Episode 3058 CWSA 12⧸31⧸25
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 13 minutes
Words per minute
127.389854
Harmful content
Misogyny
3
sentences flagged
Hate speech
8
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode of the podcast, I talk about why I think the election system in the United States is rigged, and why it s not by chance. I also talk about the new Patrick Byrne story about Venezuela being involved in the rigging of the election in 2024.
Transcript
00:00:08.120
But I do get a little bit dizzy if I talk too much.
00:00:51.600
The dopamine to the day, the thing that makes everything better.
00:01:14.880
Because we got right up to the limit, but still a few more.
00:01:21.800
So I wouldn't wait if you don't have your delivery calendar.
00:01:33.280
I always hate those, but they seem traditional.
00:02:03.440
It will either be better than we think or worse than we think.
00:02:10.520
Further, I predict that the topic of election ringing
00:02:17.520
And if you haven't caught up with the Patrick Byrne,
00:02:26.640
If you don't know his story, you really should catch up to it.
00:02:45.440
But now I think he can say it and people can run it.
00:02:52.560
being involved with the voting machines, Chinese components,
00:03:00.600
just before they could influence the election in 2024.
00:03:08.640
But I've got to say, he's very credible sounding.
00:03:14.320
And there's nothing about him that suggests he's making it up.
00:03:22.200
So I feel like this will be the year he breaks through
00:03:29.920
And then, I think the fact that we know everything else in the world is rigged,
00:03:39.840
as we're watching all these stories about corruption,
00:03:44.800
I think that makes it easier for people to believe that the elections were rigged.
00:03:50.520
Because I've been saying something now for a while, a few years, that nobody else picks up on.
00:04:01.000
I say, what are the odds that every other institution is corrupt, but our elections are not?
00:04:11.400
If you didn't know anything about election security, you'd never seen any story about it.
00:04:20.200
How would you believe that it's not corrupt when everything else is?
00:04:26.200
Now, I might have been a little ahead of the game,
00:04:28.600
because the other thing I say, which sets you up for that thing I just said,
00:04:34.360
is that whenever you have the following situation, you have corruption.
00:04:50.120
And you just wait, and assume there's no audit control.
00:04:55.720
Because even where there are audits, the audits don't catch stuff, as we've seen.
00:05:08.360
that everything is corrupt, and that there's a reason built into why it's corrupt,
00:05:19.880
It's that everything that has that element to it always becomes corrupt, every time.
00:05:29.640
what is the reason for electronic voting machines?
00:05:39.000
The only reason for voting machines is to cheat.
00:05:44.120
They're not cheaper, they're not more reliable, they're not faster, they're not anything.
00:05:55.560
Everything that has this nature is rigged or fraudulent.
00:06:02.040
Voting machines don't have any other purpose that we can see.
00:06:06.120
And then elections sort of just fall into that category.
00:06:14.440
You know, the thing that can't be explained unless there's massive fraud going on.
00:06:19.960
Now, that doesn't mean that the only fraud is the machines.
00:06:27.320
It would suggest that in every way that an election can be rigged, probably is.
00:06:34.920
Now, I do not claim that the only bad people in the country are Democrats.
00:06:46.760
It doesn't seem likely that the only bad people are Democrats.
00:06:54.520
Well, David Moss, a user on X, just completed a self-driving Tesla to drive
00:07:02.680
across the entire United States without ever engaging with the car.
00:07:07.720
So, this was the day that somebody drove the entire coast to coast and didn't touch the steering wheel.
00:07:20.440
That includes parking, it includes supercharging.
00:07:26.840
So, it's pretty easy to predict that this will be the year of the self-driving car.
00:07:39.320
How many fake news stories will I fall for in the coming year?
00:07:44.920
So, apparently, the other day, maybe yesterday?
00:07:49.560
I posted, I reposted, but to my credit, with skepticism,
00:07:55.320
the story about some election claim that involved a big shredding truck.
00:08:06.280
But, it makes me wonder, how many times am I going to get fooled by fake news?
00:08:14.280
And I thought, I should almost keep track of it.
00:08:19.320
You know, I should start with 2026 and find out, how many times do I get fooled?
00:08:26.200
You know, am I more likely to be fooled because people are better at fooling people?
00:08:48.120
I don't know about you, but if you're watching this podcast, it's probably true that your
00:08:57.880
news and social media bubble is nonstop stories about money laundering and Somalians
00:09:06.120
and basically bad behavior as well as rigged elections.
00:09:29.880
I was afraid that no normies ever see these stories.
00:09:36.840
People are saying, I went to things like, I went to lunch with my neighbors,
00:09:42.280
and not one of them had heard about the Somalian fraud and stuff.
00:09:47.880
Just hold that in your head, that your neighbors haven't even heard.
00:09:54.520
They're not even aware that there's a massive money laundering fraud problem.
00:10:04.840
Now, that doesn't mean it's never been on the news.
00:10:08.200
But the news doesn't cover it like social media does.
00:10:11.560
So I'm completely immersed in this world where every freaking story
00:10:20.600
But if you were not paying attention to that bubble that I'm in,
00:10:31.400
That does not seem like a healthy situation, does it?
00:10:45.240
Well, part of the reason that my bubble is different is I listen to a lot of
00:11:01.000
These Somali, basically, money laundering frauds.
1.00
00:11:05.480
And that they had, the whistleblowers all had the same experience.
00:11:10.360
That they were told that they couldn't talk about it,
00:11:14.200
or they'd be blamed, they'd be accused of being racist or Islamophobic.
00:11:26.200
now we can talk about things that we should be talking about.
00:11:28.680
So if Trump had not been elected, and he had not basically gotten rid of DEI
00:11:46.440
and our blocks on free speech, if Elon Musk had not purchased Twitter,
00:12:01.800
You know, you probably saw the other day that Elon Musk
00:12:05.720
estimated that at the low bound, the theft might be $1.5 trillion a year.
00:12:17.080
That would be the entire, essentially, the deficit.
