On today's show, Jordan B. Peterson talks about Texas, gerrymandering, and the latest from Gaza Zor Mamdani. Plus, President Trump fires the head of the Bureau of Labor statistics.
00:00:00.000All right, folks, tons coming up on the show today, ranging from Texas Democrats running away from Texas very, very bravely in order to stop gerrymandering to the latest from Gaza, Zor Mamdani leading in the polls in New York, above and far away beyond all the other candidates combined.
00:00:16.000And President Trump, of course, firing the head of the Bureau of Labor statistics.
00:00:32.000Jordan B. Peterson's new series, Answer the Call, is going back to where this all started to speak directly to the people who need it most.
00:01:33.000There's one congressional district, particularly, District 13, that looks like kind of a snake that just kind of goes halfway up through the state.
00:01:42.000And then that is juxtaposed with another congressional district, District 17, that was created just to get to a Democratic majority that looks sort of like a stair stepper.
00:01:54.000You know, all these congressional districts are a total mess, like a complete and utter total mess.
00:01:58.000That is the Illinois congressional redistricting plan.
00:02:16.000That is a half Democrat, half Republican state, sort of.
00:02:20.000Oregon actually happens to be particularly badly gerrymandered.
00:02:24.000So there are a bunch of, this is a way that politics is done.
00:02:28.000The sort of attempt to treat gerrymandering as though it is unnatural and politics are only pursued by one side.
00:02:32.000That, of course, is absolute nonsense.
00:02:35.000So the Texas state Republicans are now attempting to re-gerrymander the state.
00:02:40.000And now Texas Democrats are threatening that they are going to run away from the state.
00:02:45.000Now, in order for them to do that, what they actually have to do is claim that this is an authoritarian threat to democracy as opposed to a way that congressional districts have been created since legitimately the beginning of the republic.
00:02:58.000Elbridge Jerry, who is the person who actually the term is named after former vice president of the United States, who served under President James Madison from 1813 until his death in 1814, obviously the founder of so-called gerrymandering lived at the very beginning of the Republic.
00:03:15.000So this is a very long-standing congressional practice.
00:03:19.000But according to former Barack Obama, A.G. Eric Holder, this is all authoritarian and a threat to democracy.
00:03:24.000Here's Eric Holder, who once called himself Barack Obama's wingman, actually suggesting that this is a threat to democracy if the Texas legislature redraws congressional districts.
00:03:36.000What we're seeing now is an attempt by the White House to insulate itself from any kind of congressional scrutiny, any kind of congressional oversight to make sure that Donald Trump remains the authoritarian figure that he has become.
00:03:49.000We have a compliant Congress, and he wants to ensure that given the fact that they passed this bill that is unpopular, that takes health care away from people, that gives tax breaks to billionaires, and it puts at risk the Republican majority.
00:04:02.000He wants to ensure that he continues to have that compliant Republican House of Representatives.
00:04:10.000Now, again, this idea that somehow the president is responsible for gerrymandering as opposed to, you know, the party that happens to be in control of a particular state legislature is ridiculous.
00:04:24.000So according to Politico, when the Texas legislature reconvenes today at 4 p.m. Eastern Time, it will be 57 Democrats short of a quorum.
00:04:32.000While a small number of Democratic legislators remain in Austin, many more have fled.
00:04:36.000Some will be in New York meeting with Governor Kathy Hochul, and they'll be hanging out 10 a.m. in Albany talking about how wrong they are and why they have to flee.
00:04:46.000Others will be hunkered down at an undisclosed hotel in Chicago.
00:04:49.000Now, I mentioned that I would be talking about Illinois.
00:04:52.000Again, there's great irony to legislators from Texas fleeing to Chicago in Illinois, one of the most gerrymandered states in America.
00:05:01.000Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker is providing them with logistical support.
00:05:06.000Now, again, it's not a shock that Pritzker is doing this.
00:05:08.000He wants to run for president in 2028.
00:05:11.000One of the leaders of this new movement is Texas State Representative James Tellerico, who spoke to Playbook Politico while he was aboard a bus hurtling toward his Chicagoland Hotel late last night, hurtling toward the hotel.
00:05:24.000He says, I'm hoping what we've heard from blue state lawmakers talking about retaliation may give Texas Republicans pause.
00:05:29.000It may give Speaker Mike Johnson pause because he's got members in blue states that may lose their seats if this escalates further.
00:05:35.000And apparently aboard the bus, he and other members talked about how Abraham Lincoln once broke quorum in the Illinois state legislature by jumping out of a window.
00:05:42.000And he said, everyone is hungry and tired, but in good spirits.
00:06:23.000Joe may be a heterodox person who voted for Donald Trump, but he is certainly not in any way sort of traditionally conservative.
00:06:29.000Well, here is James Tallarico explaining why he is running away.
00:06:34.000My Democratic colleagues and I have just left our beloved state to break quorum and stop Trump's redistricting power grab.
