely call for an end to colonialism a la Gandhi.
00:02:53.000Instead, he called for violence, which he saw as purifying in all of its varied forms.
00:02:58.000His book, The Wretched of the Earth, posited that revolutionary violence would usher in the new man, free of the evils of the West.
00:03:04.000Decolonization, he wrote, is always a violent event.
00:03:08.000Decolonization, he wrote, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder.
00:03:13.000In its bare reality, Fanon wrote, decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives.
00:03:49.000The West must be destroyed for the West has colonized.
00:03:51.000Quote, when the colonized hear a speech on Western culture, they draw their machetes or at least check to see they are close at hand, Fanon says.
00:03:58.000Such a sort of colonial power was at least somewhat understandable in Algeria, but Fanon wasn't making the case for revolutionary violence merely in Algeria.
00:04:05.000He was actually making the case for revolutionary violence pretty much everywhere.
00:04:08.000The person who made that clear was existentialist and Marxist Jean-Paul Sartre, the French intellectual.
00:04:13.000Sartre's introduction to Fanon's Wretched of the Earth makes the case not only that the colonized have an ultimate right to violence, but that the entire West must be collapsed from within for its great sins.
00:04:22.000Violence, says Sartre, quote, is man reconstructing himself.
00:04:26.000Killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed, leaving one man dead and the other man free.
00:04:34.000And the only honorable thing for the West to do is join in on its cultural suicide.
00:04:37.000Quote, you who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point
00:04:41.000of affectation, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed
00:04:46.000Sartre writes, Fanon reveals to his comrades, especially to those who remain a little too
00:04:50.000westernized, the solidarity of the metropolitans with their colonial agents.
00:04:54.000Sartre says that he has carried Fanon's, quote, dialectic through to its conclusion.
00:04:59.000We too, peoples of Europe, we are being decolonized, meaning the colonist inside every one of us is surgically extracted in a bloody operation.
00:05:06.000We must all recognize that we are complicit in, quote, a 1,000-year-old oppression.
00:05:11.000Our beloved values are losing their features.
00:05:13.000If you take a closer look, there's not one that isn't tainted with blood.
00:05:38.000This is, for example, how Israel, the ultimate case of decolonization across human history, after the return of a native population to its homeland and its battle to throw off the shackles of the British Mandate, became today's hottest, quote, decolonization cause.
00:05:50.000Sartre's radical call has been taken up sporadically both at home and abroad.
00:05:53.000As critical theorist Homi Bhabha points out, in his foreword to Fanon's book, the Black Panthers found inspiration in Fanon.
00:05:59.000So did the Iranian revolutionaries, who ended with the rise of the mullahs.
00:06:02.000Those revolutionaries transmuted Fanon's distinction between oppressor and oppressed into a distinction between the arrogant and the weakened, translating Fanon's Marxist-tinged radicalism into radical Islamism.
00:06:13.000But the coalition of Fanon's Wretched of the Earth could not materialize until the generation of Sartre came to full maturity, until the institutions of the West poisoned themselves slowly with the imbecilic suicidality of weakness.
00:06:26.000The West remained strong enough to fend off the radical alliance when it faced down the Soviet Union, but then it couldn't stand up for itself, and so it began to fall.
00:06:33.000Fast forward 60 years from Sartre, and Sartre's radicalism has now become a mass movement, a movement uniting Hamas and campus radicals, the far left, and the terrorists.
00:06:42.000Cornel West, the black Marxist radical, calls Fanon, quote, the greatest revolutionary intellectual of the mid-20th century.
00:06:47.000According to West, he compels us to acknowledge colonialism is a sustained barbaric war waged against colonized people sanctioned by Western values.
00:06:54.000What's more, colonialism, says West, is not a far-from-home problem.
00:07:35.000The alliance of the supposedly marginalized march together, arm in arm, toward the destruction of the West, and in particular, the United States.
00:07:41.000After all, the United States, even according to Fanon in 1961, had become the chief colonizer thanks to its power.