00:12:22.600
And you might remember, I keep bragging about this,
00:12:27.080
That I told you that people like me who have a background in budgeting,
00:12:32.920
you know, that was my day job in the corporate world, was a lot of budgeting.
00:12:38.120
You develop a kind of intuition about where something is wrong.
00:12:42.520
And several years ago, I started saying, I don't see how we could possibly be in this much of a deficit
00:12:52.360
hole unless the amount of fraud was so high that it's unimaginable.
00:12:59.960
Now, at the time, I did not get a lot of agreement.
00:13:06.520
But today, I think every one of you agrees today that at least some big portion of it was just fraud.
00:13:21.160
Anyway, I saw that HUD thinks they may have found 5.8 billion in improper rental aid payments,
00:13:36.040
Now, they haven't confirmed that, but there's some red flags.
00:13:41.800
And what I like about this is that I'm noticing in the government
00:13:47.320
that they've turned spotting fraud into a competitive sport.
00:13:52.040
So you should expect to see more and more department heads say, hey, we found some fraud.
00:14:03.880
So we're going from an environment in which if you mentioned the fraud, you were racist,
00:14:10.280
to an environment in which people are competing to see who can find the most.
00:14:16.360
And people are competing to come up with the best idea for finding the most.
00:14:29.480
Speaking of that, Health and Human Services just froze child care payments to Minnesota
00:14:38.920
Not all of it, but massive amounts were apparently going to fraud.
00:14:42.840
But at the same time, what do you think Tim Walsh said when it was announced that the government
00:14:54.120
was going to stop payments because the payments were almost all fraud?
00:15:09.880
He's politicizing the issue to defund programs to help Minnesotans.
00:15:20.040
Does he really think that Trump sits down in the morning and says, what can I do?
00:15:24.200
How can I hurt those children in Minnesota in a way that will help me?
00:15:33.000
It's so obvious he has no real response to that.
00:15:36.840
How in the world does that make sense to his followers?
00:15:42.600
Oh, Trump has a long-term plan to damage Minnesota.
00:15:57.800
You've got to press yourself up to make that make sense.
00:16:07.480
But what are the odds that Trump is doing it because it's part of his long game to hurt Minnesota?
00:16:27.160
And he said that they're using AI and Palantir to flag potential
00:16:34.920
So I think that's the model you're going to see.
00:16:37.640
I think people will be doing the Bill Pulte model where you partner with maybe private companies.
00:16:46.040
And the private companies spot potential flags or I should say flags for stuff.
00:16:55.160
So basically, every part of the government that gives away money is probably going to move to that model.
00:17:10.120
And there should be no surprise, Fox News is reporting, that now we know from new surveillance
00:17:17.800
photos, surveillance video, that the parents in Minnesota might have been in on the fraud.
00:17:25.800
So they've got video all the way back from 2018, of course, in which parents are seen to be checking
00:17:33.320
their kids into daycare, but then just turning around and taking them out.
00:17:37.880
So I guess it was the checking in part that made it look legitimate.
00:17:42.840
Are you surprised that parents might be part of the scheme?
00:17:55.320
I saw Liz Collins reports, reporting on this, that there's a former homeland security agent who
0.99
00:18:02.680
claims that when reports were given to the Minnesota, let's see, he said that he claims that prosecutors
00:18:14.440
ignored Minnesota daycare fraud cases and that they, quote, just evaporated.
00:18:25.720
And there was no shortage of people reporting it.
00:18:30.120
And when it was reported, they just slow walked it and then made it go away.
00:18:38.840
Do you know how much ignoring you would have to do?
00:18:41.160
You would have to have a lot of people ignoring a lot of things for a long time.
00:18:53.560
The only way that could happen, says me, is if people were afraid of being called racist.
00:19:00.200
So when you calculate the damage of DEI, if I were doing the analysis of what is the damage of DEI,
00:19:13.240
you could come up with a long list, but you'd have to add trillions because of this.
00:19:26.360
Now, here's more good news that may not turn into good news.
00:19:32.680
But if you're on social media and you're watching the bubble that I'm watching,
00:19:38.440
you see people like Elon Musk talking about the fraud and Doge and talking about it.
00:19:44.680
You'll see people like David Sachs and Chamath and lots of other smart people.
00:19:52.680
So the good news is that the smartest people in the country, Bill Ackman would be another,
00:19:59.720
the smartest people in the country are very engaged in figuring out how to fix this.
00:20:05.880
Because all of their wealth, at least anything that depends on the United States, is completely
00:20:11.480
a risk. Now, I don't think that's the only reason that they're so engaged, but they've not been
00:20:17.960
engaged before. And they're the exact same people you would want to fix any big problem, right?
00:20:26.760
If you said, we have this big problem that nobody's been able to fix, and we need the smartest people
00:20:33.160
in the room to really get engaged. Well, we got that. Amazing. We finally have the smartest
00:20:41.320
people in the room all on the same side, for the most part, and focused. But here's the problem.
00:20:49.960
We might have too much diverse energy. So they're not all saying exactly the same thing.
00:20:59.800
And it's unclear what plan would be the best, as Cernovich added into the list of the smartest people.
00:21:06.360
So my question is this. How do we get to the point where we've focused all that smart energy?
00:21:17.240
Because we're not really at a place where we can focus it.
00:21:24.920
So if you said, Scott, that's easy. All you need is a fraud czar. I don't think so.
00:21:32.600
I mean, that might be part of the solution. But the fraud czar would get destroyed the same way
00:21:39.400
they went after Musk. Now, Musk is, you know, there's only one Musk. So he's managed to recover
00:21:47.560
and even grow his business and get his compensation from Tesla and everything else. But that's rare.
