Ep. 688 - Let Them Eat Tendies
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
169.80833
Summary
This is the single funniest story I've seen in years, and it has deep political implications. It's a story about how a bunch of internet trolls are bankrupting hedge funds, and they're doing it through wild speculation. We will break down the math behind it.
Transcript
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A bunch of internet trolls are currently in the process of bankrupting a lot of hedge funds,
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a lot of Wall Streeters, and they're doing this through wild speculation, which is a huge problem,
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you see, because it's only hedge funds that are supposed to make money through wild speculation.
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When ordinary people try to make money through ordinary speculation in a way that threatens
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the financial establishment, well, that's hateful. That's a threat to democracy. That is
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white supremacy. We will break down the math. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment from yesterday comes from BizBoy5, who says,
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someone needs to ask Joe if he's going to donate all his salary like Trump did, see him squirm.
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I think Joe's reaction, of course, would be, come on, man. Come on, man. The big guy's got to get a
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little skim off the top. Come on, Hunter. What are you talking about, man? Yeah, so I don't think he
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would do that, but it would be a very hilarious point if that could occur. It will not, however.
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Speaking of financial services, this story about GameStop and the GameStop stock price going through
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the roof. This is the single funniest story that I have seen in years. And not only is it hilarious
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in and of itself, but it actually has deep political implications and the political implications are
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simply delightful. I fear that because this involves finance and involves investing, this story
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might be a little too complicated for most people who aren't going to pay very close attention to it
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to understand just how funny it is. So I'll try to break it down very simply because I don't know
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anything about finance either, but I I've at least read a fair bit about this particular, uh, once in a
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century type of event, once in a lifetime type of event, a bunch of internet trolls on the Reddit board,
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Wall Street bets decided that Wall Street bets, this is like an irreverent investing board. This is not
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like a sober serious investing board. They just put up kind of crazy risky bet ideas. They noticed that
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hedge funds had taken a short position on GameStop. GameStop is this video game store, right? You know
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what GameStop is. It doesn't have a ton of growth potential. It seems like it's kind of heading out the
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door, kind of like blockbuster, some of these old companies. So these internet trolls discover that
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Wall Street took out a big short position on this, specifically one hedge fund called Melvin Capital.
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And a short position is when basically when you're betting against the stock. So if the stock price
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goes down, you make a lot of money. And if the stock price goes up, not only do you lose money,
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but you've got to start buying it up. So you've got to start putting more cash on the table to cover
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your losses, right? So GameStop though, it was trading at like $6, not that long ago.
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It wasn't doing great. Hedge funds take out huge short positions on this. And these trolls at Wall
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Street bets decide, you know, we're going to make this stock price on this kind of crappy company
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go through the roof and maybe we'll make some money in the process. But more importantly,
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we are just going to mess with these hedge funds, these guys, we have no sympathy for them. We're
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going to completely mess with the financial establishment. And the craziest thing is it's
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working. The board has, I think, 2 million members. And so I was asking myself when this
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was going on, how, why hasn't this been done before? And the reason is you've never had this
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kind of the technology to do it, you know, to wrangle like 2 million of these kind of eccentric
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type of people. But you've also never had the memes. You've never had the humor. You've never
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had the specific political conditions of people wanting to flip the bird to the establishment,
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which they believe has royally screwed them over in, in recent months. You've had individual aspects
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of that kind of thing, but you've never had it all coincide. This whole phenomenon is very
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internet-y. Okay. So it's very, the kind of lingo that people use, they'll, they'll be joking about
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how, you know, they're just going to grit their teeth and take some of the losses until their mom
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brings them chicken tendies into the basement, you know, and they're using all this kind of very
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internet-y lingo. They actually, they have like sheet C shanties that are being posted. They posted
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one last night about how we've got to, we've just got to hold on as the financial industry pushes back
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because we're all going to make a bunch of money and bankrupt Wall Street.
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There once was a stock that put to sea. The name of the stock was GME. The price blew up and the
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shorts dipped down. Hold my bully boys hold. Soon may the tendy man come to send a rocket into the sun.
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One day when the trading is done, we'll take our gains and go. She had not been two weeks from shore
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when Ryan Cohen joined the board. The captain called all hands and swore he'd take his shares
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and hold. Soon may the tendy man come to send a rocket into the sun. One day when the trading is
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done, we'll take our gains and go. It goes on. I encourage you to listen to the entire shanty.
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It goes on and on like this. So far, GameStop, not a great company, is up something like 2,500%
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this month. The stock has hit, I think, $460 a share. AMC Movies, this is another company that's
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basically headed for bankruptcy, right? Because no one's going to the movies anymore. AMC,
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they sent this one through the roof. They sent BlackBerry up, you know, the old cell phone company.
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That's up 250%. I think they were going to target Nokia as well, another cell phone company that
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nobody uses anymore. It's all just a huge meme. However, the meme is becoming reality. So the
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internet joke is totally affecting reality and it's going to put hedge funds out of business.