00:06:42.000Trump told our Republican colleagues to redraw the political maps here in Texas in the middle of the decade to get him five more seats and protect his majority in Congress.
00:06:53.000They're turning our districts into crazy shapes to guarantee the outcome they want in the 2026 elections.
00:06:59.000If this power grab succeeds, they will hang on to power without any accountability from the voters.
00:07:05.000The Texas Democrats are fighting back.
00:07:07.000We're leaving the state, breaking quorum, and preventing Republicans from silencing our voices and rigging the next election.
00:07:15.000We are not fighting for the Democratic Party.
00:07:17.000We are fighting for the Democratic process, and the stakes could not be higher.
00:07:58.000How many more seats are you going to take away from Orange County?
00:08:00.000There's not that much more you can do to gerrymander Republicans out of existence in places like California.
00:08:06.000But this, again, goes to the desperation of Democrats who do not have a national brand and what national brand they do have is quite negative.
00:08:14.000Already coming up, Zoran Mamdani is still the frontrunner in New York, maybe by a bigger margin than before.
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00:11:17.000Whether you call it the abolition of private property, you call it housing guarantees.
00:11:22.000It's preferable to what is going on right now.
00:11:24.000I mean, just the phrase abolition of private property, not something we usually hear in America.
00:11:32.000I mean, he is right about all of that.
00:11:35.000It is, again, an amazing thing that Democrats have decided to mobilize behind him.
00:11:39.000And they are, by the way, there is a new poll out showing that, you know, a couple of weeks ago, if you'd combined all the rest of the Democrats running against Mamdani, they would have essentially overcome his levels of support if you'd combined them with Curtis Sliwa, the only Republican in the race.
00:11:54.000But now there's a new poll out by Zenith Research and Public Progress Solutions, and it finds him in the lead with over 50% of the vote, regardless of who else runs, which of course is a disaster area for the city of New York, which will clear out.
00:12:09.000I mean, it's hard to think of a worse idea for the financial center of the human planet than Zorin Mamdani, a communist being in charge of it.
00:12:21.000Well, a clip is now merged of New York City Democrat Socialists of America steering committee head Daniel Golden, who talks about how they coordinate openly with Zorin Mamdani.
00:12:32.000And actually, his plans are even more radical than the stuff he's talking about.
00:12:35.000He actually would love it if other states and cities would send people who want to be trans to New York so they can pay for them.
00:12:43.000Here is the New York City DSA steering committee head, Daniel Golden, describing the joys of Zorin Mamdani.
00:12:52.000But most importantly, we collaborated with the Zoran Mamdani campaign on his trans rights platform.
00:12:58.000And what we explicitly wanted to do was use the power of New York City to provide free gender-affirming care.
00:13:05.000And I say free in case insurance companies decide to foot us off.
00:13:09.000Free gender-affirming care, not just to people in New York City, but across the country.
00:13:13.000There's no reason at all that we can't use telehealth and mailing prescriptions to people across the country to undermine state bands.
00:13:22.000The Zoran campaign was always eager to work with us.
00:13:40.000And all of a sudden, my work shifts from being on the outside to thinking about how to utilize the fairly significant municipal power of New York City.
00:14:10.000I said when Mom Dani was running in the New York mayoral primary, a lot of people were saying politically, why is he not dissociating himself from globalize the Intifada?
00:14:19.000Why is he not moving away from the quasi-support of Hamas?
00:14:25.000And I said the answer is because for the Democratic voting populace, that is popular.
00:14:30.000I was there in 2012 at the Democratic National Convention when Antonio Villagosa, who was then the head of the DNC, got up and in the Democratic National Committee platform, they wanted to have a plank that said that Jerusalem was the eternal and unbreakable capital of Israel.
00:14:58.000You can see it in Its most virulent and ugly form with regard to what Israel is doing currently in Gaza.
00:15:06.000Just to make clear right now, Israel is shipping in extraordinary amounts of aid to Gaza, extraordinary amounts of aid.
00:15:13.000Ambassador Mike Huckabee put out a tweet this morning explaining exactly what is happening in Gaza.
00:15:19.000Quote, there is no policy of starvation in Gaza except Hamas's deliberate starvation of the hostages.
00:15:23.000Israel does not limit the amount of aid entering Gaza and has in the past facilitated the entry of up to 700 aid trucks per day, depending on UN and NGO supply.
00:15:31.000In addition, Israel is now facilitating daily humanitarian pauses, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and aid airdrops.
00:15:38.000UN-led aid distribution has stagnated after an initial increase, and the vast majority of it is diverted by Hamas.
00:15:43.000We talked last week about how the UN is openly saying they will not allow the IDF to help them get the aid into the Gaza Strip because they want it stolen by Hamas.
00:15:54.000A growing number of aid partners are trying alternative methods of aid distribution to civilians instead of relying solely on the UN mechanism.
00:16:00.000The main obstacle is not aid entry, says Huckabee, but distribution within Gaza.