00:21:54.680
I don't know how many people could have survived the attacks that went after Musk. So it would really be
00:22:03.160
hard to get a fraud czar who had that much risk tolerance, but also had the skill. And I don't know
00:22:12.280
if it's enough. And we also know that justice moves too slowly. I've heard a number of people say,
00:22:22.920
Scott, all they have to do is prosecute some high level people and this will stop. You know,
00:22:30.600
if Larry Ellison, the AG in Minnesota, let's say he quickly got indicted. Well, I don't know,
00:22:41.160
would that stop anything? How long would it take? So justice moves too slowly to be
00:22:49.880
the biggest part of the answer, but obviously has to be part of the answer.
00:22:55.800
But I like the fact, as I mentioned before, that finding the fraud and doing something bad
00:23:02.280
is a competitive sport. So I think the best case scenario is that private companies find a way to
00:23:11.720
free market this situation. So you've got Palantir and other AI companies that can be helpful. So they
00:23:20.600
might have, you know, a massive, potentially, they might have a massive financial payoff.
00:23:29.160
No, Ricoh would be slower because you have to, Ricoh, you have to pull together like years of
00:23:35.320
everything. I mean, that would be slower. We need to do it probably, but it'd be slower.
00:23:42.520
So what was I saying? So if you added the AI companies that might have some incentive to spot
00:23:52.520
the fraud, and then you added that the QI-TAM rule that I didn't know about, but apparently it's
00:23:59.160
been a thing for years, that allows you an individual, private person, to ask the government
00:24:08.120
to sue somebody who has been ripping off the government. And then if you, as the whistleblower,
00:24:13.640
let's say, if they succeed and they claw back some money, you get a portion of it.
00:24:20.120
And it could be big. It could be very big money. So here's the good news. When I talk about the
00:24:27.960
smartest people being fully engaged, they're also the smartest people at creating new businesses that
00:24:35.160
didn't exist, right? Every one of them that I mentioned has done entrepreneurial things.
00:24:43.320
They've got a track record, right? Every one of them. And that is exactly the people you want
00:24:51.800
designing a new system. So it might not be that there's one path to fix it. It might be that the
00:25:00.840
free market has now surfaced what looks like a set of variables that could sort of automatically
00:25:11.480
drift in the direction of getting rid of the fraud, because essentially it would monetize getting rid of
00:25:17.640
fraud, which hasn't really been the case. Well, it has been the case, but not everybody knew it.
00:25:25.160
And now lots of people know it. So that's the good news. All right, let's talk about Pam Bondi,
00:25:34.040
who is not working fast enough, people say, and has prosecuted no high profile cases.
00:25:42.120
So I'm going to wade into this at my risk. You may have heard me say this on social media.
00:25:56.760
It goes like this. If I put the, what I call the Dilbert filter on this situation,
00:26:03.560
how do we know, we who are not lawyers, how do we know how long something should take?
00:26:08.680
How do we know how many cases she's working on? How do we know how hard it is to staff
0.54
00:26:16.280
when you can't get, when, when lawyers are like 90% Democrat, but you don't want to staff up with
00:26:24.680
Democrats if the whole job is to go after Democrats? How long does it take to staff up?
00:26:32.040
What kind of cases is she working on that are exactly what she should be working on? But they
0.99
00:26:41.080
just take a long time because they're complicated. So the higher profile of the case and the more
00:26:47.720
complicated the case, the more you should expect it would take longer than a year, even to get to
00:26:53.800
indictments. So case in point, I guess Kash Patel has recommended to the Department of Justice to look
00:27:03.320
into the whole situation with the Russia collusion hoax. Now the Russia collusion hoax is massively
00:27:13.720
complicated. It involves everybody from ex to current CIA and involves two parts. One is making it easier
00:27:25.560
for Democrats to get elected and the other is making it harder for Republicans to stay out of jail. So it
00:27:33.320
involves everything from the original meetings that Obama had, the special councils, the raid on Mar-a-Lago.
00:27:45.960
There are so many moving parts. If Pam Bodley only had one thing to work on for the rest of her life,
00:27:54.280
how long would that take? Then you multiply that by a thousand. Because remember, you've got the J6 stuff,
1.00
00:28:03.400
how complicated would it be to get the other side of the J6 stuff, that that was all a plot,
00:28:11.000
and then to wrap it all into a RICO? Because a RICO case has to show a pattern of behavior
00:28:18.280
that is stretched over time and involves multiple people. So let me say this as clearly as possible.
00:28:28.760
I am as frustrated as you are that nobody important goes to jail. Can we all get on the same side of that?
00:28:36.120
You know, none of us think it's fast enough. But we also don't know what would be fast enough.
00:28:46.680
What would it look like if she were doing a great job? And what would it look like if she were not?
00:28:53.160
Could we tell? So one lawyer online said to me, Scott, what you, I'm paraphrasing you, what you're missing
00:29:01.880
is that big law firms are already staffed up to surge like whole groups of people into different jobs
00:29:11.880
for the government or for a private company. So the thinking is that it's just business as normal
00:29:19.400
to be way overworked, but to instantly or quickly correct the fact that you have too much work
00:29:27.720
by going to big law firms and say, hey, we need, we need two dozen lawyers today.
00:29:33.000
You know, can you just give us a whole staff? And then those law firms, I didn't know this by the way,
00:29:44.840
However, how does it work when the people you're going after are Democrats?
00:29:49.800
Do you think there's a big law firm that can give you two dozen lawyers that are both good at what
00:29:57.320
they do, not doing anything more important? You know, somebody said it's not the best lawyers
00:30:04.360
that they send for that, but I don't know about that. You know, they didn't already have something
00:30:09.000
important to do. So they could sort of instantly go over and that they would do a
00:30:14.440
non-biased job instead of dragging their feet. Because all you would have to do is get an anti-Trumper
00:30:23.400
in the mix. You know, one lawyer who drags their feet and they can just drag this thing forever.
00:30:30.840
So I am skeptical that the existing model of surging lawyers into a high profile, you know,
00:30:40.600
high workload situation could work in this situation. It might work in normal situations.
00:30:49.240
And how long will it take before John Brennan is indicted?
