In this episode, we discuss the debt ceiling compromise that was struck between Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy, and why it was a good deal for both sides of the aisle. We also discuss what it means to "cave" and what it doesn't mean, and how to measure the measure against what you wish would happen and what you really want to see in the future. And finally, we talk about why Joe Biden is a better president than Donald Trump and why he should have been re-elected in 2016. The Debt Ceiling Fix Podcast is produced and edited by Alex Blumberg. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Build Buildings Records, recorded live at WFMU in St. Louis, Missouri. The show was mixed and produced by Riley Bray. Additional music written and performed by Kevin McLeod. Music by Haley Shaw. Art: Hayden Coplen and Mark Phillips. Editor: Patrick McElroy. Special thanks to David Axelrod, John Rocha, Jake Chapman, and Matt Kuchta, and Mike Carrier, and his band, The Strangers, for producing the music for the intro and outro music, and our ad music. and our sound design, which was done by Jeff Perla, and the rest of our mixing and mastering and mastering by Ian Davenport, with additional mixing and mixing by Mark Phillips, and additional mixing by Matthew Boll, and Bobby Lord. , and our thanks to our excellent sound engineer, and mastering assistance by John Kacchia, and alyssa, and thanks to the help from his good friend, and and the help of his assistant, and . We hope you enjoy this episode and enjoy it. Thank you for all of your support and support and all of our hard work, and we really appreciate all of the feedback and support we get back to the feedback we can get back from all of you. Thank you so much for all the support we can do, and all the feedback from you, and thank you for your support, and support you all for your feedback and all your feedback, and your support is appreciated back and support, thank you, thank you all of it's worth it's really really helps us can really appreciate it really really means a lot more than that, it really means it really does mean it, it means it, really really matters.
00:00:01.000The debt ceiling was going to be raised and some sort of debt crisis was going to be averted, mainly because it was not really in anybody's interest for the debt ceiling to be hit.
00:00:09.000It was not in Republicans' interest for the debt ceiling to be hit, because every time that has happened, it has not really redounded to their benefit electorally.
00:00:15.000And it certainly was not in Joe Biden's interest for the debt ceiling to be hit, because if a recession hits on his watch, then it puts his re-elect efforts in jeopardy.
00:00:22.000So the only question was going to be whether Joe Biden was going to cave or whether Kevin McCarthy was going to cave.
00:00:27.000Now, we have to define the terms of what it means to cave here.
00:00:31.000There are a few different descriptions of what it could mean to cave under these circumstances.
00:00:36.000Number one, the real definition here is Joe Biden set the groundwork.
00:01:02.000If, however, you wish to take another definition of caving, and that is Republicans going along with any part of the Democratic agenda that basically Republicans should have threatened to shut down the government until Joe Biden became Ronald Reagan, or better yet, Until it became Calvin Coolidge.
00:01:19.000If that was your definition, then, presumably, McCarthy came.
00:01:22.000And so the question as to how you view this debt ceiling bill is largely about the gauge against which you gauge the bill.
00:01:28.000Okay, so, the measure against which you gauge the bill.
00:01:31.000So, are you trying to measure the debt ceiling compromise bill against what you wish would happen?
00:01:36.000Like, what would be the best possible outcome?
00:01:38.000Or are you trying to measure it against the worst possible outcome?
00:01:41.000The worst possible outcome here would have been for Republicans to simply cave to Joe Biden, give him the clean debt ceiling bill, which is what Republicans historically have done, and let him spend as much money as he could possibly want.
00:01:51.000That would be the worst case scenario for the Republicans.
00:01:53.000The worst case scenario for the Democrats would have been that Republicans shut down the government, presumably.
00:01:59.000But that was not going to materialize because, again, that's not even a worst-case scenario for the Democrats because they end up then winning elections on the basis of that.
00:02:05.000The worst-case scenario for the Democrats, presumably, is that Joe Biden caves to the extent that he gives serious, real concessions.
00:02:12.000Okay, well, if you are looking at who escaped the worst-case scenario, Republicans escaped their worst-case scenario significantly more than Democrats escaped their worst-case scenario.
00:02:22.000Whenever a deal gets made, this is the essence of deals, whenever a deal gets made, everyone is unhappy.
00:02:27.000If a deal happens where one side is very happy and the other side is very unhappy, well then, you know who won the deal.
00:02:32.000When both sides are kind of unhappy, that's most deals.
00:02:35.000And again, I think the one of the things that you were saying, we're going to go through the details of the debt ceiling bill that is now going to be voted upon in the House is very likely to pass.
00:02:43.000One of the things that you are seeing in the commentariat on the right side of the aisle is proper, true critiques of the debt ceiling bill, of the budgetary process.
00:02:51.000All the things they are saying are true.
00:02:53.000We should redo all of the entitlement programs.
00:02:56.000We should be looking at systemic debt in the United States.
00:02:59.000We should be looking at vastly scaling back the administrative state.
00:03:02.000Sure, we should be doing all of those things.
00:03:03.000And in the best of all possible worlds, we would do those things.
00:03:05.000Also, Joe Biden is the president and Democrats run the Senate.
00:03:08.000So, in realistic world, Were those things going to happen?
00:03:12.000How much could McCarthy actually pry out of the cold, dead hands of Joe Biden?
00:03:18.000And so again, I say it again, when you look at this debt ceiling bill, I agree with every critique of the debt ceiling bill from the right.