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Gabe Plotkin, who's the hedge fund trader at Melvin Capital, he was the one with the biggest short
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position. Yesterday, when this news broke, he had to raise almost $3 billion to bail out the fund.
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Squawk Box, which is, you know, the very serious sort of CNBC financial news show, they just couldn't
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make any sense of it. You know, we've mentioned social media. I couldn't help but, it's not obviously
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similar to some of this controversy surrounding Facebook and Twitter and everything else. But once
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again, what's one of the, one of the things that we're talking about is maybe misinformation and,
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and pumping dumps and it's occurring on social media again. It just, I'm wondering whether it's
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part of the same problem, the type of regulation that, that, that we finally need to, to consider.
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And like I said, we should always have a light touch with regulation, but
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you're, you're seeing the way things can get started again. This is different. Maybe it's Reddit,
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maybe it's not Facebook, but you're seeing the, the, the same situation. At this point,
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it's not about an election. It's not about a, uh, an insurrection, but there are interesting things
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happening that, that seem to be spawned to some extent, or at least, uh, at least blown out of
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proportion by social media again. That entire monologue was completely meaningless. That guy has
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absolutely no idea what he's talking about. First of all, some of the things he's saying are just
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factually not true. He's saying this might be a pump and dump. It's not a pump and dump pump and
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dump is where you pick a stock cynically. You bring up the price really, really high. And then
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you try to find a bigger idiot to sell it to. So you're going to totally mess that guy over,
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but you're going to make money at his expense. That's not what's going on here. What's going on
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here is these internet trolls found a giant short position from a giant institutional investor.
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And they said, nah, I don't think so. We're not going to let you guys do that. And so then
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this financial analyst on CNBC says, well, I don't know, maybe it's, uh, maybe we need to regulate
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this. I mean, we want a light touch on regulation, but we can, we can't let these guys do it. What
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he's really saying is we don't want any regulation for the institutional investors. We don't want any
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regulation for wall street when they do this exact thing, but we do want regulation for ordinary
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people. We don't, we, we can't let individual investors do this kind of thing. Then the whole game's
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going to be up. What is going on here is not primarily a financial phenomenon. It's a political
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phenomenon. And it is the same phenomenon that you've been seeing build up coinciding in part
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caused by in part causing the Trump phenomenon. It's ordinary people rebelling against an established
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elite that they don't have any faith in. A lot of times this word populism gets thrown around. And I
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think it's often sort of a silly word because I don't think people are either populists or elitists.
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For instance, if we have a good elite, then I'm an elitist. If we can have a good, virtuous,
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smart, thoughtful elite, then great works for me. I count me in the elitism category,
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but we don't have that. We have a bunch of corrupt, cynical idiots in our so-called elite.
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And so with that kind of an elite, I'm, I'm the opposite of an elitist. I'm the furthest thing for,
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I'm a total populist. If the elites that we are currently governed by are hipster Rasputin,
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Jack Dorsey, a grown man with a, with a nose ring and the crooks of the Obama Biden liberal dominant
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regime and the educational establishment, which is utterly upending liberal education. If those are
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the elites, I'm out, right? And that's what you're seeing here. And you're seeing all these unwashed
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peasants on these internet boards, eating their chicken tendies. You're seeing them out Fox the
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wall street elite. And they are not, they are not liking that very much. So now the financial
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establishment is pushing back. They're trying to shut these guys down. You know, in a way the media
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understands this thing. So, so Chris Saliza at CNN posted this piece yesterday that, that people made
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fun of, but he actually had sort of a point. He said how Trumpism explains the GameStop stock surge.
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And it is, it's kind of a negative article, but if you take the preference out of it and you just
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look at the phenomenon, yes, it does sort of explain that. But then other media outlets do the same
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thing they do to all the Trump people. They say, well, the only way to explain what's going on right
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now is to say that the people doing this have awful, terrible intentions and they're evil and
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they're bigoted and they're neo-Nazis and they're white supremacists. And we got to shut the whole
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thing down. They're, they're the, the elites are making the exact same mistake with regard to this
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kind of frivolous financial phenomenon that they have for the political phenomenon. And just like
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Trumpism, it isn't going anywhere. This is only more evidence that sure you can vanquish Trump for now,
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but you're not getting rid of the forces that propelled Trump and that, that have supported him.
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And this sort of a phenomenon is a time when if you can picture rich uncle penny bags and all
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these wall street fat cats, you know, sort of lighting up cigars and laughing about all their
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zillion dollars of profits. I think you can participate in that as well. You can light up
00:13:09.240
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market moment, this wonderful reaction of the unwashed masses on the internet toward the financial
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promo code Knowles, T-H-O-M-P-S-O-N cigar.com, promo code Knowles. Mother Jones, the liberal outlet,
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I guess even further leftist outlet, is looking at the GameStop, Wall Street bets phenomenon
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and following up on what the CNN types are saying. This isn't just Trumpism. This is neo-Nazism. This
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is white supremacy. One reporter from Mother Jones says, I can report from the Telegram channels that
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the Nazis appear to be trading GameStop and AMC as well. Now, why, why would someone say that?