00:16:04.000The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is the only mechanism successfully ensuring aid is not diverted by Hamas.
00:16:09.000So how much aid went into Gaza over the last week?
00:16:12.00023,000 tons of aid, 23,000 tons of aid.
00:16:17.000Now, a rough estimate for how much aid it would require to feed 2 million people in Gaza every day is about 1,200 tons of aid, 1,300 tons of aid.
00:16:27.000So what that means is that they shipped in the last week more than double, almost triple the amounts of aid that would be necessary to support the entirety of the Gaza Strip every day.
00:16:39.000Hamas was stealing an enormous amount of it.
00:16:41.0001,200 trucks entered Gaza over the past week, and Israel has been holding off on military action day to day in order to facilitate the entry of that aid.
00:16:52.000It is pretty clear what is happening here, which is that Gaza is not in a state of overt famine, except that Hamas keeps stealing the aid.
00:17:02.000Whatever famine is being caused in Gaza is being caused by Hamas.
00:17:06.000Hamas is not trying to bring aid into the people.
00:17:08.000Hamas is desperately attempting to avoid that.
00:17:10.000They're shooting people who show up in lines for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
00:17:14.000They shoot rockets at the aid stations that Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has set up.
00:17:19.000Here, for example, is a Gazan telling MSNBC the dirty part, which is that Hamas actually would like a famine.
00:17:26.000Hamas wanted to see the deterioration of the humanitarian conditions in Gaza, knowing full well that this may be the only hope for drawing in the international community, for producing horrendous imagery that showcase the war as being a humanitarian catastrophe and therefore hoping to bring about a rapid end to the war that it started and it has an ultimate responsibility to end.
00:17:56.000I think for sure Hamas has had a role in siphoning off plenty of the aid going in.
00:18:04.000Look, obviously, as a father, as a human being, when I look at pictures of anybody suffering, particularly children, you have to be very concerned and upset about that.
00:18:14.000I don't know how a human being can look at pictures in Gaza and not be upset by those pictures.
00:18:17.000The question is, who is to blame for that suffering and how does that suffering stop?
00:18:22.000And the answer to the former question is Hamas.
00:18:24.000And the answer to the latter is that Hamas is no longer in control of either aid distribution or of the Gaza Strip in part or in whole.
00:18:31.000Obviously, also, if the Europeans continue to support Hamas and do Hamas's work in terms of propaganda to ensure that Hamas never gives up, the suffering only continues, which is Hamas's game.
00:18:45.000By the way, we know for a fact why Hamas is doing this, because Hamas is winning what it believes to be political victories precisely by starving the people of Gaza.
00:19:12.000Because they have pushed this propagandistic effort to label Israel as a genocidal nation.
00:19:19.000And somehow, post-October 7th, after the deadliest attack on Jews since World War II, they are now on the verge of having a bunch of countries declare a Palestinian state with no government, no territory, no borders, and no freedom.
00:19:32.000I mean, that's an amazing PR victory by them, reliant on the stupidity and gullibility of a bunch of people who are willing to do Hamas's propaganda work for them.
00:22:14.000According to Semaphore, last Thursday at 3 p.m., the Times was preparing to run images of Yusuf Matar, a young child in Gaza with cerebral palsy, who is suffering from lack of nourishment, alongside its July 24th story that cited doctors in Gaza finding, quote, an increasing number of their patients are suffering and dying from starvation.
00:22:31.000And by the way, if you think that there is a chance in hell that if Hamas, for example, and all of the Palestinian propaganda outlets had pictures of hundreds of starving Palestinians, like in skeletal condition and they weren't running on the front pages, you'd be out of your mind.
00:22:50.000And you know they would be because the Palestinian propaganda effort is overwhelming and the media have bought into it because it matches all of their priors.
00:22:59.000The Times' topmost editors wanted to err on the side of caution.
00:23:02.000After viewing the photo, according to communications viewed by Semaphore, they worried it might inadvertently call into question the paper's reporting, which said many of the children suffering from hunger did not have pre-existing health issues.
00:23:13.000Managing editor Mark Lacey said, quote, do we want to use a photo that will be the subject of debate when there's presumably no shortage of images of children who were not malnourished before the war and currently are?
00:23:45.000They ran another photo of a kid who had significant health disorders prior to the situation in Gaza.
00:23:53.000They were desperate to run a photo demonstrating that Israel was starving children.
00:23:58.000And so they went ahead with photos of kids who had serious other health conditions other than lack of nutrition.
00:24:06.000I mean, Hamas could always count on its friends in the media.
00:24:09.000They could always count on their friends in the media.
00:24:11.000In fact, Hamas can count on its friends in the media so much that last week, very end of last week, Hamas released a video of a hostage that it took during October 7th.
00:24:27.000For those who can't see, he's skeletal, totally starved.
00:24:32.000If you look at a before and after picture of this guy, he looks totally different.
00:24:35.000And they forced him to dig his own grave in a tunnel.
