Donald Trump wins the primary in New Hampshire and Nikki Haley becomes the new face of the anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party. What does that mean for her chances in the fall? And why did she fail to resonate with the pro-Trump base in the primary? And what role does she play in the 2020 campaign? And how can she change the landscape of politics if she's not running for president in 2020? All that and much more on today's episode of 'The FiveThirtyEight' with John Avlon and Sarah Downey. John and Sarah discuss all of that and more in this special bonus episode of the podcast, including a clip of Haley's childhood that went viral and why she should have been able to stand up against identity politics in the face of racial division in America today. Subscribe to the podcast and tell us what you think about it in the comments section below. Thanks to our sponsor, Caff Monster Energy! for sponsoring the podcast! We'll see you next Tuesday with a new episode of "Your Turn" featuring John McCain and Sarah Palin! Subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your stuff! Thanks for listening and share it! Timestamps: 4:00 - What would you like to see John McCain do next? 5:30 - What do you think of Nikki Haley's clip? 6:15 - Why Nikki Haley should run for president? 7:00 8:10 - What does she have a chance to win the 2020 Democratic primary? 9:40 - Is she better than John McCain or Hillary Clinton better than Hillary Clinton? 11:00 | What do I think I would do better? 16:00 Is she a better presidential candidate? 17:00 Should she stay in the race for 2020? 18: Is she more likely to win in 2020 than she s better than Joe Biden? 19:30 21:40 22:10 27:30 What are you think she s going to be a better candidate than she has a chance of winning the 2020 election? 26:30 Is she's going to have a shot at it? 29: What s she going to win it in 2020 or not? 30:00 Does she have it better than she should be better than I think she's better than that? 31:00 Can she be a black woman? 32:00 Are you better than me?
00:00:42.000I can just say that There's never been a movement like this, Make America Great Again, in the history of our country.
00:00:48.000I just stopped here and I figured I'd see three or four people and maybe walk inside and you see a crowd like this and this is, this is organic.
00:01:02.000I'm not sure what else there is to say about that.
00:01:04.000It does raise the question of just why Nikki Haley failed to resonate as sort of the anti-Trump candidate.
00:01:10.000Now part of it is that there just isn't an anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party sufficient to actually overcome the pro-Trump wing of the Republican Party.
00:01:19.000When Donald Trump became the nominee in 2016, Everybody came home, and then everybody came home again in 2020, and everybody's coming home again in 2024.
00:01:27.000That is, in fact, the way politics works.
00:01:28.000And so people who are looking at his results in, say, New Hampshire in 2016, and saying he was going to replicate his 35% in New Hampshire in 2024, are ignoring the fact that in the intervening period, he became the President of the United States, and then ran another election cycle, and now is running yet a third election cycle.
00:01:47.000But the outsized animus for Nikki Haley that you see on some parts of the right, and I do think it's outsized.
00:01:53.000Part of that is because if you oppose Trump, there's a part of the base that just is angry at you for having opposed Trump.
00:02:04.000She's somebody who's praised his presidency.
00:02:06.000And so the idea that she's some sort of wild anti-Trump force, I think, is wrong.
00:02:10.000But what Nikki Haley does have is an affect problem that is out of, I would say, pattern with the modern Republican Party.
00:02:18.000The Republican Party at this point is, in fact, a party that is angry.
00:02:23.000And I think justifiably angry on a number of scores.
00:02:26.000One of the things the Republican Party is angry about, the base particularly, they're very angry about hearing about racial divisions.
00:02:34.000They've been lectured since 2008, since Barack Obama ran for president in 2007, they've been lectured that America was coming close to racial unity only to have that ripped away from them.
00:02:45.000And to watch as everybody sort of retreated back into tribalistic corners.
00:02:50.000And this is how you end up with critical race theory and DEI and equity throughout the Biden administration.
00:02:55.000So when they hear from members of the Republican Party about how America is a place that was replete with discrimination even 20 years ago or 30 years ago, They tend to think, I'm not sure that the person who's saying that is the person that I want fighting this fight today.
00:03:10.000Not that people are lying about their experiences of 20 or 30 years ago, but to point out that your experience of 20 or 30 years ago, does that make you the person who is best suited to fight against the DEI culture today?