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Why would someone say, I don't, how do you know that it's the Nazis trading this? How do we, I mean,
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to Mother Jones, everyone to the right of Hillary Clinton is a Nazi. I think the reason to say that
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is because it justifies shutting it all down. If it's Nazi, if it's ordinary internet trolls eating
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chicken tenders, you don't have a good argument to shut, shut down trading on this stock because
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ordinary people are doing what institutional investors have done for a long time. But if it's
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Nazis, you can do whatever you want. A reporter for The Hill, a much more mainstream outlet writes
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to the reporter from Mother Jones, what is your sense of the overlap between the Wall Street bets
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people and the Nazis on Telegram and elsewhere who stormed the Capitol? Ooh, good. Maybe we can use
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the FBI to go to their homes and, and shut them down and put them in prison and take away all their
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money. They can't do this, darn it. Discord, a social media platform, shut down the Wall Street bets
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account for hate speech, for hate speech because they drove GameStop and AMC and BlackBerry, because
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they drove them through the roof to wreck some Wall Street investors for the lols, for the laughs.
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They booted them for hate speech. This is the same thing you, you see done to conservatives. Whenever
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they walk a little bit away from the liberal establishment, whenever they question in any
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way, the dominant liberal regime, what are we told? We're told that's hate speech. That's bigotry.
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It's dangerous. It's a threat. You're a Nazi or a white supremacist. And we've got to,
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we've got to censor you. NASDAQ is considering halting trading to let the investors, quote,
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recalibrate. NASDAQ CEO, Adina Friedman, said that the exchange could halt trading activity for
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stocks in the event that they were targeted by these internet users. So you're going to let these
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giant bigwigs on Wall Street have a, have a completely unfair advantage on investing when
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their stocks get, when their investments get threatened. But ordinary people, what happens when
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you're, with far less knowledge, by the way, what happens when you lose some money in the markets?
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Do they, do they stop trading on NASDAQ for you? I don't think so. The White House, for their
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measure, are monitoring the situation. Jen Psaki, the press secretary, was asked about this and she
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had a typically profound answer. Is the White House concerned about the stock market activity we're
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seeing around GameStop? And now with some other stocks as well, including the subsidiary or whatever,
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the company that was Blockbuster. And have there been any conversations with the SEC about how to
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proceed? Well, I'm also happy to repeat that we have the first female treasury secretary and a team
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that's surrounding her and often questions about market. We'll send to them.
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Hold on. What? Hey, this is the strangest day in the markets that we've had in a hundred years.
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What's going on over there? Well, I'd like to remind you that the treasury secretary has breasts.
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Okay. Can you tell us anything about the markets? She identifies as a woman and her pronouns are she and
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her? Yes. Yes. Jen Psaki. I understand all that, but I need things that matter. I need information.
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I need information that matters, not just your ridiculous liberal identity politics claptrap.
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She goes on. She reminds us that we have a woman press secretary. Whoop-dee-doo. Then she,
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then she goes on and sort of tries to address the question. But our team is of course, our economic team,
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including Secretary Yellen and others are monitoring the situation. It's a good reminder though,
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that the stock market isn't the only measure of the health of our economy. It doesn't reflect how
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working and middle-class families are doing. As you all know from covering this, we're in the midst
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of a K-shaped recovery. America's workers are struggling to make ends meet, which is why the
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president has introduced this urgent package to get immediate relief to families.
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So she's just not, she's not going to touch it. You can just tell this woman is not nearly as
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talented as her predecessors, as Kayleigh McEnany and as, as Sarah Sanders. Certainly,
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you know, Sarah and Kayleigh are extraordinarily intelligent and even more so prepared.
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And this gal is just not, she isn't. She, whenever they ask her questions, she usually says, well,
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I'll have to check, you know, I'll have to go talk to the secretary of such and such. And yeah,
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but I'll get back to you. It's, if she were a Republican, there's no way she would have gotten this
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job because the reporters would be tough on her and she wouldn't be able to stand up to it.
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But because she's a Democrat, the reporters don't care because they're all on the same team.
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They're all on the same team. And that is quite, quite a lot of what, what the GameStop thing is
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about. People thinking that there is a game that is rigged against them. And so what do they want to
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do with this kind of corrupt establishment that they have no respect for? They want to just throw
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rocks at it and see what happens. And the establishment is striking back. When I say
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that the GameStop phenomenon is, is about a meme, you know, it's about the sea shanties and the,
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the chicken tendies and, and just laughing their way through this whole thing. There's actually
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on the message board, this is a little offensive. I'll probably get my stream shut down when I even
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read what they say. The, the people on Wall Street bets have a slogan on their message board,
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which is we can remain retarded longer than they can remain solvent. So this is something
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they've been writing on their message board, meaning we can behave irrationally longer than
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these guys can hold their short positions. And we're going to behave irrationally because we want
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to crack this liberal establishment because we believe this liberal establishment is not
00:21:02.740
particularly rational and not serving our interests. And the establishment keeps proving it.
