Dave Portnoy is featured in the biggest internet story of the moment, which raises questions about cancel culture and answerability for doing bad things. Plus, we get to war looming between India and Pakistan, President Trump declaring a ceasefire with the Houthis in Yemen, and more!
00:00:00.000Already, tons coming up on today's show.
00:00:02.000Dave Portnoy is featured in the biggest internet story of the moment, which raises questions about cancel culture and answerability for doing bad things.
00:00:10.000Plus, we get to war looming between India and Pakistan.
00:00:14.000President Trump declaring a ceasefire with the Houthis in Yemen.
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00:00:42.000Alrighty, folks, the big online story of the day, the story that has exploded across the interwebs, is a controversy involving Dave Portnoy.
00:00:49.000Dave Portnoy is, of course, the founder and owner of Barstool Sports.
00:00:53.000He also owns a series of bars, restaurants around the country that are labeled with Barstool.
00:00:57.000And the reason that he's in the news today is because of a controversy that broke into the open when a person who is a student, apparently at Temple University, named Mo Khan, went to a Barstool bar and proceeded to order From the back room, some sort of dish.
00:01:13.000And one of the things they do, I guess, at these bars is they have a sort of letter board.
00:01:16.000And you can ask the waiter or waitress to change the letters on the letter boards.
00:01:20.000You can say, break up with him on the letter board.
00:01:22.000Or you can say, go Eagles on the letter board.
00:01:25.000Well, this guy asked for a very specific thing on the letter board.
00:01:55.000All these people seem like just delightful, transgressive, wonderful human beings.
00:01:59.000In any case, Dave Portnoy is the owner of Barstool Sansom Street.
00:02:04.000The bar put out a statement saying that it involved a customer whose actions were deplorable.
00:02:09.000And Portnoy said that two customers were involved.
00:02:12.000The bar blamed misguided employees who ignored the company's training and their zero-tolerance policy for discrimination and hate.
00:02:18.000And again, private companies can have those sorts of policies.
00:02:21.000If you are an employee and you are asked to say the N-word on a sign or screw whitey or whatever it is, and you say no, that is what you are supposed to do as an employee of Barstool.
00:02:30.000Well, the president of Temple University, John Fry, announced that a student believed to have been involved in the incident had been suspended.
00:02:36.000That would be the person who posted this in celebratory fashion.
00:02:40.000Okay, well, then, apparently, Portnoy reached out to this person, whose name is Mocon.
00:02:48.000Originally, he said he was very angry and it happened at his bar.
00:02:59.000Saying that he wanted to reconsider his approach and instead he was going to send the people responsible for the sign on an all expenses paid tour to Auschwitz.
00:03:06.000Which by the way I think is actually quite the wrong approach.
00:03:09.000I actually don't think that the right approach for people who don't like Jews is to send them to a place where Jews were killed in the hope that this is somehow going to make them better human beings.
00:03:17.000I just don't think that is a great approach to education in this way.
00:03:22.000I think that basically throwing up the middle finger is the proper response.
00:03:25.000And we'll get to how we ought to respond as a society.
00:03:28.000To bad things said publicly, which is what this is.
00:04:46.000I'm asking you for help to pay for these attacks, to pay for any possible legal restitution, any relocation expenses.
00:04:55.000Any educational expenses and show the founders of cancel culture that their reign of tyranny is over.
00:05:04.000Okay, so this is the new game, obviously.
00:05:07.000Obviously, this is the new game, right?
00:05:08.000This follows hot on the heels of the Shiloh Hendricks story, which we talked about yesterday on the show.
00:05:13.000That was the woman who allegedly called a child the N-word at a playground and then was caught on video, basically.
00:05:19.000Dumbling down on that, and that was posted by a third party, and then people came after her, and then people raised like $500,000 for her.
00:05:26.000Now, just to be clear, this person, Mo Khan, he never denies the allegation that he was the person who put up the sign saying F the Jews.
00:05:32.000In fact, he then went on the show of a person who was extraordinarily and publicly anti-Semitic on X, where the host said that Portnoy is a filthy Jew.
00:05:43.000And Mo Khan basically just said, of course, because Mo Khan is a person who does not like Jews, clearly.
00:07:23.000It's okay for black people to feel offended and correct for them to be offended if somebody calls them the N-word.
