Former President Barack Obama has concerns about the structure of Joe Biden s re-election campaign, according to a report from the Washington Post. Other Democrats are also worried about Biden s chances in the upcoming primary election. And Biden is already turning to his last messaging refuge: Stop Donald Trump. Today's episode is brought to you by Vevolution, a podcast about the intersection of technology and politics that takes a deep dive into the intersection between politics and technology. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records, and our ad music is by Build Buildings. We are produced by Riley Bray and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Please take a few minutes to fill out this brief survey. Have a question or suggestion? Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text "ELT" to 741741 and we'll get a live, unedited version of your question answered. Thanks for listening and share it with a friend or become a supporter of our podcast by becoming a patron! Thanks also for supporting our sponsor, Pivotala! P.S. Don t forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our new podcast on Apple Podcasts! and leave us a rating and review our podcast! Subscribe to our newest episode of The Dark Side Of Politics, wherever you get your listening choices are available. It helps us spread the word out there about what we're listening to! and we make it easier to reach more listeners everywhere! Thank you, everyone! Timestamps: 0:00 - 5: 1: 5:30 - 6:35 - 7:40 - 8:15 - 9: What's a good day? 6:20 - What s a good idea? 7:00 | 8:00 9:30 | 11:30 11:40 12:15 13:40 | 13:00 Is Joe Biden's Re-election strategy? 15: What do you think I'm running for 2020? 16:10 17:20 | 16: How do you like it? 17:10 | 17:00 / 16: What s your favorite part? 18:00 & 17:15 | 18: Is it better? 19:20 21:40 & 15:00 +16:00 Or 15:40 + 17:30 + 16:30)
00:00:16.000That apparently includes former President Barack Obama.
00:00:18.000So according to the Washington Post over the weekend, quote, Former President Barack Obama has raised questions about the structure of President Biden's re-election campaign, discussing the matter directly with Biden and telling the president's aides and allies the campaign needs to be empowered to make decisions without clearing them with the White House, according to three people familiar with the conversations.
00:00:36.000In other words, Barack Obama is telling Joe Biden to outsource his campaign to people who are not Joe Biden.
00:00:43.000Now, apparently, Obama grew animated in discussing the election.
00:00:46.000He recommended David Proof, who's Obama's own 2008 campaign manager, to head up Joe Biden's re-elect effort.
00:00:52.000Other Democrats are also deeply worried about Biden's re-elect chances.
00:00:55.000According to the Post, quote, Representative Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who is running for her state's Open Senate seat, has expressed concern to allies she might not be able to win if Biden is at the top of the ticket, according to people familiar with those conversations.
00:01:07.000And according to Axios, quote, many high level Democrats think things are not fine.
00:01:10.000They fear the president's political machine hasn't found the sweet spot between a chill Zen and dangerous complacency and has been way too Zen.
00:01:18.000Biden's allies are worried that his base won't show up.
00:01:22.000You remember Jim Clyburn, the congressman from South Carolina whose endorsement of Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders basically turned the primary elections in 2020 toward Joe Biden.
00:01:32.000Here's Clyburn saying that he's worried that voter turnout is just not going to happen for Joe Biden.
00:01:37.000How worried are you about black voters showing up for President Biden in November?
00:01:53.000I've also seen at least one report indicating that I have sat down with President Biden, and I did with him, and I've told him what my concerns are.
00:02:06.000I have no problem with the Biden administration and what it has done.
00:02:12.000My problem is that we have not been able to break through that MAGA wall in order to get to people exactly what this president has done.
00:03:01.000So last week on Friday, he gave a speech in Valley Forge.
00:03:05.000That was a weird place to effectively launch your re-election campaign, because when you think of Valley Forge, you're immediately thinking of negativity, right?
00:03:30.000Now, when I think about that stuff, I don't think reelect success.
00:03:34.000If you're the president and you're running based on your record and you're running based on what a high achievement your first administration has been, opening your campaign at Valley Forge is not exactly an inspiring moment.
00:03:46.000But we'll get to why Joe Biden picked Valley Forge in just one moment.
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00:04:46.000Puretalk.com Okay, so Joe Biden shows up in Valley Forge to give this speech, and the entire theme of the speech is going to be how he is like George Washington, and it turns out that Donald Trump is like Hitler.
00:05:03.000This is the entire theme of the speech, and it's going to be the theme of the campaign.
00:05:05.000So you think that 2020 was a rough campaign?
00:05:11.000This is the first time, by the way, that Joe Biden has really launched against Trump in the campaign.