00:03:25.000The reason that's coming up is because there's a clip of Nikki Haley that went viral just before the primaries, in which she was talking about her childhood.
00:03:32.000And again, what she says here I don't think is actually wildly controversial, except that it is very much at odds with the attitude of many members of the Republican base, which is to say, are you going to stand up against the predations of the D.E.I.C.R.T.
00:03:46.000Are you going to stand up against the idea that America is a place of racial division with sufficient alacrity, or are you going to try to play a little bit of identity politics for gain?
00:03:55.000Here's the clip of Nikki Haley that went totally viral.
00:03:58.000We were the only Indian family in our small southern town.
00:04:04.000I was teased every day for being brown.
00:04:08.000So anyone that wants to question it can go back and look at what I've said on how hard it was to grow up in the deep south as a brown girl.
00:04:17.000What I will tell you is, saying that I had black friends is a source of pride.
00:04:22.000Saying that I had white friends is a source of pride.
00:04:25.000If you want to know what it was like growing up, I was disqualified from a beauty pageant because I wasn't white or black.
00:04:32.000Because they didn't know where to put me.
00:04:34.000So look, I know the hardships, the pain that come with racism.
00:04:41.000It's the reason that I fight bullies every day when it comes to racism, anti-semitism, or hate.
00:04:49.000So, the reason that clip went viral on the right is because, again, the question is, is she saying that sort of stuff to pander to legacy media, or is she doing what Tim Scott sort of did during the campaign, where he says, look how far we've come, I've suffered from racism, I know what that's like, but America is a place of opportunity, and to pretend that America today is what America was yesterday is foolish.
00:05:08.000Or is this a, I'm a diverse candidate, vote for me, kind of play?
00:05:12.000I think a lot of Republicans took away the latter message from clips like that one and it obviously did not help Nikki Haley.
00:05:17.000Now again, I think that's combined with a lot of people who are very pro-Trump and very angry that anybody would deign to run against Trump.
00:05:23.000Whatever the result, it didn't end up well for Nikki Haley in New Hampshire overall.
00:05:27.000Now she says that she is not going to drop out of the race just yet.
00:05:31.000She said yesterday that she was not going to talk political obituaries.
00:05:56.000And I do it because I love this country.
00:05:58.000And we're going to go and fight until the very last poll closes, and then we're headed to my sweet state of South Carolina, and we're going to make the case there as well.
00:06:06.000Now, it's a couple of weeks until South Carolina.
00:06:08.000Do I think that Nikki Haley is going to stay in all the way until South Carolina?
00:06:13.000Maybe she wants to rack up some delegates in case there's an act of God and something happens to Trump and they go to the convention and she says, I'm the person with the second most delegates and make her case there.
00:06:20.000Maybe she wants to trade her delegates for some sort of slot in the administration.
00:06:38.000If you're a Democrat, you sort of feel like the trap may have just snapped closed on your opponents.
00:06:43.000For a long time, Democrats, particularly in the legacy media, have been saying that all of Donald Trump's opponents, they're terrible, they're awful, they're no good, they're very bad, except for Nikki Haley, who is kind of okay.
00:06:51.000And the reason you say she was kind of okay is because, again, of that sort of softer affect that she has.
00:06:56.000But don't worry, if Nikki Haley had actually become the Republican nominee, she would have been just as bad as Trump, worse than Trump, because she's more seductive in terms of her politics and in terms of her mean than Trump is.
00:09:22.000The reason it's sort of fascinating is because we covered a lot of ground.
00:09:26.000And one of the biggest pieces of ground we covered is the debate between Biden and Trump.
00:09:30.000And so I want to play a little bit of that for you right here, because I think that this is going to be the debate, obviously, going into the 2024 election, is this debate between Biden and Trump.
00:09:40.000The debate did not center particularly much on Joe Biden's record because the truth is that Joe Biden's record is deeply flawed.
00:09:46.000And we're going to get to more of that in just one second.
00:09:49.000Instead, it centered on the central contention that is being made by people who are voting for Biden, which is that Donald Trump ought to be ruled out just right away.
00:09:57.000Just right off the bat, Donald Trump cannot be president of the United States because he's just too scary.