00:07:29.000And it's okay for Jews to feel offended if people say F the Jews.
00:07:32.000And it's okay for white people to be offended if somebody says F whitey.
00:07:35.000All of these things are bad things to say.
00:07:38.000The fact that this even needs to be said is indicative of a breakdown in the social fabric that is pretty catastrophic inside the United States.
00:07:45.000Portnoy put out a letter where he said, This, unfortunately, is the real world.
00:08:10.000A world where Mo Khan is an anti-Semitic grifting piece of bleep who deserves an awful life.
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00:10:57.000So, let's talk about cancel culture for a second.
00:11:00.000There are three perspectives on cancel culture.
00:11:02.000Okay, so I wanted to find cancel culture here because I think people are equating many different things that are not actually cancel culture.
00:11:12.000If you cancel somebody or if you criticize somebody, for example, that is not a legal ban on their behavior.
00:11:27.000Just people not wanting to hang out with you.
00:11:30.000Or it can be a whole range of activity.
00:11:32.000Cancellation can range from people criticizing you, theoretically, to people wanting to not hang out with you, to people firing you, to people deciding no one can hire you, right?
00:11:46.000Any violation of any taboo ought to be treated with the harshest possible measure of cancellation.
00:11:51.000That's perspective number one, which is like the cancel everyone perspective and use like the harshest, most brutal methods of quote-unquote ruining people's lives for any level of rhetorical transgression.
00:12:01.000Perspective number two is that no one should ever be canceled for any reason.
00:12:05.000So no criticism, no social ostracization, no calling out, nothing.
00:12:11.000Whatever you want, and there will be no consequences, socially even, attendant on you saying those things.
00:12:16.000And then there's perspective number three, which is, I think, the sort of more moderate, complex, and true perspective, which is some behaviors or opinions are actually disgusting and do, in the real world, receive social sanction, and other behavior should not.
00:12:31.000And the level of forgiveness and social sanction ought to vary, which is complex, right?
00:12:35.000Because you might be talking about, do you want to have dinner with somebody?
00:12:43.000Or you might be talking about, do you want somebody in your school or not?
00:12:46.000These are all different methods of dealing with behavior that people find unacceptable in the social world.
00:12:52.000So, the problem with the first perspective, that all violations and all taboos ought to receive the social death penalty, is that it is censorious.
00:13:00.000It prevents useful conversations from happening.
00:13:08.000Probably 20 years in this country, with people being cancelled, meaning socially ostracized, losing jobs, losing career opportunities, being destroyed for correct opinions like men are not women, or for saying a word in Mandarin that sort of sounds like the N-word.
00:13:21.000Social media mobs were activated in order to destroy people who violated literally any taboo.
00:13:26.000The lines were bright, and if you crossed the line, you were destroyed.
00:13:28.000And this led to a reactionary right, which then moved to perspective number two.
00:13:41.000Now, the problem with this perspective is that if there is never any social sanction or criticism or ostracization for bad behavior or terrible opinion, that's just called moral relativism, in which the ugliest opinions and expressions are supposed to be given equal credibility with decent or even controversial but useful opinions.
00:13:59.000So the real answer in a normal society would be number three.
00:14:02.000Sometimes people deserve the social consequences for what they do.
00:14:12.000So, just for example, in the normal world, you don't have a duty as a business owner to hire or have over to dinner somebody who shouts the N-word at children or who says that white people are colonizers and evil.
00:14:24.000Also in the real world, it would be a bad thing to do to post that person's address online so people can then go to their house and harass them.
00:14:30.000In the real world, you have every right to avoid buying a Bud Light because they claim that men can be women.
00:14:35.000And you also have every right to decide you don't want to engage with a company that says, for example, that the police are systemically racist.
00:14:41.000You also shouldn't go to the home of the CEO and threaten to burn down his house.
00:15:02.000The sort of emergent informal standards of the social fabric used to work just fine because most issues remained personal.
00:15:09.000So for example, in the pre-social media era, if Shiloh Hendricks existed in that era before cell phones, she might have said something awful to a kid and everybody in the neighborhood would have known that she was being crazy and everybody Would have basically stayed away.
00:15:22.000And the same thing would have happened with this Mo Khan character.
00:15:24.000He'd have done something ugly and nasty at a restaurant.
00:15:26.000The employees probably would have lost their jobs for involving themselves.