00:03:24.000It does not tremendously lower the arc of spending in the United States.
00:03:28.000It does not redo the entitlement programs.
00:03:31.000It does not suck away all the power of the administrative state.
00:03:35.000Are you measuring the bill against what you wish the bill would be?
00:03:38.000Or are you measuring it against what Republicans were, what was possible to get with a Democrat president and a Democrat Senate?
00:03:46.000Now, I'd like to remind everybody here that Republicans didn't exactly scale back to spending when Donald Trump was president.
00:03:51.000And normally what you would say, in a normal sort of political cycle, what you would say is that when Republicans have unified power, meaning the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, when they have those things, that is when they should tremendously scale back spending.
00:04:02.000And yet, ironically, if you look at the history of party politics in the United States over the course of the last hundred years, what you see is that spending actually tends to get scaled back only when there's a split in the government.
00:04:12.000When Republicans have unified control of the government under George W. Bush, when they
00:04:16.000have it under Donald Trump, they actually blow out the spending.
00:04:18.000When Democrats have control of government, unified control of government, they blow out
00:04:23.000Only when there's a split in government is there any sort of hold back in the spending.
00:04:27.000And listen, as somebody who's very fiscally conservative, somebody who believes that the systemic $31 trillion debt problem of the United States will come back to bite us in the ass, I tend to be kind of a pessimist when it comes to the idea that our political actors are incentivized in order to make serious systemic change to our spending.
00:04:43.000Instead, I think it's very likely that the United States is going to follow the pattern of every other Western country that racks up too much debt.
00:04:49.000When we hit the cliff, we're going to have to take austerity measures.
00:04:52.000Because when has a state ever sort of hemmed it back in?
00:04:56.000The last time a state hemmed it back in, I believe, was Canada in like the 1970s.
00:04:58.000It's been a long time since a Western state looked at itself in the mirror and said, 30 years from now, we're going to have a massive debt problem and it's going to be a bomb and it's going to go off in our economy.
00:05:08.000Preemptively solving problems is not what politicians do.
00:05:10.000They tend to kick the can down the road.
00:05:12.000So from that perspective, McCarthy forcing Biden to the table, forcing Biden to give concessions, you have to at least say that on a political level, that is a good play by McCarthy.
00:05:23.000So according to the Wall Street Journal, lawmakers returning to Washington on Tuesday will face intense pressure from leaders on Capitol Hill and the White House to support the debt ceiling bill and overcome opposition on both the left and the right.
00:05:32.000For now, Biden and McCarthy appear on track to gain enough bipartisan support to suspend the debt limit.
00:05:36.000The measure could still run into procedural obstacles, complicating the race to avoid an unprecedented default.
00:05:42.000The legislation's first test comes on Tuesday when it goes before the House Rules Committee, which acts as a gatekeeper for legislation coming onto the House floor.
00:05:49.000Two conservative Republicans on the committee, Representative Chip Roy of Texas and Ralph Norman of South Carolina, have said they oppose the deal already.
00:05:54.000The committee is made up of nine Republicans and four Democrats.
00:05:57.000So the Republicans could lose a couple of votes and still pass this thing out of the House Rules Committee.
00:06:02.000We'll get into the details of what exactly is in here and why.
00:06:05.000Again, you can view every one of these bills as a giant failure from the perspective of our government cannot hem itself in.
00:06:10.000Our government has generated more debt than any government in the history of humanity.
00:06:15.000Probably all governments combined in the history of humanity is the size of the debt that we have run up here in the United States.
00:06:20.000You can recognize all of that and still recognize that maybe this is the best that McCarthy could pry out of Biden.
00:06:28.000Or if you could pry it a little bit more, it wasn't like so much more that you're going to get an amazingly better deal and avoid the debt limit being hit.
00:06:35.000I try to be realistic with my audience.
00:06:36.000Again, the easiest thing in the world when it comes to this business is to take the absolutely purest view that what Republicans should do is completely shut down the government, hit the debt limit, and let everything burn to the ground in order so that what Joe Biden is going to... So what's he going to do?
00:06:49.000Is he going to just revise his entire view of spending?
00:06:54.000Being realistic about that means that what Republicans should focus on is winning Back to the White House, winning races as opposed to bitching about Joe Biden being in the White House and the Democrats controlling it.
00:07:04.000Hutz, we win some races and then we actually do the hard work of governing.
00:07:08.000That would be the thing that is worth aiming at.
00:07:11.000And if you can gain some sort of concessions from Joe Biden after he started off saying he wouldn't even negotiate, that seems like a political win for McCarthy at the very least.
00:07:19.000We'll get to more on this in just one second.
00:07:20.000First, And we here at the Ben Shapiro Show, we are very interested in ensuring that corporate America does not ram their values down your throat.
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00:08:46.000The Senate of the United States is run by Chuck Schumer.
00:08:49.000All those things you can hold in your mind at the exact same time.
00:08:52.000I remember this sort of recapitulation of a battle that happened All the way back in, what was it, 2014?
00:08:59.000When Senator Ted Cruz from Texas decided that he was going to essentially hold up the budgetary process in order to shut down funding for Obamacare.
00:09:08.000And a lot of Republicans cheered him on because they said, OK, well, he's going to force Obama to make some sort of concession.
00:09:14.000And instead, what happened is, was Obama going to ever repeal Obamacare on the basis of Ted Cruz filibustering?