00:30:54.200
Anyway, so don't get mad at me. I'm the Dilber filter messenger to tell you that
00:31:01.080
if there's a lot of people involved and it's complicated, it's going to take way longer than
00:31:07.080
you want it to. Does everybody agree with that? Just that. We're all equally frustrated.
00:31:16.520
But whenever you have this complexity and this setup, it's always going to take longer than you
00:31:23.800
want. And that would be sort of normal, just normal life. Anyway.
00:31:31.640
So apparently, according to Wall Street Apes on X, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison,
00:31:43.800
this is Wall Street Apes framing of it, admits the Somalians were imported to vote Democrat.
00:31:51.480
Essentially he did. He said, quote, well, the Somali community is critical. In my own election,
00:31:57.640
I wouldn't be in office without the help of the Somali community. Okay. Now that alone is not illegal.
00:32:09.400
But we do know that the Somali community has made a difference, not just in Minnesota, but also in Ohio
00:32:17.400
and Virginia, maybe some other places. So at what point does it become illegal?
00:32:24.280
It's not illegal to have people legally enter the country. If they entered legally,
0.99
00:32:34.040
and then they were legally allowed to vote, it would just be a good strategy, but it wouldn't be illegal,
00:32:40.440
right? However, did you know Scott Pressler was reporting this yesterday? And just think about the
00:32:49.320
fact that what I'm about to tell you, you probably did not know. And it's been true for a while,
00:32:57.400
that if you work for a building, so if you're an employee of some large apartment building,
00:33:06.120
it doesn't matter what kind of employee, you can vouch for an unlimited number of people who live in the
00:33:13.080
building or allegedly live in the building, you can vouch that they are legally allowed to vote,
00:33:22.760
even if they don't have ID. So in other words, if I understand this correctly, the janitor of a big
00:33:29.560
building could vouch for every person in the building, even if every one of them had been illegal.
00:33:39.960
And that's actually a written law in Minnesota. It's a law. Now, when that law got passed,
00:33:50.920
what was anybody thinking? How in the world? Yeah, there's some paperwork to vouch. How in the world
00:33:57.400
did anybody think that was sort of anything but cheating in the election? What would be the other
00:34:02.680
reason? You know, usually the Democrats say, well, we don't want to suppress voting,
00:34:08.760
so we want to make it easy to vote. There's no way. There's no way that that particular law was to
00:34:16.440
stop suppression of voting. That was purely to make it easier to cheat. Obviously, you can't say that any
00:34:25.640
other way. Well, are any other states or cities having problems with fraud? Oh, surprise. Real clear
00:34:35.720
investigation says that there was some guy, a city official in Austin who had, let's see,
00:34:47.320
given a bunch of fake contracts to friends that were fairly gigantic, had been doing it for a while.
00:34:55.000
So let's see, how much did he give? He was using the city credit card, which he was allowed to use for
00:35:03.800
city services. But instead of doing city services, he used it to pay 30 different vendors. But the city
00:35:12.120
auditor could only verify that eight of them were even real companies. And of the real companies,
00:35:18.280
do you think those are relatives too? Or people who gave me kickbacks?
00:35:25.960
So most of the money, or a lot of it, went to places that appeared to be fake.
00:35:31.720
At the same time, the guy who was doing this was earning over half a million dollars a year in salary.
00:35:39.480
So he was overpaid, and he was just massively doling out the city credit card to his presumably
00:35:46.840
fraudster friends. Now, how long ago was the first time you heard me say this,
00:35:54.760
that all local government is criminal. All local government is criminal. And the reason is this,
00:36:03.160
because there's always somebody who's in charge of who gets the money. And there's never enough audits,
00:36:10.600
let's say security, to stop it from happening fraudulently. So again, a lot of money involved,
00:36:17.880
people involved, time goes by, poor auditing procedures. Was this predictable? Yes. If you
00:36:27.320
took a dart and threw it at a map of the United States and hit any city, you don't think this is
00:36:33.240
happening anywhere else? I'll bet some form of this, maybe not as bad, but I'll bet you some form of this
00:36:40.280
is 100% in every city, 100%. Because whoever has the wallet will be just infinitely approached by
00:36:50.840
people who say, you know, if I got a little bit of what's in that city wallet, I'll bet you a lot of
00:36:57.480
people would donate to your campaign. There's no way the system could produce, if you saw it on paper,
00:37:04.440
if somebody said, we've never had a city before, but we're gonna, we're gonna invent a thing called
00:37:10.600
a city. And here's how it will be run. And you simply just drew on paper, who has the control?
00:37:20.360
Who's watching it? How money flows? How money is allocated? Anybody smart would know that that
00:37:27.240
was a settle for fraud. So the cities are designed in a way that guarantees fraud,
00:37:35.560
guarantees it. And sure enough, that's what we see.
00:37:40.520
Well, here's a story about further layoffs in the media world. According to The Wrap,
00:37:49.240
entertainment and media layoffs were up 18%. And 17,000 jobs were slashed in 2025.
00:37:57.240
Now, what they mostly mean is the traditional media. So there've been some mergers and cutbacks and
00:38:03.400
stuff. So the traditional media took a hit. But I would argue that that's not the bad news it looks
00:38:12.200
like. Because the independent journalists and the independent media, and I would be part of the
00:38:20.680
independence, vastly increased. So it's not really a story about less media employees. It's more a story
00:38:30.120
about less traditional fake news, stuff we don't want to see media, and way, way, way more Nick
00:38:38.840
Shirley's and Scott Adams's and people who, you know, are doing a show independently. So I think that is an
00:38:53.400
And I love the fact that the jobs that are being created, are being created by the people creating
00:38:59.640
them. So it's not like a boss had to create a company that hired people. It's more like people like
00:39:08.440
me said, what happens if I turn this camera on and start talking? Can I monetize that? Yep. Turns out I can.
