Inflation won't come down as Joe Biden keeps touting his big spending agenda, we still have no clue why the military keeps shooting down random objects in the sky, and Nikki Haley declares a presidential run. Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. To join the ExpressVPN membership program, go to bit.ly/JoinExpressVPN and use the promo code: "ELISSA" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. If you decide to upgrade your membership, you'll get access to all of the latest and up-to-date economic and political news, including blogs, podcasts, and social media accounts. You can also join the "Elise Swopes" community by clicking here. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your fellow podcasting friends! Tweet me if you have any thoughts or suggestions on how we can improve the podcast. Timestamps: 4:00 - Joe Biden's inflation numbers are not what you think they are 5:30 - What's the real problem? 6:40 - Is inflation slowing? 7:00- Inflation is slowing, or is it? 8:30- What's going to happen? 9:15 - How bad is it going to be? 11:40- Is inflation going to get worse? 15:00 16:30 17:40 18:00 | What is the problem here? 19:10 21:20 22:30 | Is inflation a problem? ? 27:40 | Is it better? 26:40 ? 27? 33? 31? 35? 32? #1? ? #3 35 + + + #3? + #1 #5 ? #1?? & #2? ) + And so on? And so much more? & so on... @ And do you think so? (p=1&c) Also tweet me out! #listen to this post? <3) #tr_t=8&setteep=a&setter_listen_list=av=av_av_tav=setter=a_p&list_list_tr_setter&q&q=settee&setterm=settle&settle_to_list
00:00:33.000Well, the January inflation numbers came in and they suggest a 6.4% year-over-year increase in the inflation rate in the United States.
00:00:43.000Now, the biggest problem here Is that the media have declared that this is actually a slowing pace because it was 6.5% in December.
00:00:52.000The problem is you had 500,000 job pickups in January and a 6.4% inflation rate and the consumer price index went up.
00:00:59.000And the biggest problem of all, the thing that the media have been completely ignoring is that when you're looking at year on year statistics, you actually have to look at the prior year and how much it increased last year from the year before.
00:01:10.000And what you're actually getting right now, you're getting an aggregation of inflation rates at this point.
00:01:15.000So Joe Biden is out there and he's suggesting the inflation report is good.
00:01:18.000I want you to hear what he has to say before we completely debunk everything he's saying right now because it makes no sense.
00:01:23.000The good news is that inflation in America is continuing to come down this fall in seven straight months.
00:01:49.000Whenever Joe Biden says, it's like my dad used to say, Joey, whatever comes next is not true.
00:01:55.000His suggestion that everything is going fine on the inflation front is just wrong.
00:01:59.000According to the Wall Street Journal, still elevated inflation cooled slightly at the start of 2023 to 6.4% in January from a year earlier, with energy, housing, food, and other items keeping some pressure on prices.
00:02:08.000The increase in the Consumer Price Index, a closely watched measure of inflation, edged down from 6.5% in December, according to the Labor Department, and marked the seventh straight month of easing inflation since peaking at 9.1% in June, which is the highest reading since 1981.
00:02:30.000On a monthly basis, the consumer price index actually rose 0.5% in January from December, compared with a previous 0.1% increase, which means actual loss in real wages over the course of the last year.
00:02:42.000There's a reason the markets were really choppy yesterday.
00:02:45.000Core CPI, which excludes energy and food prices, rose 5.6% from a year earlier, down from 5.7% in December.
00:02:52.000But again, the fact that we are now petering out in terms of the quashing of inflation is the real problem.
00:02:58.000So if you look at the below the headline stats, things start to get truly ugly.
00:03:04.000As Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air says, the consumer price index for all urban consumers rose 0.5% in January on a seasonally adjusted basis after increasing 0.1% in December, the U.S.
00:03:13.000Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.
00:03:15.000Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 6.4% before the seasonal adjustment.
00:03:20.000So this is the third time that Joe Biden has declared victory over inflation.
00:03:26.000But what you actually see is that there has been an increase in the consumer price index in August, September, October, November, December, and January.
00:03:35.000The last time there was no increase in the consumer price index, seasonally adjusted, was in July.
00:03:41.000The White House is hoping that you just forget about all this because, again, we went from 6.5% in December to 6.4% year-on-year inflation.
00:03:48.000The problem is, and this is the biggest problem, of course, is that CPI, having drifted downward from last summer, does not adjust for the fact that we are now making a comparison with months, right?
00:04:04.000While the problem is in January 2022, you'll recall the inflation rate was 7.5%.
00:04:09.000Which means the January 2023 is 6.4% higher than that.
00:04:14.000Right, so you're actually compounding now.
00:04:17.000So, if you had a giant jump from January 2021 to January 2022, a 7.5% increase, and then you had from there a 6.4% increase, you're talking about, over the course of two years, significantly more than a 10% inflation rate.
00:04:47.000That is the last time that the inflation rate was anything close to normal.
00:04:51.000Those are the year-over-year inflation rates.
00:04:53.000Then you had April of 2021, 4.2, May 5.0, June 5.4, July 5.4, August 5.3, September 5.4, October 6.2.
00:04:55.000It started picking up and picking up and picking up to the point where January 2022, you had a 7.5% year over year increase in the inflation rate.
00:05:00.000And January 2023, again, a 6.4% increase year over year.
00:05:02.000point to it started picking up and picking up and picking up to the point where January 2022 you had a 7.5% year over year increase in the inflation rate and January 2023 again a 6.4% increase year over year.
00:05:15.000Well, I mean, it ain't going to be great because remember year over year, February of 2022 compared to February of 2021, that is a 7.9% inflation rate.
00:05:27.000So let's say that the inflation rate cools slightly year over year to like 6.3%.
00:05:33.000Well, that means, again, that using that compounding, that over the course of two years, the inflation rate has increased significantly more than probably 12 or 13%.
00:07:53.000Joe Biden can try to blame that on the pandemic.