00:09:21.000Very unlikely, considering that, again, Barack Obama was the president and Obamacare was named after him.
00:09:26.000And in that case, you can at least say that Cruz was speaking on behalf of a party that had control of the House and the Senate at the time.
00:09:32.000In this particular case, the Republicans don't even have control of the Senate.
00:09:36.000They have a very slim control of the House.
00:09:37.000So prying concessions out of Joe Biden on this sort of stuff?
00:09:41.000It's not a massive victory, but it's definitely a victory over Joe Biden, which is why Joe Biden was resisting it for so long.
00:09:46.000Okay, so to understand what is exactly in this debt ceiling deal, you have to understand how spending works in the United States.
00:09:52.000So the way that spending works in the United States, there's two types of spending.
00:09:55.000There's mandatory spending and there's discretionary spending.
00:09:58.000Mandatory spending, which amounted to 31% of the federal budget back in 1970, now constitutes about two-thirds of the federal budget.
00:10:07.000In 1970, that would be Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
00:10:31.000You have to have a budget process where you decide how much money to allocate to defense.
00:10:35.000Defense represents something like 45% of all discretionary spending in the United States, and the rest is split among all of the various other elements of the government.
00:10:43.000So again, the amount of discretionary spending as part of the budget is actually fairly low at this point.
00:10:50.000All debt ceiling bills are designed to lower discretionary spending because no one is actually touching the entitlements.
00:10:55.000Entitlements are the third rail of American politics.
00:10:57.000You say obvious truths like social security is not sustainable.
00:11:01.000The demographic base of the United States is not large enough to sustain social security.
00:11:05.000The economy is not growing fast enough to sustain social security.
00:11:09.000Social Security, for example, should be converted for people under the age of 50 to private savings accounts if they wish to opt out, right?
00:11:15.000Sir, if you say things like this in American politics, you get ripped up and down.
00:11:18.000So the mandatory spending of the United States, which was not going to be touched anywhere in here, it remains mandatory.
00:11:23.000The only question is what happens with the discretionary spending.
00:11:26.000So with regard to this discretionary spending deal, that's what it is.
00:11:29.000To raise the debt ceiling in return for essentially holding discretionary spending steady.
00:11:34.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal holds non-military spending roughly flat for the 2024 fiscal year from this year after factoring in some appropriations adjustments.
00:11:42.000The deal sets a 1% cap on spending increases for the 2025 fiscal year.
00:11:47.000House Republicans portrayed the 2023 spending level as a rollback to fiscal 2022 levels.
00:11:51.000The deal also includes a provision that forces a 1% cut in government spending if all 12 appropriations bills are not passed by the end of this year.
00:11:59.000So what that would mean is that basically we hold the budget steady this year as opposed to last year.
00:12:04.000Now, critics of the deal are saying, correctly, we spent more money than God in the last year.
00:12:09.000So you're just holding steady at the amount of money that you spent last year.
00:12:16.000But there's a key element that is necessary to understand.
00:12:20.000When the Wall Street Journal says that the deal holds non-military spending roughly flat, what the deal means is, let's say that you have $10 and that $10 is allocated to discretionary spending last year, which means we're going to spend $10 this year because we're holding it flat.
00:12:32.000And let's say that normally the military budget compromises four out of those $10.
00:12:36.000Well, we have now capped the flat non-military spending, but military spending can continue to go up, which means there will have to be some cuts in the non-military spending portion of this bill.
00:12:48.000The military spending, theoretically, could go up to $6 out of those $10, which means cuts to the other programs that used to be the $6 and now are the $4.
00:12:58.000That the portion of discretionary spending, that is non-defense spending, is actually, under this budgetary deal, likely to shrink somewhat.
00:13:06.000Because the military budget, with a House Republican majority, is likely to grow.
00:13:10.000Military spending in fiscal 2024 would be roughly at the level of Biden's fiscal 2024 budget request.
00:13:18.000The deal would cut up to $21.4 billion the IRS had planned to use to boost tax enforcement and modernize its technology.
00:13:25.000So we're going to get rid of some of those agents, presumably.
00:13:27.000Congress had provided about $80 billion to those plans last year.
00:13:31.000About $1.4 billion of that money would be taken back from the agency immediately.
00:13:35.000The rest could be used in 2024 and 2025 to prevent cuts to other federal programs.
00:13:40.000The deal also claws back about $30 billion in unspent money Congress passed to battle the pandemic.
00:13:44.000So again, these are all cutting around the edges issues because we spend, you know, six, seven trillion dollars in this country every single year.
00:13:51.000The White House did agree to a key GOP demand, tightening some work requirements for federal aid, primarily by temporarily raising the age of people who have to work in order to receive food aid through SNAP.
00:14:00.000That's the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
00:14:03.000And people are whining about this on the left.
00:14:04.000Oh my God, people are going to go hungry.
00:14:05.000It's called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
00:14:09.000Like, it supplements you going and working.
00:14:11.000The tentative deal would require able-bodied, low-income adults without dependents between the ages of 18 and 54 to work to receive food aid.
00:14:18.000Right now, if you are 50 and you have no dependents and you're able-bodied, you can still get SNAP without trying to work.
00:14:23.000So they're raising that age to 54, which seems kind of fair.
00:14:26.000You are able-bodied and 50, retirement age in this country, and until the age of 65.