00:15:29.000And everybody just kind of would have stayed away from that dude.
00:15:32.000Social media has made pretty much everything worse.
00:15:35.000Because now there's a mob waiting to form.
00:15:37.000Basically, that's all social media is.
00:15:39.000It is a mob waiting to form around an issue.
00:15:41.000Just like kind of white blood cells in your immune system waiting for something to attack.
00:15:46.000Now, mobs form to destroy people, and so we are all forced to decide on the spot whether we think a person is bad or good, hero or villain, deserving of shame or support, what level of shame, what level of support.
00:15:59.000But the biggest thing is that in this country, because we have lost the boundaries of what is sort of informal, acceptable debate, not legal bans again, what is sort of the acceptable range of argumentation, the Overton window, as it's called.
00:16:11.000We no longer even agree on the big outlines of an Overton window.
00:16:15.000of either total cancellation for everyone with whom we disagree or total support for bad behavior in order to fight total cancellation.
00:16:22.000And the thing is that these two perspectives are mutually reinforcing.
00:16:26.000The moral relativism of there should be no social consequences or criticism for anything leads people who don't like the stuff that's now being said to call for more social consequences, which leads to more reactionary moral relativism, which leads to more social consequences and back and forth until the end of time.
00:16:43.000I said Monday on the program that people should stop giving money to bad people because I think people should stop giving money to bad people.
00:16:49.000But there is another argument, and it's a pragmatic argument, a counterargument.
00:17:42.000It's one thing to declare a sort of mutually assured destruction in a case where the parties involved are responsive and responsible.
00:17:49.000So, for example, I have argued in favor of a sort of mutually assured destruction to stop secondary corporate boycott tactics that the left enjoyed for decades.
00:17:57.000So I, along with Matt, agree that sometimes we ought to boycott Bud Light because that teaches corporations to stop pandering to the woke.
00:18:04.000Even if, generally speaking, we don't like boycotts.
00:18:18.000So the idea that if you make a person who does a bad thing rich, then the even worse people targeting her will stop targeting her.
00:18:25.000That's not going to happen on an actual practical level.
00:18:28.000What actually will happen is that each side is going to continue to fund and support its own worst offenders.
00:18:33.000Thus leading to even further general degradation of the social fabric.
00:18:37.000Social media mobs will be so outraged by the funding of the cancelled person that then they will seek to support even worse people on their own side.
00:18:45.000Meanwhile, criticism of bad behavior and speech, which, again, that is sort of a normal part of a moral life.
00:18:51.000It says in the Bible that you're not supposed to put a stumbling block before a blind person.
00:18:55.000What that means is that you are not supposed to let people go without warning if they are engaging in bad behavior.
00:19:00.000And if they're engaging in evil opinions, because there are, in fact, opinions that are quite evil.
00:19:04.000If you believe in the mass murder of entire populations, for example, that's kind of an evil opinion.
00:19:10.000Criticism of that, if you get rid of it, if you say that that sort of criticism is cancellation, that it's a sort of puritanical thought crime, this leads to a bizarre logic where it is actually worse to criticize a Nazi than to actually be a Nazi.
00:19:26.000Or where it is worse to actually criticize.
00:19:30.000The woke insanity than to be a woke insane person.
00:19:34.000Mobs in general are not dissuaded by the failure of their cause.
00:19:38.000In fact, they're very often emboldened by it.
00:19:40.000The only thing that actually will stop a mob is the judicious application of countermeasures.
00:19:46.000So, for example, the equal application of law.
00:19:48.000If somebody is being doxxed, physically threatened, those people should be tracked down by law enforcement and go to jail because they're violating the law.
00:19:55.000We should support people whose social sanction Whose cancellation far outweighs the supposed social crime.
00:20:02.000We should support them, not as sort of a moral matter because what they said is great, but because if the punishment outweighs the crime, if it's way too extreme for the crime, that is a bad thing for the system.
00:20:15.000We should totally oppose, obviously, inappropriate cancellation.
00:20:18.000When people are canceled for dumb reasons, that should be complete support.
00:20:21.000And we should allow forgiveness where appropriate.
00:20:23.000People should, in fact, ask for forgiveness, and we should give it to them.
00:20:26.000One of the reasons forgiveness has gone out of style is because people feel like they're going to be dunked on the moment that they actually ask for forgiveness by the social media mob.