00:07:55.000The pandemic's been over for at least a year and a half at this point, if you date the end of the pandemic to the widespread availability of vaccines, which even the most conservative people on COVID really should do.
00:08:06.000Meanwhile, Karine Jean-Pierre over at the White House, she is claiming that there's a decline in real wages, but that is showing that Joe Biden's plan is actually working.
00:08:14.000So we now have, once again, complete unfalsifiability in politics, when if the wages go up, that is evidence that the plan is working, and if the wages go down, that is also evidence that the plan is working.
00:08:23.000Here's Karine Jean-Pierre, world's most untalented White House press secretary.
00:08:25.000Administration officials have said growing real wages is an important marker for the economy.
00:08:34.000How do you view the setback in today's numbers?
00:08:37.000I do want to say that what we have said many times is that we believe that the President's economic plan is indeed working and it's giving people a little breathing room.
00:08:48.000You heard me say this at the top, how we have seen the plan actually working.
00:10:04.000I mean, that's what we're saying, right?
00:10:06.000Okay, you know that she's not telling you the truth.
00:10:09.000Meanwhile, Cecilia Rouse, who is one of the economic advisors to the president, she's out there suggesting that President Biden is focused like a laser on inflation.
00:10:16.000If this is him focused on inflation, I'd hate to see what it looks like when he's not focused on inflation.
00:10:21.000As prices climb, experts worry that older individuals who are in poor physical or mental health or who have lower incomes are at greater risk for not having enough food or for eating less healthy foods.
00:10:33.000The squeeze also has the potential to isolate them socially if they back away from activities like eating out with friends.
00:10:41.000I'm just thinking, what would you say to those folks, Cecilia?
00:10:46.000Inflation is painful across the economy.
00:10:50.000And that is why the Federal Reserve is taking the action it is taking.
00:10:54.000It is why President Biden is focused on inflation.
00:10:57.000So if we go to seniors in the Inflation Reduction Act, he was focused on decreasing costs for them.
00:11:05.000Oh, that's what he's been focusing on is the Inflation Reduction Act, which again, they even changed what they claimed it was supposed to do.
00:11:12.000You remember that when they were pushing the Inflation Reduction Act, it was supposed to decrease inflation, which it has not really done in any marked way.
00:11:18.000And remember, I will say again, the Federal Reserve is tasked with keeping inflation at a 2% annualized rate.
00:11:24.000We have not seen a 2% annualized rate in this country since February of 2021, the month after Joe Biden took office.
00:11:30.000Since then, we're now at triple year-on-year what the inflation rate is supposed to be.
00:11:34.000And that is after a year where there was a quadruple inflation rate, what it's supposed to be.
00:11:39.000And nearly 8% inflation rate January 2022.
00:11:42.000And now we have a 6.5% inflation rate in January 2023.
00:11:46.000And these doles are out there saying everything is working amazing.
00:12:38.000The actual retail sales in January jumped 3%.
00:12:41.000So people are continuing to spend money and that is driving up the prices.
00:12:44.000People still need to buy the necessities and they still have, again, we spent more money in 2020, 2021 and 2022 than any time in human history.
00:12:52.000And so people had all of this money pumped into their pocket and now they're spending all that money and it is jacking up the prices for everything.
00:12:59.000And so that's not going to stop until the economy cools.
00:13:02.000When the government plays with the money supply.
00:13:04.000This is what happens when the Federal Reserve decides to essentially buy up every asset in sight in order to inject liquidity into an economy instead of saying, hey, maybe we should hold back and wait off a little bit and then people will go back to work.
00:13:16.000There's also the problem with a shutdown economy that was pursued in 2020 by a wide variety of high income states.
00:13:23.000Doing that, as it turns out, just injects tons of liquidity into the economy, and it goes into people's pockets, they save it for a couple of years, and then they spend all of it.
00:13:30.000And so until that is exhausted, what you're going to end up with is these elevated rates.
00:13:34.000And meanwhile, you also have supply problems.
00:13:37.000So one of the things that's happened, obviously, is that oil supply in the country is not meeting demand right now.
00:13:41.000When Joe Biden took office, the price of a gallon of gas was about $2.40 a gallon.
00:13:46.000Despite all of Joe Biden's talk about how wonderful he has been on the gas and oil issue, even Joe Biden is now being forced to admit that new refineries are not being built because of him.
00:14:11.000This means I'm up at all hours of the night.
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00:15:09.000Okay, so Joe Biden, here he is admitting the truth that the reason gas prices are really high is because he keeps trying to undermine the oil and gas companies here to us yesterday.
00:15:18.000You had the oil companies, you know how much they made in profit this year?
00:15:21.000$200 billion in the middle of an energy crisis.
00:15:26.000Because they bought back their stock and they're not investing.
00:15:30.000And refineries, repairing them or maintaining them.
00:15:34.000Now they're saying, and it's a legitimate argument they make, they say, Biden, you want to go green and in 10 years you won't need this.
00:15:44.000We're going to need oil for a long time, gas for a long time.
00:15:58.000His entire premise is we need to go green and we'll spend trillions of dollars in order to go green.
00:16:02.000And also the oil companies need to keep pumping and building refineries and investing in future production of oil and natural gas while we tell them that we want to move away from that.
00:16:11.000He's boxed himself in and he knows that he has boxed himself in.
00:16:14.000Or maybe he doesn't and he's just saying things.
00:16:16.000Or maybe the hair plugs have finally seeped down into his neural Activity.
00:16:21.000Something has happened here that is forcing him to tell the truth right there.
00:16:24.000The economy is, in fact, on a knife's edge.
00:16:28.000Largely because, again, people are not feeling the immediate effects other than on the inflation rate, which is very, very serious, and people definitely are feeling that.
00:16:35.000But that has not been brought home to Democrats because, again, the 2022 elections sort of spared Joe Biden the act.
00:16:42.000Come 2024, that is likely not to be the case.
