The Dow and S&P 500 are on pace to fall for the third straight quarter, a sign that the economy may be entering a recession. Meanwhile, tensions continue to rise in Ukraine and China, as tensions rise with the United States over the Ukraine conflict. And a Russian naval flotilla is spotted near the U.S. east coast of Alaska, raising concerns that the situation is getting worse than it appears at first blush. Today's episode is brought to you by Bloomberg and the Center for Economic and Political Studies at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where we discuss all things economic and political news and take a look at the latest headlines from the past week and look forward to what's in store for the coming weeks and months. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: CROWNEATERS at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase when you enter the offer ends on October 31st, 2019. Our ad-free version of the podcast is available on all major podcast directories, including Audible, iTunes, and Podcoin. Please rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and subscribe to our newsletter! Subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your favourite podcast listening platform. Subscribe, comment and review our podcast on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening and share the podcast! if you like what you're listening to this podcast. We post it! and share it on your feed! If you like it, leave us a rating and review us a review and subscribe and review it on iTunes and subscribe on your social media platforms! We'll be listening to our other podcasting platform, and we'll be spreading the word about it everywhere else on the internet! Thank you for listening to your thoughts and sharing it to your friends across the intergalactic listening habits and posting it around the world! in your feed and spreading it everywhere you re listening to it everywhere we post it to the world on social media to your fellow podcasting about it's best listening to you guys are listening to us on your thoughts on your podcast? and other things we can do more of your podcasting and we're listening out about it on the podcast in the world? thanks to you can do that thank you and all that s going out to other people everywhere else?
00:00:00.000There's been a lot of speculation for a very long time that the economy was going to soften and now it has finally begun.
00:00:04.000According to the Wall Street Journal, earnings for the nation's biggest companies are poised to fall for the third straight quarter, hurt in part by the decline in energy prices.
00:00:12.000So why exactly aren't we technically in a recession?
00:00:14.000Presumably because consumer spending remains pretty high because of all the inflation in the economy, because of all the extra dollars that Joe Biden blew into the economy because of the easy money policies of the Federal Reserve.
00:00:23.000It takes a while for that to wash its way out of the economy.
00:00:25.000But as that happens, consumers are not going to be able to outpace producers. Producers
00:00:31.000are starting to cut back. They are seeing the writing on the wall. They're starting to
00:00:34.000consolidate their gains. And they're starting to realize that if they continue to expand their actual
00:00:38.000manufacturing, their actual production, then they are going to undercut themselves. And so you're
00:00:42.000starting to see earnings declines for virtually every major company. The members of the S&P 500,
00:00:46.000according to the Wall Street Journal, on pace to collectively report a 5.2% decline in earnings,
00:00:53.000Revenue is on track to rise 0.6% from a year ago, but that's largely due to inflation
00:00:58.000at this point. Some of this is due to the decline in oil prices.
00:01:02.000For example, the energy sector is taking it right on the chin.
00:01:05.000But it's also happening in materials and it's also happening in tech.
00:01:07.000Apple sales fell for the third consecutive quarter amid softening demand for consumer devices.
00:01:12.000The only areas that continue to have quarterly revenue growth are areas of healthcare, communication services, real estate is continuing to sort of hold steady at this point.
00:01:23.000But we are about to see more of these companies report bad earnings, and that means that the economy is likely to see a downturn in the coming quarters.
00:01:31.000Employment numbers came out on Friday.
00:01:34.000That, of course, is not greatly a shock because, as we've been saying for months here on this program, what goes up must come down.
00:01:40.000The idea that an overheated economy was not going to crash off of a cliff was always a rather specious presumption.
00:01:47.000Meanwhile, on foreign policy, the Ukraine war continues apace.
00:01:51.000According to the New York Times, Ukrainian forces struck two bridges connecting Russian-occupied Crimea to the rest of Ukraine on Sunday, part of a broader pattern of attacks on and around the peninsula that has sought to scramble critical supply routes for the Kremlin and push the scope of the war into fresh territory.
00:02:03.000This is all part of the Ukrainian offensive.
00:02:05.000They're hoping that they will push the Russians back so much that the Russians will come to the negotiating table.
00:02:10.000The question at this point is, what exactly the Russians are asking for?
00:02:13.000Because everybody knows the lines of the negotiation here, and they also recognize that there's a misalignment of incentives.
00:02:19.000The West keeps saying that Zelensky gets to make the deals.
00:02:21.000Zelensky keeps saying there will be no deal until the Russians are off of all of Russian territory, and the Russians keep saying there will be no deal if they're being pushed out of what they consider now to be formal Russian territory, namely in Crimea and the Donbass region.
00:02:34.000Sunday's attacks injured a driver and closed traffic on a second bridge to the east of Chonhar, near the small town of Henechesk.
00:02:40.000According to the governor of the region, Vladimir Zahaldo, who's a Russian guy, one of the strikes tore three holes in another roadway as well.
00:02:48.000Ukraine's armed forces took credit for both strikes on Sunday and another departure from their typically coy approach, as Zelensky and other top officials emphasized their new aim is to force ordinary Russians to face up to the Kremlin's wars.