00:07:47.000Quote, two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe.
00:07:51.000It succeeded so well that the United States became a monster in which the taints, the sickness, the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.
00:07:58.000The alliance to destroy the West spans the globe.
00:08:01.000And it's right here at home, too, threatening everything we stand for.
00:08:04.000If decolonization is merely a code word for attacking the powerful and the systems that supposedly sustain them, then queers for Palestine begins to make a lot of sense.
00:08:13.000That's why the same people caterwalling over the use of the wrong pronoun will celebrate the burning of babies in the Gaza envelope.
00:08:19.000As Washington Post writer Karen Atia recently retweeted after the slaughter of 1,500 Jewish civilians, quote, What did y'all think decolonization meant?
00:08:29.000She might be evil, but she isn't wrong.
00:08:32.000In just one second, we'll get to the latest from our college campuses, where again, this coalition of funnels, supposedly wretched of the earth, rises.
00:08:39.000Again, we'll get to that momentarily first.
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00:09:49.000Okay, so as I'm mentioning, the evils on college campus have become incredibly pronounced.
00:09:55.000They span from the student body to the administration.
00:09:58.000Last night, students at Cooper Union in New York, Jewish students, were actually trapped inside a building, in a room, and the police wouldn't allow them to leave.
00:10:06.000Now, I've been in a situation like this before, personally, when I spoke at Cal State University Los Angeles back in 2015, 2016.
00:10:12.000I remember that we were actually locked in the auditorium because there were people outside who were Nearly rioting and they were attempting to beat up people attempting to get into the room.
00:10:21.000The police actually had to shut down the room and they wouldn't let anybody out because they were afraid that that nobody would be able to be protected.
00:10:26.000It was the same story at Cooper Union last night.
00:10:28.000Here's some film of students at Cooper Union stuck in the library as pro-Hamas protesters
00:14:01.000And the answer is, when you build a coalition that is explicitly designed to tear away at the West, and Israel is an element of that coalition, the alliance rides again.
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00:15:46.000Balance of Nature has sent a bunch of fruit and veggie capsules down to the studio.
00:16:44.000And they say, in the strongest possible terms, the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council at the University of California, a diverse statewide body representing over 300 faculty system-wide, rejects recent UC administrative communications that distort and misrepresent the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and thereby contribute to the racist and dehumanizing erasure of Palestinian daily reality.
00:17:04.000In light of the history and statements by the UC regions demonizing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and other forms of Palestinian solidarity, we have no confidence the UC administration comprehends or respects its obligations.
00:17:15.000It is deeply distressing the UC and other higher institutions' administrative statements in the last week and a half that irresponsibly wield charges of terrorism and unprovoked aggression have contributed to a climate that has made Palestinian students and community members unsafe.
00:17:30.000The people who really feel unsafe on campus these days are obviously the pro-Hamas protesters who are marching en masse through campuses and threatening people.
00:17:38.000By the way, how pathetic are our university students?
00:17:40.000They're so pathetic that at Brandeis University, which was founded by the American Jewish community, at Brandeis University, Student leaders voted 10 to 6 not to condemn Hamas.
00:17:54.000Yoni Khan, a senior at the university, said that he stands with Palestinians, but this is still about condemning an extremist organization, but he was, you know, in the minority.
00:18:02.000So, amazing stuff there from Brandeis.
00:18:05.000So, again, this is a group of young, highly educated, usually upper-class students who are fully in league with the ideology of terrorism because Hamas is just part of the violent coalition to tear down the civilization, so they have to stand by their buddies.
00:18:21.000And what that means is that also there's a sense of tremendous entitlement from these folks.
00:18:31.000Probably the best example of this that I've seen over the past few years is a person named Reina Workman.
00:18:37.000Reina Workman is a member of the NYU Student Council.
00:18:43.000In fact, Raina Workman is the NYU Law School's Student Bar Association president.
00:18:51.000So she was caught on camera defacing posters of kidnapped Israelis.