00:39:19.160
Well, according to SciPost, Karina Petrova, there's a study that says that shocking headlines
00:39:29.720
make people skeptical. But then over time, they come to believe the thing that was the shocking
00:39:36.360
headline. Does that surprise you? So the idea is, when you first see a headline that says,
00:39:43.480
shocking thing happened here or there, and then you read it, you go, well, you know, I don't know.
00:39:49.320
I'm not sure that's true. Yeah, everybody says everything's shocking.
00:39:53.480
So you automatically put some critical thinking on a headline that just seems a little overdone.
00:40:00.200
But then over time, you forget where you saw the headline. And you start thinking it must be a fact.
00:40:07.400
So you remember the story, but you won't remember your initial skepticism. So it makes it
00:40:15.560
believable over time. I think probably only if you hear it repeated.
00:40:32.680
We talked about this before, but this just blows my mind. So San Francisco,
00:40:38.600
San Francisco, a city you would associate with being lax on crime, right? So San Francisco,
00:40:46.600
most people would agree, left and right, that they would be soft on crime compared to other places.
00:40:53.160
But despite being soft on crime, apparently they have this license plate reading technology called
00:41:02.600
Flock, F-L-O-C-K. And it can read license plates. And it has, they've got about 500 of them
00:41:11.800
in major roadways in San Francisco, around San Francisco. And that is centralized. It must be in
00:41:18.280
other cities too. So they have a centralized nationwide database of more than 1 billion
00:41:27.640
Now they're being sued by someone who doesn't want them to be able to track you if there's no warrant.
00:41:37.080
So if there's no, you know, reason to track you, at least one individual is suing,
00:41:43.800
because he says that should only be, they should only track you if they have a warrant. And these are
00:41:50.920
warrantless. So apparently you can, in most cases, you could track your car in San Francisco from
00:41:57.880
wherever it starts to wherever it ends up. How comfortable are you with that? Because remember,
00:42:06.680
it's tracking everyone. Well, how in the world do you stop people from tracking their spouse?
00:42:15.240
Don't you think that every engineer who has access to this thing
00:42:18.440
is already tracking their ex? Find out where their ex goes when they go to work?
00:42:30.440
But it's weird that the most lenient city would be doing this, of all things.
00:42:37.800
Now, so far, all I know about it is it tracks license plates. I don't believe it does facial
00:42:44.520
recognition, but it would be easy to add it. And I don't believe it has a full AI capability,
00:42:52.760
although obviously that would be coming. So if you take a 500 camera system and you can track license
00:43:01.240
plates, you can track faces, which I just assume is coming, and you can use AI to make it,
00:43:08.120
you know, identify and flag things, you have created quite a monster. That is a monster where you're not
00:43:16.680
going to know, where does that end up? Like, how bad will that become? You know, if they do it gradually,
00:43:25.880
like, well, it's just license plates, then it doesn't seem as scary. But once you realize there's nothing to
00:43:32.520
stop them, really, from having facial recognition and AI. What in the world could that become?
00:43:41.640
I don't know. So we always talk about this California wealth tax, where they're floating the idea in
00:43:49.080
California that some billionaires would have to give up 1% of their wealth per year for five years.
00:43:56.360
So in the end, 5% of their wealth would be taken in taxes. But apparently, I didn't know this,
00:44:03.000
but even Gavin Newsom opposes it. But Bill Ackman, so it might not happen, because, you know,
00:44:08.680
if the governor opposes it, he could veto it. Bill Ackman warns that no one would say
00:44:14.440
if California implements a wealth tax. Now, we've already seen some billionaires
00:44:21.480
that the Californians say they're going to move. And it could be a bluff. Maybe they prefer to stay,
00:44:29.640
but they're making sure that people know that if they do go, you know, everybody would go. And they
00:44:37.240
would turn California into something it hasn't been. But there have been some other options for raising
00:44:47.960
money that have been raised. First of all, let me say the obvious. No one wants higher taxes
00:44:57.480
when your estate is wasting the money. No one wants higher taxes in general. But in the current
00:45:04.520
context of massive fraud, it's going to be really hard to increase taxes on anybody if you know that
00:45:11.480
it's just been wasted. So we'll see how that goes. But some people have proposed that if you just raise
00:45:19.960
the sales tax, it would be a more reasonable approach. The idea is that it's automatically
00:45:29.160
progressive. So if a billionaire buys a boat, a yacht, that's a lot of sales tax. But if you get a
00:45:40.600
stick of gum, it's a little bit of sales tax, but not much. However, the sales tax in California is already
00:45:50.360
is insanely high. I forget what it is. So I'm not in favor of sales tax. It's just an alternative.
00:45:57.880
However, even billionaires agree with the following, that billionaires have a way to
00:46:04.040
avoid taxes that ordinary people don't. And that maybe that needs to be close. Did you know how that
00:46:10.920
works? I used Grok to give me a little tutorial on how the billionaires avoid taxes.
00:46:19.960
And let me see if I can explain that in a way you would understand.
00:46:27.880
So a normal person gets normal income and they pay income tax.
00:46:33.080
A billionaire might not have income at all. They might just have a lot of assets.
00:46:41.480
So one of the ways that they can avoid paying income taxes is to make sure that their businesses
00:46:49.000
do not give them a salary so there's no income. But where do they get the money to spend
00:46:56.680
if they don't have an income? And the answer is they can take a loan so they can go to a bank and
00:47:04.440
they can say, give me a large personal loan. Now, it wouldn't be large compared to their assets.
00:47:12.840
It would still be tiny, tiny, but it would be large to us. And it would be so much money
00:47:18.200
that they could spend it like income by mansions and yachts and stuff without any income.
00:47:26.200
The bank would say, can you pay back this loan? And the billionaire would say, are you kidding?
00:47:32.680
I have, I'm worth, you know, $20 billion. I'm only asking you for half a billion.
00:47:39.960
So the bank says, that's a pretty good deal. You know, we're definitely going to get paid back.