00:02:57.000Things are likely to get worse before they get better.
00:03:00.000Meanwhile, the American public do not have their heart in this anymore.
00:03:03.000By polls, a plurality of Americans are not interested in an endless level of support for the Ukraine war or really for much more support than has already been given At this point.
00:03:12.000And Russian and Chinese forces are also upping the ante.
00:03:16.000Over the weekend, a combined Russian and Chinese naval force patrolled near the coast of Alaska in what U.S.
00:03:20.000experts said appeared to be the largest such flotilla to approach American shores.
00:03:23.000Apparently, 11 Russian and Chinese ships steamed close to the Aleutian Islands, according to U.S.
00:03:42.000Northern Command confirmed Russia and China had carried out a combined naval patrol in their Alaska and didn't specify the number of ships or their precise location.
00:03:49.000So Russia and China are upping the ante.
00:03:53.000And meanwhile, the Biden administration really has no plan because while they're asking for concessions from China and while they continue to fund the war in Ukraine, there's no off-ramp with regard to the war in Ukraine to allow us to shift focus to China.
00:04:04.000And meanwhile, China is realizing that it's going to be boxed in both demographically and economically in very short order, all of which spells the possibility of future conflict.
00:04:14.000It is the unpredictability In change in America's foreign policy from weak and passive to aggressive that really throws people off kilter.
00:04:23.000And the fact is that Russia never would have invaded Ukraine if it had not been for the sins of the former Biden administration, one which was vice president of the United States.
00:04:31.000You'll remember that Russia actually invaded Ukraine originally in 2014.
00:04:34.000That is when Barack Obama was president of the United States.
00:04:37.000Over the weekend, Obama did another fawning interview with the glowing media in which he claimed that they did all of the right things.
00:04:42.000Here's Christiane Amanpour, one of the worst Pseudo-journalist in the business, asking Barack Obama about American foreign policy when Russia first invaded Crimea.
00:04:51.000And part of what happened was both myself, but also Merkel, who I give enormous credit for, had to pull in a lot of other Europeans kicking and screaming to impose the sanctions that we did and to prevent Putin from continuing through the Donbas into the rest of Ukraine.
00:05:13.000So I actually think that given both where Ukraine was at the time and where the European mindset was at the time, we held the line.
00:05:26.000And the entire attempt to hand over Crimea to Russia in the first place was deeply tied to Barack Obama's pathetically intransigent approach with regard to Iran.
00:05:34.000He was trying to cut a deal with Iran, a nuclear deal with Iran.
00:05:37.000He wanted Russia to help broker that deal.
00:05:38.000And so he was willing to hand Crimea to the Russians in order to make sure that that happened.
00:05:42.000And then when there's another Russian advance in Ukraine, this time Joe Biden is president of the United States.
00:05:48.000You can see why Russia thought they were going to get away with it.
00:05:50.000Again, it is confusion in foreign policy that leads to all of these problems, and all of them are starting to stack up with regard to Joe Biden's administration.
00:05:58.000The polling numbers show that he's really, really weak right now.
00:06:00.000He's polling even with Donald Trump in Michigan.
00:06:02.000In most of the major national polls right now, Donald Trump is running about even with Joe Biden.
00:06:08.000The latest national polls have Joe Biden up one according to Insider Advantage, tied according to New York Times-Siena, up three according to the Morning Consult, and Trump up four according to Messenger-HarrisX.
00:06:18.000So that says that Joe Biden is running extremely weak right now, and he should be, because his policies are absolutely awful.
00:06:23.000And when you link that with the fact that the Hunter Biden scandal is not nearly over and could easily break into the mainstream over the course of the next year and a half, Democrats should be running scared.
00:06:32.000In fact, you're starting to see a few cracks in the base for the Democratic Party.
00:06:35.000Representative Jake Auchincloss, Democrat of Massachusetts, he finally admitted on national TV that if Hunter committed crimes, he should face penalties for that.
00:06:43.000If Hunter Biden committed crimes, Hunter Biden should face justice and accountability for those crimes.
00:06:49.000Which, by the way, is a sentence that I've heard very few Republicans say about Donald Trump for much more massive crimes.
00:06:56.000This focus, this obsession, I would say, on Hunter Biden is really just a whopper of whataboutism.
00:07:02.000Because the Republicans are trying to deflect, to diminish, to defend Donald Trump from the grave crime of conspiracy against the Constitution of the United States.
00:07:14.000Okay, and this is going to be the great misdirect by the Democrats is going to be to Donald Trump.
00:07:19.000And the question as to whether Republicans can take advantage of Joe Biden's weakness rests almost entirely on whether the Republican base is going to nominate a person who's going to make the entire subject of the next election about his various foibles and legal peccadilloes.
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00:08:37.000Okay, so, The question for Republicans is going to be whether they actually believe that the rest of the country believes like they believe about Donald Trump.
00:08:47.000If you listen to Republicans in the base talk about what's going on with Donald Trump and the myriad trials that have been brought against him.
00:08:52.000The trial in Manhattan, the trial in Florida, the trial now in Washington, D.C.