00:10:36.000Can I ask you, like, for our head of state, our chief executive, shouldn't rhetoric be arguably one of the most important things that he does?
00:10:45.000And now I've been given a choice between a person who I think in calibrated ways says things that are divisive and a person who in uncalibrated ways says things that are divisive.
00:10:54.000And so the evidence that Joe Biden is divisive is every poll taken.
00:11:02.000He is, by all available metrics, incredibly divisive.
00:11:06.000A huge percentage of Americans are deeply unhappy, not only with his performance, but don't believe he's a uniter.
00:11:12.000And this is one of the things that I think that Democrats ought to keep in mind, is that Democrats are thinking, just right off the bat, that Donald Trump is so divisive because of his rhetoric and all the things he says.
00:11:22.000But are people disappointed with Trump?
00:11:25.000Or is Trump kind of what he always was?
00:11:28.000Because one of the feelings I get is that people are deeply disappointed in Joe Biden.
00:11:31.000That's a very difficult feeling to shake.
00:11:33.000If you're disappointed in a political candidate, you tend to turn away from that political candidate.
00:11:41.000That was actually the story of the 2012 election.
00:11:43.000Between 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama actually lost votes.
00:11:46.000He's the first incumbent president to lose votes and somehow retain the presidency.
00:12:19.000But Joe Biden came into office on the wings of eagles.
00:12:21.000Joe Biden came into office pledging that he was going to unite the country.
00:12:24.000He was going to bring honor and the adults back to the White House.
00:12:26.000And instead, he has provided terrible leadership and divisive rhetoric and speeches in which he labels half the country terrible and awful and threats to democracy.
00:12:36.000We also talked about the idea of tyranny.
00:12:38.000So Stephen focused a lot on January 6th.
00:12:42.000He focused a lot on the idea that Trump would, if he could, be a tyrant.
00:12:45.000And the point that I made is that Donald Trump Would he exercise power, if he could exercise power, in ways that I would not like?
00:12:56.000I mean, he recently went on a Twitter spree, or a truth social spree, in which he claimed that the president has what he called absolute immunity, like for any crime ever.
00:13:05.000So do I think that he would effectuate that if he could?
00:13:10.000Here's how I explained it to Steven when we were talking about which character is more tyrannical.
00:13:17.000Joe Biden has used executive power in ways that far outstrip anything that Trump has done.
00:13:20.000Every president has been stretching and stretching and stretching executive power.
00:13:23.000Joe Biden is going, like, Joe Biden has gone well beyond anything Trump even remotely attempted to maintain via just pure executive power.
00:13:31.000I mean, Joe Biden literally used the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration to try to cram down VAX mandates on 80 million Americans.
00:14:15.000And the biggest problem of all for Joe Biden is not just that he is bad on policy, which again, we'll get to in a moment.
00:14:20.000The biggest problem for Joe Biden is that there is a conflict of visions between Joe Biden's view of the world and what the American people think.
00:14:26.000He is guided by an upper crust liberal elite, a coterie that does not think like the rest of the United States thinks.
00:14:34.000And that refuses to kind of engage in the conversations that the rest of Americans are engaged in.
00:14:41.000There's a poll that I want to get to in just one second that explains where a lot of the Democratic Party agenda is coming from.
00:14:47.000And it is not coming from the same place that most Americans are coming from.
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00:15:55.000Okay, so the conflict of visions may be the story of not only this election, but the election of 2016 between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
00:16:04.000So there is a person named Yuval Noah Harari.
00:16:08.000Yuval Noah Harari is an author, and a professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
00:16:26.000And the reason I'm bringing this up is because I think this is actually the view of a huge number of liberal-minded elites in the United States.
00:16:33.000And it is completely at odds with the way that most people, I think, think.
00:17:05.000are just stories. Israel or the United States, they are just stories, very powerful stories,
00:17:12.000stories we might want to believe very much, but still they are just stories. You can't really see
00:17:18.000the United States. You cannot touch it. You cannot smell it.
00:17:21.000Okay, the reality. Once you create this fact-value disconnect, once you get rid of
00:17:28.000the divine or any rational basis at all, or faith basis for fundamental first principles,
00:17:33.000then you fall very quickly into moral relativism.