00:18:55.000So this is something that has become unbelievably common and pretty shocking because these are just posters of people who are literally being held hostage by a terrorist group and pro-Hamas people.
00:19:05.000You can't call these pro-Palestinian people because this has nothing to do with being pro-Palestinian people.
00:19:11.000I mean, if it does, then I think you're getting the issue wrong.
00:19:14.000They're literally tearing down posters of kidnapped children or defacing them.
00:20:17.000So here is ABC News covering Rhino Workmen.
00:20:21.000I mean, the sense of absolute entitlement from these privileged, petty, pathetic left-wingers who, again, are in league with the quote-unquote Wretched of the Earth, according to Fanon, it's really, it's quite disgusting.
00:20:35.000And people should realize how revolutionary the implications are.
00:20:37.000Here is Raina Workman declaring that not only is she entitled to tear down posters of kidnapped children, she's entitled to a job from you.
00:20:43.000And if you don't give it to her, it's because you're discriminatory.
00:20:46.000If you were to redo the letter, obviously with the benefit of hindsight, anything you would have done differently?
00:20:53.000I think I will continue to speak up for Palestinian human rights and use whatever platform I have available to me to call for a ceasefire and end this occupation that's harming the Palestinians.
00:21:23.000And that was what my message was intended to get across, was that we are seeing violence happening that is part of a much larger structural violence system that is happening in Palestine right now.
00:21:36.000I think what I use my platform for and who I condemn was pretty clear by my message and I think that I will continue to condemn apartheid and military occupation and that in this moment I'm focused on calling for an end to genocide and calling for an immediate ceasefire.
00:21:53.000Do you think that in this space that we're in right now, there's room to have empathy for the Israelis who lost their lives, who were brutalized, were raped, and also empathy for the Palestinians?
00:22:11.000Yeah, I think right now, if you turn on any mainstream channel, you'll see the stories of Israelis on every screen you look to.
00:22:18.000And so I think for me, I will continue to use my platform to uplift the voices of Palestinians and the struggles they're going through, because right now we have over 5,000 Palestinian lives lost.
00:25:00.000People like Angela Davis promoting it.
00:25:02.000But it's bled up into all aspects of American society, most obviously, including our media, to the extent that the New York Times, at this point, is literally defending rehiring a freelance writer who praised Hitler.
00:25:17.000According to Jewish News Service, Palestinian filmmaker Soleiman Hiji, who has posted on social media of being in a state of harmony, as Hitler was during the Holocaust, and wrote, How Great You Are, Hitler, has been rehired by the New York Times.
00:25:29.000He freelanced for the New York Times from 2018 until 2021.
00:25:33.000And since October 12th, he's had nine bylines.
00:25:37.000He's just writing for the New York Times again.
00:25:42.000The New York Times, they said, Oh, you mean the standards of not being a Hitler supporter or the standards of being a Hitler supporter or silent on genocide like the New York Times was the first time around.
00:25:49.000to ensure he understood our concerns and could adhere to our standards.
00:25:52.000Oh, you mean the standards of not being a Hitler supporter or the standards of being
00:25:55.000a Hitler supporter or silent on genocide like the New York Times was the first time around?
00:25:59.000And this is bled up into the media. And the way that the media do this in a softer fashion
00:26:05.000is they just set up this full scale moral equivalence that They pretend that you don't actually have a moral obligation to take sides in a battle between genocidal terrorists and legitimate states.
00:26:15.000So, the New York Times put out an entire opinion video piece Saying you don't have to take sides.
00:26:20.000There's nothing that suggests you have to take sides against terror groups that burn babies alive.
00:27:28.000Well, suddenly the New York Times is saying you don't have to have a moral opinion on this stuff.
00:27:31.000The New York Times spends its days asking every single Republican, if a Republican makes a bad comment anywhere, every Republican must now have an opinion on that thing.
00:27:39.000Apparently there's only one issue where you don't have to have an opinion, according to the New York Times.
00:27:43.000And that happens to be, you know, where Muslims are murdering Jews en masse and calling for their extermination.