00:16:44.000Now, that is only one major issue that is plaguing this administration.
00:16:47.000There are a bevy of major issues plaguing this administration.
00:16:49.000It turns out that wild incompetence combined with significant ideological problems lead to a myriad of issues for this administration.
00:17:04.000And we are now finding out, apparently, that the U.S.
00:17:06.000actually tracked that giant Chinese spy balloon from its launch on Hainan Island along an unusual path, according to the Washington Post.
00:17:15.000By the time a Chinese spy balloon crossed into American airspace late last month, U.S.
00:17:19.000military and intelligence agencies had been tracking it for nearly a week, watching as it lifted off from its home base on Hainan Island near China's south coast.
00:17:26.000monitors watched as the balloon settled into a flight path that would appear to have taken it over Guam.
00:17:31.000But somewhere along that easterly route, the craft took an unexpected northern turn, according to several U.S.
00:17:35.000officials, who said analysts are now examining the possibility China did not intend to penetrate the American heartland with its airborne surveillance device.
00:17:41.000The balloon floated above Alaska's Aleutian Islands, thousands of miles away from Guam, and drifted over Canada, where it encountered strong winds that appeared to have pushed the balloon south into the continental United States.
00:17:51.000And then, of course, it was shot down after it traversed the entirety of the continental United States.
00:17:56.000This new account suggests the ensuing international crisis that has ratcheted up tensions between Washington and Beijing may have been, at least partly, the result of a mistake.
00:18:04.000If we were tracing it from points of origin, why didn't we shoot it down when it went over Alaska?
00:18:10.000Why didn't we shoot it down over Canada?
00:18:11.000We've been shooting down objects over Alaska and Canada, have we not, over the course of the past week?
00:18:15.000So what exactly would you say that you do here if you're in the intelligence agencies and you're watching a giant Chinese spy balloon miss Guam and hit Alaska?
00:18:23.000At a certain point here, you gotta be like, uh, guys, maybe we should shoot that thing down.
00:18:26.000That is not going the way we thought that that was gonna go.
00:18:28.000But apparently, they're like, no, it's probably fine.
00:18:46.000So you went from absolutely complacent about a giant Chinese spy balloon that is visible to the naked eye above Montana, floating across the entirety of the continental United States.
00:19:11.000Again, first rule of politics, Hanlon's razor, everything that only that which is not attributable to stupidity should be attributed to malice.
00:19:21.000This is a stupid administration filled with stupid people.
00:19:23.000Now, again, there are a lot of people in politics who are very stupid on all sides of the political aisle.
00:19:28.000As I say to most people, when we talk about politics, one of the things that bothers me the most is this assumption that everybody is ill-motivated because they're just super uber-competent.
00:19:52.000The same thing is true in politics, and it's particularly true of the Biden administration.
00:19:56.000What makes that threatening is they take that incompetence and then they say, we need more control.
00:20:00.000And the failures that they have actually created then become evidence that they need more control so that they can then pursue more failures.
00:20:06.000We're seeing this on the economy with inflation.
00:20:15.000And so we created this massive inflation cycle.
00:20:17.000Obviously, the solution is give us more power.
00:20:20.000And now we're seeing the same thing with regard to the Chinese spy balloon.
00:20:23.000We're incompetent, so we allowed this thing to float across the entire continental United States.
00:20:27.000Now you should trust us if we shoot down every single thing that we see.
00:20:29.000Okay, you don't even know what you're shooting down.
00:20:34.000I mean, they're admitting they don't know what they are shooting down.
00:20:37.000Which should frighten us, because frankly, that means that a foreign adversary could take advantage of the fact that we have a lot of dum-dums in charge.
00:20:46.000And if all of this makes you a little bit depressed, I'm going to tell you something even more depressing right now.
00:20:51.000You didn't see that one coming, did you?
00:20:53.000But the reality is that since we are all going to die, that means we should all have life insurance.
00:20:57.000It is a smart thing to do if you have a family that is dependent on you.
00:21:01.000You should have life insurance in case, God forbid, something should hit you.
00:21:03.000You're just walking along the street and suddenly...
00:21:05.000Joe Biden's Air Force shoots down a random object in the sky, and as it's plummeting toward Earth and you're directly in its sights, you think to yourself, man, I shouldn't have voted for that guy.
00:21:14.000And also, I probably should have gotten life insurance with Policy Genius.
00:21:17.000With Policy Genius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $39 per month for $2 million in coverage.
00:21:22.000Some options offer coverage in as little as a week and avoid unnecessary medical exams.
00:21:26.000PolicyGenius's licensed agents can help you find coverage options in as little as a week.
00:21:29.000They work for you, not the insurance companies.
00:21:31.000That means they don't have an incentive to recommend one insurer over another, so you can actually trust their guidance.
00:21:52.000Now, the place where stupidity turns to malice is when you keep doing the same thing over and over and over.
00:21:56.000At a certain point, if a stupid person just keeps doing the stupid thing and then claiming that they're doing the right thing, now it's turned to malice.
00:22:03.000And so I just, we may have turned the corner on that with regard to the Biden administration and how it is handling random objects in the sky.
00:22:12.000According to the Wall Street Journal, this administration still doesn't know what the hell it's shooting down.
00:22:16.000So in order to cover up for the fact that the president of the United States was a coward over the Chinese spy balloon.
00:22:22.000And again, I say that advisedly because the president of the United States was also a coward in pulling out of Afghanistan in the way that he did.
00:22:28.000People tend to have this bizarre vision of quote-unquote dark Biden wearing the aviator sunglasses like this guy is some sort of muscular presence in foreign policy.
00:22:37.000This is a guy who literally reported that he sat in the room where Barack Obama was greenlighting the raid on Osama bin Laden and encouraged him not to do it.
00:22:48.000And then we made him president because we're idiots.
00:22:50.000Again, everyone is stupid is the theme of today's show.