00:08:56.000When Republicans talk about this, they say that the subject of the next election should be the corruption of the DOJ.
00:09:00.000And I agree that in an ideal world, we'd be talking Endlessly with independence about the corruption of the DOJ and the weaponization of law enforcement and the use of the FBI to go after Donald Trump beginning in 2015 at the behest of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
00:09:12.000Now all of that, all that should be highly relevant.
00:09:25.000Do I think this person is likely to lead to a more stable America where I can send my kid to school knowing they'll be safe and where I can have bread on the table?
00:09:35.000And Republicans can win on those questions because Democrats have made the country less safe with regard to crime because Democrats are threatening your kids in terms of the values they are promulgating at schools.
00:09:43.000All those questions are questions Republicans can win, but not if they never talk about it again.
00:09:47.000If the center issue in 2024 is whether the DOJ is being mean to Donald Trump for political purposes, Or whether Donald Trump is in fact committing criminal acts.
00:09:56.000That is not going to be a winning formula for Republicans in 2024.
00:10:00.000The only way that's a winning formula is if so many Democrats stay home because they are just unhappy with Joe Biden that Donald Trump squeaks by.
00:10:07.000But that is not a recipe for a sort of broad-based electoral victory.
00:10:13.000And, you know, when we started our business, one of the things we said at the very beginning of Daily Wire was luck is not a business strategy.
00:10:18.000Well, luck is not a political strategy either.
00:10:20.000And the idea that you're just going to luck into 2016, again, that basically Joe Biden won't visit Wisconsin or he won't visit Michigan.
00:10:28.000That he'll just go absent in the election?
00:10:31.000Or that Democrats are going to stay home again?
00:10:33.000There are a couple factors that militate against that.
00:10:34.000One of them is the factor that a lot of Democrats remember 2016, and they remember that when they thought Hillary Clinton was a 99% lock to win, they didn't show up until Donald Trump became president.
00:10:43.000Number two, Hillary Clinton in the polls is running well ahead of where Joe Biden is running right now.
00:10:47.000So if you're a Democrat, you understand there's a very real risk that Donald Trump is going to get back in the White House, which means you're very motivated to go and vote.
00:10:54.000Again, when it comes to the message of the campaign, Democrats are going to be able to basically shy away from whatever is the supposed corruption in the DOJ, the alleged corruption.
00:11:03.000Corruption, I think, is very real and very partisan.
00:11:05.000They're going to be able to shy away from that and just talk endlessly about Donald Trump.
00:11:08.000And Donald Trump loves to talk about Donald Trump.
00:11:10.000And the entire election will be about Donald Trump.
00:11:12.000If the election is about Donald Trump, he's going to lose.
00:11:14.000If the election is about Joe Biden, he is going to lose.
00:11:34.000Well, just what you would think he's been doing.
00:11:36.000Sure, he's, you know, handling his legal troubles and sure he's talking about that stuff, but he is spending zero focus at all on his actual political opponent.
00:11:45.000All of his focus right now, and again, you can't blame him for this, because if you were hit with 87 charges or whatever it is, You would also spend all of your mental energy thinking about that sort of stuff and presumably truth socialing about that sort of stuff at all hours of the day.
00:11:59.000Now, Trump does that even on a good day, but on a bad day, he's for sure going to do that.
00:12:02.000But the problem is, again, that where Donald Trump puts his spotlight is also where the media are happy to put their spotlight and where Democrats are happy to put their spotlight.
00:12:09.000If every waking hour is spent on Donald Trump's truth social talking about how much he hates Nancy Pelosi and Jack Smith and Mike Pence, that is not a recipe for electoral success.
00:12:52.000He sat in Jeremiah Wright's church for 20 years, as we all know, that he wrote love letters to his girlfriends in which he talked about fantasies of gay sex.
00:12:59.000He did all sorts of really salacious and ugly material in that biography by David Garrow, who's a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, by the way.
00:13:07.000And David Garrow says in an interview with Tablet Magazine that Joe Biden is not running large parts of his administration.
00:13:26.000There are obviously large parts of the White House policymaking that belong to Barack Obama because they're staffed by his people who work for him and no doubt report back to him.
00:13:32.000Personnel is policy, as they say in Washington.
00:13:34.000Again, this is a biographer of Barack Obama.
00:13:37.000David Gary says, to me this is very odd and kind of a spooky arrangement.
00:13:40.000Spooky because it's happening outside the constitutional framework of the United States
00:13:43.000government and yet somehow it's been placed off the list of permitted subjects to report on,
00:13:46.000which is a pretty good indicator of the extent to which the information we get and public reaction
00:13:49.000to that information is being successfully controlled. That of course is exactly right.
00:13:55.000But one of the things that's happening here is that we're not talking about any of that stuff.
00:13:59.000The only thing that we are spending our time talking about, presumably, is Donald Trump's legal troubles, which we'll get to in just one second.
00:14:06.000We'll get to the latest on that first.
00:14:08.000The economy is really on sort of a razor's edge, unclear which way it's going to go.
00:14:13.000I am big into diversification, particularly into assets that are likely to accrue in value over time.