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Do you remember some years ago, maybe it was four or five years ago, there was a Twitter account,
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it was a troll account called a Ricky Vaughn. And he posted very offensive things. And, you know,
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he was, uh, you know, just, it was an anonymous account, but it was politically incorrect. It was
00:21:24.800
outright offensive. Okay. Then the, the account went away. The guy who ran that account is facing 10 years
00:21:33.840
in prison. He's facing 10 years in prison for posting memes. Specifically what he did is he posted
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these memes and it said, if you want to vote for Joe Biden, or I'm sorry, at that time, I guess it would
00:21:46.940
be Hillary Clinton. If you want to vote for Hillary Clinton, text your vote to five, three, two, whatever,
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you know, whatever the number was. This is a joke. Of course, you can't text your vote,
00:21:58.700
right? Vote by text. It's so much easier than showing up to the polls. We posted these memes.
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This is a, a variation on a very longstanding joke, which is, if you've ever worked on a political
00:22:10.880
campaign, you know, this joke, you'll say, Hey, are you a Republican or a Democrat? And they'll say
00:22:18.440
Republican. You'll say, okay, good. Make sure you vote on Tuesday. And someone else comes up. They
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say, when's election day? You say, are you a Republican or a Democrat? I'm a Democrat. You say,
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good. Make sure you vote on Wednesday, right? You make sure you vote after the election. It's an old
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joke. Now this guy for posting a variation on it, a meme is going to prison. I'd like to remind you
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that in this past year, the Democrats changed all the election rules in key areas, weeks and months
00:22:50.880
before the election, completely upended them in some places in contravention of state constitutions.
00:22:55.880
So the, the peasants joke about elections. They get 10 years in prison. The crooked Democrats
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change all the election rules, get rid of election integrity measures. They get to throw the people
00:23:10.340
in prison. Does that seem fair to you? Does that seem like a fair system? Not to me. And it's,
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it's so much bigger than GameStop. It's so much bigger than internet regulation. It's so much bigger
00:23:24.820
than Trump. The left has been doing this for a very long time. You remember when some people who
00:23:32.400
were in manufacturing, they worked in factories, they worked in middle America, when neoliberal
00:23:37.440
elites shipped their jobs overseas, when they made the conscious decision to outsource their jobs,
00:23:42.900
these guys would complain and say, Hey man, we voted for you. And now you're taking away all of our
00:23:47.680
jobs. And these elites would come in and say, no, no, you don't understand. GDP is going up a little
00:23:52.020
higher. No, no, you, it'll, it's okay because GDP is going up and, you know, cheap Chinese goods are,
00:24:00.120
are their prices are falling. So you can buy a TV for less money. So really you're doing well.
00:24:04.640
And anyway, learn to code. Remember that? Learn to code. Then when a bunch of journalists lost their
00:24:12.180
jobs, a lot of conservatives said to them, Hey guys, go learn to code. And you know what happened
00:24:16.720
when the conservatives said it, they got booted off of social media. You were not permitted to say
00:24:20.580
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00:24:27.040
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00:24:31.920
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When Joe Biden was running for president, he said he would not get rid of fracking. He would not go
00:26:49.100
after the oil industry, right? Because he was trying to get voters specifically in Pennsylvania.
00:26:53.900
And then Trump said, yes, you will. You've promised that you would. And he said, no, I won't. That's a
00:26:58.420
lie. Kamala Harris said, no, I won't. That's a lie. And now that's what he's doing. That's exactly what
00:27:02.920
he's doing. He's killing all of these jobs in energy and oil and natural gas. So John Kerry,
00:27:10.040
who I guess is the climate czar, I guess that's his, who knows what he's, he's the czar of,
00:27:14.840
of yachting, I think. He's the Thurston Howell III, the czar of riding around on fancy boats.
00:27:22.440
So Kerry comes out and is asked about this and he, he has, he has the, the learn to code of 2021.
00:27:29.520
Coal plants have been closing over the last 20 years. So what president Biden wants to do is make
00:27:37.620
sure those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people who
00:27:43.060
go to work to make the solar panels. They were making them here at home. That is going to be a
00:27:48.160
particular focus of the, uh, build back better agenda. And, and I think that, that unfortunately
00:27:56.260
workers have been fed a false narrative, no surprise, right? For the last few years, they've
00:28:03.020
been fed, uh, the notion that somehow dealing with climate is coming at their expense. No, it's not.
00:28:11.500
What's happening to them is happening because of other market forces already taking place.
00:28:16.620
And, and, and what the, what the, what the financiers, uh, the big banks, the asset managers,
00:28:22.520
private investors, venture capital are all discovering is there's a lot of money to be
00:28:27.600
made in the creation of these new jobs in these sectors. Well, you see, they've just been fed a
00:28:34.420
false narrative. They have been fed, they're currently being fed a false narrative actually.