00:17:35.000And once you're in moral relativism, it is very hard to escape it.
00:17:39.000And that's why there's a really fascinating poll that came out recently from Rasmussen.
00:17:45.000And it looked at the people who are sort of that we describe as the elites.
00:17:51.000Here's how the Rasmussen polling group describes it.
00:17:53.000They say, the people who run America, or at least think they do, live in a bubble of their own construction.
00:17:57.000They've isolated themselves from everyday American realities.
00:17:59.000To such a degree, their views about what is and what should be happening in this country differ widely from the average Americans.
00:18:05.000An analysis of their thinking, conducted for the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, finds that on a variety of economic, social, and political issues, there exists a wide gap between how the top 1%, the elites, think things should be and how the rest of America looks to them.
00:18:20.000These would be defined as people having at least one post-grad degree.
00:18:24.000Okay, so these are people, they just graduated college, they have a JD, an MBA, an MD, earning at least 150 grand annually, living in a high population density area.
00:18:34.000So that'd be like a New York lawyer who graduated from NYU or something.
00:18:38.000And then it compares what these elites think to what the rest of America thinks.
00:18:41.000And what they find is this vast disconnect, a serious and vast disconnect.
00:18:46.000So, for example, in a time when most Americans have suffered a loss of real take-home pay, 74% of elites say they are financially better off today than in the past, versus 20% of all Americans.
00:20:26.000Because to them, property rights are kind of irrelevant because they already own the things.
00:20:32.000In fact, the people who need property rights the most typically are not the people who already own, but the people who are going to need to own in order to get out of the situation in which they currently live.
00:20:41.000I'll get to more of this polling in just one second.
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00:21:46.000Okay, back to this fascinating poll of the elites from Rasmussen.
00:21:51.000Apparently, somewhere between half and two thirds of these elites favor banning things like SUVs,
00:21:56.000gas stoves, air conditioning, and non-essential air travel to protect the environment.
00:21:59.000About six of these ten elites have a favorable opinion of the so-called talking professions to be lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and journalists.
00:22:06.000Now, again, I think normies in America look at that and they're like, lawyers?
00:22:10.000Those are people who make things more complicated and cost me money.
00:22:21.000I think it's how many Americans feel about our institutions right now.
00:22:23.000But the elites, because these are the circles in which they walk, have a lot of faith in institutions that the rest of America has been disabused about.
00:22:46.000Again, when it says, does the United States provide too much individual freedom, too much government control, or is the balance about right?
00:22:54.00057% of Americans say about too much control.
00:22:58.000Ivy League graduates, 55% say too much freedom.
00:23:02.000That gap defines the Biden administration.
00:23:05.000The Biden administration is defined by this gap.
00:23:07.000Now again, I think that normal people are not thinking like this.
00:23:10.000I don't think normal people think that things like country and borders are artificial abstractions created out of thin air.
00:23:17.000They're stories that we just tell ourselves.
00:23:19.000Arbitrary stories that we can change at any time.
00:23:22.000And in fact, I think that the stories that replace those stories, even if you buy Yuval Noah Harari's framework here, the stories that replace those stories are much worse than the stories that have historically been accepted by human beings.
00:23:37.000The replacement for stories about church, for example, has not been a better story that we tell ourselves.
00:24:03.000But the answer to that story is a better story.
00:24:06.000And that story could be answered not with puzzlement and bewilderment, But with a simple three-word answer, here's what that sounded like.
00:24:15.000The one kind of weird thing that we're coming up against, that we have been coming up against now for some number of decades and will continue to, is as societies progress, seems like people are having less children.
00:24:27.000And I actually don't know 100% what the answer is to that question.
00:25:28.000He's running against Joe Biden in an exotic campaign in New Hampshire against the current president.
00:25:33.000But he went off on the media because they're asking a bunch of questions.
00:25:36.000And he said, listen, you're not even asking the questions Americans care about.
00:25:39.000And that makes perfect sense because journalists, many of them are part of this elite coterie who have a different value system from the rest of America.
00:25:49.000I'm only doing this to defeat Donald Trump.