00:27:47.000When that happens, suddenly the New York Times goes full on, well, you know, there are other things happening in the world.
00:27:53.000Again, many of the conflicts that they mentioned right there, you should have an opinion on.
00:27:56.000You should have an opinion on the Chinese government keeping Muslims in concentration camps in China.
00:28:01.000Some of us have expressed that opinion many, many times.
00:28:04.000By the way, the idea of the New York Times doesn't say you have to have an opinion on Ukraine versus Russia is insane.
00:28:07.000The New York Times has been pushing that for years at this point.
00:28:11.000But again, the moral equivocation is just cover for terrorism.
00:28:19.000So, give you the latest on the ground right now in Israel right now.
00:28:24.000The Israelis last night performed their largest ground assault since the beginning of this particular round of conflict, since October 7th.
00:28:32.000They sent some tanks in to areas in the northern Gaza Strip.
00:28:38.000It was a limited raid ahead of any sort of potential ground offensive.
00:28:41.000There are a lot of rumors that Biden has been trying to convince the Israelis to delay the ground offensive.
00:28:45.000Israel, for its own part, is still kind of deciding when it wishes to go, what it wishes to do, and all the rest.
00:28:51.000The suggestion was that Biden wanted a delay so that the United States could get more defensive weaponry in place to protect our troops abroad.
00:28:58.000Which, by the way, we should have had originally, except that Joe Biden was too busy playing nice and playing footsie with the Mullahs to actually defend our troops.
00:29:06.000But here was Joe Biden yesterday saying that he did not call for a delay on a ground invasion.
00:29:11.000Have you sought assurances from him that he will hold off on a ground invasion into Gaza until the safe release of the hostages can be assured?
00:29:22.000And of course, those include 10 unaccounted for Americans.
00:29:38.000I pointed out to him, if it's real, it should be done.
00:29:43.000Now, to his credit, Biden was asked about the numbers from the Gaza Strip.
00:29:46.000He said, you know, we're getting all those numbers from Hamas.
00:29:48.000I take them with a grain of salt, which, you know, good for him for actually saying this, since the administration has so far not really done that.
00:29:56.000In the 18 days since Hamas killed 1,400 Israelis, the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry says Israeli forces have killed over 6,000 Palestinians, including 2,700 children.
00:30:08.000You've previously asked Netanyahu to minimize civilian casualties.
00:30:12.000Do these numbers say to you that he is ignoring that message?
00:30:16.000What they say to me is I have no notion that Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.
00:30:25.000I think we should be incredibly careful.
00:30:28.000I think, not we, Israel should be incredibly careful to be sure that they're focusing on going after the folks that are propagating this war against Israel.
00:30:40.000And it's against their interest when that doesn't happen.
00:30:43.000But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.
00:30:48.000Again, embedded in that is Joe Biden's usual garbage about how Israel has to be so careful about civilian casualties, you really have to warn the Israelis, what we talked about yesterday on the show.
00:30:56.000Meanwhile, Biden is trying to figure out exactly what to do with the fact that Iran is getting very, very spicy with regard to Americans in the region.
00:31:03.000According to the Washington Post, President Biden faces mounting pressure to strike Iranian proxies that have repeatedly been attacked and injured.
00:31:09.000troops in Iraq and Syria this month, but he's weighing any decision to retaliate against his broader concern that the war in Gaza could be on the precipice of erupting into a region-wide tempest.
00:31:16.000The truth is, the thing that will keep it from erupting into a region-wide tempest is if the United States makes clear that if you injure our troops, we will stomp on you like a fly.
00:31:24.000That historically has been the American way of doing business in these places, and that has, in fact, worked.
00:31:30.000When American troops are attacked, the only way to push people off of doing that is to make it very clear to them that if they do that, they and their buddies die.
00:31:39.000There's a reason that Donald Trump did this exactly right.
00:31:41.000When he was the President of the United States, if there were attacks on American troops, Donald Trump responded in kind, and he did so with alacrity.