00:47:44.600
Not definitely, but probably. So they give them a loan and it's collateralized
00:47:51.720
by the assets of the billionaire. So the bank is happy. They always know they can, you know,
00:47:57.400
seize the opt or seize the mansion or seize the stock if something goes wrong. Then the billionaire
00:48:04.920
spends the personal loan just because it's their cash. They can do whatever they want.
00:48:12.040
It's not a business loan, it's a personal loan. Sort of like a line of credit on your house,
00:48:18.280
but just the big version. Then when they die, the billionaire, they can transfer those assets to their
00:48:25.720
heirs at a stepped up fair market value. And even the heirs avoid taxes. Now, I believe there's still a,
00:48:36.120
what do you call it? A estate tax. So if you didn't know, the estate tax over a certain level is 40%.
00:48:45.320
So when I die, if I do, my estate tax above a certain,
00:48:52.600
certain dollar amount will be taxed at 40%, which is pretty egregious, but, uh, but it's happening.
00:49:02.360
Anyway, does that make sense? I've never really, I never really spent two minutes looking into
00:49:08.200
why billionaires don't pay taxes. So I would agree, but that seems like a loophole that needs to be closed.
00:49:16.040
It seems like it. Well, according to the Epoch Times, the CEO of the IRS, I didn't know they had a CEO,
00:49:28.840
says that 94% of middle-class taxpayers will see tax relief next year. So that would be under the big,
00:49:36.040
beautiful bill, I guess. Do you believe that? I'm primed to never believe anything about taxes going down.
00:49:48.360
I always think taxes are going up, even if all the reporting is going down for some people.
00:49:53.240
So I'm going to say maybe, maybe, but probably not. So it doesn't matter who's president. It doesn't
00:50:05.560
matter what the law is. I never believe taxes will go down. Well, did you know, there's a study,
00:50:16.920
side post is writing about this of Vladimir Henry, that mass shootings increase the local turnout for
00:50:23.560
voting, but do not shift presidential choices. How many of you would have known that without
00:50:30.200
looking at a study? That if there's a mass shooting in the news, uh, locally, you might get a higher
00:50:37.720
turnout for a vote, but they don't, they don't change what they vote for. The people who wanted
00:50:43.480
Democrats to get rid of guns still want it. And the Republicans say, well, it's the cost of being
00:50:50.520
a free country. Don't take my guns. Um, so they both, so they both get more votes, but it doesn't change
00:50:59.240
the mix. They kind of just asked me, I knew that. Well, Daniel Greenfield of Front Page Magazine is
00:51:08.600
reporting that the MSNBC, which is now rebranded as MSNOW, the ratings have collapsed, as you probably
00:51:17.080
know. Uh, how bad is it? Let's say, according to Nielsen Media Research, this is fairly new,
00:51:24.680
Fox News averaged 2.72 million primetime viewers and 287,000 viewers in the key demographic, 25 to 54.
00:51:36.200
So that was up. It was up 14%. Uh, and the, the key demo group was up 18%. That's pretty damn good.
00:51:46.840
How did MSNBC do? Oh, oh, oh, sorry. They averaged 920,000,
00:51:54.600
under 23,000, down, down 25% since 2024. And only 81,000 in the key demo. That was down 39%.
00:52:08.360
Wow. And CNN did even worse. Now the reporting doesn't give reasons.
00:52:20.280
Would you like to know some reasons why MSNOW is down and Fox News is up?
00:52:25.560
Well, I've said, I say this a lot, but, um, MSNOW has bad producers and their on-air talent looks mentally
00:52:38.200
insane. Right? If you look at any show on MSNOW, it's poorly produced. You know, it'd be a table of
00:52:49.080
people who look crazy, just yelling at each other, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know,
00:52:54.040
Rachel Maddow looks like she just has mental illness. And they just seem a little weak and weird and
00:53:02.440
just somebody you don't want to watch. But also none of the shows are engineered to be as interesting
00:53:11.080
as Fox. So if you've never watched, um, the show called The Five on, uh, Fox, you haven't seen what
00:53:20.040
good producing looks like. So everything from the selection of the cast, to how, how many there are,
00:53:28.840
to, um, you know, how they, how they always have the one person who's sort of the foil, you know,
00:53:36.120
the Democrat foil, um, everything about that is well designed and the people don't look mentally insane.
00:53:44.040
So over time, you can completely see how Fox News could, um, and they do, they attract people from the
00:53:52.440
other side. But if you're, if you're a Republican and you turn on MS now, you just go, what the, ugh,
00:54:01.960
what the hell? It's just all poorly produced. So, and poorly produced and they don't have as good a
00:54:09.240
host. They don't, they don't have a Greg Goffeld, for example. Right? Who, who is a Greg Goffeld?
00:54:17.160
I just don't have one. It makes a big difference. Well, here's a weird story I don't understand.
00:54:27.160
So are you aware that in Iran, uh, I guess this week there were massive street protests
00:54:35.640
and, you know, streets are full of people who are bad at the regime. Now, I think that's happened
00:54:41.080
before, but it didn't turn into anything. Yeah. Dana Pree now, Jesse Waters, every one of them are
00:54:49.160
more talented than anything you see on MS now. So at the same time, the Iranian public is doing some
00:54:59.000
massive protests, uh, in Israel, according to the Jerusalem post, Mossad. So that would be Israel's,
0.75
00:55:07.400
you know, intelligence agency. They posted a message on X in, in Farsi, the language of Iran,
00:55:15.800
urging demonstrators to act, saying that it was with them in the streets.
00:55:22.360
It's with them in the streets. And it said, go out together into the streets. The time has come.
00:55:31.640
It says, we are with you, not only from a distance and verbally, we are with you in the field.
00:55:41.000
So Mossad is admitting that they're literally on the ground participating with the protesters.
00:55:50.520
Now, does that seem like a good idea to you? I'd love to know why they thought that was a good idea.