00:05:16.000So he's really been attacking quote-unquote MAGA Republicans in the impression that perhaps somebody who is not Donald Trump is going to win the nomination.
00:05:23.000I think Biden is already figuring, I have to define my opponent.
00:06:06.000But flanking yourself with the American flag while you declare that the people who you are running against are threats to the actual democracy It's a little bit much.
00:06:47.000It's the same sort of play that Hillary Clinton tried in 2016 when she suggested that Donald Trump, again, was the leader of the deplorables.
00:06:54.000And it turns out that no one voted for Hillary Clinton.
00:06:59.000Well, what happens this time when you have an ailing, elderly, fragile old man who has tyrannically used the power of the executive in order to overthrow generations of precedent With regard to what the President can and cannot do, standing up there and declaring that his political enemies are actually enemies of the Republic itself.
00:07:18.000So again, that's why he's at Valley Forge.
00:07:30.000Bank shots don't tend to work in politics.
00:07:31.000For those who are not familiar with the basketball terminology, a bank shot is when you use the backboard in order to make a basket.
00:07:37.000In other words, it requires a ricochet.
00:07:39.000Joe Biden attacking Donald Trump as a candidate with reference to January 6th particularly as opposed to what Donald Trump will do as president or what Donald Trump's agenda is as president.
00:07:52.000It's not gonna play because again, the date on the calendar as of today is January 8th of 2024.
00:07:59.000We are now three full years removed from January 6th.
00:08:03.000And in that intervening time, Donald Trump has not been the president of the United States.
00:08:08.000For all the talk about how horrible January 6th was, and I think January 6th actually was quite horrible.
00:08:12.000For all the talk about how January 6th was horrible, it did not actually stop the peaceful transition of power in the United States.
00:09:11.000Okay, no one who has a brain believes this.
00:09:14.000No one believes that January 6th we nearly lost America.
00:09:17.000It was a riot that went out of control and then was cleared up within three hours and then the vote was certified by Republicans.
00:09:24.000And then Joe Biden became president of the United States.
00:09:27.000Does anyone believe that a bunch of dolts and some people who just didn't know what the hell they were doing walking through the Capitol building was a threat to the very fabric of the most powerful republic in the history of the world?
00:09:38.000For all the people who are saying that it was a coup, typically a coup requires you to activate the military and to use that military power in order to take control of the levers of power.
00:09:50.000In the actual building itself, was the crowd generally armed with weaponry?
00:09:55.000They found some knives on people, they find like, lots of guns on people, bazookas, rocket launchers, like what?
00:10:01.000Again, you can point out that January 6th was ugly and terrible and was predicated on a lie, which is that the Vice President of the United States had the power to unilaterally overthrow the certified election results from states.
00:10:21.000The reason that Biden has to say that is because his implication is that if Donald Trump wins the next election, you will never vote again.
00:11:54.000Okay, particularly because the line that he spouts there, which is he says, Donald Trump's campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future.
00:12:01.000He's literally doing an entire speech about January 6th.
00:12:04.000The entire speech is about January 6th.
00:12:06.000Now, again, I may not be amazing with math, but I know how calendars work.
00:12:11.000And I know that January 6th, 2021 is in the past.
00:12:14.000And I noticed that you're at Valley Forge and you are citing the past.
00:12:19.000This is in fact the entire schtick of the campaign.
00:12:22.000So you being out there saying that Donald Trump is all about the past and we're all about the future is obviously not true.
00:12:27.000Also when he says things like, our sacred democracy is at risk.
00:12:29.000Again, I would take that a little more seriously if I didn't believe that you were willing to overthrow pretty much every vestige of democracy in pursuit of political power.
00:12:37.000You attempted to use the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration in order to foist vaccines on 80 million people and we had to sue you to stop it.
00:12:47.000You unilaterally declared that you could get rid of student loan debt after acknowledging you don't have the power to do that.
00:12:52.000I mean, what power has this person not tried to irrigate to himself via the executive?
00:12:59.000Does anyone truly believe that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are deep down devoted, quote unquote, public servants?
00:14:17.000Your tax deduction is based on the sale price of your car.
00:14:19.000Cars for Kids works hard to sell your car for the best price.
00:14:21.000That means more funds for their charity and a bigger tax deduction.
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00:14:30.000So it's a great deal and you're doing something good.
00:15:14.000Again, all of these charges would carry a lot more weight if Kamala Harris, your vice president, had tried to bail rioters out of prison during 2020.