00:22:53.000But apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, the United States hasn't seen any evidence that the three objects shot down since Friday over the United States and Canada were part of China's spy balloon program.
00:23:01.000Those searchers have yet to recover debris from them, a senior White House official said.
00:23:04.000So we don't know that they're part of the Chinese spy balloon program.
00:23:06.000We're just shooting down random stuff without finding out what it is.
00:23:09.000Which is weird because the excuse for not shooting down the Chinese spy balloon originally was, we don't know what it is and we need to recover the debris.
00:23:16.000The search for the remnants of the objects is hampered by the remoteness of the search area and frigid conditions there, said John Kirby, the National Security Council coordinator for Strategic Communications on Tuesday.
00:24:15.000He's been missing on this issue, completely MIA.
00:24:17.000But he does have the world's worst press secretary out there saying that Joe Biden has received briefings, which is of no, honestly, no comfort to me whatsoever, considering the man does not have brain function.
00:24:28.000Yes, this leftist serious tumbler has also received intelligence briefings.
00:24:32.000It is an inanimate object and is incapable of making decisions.
00:24:35.000Very similar to our president, President Houseplant.
00:25:32.000Meanwhile, Joe Biden, he won't tell you what the hell is going on with the objects in the sky that we are shooting down.
00:25:39.000And he doesn't really have much convincing to say about the massive inflation rate.
00:25:42.000He also doesn't have much to say about the giant train explosion in Ohio, in East Palestine.
00:25:49.000Nothing from the President of the United States about creating a giant toxic mushroom cloud directly outside of a town of 5,000 people and poisoning the groundwater, apparently.
00:25:58.000Nothing from the President about that.
00:26:00.000There's a lot to say about lead in the pipes during his State of the Union address.
00:26:03.000Nothing about his EPA blowing up trains filled with toxic materials.
00:27:31.000Genius-level stuff, again, from our genius president.
00:27:34.000As the Washington Examiner also points out, this person was already breaking the law, and it turns out that a local DA let this person off the hook for what would have been a felony gun charge a couple of years ago.
00:27:45.000Well, once again, it was a preventable shooting.
00:27:47.000It could not have been prevented by passing more gun control laws.
00:27:49.000It could have been prevented if local prosecutors had enforced existing gun laws.
00:27:53.000The shooter was arrested in 2019 and charged with carrying a concealed pistol without a concealed carry permit.
00:27:59.000It carries a potential five-year prison sentence and would have prevented the shooter from being permitted to own a firearm once his sentence was up.
00:28:04.000Instead, he pled down to possession of a loaded firearm in a vehicle, which is a misdemeanor, and then prosecutors dismissed the felony charge and he served 18 months probation and remained eligible to purchase and own guns.
00:28:18.000Prosecutors letting people off the hook.
00:28:20.000And then the person goes on to commit a crime.
00:28:21.000And Joe Biden's solution is ban the long guns.
00:28:24.000This administration is such a disaster area and the disaster area permeates every area of the administration.
00:28:29.000I mean, I was just going through almost agency by agency yesterday, the failures of this administration.
00:28:34.000So you have the defense apparatus, which can't even tell us what the hell they're shooting down over American skies after apparently watching a Chinese balloon float across the entirety of the United States from inception in China.
00:28:45.000You have the economic apparatus inside the Biden administration which is generating year-on-year inflation rates of triple the norm and is lowering real wages by significant margins while spending more money than God has ever seen.
00:28:58.000You have Rochelle Walensky at the CDC who is still proclaiming that we have to mask up the kids.
00:29:04.000She did that yesterday, so that's excellent.
00:29:07.000You actually have to wear the mask for it to work.
00:29:09.000Okay, so there are lots of studies now in Georgia... Dr. Walensky, why are we masking our kids today?
00:29:15.000Also, so our guidance for school-based masking is related to our COVID-19 community levels, and fortunately we're in a place now in this country where most of our country is in green or yellow.
00:29:25.000So what is your timeline for updating, re-evaluating these guidance?
00:29:30.000You know, our masking guidance doesn't really change with time.
00:29:32.000In those situations, we actually don't recommend masking.
00:29:34.000We recommend it for high COVID-19 community levels.
00:29:36.000So what is your timeline for updating, reevaluating these guidance?
00:29:41.000You know, our masking guidance doesn't really change with time.
00:29:47.000Okay, so in other words, they continue to maintain that kids should mask up to prevent And as you'll recall, the CDC this week tried to declare that the COVID vax should be given to small children as part of the recommended vax list for kids, like measles, mumps, rubella, which is absurd.
00:30:04.000Meanwhile, the Health and Human Services Department, they actually have a website that features a video training kids on mask wearing.
00:31:07.000By the way, it is worth noting here that there is now new data, which pretty much everybody already understood and has understood for a long time, that masks are completely ineffective at preventing transmission.
00:31:18.000The notion that they were ever preventing transmission against Delta or Omicron was utterly untested.
00:31:22.000The only test case that was ever done was with regard to the original variant, and even that, the data was really shoddy.
00:31:29.000That they came out fairly early on in the pandemic.
00:31:31.000And again, the data were really shoddy, particularly with regard to anything that wasn't a KN95 that was glued to your face.
00:31:38.000But you still have the HHS pushing that.
00:31:40.000So the incompetence is at every level of the administration.
00:31:43.000The Transportation Department, led by a person who is very bad at his job, but is gay, which I guess alleviates most of your problems.
00:31:51.000Now, the Secretary of Transportation, he's had pretty much nothing to say about this, Pete Buttigieg.
00:31:57.000He does have things to say about paternity leave.
00:31:59.000He does have things to say about apparently too many white people in the construction industry, which raises the question as to whether he has ever seen a construction crew anywhere in the United States.
00:32:07.000Um, but he, um, he apparently has nothing to say about the fact that according to the Washington Post, 11 days after a train derailed, spilling toxic chemicals and causing a massive fire in East Palestine, Ohio, officials told residents to use bottled water until testing could confirm whether the local water supply was safe to drink.