00:28:39.920
And can't forget, I forgot to mention coal, coal workers, especially being hit. Well, you see,
00:28:44.760
look, the jobs, they've been going away for 20 years. Right. Cause you, you guys in your crooked
00:28:51.900
liberal establishment, we're getting rid of those jobs. People weren't complaining about losing those
00:28:58.180
jobs under Trump. Actually, that was a defining point of the campaign. Trump said, look, I'm,
00:29:03.160
I'm trying to fight to keep your jobs and Joe Biden is going to lose your jobs. And what did Joe
00:29:07.440
Biden say? He said, no, I won't. Absolutely not. You're going to get to keep your jobs in coal and
00:29:12.300
oil and natural gas. And then what's John Kerry comment? No, of course you're going to lose your jobs
00:29:17.800
because of the sun monster. The sun monster is going to destroy all of life on earth six months
00:29:25.400
ago by my calculations. And so that's why we've got to completely upend society and build back better.
00:29:32.640
And you can't do a damn thing about it. Peasants learn to solar, learn, learn to solar learned. That's
00:29:42.440
your answer. No. How about we just get rid of your ridiculous, get rid of the whole position that
00:29:48.840
Kerry has, this idea of the climate czar, get rid of all these silly ideologies, get rid of this
00:29:56.100
apocalyptic fear of the sun monster and allow people to keep their jobs. It's not inevitable.
00:30:02.600
The left wants to pretend that their very narrow ideology is the inevitable path of politics.
00:30:08.740
politics. And none of us can say a word about it. The right side of history sort of thing.
00:30:13.280
But it's not. We can fight back against it. That's in many ways what the Trump year has
00:30:18.260
represented. And that's certainly what this GameStop thing represents. Notice John Kerry not wearing
00:30:24.560
a mask. Could you imagine with his lockjawed accent, if you were wearing a mask? Jen Psaki,
00:30:32.020
press secretary, not wearing a mask. Joe Biden has been better about this because he's telling
00:30:36.880
everyone to always wear a mask on federal property. So you'll see now a lot of photos of Joe Biden,
00:30:42.740
even in the Oval Office, he'll be wearing a mask. He's a little smoother at this kind of retail
00:30:47.200
politics. John Kerry is violating Joe Biden's mandate right now. Jen Psaki is violating Joe Biden's
00:30:54.640
mandate. The reporters have to wear masks and they are, at least while the cameras are running.
00:30:59.500
But these guys don't have to. Because there's a different set of rules for them.
00:31:07.660
NASDAQ is going to halt trading if they're, if they're at risk of losing money. Joe Biden's going
00:31:13.120
to suspend his mandate for John Kerry. All of these, all of the main environmental activists,
00:31:20.560
Kerry, sure, but Al Gore, Leo DiCaprio, these guys use so much more energy than the ordinary person.
00:31:27.840
And what do they do? They scold ordinary people and say, do less, buy less, live less.
00:31:33.780
I'll be on my yacht. Contact me when global warming is over.
00:31:39.820
It's a, it's a different hierarchy here. It's a new, new sort of a caste system.
00:31:45.680
You know, Twitter, if you, oh my goodness gracious, if you say the wrong thing on Twitter now,
00:31:50.020
if you, if you question, oh my heaven forfend you raise any questions about the 2020 election,
00:31:55.340
you'll be gone in two seconds. If you use the letter Q, oh buddy, you're out of there. If you
00:32:02.820
are the sitting president of the United States in 2020 and they don't like your, the cut of your jib,
00:32:10.020
they'll kick you off. They won't remove child porn, but they'll remove conservatives. That's
00:32:16.460
according to one lawsuit just came out. A lawsuit going after Twitter saying they refuse to take down
00:32:22.520
widely shared pornographic images and videos of a young teenage boy who was a victim of sex
00:32:28.340
trafficking because a Twitter investigation, quote, didn't find a violation of the company's
00:32:33.620
policies. This lawsuit was filed yesterday by the victim and his mother in the Northern District of
00:32:39.920
California. The boy, by the way, I think he's still 17 years old and the video depicts him at 13 years
00:32:46.440
old engaged in sex acts and, and Twitter refuses to take it down. Now they probably, I guess they'll
00:32:53.740
take it down now probably, right? But now that, now the lawsuit's getting bad press, but they don't care.
00:32:59.100
It's, it's just not a priority for them. And one could spend many, many hours discussing the bizarre
00:33:06.820
sexual ideologies of, of radical leftists, but it just doesn't, it just doesn't matter. They've got
00:33:13.780
bigger priorities, namely keeping down common sense. Perfectly mainstream conservatives have
00:33:21.440
been kicked off of Twitter just as easily as the more eccentric types. The duly elected sitting
00:33:28.660
president kicked off of Twitter because the establishment didn't like him. And this I think
00:33:33.660
helps to explain why a new poll just came out from Politico and Morning Consult shows that a majority
00:33:39.900
of Republican voters want Donald Trump to run for president again in 2024. I get it. I totally
00:33:47.820
get it. I was having a discussion yesterday with a pal of mine over why, why Republicans stick with
00:33:55.780
Trump. He's such a jerk. He messed things up in some places. He, he didn't fight hard enough in
00:34:01.880
Georgia. He didn't do this. He didn't do that. Why do, why is it that we go after all the other
00:34:07.120
Republicans? But somehow we stick with Trump because Trump is our rock that we throw against
00:34:15.320
the edifice of this crooked establishment. That's why. Why, why is Wall Street bets sticking with
00:34:22.900
GameStop and BlackBerry and AMC? Is it, is it even because they think that GameStop is this deep value
00:34:30.520
company? No. They just know that that's a great cudgel against this establishment. And negative
00:34:39.380
politics, the idea of fighting against somebody, it's, that's not a dirty concept. That is often
00:34:45.280
how politics works, perfectly natural. And it's especially true when the dominant regime is as
00:34:51.340
corrupt as the regime that we're living under right now, which is unprecedented in American history.