00:15:21.000She tried to bail them out of jail in 2020.
00:15:24.000And again, anyone who thinks that the January 6th events were even remotely on par with prior insurrections in the United States, like, say, the Civil War, is out of their mind.
00:15:42.000Who are the moderates out there who are like, you know, inflation is up 20%.
00:15:46.000The Red Sea is being overrun by hoovy pirates.
00:15:50.000The president might fall down at any moment.
00:15:52.000The Secretary of Defense literally got lost over the weekend.
00:15:54.000We'll talk about that in a little while.
00:15:56.000But I do remember when January 6th was bad.
00:15:59.000I understand that Democrats want to make this thing like a national holiday and that every year we're going to commemorate January 6th as though it is representative of the great breach in American society.
00:16:11.000I think this math works when Joe Biden is not on the ballot.
00:16:14.000But when Joe Biden is on the ballot, I think it's kind of a tough sell.
00:16:18.000Then Joe Biden started talking about how he won the last election, which of course is true.
00:16:23.000What's weird though, is that when he talked about that, he didn't talk about winning the
00:16:27.000Electoral College, which is actually how you win elections.
00:16:29.000That was the entire debate of the January 6th rioters and compatriots. They were talking
00:16:34.000about the Electoral College and state certifications and all the rest. Instead, he cited the
00:16:38.000popular vote, which again is a weird thing.
00:16:40.000That's a weird, we don't decide presidential elections in this country based on the popular
00:16:43.000vote. A record 81 million people voted for my candidacy and to end his presidency.
00:16:53.000Trump lost the popular vote by 7 million.
00:16:57.000Okay, then he suggests that Donald Trump, if he were to lose, or if he were to become president again and had the power, he would invoke the Insurrection Act to go arrest all of his enemies.
00:17:06.000Now again, that is not... When Donald Trump talked about invoking the Insurrection Act, he was talking about to stop actual honest-to-God riots in the streets in 2020.
00:17:15.000Or is Joe Biden just like, I guess the idea here is that if Donald Trump becomes president, then Joe Biden will end up in jail because Trump invokes the Insurrection Act to overthrow state governments or something.
00:17:27.000With former aides, Trump plans to invoke the Insurrections Act, the Insurrection Act, which will allow him to deploy, which is not allowed to do under any circumstances, allow him to deploy U.S.
00:17:39.000military forces on the streets of America.
00:18:10.000He says very silly things all the time.
00:18:12.000In the same speech in which he will talk about poisoning the blood of the country, he will talk about how magnets don't work in water.
00:18:18.000That's about how seriously most people take Donald Trump's actual verbiage.
00:18:23.000But we're supposed to believe that Donald Trump Who is buffoonish when he speaks very often, is somehow the same person who is going to invoke the Insurrection Act and send federal troops into your home to arrest you if you oppose him or something.
00:18:37.000And he says this, the opponents of the Republic are opponents of democracy, he said, at a rally flanked by a giant backdrop of an American flag as he labeled his political opponents enemies of the Republic.
00:18:50.000And then, of course, he lumps in all Republicans, right?
00:19:02.000The push and pull of American history is not a fairy tale.
00:19:06.000Every stride forward in America is met with ferocious backlash many times from those who fear progress and those who exploit that fear for their own personal gain.
00:19:16.000From those who traffic in lies, Told for power and profit.
00:19:21.000For those who are driven by grievance and grift, consumed by conspiracy and victimhood.
00:19:28.000From those who seek to bury history and ban books.
00:19:34.000And again, all of this is just such projection, right?
00:19:36.000When he says things like, the people who fear progress, meaning if you don't agree with him, those are people who exploit fear for personal gain.
00:19:44.000He's literally standing there telling you if you don't vote for him, the Republic is over.
00:19:48.000He's exploiting fear for personal gain.
00:19:50.000He says, for those who traffic in lies told for power and profit.
00:19:52.000He literally lies about the history of the United States, suggesting that because America has terrible racial history, that means that all inequality today is a form of inequity.
00:20:03.000He says that people who are driven by grievance and grift and consumed by conspiracy and victimhood are on the other side?
00:20:09.000His entire coalition is a coalition of the supposed victims.
00:20:12.000For most to seek to bury history and ban books, they're literally pulling down statues.
00:20:20.000If this is Biden's final pitch, I just don't see how this connects in the same way that it did even, say, in 2022.
00:20:27.000When Joe Biden was not actually on the ballot, right?