00:20:36.000If we are going to share a society together, a social fabric does require a more nuanced view of how we treat these sorts of things that we don't like.
00:20:48.000And that nuanced view can't just be cancel everyone or cancel no one.
00:20:53.000And cancellation itself has to be actually really defined.
00:20:57.000Because if we now define cancellation as just being criticized by somebody, you've actually shut down free speech, you haven't exacerbated or made better free speech.
00:21:05.000These are things we have to think through as a society.
00:21:07.000Social media has made this necessary, and as our common moral standards degrade, the society is going to continue to fall apart through a sort of reactionary cycling between the cancel everyone and cancel no one sides of this particular argument.
00:21:22.000We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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00:22:16.000I'm on the road right now, but I've got that Simply Safe system at my studio in Florida.
00:22:20.000And so I feel a lot safer knowing that they are there when I'm not.
00:23:44.000This should be a reminder, by the way, that a world in which many, many countries are nuclear is a supremely risky world.
00:23:51.000So, just to illustrate how dangerous the world could become, let's talk for a moment about who has nuclear weapons and who is a nuclear country, meaning they have nuclear energy but not nuclear weapons, because the threshold for developing nuclear weapons is much higher than for just developing civilian nuclear energy.
00:24:06.000So right now, According to our friends over at Perplexity and sponsors over at Perplexity, there are nine countries that have nuclear weapons.
00:24:12.000Russia, the United States, China, France, the UK, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea.
00:24:17.000Okay, so, there are also a bunch of countries that host foreign nuclear weapons.
00:24:22.000That includes Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey, and Belarus.
00:24:25.000Belarus has been hosting Russian nuclear weapons since 2023.
00:24:30.000Okay, now, imagine that all those countries decided they were going to develop nuclear weapons of their own.
00:24:39.000There are a bunch of countries that are planning civilian nuclear energy, like Jordan, Egypt, Poland, Kazakhstan, and several others in Africa, Asia, and South America.
00:24:56.000Do we think that this would be a good thing?
00:24:59.000Do we think that the world would become a safer place because of massive nuclear proliferation?
00:25:04.000Well, the reality is that in the absence, Of the sort of American global overwatch in the absence of a feeling of security by America's allies.
00:25:12.000And with the growth of America's enemies, more and more countries are going to feel that the guarantee of their security is nuclear armament.
00:25:19.000If you're enjoying having to care about India and Pakistan right now, let me recommend that you allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon.
00:25:25.000Seriously, if India and Pakistan were just having like a little border dispute and firing at each other right now, people across the world would not be watching this conflict.
00:25:35.000Because both of these countries are nuclear-armed, and people are concerned that if this were to escalate, you would end up with nuclear war.
00:25:42.000And in that nuclear war, that could drag in China, which is a border country, and it could theoretically drag in other surrounding powers and possibly even the United States if this thing were to escalate.
00:25:51.000This is why people care about things like global thermonuclear war.
00:25:55.000Well, India yesterday launched military strikes on targets in Pakistan, both countries said on Wednesday.
00:26:00.000Pakistan claimed it had shot down five Indian Air Force jets.
00:26:03.000An escalation that has pushed the two nations to the brink of wider conflict, according to CNN.
00:26:08.000India's missile strikes were targeting terrorist infrastructure, they said, across nine sites in Pakistan's densely populated Punjab province and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
00:26:16.000That came in response to a massive terror assault by terrorists in India and administered Kashmir by Pakistani terrorists.
00:26:24.000Pakistan, of course, does operate in cahoots with terrorist groups.
00:26:44.000Now, the United States and China are sort of the powers sponsoring each side.
00:26:48.000So the United States does have a relationship with Pakistan because supposedly Pakistan helps us with counterterrorism.
00:26:54.000Let's just say that that support is incredibly intermittent.
00:26:57.000And the United States also supports India, which is a democratic ally of the United States, and is an incredibly important country geopolitically, very fast increasing economy, very fast increasing population.
00:27:09.000A border country, again, with China, if you wish to build a sort of geopolitical wall against Chinese interventionism, then India is a key part of that.
00:27:19.000Both sides, China and the United States, are urging weapons down.
00:27:24.000They don't want this escalating any further.