00:14:33.000Currently, under rules resuming in all states by July, those adults can receive benefits for no more than three months within a three-year period unless they are working or enrolled in a work program.
00:14:42.000The deal makes some under-the-hood adjustments to how states can decide to grant exemptions for individuals to the existing work requirement for food aid.
00:14:48.000Currently, states can opt to drop the work requirements for up to 12% of recipients.
00:14:51.000That's going to go down to 8% of recipients.
00:14:54.000There's also some permitting of energy projects, including the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which presumably is some sort of concession to Senator Joe Manchin to get him to go along with the deal as well.
00:15:04.000So again, are these massive, major changes to spending in the United States?
00:15:09.000I mean, there's some good stuff about this.
00:15:10.000For example, the bill text applies Congress's PAYGO rule that requires new spending to be offset by savings elsewhere to executive actions, which means that if Joe Biden tries to spend money from the executive branch without congressional approval, he also has to show where he is cutting.
00:15:23.000However, the text also says that the Office of Management and Budget, the White House's OMB, could waive the requirements if necessary for the delivery of essential services or necessary for effective program delivery.
00:15:33.000And also, the OMB could basically single-handedly do that.
00:15:36.000So that looks like a fairly empty requirement.
00:15:38.000Joe Biden does have to resume collecting student loans and charging interest on them.
00:15:41.000So all this crap about Joe Biden relieving student loans in the face of court challenge, all of that is going to stop.
00:15:46.000Again, these are all concessions by Biden.
00:15:48.000Remember, this process started with Joe Biden saying he would not negotiate on any of these things.
00:15:55.000So now Democrats are trying to play this as a victory for them.
00:15:58.000It's not really a victory for them because a real victory for them would have been Joe Biden's agenda, which is raise the debt limit without any sort of strings attached.
00:16:05.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:16:07.000We'll analyze sort of the political calculus here.
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00:17:29.000The reality is that there is political gridlock in Washington, D.C.
00:17:32.000Republicans were never going to get everything on their wish list, no matter how much they yell and shout about it.
00:17:37.000And the idea that they were going to simply not fund the government going forward and then presumably lose every purple seat they have in the House in the next upcoming election cycle, that's not how politics works.
00:17:47.000We can pretend that's how politics works, but it is my job to tell you how I wish politics works and then also how politics actually works.
00:17:55.000Again, in a utopian world, in which I was president of the United States, and McCarthy was the speaker, and McConnell was the majority leader, in that world, we make massive cuts, right?
00:18:09.000And by the way, one of the reasons that we don't actually have control of the Senate is because we decided it was really, really important not to vote in Georgia Senate runoffs.
00:18:16.000It was more important to complain about it.
00:18:18.000Anyway, the Republicans, one of the big mistakes I think Republicans make with their own base is they're not honest with them.
00:18:23.000So I think the Republicans ought to say, listen, this is not even remotely what we would love to see, but it's the best we can pry out of Joe Biden, because I think that most people understand that.
00:18:30.000I also think most people are not interested in looking at a debt limit crisis in which the bond rating of the United States is wildly downgraded and there's more economic turmoil.
00:18:40.000But here's what the Republicans are pitching.
00:18:42.000They say this stops out of control inflationary spending by cutting spending year over year.
00:18:47.000It doesn't really stop out-of-control inflationary spending, considering we're already in the middle of a cycle of massive inflationary spending.
00:18:52.000It just means that Joe Biden can't continue to increase the budget from $6 trillion to $8 trillion to $10 trillion.
00:19:09.000All those things are, in fact, those are good things.
00:19:12.000Now, Chip Roy and a lot of the Republicans are like, nah, we don't like any of this stuff, right?
00:19:18.000We should have gotten way more out of this debt ceiling bill.
00:19:22.000And again, I don't disagree with Chip Roy's critique.
00:19:24.000I think everything that Chip Roy says here is correct.
00:19:27.000The reason that Chip Roy says he opposes the deal, and again, I like Representative Roy.
00:19:30.000I'm very friendly with Representative Roy.
00:19:32.000I think that he is a Pure hearted conservative.
00:19:36.000And if you look at the way that he is critiquing the bill, I agree with all of his critiques.
00:19:40.000So he says that the Limit Save Grow Bill, which was the one passed by Republicans in order to pressure Biden, that one had essentially added $1.5 trillion to the debt ceiling, as opposed to this one, which has $4 trillion with the debt ceiling.
00:19:53.000That originally the bill passed by the House had $131 billion cut to annual spending next year, shrank the federal bureaucracy to pre-COVID and capped growth for 10 years.
00:20:03.000This one caps growth for maybe a couple of years and has $12 billion in top line cuts that are negated by other spending that could grow the federal bureaucracy.
00:20:11.000It has minor work requirements as opposed to strong work requirements.
00:20:17.000So the Reins Act is a piece of legislation that allows Congress to basically override any attempt at regulation by the Biden administration.
00:20:23.000Instead, they have admin pay go, which I mean, again, Chip Roy's critiques, all of them are right.
00:20:31.000Everything that he's saying about this bill and its shortcomings are right.
00:20:33.000The question is, were Republicans going to get that much more out of Joe Biden on this negotiation?
00:20:38.000And I say, I remain a little bit doubtful that they were going to get a lot more out of Joe Biden on this particular negotiation.