00:20:30.000They say Trump wasn't on the ballot, but neither was Biden.
00:20:32.000When Biden is on the ballot, is that what you're thinking about?
00:20:35.000We'll get to Joe Biden in just one second.
00:20:38.000His actual look, what's actually happening to him, because part of the problem is the person presenting this message is not a credible person presenting this message.
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00:21:49.000One of the big problems here for Joe Biden is that if you were a ringing image of small-r republicanism, somebody who believes in democracy, he wouldn't look like a senile, decrepit messenger of a failing administration.
00:22:04.000So Joe Biden concluded his speech, and one of the big problems they've been having on this campaign and throughout his presidency is that Joe Biden literally does not know where to go when these speeches end.
00:22:16.000I'm sorry if this is hurting feelings, but it happens to be the obvious case to anyone who has a functioning prefrontal cortex and retinas.
00:22:23.000Every time Joe Biden finishes a speech, he starts wandering off into walls.
00:23:29.000And by the way, when we talk about threats to democracy, here's kind of a threat to democracy.
00:23:34.000What happens when you try to disqualify your political opponent from the ballot?
00:23:39.000What happens when you stick your DOJ on your political opponent, filing no less than four different cases in various jurisdictions, some state, some federal?
00:23:59.00081% of Democrats believe that states should disqualify former President Trump from presidential ballots, according to a new CBS News YouGov poll.
00:24:07.00081% 4 and 5 Democrats believe that Donald Trump should just be thrown off ballots, thrown off the ballots.
00:24:12.000He's never been criminally convicted of anything.
00:24:14.000He's not even being charged with insurrection, by the way.
00:24:17.000In all the various cases where he's being charged, he is not being charged for insurrection, which would be the thing that would theoretically invoke Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
00:24:25.000But 81% of Democrats want him summarily kicked off the ballot now.
00:24:29.000Poll Republicans on whether they think that Joe Biden should be actually barred from the ballot.
00:24:34.000You want to talk about insurrectionist legal theories?
00:24:38.000So basically, the case against Trump, when it comes to January 6th, is twofold.
00:24:42.000And you'll hear both cases made by Democrats, and usually they merge them.
00:24:45.000One is that January 6th was, in fact, the actual insurrection.
00:24:48.000It was like a full-scale coup attempt by Donald Trump, which is weird, since he was the President of the United States, and has the power of the executive to order around the military, which he didn't actually use.
00:24:59.000But the claim is that he incited an insurrection.
00:25:02.000So the standard for incitement is much stronger than, you need to go peacefully protest at the Capitol building.
00:25:07.000That is not incitement of an insurrection.
00:25:09.000Two, it wasn't an actual insurrection.
00:25:11.000It was a bunch of morons who decided they were going to break into the Capitol building while screaming and shouting, one dressed like a weird barbarian wearing buffalo horns.
00:25:19.000And then a bunch of people who were just kind of following along because the police officers were standing right there and they're walking between the rope lines.
00:25:25.000So again, that's not to minimize the violence done to police officers outside the building.
00:25:31.000But case number one that they make is that Trump was responsible for the events of January 6th.
00:25:35.000And I've said Trump raised the temperature.
00:25:37.000That's not the same thing as being responsible for the actual breaking into the Capitol building.
00:25:41.000Two is the idea that from November 4th to January 6th, Donald Trump put forward a bunch of specious legal theories that were untrue about election fraud, about certification of state election results, about what the vice president could do in the face of all of that.
00:25:56.000And the idea is that that's insurrection.
00:25:58.000The specious legal theories put forward into law is an attempt at insurrection.
00:26:04.000And this is the other case that you'll hear Democrats make.
00:26:06.000What do you call it when you activate state players in various states to literally remove your political opponent from the ballot without a criminal conviction or investigation of any sort?
00:26:38.000And yet this is what Democrats keep saying.
00:26:40.000By the way, when Joe Biden says things like Donald Trump is a threat to the republic and that January 6th was in fact an insurrection, he's agreeing with that legal theory.
00:26:49.000When he suggests January 6th was an insurrection and that Donald Trump is responsible for January 6th, he's agreeing with the legal theory that says Donald Trump needs to be barred from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
00:26:59.000Well, here is Washington, D.C.' 's Mayor Muriel Bowser, who can't stop crime but certainly wants to stop Trump from being on the ballot, talking about Trump being booted from the ballot.
00:27:06.000Do you think he should be barred from any ballots given his actions on January 6?
00:27:11.000Well, I support every state taking very aggressive action to keep him off the ballot.