00:27:26.000They're trying to encourage India to say that they've done enough at this point in response to the terror attack.
00:27:30.000And China's trying to encourage Pakistan to step down.
00:27:33.000Again, I don't think this escalates much from here because I don't think that either country has an incentive to drive a vastly larger war in which the end could actually be mutual nuclear destruction.
00:27:45.000Both India and Pakistan claim all of Kashmir, but the truth is that it's kind of divvied up.
00:27:50.000The last clash in the region happened in 2019.
00:28:06.000India then retaliated with airstrikes and Pakistani forces shot down a warplane captured an Indian pilot and then a negotiated release happened.
00:28:12.000This will probably be something similar.
00:28:15.000So again, the panic that this is going to leap into nuclear war is likely...
00:28:22.000With that said, the reason everybody is worried about this sort of stuff is that a larger nuclear-armed world is incredibly dangerous because everything gets put on the brink of disaster immediately.
00:28:32.000It is the reason why, for example, the war in Ukraine has lasted so long.
00:28:36.000If Russia were not armed with nuclear weapons, then presumably Western support for Ukraine would have been significantly larger and significantly more powerful, and there would have been a possibility of Ukraine literally pushing Russia out of their country.
00:28:47.000But that couldn't happen because of the possibility that Putin might actually unleash nuclear weapons were he to be pushed out of Donbass and Crimea.
00:28:55.000And so that war has just sort of continued for years on end.
00:29:00.000And geopolitics requires, it requires some sort of stability.
00:29:05.000The United States has been the guarantor of stability since World War II.
00:29:09.000As the United States recedes from the world scene, the world is going to become significantly less stable.
00:29:14.000And that chaotic and unstable world is going to lead to problems for the United States because the world is extraordinarily interconnected.
00:29:20.000Our economies are interconnected at this point.
00:29:23.000This is why you see sort of a drive from the Buchananite wing of the Republican Party to move simultaneously toward foreign policy isolationism and economic autarky.
00:29:33.000Now, the consequences of that are lower living standards in the United States.
00:29:43.000It's a great way to reduce your footprint and also to reduce your living standards.
00:29:47.000But as the world becomes more multipolar, as the United States withdraws from its hegemony since World War II, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, the globe is going to get more unstable, not less.
00:29:58.000Speaking of which, yesterday, President Trump declared that there was a truce with the Houthis.
00:30:03.000Now, the Houthis, again, is a terrorist group in Yemen.
00:30:06.000They've been holding up shipping in the Red Sea.
00:30:09.000They've been firing in a wide variety of ships in the Red Sea.
00:30:12.000Basically destroying that trade route, so everybody now has to go around the Horn of Africa in order to ship things from east to west.
00:30:19.000Well, the United States has been bombing the Houthis, and the Houthis apparently came back to the United States and said, we'll stop bombing American ships.
00:30:26.000We'll stop going after American ships.
00:30:27.000In fact, the Houthis said they'll stop going after everything except Israeli ships.
00:30:31.000Now, the problem with that, of course, is that the Houthis have attacked a number of ships that they claim are Israeli that are not actually Israeli.
00:30:37.000The other problem with that is that the Houthis should not be firing at anybody in the Red Sea.
00:30:41.000Because if the idea is they get to pick off boats one by one, and there's no collective response, well, they're going to start picking off more and more boats from more and more enemies.
00:30:51.000But President Trump, and again, there's a broader geopolitical context to this, what this really appears to be is a setup for a bad nuclear deal cut by the Trump administration.
00:31:01.000Now, President Trump has been saying that the Obama-Iran deal is the worst deal in history.
00:31:55.000So, President Trump, yesterday, he explained that the Houthis have said that they are not going to bomb our ships, which of course is a good thing.
00:32:03.000And again, the suggestion here is not that the United States needs to, quote-unquote, keep bombing the Houthis on behalf of Israel or something like that.
00:32:51.000Okay, so Stephen Miller, who of course is a top advisor to President Trump, senior advisor, he says the Houthis will no longer be firing on U.S. ships.
00:32:58.000Now the question is whether that means U.S. ships, all ships, or what this means.
00:33:02.000Just today, President Trump announced that the Houthis have said that they will not shoot at American ships, they will not shoot at American military, as a result of the bombardment campaign that President Trump authorized and led.
00:33:17.000A major victory for U.S. foreign policy.