00:31:47.000It was Donald Trump who pulled the trigger on Qasem Soleimani, and he was totally correct to do that, considering that Soleimani had helped plan the death of thousands of American troops in Iraq.
00:31:55.000Biden said on Wednesday that he warned Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, that if Tehran continues to move against U.S.
00:32:00.000forces in the Middle East, we will respond.
00:32:02.000But so far, there really has been no response yet, and it's that sort of lack of clarity that is leading to an escalation.
00:32:09.000So, obviously, you know, it makes some sense that if there's going to be a base of attack, Iran, an insurgent group that is using a base of attacks in order to attack Americans, droning them to death would probably be a proper solution for all of that.
00:32:25.000Meanwhile, by the way, the Biden administration just let in the Iranian foreign minister to the United States.
00:32:29.000He met with Hamas five seconds ago to cheer with them.
00:32:31.000I don't understand why the United States is granting temporary visas to terrorists and terror supporters.
00:32:38.000By the way, this whole thing, of course, has been pretty embarrassing for the Biden administration.
00:32:42.000Even more embarrassing, since Jake Sullivan, who is the National Security Advisor to Joe Biden, he wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine before the October 7th attacks, in which he bragged about a bunch of supposed foreign policy successes.
00:33:29.000Yeah, it's worked out amazingly, amazingly well.
00:33:31.000They had to cut all of that from Sullivan's embarrassing essay.
00:33:34.000Okay, well, in other news in the United States, actually good news in the United States before I change, the Republicans have now actually put a Speaker of the House in place.
00:33:54.000By the way, I thought Jim Jordan would've been excellent.
00:33:57.000I thought he would've done- I thought Steve Scalise was excellent.
00:33:59.000I thought he would've done a great job.
00:34:00.000I thought Kevin McCarthy was doing a fine job.
00:34:03.000So, in other words, we basically traded a conservative Speaker of the House for another conservative Speaker of the House.
00:34:09.000You can like Mike Johnson better than Kevin McCarthy on his personal policies and predilections.
00:34:14.000In a second, I want to talk about the incentive structure and what actually happens once he's Speaker of the House.
00:34:18.000Because as I've said before, every Speaker of the House is going to face the same incentive structure.
00:34:23.000And so if you're expecting a radical shift in Republican policy to occur because Mike Johnson is Speaker as opposed to McCarthy, you got another thing coming.
00:34:30.000But is it good that Johnson is in place?
00:36:33.000So finally, some good news for Republicans.
00:36:36.000Apparently, Republicans, last night, they decided to stop kicking themselves directly in the nads, and instead, they decided to actually vote in favor of Mike Johnson.
00:36:45.000So Mike Johnson, somebody that I would say most of America had not heard of, like, ever.
00:36:50.000He was only elected to Congress fairly recently.
00:36:53.000He hasn't been in Congress all that long.
00:36:58.000According to Politico, his anonymity in Washington was the driving force in his election as Speaker because he hadn't made any enemies yet.
00:37:05.000He became the unlikely leader of an unruly group of House Republicans who will now rely on him to run their side of the Capitol.
00:37:30.000Matt Gaetz and a few of his crew decided they hated McCarthy.
00:37:33.000And so what that meant is that any compromise that McCarthy cut was going to be seen as treason by Gaetz and company and used as an excuse to get rid of McCarthy.
00:37:42.000Well now, Johnson is gonna come in, he's gonna do kind of exactly what McCarthy did, because the incentive structure is precisely the same.
00:37:48.000So to take an example, McCarthy just cut a continuing resolution.
00:38:10.000Now, he can pass a bunch of single-issue bills, supposedly, he can pass the appropriations bills, do the process and all of that, but Democrats are going to reject it and he's going to come back to doing continuing resolutions.
00:38:20.000Now, the thing is that because Gates ousted McCarthy and because Johnson is the new speaker, he has an incentive, Gates does, in making Johnson appear to be better than McCarthy, which means he's not going to yell and scream about any deal that Johnson cuts.