00:32:23.000As questions continue to swirl around the cause of the February 3rd accident and the official response to it, the disaster's still-emerging list of effects became clear.
00:32:30.000Water officials are tracking a large plume of contamination flowing down the Ohio River.
00:32:34.000About 3,500 fish in local waterways have been killed by the chemical release.
00:32:38.000Cleanup crews are excavating a grossly contaminated 1,000-foot area around the train tracks where butyl acrylate, puddled, and vinyl chloride burned.
00:32:46.000Ohio Health Director Bruce Vanderhoef said, for right now, I think bottled water is the correct answer.
00:32:53.000Every department of the- just like clockwork, man.
00:32:55.000I mean, they're really making the trains run on- well, I mean, you can't really say that they're making the trains run on- at least they're not blowing up- well, you can't really- you can't really say that.
00:33:07.000Every aspect of this administration firing on all cylinders.
00:33:11.000Meanwhile, by the way, the SBA, the Small Business Administration under Joe Biden, is not even going to try to claw back fraud.
00:33:20.000According to the Daily Wire, the federal government will not even attempt to recover some coronavirus-related loans that did not meet the conditions for forgiveness.
00:33:27.000In what could amount to a greenlighting of theft from an $800 billion program, the SBA said it will not seek to collect on loans that should have been paid back, but were not, as long as the amount is $100,000 or less.
00:34:03.000Well, because of the abusive use of the FTC as a political tool by Lena Kahn, who is attempting to remake federal antitrust laws to target political opponents via the FTC.
00:34:15.000A woman named Christine Wilson, who is the only Republican appointee to the FTC.
00:34:20.000Khan's confirmation in 2021, my staff and I have spent countless hours seeking to uncover her abuses of government power.
00:34:25.000That task has become increasingly difficult as she has consolidated power within the office of the chairman, breaking decades of bipartisan precedent and undermining the commission structure Congress wrote into the law.
00:34:35.000So again, the FTC has been used for corrupt purposes by President Biden.
00:34:39.000quote, under President Biden, FTC leadership has abused the merger review process to impose a tax on all mergers, not only those that hinder competition.
00:34:45.000Progressive tried but failed to enact a legislative moratorium on mergers in early 2020 and to pass other restrictions since.
00:34:53.000And so now the Republican appointed commissioner at the FTC has resigned in protest.
00:34:58.000Meanwhile, as we'll get to in a second, the State Department is bankrolling groups that are secretly blacklisting conservative There is not an area of this administration that is not permeated by either incompetence or malice.
00:35:08.000There's not one area of this administration.
00:35:11.000It's like political cancer that is now metastasized to every department in the federal government.
00:35:18.000Speaking of the medication that is necessary, let's talk about your family for a second.
00:35:22.000So the reality is, let's say that you are living in East Palestine.
00:35:26.000You've now been forced to flee your home because the federal government decided it would be a great idea to blow up phosphine gas near your house.
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00:37:26.000The State Department is the most isolated of the federal government, is a repository of all scum and villainy.
00:37:31.000The State Department is just terrible.
00:37:32.000The Washington Examiner and Gabe Kaminsky report this week that the Department of State has now funded a deep-pocketed disinformation tracking group that is secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media.
00:37:43.000Costing the news organization's vital advertising dollars.
00:37:45.000Apparently, the Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S.
00:37:49.000nonprofit groups, is feeding blacklists to ad companies with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling alleged disinformation.
00:37:56.000That same disinformation group has received $330,000 from two State Department-backed entities linked to the highest levels of government.
00:38:03.000So you basically have the State Department funding nonprofits to push boycotts of particular conservative media.
00:38:09.000GDI compiles a dynamic exclusion list that it feeds to corporate entities like the Microsoft-owned advertising company Zander, according to emails.
00:38:17.000Zander and other companies are in turn declining to place ads on websites that GDI flags as peddling disinformation.
00:38:23.000So again, every area of the federal government has been corrupted by the perversity of the ideology of this administration, and this is where stupidity flips over into malice pretty quickly.
00:38:33.000Meanwhile, the fact of the matter is that Joe Biden is quite vulnerable in 2024, which means the Republican side of the aisle is going to fill up quite quickly.
00:38:41.000Because Joe Biden is an incompetent president, because Joe Biden has no personal magnetism or charisma, because Joe Biden is effectively just a dead body the Democrats have stapled to some sort of dolly and are wheeling around upright, trying to make sure that the nominee is not Kamala Harris, this means that there are a lot of Republicans who are going to jump in the water.
00:38:56.000So the other day, Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor and former Trump ambassador to the United Nations.
00:41:14.000She was a good, fairly popular governor of South Carolina.
00:41:18.000She's run into some issues with her base.
00:41:20.000She got crossways of the base for taking a sort of moderate line with regard to the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state capitol.
00:41:29.000And it was placed in a museum instead, for example.
00:41:32.000She also got a foul of the base after January 6th when she took a very harsh line against Donald Trump post-January 6th, and then seemed to sort of reverse herself a little bit.
00:41:39.000Also, obviously, one of the elephants in the room with regard to her candidacy is that she had said she would not run if Trump would run, and obviously she's reversed herself on that now.
00:41:46.000I don't take any of those sorts of promises seriously.
00:41:48.000When people say, I won't run if X runs, or I'm not going to run, or I promise on... Who cares?
00:41:52.000The real question is, would she make a good president?
00:41:54.000And the answer is Nikki Haley would in fact make a good president.
00:41:57.000The drawbacks of her candidacy, sort of broadly speaking, are that Americans tend to not be as focused on foreign policy as they are on domestic policy.
00:42:04.000So you would assume that she's going to have to focus a lot on her tenure as the South Carolina governor, as opposed to her tenure at the UN.
00:42:11.000Because when it comes to foreign policy, like probably Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State, is going to run for president.