00:14:19.000Days ago, our longtime sponsor, Masterworks, delivered a 77.3% net return to some of their investors.
00:15:23.000He points out that President Trump's expressions of concern over election irregularities,
00:15:28.000that's all First Amendment protected material.
00:15:30.000He's pointing out also that the actual statutes that have been brought in the indictment against Donald Trump are not actually properly formulated.
00:15:37.000So, very likely there may even be a preemptive appeal to the Supreme Court to try to get this thing stopped ASAP, as fast as possible.
00:15:44.000That has been encouraged by people ranging from Mark Levin to Senator Mike Lee in Utah.
00:15:48.000A flurry of interviews and statements on Sunday from Trump and his legal team previewed how they might seek to defend the former president against federal conspiracy charges.
00:15:55.000According to Laurel, Sunday an ABC said the government will never be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump had corrupt or criminal intent.
00:16:03.000Now, that is, again, that's the legal issue, and whether it's true or whether it's false, we're going to find out.
00:16:10.000Donald Trump has the deck stacked against him, no question, because the judge in this case, number one, is a dedicated Democrat who actually served at the same law firm as Hunter Biden, apparently, because this is taking place in Washington, D.C., which is a very unfriendly area for jury selection.
00:16:22.000Apparently, Team Trump wants to get this thing moved to Virginia because they believe that Washington, D.C.
00:16:26.000is a place where Trump can't get a fair trial.
00:16:28.000And of course, this is only one of three trials that Trump is currently undergoing, and we're expecting the Georgia DA to drop an indictment on Donald Trump any moment.
00:16:35.000So it'll be four different trials over the course of the next year.
00:16:47.000This is the one about Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump supposedly taking personal money and spending it on Stormy Daniels to silence her as opposed to campaign money.
00:17:12.000With that said, should it be prosecuted?
00:17:14.000The political case is it shouldn't be prosecuted because Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted for essentially the exact same crime.
00:17:19.000But in a court of law, could Donald Trump be prosecuted?
00:17:21.000Sure, but it's also in Florida, which is a much more friendly territory for Donald Trump since he won the state twice.
00:17:26.000And then you head on up to Washington, D.C.
00:17:27.000You have an incredibly weak case brought by Jack Smith on the January 6th matters.
00:17:31.000Again, if he wanted to bring a charge of indictment that is an actual criminal charge, he didn't bother to bring that charge because he couldn't prove it.
00:17:36.000So instead, he brought a bunch of ancillary charges ranging from obstruction of justice to fraud.
00:17:40.000None of those statutes really seem to apply.
00:17:43.000And at the very same time, on a political level, all Donald Trump did over the weekend, all he did over and over and over is just tweet about this.
00:17:52.000And that's all this election is going to be.
00:17:54.000So the question for you, kind of normal conservative or normal independent is, is this top of mind for you?
00:17:59.000Is this the thing you wake up every morning outraged about?
00:18:02.000For a certain percentage of the population, sure.
00:18:04.000Is that population larger than 25-30%?
00:18:05.000I have serious doubts that that's the case.
00:18:08.000Considering again, that a solid majority of independents think Trump should be indicted and they don't really care about what the charge is.
00:18:13.000It's gonna be very hard to convince those independents.
00:18:16.000Not only should Trump not be indicted, he should be elected because he's being indicted.
00:18:21.000And again, I encourage Republicans to think pretty seriously about who they think is likely to beat Joe Biden, not just about who they think it feels good to nominate.
00:19:51.000The fact that the left is so excited about this judge demonstrates that Trump is exactly
00:19:55.000Again, the case that this person is making is that because of her identity as a black woman, this will make her Trump's worst nightmare, which is the opposite of being a good judge.
00:20:03.000What it means to be a good judge is that you impartially decide the case in front of you, not that you look deep within the wells of your own soul and then come up with some sort of jerry-rigged explanation for why the bad orange man has to go to jail.
00:20:14.000That's exactly what the MSNBC analyst is saying.
00:20:15.000So again, Trump's complaints are well predicated here about the judge.
00:20:19.000I think there's very little doubt about that.
00:20:21.000The question for Republicans is, should that be the basis on which the elections run?
00:20:25.000It doesn't stop there, of course, because the posts just keep coming and coming and coming over the weekend.
00:20:29.000We'll get to more on this in just one second.
00:22:06.000In the motion, he said all the proposed order seeks to prevent is the improper dissemination or use of discovery materials including to the public.
00:22:11.000Such a restriction is particularly important in this case because the defendant has previously issued public statements on social media regarding witnesses, judges, attorneys, and others associated with legal matters pending against him.
00:22:20.000In recent days regarding this case, the defendant has issued multiple posts either specifically or by implication including the following.
00:22:26.000If you go after me, I'm coming after you.
00:22:58.000He went off about his civil rights being violated.
00:23:00.000Again, I'm not saying that Donald Trump is wrong about any of this.
00:23:03.000I'm just asking whether this is an electoral strategy that seems to be worthwhile.
00:23:07.000Here was Donald Trump going off on his civil rights being violated at a Montgomery, Alabama rally on Friday.