00:25:51.000Nobody seems to want to do that in the Democratic Party right now, other than me, because Joe Biden can't, is my proposition, because the data says he can't.
00:25:59.000No one in the country right now cares.
00:26:00.000In fact, most of the people in the country are going to the Trump rally right now, because he's listening to them.
00:26:18.000Democrats are not giving answers to the questions that Americans care about, and journalists aren't even asking the questions that Americans give a crap about.
00:26:24.000In fact, their definition of freedom is so wildly different from the definition that most Americans hold that it's gonna get them in an awful lot of trouble.
00:26:30.000So for example, Senator Tammy Duckworth was asked what 2024 was about, and she said freedom.
00:26:36.000And so the question is, what do you mean by freedom?
00:26:40.000Well, I think that it's about Freedom, right?
00:26:43.000It's about protecting democracy, but protecting freedoms.
00:26:45.000And 1 of our freedoms is the right to control our bodies and control our reproductive cycles.
00:26:50.000Also talking about the right to the freedom from student loans, the freedom to walk down the streets and not have to worry about being target of.
00:28:23.000Shouldn't he want a restructured way of life?
00:28:27.000And what he's talking about is the things that most Americans actually care about.
00:28:31.000The things that are, the stories that have always worked.
00:28:33.000The stories about family and freedom and the ability to use your merit to rise to the top.
00:28:41.000And one of the things that he's saying about He said, if you're 5'3 and you're 300 pounds, taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.
00:28:49.000Young men are putting themselves six feet in the ground because all this damn country does is keep kicking them down.
00:28:54.000And people are like, why is he doing the welfare queen routine?
00:28:56.000Well, it turns out that most Americans actually are not in favor of the basic proposition that freedom means freedom from student loans, for example.
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00:30:17.000Okay, so speaking of Joe Biden's policy, you know, the most undercovered story of this of this cycle, this new cycle so far, is the fact that we have two dead Navy SEALs.
00:30:29.000I mean, like, how is this not the biggest story in America?
00:30:33.000So these two Navy SEALs actually died.
00:30:35.000They were lost at sea during an operation attempting to seize Iranian-made missile parts that were bound for Houthi rebels in Yemen.
00:30:42.000All of this, by the way, an outgrowth of the gigantically weak foreign policy of this administration with regard to Iran.
00:30:49.000CENTCOM said in a statement the military had declared the two deal seals dead.
00:30:52.000It was now conducting recovery operations following a 10-day exhaustive search.
00:31:01.000The seals were reported lost earlier this month when they took part in a nighttime operation to board a boat in the international waters of the Arabian Sea, according to the U.S.
00:31:08.000That is an attempt to ensure freedom of shipping, which has been completely obstructed under Joe Biden through the Red Sea.
00:31:16.000Joe Biden's attempts to fire missiles that hit camels in the ass has so far had very little effect on the actual prevention of who the terror attacks on ship and which continue unabated.
00:31:27.000Meanwhile, We have two Americans dead in an attempt to stop the Houthis.
00:31:31.000We have other Americans who have been severely wounded, including one with apparently brain injuries, thanks to Iranian attacks on American bases in Iraq.
00:31:39.000And Joe Biden is just trying to walk through this thing.
00:31:41.000Here is Joe Biden literally just trying to stumble across grass and avoiding questions about these two dead Navy SEALs.
00:32:10.000Several Americans may have been injured.
00:32:12.000Will Iran pay any price for this latest assault?
00:32:14.000CENTCOM said in a statement most of the missiles were intercepted by the al-Assad airbase air defense systems while others impacted the base.
00:32:20.000Damage assessments are ongoing and added a number of U.S.
00:32:22.000personnel are undergoing evaluation for traumatic brain injury.
00:32:26.000At least one Iraqi service member was wounded.
00:32:29.000This is one of the largest of the 140 or so attacks by Iranian-backed militias since October 7th against the United States in Iraq and Syria.
00:32:35.000And all of that is designed to put pressure on the United States, to put pressure on Israel to stop and leave Hamas in place in the Gaza Strip after the worst terror attack on Jews since World War II.
00:32:46.000The reason Iran is doing this is because Iran believes that in an election year, Joe Biden is so all-fired frightened of getting into a war with Iran that they can push the United States around to their heart's content.