00:42:16.000Americans don't care that much about foreign policy until it's immediate.
00:42:19.000And so running as a foreign policy guru really doesn't do you a hell of a lot of good.
00:42:24.000Americans right now are particularly focused on domestic policy.
00:42:26.000That's going to be difficult for her to sort of outflank people like Ron DeSantis on those issues or say Brian Kemp if he decides to run for president from Maryland or Glenn Youngkin if he decides to run for president from Virginia.
00:42:37.000She's also sort of has just run this sort of gauntlet because she was a member of the Trump administration.
00:42:42.000The left is going to tie her to Trump.
00:42:44.000And because she left the Trump administration early and has had some things critical of Trump, some on the right who really like Trump are angry at Nikki Haley.
00:43:07.000So imagine, for a second, that you really don't want Trump to be the guy, right?
00:43:10.000Let's say you're on the left and supposedly Trump is Hitler, right?
00:43:14.000The only thing that separates them is the little mustache.
00:43:16.000You're on the left and you're one of these people who believes that Trump is essentially a Nazi who's putting America in danger of authoritarianism.
00:43:22.000So, anybody who declares against Trump, you should immediately be like, ah, this person would be great.
00:43:26.000This person would be like, man, I would rather have Nikki Haley as the nominee than Donald Trump.
00:43:29.000If you're on the left and this is your perspective, wouldn't you think that's the case?
00:43:32.000Instead, the media immediately left to attack Nikki Haley with extraordinary alacrity.
00:43:38.000They're really angry at Nikki Haley for running.
00:43:41.000Because they kind of want Trump to be the nominee.
00:43:44.000I mean, that dude is absolute ratings gold for a lot of these networks.
00:43:47.000And two, they think that he's much more beatable than some of the other candidates on the right side of the aisle.
00:43:51.000So their immediate reaction to Nikki Haley is to attack her in some of the dumbest ways I've ever seen.
00:43:55.000So there was an article in Politico that suggested that Nikki Haley had on a government state form, and here she is touting her diversity as an Indian-American woman.
00:44:05.000And on her forms, early government forms, she lists herself as Caucasian.
00:44:11.000Yes, because there was no actual category for Southeast Asian or South Asian rather.
00:44:16.000There was no actual category on that on the forms.
00:44:18.000And so Indian Americans had to choose between black and white.
00:44:42.000And then, of course, you have Joy Reid, one of our nation's most unintelligent commentators, suggesting that the thing about Nikki Haley is that she's just a Trumpie.
00:44:49.000She's Trump's person, which is weird since she's now running against him.
00:44:53.000Stuart, she's tried to inoculate herself by that, by saying, no, no, no, I'm not one of the bad ones.
00:44:57.000I hate the 1619 Project just as much as you do.
00:44:59.000And you know, she's had this sort of, she talks about her Indian American heritage, but she focuses not on her Sikh background, but on her conversion to Christianity.
00:45:07.000Like, she's definitely tried to fit in.
00:45:09.000But I just want to put up the 2016 cast of characters that ran against Trump.
00:45:52.000I mean, I gotta say that the people you guys are talking about running on your side of the aisle, if Joe Biden should plot, are people like Kamala Harris, the world's most untalented person.
00:46:01.000Like there's never... Karine Jean-Pierre is only the world's most untalented press secretary.
00:46:04.000Kamala Harris is the world's most untalented human.
00:46:07.000Like of all the humans on Earth, she has the least talent.
00:46:09.000It's like God sucked every element of talent out of her before he created her in a laboratory.
00:46:13.000In any case, here's Whoopi Goldberg saying that Nikki Haley is a crazy person, says Whoopi Goldberg, a person who has literally said that everyone in America is racist and everyone in human history might be racist, except for Hitler, who is not racist because Jews are white.
00:46:28.000So, Nikki, you know, since you have been asleep all this time and you just woke up, You're just finding out that there are things about our country that are not perfect.
00:46:44.000And for us to pretend that it is and that nothing happened is ridiculous.
00:46:53.000And you of all people should know better.
00:46:56.000Because you used to actually have some sanity and knew right from wrong.
00:47:02.000And then you lost your mind and went in some new direction.
00:47:07.000Oh, you used to have sanity, and you're right.
00:47:09.000Why is it that the minute that any Republican declares for president, this is when they lose their mind?
00:47:13.000They did the same routine with John McCain, by the way.
00:47:14.000They loved John McCain, precisely until the point he won the Republican nomination, at which point John McCain became a rabid right-winger in the mold of George W. Bush, right?
00:47:21.000This is the way that they always work.
00:47:23.000Listening to Whoopi Goldberg declaim on politics is just an amazing experience.
00:47:27.000It's almost an out-of-body experience watching someone this stupid talk about politics.
00:47:32.000This is a person that, presumably, some people watch on The View.
00:47:37.000Um, and this is a person who literally said yesterday that she can't tell the difference between Rick Scott and Tim Scott.
00:48:18.000Tim Scott, speaking of, is another person who may be running for president as well.
00:48:22.000Now, the great fear for people who don't actually like Donald Trump the best among all the nominees is that you get a repeat of 2016 in which there are so many Republican candidates in the pool that it basically fragments the field and Donald Trump runs the gauntlet with like 20-25% support.
00:48:35.000That could theoretically happen, right?
00:48:55.000There's been talk about Kristen Uno from New Hampshire running.
00:48:58.000Larry Hogan from Maryland talking about running.
00:48:59.000So you could have a very full stage once again.
00:49:01.000And if Donald Trump's the most prominent person on that stage and the rest of the field doesn't consolidate, that does in fact put him, statistically speaking, in the driver's seat.
00:49:08.000Now I think that the field is going to clear a little bit, but You know, the question is going to be, how fast?
00:49:14.000Meanwhile, Democrats are going to do their best to rip down everybody who is not Donald Trump.
00:49:19.000Because, let's just face it, this is a Democrat strategy.