00:34:57.920
We always like to pretend, oh, everything's doing fine. GDP is, is doing well. It's, it's all okay.
00:35:05.840
You haven't been able to leave your home without a filthy piece of cloth covering your mouth
00:35:11.420
in 10 months. Many of you have not been permitted to work and you haven't been given relief from the
00:35:19.380
government, which, which has banned you from working. You've been given $600, maybe a little bit more
00:35:26.960
with the second relief package. You have been kicked off of social media. You have been told not to go
00:35:34.560
over to Christmas, not to have Thanksgiving, not to hug your loved ones, not to bury your dead
00:35:39.720
by an elite that doesn't believe any of this, that flouts these rules left and right whenever,
00:35:47.200
and changes the rules whenever it suits their political interests. And people are very,
00:35:51.800
very angry about that. And they're very justified in that anger.
00:35:59.260
And they want a cudgel and Trump remains that cudgel. In some ways, Trump's political prospects,
00:36:08.460
if he does want to run again, will depend less on the field in 2024 and more on the establishment.
00:36:15.060
If the establishment remains this brazen or gets more brazen, which it seems like that's the direction
00:36:22.380
they're going in, it's going to be very difficult for, for another Republican to come up and claim the
00:36:27.540
mantle. Even if that other Republican would be more capable in terms of legislation, even if that other
00:36:33.820
Republican would be more competent in terms of organization of political apparatus. Don't forget,
00:36:40.160
Trump worked in business his whole life, right? He didn't, the guy never ran a formal campaign until
00:36:44.200
2016. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. People are very, very angry. Is it any wonder? You know,
00:36:52.380
in San Francisco on Tuesday, the San Francisco school board voted to accept the recommendations
00:36:58.460
of a renaming committee that voted to officially rename 44 public schools bearing the names of
00:37:05.220
controversial historical figures. Do you know who these controversial historical figures were?
00:37:10.020
Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln. George Washington. Teddy Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin
00:37:20.220
Roosevelt. A Democrat icon. He's now, his portrait is hanging in, in Biden's Oval Office. Herbert Hoover.
00:37:29.340
Paul Revere. The regulars are out. The Revolutionary War hero, Paul Revere. Thomas Edison.
00:37:36.140
Edison. If those schools have light bulbs, they, it's very, a little ungrateful for them to rename
00:37:43.560
Edison school. Even Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is a far left person, the one who,
00:37:52.220
she's the woman who said that Amy Coney Barrett perhaps shouldn't be a judge because she's Catholic.
00:37:58.200
Renaming her because they allege that she said or did something that could be sort of construed as racist
00:38:03.500
five million years ago or something. No evidence that she said or did anything like that.
00:38:09.880
This is, this is my argument against the Tubman $20 bill. I won't rehash my arguments we've talked
00:38:14.040
about the last couple of days. I don't think we should put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. I don't
00:38:19.700
have anything against Tubman, but I don't think the Tubman 20 is about Tubman either. I think it's about
00:38:23.780
getting rid of Andrew Jackson and pushing leftist identity politics. And that is poison. It's poison
00:38:30.300
because it will overthrow not only our understanding of the American regime and our appreciation for it,
00:38:35.560
not only will it reframe American history and cast it in a negative light to use the terms that the
00:38:41.460
1619 project uses, but it will rip the country apart. If you don't have loyalty and respect for
00:38:47.380
your country, you're not going to flourish. You're not, you're probably not going to stay together very
00:38:52.580
long. And, and the country is fraying, it's ripping apart. And it's because of that crooked
00:38:59.880
establishment. In the midst of all this, Joe Biden is pursuing a radical agenda. We were told he wouldn't,
00:39:10.260
we were told he'd be moderate Joe. I don't think so. You know, the Democrats have been clamoring for
00:39:14.900
court packing, adding new judges to the court. Well, some democratic senators say, no, I don't,
00:39:21.880
I don't really want to go for that. I'll vote against that. So Joe Biden just appointed a
00:39:25.880
bipartisan commission to study reforms to the Supreme court and the federal judiciary. So according to the
00:39:32.240
Washington post, it's an attempt to make a nod at both camps. There are the activists on the left
00:39:37.800
who want him to pack the court and there are the swing voters who, who aren't that interested in it.