00:23:13.000The only civil rights that have been violated in this matter are my civil rights and those of the countless people that Biden and the communists have been persecuting.
00:23:23.000And they are communists, and they're Marxists, and they're people that don't get it.
00:23:44.000I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but the horse ain't dead yet in the sense that people keep saying over and over that if the election is run on this basis, Donald Trump will win.
00:23:50.000And I just don't see the evidence of that.
00:23:52.000Over the weekend, he also went after variously Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence.
00:23:57.000On Truth Social, he went off on Nancy Pelosi because Nancy Pelosi suggested that he looked like a scared puppy, which is definitely getting his goat.
00:24:02.000and Trump put out on Truth Social, I purposely didn't comment on Nancy Pelosi's
00:24:06.000very weird story concerning her husband.
00:24:08.000But now I can because she said something about me with glee that was really quite vicious.
00:24:11.000I saw a scared puppy, she said, as she watched me on television like millions of others
00:24:39.000Who are the voters who are like, well now that he did say that she has a sick and demented cycle, will someday live in hell, and that her husband's journey to hell starts and finishes with her, now I'm totally in.
00:24:51.000This would be one thing if you're running for re-election.
00:24:53.000He is now running after an election that he lost.
00:24:56.000So he's going to have to win some additional votes.
00:25:23.000He says, Little Mike Pence, a man who was about to be ousted as governor of Indiana until I came along and made him VP, has gone to the dark side.
00:25:30.000Don't know the power of the dark side.
00:25:33.000I'd never told a newly emboldened, not based on his 2% numbers, Pence to put me above the Constitution or that Mike was too honest.
00:25:56.000So either the man has the worst selection in personnel in human history, or it turns out that he crosses swords with a lot of the people who end up working for him because he doesn't do the right thing very often with those people.
00:26:07.000He also ranted about fellow Republicans over the weekend.
00:26:10.000Here he was suggesting that it's other Republicans' fault that he's being indicted right now, which again is weird considering that it's really his own.
00:26:17.000Okay, it's Democrats' fault, and it's his fault.
00:26:19.000But it's hard to blame, say, Ron DeSantis or Marco Rubio or Chris Christie or Mike Pence for what Donald Trump did.
00:27:26.000So the guy was president for four long years, and he allowed his entire Justice Department, apparently, to be completely run through with people who hated his guts and did nothing.
00:27:35.000But now, it's the fault of a rando congressperson from, like, Iowa.
00:27:40.000Again, is this a winning electoral strategy?
00:27:42.000I ask you this over and over and over.
00:27:44.000I'm not going to stop asking you because the only thing that matters to me, the only thing that matters to me is what the policy of the United States looks like going forward.
00:27:50.000Donald Trump's personal peccadillos and his myriad foibles, I was willing to put those aside when he was doing good stuff for the country.
00:27:57.000The question is, is he going to have a chance to do those things again by being reelected president on the basis of those things?
00:28:03.000And Donald Trump's campaign for re-election is actually very simple.
00:28:05.000Things were better when I was president.
00:28:07.000Joe Biden has been a terrible president.
00:28:41.000But Joe Biden doesn't ever seem to leave President Trump's lips.
00:28:44.000And that's going to be a problem with him in a general election.
00:28:46.000And if Trump fans and Republicans decide that the chief factor in terms of conservative loyalty is somehow following Trump down the primrose path to losing, I don't see that here.
00:30:45.000When a Republican is being targeted by his political opposition to be put in jail for crimes that any Democrat could commit and get away with, that is political prosecution.
00:31:38.000Could it have something to do with the fact that instead of focusing in on Joe Biden and his terrible governance that everyone hates according to the polls, we are not focusing one iota on that?
00:31:47.000According to FiveThirtyEight, they did the numbers crunching.
00:31:50.000They found in 38 special elections held so far this year, Democrats have outperformed the partisan lean by an average of 10% Romping in parts of the country that typically support the party and cutting down on GOP margins in red cities and counties, too.
00:32:01.000For example, the Democratic candidate in a Wisconsin State Assembly special election last month lost by just seven points in an area where Republicans have a 22-point edge and where Trump beat Biden by almost 17 points in 2020.
00:32:12.000In a New Hampshire special election in May for a state house seat, the Democrat won by 43 points.
00:32:16.000That's far beyond the 23-point edge in the district.
00:32:21.000And these are not good numbers for Republicans.
00:32:23.000And for comparison, according to FiveThirtyEight, Democrats outperformed the weighted partisan lean by about 4% in special elections held between 2018 midterms and 2020 elections.
00:32:32.000When Biden won the White House by 4.5%, but Democrats underperformed in House races.
00:32:35.000So now they're up by like 10% in these special elections.
00:32:38.000Does that mean that necessarily nothing can change?
00:32:44.000But there's no question at this point that if Donald Trump runs an election campaign that is based solely on his indictments, that is probably not going to redound to the benefit of Republicans.
00:32:53.000And so I ask once again, what's the plan for victory here?
00:32:56.000We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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00:34:24.000These are paraben-free, I don't know what paraben is, sulfate-free, woke-free, made in the United States.