00:20:44.000Democrats have been pretty cavalier about blackmailing people over the debt limit, about government shutdowns and all the rest, because they think that it redounds to their benefit, actually.
00:20:53.000In just one second, we'll talk about the fact that many Democrats are not particularly happy with this deal.
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00:22:14.000Many Democrats are also very unhappy with this.
00:22:16.000And again, given the fact that Democrats control the Senate and the presidency, that tells you a lot about what McCarthy has actually been able to leverage out of the Democrats here.
00:22:24.000Remember, when McCarthy came into power, the idea was he wasn't even going to be able to be Speaker for very long.
00:22:29.000He was going to get ousted by his own party.
00:22:32.000And now he's actually pried some concessions out of Joe Biden.
00:22:36.000So, Steini Hoyer, who is the former House Majority Leader, now he's one of the House Minority Whips, he says that the deal is not good.
00:23:50.000We're not being briefed till five o'clock on Sunday.
00:23:52.000Our leader hasn't even been given details on any of this.
00:23:56.000Representative Stephen Horace Ford, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, voiced similar concerns.
00:24:03.000So again, a lot of these sort of radicals on the Democratic Party side are pretty upset with Joe Biden over this entire deal.
00:24:09.000Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy points out that, you know, we did pry Joe Biden off of his position that he was not going to negotiate, didn't we?
00:24:16.000Back to February 1st, sat down with the president.
00:26:06.000I haven't talked to him since that point in time.
00:26:09.000What I've consistently said, however, privately and publicly, was that the extreme Republican negotiating position and that the extreme bill that they passed on April 26, the Default on America Act, contained nothing that was consistent with Democratic values or American values.
00:26:30.000Okay, so again, are Democrats super happy?
00:26:34.000It is a flex by McCarthy to win one over Biden on this.
00:26:38.000And pretending that it's not a victory for McCarthy or that it's a complete Republican cave or something, it depends what you are measuring caving against, as I said at the very outset.
00:26:45.000Okay, meanwhile, we have now approached the holy month of pride.
00:26:49.000Ah yes, just days until the holy month begins with all of its sacraments, all of its martyrs, We're going to have various holy rituals that we perform throughout the holy pride month.
00:27:00.000And corporate America is going all in on this, which is a shockingly stupid move because it turns out that the American public has decided that they are not up for this, particularly since the ubiquity of the rainbow propaganda has now reached it down to the small children, which presumably is why Target has now lost $10 billion in market cap in 10 days.
00:27:20.000According to the New York Post, Target has now lost $10 billion in market valuation over the last 10 days as the popular retailer continues to face backlash over its Pride-themed clothing line for children.
00:27:29.000A week ago Wednesday, Target enjoyed stock value of $1.61 a share.
00:27:33.000Following calls to boycott the Minneapolis-based retailer over its Pride collection, the value plummeted and closed Friday at $138.93 a share, which is a serious drop.
00:27:39.000That's a 14% drop in value for the blue-chip stock.
00:27:45.000Which translates to about a $10 billion drop in market cap.
00:27:48.000That is the retailer's lowest stock price in nearly three years.
00:27:52.000And listen, I'm a big fan of this idea that consumers should start exercising their choice when it comes to being propagandized to by various Outlets, by various members of corporate America.
00:28:04.000See, what all the corporations have been betting on, they've been doing this for legitimately 20 years.
00:28:07.000What they've been betting on is that the right doesn't care.
00:28:09.000That the right is just gonna go and shop at Target regardless of whether Target is pushing pride nonsense during the holy month.
00:28:15.000That, you know, you gotta get your kid a Lego set, so you're gonna go and get your kid a Lego set, and where do you go?
00:28:19.000Well, Target's local and it's easily available, so that's where you're gonna go.
00:28:40.000The reason that it's not done like Bud Light is done is because Bud Light, after hiring Dylan Mulvaney, and now making itself unsaleable to a wide swath of the American public that consumed its product, Bud Light was really vulnerable.
00:29:03.000And so, Bud Light, how do they recover from that?
00:29:07.000Their competitor, right next to it, in the fridge, is like the same price and probably a better beer anyway.
00:29:14.000So as long as there are readily available alternatives, it makes it very difficult for Bud Light to ever kind of dig itself back out of this hole.
00:29:23.000It's where people do their shopping for everything from groceries to clothing.
00:29:27.000And so what that means is that there are a lot of areas where Target is the most convenient place.
00:29:30.000It means you can have sort of a short-term spasm of public rage against Target.
00:29:34.000And eventually it's going to dissipate, which is why when it comes to corporate boycotts, I highly recommend that strategically speaking, I'm super glad this is happening with Target.
00:29:42.000But I think we should also recognize what sort of the endpoint here is and pushing Target off of it.
00:29:48.000Let's trans the kids material at the very front of Target, making it go to the back of the store.
00:29:53.000That's at least a shot over the bow and people should take it as a shot over the bow.
00:29:55.000The kind of brands that need permanent destruction and we are capable of exercising permanent destruction over those brands are going to be single product brands where an alternative is readily available.
00:30:06.000Now, it doesn't take that many of these for a lot of these stores to say the same thing that the computer says in war games.
00:30:13.000The only winning move here is not to play.
00:30:16.000Which, if corporate America went back to neutral, that's pretty much all we are looking for.
00:30:20.000But it is clear that corporate America so far has not gone back to neutral, and this also requires a conservative intelligentsia that is willing to fight.