00:24:38.000And then they released the pictures as a way to try and create pressure inside Israel for Israel to essentially end the war without victory.
00:24:45.000They released those pictures publicly.
00:24:48.000And in fact, in the video, they actually have a person from Hamas handing him food.
00:24:54.000And they make the claim that Hamas is living in the same conditions as Evyat Tardavid.
00:26:04.000Because they knew that the media would not pick up on it and run with it.
00:26:08.000The New York Times did not dedicate a front page to that picture of Evyatavid, who, by the way, is, as far as I have seen, maybe the only picture of an adult victim of starvation in the Gaza Strip.
00:26:23.000Again, you would imagine lots of pictures of adult victims of starvation in the Gaza Strip if Hamas had those to bubble his eyes, except that Israel and the GHF have been handing out thousands of meals, millions of meals over the course of the last couple of months in the Gaza Strip.
00:26:39.000Okay, so did this run on the front page of the New York Times?
00:26:47.000And again, they know that their friends in the media will do whatever they can to foster the idea that this is once again a cycle of violence and Israel basically should surrender.
00:26:57.000Now, I do find it amusing that all of these people keep saying, well, Hamas should just give up the hostages and end the war.
00:27:05.000How do you propose to accomplish this?
00:27:07.000Do you really think that Hamas is going to stop now?
00:27:10.000They believe they have the upper hand in terms of the politics of the situation.
00:27:14.000The minute they give up all the hostages, they're dead and they know it.
00:27:18.000I mean, what do you think is going to happen here?
00:27:21.000And I think in order to truly understand what Evyatar David, how starved Evyatard is, here is a picture of Evyatar David before.
00:27:30.000Here's a picture of Evyatar David after.
00:27:32.000That is a victim of starvation because Hamas is deliberately starving its own hostages.
00:27:38.000But then you have tweets like this one from Piers Morgan, who has truly turned into the Jerry Springer of low-rent politics.
00:27:44.000Quote, it's interesting that all the prominent pro-Israeli voices on here who refuse to believe any Gazan casualty numbers published by the Hamas-run Palestinian Health Ministry accept the veracity of hostage pics or videos posted by Hamas without hesitation.
00:27:56.000I don't know what the hell Piers is trying to say here.
00:27:57.000Honestly, is he claiming that the pictures put out by Hamas are fake there?
00:28:05.000And if he's saying, why do you only believe the Hamas propaganda videos in which they accidentally expose themselves as opposed to the numbers that they put out that are totally unverified and unverifiable?
00:28:25.000That principle is that if somebody makes what's called an admission against interest, it is admissible in court in a way that admissions against interest are not.
00:28:35.000In other words, people don't tend to tell on themselves.
00:28:38.000So if Hamas is putting out one line of attack saying that Israel is killing hundreds of people at aid stations every day, that serves their purposes.
00:28:45.000And if they put out a video that is designed to stoke hatred in Israel by people against their government, which is what this was, and it accidentally instead shows that they are starving hostages, that is an accidental admission against interest.
00:28:57.000So yes, I believe them when they put out a video of the hostage whose name we know of them starving this person to death.
00:29:06.000Yes, I believe them when they do that.
00:29:07.000And no, I don't believe them when they put out statistics that there's no way of verifying five minutes after an event occurs when we know they lie repeatedly.
00:29:16.000But again, all this is part of a broader propagandistic idea and it is bought into by the left across the globe.
00:29:23.000I mean, truly across the globe, which is an amazing thing and speaks to sort of the underlying dynamic on the left, which is always and forever to declare that unsuccessful third world regimes like Hamas are somehow victimized by their colonial overlords or some such nonsense.
00:29:40.000Now, how's this actually going to come to an end?
00:29:43.000According to the New York Times, there's now a discussion between the Israeli government and the American government.
00:29:48.000They're going to try and push for a comprehensive deal.
00:29:51.000Hamas does not want to make a deal, obviously.
00:29:53.000So basically, Israel and the United States may say that there will be no more piecemeal deals.
00:29:59.000Everybody comes out alive, Hamas goes into exile, or Israel goes to the end.
00:30:04.000Okay, which, by the way, should have been the situation in the first place.
00:30:07.000They should set up humanitarian enclaves in Rafah and a couple other places around the Gaza Strip.
00:30:11.000They should make sure that the aid to those places is plentiful.
00:30:14.000They should use face recognition technology to try and prevent people associated with Hamas from getting into those enclaves.
00:30:19.000This would be basic counterinsurgency strategy.
00:30:22.000And then they should, and then they should essentially clean up the rest of the Gaza Strip.
00:30:25.000They should give people a particular period of time to get to those humanitarian aid areas that are protected by the IDF and other people on the ground, in which aid is controlled, not by the United Nations, which is, again, an awful, evil organization, but instead is controlled by an organization that does not wish to hand the aid to Hamas.