00:34:28.000Get him a Precision 5 razor with welded steel blades, flip-back trimmer that will groom his face, not his worldview.
00:34:32.000Help your son escape academia's leftist indoctrination by more than just a close shave.
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00:34:42.000Meanwhile, the media seem absolutely determined to knock Ron DeSantis down.
00:34:46.000The idea here is that if you can knock DeSantis down, then Trump ends up the nominee and you get the race, presumably, that you want.
00:34:51.000This is why Newsweek is promoting the idea that Ron DeSantis was met with a large number of empty seats at a meet and greet event in Iowa.
00:34:58.000He went to Cedar Falls before eating breakfast at the Vinton Family Restaurant before heading to a meet and greet at a livestock auction in Tampa.
00:35:05.000But then there was a viral photo showed on social media that shows that there weren't a lot of people who showed up at this point.
00:35:10.000The journalist Tim Miller, who is very much a sort of bulwark type left winger, a quasi
00:35:17.000conservative, a supposed conservative, he added a caveat saying, for what it's worth,
00:35:20.000DeSantis is doing a bunch of events this week and not all have been this sparse.
00:35:23.000This is the reality when you reboot and have to do grind it and have to grind out lots
00:35:38.000When Ron DeSantis unveiled his economic platform last week, he presented himself as a conservative
00:35:41.000populist, a skeptic of corporations inside a party often allied with them.
00:35:44.000But DeSantis' rhetoric hasn't always matched his record as governor.
00:35:47.000He's done his share to support corporations.
00:35:48.000As a presidential candidate, he has relied on contribution from titans of the business world.
00:35:52.000The tension between these two impulses was kept at bay for months, as DeSantis looked well positioned to challenge Donald Trump for his party's nomination.
00:35:58.000But as he stumbled and continued warring with select corporations like Disney and Bud Light, big business is starting to show signs of irritation.
00:36:04.000So again, The new narrative that's going to come out, it's not new, is that DeSantis is already done for, that the campaign is already over.
00:36:10.000And the reason that you're seeing the media mirror that is because despite the fact that it is only August, there's not been a single debate yet, and we are still six months off from a primary, if they can kill DeSantis in the cradle right now, there really ain't anybody in the wings.
00:36:21.000The only other candidates right now in the Republican Party who are already in the race are polling in single digits.
00:36:27.000If you look at the RealClearPolitics polling average right now, Donald Trump is at 53.7, DeSantis at 15.7, which is a drop of like three to five points over the last two months.
00:36:37.000Vivek Ramaswamy has jumped into third at 6%, and Mike Pence is at 5%.
00:36:41.000In Iowa, by contrast, Trump is running about 27 points ahead of DeSantis.
00:36:46.000In New Hampshire, he's running about 24 points ahead of DeSantis.
00:36:49.000DeSantis is in second place in both of those nominating contests right now.
00:36:54.000None of the other candidates are clocking more than single digits in any of those races right now.
00:36:59.000So if the media can knock DeSantis down to size, then the idea would be that Trump waltzes to the nomination, which at this point is apparently sort of the plan.
00:37:36.000So the way that this works apparently is that I suppose black people all over the world can be as racist and anti-semitic as they want to be according to the mainstream media.
00:37:47.000Racism and anti-semitism are bad except depending on who's performing them.
00:37:52.000The reason I say this, there's an amazing headline in the New York Times, this is from a few days ago, about a song that was sung at a giant political rally at a leftist South African party rally.
00:38:05.000That party, the EFF, is run by a person named Julius Malema, who has been challenged in court before for racism, and he started chanting, A Kill the Boer, B-O-E-R, is a reference to killing white people, particularly farmers, in South Africa.
00:38:21.000According to the New York Times, a video clip of that moment shot across the internet and was seized upon by some Americans on the far right, who said it was a call to violence.
00:38:28.000That notion really took off when Elon Musk, the South African-born billionaire who left the country as a teenager, chimed in.
00:38:32.000in. He said they're openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa. Well, I mean, yes.
00:38:37.000I mean, clearly, if this had been a white party in South Africa saying, kill the black people.
00:38:43.000I mean, I don't know. It's not super subtle what's going on right here.
00:38:47.000Here is the headline from the New York Times, however.
00:38:52.000Oh, it's the backlash that's the story.
00:38:54.000It's not that you have full-scale political parties in South Africa calling for the extermination of white people.
00:39:29.000Well, because he appeared to have liked an insensitive meme with a photo of George Floyd on social media.
00:39:35.000Legacy Motor Club announced Gregson's suspension, saying his actions do not represent the values of our team.
00:39:39.000NASCAR said Gregson violated the stock car racing member conduct section of its rules, which says in part members should not publicly disparage people based on their backgrounds.
00:39:47.000So, um, Gregson did not address the alleged meme but acknowledged his actions.
00:39:51.000He said, I'm disappointed in myself for lack of attention and actions on social media.
00:39:55.000Apparently, the post shows a photo of Floyd's face and includes a reference to his death.
00:40:01.000The immediate response is that he must have been racist to repost the meme.
00:40:04.000Which, again, not sure why that would be racist as opposed to just gauche.