00:33:21.000Okay, so, if that's the extent of it, then sure, great.
00:33:25.000You know, the fact that the Houthis will stop firing on shipping in the Red Sea is great, although, again, if they're firing on ships that they consider quote-unquote Israelis, they have fired on a bunch of ships that are not Israeli in orientation while claiming that they are, in fact, Israeli.
00:33:37.000However, this is part of a broader gambit by Iran.
00:33:40.000Let's be very clear what is happening now.
00:33:41.000It's not that the United States bombed the Houthis into submission, and so the Houthis are stopping their activity.
00:33:45.000What the Houthis are attempting to do at the behest of Iran is basically carve off the United States from Israel in the Iranian nuclear negotiations.
00:33:54.000According to a report from the New York Times, two Iranian officials said that Iran had persuaded the Houthis to stop their attacks on U.S. assets as part of the Omani mediation efforts.
00:34:04.000CNN cited people familiar with the matter as saying that Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, Again, his supposed negotiator extraordinaire, who has yet to negotiate a good deal, had worked with the Omanis over the past week to broker the U.S. Houthi ceasefire.
00:34:16.000The sources said the ceasefire was also meant to help build momentum in the Iran nuclear talks, which Koff is leading.
00:34:21.000So again, the goal here for Iran is to basically say, okay, the Houthis will stop attacking U.S. ships in the Red Sea, and in return, you guys cut a bad Iran nuclear deal and wash your hands of the whole region.
00:34:34.000Now, of course, Iran is not going to stop developing nuclear weapons.
00:34:37.000Particularly if the Trump administration cuts a bad deal.
00:34:40.000And what is the predictable result of all that going to be?
00:34:43.000The predictable result is going to be something very much like what just happened in Yemen, meaning the Israelis took it upon themselves to destroy the entire airport in Sana 'a.
00:34:50.000So if you want Israel bombing Iran, actually the best way to ensure that Israel is going to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities is to cut a bad Obama nuclear deal.
00:34:58.000Because Israel will then have no choice but to go ahead and do that.
00:35:02.000So if what you're seeking to avoid is escalation, then stronger peace through strength.
00:35:07.000Stronger strangling of the Iranian economy.
00:35:09.000Stronger demands upon Iran would be the way to actually do that.
00:35:13.000It's not possible to see the Houthi deal outside of the context of the broader Iranian issue.
00:35:19.000I mean, President Trump said that back in March.
00:35:21.000He literally put out a statement in March saying that the Houthis are just an Iranian proxy state.
00:35:26.000So the reason, again, that the Houthis are doing this is to try and suggest that if Iran basically goes after Israel on its own, that the United States will...
00:35:49.000They'd be threatening other areas in the Middle East, ranging from parts of Syria, presumably, to Iraq, to places like Azerbaijan.
00:36:00.000An Iranian nuclear weapon creates geopolitical instability for sure.
00:36:03.000And so if this is an attempt to basically say to the Trump administration, get an easy win with a headline, and then we get to go nuclear, and after all, we don't care about you, we just care about the Israelis.
00:36:13.000First of all, the Iranians are good at this.
00:36:15.000They know the game that they are playing.
00:36:17.000And if the United States shows that it is uninterested in the region, the Iranians are not going to stop being interested in the region.
00:36:25.000Again, when the United States recedes from the world scene, it is not that what fills the gap is something better and more peaceful and more wonderful.
00:36:31.000What fills the gap is usually something significantly worse, significantly more chaotic.
00:36:36.000And as I said before, with regards to India and Pakistan, if the world is a more chaotic place that has an impact on the United States economically, it has an impact on the United States in terms of security.
00:36:46.000Now again, that is not a call for full-scale American war in the Middle East.
00:36:52.000I think there's a strong case to be made that Iran, being absolutely dishonorable, a country that is led by Islamic maniacs, I mean, that really is what the country is.
00:37:04.000It's an Islamic dictatorship, a revolutionary dictatorship, that they are untrustworthy in the extreme when it comes to foreign policy.
00:37:12.000They've killed thousands of American soldiers on Iraqi soil and all the rest.
00:37:15.000It seems to me that there's a strong case, not an impregnable case, but a strong case to be made.
00:37:21.000That a single B2 sortie involving the United States to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities would greatly reset the region.