00:30:44.000And then after giving people enough time to get to the enclaves, Israel should essentially start annexing one mile per day, one square mile per day for every day that Hamas does not surrender in the rest of the Gaza Strip because there's nothing else that Hamas understands at this point.
00:30:57.000If Israel would like to get back its hostages, that is the only way of doing this.
00:31:01.000All righty, coming up, we'll get into the latest on the economy.
00:31:03.000Again, President Trump needs a booming economy.
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00:33:18.000Okay, meanwhile, the other big news over the course of the weekend was that President Trump made the unique move of firing his Bureau of Labor Statistics chief after a weak jobs report.
00:33:29.000So we talked about this jobs report that came out last week that showed not only weak job growth, that 73,000 jobs estimated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but also showed a revision downward of a couple hundred thousand jobs, demonstrating that actually over the last three months, there's basically been almost no job growth in the United States.
00:33:47.000In a social media post, President Trump said that Erica McIntarfer, the BLS commissioner, would be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified, asserting that the government's jobs numbers have been manipulated for political purposes.
00:34:00.000So first of all, to understand why jobs number change, you actually have to understand exactly what job numbers do and how they are calculated in the first place.
00:34:10.000So according to News Nation, how are those jobs numbers calculated?
00:34:13.000Well, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases an estimate of the change in payroll employment for the previous month.
00:34:18.000That estimate is based on a monthly survey of about 560,000 businesses selected to represent millions of employers nationwide.
00:34:26.000So businesses report the total number of people who worked or received paid during that pay period, including the 12th of the month.
00:34:32.000So they produce an initial estimate for the overall economy based on job gains or losses at the businesses that submitted their data.
00:34:39.000But many businesses haven't finalized their payroll data in time for the initial release, meaning the early numbers often represent an incomplete snapshot.
00:35:28.000And so this raises the question of, was this jobs report rigged?
00:35:31.000Why is President Trump going off on the jobs report?
00:35:35.000According to Alicia Finley reporting for the Wall Street Journal, the BLS commissioner has traditionally been a nonpartisan post.
00:35:42.000The Senate confirmed Ms. McIntarfer 36 to 8 last year.
00:35:48.000But Trump asserted without evidence that McIntarfer faked the jobs numbers before the election to try to boost Kamala's chances of victory and revise the job numbers after the election by 818,000.
00:35:58.000Well, the truth, says Finley, is the jobs numbers have become more volatile in recent years because of declining business survey response rates.
00:36:05.000It's why polls have been not particularly great because response rates are down.
00:36:09.000The Bureau surveys 631,000 workplaces by a variety of media, including phone, web, even fax.
00:36:14.000Many businesses don't respond every month.
00:36:16.000The BLS tries to collect the data and then revises its findings over the next two months.
00:36:20.000The survey's overall response rate has declined to 43% from 60% before the pandemic.
00:36:25.000Small businesses are less likely than bigger ones to respond, especially in the first month.
00:36:29.000And the survey doesn't fully account for business births and deaths either.
00:36:34.000So is it true that there was some sort of gigantic screw-up here?
00:36:40.000That actually the person who's responsible is the person who's the head of BLS.
00:36:46.000It doesn't seem like there's a lot of evidence to the idea that this lady in particular is responsible for the bad job numbers here.
00:36:54.000The White House points out that there have been a lot of job revisions over the course of the last couple of years.
00:37:00.000Quote, a lengthy history of inaccuracies and incompetence by Erica McIntarfer, the former Biden-appointed commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has completely eroded public trust and government agency charged with disseminating key data used by policymakers and businesses to make consequential decisions.
00:37:15.000This is what the White House has to say about all of this.
00:37:39.000As inflation was mounting, you saw his public officials out there saying the American people just didn't understand inflation was transitory.
00:37:47.000Hiring the head of BLS isn't actually going to fix this problem.
00:37:50.000In fact, in many ways, it undermines President Trump because let's say that the job numbers go up next month after he replaces the head of the BLS.
00:37:59.000Is that going to be a more trustworthy number?
00:38:01.000How many people are going to say that that person now has a political incentive to please President Trump by creating a number that he likes?
00:39:31.000Because firms are created or firms go out of business, and we don't really know that during the course of the year until we reconcile against a real full count of all the businesses.
00:40:17.000Look, the fact is that when the data are unreliable, when they keep being revised all over the place, then there are going to be people that wonder if there's a partisan pattern in the data.
00:40:28.000Okay, well, I mean, that may well be the truth, but you know what else is going to make people believe there's a partisan bent to the data is when you fire the head of BLS and try to replace that person after a bad jobs report.
00:40:39.000You'll notice that President Trump didn't fire this person after a good jobs report or a revision up, right?
00:40:45.000If the idea here is that you're trying to ensure the veracity of the statistics, then an error in the other direction would be just as bad in terms of just ensuring that people believe the stats.
00:40:56.000So do I think this is a smart political move?
00:40:58.000I do not think that it's a smart political move by the president because again, it is undermining people's belief in the fairness of the stats.