00:55:56.760
Because everything I know about people is that the Iranians would be maybe plenty happy to find their
0.99
00:56:04.440
own way away from the regime. But as soon as they're, uh, as soon as the country that's bombed them
00:56:12.600
says, you know, I'm with you, doesn't that immediately, doesn't that immediately make them
00:56:18.920
bond together and say, wait a minute, wait a minute. This is up to us to get out here.
00:56:28.840
I don't understand. Maybe, I'm just speculating, maybe Mossad thinks that if the Iranians think
00:56:37.400
they have support from even Israel, that it would embolden them. That's not the way things usually work.
00:56:46.840
Usually the, you know, usually it works the other way. So, you know, they're not stupid, obviously.
00:56:53.400
Fake news? No, it was actually on the Mossad X account. So the X account is, uh, I think that's real.
00:57:01.640
Huh. Anyway, it's either very clever, uh, or it's not. I don't know. I'm just gonna watch that one.
00:57:15.000
Um, according to TechCrunch, the number of followers you have on social media has never mattered less.
00:57:23.400
Now here they're talking about people monetizing, but apparently, um, the thing that moves your traffic
00:57:31.480
is not how many, not how many followers you amassed. It has to do with how good your clipping service is.
00:57:41.000
So apparently there are all these young people who are making clips. Um, and that's the way people
00:57:48.840
discover things now. They call it a teenage clipping army. So it's a, now a well-developed market.
00:57:58.040
So if you were an independent, um, internet producer,
00:58:04.520
you could amass a very large following. Let's say in my case, I've got 1.3 million followers on X.
00:58:12.760
But still, even with 1.3 million followers, um, a lot of people who follow me don't see my content.
00:58:21.480
And I'm not alone. You know, people have been complaining about this for a while,
00:58:26.200
uh, that they amass all these followers and they can tell that the followers are not seeing their
00:58:31.800
content. But what they are seeing or what people are seeing is clips. Now you may have noticed that
00:58:40.520
there are more of more clips from my content than you've ever seen before. I don't pay for that in case
00:58:46.600
you're wondering, right? Uh, but you've seen, uh, yeah, you, you, you seen Jay and, uh, is it Jason,
00:58:57.160
Jason Cohen? You've seen some other people clipping me and that does make a big difference sometimes.
00:59:04.840
It just depends if the clip goes viral. So in case you're wondering, I do not pay for a clipping service
00:59:14.200
of teenagers. Well, did you hear the story that apparently earlier this month, the CIA launched a
00:59:25.000
military attack on a, uh, base, like a base or a port in Venezuela and it blew up some shit and, uh, we
0.65
00:59:35.480
never heard of it. But the weird part is Venezuela didn't mention it. How in the world do we, do we,
00:59:44.120
attack a land-based major facility in Venezuela weeks ago and Venezuela never mentioned it? Yeah.
00:59:55.080
How in the world? But apparently Trump wasn't happy about that. So he mentioned it on a radio show.
01:00:03.800
And he said that, uh, they destroyed quote, a big plant or facility where ships come in
01:00:09.080
and then he was asked who did it. And he was shy about it, which everybody assumes means the CIA.
01:00:17.560
And then apparently Trump wanted Venezuela to know about it or the world to know about it. So he,
01:00:23.480
he outed it. Some in the CIA are not happy that he outed it. But obviously, obviously we didn't intend
01:00:31.000
it to be a secret because we would have assumed Venezuela would have mentioned it, but they didn't.
01:00:36.360
So he did. Anyway, uh, on the, on the Venezuela side, um, I'm loving this story about the,
01:00:47.880
well, let me give you some context. Have you ever watched a movie or a TV show where the villain
01:00:53.960
was the interesting one? And then you found, you found yourself rooting for the villain
01:01:00.600
and you didn't feel good about yourself. Like I can't, I can't root for the villain.
01:01:05.800
Well, I'm having that experience in the real world because one of the tankers, uh, it's empty,
01:01:12.360
so there's no oil in it. Um, but the U S was going to board and seize a tanker, uh, that was leaving
01:01:18.200
Venezuela. And the reason we had the authority to grab it is that it was allegedly, uh, misidentifying
01:01:27.480
itself and maybe, maybe had a fake flag. Um, but instead of, instead of surrendering,
01:01:36.200
which you would expect the tanker to do if the entire, if the U S Navy told you to slow down,
01:01:43.000
we're going to board you, you would not expect them to run for it because they know they can't,
01:01:48.120
outrun us. Right. But, but these are the bad guys. Yeah. I'm just using my analogy of bad guys.
01:01:55.160
So the bad guys decide to do a U-turn and instead of surrendering, they're going to run for it.
01:02:01.800
Now, to me, first of all, I thought, how in the world could that work? But now there's a new twist.
01:02:10.200
Apparently they painted a Russian flag on the side of it to pretend that they were a Russian flag ship.
01:02:19.080
Now, apparently this slowed down our Navy because we didn't want to seize a Russian flagged ship.
01:02:26.440
We wanted to seize it if it was misidentified, but we can't prove it's misidentified because we don't
01:02:33.480
know for sure if Russia said, okay, yeah, you're Russian. You know, there's a, there's a process
01:02:39.880
by which you would reflag, but there's nothing to stop Russia from saying, all right, yeah, sure.
01:02:45.320
Yeah. If you want to, just say you're Russian. And then they paint a Russian flag on the side
01:02:50.680
of the ship and then they can't be taken down. Again, I'll put it in the context of,
01:02:57.640
I don't want to root for the bad guys, but if they get away with this, that's pretty good.
01:03:06.040
That's pretty good. It doesn't, I don't think it makes much difference to the United States,
01:03:10.360
whether they get away with it or not. But if somebody actually figured out how to thwart
01:03:17.160
the US Navy by painting a poorly produced flag on the side of the ship, I would have a little
01:03:23.800
bit of respect for that in the, in the bad guy way. Well, there's a story that says, according to Marjorie
01:03:33.320
Taylor Greene, who is now out of politics, she says that when she tried to get Trump to agree to release
01:03:41.640
the Epstein files, that part of that conversation involved Trump saying, I remember this is Marjorie
01:03:48.360
Taylor Greene, she's the one who heard it, that if they release him, quote, his friends will get hurt.