00:49:23.000They have the same strategy in 2024 that they had in 2016, which is they think that Donald Trump is the most beatable.
00:49:28.000Now, they may get their wish and then find that their wish has been thwarted by the monkey's paw, that Donald Trump gets the nomination, then he wins.
00:49:36.000However, if you're just looking at how the media are treating the possible alternatives to Donald Trump, it's very obvious that they prefer Donald Trump to the alternatives because they think that this will allow them a better shot at victory.
00:49:47.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:50:14.000Well, one of the things that drove her out was outrage over her gender recognition reform, which would have allowed anybody in Scotland over the age of 16 to change gender designation without a medical diagnosis.
00:50:24.000She tried to claim that this was not the final straw, that this is not what pushed her out.
00:50:28.000So you will recall that there was a big scandal in Scotland because a rapist, a male rapist, had been talking, they were talking about moving that male rapist to a women's prison.
00:50:38.000Where presumably he could be very rapey, some more, with his very female penis.
00:50:43.000And Nicholas Sturgeon be like, no, he's a lady.
00:50:48.000The reform was hailed by transgender campaigners as a landmark move, but according to the New York Post, anger boiled over last month when it emerged a shaven-headed rapist was sent to a female prison after declaring she was a transgender female.
00:50:59.000I love the fact the New York Post is still going to Go along with this in its very language.
00:51:03.000Stop doing this, members of the media.
00:51:06.000It turns out that a clean-shaven male who rapes women with his female penis is not a female.
00:51:12.000Sturgeon said, I have been and always will be a feminist.
00:51:16.000She went after JK Rowling because JK Rowling had accused her of being a destroyer of women's rights.
00:51:21.000By the way, the face-tattooed bald woman was a man.
00:51:25.000Yeah, that might be the reason why she had to step down.
00:51:27.000She said, I will stand up for any stigmatized, discriminated against, marginalized, and vulnerable group in society.
00:51:32.000Yes, that is a stigmatized, discriminated against, marginalized, vulnerable person is the very male rapist who wishes to locate himself inside a female prison.
00:51:41.000Really strong stuff there from Nicola Sturgeon, but now she's gone.
00:51:45.000I'm glad that we have now seen the back of Nicola Sturgeon and don't let the door hit you on the way out.
00:51:51.000Speaking, by the way, of insane stories surrounding transgender issues, our show here, Crane and Company, The folks there sat down with an NCAA women's swimmer named Riley Gaines to talk about Leah Thomas because Riley Gaines was on the swim team with Leah Thomas and it was quite shocking.
00:52:09.000Here's a little bit of what it sounded like.
00:52:11.000If we let it, there will be men pretending to be women that ruin women's sports.
00:52:16.000But ranking first was a person I had never heard of before.
00:52:19.000And of course, this name was Leah Thomas.
00:52:20.000Leah Thomas did, in fact, formerly swim on the men's team for three years.
00:52:25.000I thought, surely the NCAA wouldn't let this person compete with us.
00:52:29.000The NCAA official looks at me and says, great job.
00:52:38.000Leah Thomas, who used to be Will Thomas, is now dating someone that used to be a man that's now a woman, and they consider themselves lesbians.
00:54:37.000One thing that I have made abundantly clear is that I do not want children.
00:54:42.000I say it on stage, I say it in interviews, it's the first thing I say to myself in the mirror when I wake up each morning, right before I tell myself, God, you're a dynamic woman.
00:54:52.000Kids don't respect me, and quite frankly, the feeling is mutual.
00:54:57.000And the fact is, there are millions of women just like me, but for some reason, every single one of us, at some point in our lives, is shamed by society for not wanting a baby.
00:55:06.000These Fox News trolls are right about one thing.
00:55:39.000Whether she chooses to have kids or not, you know, frankly, I don't care.
00:55:44.000What I do care about is that society actually should favor the choice to have kids over the choice not to have kids.
00:55:49.000It's very important that people have kids.
00:55:51.000It makes them better people, obviously.
00:55:53.000I mean, I don't think Chelsea Handler is anybody's idea of a saint.
00:55:56.000But beyond the individual fulfillment that comes from having children, a society that is not built around the future generation is a selfish and stupid society.
00:56:04.000And that is precisely what we have constructed for ourselves.
00:56:06.000Not only that, it is a society that is demographically doomed to destruction.
00:56:10.000And so when you change the norm from it is good to have kids to we are utterly indifferent as to whether people have kids.
00:56:16.000What you end up with is a dying civilization.
00:56:18.000And that is precisely what we are seeing today.
00:56:21.000There is a Pew Research Center poll from November of 2021, and it shows a growing share of childless adults in the United States don't expect to ever have children.
00:56:30.000Quote, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that a rising share of U.S.
00:56:33.000adults who are not already parents say they're unlikely to ever have children.
00:56:37.000Their reasons range from just not wanting to have kids to concerns about climate change and the environment.
00:56:40.000So, I mean, this would this would be the giveaway.
00:56:46.000Because the reason, if you're not having kids because you're worried that it's gonna be hotter in a hundred years than it is today, let me explain to you the vast span of human history when temperature has changed fairly radically, and also when we have air conditioning and people can expect to live eight decades.
00:57:00.000I mean, like, to pretend that your kids are in some innately greater danger because of gradual changing of the climate over the course of a century, and so you shouldn't have the kids, is insane.
00:57:14.000And then there are the people who just say they don't want to have kids because obviously they want to be like Chelsea Handler and be able to take Instagram photos of themselves for the pleasure of strangers smoking a joint in a hot tub.
00:57:22.000And apparently this is how you find fulfillment and true meaning in your life.
00:57:26.000As you get topless into a jacuzzi the way that Chelsea Handler would and you smoke a joint and you put it on your Instagram and then randos cheer for you and it makes you feel really good for a second before you drink a bleep load of wine as I said yesterday and then fall asleep on your couch while drooling into your cat's fur.