00:27:18.000He is undergoing, you know, court action across America.
00:27:26.000Meanwhile, the Colorado Secretary of State, who's responsible for barring Trump from the ballot, they're pending Supreme Court litigation.
00:27:33.000She says, I'm not disenfranchising anyone by barring, you know, the leading presidential candidate for the opposing party from the ballot.
00:27:40.000Do you think that there's a risk here of disenfranchising voters?
00:27:46.000I think the biggest risk of disenfranchising voters happened on January 6th, when Donald Trump tried to steal the presidency from the American people.
00:27:54.000Make no mistake, that is exactly what he intended to do.
00:28:00.000We are a country of laws and of constitutions.
00:28:06.000So, for example, if a lot of voters wanted to vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger, they wouldn't be able to do so because he is disqualified from running for president under the United States Constitution.
00:28:18.000But don't worry, she's not disenfranchising anyone, because he's actually disqualified.
00:28:20.000A little anti-democratic, you might say.
00:28:23.000Not allowing people to vote for, you know, your political opponent.
00:28:25.000That's exactly how Trump is responding to all of this.
00:28:27.000He says, uh, you're calling me a dictator?
00:28:28.000That's rather insulting, since, you know, I left power.
00:30:01.000The attack on Israel would never happen.
00:30:03.000The attack on Ukraine would never have.
00:30:05.000All these things would never have happened.
00:30:10.000Yeah, that is going to be Trump's strongest argument.
00:30:12.000Trump's strongest argument is Joe Biden is a bad president.
00:30:14.000And Biden's apparent strongest argument is Trump is Hitler.
00:30:18.000Now, the media are going to try and run this one up the flagpole, like all the way up the flagpole.
00:30:21.000So Jonathan Capehart is really doing yeoman's work on behalf of the Biden administration from MSNBC.
00:30:25.000Yet on Michael Fanone, who is one of the officers who was attacked during January 6th.
00:30:31.000I mean, the media jumped into action, by the way, on this thing, like super fast.
00:30:34.000The minute that Biden gave the speech, they immediately went into January 6th mode, which was like crying actual real tears on TV about January 6th, which again, happened three years ago.
00:30:43.000Here's Jonathan Capehart literally crying on TV about this.
00:30:47.000Joining me now in studio is Michael Fanone, former D.C.
00:30:50.000Metropolitan Police Officer, Courage for America Council Member, and author of Hold the Line, The Insurrection, and One Cop's Battle for America's Soul.
00:31:01.000Officer Fanone, I'm going to try to get through this.
00:31:06.000Thank you for what you did three years ago today.
00:31:11.000Please tell me your thoughts on this third anniversary.
00:31:15.000We are still in the midst of the same fight that began on January 6th, 2021.
00:31:34.000I think my favorite part about that clip is where Fanon literally has to change his affect.
00:31:38.000He starts off like, okay, this is gonna be like a normal interview, and then after Jonathan Capehart starts crying, he's like, okay, I also have to get, we're gonna have competitive choking up here, being very, very upset about January 6th.
00:32:02.000Again, what this is going to come down to, if this is a battle between Biden calling Trump Hitler and Trump calling Biden incompetent, I'm sorry, Trump's going to win.
00:32:22.000The number of people who believe, truly believe, that Donald Trump is Hitler, that number is relegated to very, very blue cities.
00:32:28.000I know I used to live in one, and some people there actually believed that while they were sitting outside in the sunlight in Santa Monica drinking their sparkling wine while Trump was president.
00:32:41.000If the battle is between the accurate definition of your opponent, Donald Trump's definition of Joe Biden as incompetent, bad at his job, Borderline senile.
00:32:51.000And Joe Biden's portrayal of Donald Trump as a full-scale, Hitlerian threat to the republic, like a Nazi.
00:32:59.000Only one of those is kind of accurate.
00:33:00.000In just a second, we're going to get to the incompetence of Joe Biden because, again, every week it just seems to get worse.
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00:35:22.000So you remember when Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg took paternity leave to help his ailing husband who had just given birth for a couple of months and no one noticed.
00:35:41.000Apparently, Lloyd Austin, who is the Secretary of Defense.
00:35:43.000Now, you may notice the United States is currently engaged tangentially But fairly seriously, in two incredibly serious conflicts, the war in Ukraine, where the United States is in fact coordinating with Ukraine, trying to provide military aid and support, and what is going on in the Middle East, where the United States in some cases is directly engaged.