00:30:28.000And there's a lot of the conservative intelligentsia that really is not, and is deeply upset about the idea of fighting back against this nonsense.
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00:33:16.000And then when we had kids of our own, we actually had annual passes at Disneyland when we lived in Los Angeles.
00:33:21.000And so at least twice a month, we'd end up taking a Sunday and going with our very little kids to Disneyland.
00:33:26.000And then when we moved to Florida, we went to Disney World.
00:33:29.000And now, over the course of the last, like, three years, Disney World, Disneyland, they've decided that it's very important to woke themselves.
00:33:35.000At the behest of people like Bob Iger, who is just one of the world's most ridiculously perverse political figures.
00:33:44.000So this clip has now emerged from Disneyland.
00:33:46.000There's something at Disneyland called Bibbidi-Bobbidi Boutique.
00:33:49.000Bibbidi-Bobbidi Boutique is made for small girls.
00:34:02.000It was amazing when we bought her a dress and they do her hair up like a princess and it's beautiful.
00:34:06.000Okay, well now, because Disneyland, which used to be a place that actually had a brand, so that brand involved basically enmeshing you in a fantasy world in which all the people, like if you walked down Main Street in Disneyland, the idea is you were in Main Street, 1920s America.
00:34:22.000Same music, cobblestones, that's what it looked like.
00:34:25.000And when you went into Fantasyland, the idea was it was all princes and princesses.
00:34:29.000And yes, with gender-specific garb, because anything less would be ridiculous.
00:34:33.000Well now they've decided that the personal sexual preferences of their employees take precedence over the brand itself.
00:34:43.000I mean, I guess now it's a lot of businesses, but name another business 20 years ago where people were like, your personal value of individuality is now going to overcome the corporate brand.
00:34:51.000In fact, this was a joke in office space, right?
00:34:54.000The joke in office space was that your personalization extended to like the flair that you could work, meaning like small pins that you could wear on your uniform if you were at a restaurant.
00:35:02.000That was like the extent of the individuality.
00:35:04.000Now, your individuality has extended to the point where at Disneyland, you can be a man With a mustache, wearing a dress in front of small children.
00:35:12.000So this is tape from Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boutique 2023.
00:35:33.000Wearing a mustache and guiding small children in there.
00:35:35.000Because that's what you want to explain to your four-year-old child, is why this individual is wearing a dress and talking to small children about why he's a Fairy Godmother.
00:35:45.000That's what you pay hundreds of dollars to go to Disneyland for, presumably.
00:35:49.000And then Disney wonders why they are losing market share.
00:36:49.000It's amazing to me that, like, educating small children, we all take a fair bit of time and thought to figure out how we wish to educate our children.
00:36:57.000To pretend that it is a matter of absolute moral apathy whether a small child, like a baby, is wearing a trans flag, and that that has nothing to do with the future trajectory of the child.
00:37:06.000It would be just a giant shock if that kid experienced sexual confusion as the kid gets older.
00:37:33.000If your child is wearing a piece of religious iconography, you can presume that the parents are going to teach a religious philosophy to that child.
00:37:40.000If a child showed up at school wearing a Taliban flag, you can assume something about the parents and what that kid is going to be indoctrinated into.
00:37:48.000And if the kid shows up at school wearing a trans flag, or it's a baby wearing a trans flag, you can figure out exactly what the parents are going to indoctrinate into that child.
00:37:55.000Corporate America taking advantage of that with the certain knowledge that Republicans are going to be apathetic.
00:38:00.000That's how they've been able to win for so many years.
00:38:03.000Well, now Republicans are pushing back, and it's fascinating to see who is deeply uncomfortable with all of this.
00:38:09.000So, David French, who, again, I'm friends with David, I don't understand why his beat now, he used to be a National Review, he used to be a lot more conservative, I think, in the way that he viewed the world.
00:38:22.000His beat over at the New York Times is to say all the things to liberals about how much they hate conservatives, but as an apostate conservative, as a person who's too moral for the conservative movement.
00:38:31.000That's the only way I can interpret a piece titled, Will DeSantis Destroy Conservatism As We Know It?
00:39:07.000So in other words, David's beat at the New York Times is to tell liberals everything they like to hear, but guised in the language of conservatism and from the most pure possible perspective of what conservatism could possibly be.
00:39:18.000And so the idea now is that he suggested that Trump was a particular danger to conservatism.
00:39:23.000So dangerous that not only did he not back him in 2016, he also wouldn't back him in 2020.
00:39:29.000So again, the conservative movement was being damaged by Trump.
00:39:32.000Now he's moved that to include Ron DeSantis, the only rival to Trump, who's within spitting distance of him in the primary.
00:39:39.000And the reason that he's upset with Ron DeSantis, presumably, is because Ron DeSantis is taking up arms against corporations that are getting special benefits from the state of Florida.
00:39:52.000He says, DeSantis, his primary victory would signal the transformation of conservatism.
00:39:57.000Since 2016 wasn't a mere interruption of Republican ideology, one in which Republicans would return to fusionism once Trump leaves the scene, but rather the harbinger of more permanent change.
00:40:08.000DeSantis is ambitious, but his political commitments have an underlying consistency that extends beyond that ambition.
00:40:14.000When you understand that distinction between the two men, between Trump and DeSantis, you understand the course of the race so far and its likely shape going forward.