00:38:32.000So, inherently, Johnson has more leeway to cut deals and make deals than McCarthy did, mainly because all the people who would be incentivized to get rid of somebody for the publicity already did that, and so they can't do it again.
00:38:43.000They have to play this as though they achieved some sort of massive win by substituting Johnson for McCarthy.
00:38:48.000And again, the policy is going to come out almost exactly the same.
00:38:50.000It's going to be very, very, very similar.
00:38:54.000Now, the fact is that Johnson has a lot less experience than McCarthy in this space.
00:39:06.000I happen to resonate to an enormous amount of what Johnson says.
00:39:10.000As a speaker, I think he's way more appealing than Kevin McCarthy was.
00:39:14.000However, the Speaker of the House's job is not just to be a person who speaks well and a person who communicates well.
00:39:20.000The Speaker of the House essentially has several jobs.
00:39:23.000One is to, yeah, speak well and maintain policy positions, but The kind of bigger aspects are vote counting, vote whipping, rewarding allies and punishing enemies, getting together a coalition to actually do things.
00:39:35.000And that requires a lot of backscratching.
00:39:47.000The Speaker also is supposed to fundraise for pretty much all the Republicans across the board.
00:39:52.000So McCarthy, over the course of his time in House leadership, raised almost half a billion dollars for various House Republican candidates, including many of the same people who then ousted him.
00:40:01.000Mike Johnson, in the last election cycle, you wouldn't expect him to raise tens of millions of dollars.
00:40:04.000He's one guy running in an uncontested district in Louisiana.
00:40:08.000Mike Johnson, in his last election cycle, raised $1.3 million.
00:40:11.000So can he translate that over into raising hundreds of millions of dollars for fellow candidates?
00:40:16.000McCarthy, when recruited a bunch of candidates in purple districts, Johnson hasn't really done that yet.
00:40:22.000So, again, he's gonna have to prove that he can do all of the hard-nosed things that McCarthy could do.
00:40:29.000And there's a lot of parliamentary procedure to being Speaker of the House.
00:40:31.000It's not like anybody can just walk in the front door and suddenly transform the place.
00:40:35.000If you don't file a bill at the proper time, Democrats could sneak in.
00:40:54.000The idea that the Gateson team achieved some sort of massive material victory by throwing the House into full-on chaos for three weeks and demonstrating the fractiousness and idiocy of part of the Republican caucus, I don't buy it.
00:41:54.000And that any other form of human relationship is not the same morally or sociologically.
00:42:02.000He was involved in the attempts to stall certification of the election post 2020.
00:42:10.000And this is being used as a club by Democrats already.
00:42:14.000He devised an argument that was actually the only good argument that was made in the aftermath of November 7th, which is essentially that a lot of states, like Pennsylvania, had unilaterally shifted their voting laws so as to benefit Democrats in ways that were illegal.
00:42:25.000That was like the only good legal argument that was made during that entire spectacle.
00:42:29.000Johnson was the one making those arguments.
00:42:31.000And he said some stuff during that time that, frankly, is ridiculous.
00:42:35.000He called into question the voting systems inside of Venezuela.
00:43:43.000We know that there's a lot going on in our country, domestically and abroad, and we are ready to get to work again to solve those problems, and we will.
00:43:53.000Our mission here is to serve you well, to restore the people's faith in this house, in this great and essential institution.
00:46:02.000Instead, use ZipRecruiter.com slash DailyWire to find the world's best employees.
00:46:06.000ZipRecruiter is indeed the smartest way to hire.
00:46:09.000So, Mike Johnson, again, his speech last night was excellent.
00:46:12.000When he got to his principles, this is particularly good.
00:46:14.000So, Mike Johnson ticked off a lot of the left last night when, before he assumed his speakership position, he actually knelt in prayer with a bunch of other members of the Republican caucus.
00:46:26.000It's super offensive to, you know, pay tribute to God after you achieve something of a magnitude, becoming Speaker of the House in the United States of America.
00:46:33.000That, of course, is deeply offensive, deeply problematic, clearly.