01:03:57.320
Now that needs a lot more context, doesn't it? Because if the only reason that Trump doesn't
01:04:04.520
want the Epstein apology released is because his friends would get hurt, that might not be a good
01:04:11.240
reason. But if he also knows that his friends are innocent, then you would care. I think you would
01:04:20.600
care if your friends got hurt. And I don't, I don't disagree with that impulse to protect your friends,
01:04:27.960
if you know that they're not guilty of anything. I suspect though, that's not the one and only reason
01:04:35.560
he doesn't want it released. I suspect that the, you know, the intelligence agencies are behind
01:04:42.520
some of the suppression, I think. So it seems likely to me that the CIA would suppress anything that was
01:04:51.880
bad for them forever, but they wouldn't allow anything that was bad for Trump's friends to be
01:04:58.520
released. So if Trump says it would be bad for my friends, he might be leaving out the part that says
01:05:06.840
you're not going to learn anything useful, because the CIA is definitely not going to show you that.
01:05:11.800
And they do have the power to block anything. So I would wonder if there's more context to his comments.
01:05:18.920
So I do agree that if he knew, and he probably does, that nothing good could come out of it,
01:05:29.320
except for, it would hurt his friends, but in return, nothing good could come out of it.
01:05:35.400
What are you going to do? What would you do? If you knew nothing good could come out of it,
01:05:41.160
except it would hurt your friends. I don't know. I might block it. I don't think that's the worst
01:05:49.800
impulse in the world. Anyway, I guess January is the month where we have to worry about the
01:05:58.200
government shutting down over healthcare being continuously funded or not. But pollster Frank Luntz
01:06:06.760
thinks that it would be bad for Trump if it doesn't get funded. I guess that means bad for Republicans
01:06:15.560
in general, because Trump won't be running again. But do you believe that? Do you think that if the
01:06:23.880
Republicans say, no, it's a waste of money, we're not going to fund it for another three years,
01:06:31.320
do you think that that would hurt the Republicans more? The polling seems to suggest yes.
01:06:37.480
But I wonder if that's real. Because I think people just always just defer to their side.
01:06:44.360
So if the Republicans shut down things, I don't know. I can see how that would be bad for Republicans,
01:06:52.760
but not guaranteed. All right. One more sip of water. One more short story.
01:07:08.840
Okay. So there's a former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, who's now on Russia's Security
01:07:17.720
Council, who said about Zelensky. He was talking about the attack on Putin's residents.
01:07:25.240
And he said that Zelensky was, quote, trying to derail the settlement of the conflict.
01:07:33.640
And then Medved said that Zelensky, he wants war. But here's the provocative part.
01:07:40.280
Well, now at least he'll have to stay in hiding for the rest of his worthless life.
01:07:45.880
How would you like to be Zelensky? And allegedly, but we don't know,
01:07:51.880
allegedly tried to assassinate Putin in his residence.
01:07:57.640
And knowing that Putin is the most assassinating guy in the world, maybe not counting Israel.
01:08:05.240
So Israel does assassinate anybody they can get to. But even Israel didn't assassinate the supreme leader.
0.69
01:08:12.600
So if you were going to try to assassinate somebody, and it didn't work,
01:08:19.400
the most dangerous person you could miss would be Putin. He would definitely chase you to the end of
01:08:26.360
the earth to assassinate you back. Am I right? Especially if Zelensky is out of power.
01:08:33.560
The minute that Zelensky is no longer the leader of Ukraine, which has to happen someday,
01:08:41.160
I think Putin is going to give the green light to all of his
01:08:44.920
assassinators to throw him off a balcony somewhere. So when Medvedev says,
01:08:52.440
well, now at least he'll have to stay in hiding for the rest of his worthless life, that's probably true.
01:08:58.680
I don't think there's enough security in the world that could protect Zelensky from Putin. And maybe
01:09:04.920
even the Ukrainians would kill him first for making the deal. I don't know. But if you were Zelensky,
0.88
01:09:11.000
the only way you have to survive is to stay in power. So that's a problem.
01:09:23.320
That's my advice. Never assassinate or attempt to assassinate the most revengey assassinating guy in
01:09:30.040
the world. Now, my other question is this. Apparently, we know that Putin has not lived in any of his
01:09:41.000
residences for three years, specifically because they're harder to defend, and that he's been using
01:09:47.400
an apartment in the Kremlin because it's easier to defend. Now, do you think that Ukraine was not aware
01:09:56.680
of that? So what would be the point of blowing up a residence that has zero chance of having
01:10:04.920
Putin inside it? Is it because he has a family they're going after? That doesn't seem like a good
01:10:11.560
plan. So I'm a little bit skeptical about why that happened. I did say that it would make sense to do
01:10:20.440
a false flag if you were Russia and you wanted to prologue the war or you wanted to do a decapitation
01:10:28.440
strike on Zelensky. It would be a good false flag to say he started it. But did he? Was it a real
01:10:38.600
assassination attempt? Do you think they had the ability to get an asset all the way in there but
01:10:47.320
they didn't have the ability to know he wasn't there? Why would you even do the attack if apparently
01:10:54.760
people knew he was never there? So something about this doesn't add up, but I don't know what it is.
01:11:01.320
All right, ladies and gentlemen, looks like I made it. That is my show for today.
01:11:09.240
Yesterday I missed because I had a coughing attack that lasted a while. But so far, no coughing today.
01:11:18.920
And we're wishing well for Victor Davis Hanson. Apparently he's got some major medical problems.
01:11:26.360
And so give him a thought today. Russia has attempted to assassinate Zelensky several times.
01:11:35.880
Yeah, so they don't need a reason. It's all mysterious.
01:11:42.760
All right, everybody. Have a great day. Hope you enjoyed. I'm going to talk to the locals,
01:11:50.840
my beloved locals people privately in 30 seconds.