00:40:21.000Who DeSantis attacks is ultimately less important than how he does it.
00:40:23.000DeSantis punishes Disney for merely speaking in opposition to a Florida law that restricted instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida public school classrooms.
00:40:32.000DeSantis attempts to regulate social media moderation.
00:40:34.000He attempts to restrict speech about race and racial equality in public universities and private corporations.
00:40:38.000He's even banned private employers from imposing a COVID vax mandate.
00:40:42.000Now, you can disagree with DeSantis on all of these things and still recognize that the forces DeSantis is fighting are quite nefarious.
00:40:49.000And that in order to truly understand what DeSantis is doing on the corporate front, you have to understand the dirty combination of Democratic Party politics and corporate America cramming down politics on Americans via the market mechanism.
00:41:34.000And this notion that only the purest, only the most pure people can ever represent us on every particular aspect In order for us to achieve utopia?
00:41:44.000Because it isn't going to happen and you're going to lose every battle.
00:41:46.000Or maybe you don't mind losing every battle.
00:41:49.000Maybe you would rather have Joe Biden continue to be president and wreck the country.
00:41:53.000Along all of these lines, if you're talking about who's more restrictive of free speech, Joe Biden versus Ron DeSantis, that is not a particularly close call.
00:42:00.000Joe Biden is actively attempting to use the federal government to implement into law anti-discrimination law that basically cracks down on every religious institution in the country.
00:45:01.000ZipRecruiter.com slash DailyWire to try them out for free and find the best possible employees.
00:45:07.000Okay, meanwhile, corporate America, apparently they're now so delusional that it's, you know you've really reached the edge of delusion when it's not just that you're virtue signaling to the left in the hope that the right remains apathetic.
00:45:18.000Like that's understandable given the last 20 years of right-wing apathy and the right-wing sticking its head in the sand and pretending that everything is going to be fine.
00:45:25.000What's truly amazing is how many corporations have decided that against their own direct business interests, they are now going to go woke.
00:45:31.000So the best example of the day is Lululemon, which sells really, really overpriced workout gear.
00:45:37.000Like, to be fair, their workout shirts, they're nice.
00:45:40.000Also, Lululemon is apparently insane on a corporate level.
00:45:44.000So two former employees have now said that they were fired for allegedly breaking store policy at a Lululemon store in Georgia.
00:45:51.000So apparently there is video of a robbery at this store in Georgia, this Lululemon, and the women who were working for the store called the cops and then they were fired for calling the cops.
00:46:19.000Rachel Rogers and Jennifer Ferguson recorded the scene inside and outside the store.
00:46:24.000They don't appear to try to stop the men, but they do say they did call police.
00:46:29.000The Lulu Land Book says it has a zero tolerance policy for chasing or physically engaging with suspects during a robbery.
00:46:39.000So what is the purpose of having people who work at a store, particularly in security?
00:46:44.000Now, the reason that Lululemon presumably has this policy is because they are deeply afraid that the woke are going to come after them if they actually start prosecuting shoplifters.
00:46:52.000So the entire business district of San Francisco has basically been emptied out of businesses because stores have gone so woke.
00:46:59.000They're so afraid of the wokes that they've decided they would rather shut down their stores, but only after years of seeing mass shoplifting.
00:47:07.000The truth is that we are now living in an environment in the United States where shoplifting is not done on the one-to-one kind of personal level.
00:47:12.000Shoplifting, the way we think of it, is some 15-year-old kid goes into like the local A&P and steals a Slim Jim and puts it in their pocket.
00:47:20.000That is not what we're talking about here.
00:47:21.000We're talking about organized gangs of people who are running in and stealing thousands of dollars worth of gear from Lululemon, and Lululemon is so petrified of the possibility that they will be sued by the criminal That Al Sharpton will arrive and call them racist.
00:47:33.000They're so scared that Ben Crump will be on their front doorstep that they've told their own employees.
00:47:38.000Employees who, again, they work for the company.
00:47:42.000That they're not supposed to call the cops, tape, any of this.
00:47:46.000Jennifer Ferguson and Rachel Rogers told local outlets they reached out to authorities after a group of robbers came into their store in Peachtree Corners.
00:47:52.000Despite company policy saying employees should not intervene in robberies.
00:47:56.000They said, we're not supposed to get in the way.
00:47:57.000You kind of clear a path for whatever they're going to do.
00:47:59.000And then after it's over, you scan a QR code and that's that.
00:48:01.000We've been told not to put it in any notes because it might scare other people.
00:48:05.000We're not really supposed to talk about it.
00:48:07.000So Blue Lemon apparently has now put itself between a rock and a hard place because what they're afraid of is that there will be reports that there are robberies at the store.
00:48:14.000So you just consider it a breakage for people to rob the store.
00:48:17.000And they're afraid to just hire security at the stores because then they're afraid that they're going to be accused of racial profiling or some such nonsense.
00:48:24.000A Lululemon spokesperson told Insider in a statement, the safety and security of its staffers and shoppers is top priority.
00:48:29.000The company has policies and protocols in place to uphold a safe environment.
00:48:32.000We take theft and vandalism very seriously, and our focus right now is supporting our educators as well as continuing to collaborate with local partners and law enforcement.
00:48:40.000Company policy says that the women were likely fired for recording and interacting with the robbers rather than for calling the police.