00:46:36.000I mean, being Rashida Tlaib and being an actual terror supporter, okay, according to Democrats, kneeling for prayer on the floor of the House, that, of course, is a huge problem.
00:46:44.000You're allowed to kneel in kente cloth for George Floyd.
00:46:46.000You're just not allowed to do it for God without the kente cloth.
00:46:49.000In any case, Mike Johnson, he said last night that it's time to reject atheism and Marxism.
00:46:55.000In 1962, that our national motto, In God We Trust, was adorned above this rostrum.
00:47:02.000And if you look at the little guide that they give tourists and constituents who come and visit the house, if you turn in there to about page 14 in the middle of that guide, it tells you the history of this.
00:47:12.000And it says very simply, these words were placed here above us, this motto was placed here, as a rebuke of the Cold War era philosophy of the Soviet Union.
00:47:23.000That philosophy was Marxism and communism.
00:47:28.000So obviously he is slapping at some members of the left.
00:47:31.000Then he listed what he called the seven core principles of conservatism.
00:47:37.000I think it's really quintessentially the core principles of our nation.
00:47:41.000I boil them down to individual freedom, limited government, the rule of law, peace through strength, fiscal responsibility, free markets, and human dignity.
00:47:52.000Those are the foundations that made us the extraordinary nation that we are.
00:47:56.000And you and I today are the stewards of those principles.
00:48:01.000That sounds pretty traditionally conservative to me.
00:48:02.000I mean, in there I heard, you know, peace through strength, which is something that a lot of people are not big fans of these days.
00:48:08.000I heard fiscal responsibility, something a lot of people on the right are not big fans of these days.
00:48:12.000So again, the idea that he's some sort of like wild departure from traditional conservatism is ridiculous.
00:48:17.000He's a traditional conservative, which is good.
00:48:19.000A traditionally conservative Speaker of the House would be a very good thing.
00:48:21.000I hope that he pulls the levers in a more conservative direction than House leadership has been able to do.
00:48:25.000I also understand, as I've said, the incentive structure.
00:48:28.000And the incentive structure means he has a Democrat Senate, he's a Democrat President of the United States, and he has an extremely thin majority in the House.
00:48:35.000And all it takes is a few grandstanders to make it so that he has to cut a deal with Democrats again.
00:48:41.000In the initial run, I expect that he's going to get the support of many of the people who ousted McCarthy, so those aren't going to be the people who buck him.
00:48:47.000But, as time progresses, he'll have the exact same incentive structure as everyone else.
00:48:52.000So, was this like a big, giant win for the Republican Party?
00:48:54.000Again, really like Mike J- Like, in a ton of ways.
00:49:20.000And any attempts to retcon that are pretty ridiculous.
00:49:23.000Well, regardless of what the Democrats are saying, Johnson's first move was a good move.
00:49:27.000He announced last night that the very first move that he was going to make as Speaker of the House was to push a resolution to support Israel and then a bill to support Israel in its war against Hamas.
00:49:39.000The first bill that I'm going to bring to this floor in just a little while will be in support of our dear friend Israel and we're overdue in getting that done.
00:49:48.000We're going to show not only Israel but the entire world that the barbarism of Hamas that we have all seen play out on our television screens is wretched and wrong and we're going to stand for the good in that conflict.
00:51:01.000According to Politico, while Mike Johnson might have been an obscure four-term Congress member before Wednesday, but if Democrats have their way, he'll soon be well-known by every American as an election denier, an anti-abortion extremist, a slasher of Social Security and Medicare.
00:51:13.000Democrats are determined to define Johnson in the public eye before he has a chance to define himself.
00:51:18.000Democrats said on Wednesday they were hurriedly digging into Johnson's record.
00:51:22.000There were 69 episodes of his podcast on Spotify, which Johnson co-hosts with his wife, many of which touch on hot-button political topics.
00:51:30.000One Democratic operative was quick to spotlight one such episode as indicative of the goldmine they believe is about to be discovered, a June 5th show in which the Johnsons spotlighted an initiative to turn Pride Month into Fidelity Month, which sounds kind of great, actually.