00:32:56.000They can shut down shipping in the Red Sea.
00:32:57.000They can continue to have Hezbollah fire missiles into northern Israel and kill Jews.
00:33:01.000They can continue to fire directly at American bases.
00:33:05.000They can have their proxy forces fire directly at American air bases in Iraq, and Joe Biden will run away.
00:33:11.000In fact, that is not a bad analysis by the Iranians because that's how weak Joe Biden is.
00:33:14.000Peter Baker at the New York Times reports as much.
00:33:16.000He says, Another day, another barrage of rockets and another spark that American officials fear could set off a wildfire of violence across the Middle East.
00:33:23.000The assault on American troops based at Al Asad Air Base in Western Iraq Saturday night was by one measure the most successful bleed to be carried out by a militia sponsored by Iran since the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7th.
00:33:35.000Two out of an estimated 17 rockets and short-range ballistic missiles fired at the base made it through air defense systems.
00:33:41.000American forces have at times mounted retaliations, but in limited fashion to avoid instigating a full-fledged conflict.
00:33:47.000Biden administration officials have regularly debated the proper strategy.
00:33:50.000They don't want to let such attacks go without a response.
00:33:52.000But on the other hand, They don't want to go so far, the conflict would escalate into a full-fledged war, particularly by striking Iran directly.
00:33:58.000They privately say they may not have no choice if American troops are killed.
00:34:01.000That's a red line that has not been crossed, but if Iranian-backed militias ever have a day of better aim or better luck, it easily could be.
00:34:07.000What do you call it when you have two dead Navy SEALs in an attempt to stop the Houthis from shipping a bunch of missiles into their territory?
00:34:15.000Again, the fear of Iran is dictating this administration's foreign policy and it's dictating Iran's aggression.
00:34:21.000Now, the reality is that Iran really, really does not want to direct war with the United States.
00:34:26.000What they do want to do is humiliate the United States and pressure the United States into pressuring Israel to leaving their proxy force in Hamas in place.
00:34:33.000But there's an entire article in the New York Times by rule Mark Garrett and Ray Take talking about exactly what Iran wants.
00:34:41.000And what they say, correctly, is while Iran is clearly asserting its military strength amid the widening regional turmoil, that doesn't mean its leaders want to be drawn into a wider war.
00:35:07.000Well, because they're afraid that if they go to war, if they get in like a direct firing war with the United States or Israel, they're afraid their regime is over.
00:35:13.000The elderly supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is seeking to secure his legacy.
00:35:17.000That means not getting dragged into a wider war.
00:35:20.000They're busily rounding up protesters and executing them right now.
00:35:25.000So, you know, Iran doesn't want the war, certainly more than the West doesn't want the war.
00:35:29.000But Joe Biden is making clear, just like Barack Obama did in 2012 to the Russians, if you guys want to get aggressive, like now would probably be your best move.
00:35:37.000Because if you like, please, please, please don't make me get aggressive with you because I want to get reelected.
00:35:42.000And Joe Biden is basically saying that to the Iranians.
00:35:44.000And the Iranians are like, well, that gives us a window of opportunity.
00:35:49.000Now, there could be a miscalculation here.
00:35:50.000Iran could go too far and the United States might be forced, even under Joe Biden, to do something.
00:35:54.000But the best way to do this would be to be predictably unpredictable.
00:35:58.000The reason they never did this under Trump is that they didn't know what the hell Trump was going to do.
00:36:01.000Trump might have fired a missile and taken out the Ayatollahs.
00:36:05.000Nobody believes that Biden is going to do that.
00:36:06.000Instead, Joe Biden continues to signal to the Iranians and their proxies that he will, in fact, do their work.
00:36:13.000That he will, in fact, attempt to leverage down a bad deal on Israel after the Hamas attack.
00:36:20.000According to the Wall Street Journal, a proposal submitted to Israel via the United States suggests a post-war Gaza that would create a pathway toward a Palestinian state in exchange for Saudi recognition of Israel.
00:36:31.000Now, the reason that's totally insane is because if Israel grants a pathway to a Palestinian state on the heels of the worst terror attack in Israeli history, you are simply saying to people that if they attack you and kill lots of your citizens, you will give them stuff.