00:48:46.000So they don't want you taping any of it or posting it because criminality is not a public interest.
00:48:50.000Instead, they just don't, they want it to remain a secret so that you can be inside a Lululemon store when it gets robbed by a group of shoplifters.
00:48:57.000Corporate America, man, I gotta say, this has to be one aspect of managerial decline in the United States.
00:49:04.000There's a theory of managerial decline at companies in which the founders of companies really take their business seriously.
00:49:09.000And then after a certain point, they've been working for the company 10, 15, 20 years, and the founders decide to go out to pasture and they hand it over to the managerial elite.
00:49:32.000Corporate America and the preserve of political cowards.
00:49:36.000And what that means, if you're a coward, As my friend Jeremy Boringlice used to say, cowards don't get themselves killed, they get their friends killed.
00:49:43.000And that's what's going to happen in one of these stores.
00:49:44.000Eventually what's going to happen is that somebody will get killed at one of these stores by a shoplifter who comes in with a gun.
00:49:50.000And security just isn't present because these stores were too afraid of the liability.
00:51:23.000DeSantis, however, seems to have hit on what I think is actually a fairly successful political line.
00:51:29.000The successful political line here is that he is going to win.
00:51:33.000Now, he's not saying that Trump lost in 2020.
00:51:36.000What he is saying is that Joe Biden is the president right now, and I pledge that if you give me the nomination, I'll win, which is kind of what Republicans want.
00:51:43.000I mean, if you're just looking at the thing Republicans want, it's to win.
00:51:46.000Not complain about losing, but to actually win.
00:52:03.000Why is right now the time for Ron DeSantis to run for president?
00:52:08.000Because everyone knows if I'm the nominee, I will beat Biden, and I will serve two terms, and I will be able to destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology on the dustbin of history.
00:52:22.000At the end of the day, I've shown in Florida an ability to win huge swaths of voters that Republicans typically can't win, while also delivering the boldest agenda anywhere in the country.
00:52:37.000They believe Trump is the best shot at victory, but that is the line that DeSantis is going to have to pursue right here.
00:52:42.000Now, embedded in that line is, of course, the notion that is obviously true, that Trump is not the president, that he lost us two Senate seats as conservatives in the state of Georgia in 2021, that he blew a bunch of Senate seats in 2022.
00:52:53.000And that's all embedded in DeSantis' pledge of victory, whether you believe it or not.
00:52:58.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:54:05.000This dates all the way back to that great tape of the idiot charging into the middle of Dodger Stadium onto the field to propose to his girlfriend, then security absolutely destroying him.
00:54:14.000So I'm very much in favor of this sort of stuff.
00:54:16.000And every time somebody does this as an art museum, I want to see somebody just tackle.
00:54:44.000Disney's run out of ideas, and so their new idea is, what if we just take all of our old animated movies and make them worse but put people in them?
00:54:53.000And it did make a lot of money over the weekend, because again, people were looking for something to take their children to.
00:54:58.000Kids movies tend to do pretty well over Memorial Day weekend, traditionally speaking.
00:55:03.000Apparently, it grossed $10.3 million prior to Friday's full-day launch.
00:55:09.000And over the course of the entire weekend, it grossed over $100 million.
00:55:13.000Now again, among May releases to make over $10 million from the Thursday starts, there are only a couple that have failed to make a full $100 million.
00:55:21.000The Little Mermaid has the fifth best Memorial Day launch behind Top Gun Maverick, Pirates of the Caribbean at World's End, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, X-Men The Last Stand, and it was about a half million ahead of Fast and Furious 6.
00:55:36.000I do not think that this movie is going to have tremendous staying power.
00:55:39.000The reason I don't think this movie is going to have tremendous staying power is because they took what was a great score by Alan Menken and then they added some extra music with lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
00:55:51.000And Lin-Manuel Miranda, as I've talked about before, is I think maybe the single most overrated talent working today in both theater and Hollywood.
00:55:59.000I, I, I, there are some moments to In the Heights, but overall, it's kind of meh.
00:56:04.000And I am, I was an early naysayer on Hamilton, not for any of the woke reasons, but because
00:56:35.000Which, I don't know why Awkwafina's in things, but apparently Awkwafina, not the water, like an actual human who calls herself Awkwafina, she was in one of the Marvel movies, she plays Scuttle in this.
00:56:47.000And they recorded a new song for The Little Mermaid, which of course has a really great score, the original.
00:56:52.000This may be the worst song ever recorded.
00:56:56.000This song right here, called Scuttlebutt.
00:56:58.000Which is supposed to happen in the movie.
00:57:14.000In any case, she ends up going on shore.
00:57:17.000And, uh, and she doesn't have a voice.
00:57:18.000And there's one point near the end of the film where Scuttle comes and tells her that Prince Eric is about to propose to her, and she's super excited.
00:57:24.000It turns out, of course, that that's not true, that he's about to propose to Ursula, who's made herself over as a witch, into, like, an actual woman.
00:57:31.000In any case, that's this point in the movie.
00:57:33.000In the movie, it takes, like, 20 seconds.
00:57:35.000In the new live-action version, there's a full song that they inserted for no reason here with Awkwafina.
00:57:43.000It is called Scuttlebutt, and if ever our military men and women at Gitmo need to get information out of a terrorist, in short order, they need to play this at full volume for like 25 seconds.
00:57:58.000This makes waterboarding look like a trip in the park.