00:36:02.000We have right now aircraft carriers and battleships in the Middle East, in the Red Sea, in the Mediterranean.
00:36:09.000We've been shooting down Houthi drones.
00:36:12.000We have been shooting down Pirate ships, like these little inflatable boats that are being used to attack shipping.
00:36:20.000Right now, the United States has troops that are in harm's way in Syria, in Iraq, that are being fired upon by Iranian forces.
00:36:28.000So it makes a bit of a difference where the Defense Secretary is.
00:36:30.000Like, this stuff is happening in real time.
00:36:34.000According to CNN, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, the Pentagon's number two leader, was among the senior leaders kept in the dark about where the hell Lloyd Austin was.
00:36:43.000So he checked into the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center following complications from an elective surgery.
00:36:54.000According to Politico, the Pentagon did not tell President Joe Biden and other top officials about Defense Secretary Austin's hospitalization for three full days, according to three U.S.
00:37:15.000National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and other senior White House aides did not know of Austin's January 1st hospitalization until the DOD sent over word on January 4th.
00:37:25.000The official said it was highly unlikely Austin had conveyed word to Biden before Jake Sullivan was briefed on it.
00:37:30.000If Jake didn't know, no way the president knew, said one of them, who would have told him of Austin's condition if not Jake?
00:37:34.000If someone did tell the president, Jake would have been his first call.
00:37:38.000Biden held a cordial conversation with Austin on Saturday night, per one of the U.S.
00:37:42.000The president has complete trust and confidence in Secretary Austin, the official said.
00:37:46.000But as the news of Austin's situation came as a shock to all White House staff, they were unaware the Pentagon boss was dealing with complications following an elective medical procedure.
00:37:55.000National security staffers were surprised it took the Pentagon so long to let them know of Austin's status.
00:37:59.000The Pentagon did not make that information public until Friday evening.
00:38:02.000They notified Congress about 15 minutes before they released a public statement.
00:38:06.000Austin said, quote, I could have done a better job ensuring the public was appropriately informed.
00:38:27.000On Friday evening, as many people were turning toward their weekend, DOD spokesperson Major General Pat Ryder announced Austin had been hospitalized since January 1st.
00:38:35.000His deputy, Kathleen Hicks, partially assumed some of his duties during that time.
00:39:13.000Apparently, It was because Austin is supposedly too macho to let anybody know that he went in for an elective procedure and ended up in the ICU.
00:40:03.000But, because Austin was expected to return to his full duties, albeit from the hospital, she decided to stay in Puerto Rico to ensure continuity of communications.
00:40:10.000There are all these people around the Secretary at all times who manage him and help him on a day-to-day basis.
00:40:14.000No one even told the White House it had won Pentagon officials?
00:40:17.000I'm surprised that no one is using the word cover-up yet.
00:40:27.000According to Politico, someone's head has to roll, but it's not gonna be Austin's.
00:40:30.000I'm sure it'll be some low-level aide who was told, you need to tell my number two, and then the number two never got told, so the low-level aide ends up without a job, because that's the way it usually works in Washington, D.C.
00:40:38.000The higher up shuttles all the responsibility down to somebody lower down, that person gets fired, and that's the end of the story.
00:40:45.000The White House and Pentagon insist Austin's job is not in jeopardy, but they're sticking to that line, despite not even knowing what's actually been going on at the Pentagon.
00:41:19.000Meanwhile, over on the border, we now have some new stats.
00:41:23.000According to data released by the Biden administration, the Department of Homeland Security, they say that 2.3 million migrants have been allowed into the southern border, according to DHS.
00:41:36.000Now, I don't know if that number is real.
00:41:41.000The reason that seems low to me is because at least 6 million border apprehensions have taken place since Joe Biden took office.
00:41:48.000To put that by way of perspective, during the entire four years of Donald Trump's administration, there were 1.6 million border apprehensions.
00:41:56.000By the way, an apprehension does not mean that the person is then turned away and sent back home where they came from.
00:42:01.000A border apprehension means they pick you up, they take you to a detention facility.
00:42:05.000If you claim asylum, then they release you into the country within 72 hours of the date to come back for some sort of court date.
00:42:12.000The period of time between when you arrive in the country and are picked up by border patrol and when you're released into the interior of the United States is usually within a week, well, always within a week, and usually within 72 hours.
00:42:23.000So when they say only 2.3 million people have entered the country, I have serious doubts that that number is accurate.
00:42:28.000I think that number is way, way higher.