00:39:42.580
So he wants to nod to both of them and create this commission. If you make a commission to propose
00:39:48.580
reforms, the commission has to propose reform. Coming back and saying, we don't think you should
00:39:55.340
change it at all is not really an option. If there's enough of a public outcry, maybe, but it's not,
00:40:01.200
that's not why you form one of these committees. You do it to, to give yourself the institutional
00:40:07.320
cover to make radical changes. And this, this is how the left wins, by the way, is through
00:40:12.600
incrementalism and gradualism. If you have two sides being represented here, the side that wants
00:40:19.820
radical change and the side that wants no change at all, when you create a commission to reconcile
00:40:25.020
those two, you get a lot of change. There's no way that the conservatives can possibly win in that
00:40:32.560
situation. Unless the public outcry is simply so great that the commission loses its mandate.
00:40:38.720
But absent something like that, there's going to be this change and there's nothing,
00:40:42.780
nothing we can do about that. A change to the Supreme Court
00:40:46.060
could be the straw that breaks the camel's back in terms of respect for our institutions in this
00:40:54.040
country. I think that's why the court refused to hear any of the election challenges, is they just
00:40:58.920
thought we need to preserve the institutional integrity. We don't want to weigh in on this
00:41:03.620
election. When we weighed in on Bush v. Gore, which we didn't want to do even then, it, you know,
00:41:08.260
undermined the court and we just can't do it. Joe Biden doesn't care. Country's a powder keg right
00:41:14.200
now. Joe Biden's smoking a cigarette, about to flick that butt. And it's not just the court.
00:41:21.300
It's a whole slew of executive orders. It's a whole heap of radical policies that are so disconnected
00:41:31.560
from the will of voters and from what he promised on the campaign trail. Not on the campaign trail
00:41:36.780
10 years ago. This year, this past year, he was lying right to their face because he knows the people
00:41:42.020
can't do anything about it. 32 executive orders. Joe Biden has signed 32 executive orders in his
00:41:54.100
first week. Now, you might be confused about this. If you were paying any attention to the
00:42:00.660
presidential election, which really none of us were because it was a fake presidential election
00:42:04.200
because no one was allowed to go outside. No one was allowed to hold rallies. It was all controlled by
00:42:08.060
the media. And big tech censored conservatives and, and news that was damaging to Biden.
00:42:15.420
However, if you were watching at all, George Stephanopoulos,
00:42:18.740
Bill Clinton's communications director, who now pretends to be a journalist at ABC,
00:42:22.760
he was hosting Joe Biden and he says, all right, Biden, how are you going to govern? You're going to,
00:42:28.560
you're going to get this done. You're going to get that done. You're going to ram through your agenda.
00:42:31.080
Joe Biden says, Hey, I need to build consensus. You cannot govern through executive order like a dictator.
00:42:36.760
I have this strange notion. We are a democracy. Some of my Republican friends and some of my
00:42:43.680
Democratic friends even occasionally say, well, if you can't get the votes by executive order,
00:42:48.100
you're going to do something. Things you can't do by executive order unless you're a dictator.
00:42:52.220
We're a democracy. We need consensus. You can't govern by executive order unless you're a dictator.
00:42:58.540
In a democracy, you need consensus. So if you take Joe at his word there and then you observe that
00:43:06.380
he signed 32 executive orders in his first week, can you do that math? What is Joe saying about
00:43:14.720
himself? He's saying he's a dictator and he's saying we're not properly a democracy. And there have been,
00:43:19.880
I don't want to use hyperbolic language here. When I say Joe's a dictator, I mean that in the purest
00:43:24.740
sense of that word, he is just saying things and that that is becoming the law of the land, right?
00:43:29.040
He's dictating. So that is just what's happening in the first week. It's not like they've been
00:43:32.800
passing laws in the Congress. And for a long time in this country, that's not really how you govern.
00:43:37.720
You govern through the executive agencies and the bureaucracy and by EOs. And if you're governing that
00:43:44.260
way, what Joe Biden is saying there to Stephanopoulos is we're not a democracy. And there have been
00:43:47.860
many sophisticated political thinkers who say that at this point, the United States more
00:43:53.560
resembles an oligarchy than a democracy. We've spoken on this show before about the cycle of
00:43:59.700
regimes, kind of classical cycle of regimes. You have democracy, then that decays into an oligarchy,
00:44:05.780
then that transforms into a monarchy, then the monarchy can be overthrown or reformed into a democracy,
00:44:10.720
democracy, so on and so forth. I'm not saying this country is purely an oligarchy at this moment,
00:44:18.880
but it certainly is somewhere between, at the very least, it's somewhere between a democracy and
00:44:24.420
an oligarchy. And as you see the rise of Trump's, as you see the rise of Wall Street bets, the GameStop
00:44:33.340
insurgency, as you see the political violence in the streets, I guess on both sides, much more violent
00:44:39.240
on the left and on the right, but there has been some on the right too. What you are seeing, I'll
00:44:43.600
use the language of the left, is this is the cry of the people that haven't been heard. Sure, I'm not
00:44:50.320
saying this as a way to endorse it or in a prescriptive way, I'm using it in a descriptive
00:44:53.880
way, the exact same way the left does. All of these aspects, you're seeing people who believe that
00:45:00.320
democracy in this country is not really functioning, that we are more effectively an oligarchy.