00:40:12.000So the same media who will declare that this NASCAR driver is a racist and must be extirpated from American society and his job, they're the same people who are like, kill the boar is actually a subtle message about the evils of white supremacy.
00:40:24.000According to the New York Times, the channel was born at a time when black South Africans were fighting a violent racist regime and was made popular in the early 1990s by Piper Mokoba, a former youth leader in the African National Congress.
00:40:35.000But in 2012, the ANC, they distanced themselves from the song, and they expelled Mr. Malema for his incendiary statement.
00:40:43.000Apparently, this is all not a big deal, according to the New York Times, despite the fact that, again, this song was actually banned, I believe.
00:40:51.000It has been declared a hate speech song in South Africa for years and years.
00:40:55.000But now, we have to kind of go back on that, because the minute that the right-wing Americans recognized that perhaps there are, in fact, people who are black who are racist against whites in a place like South Africa, Uh, if we notice that, then the song apparently is good again.
00:41:09.000Meanwhile, in other aspects of race that are terrible for people everywhere, the Chicago mayor, Brandon Johnson, is focused laser-like on crime problems in his city.
00:41:18.000So there's been mass looting all over the city of Chicago in recent past, and the new mayor, That's not appropriate.
00:42:37.000Okay, meanwhile, when you talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations, the level of antisemitism that is tolerated so long as it comes from black leftists is truly astonishing.
00:42:46.000It really is an amazing, amazing thing.
00:42:48.000And the way that anti-Semitism is treated in the press is if it's a white fan of Donald Trump or a white non-fan of Donald Trump who's a white supremacist, then anti-Semitism is a true deep scourge.
00:42:56.000If it's coming from Hamas, Hezbollah, if it's coming from any of the radical Middle Eastern Muslim groups that seek to destroy the state of Israel, then it's more a political question than, you know, wiping the Jews off the planet.
00:43:07.000And if it's coming from prominent black people, then it's pretty much not a problem at all.
00:43:13.000By the way, this extends all the way to the very top of how the media treat people.
00:43:17.000So, I mentioned earlier in the day this interview with a historian, David Garrow, about Barack Obama.
00:43:22.000Okay, so the fact that Barack Obama's anti-Semitism was overlooked for literally years is an amazing, amazing indicator of just how easy people on the left go when it comes to anti-Semitism coming from members of the black community.
00:43:35.000Tablet Magazine covering this, David Samuels is the author.
00:43:38.000He writes, quote, In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African-American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of black racial consciousness against his girlfriend's white-identified liberal universalism.
00:44:00.000As readers, we know the stakes of this decision will become more than simply personal.
00:44:04.000The black American man Obama wills into being in this scene would go on to marry a black woman from the south side of Chicago named Michelle Robinson and, after a meteoric rise, win election as the first black president of the United States.
00:44:13.000Yet what Garrow documented, after tracking down and interviewing Sheila Miyoshi-Ager, was an explosive fight over a very different subject.
00:44:19.000In Yeager's telling, the quarrel that ended the couple's relationship was not about Obama's self-identification as a black man.
00:44:24.000The impetus was not a play about the American black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago's Spiritus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.
00:44:32.000At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spiritus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a black mayoral aide named Steve Coakley, when a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans.
00:44:47.000The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city's power echelons, with some prominent black officials supporting Coakley, others calling for his firing.
00:44:54.000In Yeager's recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple's relationship was Obama's stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit and in the swirl of the Coakley affair, to condemn black racism.
00:45:03.000While acknowledging that Obama's embrace of a black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted what upset her that day was Obama's inability to condemn Coakley's comments.
00:45:11.000It was not Obama's blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn anti-Semitism.
00:46:18.000He said, I want to apologize to the Jewish community and everyone who's offended by my post.
00:46:21.000I know my choice of words has caused offense, and I'm sorry, that was never my intent.
00:46:24.000He said, instead, he was referring to a fake friend who had betrayed him.
00:46:29.000Apparently, there was also speculation that this sort of phraseology is used frequently in the black community, suggesting they killed Jesus, which sometimes is an imprecation with regard to Jews.
00:46:42.000Meanwhile, Cardi B just gets away with sort of the most outrageous Jewish stereotyping available.
00:46:46.000So Cardi B, and again, as a person who is not a connoisseur of her entire oeuvre, Cardi B, who is a deeply unintelligent human being, she tweeted out the other day a picture of two Hasidic Jews.
00:47:03.000And these Jews are in like the full Hasidic garb, probably in Brooklyn.
00:47:07.000One is wearing a strimal, which is the kind of furry round hat that you see sometimes.
00:47:12.000The other is wearing a black hat and is also wearing a bekasha, which is kind of a long
00:48:11.000Jews are disproportionately lawyers, doctors, accountants.
00:48:13.000There are a lot of different industries in which Jews represent a disproportionate share of members of the industry.
00:48:19.000What is actually stereotypical and antisemitic is the implication that if you take a picture of two very Hasidic Jews, that this is somehow representative of, like, her Jewish lawyers.
00:48:30.000Now, we actually have pictures of her Jewish lawyers.