00:42:31.000That also does not include the estimated 1 million gotaways, people who just went into the country, smuggled drugs into the country, or entered between ports of call and were not picked up by Border Patrol.
00:42:42.000And, apparently, known gotaways only represent, maybe, I mean, they really don't know, because they don't know how many unknown gotaways.
00:42:48.000They estimated, the CBP, that it's like 60% of all gotaways are known, which means you're talking about another 800,000 unknown gotaways, theoretically.
00:42:59.000So you're talking about nearly 2 million people who have gotten into the country as gotaways, and you're talking about, according to DHS, 2.3 million, so that's 4.1 million.
00:43:31.000In December of 2020, which is the last month of Donald Trump, full month of Donald Trump's presidency, you're talking about approximately 80,000, 75,000 border apprehensions.
00:43:43.000By March of 2021, when everybody now realizes Joe Biden's in office, you're looking at north of 175,000 border apprehensions.
00:45:48.000Just say, I fear to go back to my home country under America's current asylum rules.
00:45:53.000Number two, because the United States refuses to detain full families together under the Flores settlement, and because the United States Refuses to remain in Mexico.
00:46:03.000All you have to do is show up with a kid and basically you're gonna be released into the interior of the United States.
00:46:08.000Joe Biden ended every policy that would have prevented mass illegal immigration.
00:46:15.000The cartels have been redirecting American resources toward this wave of illegal migrants That's why they're doing it.
00:46:21.000And then meanwhile, while the Border Patrol is acting as a busing and ferrying service for illegal immigrants, all of the gotaways that we're talking about, drug smugglers, criminals, those people are just entering between these points and just rushing into the interior of the United States, and Border Patrol isn't there.
00:46:34.000It's not that we require more Border Patrol agents, it's that the Border Patrol agents we do have are basically acting as DMV agents at this point, and members of the local metropolitan busing authority, as opposed to, you know, actual Border Patrol agents.
00:48:41.000But Democrats are so tied into the idea that there must be mass migration, mass illegal migration, that they are refusing border funding if it even means changing the asylum rules.
00:48:51.000The single thing that is the biggest magnet driving people north of the border is this idiotic rule that if you claim asylum with no evidence whatsoever that you are being oppressed in your home country, other than your home country just kind of sucks, You are immediately admitted.
00:49:05.000So Republicans have been saying, okay, why don't we do a few things?
00:49:07.000Why don't we, number one, do remain in Mexico?
00:49:08.000Number two, if you claim asylum, we have to establish at your initial hearing, before we release you into the United States, that you are likely to prevail in that claim for asylum.
00:49:17.000You can't just say the magic words, and then abracadabra, all of the doors open.
00:49:23.000Alejandro Mayorkas, the DHS secretary, he says that they would not even accept more funds if those funds were used for deportation.
00:49:32.000When you say that Republicans won't accept the extra funding, they have a problem with the funds being used to release and transport illegal immigrants around the country.
00:49:44.000Would you accept the extra funding on the condition that the funds could only be used for detention and removal, but not release into the country?
00:49:56.000Brett, the funds are needed to provide the Department of Homeland Security with more border patrol agents.
00:50:04.000The funds are needed to provide the Department of Homeland Security with more technology.
00:50:10.000The funds are needed to provide our department with more detention space.
00:50:14.000To provide the Department of Justice with more immigration judges.
00:50:21.000What he wants is more money to broaden the spigot, allowing more illegal immigrants into the country.
00:50:55.000From all parts of the political spectrum, one of the biggest issues that we have when it comes to immigration is the fact that we have an undocumented population.
00:51:04.000Now you can fix that by trying to build a wall, or you can fix that by trying to document people and create a path to
00:51:24.000But one of the reasons that our public systems experience weight is because people don't have a documented and reliable path to work and sustain themselves, just like all of our ancestors did and our grandparents.
00:51:40.000Yeah, the difference is that when our great-grandparents came to the United States, there wasn't a giant welfare system that was in place for public support of people who came here without any job prospects whatsoever.
00:51:51.000Also, because of that, people were forced to assimilate much more quickly.
00:51:54.000When my great-grandparents came to the United States in the early 20th century, they all spoke Yiddish.
00:52:00.000Because the markets did not bear people speaking Yiddish particularly.
00:52:04.000Learning English was like a major, major aspect of this.
00:52:07.000It turns out that markets are a great way to make people assimilate to American values, because if you would like to live in a market-based economy, you actually have to cater to the customer.