00:37:28.000But, at the very least, the United States should not be engaging in some sort of SOP to Iran that titularly allows us to escape responsibility for things going on in the Middle East while dramatically increasing the possibilities of chaos in the Middle East, which could be what is happening.
00:37:43.000President Trump, by the way, teased that he has a very big announcement ahead of his Middle East trip.
00:37:47.000It is unclear exactly what this means.
00:37:49.000Of course, it could just be a Bitcoin announcement.
00:38:43.000Again, unstable world that is being created as America basically recedes and tries to move into a more multipolar age.
00:38:51.000That's having impact on Eastern Europe as well.
00:38:53.000Apparently, Poland is now feeling some anxiety because, of course, they are bordering Ukraine if the idea is that the United States is sort of withdrawing from the Ukraine war, which appears to be quasi-happening, kind of happening, not really clear what's happening.
00:39:11.000Nuclear development in pretty much every country that borders with a Russia or a China or a Pakistan or an Iran is very, very real.
00:39:18.000And a universal nuclear weapon world is going to be a very, very dangerous place.
00:39:24.000Meanwhile, the markets are actually on the rise thanks to the fact that President Trump now seems to be looking for an off-ramp in his trade talks with the Chinese.
00:39:34.000Now, again, there is a good way to box in China when it comes to trade.
00:39:37.000Bill Ackman, the investor, put out a statement yesterday that I think is totally correct.
00:39:40.000He said, what if President Trump were to announce that China tariffs would immediately be reduced to 20% and then escalate thereafter by 0.5% per month for the next 12 months and then by 1% per month for the next 12 months and 1.5% per month for the next 12 months and so on, which would mean like a 6% increase for a year.
00:40:04.000This approach, he says, would incentivize companies to relocate their supply chains from China while enabling them to continue to operate profitably during the transition.
00:40:12.000China would be incentivized to make a good deal with President Trump as promptly as practicable, while the risk of a dramatic shock to the U.S. and global economies would be greatly reduced if not eliminated.
00:40:23.000As I've said many times on the show at this point, doing a trade war with China is not a bad idea if you do the preconditional work.
00:40:29.000The preconditional work involves better trade deals with everybody else on earth that is not China and with whom you can ally to box China in.
00:40:37.000Part three would be to find other supply lines for key national security-based industries, like rare earth metals, for example.
00:40:50.000And four would be to rapidly build up the United States' naval capacity so that if China, feeling in a box, tried to go for Taiwan, the United States could dissuade them.
00:40:57.000Those are all preconditions to really going after China on the trade route.
00:41:00.000And this is exactly what Ackman is saying.
00:41:04.000President Trump yesterday said that China wants a deal.
00:41:08.000China wants to, very much wants to make a deal.
00:41:12.000But yeah, I would say that every country wants to make a deal and not the ones they had in the past where we were like, look, we were being ripped off.
00:41:23.000By every country practically without exception in the entire world.
00:41:33.000The question is, what are the deals going to look like?
00:41:35.000So President Trump says that he could be announcing 50 or 100 deals.
00:41:38.000And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessence has said that those deals, they take a long time to negotiate, by the way.
00:41:44.000A typical trade deal might take a year to negotiate.
00:41:46.000You'll probably have some term sheets, basically one or two page rough outline that will allow the United States to at least temporarily lower tariffs as the rest of the negotiation goes on.
00:41:55.000Here's President Trump talking about announcing further trade deals.
00:42:01.000I could announce 50 to 100 deals right now because, you know, I'm the shopkeeper and I keep the store.
00:42:07.000And, you know, I know what countries are looking for and I know what we're looking for and I can just set those terms and they can go shopping or they don't have to go shopping because everybody wants to shop here.
00:43:01.000And again, with President Trump, the strategic uncertainty will make sure that we get the best deal possible.
00:43:08.000That's what's happening with the trading partners who are coming to us.
00:43:13.000Okay, now, again, I think that's the best possible and plausible defense of Trump's approach on trade.
00:43:17.000The reality is you don't need strategic uncertainty when you have the cards in your pocket.
00:43:21.000The reality is that if you're playing poker and you hold four aces, you don't need to act as though you are bluffing because you have the cards.
00:43:30.000The United States does have the cards when it comes to these trade deals.