00:45:05.000
And there's one set of rules for Wall Street. There's one set of rules for John Kerry and
00:45:09.940
Jen Psaki and Joe Biden and the Biden family overseas and in the United States. It's one set
00:45:16.220
of rules for all those guys. And then there's another set of rules for ordinary people.
00:45:22.460
Joe Biden in his first week decides to take on the very important issue of taxpayer-funded
00:45:28.200
genital mutilation for US soldiers. So he takes away Donald Trump's ban on men who think that
00:45:37.680
they're women and women who think that they're men from serving in the armed forces, which had
00:45:41.820
been common sense until 2015. So right before the end of Obama's administration, he decides,
00:45:49.700
okay, I'm now going to permit men who think that they're women and women who think that they're
00:45:52.860
men to serve in the armed forces. And somehow that's going to be really good for American
00:45:58.240
military might, right? So he says that Trump comes in a year later and he says, nah, we're a year and
00:46:03.480
a half later. Nah, we're going to get rid of that, okay? So he reverses that. Joe Biden has an
00:46:07.320
important civil rights issue. We're going to let men who think that they're women serve in the
00:46:12.180
military. And we're going to force taxpayers to pay for the surgery, cosmetic surgery, to make them
00:46:18.080
look more like the sex that they are not, but that they imagine themselves to be.
00:46:24.280
And you have ordinary people, I think, across the political spectrum, plenty of left-wingers too,
00:46:33.300
looking at it and saying, what? That's what you're spending my money on? You're spending my money to
00:46:40.460
force me to participate in this ancient heretical religion called Gnostic dualism that posits that a
00:46:47.740
man can be a woman simply by believing himself so? What? That is so divorced from reality. You guys,
00:46:54.660
you governing elites are so divorced from reality that you are forcing us all to live in that fantasy
00:47:01.120
as well. Getting worse, folks. The majority of Senate Democrats, we'll move, we'll move past the
00:47:08.900
executive orders. We'll get into legislation. The majority of Senate Democrats now want to make
00:47:14.740
Washington, D.C. estate. 39 members of the Democratic Conference. So not enough to get it
00:47:19.860
done yet. This has been building up for some time. They want to do it. Tom Carper says this isn't a
00:47:25.560
Republican or Democratic issue. It's an American issue because the lack of fair representation for
00:47:29.660
D.C. residents is clearly inconsistent with the values on which this country was founded. That is
00:47:34.300
so illiterate that I'm surprised that this man, Tom Carper, can walk around throughout the day without
00:47:41.180
clunking himself in the head wherever he goes. It's so idiotic. The entire purpose of Washington,
00:47:47.420
D.C. is to not be a state. If Washington, D.C. were supposed to be a state, then we would have had
00:47:53.600
the federal seat in Maryland or Virginia. But we didn't. We actually took territory away from Maryland
00:48:01.860
and Virginia so that we could give it to a federal district so that the federal government would not be
00:48:06.000
within any particular state. That's the whole point of it. That's been the way D.C. has been
00:48:10.840
organized since 1801. Not only is it not contrary to the values of the country, that is a natural
00:48:19.920
product of the values of the country, which says this is a federation. This is the United States
00:48:24.860
of America. No one state is going to dominate. When Carper, I can't tell if he's just being cynical
00:48:30.340
and a liar or if he's really that stupid. I do know some, I know many people in Washington, D.C.,
00:48:36.600
and so I'm not going to discount the idea that he might just have no idea what he's talking about.
00:48:40.780
When he says that this isn't a Republican or Democratic issue, in a way, he's sort of right.
00:48:45.000
It's really, it is as of now a Democratic issue. But really what he's saying is Washington people,
00:48:49.620
Washington elites want more power. And that cuts across party lines very often. And the ordinary people
00:48:56.740
with their ordinary constitution, they might say one thing, but we, the established elites,
00:49:01.580
are saying something else. And we're going to play by a different set of rules and we're going
00:49:06.960
to make you bend the knee to us. And the rest of us are saying, man, how do I crack this
00:49:13.360
establishment? How do I go to the sun, go to the moon, send this rocket ship up, whether it's on the
00:49:17.940
internet, whether it's in the stock market, whether it's in politics, that process only just
00:49:24.220
beginning. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. See you tomorrow.
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by Ben Davies. Executive producer, Jeremy Boring. Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
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Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling. Production manager, Pavel Vidovsky.
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Editor and associate producer, Danny D'Amico. Audio mixer, Mike Coromina. Hair and makeup by
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Nika Geneva. And production coordinator, McKenna Waters. The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire
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production. Copyright Daily Wire 2021. Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Wall Street gets stonked
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as Reddit games, the GameStop stock. Plus, John Kerry is reporting for climate duty.