00:36:45.000By the way, Hamas, for its part, doesn't even want a ceasefire.
00:36:49.000According to the Associated Press, Hamas was offered a two-month full ceasefire in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages and some Palestinian security prisoners being released as well, and allowing Hamas leaders to relocate to other countries to get out.
00:37:24.000First, Lady Ballers is the hilarious story of how a group of male losers who can't win against other men decide to identify as women and join a women's basketball league.
00:38:30.000The New York Times printed a piece in which they claimed that there's bipartisan polarization around immigration.
00:38:35.000So the New York Times runs this headline, Things Fall Apart, How the Middle Ground on Immigration Collapsed.
00:38:40.000And what they show is Pew Research Center polling with regard to feelings about illegal immigration and open borders.
00:38:47.000And for those who can't actually see the graphic that we're showing right now, this is why you should subscribe so you can actually see it because it's hysterically funny.
00:38:53.000Basically what it shows is that the American right has had perfectly consistent feelings on immigration since 1994.
00:39:01.000Like with very little play in the joints.
00:39:04.000And when asked whether they support broader and looser immigration, only about 30% of Republicans said yes back in 1994.
00:39:16.000And it's always been between those two numbers.
00:39:18.000It's like just a straight line between 1994 and 2019.
00:39:22.000For Democrats, the number went from 32% pro more open borders to 83% today.
00:39:29.000But what the New York Times did is they drew fake trend lines suggesting that there was a radical decrease for Republican support for borders, for open borders, and a radical increase for Democrats.
00:39:41.000Republicans have been perfectly consistent for 30 years on this question.
00:39:46.000Democrats have been utterly inconsistent.
00:39:48.000They've moved from 32% support for open borders to 83% support for more open borders.
00:39:55.000So what is the New York Times trying to do?
00:39:56.000They're trying to pretend that there's been bipartisan polarization when in fact there has not.
00:40:03.000When in fact, the reality is that Democrats are the ones who have gotten more radical.
00:40:06.000You can try whistling your way past this graveyard, but man, it is a stupid political move.
00:40:11.000In fact, fascinating piece over at Barry Weiss's Free Press today by a reporter, Olivia Reingold, talking about black Democrats suing Chicago over migrants.
00:40:20.000According to the Free Press, Black residents said that Chicago, which calls itself a welcoming city, has been very welcoming, just not to them.
00:40:28.000Since October 2022, Chicago has greeted nearly 35,000 new arrivals with resources like laundry services, mental health screenings, and $15,000 in rental support per person.
00:40:37.000All funds that could have gone a long way in Amundsen Park in Chicago's Austin district, where nearly 28% of residents live below the poverty line.
00:40:45.000So, last October, a day before the Fieldhouse was set to become a migrant shelter, A Black Democrat rushed to the local courthouse along with three of her neighbors plus the head of the local NAACP chapter for moral support and then drafted a lawsuit in a notebook, ripped out the pages, and handed them to a clerk.
00:40:58.000So now Black Democrats are suing over this.
00:41:01.000And when we say there's a disconnect between the elites that run the Democratic Party and the rest of the country, we mean, like, the rest of the country.
00:41:08.000That disconnect extends throughout American policy.
00:41:13.000And things are only going to get worse, by the way.
00:41:15.000Because again, weakness on a foreign policy level is likely to make things really bad economically speaking.
00:41:21.000Like right now, for example, China could effectively quarantine or blockade Taiwan.
00:41:29.000There's a poll from Axios, an expert opinion poll on whether Beijing could effectively quarantine, blockade, or invade Taiwan.
00:41:38.000According to these quote-unquote experts, a law enforcement-led quarantine of Taiwan, almost 90% of American experts strongly agree or somewhat agree that there could be a law enforcement-led quarantine of Taiwan.
00:41:55.000How about a Chinese army-led blockade of Taiwan?
00:42:13.000A blockade of Taiwan, in which the Taiwan Straits are effectively closed to all trade, in which microchips just stop being shipped all over the world because China looks at what's going on in the Red Sea and they say, hell, if a bunch of ragtag pirates can do that in the Red Sea, why can't we, with a very, very large greywater navy, And a huge army.