00:41:06.000Now, again, you can say that the stats are flawed and you can point out that every stat should be taken with a grain of salt, which of course is, I think, a totally fair point.
00:41:13.000I think President Trump could say, listen, they got it wrong one direction.
00:41:16.000Maybe they got it wrong the other direction next month.
00:41:46.000Trying to pretend that this is not a massive increase in tariff rates.
00:41:51.000Obviously, it is a massive increase in tariff rates.
00:41:54.000Now, is that going to kick into inflation?
00:41:56.000We'll get into Federal Reserve policy here in a second, because if, as Milton Friedman has said, and as I've quoted many times, inflation is anywhere and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, what you would expect is a temporary increase in prices followed by a drop in demand, followed by a decrease in prices.
00:42:11.000That is normally what happens when there is a bad piece of policy.
00:42:15.000The prices go up because of restriction in supply.
00:42:17.000And then people are like, well, I don't want to buy it at that price.
00:42:21.000And then the prices go down to adjust to lack of demand.
00:42:24.000That is actually what happened during the Great Depression.
00:42:26.000There's a price spiral that was partially brought on by tariffs.
00:42:30.000It wasn't like there was a massive amount of inflation.
00:42:32.000There was actually a price decrease and a massive amount of deflation happened in the early years of the Great Depression, partially due to tariff policy, actually.
00:42:41.000Okay, so what actually is happening here?
00:42:43.000Well, the problem here is not just the tariffs.
00:42:45.000It is also the uncertainty associated with the tariffs.
00:42:48.000Here is Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan.
00:42:50.000He says, listen, a lot of this slowdown is just nobody knows what the hell is going on.
00:42:56.000They don't think they're going to move.
00:42:58.000Now, the market says they're going to move in September, maybe twice this year.
00:43:01.000The market was at seven times one point this year.
00:43:15.000And then secondly, the rate we're going to go to is a rate that is more normal than pre-global financial crisis, more of a 3%, 3.5% rate, which actually means the American economy is probably functioning better, frankly.
00:43:28.000Okay, so we are going to see exactly whether that is true or not.
00:43:31.000Jameson Greer is our U.S. trade representative, and he says there may be more coming.
00:43:36.000He says that August 12th, there's the possibility of a tariff snap back.
00:43:40.000Here he was on CBS with Margaret Brennan.
00:44:15.000We're working on some technical issues, and we're talking to the president about it.
00:44:20.000I think it's going in a positive direction.
00:44:22.000I'm not going to get ahead of the president, but I don't think anyone wants to see those tariffs snap back to 84%.
00:44:30.000Okay, so I think he's right about that.
00:44:33.000I think that he is looking, presumably, for an off-ramp President Trump here.
00:44:38.000With that said, this amount of volatility in the tariff economy, unpredictability is going to lead to investors slowing down.
00:44:47.000There's certain areas where it's not going to slow down, like AI.
00:44:50.000We know that AI, the money is just going to keep dumping into AI.
00:44:52.000That is going to keep happening until presumably the bubble bursts.
00:44:56.000Because right now, the amount being poured into AI is not being met by productivity gains on the other end concomitant with the investment.
00:45:02.000And somebody's going to win the AI race.
00:45:04.000Open AI will beat Anthropic or Meta will beat both of them.
00:45:08.000And then there will be losers and those losers will fall out of step.
00:45:15.000If President Trump wants a booming economy at this point, he already has deregulation.
00:45:20.000He already has the one big beautiful bill.
00:45:22.000He needs some sense of predictability and solidity in the American economy.
00:45:26.000And that jobs report that came out last week is a warning sign.
00:45:30.000It is a red warning sign saying that you might want to slow up on the tariff war if it is going to undermine demand.
00:45:38.000And maybe the Federal Reserve does what President Trump wants, and maybe it's the right thing to do to lower those interest rates finally and increase the ability of people to borrow at lower rates.
00:45:49.000But the big problem is going to be where do people put that money?
00:45:52.000Because right now we have a bunch of speculative bubbles all over the place.
00:45:54.000You can kind of sense these bubbles everywhere, from the real estate market to the crypto markets to things like AI.
00:46:01.000And while I don't think that we are on the verge of those bubbles bursting, I don't think that a recession is going to just pop upon us.
00:46:13.000We are in still a very risky economic time and treating it as though we are not, I think, is a mistake and shooting the head of the BLS in order to blame her for the fact that these factors are cross-cutting and existing.
00:46:34.000He became, for just a moment in time, a person for whom the left lit vote of candles is after Dr. Anthony Fauci and Anthony and Robert Mueller.
00:46:43.000There are a bunch of figures that the left has really worshipped for a very long time.
00:46:47.000Jack Smith was a brief object of worship for the left because he was going after President Trump with a wide variety of lawsuits.
00:46:54.000Well, now the Office of Special Counsel has confirmed that it is opening a probe into Smith for possible violations of the Hatch Act, which is a federal law that bans partisan political activity by certain government employees.