00:48:34.000Okay, her Jewish lawyers look like secular reform Jews at the very, very best.
00:48:40.000Do these look like the Jews that you just saw on the streets of New York?
00:48:44.000And the idea that all Jews are the same is a hell of a stereotype.
00:48:48.000If I was like, wow, rappers, and then I just posted a picture of Barack Obama and Eric Holder, you'd be like, that's a little racist, isn't it?
00:49:14.000Well, I mean, it would be if we were talking about any other race attacking members of any other race.
00:49:20.000This is, the fact that this is let off the hook is astonishing to me, but again, it shows that when racial preference and racial hierarchy is created in the name of intersectionality, ugly things then occur.
00:49:31.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:50:33.000Not just because the writing is terrific, because it really, really is, but also because of the generalized take, which is that, yes, there are things that are worth preserving from the old world, and those things are worthy of care.
00:50:43.000And that perfectionism and how you approach everyday tasks actually matters.
00:50:48.000And that you have to open yourself up to experiences of family and childbearing in order to find your most purposeful self.
00:50:59.000And also, of course, it exposes the tremendous evils of the Soviet Union, but it does so in a really subtle and amazing way.
00:51:05.000It's truly a masterpiece, A Gentleman in Moscow, highly recommended by M.R.
00:51:24.000So, I ask you, which way, Western man, This is a picture of the Prime Minister of Canada who is now getting divorced.
00:51:32.000And it is a picture of him with his son at the Barbie movie.
00:51:38.000And I just have to say, are the Chinese quaking in their boots at this point?
00:51:44.000He had tweeted out, we're team Barbie.
00:51:47.000And there's a picture of him in a pink sweatshirt that says, love you more.
00:51:54.000And his son Who is wearing a pink t-shirt and star shorts and they are gazing bizarrely and creepily into the camera right in front of the Margot Robbie Ryan Gosling poster from Barbie.
00:52:32.000Russia and China just did a joint military exercise near Alaska.
00:52:36.000And meanwhile, the head of Canada is tweeting out bizarre photos of himself with his son from the Barbie movie and saying he is Team Barbie.
00:52:44.000Ah, the future is in the best of hands.
00:52:46.000But I love it when people expose themselves for who they are and Justin Trudeau.
00:53:14.000Now, she's most famous for having blue hair, and also for really hating America.
00:53:19.000I mean, the national anthem is bad, and America's a deeply sexist and racist place, even though they're paying her way too much money to play a sport no one has ever watched except once every four years when we all pretend to be interested in women's soccer and all the rest of it.
00:53:30.000Well, Rapinoe apparently had a penalty shot and she missed.
00:53:36.000And the United States lost and they got booted by Sweden.
00:53:40.000And bizarrely enough, she started kind of laughing and smiling after she missed the shot.
00:53:57.000Now, to be fair to Megan Rapinoe, there are all these pictures that are going around of her laughing and smiling and all the rest of it.
00:54:08.000She, uh, you know, people react in bizarre ways to terrible things happening to them, so I'm not going to blame her for, like, laughing and then crying.
00:54:15.000People do react in weird ways to bad situations.
00:54:17.000If you've ever had to tell somebody truly horrible news, you kind of don't know what to do.
00:54:21.000The part about Megan Rapinoe that is, you know, annoying is that she's Megan Rapinoe.
00:54:27.000And so, she was asked, after blowing this game, she was asked about, you know, the most important things to her, her best memories from her career, and her best memories from her career are absolutely obviously political.
00:54:37.000Is there a memory that stands out to you right now in this moment?
00:54:41.000I mean, probably equal pay chance after the final.
00:54:55.000And I think, you know, they were saying equal pay, but could have been saying a lot of things.
00:54:59.000I think this team has always fought for so much more.
00:55:02.000And that's been the most rewarding part for me, of course, playing in World Cups and winning championships and doing all that.
00:55:10.000But, you know, to know that we've used our really special talent To do something, you know, that's really like changed the world forever I think that means the most to me and you know the players in this locker room here They're just getting started and you know to all the players that I played with obviously You know who know what it's like to be in the grind That's the best part
00:55:37.000Meanwhile, President Biden tweeted out, It's the worst performance in years.
00:55:40.000President Biden, of course, had to sign in because he's big fans of Megan Rapinoe, where we all pretend that the women's soccer team is even remotely similar to the men's soccer team.
00:56:11.000And the problem is not that she reacted weirdly when that happens.
00:56:14.000When bad stuff happens, bad stuff happens.
00:56:16.000The problem with Megan Rapinoe is that she's kind of a terrible person and that she has spent her entire career pressing forward the idea that America is a terrible, horrible place that has made her extraordinarily wealthy and famous for playing a sport that no one cares about worldwide.
00:56:28.000You want to know the evidence that no one cares about this sport worldwide?
00:56:30.000That the United States wins every year.
00:56:32.000That's how you know that no one cares about this sport worldwide.
00:56:35.000Because there are like seven people in the United States who take soccer seriously compared to, you know, the rest of the human population.
00:56:43.000So if we're winning at that sport, that means that half the population in the rest of the world doesn't even compete in that sport.