00:42:51.000The Chinese government right now, maybe they're holding out for a Biden victory because they think, okay, if they get a full second term of Joe Biden, they can push him around as much as they want.
00:42:58.000But what if Donald Trump is leading in a couple of months?
00:43:00.000Do they just say, you know what, forget it, let's go for broke at this point?
00:43:04.000Interesting article over at the Wall Street Journal from a couple of years ago talking about what exactly a Chinese blockade of Taiwan would mean for global business.
00:43:12.000And the answer is a gigantic disaster.
00:43:15.000Taiwan accounts for roughly 70% of the world's microchip supply.
00:43:19.000It sits next to Pacific shipping lanes that channel trillions of dollars worth of trade flowing in and out of East Asia.
00:43:26.000A Chinese blockade of Taiwan would result in chip shortages for cars and electronics to drive up inflationary pressures as well.
00:43:34.000Pretty much every major industry would be radically changed by such a blockade.
00:43:38.000And that's becoming more likely every day because Joe Biden is a weakling.
00:43:42.000And he's busy with the priorities of these elites.
00:43:46.000whose value system is unlike yours, and who are much more concerned about, say, global warming than they are about, say, global trade.
00:43:53.000Okay, meanwhile, I know what you're waiting for, and that is my analysis of the Oscar nominations.
00:43:59.000I know you weren't waiting for that because, after all, who watches the Oscars anymore?
00:44:02.000But still, I feel like it's worthwhile to go through some of these Oscar nominations because it's fun to see where, you know, people who disagree with you culturally are sitting today.
00:44:11.000So, in easily the funniest story of the day, Barbie, which as you know I loved.
00:44:48.000But, the funniest thing, by far the funniest thing, is that the only, is that the acting nominees for Barbie are Ryan Gosling, who plays Ken, America Ferreira is nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category for her garbage speech about how women have it so tough, and oh my god, it's so hard to be a woman.
00:45:22.000The greatest director of all time, Greta Gerwig, who's the greatest.
00:45:25.000We all love all of her work because she's the greatest director who ever directed, and because everything she says is wise and brilliant, and she's so wise.
00:45:57.000So the Best Picture nominees are American Fiction, which is apparently a kind of like weirdly anti-woke piece, is what I've heard, but I have not seen it yet.
00:46:05.000Anatomy of a Fall, which is about a relationship, because there's always a relationship movie at the Oscars.
00:46:11.000The Holdovers, which is, I guess, sideways in high school.
00:46:15.000Killers of the Flower Moon, which is really overlong, but it's directed by Martin Scorsese.
00:46:20.000And so we have to pretend that we all love Killers of the Flower Moon.
00:46:22.000And again, I'm not like super anti-Scorsese.
00:46:24.000I like some of his films, but Killers of the Flower Moon is a drag.
00:46:27.000Maestro, which is about Leonard Bernstein being gay.
00:46:31.000Oppenheimer, a movie called Past Lives, a movie called Poor Things, and a movie called The Zone of Interest.
00:46:37.000Now, I will admit that I'm interested to see The Zone of Interest.
00:46:40.000Mainly, it has amazing reviews, and also it covers ground that I literally just walked.
00:47:33.000For Best Actress, you have Annette Bening in a movie called Neod, which nobody has ever seen and no one knows what it's about or what it is.
00:47:39.000Or that Annette Bening was still alive.
00:47:40.000Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon.
00:47:48.000Carey Mulligan in Maestro and Emma Stone in Poor Things.
00:47:51.000I'm gonna bet that it's Emma Stone in Poor Things because Poor Things is apparently like a feminist tract about how repressed Victorian women... Then there's Best Supporting Actor.
00:48:01.000Robert De Niro got a nod for Killers of the Flower Moon, which is a late career nod to Robert De Niro playing a part that he is 40 years old to play.
00:49:19.000Barbie, again, is going to be the story because it's the only movie that, aside from Oppenheimer, anyone saw this year.
00:49:27.000Yeah, bottom line, low ratings, but I'm rooting very, very hard for Ryan Gosling to win for Barbie because it's the funniest possible outcome.
00:49:34.000The funniest possible outcome for the movie of Barbie is for Ken to win the only award.