00:47:05.000That inquiry comes at the request of Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who on Wednesday asked the agency to scrutinize whether Smith's actions were designed to skew the 2024 election in favor of then President Joe Biden and his then vice president Kamala Harris.
00:47:16.000Cotton accuses Smith of trying to influence the election by rushing criminal proceedings.
00:47:20.000Now, you'll remember that Smith did, in fact, attempt to accelerate his criminal cases against President Trump prior to the election.
00:47:28.000He wanted to ensure that something got adjudicated before the election actually happened.
00:47:34.000Smith's team brought two federal cases against Trump in the lead up to the November election, one alleging Trump unlawfully retained classified documents, another over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election laws.
00:47:44.000Both were charged in 2023 ahead of the 2024 election.
00:47:49.000Smith dropped them after Trump was reelected.
00:47:53.000Smith and then Attorney General Merrick Garland have repeatedly said politics played no role in the investigations.
00:47:58.000The probe is unusual because the steepest punishment for violation of the Hatch Act typically is dismissal from the federal government.
00:48:03.000Now, the Hatch Act is very rarely invoked.
00:48:06.000People online like the Hatch Act a lot.
00:48:08.000Our sort of online lawyering club loves the Hatch Acts.
00:48:11.000The Hatch Act's like, you're not allowed to do political activity if you are in politics, if you're in a nonpartisan position, no politics.
00:48:18.000And it turns out that people do that all the time.
00:48:21.000It's possible the Hatch Act is actually a violation of the First Amendment.
00:48:23.000There's all sorts of questions about the utility of the Hatch Act.
00:48:27.000However, it does signal that the President of the United States is unwilling to allow Democrats and Democrat appointees to be let off the hook for the politicization of everything from the DOJ to the Intel divisions.
00:48:41.000Speaking of which, CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed over the weekend on Fox and Maria Bardaromo that John Brennan, James Comey, and Hillary Clinton might actually face indictment.
00:48:51.000So what I think I hear you saying is there is still an opportunity for indictments, potential prosecutions, accountability from those people who may have lied under oath, like John Brennan, James Comey, and perhaps Hillary Clinton.
00:49:07.000Well, that's why I've made the referrals that I have.
00:49:10.000DNI Gabbard has made referrals and why we're going to continue to share the intelligence that would support the ability of our Department of Justice to make fair and just bring fair and just claims against those who have perpetrated this hoax against the American people and this stain on our country.
00:49:29.000Okay, so we'll find out whether that happens or not.
00:49:32.000Certainly, if the evidence is there, prosecutions should be in order.
00:49:35.000Meanwhile, director of the FBAC Cash Patel put out a tweet over the weekend, quote, in 2017, 2018, I proved the Steele dossier was fictitious intelligence weaponized by corrupt FBI officials to deceive a federal judge, an unlawfully spy on then presidential candidate Trump's campaign, all paid for by his opponent.
00:49:52.000Now, says Cash Patel, I'm the FBI director, we just uncovered burn bags filled with hidden Russia gate files, including the Durham manners and declassified them.
00:49:59.000Once again, I released the prior FBI's own documents and exposed the truth.
00:50:03.000The same media is calling me a liar again.
00:50:04.000Maybe this FBI will release more docs directly from FBI headquarters so we can see who is lying.
00:50:09.000Wouldn't want to deprive the fake news of more bogus Pulitzers.
00:50:13.000So we'll find out what else he has to release.
00:50:15.000It sounds like there is more that is going to drop in the very near future.
00:50:19.000Okay, meanwhile, Chuck Schumer and his Democrats are still holding up a bunch of President Trump's nominees.
00:50:25.000According to Politico, GOP's internal frustration in the Senate has been building over the past month.
00:50:30.000Many Republicans are annoyed about the lack of voice votes for President Trump's nominees.
00:50:33.000Senate Majority Leader John Thune noted in a floor address last Monday that at the same point in his tenure, President Biden had gotten dozens of nominees approved without having to call individual roll call votes.
00:50:43.000Democrats have basically been utilizing a wide variety of methodologies in order to hold up President Trump's even intermediate or low-level nominees.
00:50:52.000Thun added in an interview on Tuesday, quote, pressure is going to grow to take steps to expedite this process if Dems don't start playing ball soon.
00:50:59.000It's going to start coming from every direction.
00:51:01.000There are roughly 150 nominees currently awaiting action on the Senate floor.
00:51:05.000Democrats are forcing Republicans to eat up floor time to overcome procedural hurdle nominees on even mid-level picks.
00:51:11.000Senator Dick Durbin, of course, says, quote, Republicans would like to return to those golden years when there were groups of nominees considered, but we weren't given that courtesy by them.
00:51:21.000Okay, so the question, of course, is if that's the case, then why were so many more nominees approved by Republicans while Joe Biden was president of the United States?