00:51:41.000Like, please, go after him on that one.
00:51:44.000The DCCC sent a memo to House Democrats saying House Republicans may be breathing a short-sighted
00:51:49.000sigh of relief now they've elected a new speaker, but their decision to elevate an
00:51:52.000anti-abortion extremist has pushed to gut Social Security and Medicare, and who is one of the main
00:51:56.000architects of the illegal attempt to overtune the 2020 election will lose them the majority in 2024.
00:52:00.000You can see them already activating the strategy. Here is Hakeem Jeffries. Yesterday, he's the
00:52:04.000House Minority Leader bashing Johnson right off the bat. To start with, on Congressman Johnson,
00:52:11.000given the fact that there are peers, at least based on that sound, that there is momentum behind him,
00:52:15.000is this somebody you believe Democrats can work with across the aisle?
00:52:50.000So, yep, they're getting ready to run against Johnson.
00:52:57.000Again, this is what they think they're going to be able to do, but yeah, I think it's gonna be a hard sell a little bit because Johnson does not appear offensive.
00:53:03.000Johnson is very conservative, and you can hear him speaking, and he seems reasonable.
00:53:07.000Even Jake Tapper on CNN last night, who's no friend of the Republicans, even he was like, yeah, Johnson is a very articulate guy.
00:53:14.000Jeffries also is trying to ramp up the rhetoric around January 6th again.
00:53:18.000I think it was, for a lot of Americans, they want to put it in the rearview mirror and they're tired of this.
00:53:22.000Here is Jeffries introducing Johnson by comparing January 6th to World War II.
00:53:27.000There are many throughout this country who are understandably alarmed at the turbulence of the moment, at the chaos The dysfunction and the extremism that has been unleashed in this chamber from the very beginning of this Congress.
00:53:55.000We faced adversity on September 11, 2001, when the Towers and the Pentagon were unexpectedly struck, killing thousands of lives in an instant.
00:54:10.000We face adversity right here in the House of Representatives, when on January 6, 2021, a violent mob of insurrectionists, incited by some in this chamber, overran the House floor as part of an effort to halt the peaceful transfer of power.
00:54:33.000Again, and this is going to be the line of attack, again.
00:54:35.000So they're just going to keep going back to this well over and over and over again.
00:54:38.000Again, all Republicans have to do is show some baseline competence here and that attack line goes away.
00:54:42.000Because nobody's focusing on January 6th.
00:54:44.000They're focusing on the things happening right now.
00:54:46.000By the way, some of those things happening right now?
00:54:49.000GDP grew at a 4.9% annual clip in the third quarter.
00:54:53.000That was better than expected, but in some ways really, really problematic because the entire purpose of jacking up the interest rates was to get people to stop spending as much money because that is inflating the currency.
00:55:03.000And it's also leading to price inflation.
00:55:19.000Consumer spending increased 4% for the quarter after rising just 0.8% in Q2.
00:55:24.000One of the reasons people are spending so much is because they believe that their dollar is going to be worth less tomorrow than it is today.
00:55:28.000So you may as well buy that product that you were going to put off for six months.
00:55:31.000You might as well buy it right now before it doubles in price.
00:55:34.000Government spending and investment jumped 4.6% as well.
00:55:40.000The stock market did not jump on this news, which means that everybody still understands that there is another shoe to drop.
00:55:44.000The other shoe to drop is going to be the inflation stats, which continue to come in hot.
00:55:47.000And the Federal Reserve is going to have to raise those interest rates again.
00:55:52.000They don't really have a huge debate over this, really.
00:55:58.000According to the Wall Street Journal, to combat high inflation, the Fed has lifted its benchmark federal funds rate to a range between 5.25% and 5.5%, a 22-year high.
00:56:08.000But the possibility of the economy running this hot is going to probably spur, I would imagine, some talk about the need to raise those interest rates again.
00:56:19.000So the notion again that we are out of the economic woods here, I think that we are way too early for anything like that.