00:52:16.000But when you get rid of that entire system, and then you declare there should be open immigration, of course what you end up with is a multi-cultural stew in which nobody actually assimilates.
00:52:26.000But she's saying the quiet part out loud, which the Democrats do want an open border.
00:52:29.000So again, when we're talking about open border, Not a great economy.
00:52:35.000And say, DEI all over the administration versus Donald Trump is a fascist, which one of those do you think is more damaging politically?
00:52:42.000So, when it comes to DEI, this administration has declared itself in favor of equity at every step of the American experiment.
00:52:50.000This administration says that, in fact, equity motivates all of their policy, apparently, including immigration policy, which is why we're just going to open the border wide.
00:52:57.000Well, I have to say, one of the great exchanges I've seen recently on television happened over the weekend.
00:53:03.000Raihan Salaam is an author and writes over the Manhattan Institute.
00:53:37.000You have to be so excellent to get where she was.
00:53:38.000She's a second-generation Haitian-American who came from a family that dominated the concrete industry in Haiti.
00:53:44.000She was not the wretched of the earth.
00:53:46.000She was someone who shouldn't be judged on her merits.
00:53:47.000Wait, I'm sorry, do black people have to be wretched?
00:53:51.000No, absolutely not, but she was selected because she established the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Harvard.
00:53:58.000She presided over a steep decline in the free speech climate, and she also targeted minority professors who dissented from her perspective.
00:54:17.000But again, diversity, equity, inclusion, shtick, that is the Biden shtick.
00:54:21.000So again, you have lined up on the one side, Donald Trump's a fascist Nazi, or in Joe Biden's words, and on the other side, you have Joe Biden is doing equity, he's doing illegal immigration, and by the way, he's doing complete supply chain failure.
00:54:36.000So the Houthi attacks on shipping continue across the world.
00:54:41.000The cost of shipping has markedly increased.
00:54:46.000There's a chart from Axios, and what it shows is the average shipping container rates for particular routes.
00:54:54.000And what you see is they have jumped, spiked dramatically toward the end of December.
00:54:59.000Because that's exactly when you started seeing Houthis attacking shipping in the Red Sea and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait.
00:55:05.000In fact, what you see is that the cost of shipping from the Asia-Mediterranean From Asia to the Mediterranean areas jumped wildly from like a little bit over $2,300 a container to $5,100, like doubled.
00:55:21.000When you look at shipping from Asia to the North American East Coast, right?
00:55:46.000Because Democrats keep hoping that, well, you know, if we're sweet and if we're nice, then things aren't going to escalate any further, when it's precisely the opposite tack that actually gets things to calm in the Middle East.
00:55:56.000When you want to calm things in the Middle East, you know what you do?
00:55:59.000You make clear that if you screw with the United States, things go real bad for you.
00:56:03.000That's the actual way you calm things in the Middle East.
00:56:06.000It's why everyone in the Middle East was afraid to start up while Donald Trump was president, because they thought, that guy's nuts.
00:56:28.000If the United States said, listen, one of those missiles goes awry, and it hits an American, and you will not exist tomorrow morning, which is true.
00:56:33.000That's actually the reality, by the way.
00:56:35.000That is what would happen if the United States said that.
00:56:38.000If the United States said, if you raise your rate of fire above X and you just won't exist tomorrow morning, you know it would stop tomorrow morning.
00:56:46.000But Joe Biden is too cowardly to do any of this.
00:56:48.000So instead, you have Jennifer Granholm, who is out there declaring that, you know, they kind of hope that things are going to calm down.
00:56:55.000They're not sure exactly if they're going to calm down.
00:56:57.000This is Secretary of Energy talking about how, you know, shipping will probably get better, even though Maersk is now saying that they're going to completely avoid the Red Sea, which, of course, creates a supply chain bottleneck.
00:57:08.000What will it take to actually ensure that ships can go through that area?
00:57:12.000Well, obviously, yeah, there has to be this coalition effort.
00:57:16.000I know that many commercial ship shippers are really not just they're doing what Maersk has decided to do, which is to circumvent the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.
00:57:30.000to energy in terms of how long it takes and how much more fuel it takes to get those shipments around.
00:57:37.000But this coalition and the active, not just monitoring, but insertion of both sanctions as well as lots of discussions behind the scenes, I think we're going to, hopefully, if it doesn't escalate further, we'll be okay.
00:57:56.000Hopefully, if it doesn't escalate further, you know whose responsibility it is to make sure it doesn't escalate further?
00:58:00.000Might be your administration's responsibility.