00:43:33.000If we went to Vietnam behind the scenes, like, guys, we need you to lower your non-tariff...
00:43:42.000They'll lower it because we have all the leverage in that relationship.
00:43:46.000And one of the big problems for the administration and the reason why the economy continues to sort of be held in advance, investors are still waiting to put their money back in, is because President Trump says things and then Besant basically has to fill in the gap.
00:44:04.000They only need two dolls, which is a very bad approach to this particular issue.
00:44:07.000And Scott Besson is out there trying to defend it because that's his job.
00:44:11.000Look, the other thing, too, is this reporter behind me was quite snarky the other day when President Trump talked about the girl having two dolls.
00:44:23.000The president didn't take the question, but he said, what would you tell that girl?
00:44:26.000I said, I would tell that young girl that you will have a better life than your parents, that you and your family, thanks to President Trump, can now be confident again that you will have a better life than your parents, which working-class Americans had abandoned that idea.
00:44:54.000Okay, now, again, if you can explain to me why you need to own two dollars instead of 30 in order to own a home, like, the relationship between the two should be made clearer by the administration.
00:45:05.000Yesterday, Mark Carney, the freshly elected liberal prime minister of Canada who should not have been elected, Pierre Polyev, should have been the prime minister of Canada.
00:45:12.000At this point, Mark Carney showed up, and President Trump basically acknowledged that his intervention in the Canadian election helped swing the election to Carney.
00:45:22.000Here he's saying he can't take full credit for Carney's win.
00:45:27.000It's a great honor to have Prime Minister Mark Carney with us.
00:45:31.000As you know, just a few days ago, he won a very big election in Canada.
00:45:35.000And I think I was probably the greatest thing that happened to him, but I can't take full credit.
00:45:41.000His party was losing by a lot, and he ended up winning.
00:45:59.000Yeah, you know, it would have been a better election if President Trump hadn't declared trade war on Canada and then talked about annexing their country.
00:46:05.000Carney, for his part, had a grand old time in the Oval, basically shellacking Trump to his face.
00:46:10.000So here's Mark Carney saying that Canada will not be bought, which of course gives him a lot of street cred with his people back home.
00:46:17.000As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale.
00:46:57.000Well, respectfully, Canadians' view on this is not going to change on the 51st state.
00:47:05.000Secondly, we are the largest client of the United States in the totality of all the goods.
00:47:12.000So we are the largest client of the United States.
00:47:14.000We have a tremendous auto sector between the two of us and the changes that made have been helpful.
00:47:19.000You know, 50% of a car that comes from Canada is American.
00:47:23.000That's not like anywhere else in the world.
00:47:27.000So he's fact-checking Trump on Trump saying that we actually don't need Canada.
00:47:32.000We don't have a big trade relationship.
00:47:33.000And Carney happens to be correct there.
00:47:34.000We actually do sell billions, as in upward of $350 billion of stuff in Canada.
00:47:40.000They are our largest single trade partner, actually.
00:47:43.000President Trump, for his part, refused to give up on Canadian annexation.
00:47:47.000This is what he had to say in the Oval yesterday.
00:47:50.000I must say, Canada is stepping up the military participation because Mark knew, you know, they were low and now they're stepping it up and that's a very important thing.
00:48:13.000I was watching your face through the meeting in the Oval Office and I wondered what was going through your mind when the president talked about re-erasing the artificial border and how he criticized your predecessor and Madam Freeland.
00:48:29.000Well, thank you for, I guess, for your question.
00:48:32.000I'm glad that you couldn't tell what was going through my mind as that was going through.
00:48:37.000Look, with respect to the first point, the President has made known his wish about that issue for some time.
00:48:52.000I've been careful always to distinguish between wish and reality.
00:49:12.000I can't say that enough because there are some members of the right who seem to believe that it's like a big win to dunk on Pierre Polyev, who lost because, again, the Trump administration decided to Leroy Jenkins some sort of trade war with Canada.
00:49:26.000Again, I just don't see the purpose of that.
00:49:29.000And I hope that Mark Carney, who is not going to be a good prime minister, I hope that the Canadian people see that and that his tenure as prime minister is short-lived.
00:49:40.000Well, folks, the show continues in just a moment with a piece of good news for the Trump administration.
00:49:44.000The Supreme Court has made a ruling as to whether trans people can be banned from the military, at least for the moment.