00:57:40.000According to Pew Research, some 44% of non-parents aged 18 to 49 say it's not too or not at all likely that they will have children someday.
00:57:47.000That's an increase of 7 percentage points from the 37% who said the same in a 2018 survey.
00:57:52.000Meanwhile, 74% of adults younger than 50 who are already parents say they are unlikely to have more kids virtually unchanged since 2018.
00:58:02.000Well, it means that we're going to go bankrupt.
00:58:03.000I mean, let's say that you're a big fan of the social welfare state.
00:58:06.000Congratulations on having trashed the entire pyramid scheme that you guys rely upon, the demographic pyramid scheme.
00:58:12.000One of the things that is very obvious is that countries that enter demographic decline because of a values change have a very tough time reversing that demographic decline.
00:58:19.000There's an article in the New York Times from Andrew Jacobs and Francesca Perez titled, Can China Reverse Its Population Decline?
00:58:27.000And they point out that China's population has now begun to decline.
00:58:31.000And they say even places that have not begun to lose population yet, like Australia, France, and Britain, have been grappling with demographic decline for years as life expectancy increases and women have fewer children.
00:58:40.000History suggests that once a country crosses the threshold of negative population growth, there is little its government can do to reverse it.
00:58:46.000As a country's population grows more top-heavy, a smaller, younger generation bears the increasing cost of caring for a larger, older one.
00:58:52.000So it turns out that there are in fact societal consequences to a cultural shift from caring about the future and having kids to not caring about the future and not having kids.
00:59:04.000We are a society that doesn't care very much about our children.
00:59:07.000We've decided, in large scale, at least according to our cultural arbiters, that kids are mainly useful so you can go on Instagram and virtue-signal about how you're transing them.
00:59:15.000This is the thing that really, really matters, is how liberal you can make your kids, or how you can screw up your kids, and then you can brag to your friends about how tolerant and diverse you are.
00:59:23.000Or, alternatively, don't have kids at all, because the best life is the life that is lived without reference to time and the future.
00:59:30.000Countries such as the United States and Germany have been able to rely on robust immigration, even with relatively low birth rates, according to the New York Times.
00:59:36.000And of course, when you mention this, when you say, well, probably the United States, we should actually start having kids of our own.
00:59:47.000The good news is that the Chinese government is fully aware of the problem, said Yang Kai, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
00:59:52.000The bad news is there's very little they can do about it.
00:59:55.000So two decades ago, Australia tried a baby bonus program that paid the equivalent of nearly $6,000 a child at its peak.
01:00:02.000At the time the campaign started in 2004, the country's fertility rate was around 1.8 children per woman.
01:00:07.000By 2008, the rate had risen to a high of two.
01:00:09.000By 2020, six years after the program ended, it was 1.6.
01:00:11.000So in other words, you'd have sort of a temporary boost in birth.
01:00:15.000But what ends up happening is that you're actually front-loading the birth.
01:00:17.000What the studies tend to show is that when you pay people to have babies, then parents who are going to have three babies will have three babies, but they'll do it in a shorter time span in order to take advantage of the government money.
01:00:27.000But it's very difficult to convince somebody who doesn't want to have a baby that now they should have two babies because you're going to offer them money.
01:00:33.000John Bongard's demographer at the Population Council says, you're not going to reverse the trend.
01:00:36.000If you throw in the kitchen sink and make childbearing more attractive, you may be able to prevent the population from falling off a cliff.
01:00:42.000Even the success of some of these efforts has had limits.
01:00:46.000No country has been able to reach a sustained return to a 2.1% replacement rate.
01:00:50.000The United States rate fell below 2.1% in 1970s, and then slowly rose back toward the replacement rate by 2007, then collapsed again after the Great Recession.
01:01:00.000In 1980, they introduced what they called the speed premium, which was, if you have babies within a certain amount of time, then you get a subsidy.
01:01:07.000It increased the population increase to about two.
01:01:42.000Over the 2010s, the rate climbed to around 1.6.
01:01:44.000It's unclear whether it's going to be able to sustain.
01:01:49.000Or whether it's going to dip off again.
01:01:51.000Now, what is the reason for all of this?
01:01:53.000Well, it's true that in every country, as countries get richer, people tend to have fewer kids.
01:01:58.000That is because traditionally, in societies that are poorer, people tend to see kids as economic assets, and as societies become richer, your kid becomes an economic burden.
01:02:07.000The amount of money that you're going to spend on the education and upbringing of your kid in a rich country Tremendously outweighs the economic benefit of having a child.
01:02:14.000If you're in a very poor country, kids become labor very early, they become part of the family farm, they are sources of efficiencies.
01:02:20.000That does not hold true in richer countries.
01:02:22.000So you start to see birth rates decline.
01:02:41.000Religious Muslims are still having kids.
01:02:43.000Anyone who takes the injunction to have kids seriously on a moral level and recognizes that there is a generation beyond their own, that the height of human existence does not lie in taking a picture of yourself scuba diving and putting it on Instagram when you are 50 years old the way that Chelsea Handler is.
01:02:57.000Any part of society that recognizes those fundamental truths is likely to continue growing.
01:03:01.000Any part that does not is likely to continue fading.
01:03:03.000Secularism, in other words, bears the seeds of its own destruction because it leads to societal sterility on a population level.
01:03:11.000And that is what you are seeing in the West.
01:03:13.000And so if you wish to reverse this decline, then perhaps our society should stop on a cultural level.
01:03:19.000Normalizing and championing child-free living as though it is an alternative good to choosing to have kids.
01:03:25.000It is better to have kids than not to have kids.
01:03:27.000That should not be a controversial statement.
01:03:29.000The fact that it is signals why our civilization is in a state of serious decline.
01:03:33.000Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
01:03:36.000We'll be talking with Marissa Strait over at Prager University about the predations of social media and how it's cracking down on conservatism.
01:03:42.000If you're not a member, become a member.
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