00:51:33.000Chuck Schumer is trying to claim that it's because President Trump's nominees are historically bad.
00:51:38.000Let me say, historically bad nominees deserve historic levels of scrutiny.
00:51:45.000I saw the majority leader bring out a chart again today comparing the situation right now to past nominees from past administrations.
00:51:52.000What he fails to mention is that we have never seen nominees as flawed, as compromised, as unqualified as we have right now.
00:52:02.000And the Republican senators know that.
00:52:04.000So once again, historically bad nominees deserve a historical level of scrutiny.
00:53:50.000What Democrats are actually doing is, according to Fox News, they are attempting to leverage Republicans into stopping future recision packages.
00:53:57.000Those, of course, are the things done where the White House says we don't want to spend a certain amount of money.
00:54:01.000And then Congress essentially passes a bill by a pure majority vote saying we are not going to force you to spend a given amount of money.
00:54:09.000President Trump doesn't want any of that.
00:54:12.000He put out a post on Saturday on Truth Social, quote, praising Republicans for fighting over the weekend and far beyond, if necessary, in order to get my appointments approved and on their way to helping us make America great again.
00:54:24.000He said, Senator Cry and Chuck Schumer is demanding over $1 billion in order to approve a small number of our highly qualified nominees who should right now be helping us to run our country.
00:54:32.000The demand is egregious and unprecedented and would be embarrassing to the Republican Party if it were accepted.
00:54:37.000It's political extortion by any other name.
00:54:39.000Tell Schumer, who's under tremendous political pressure from within his own party, the radical left lunatics, to go to hell.
00:54:45.000Go home and explain to your constituents what bad people the Democrats are and what great jobs the Republicans are doing and have done for our country.
00:54:52.000Have a great recess and make America great.
00:54:54.000Again, not one of Trump's nominees has gotten a voice vote or gone through unanimous consent.
00:54:59.000At this point, four years ago, 49 of President Biden's picks had already been confirmed by voice votes.
00:55:06.000So according to Senator Mark Wynn Mullen of Oklahoma, he says the Republicans have a few options.
00:55:11.000One, they could reach a deal with the Democrats.
00:55:12.000Two, they could adjourn the Senate and give the president runway for recess appointments, which appears to be what they're going to do.
00:55:17.000And finally, a rules change package in which Republicans consider the nuclear option.
00:55:21.000Basically, they go to the Senate parliamentarian and they ask for a ruling that by pure majority vote, they can just push through these nominees without any sort of obstruction by Democrats.
00:55:33.000Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, he says, listen, we are getting some of Trump's nominees through.
00:55:38.000We've got a great start, but Democrats are holding up the process for sure.
00:55:43.000But I want to emphasize, despite Chuck Schumer's trying to slow things down, we've had an incredible first seven months under President Trump.
00:55:50.000We've had 11 pieces of major legislation that the president signed.
00:55:53.000We've repealed 16 Biden rules as well, 125 nominees, but the Democrats are not following suit at all.
00:56:01.000They're doing everything they can to obstruct us.
00:56:05.000Well, it will be fascinating to see what Republicans do next.
00:56:08.000They should hold Democrats' feet to the fire on all of this.
00:56:11.000Meanwhile, we have updates on that horrifying video last week of a white man being pummeled by a group of black young men.
00:56:21.000And then a white woman steps in and she gets absolutely clocked in the face by a young black man.
00:56:27.000And this, of course, went viral online.
00:56:28.000And it raised the question that we briefly discussed on the show: if the races were reversed, wouldn't that have been a national story?
00:57:42.000So one of the alleged assailants is 34, claimed he was called racial spurs and spat on the lead up to the beatdown.
00:57:50.000Well, of the woman, I mean, you can see that on tape.
00:57:53.000But I mean, let's assume for the sake of argument that the N-word was used by the white guy or even by the woman who was punched in the face.
00:58:02.000So when I say so, I don't mean they did something okay.
00:58:07.000But the punishment for using the N-word in the United States of America is not you get your ass kicked by an entire group of people.
00:58:12.000That is not how this typically works while people stand around filming and dancing and cheering.
00:58:17.000Words are not to be met with violence.
00:58:19.000This is one of the typical rules of a civilized society.
00:58:22.000The monopoly of violence is supposed to be held by the police or to be used in self-defense.
00:58:29.000Apparently, according to the police, one of the women who was involved in this conflagration interjected herself into a brawl on the street.
00:58:40.000Family members, according to the New York Post, of the alleged assailants have since attempted to make the street rampage into a racial issue, claiming the only reason it drew so much attention and outrage was because of the skin color of those involved.
00:58:52.000I mean, that's obviously true in the sense that if this were a bunch of black people beating up a black person, it wouldn't receive a lot of attention.
00:58:58.000But the point is, until social media, a bunch of black people beating up a white person would not have received a lot of attention and still has not nationally.
00:59:06.000The real question here is about the legacy media coverage, because the question is not if a bunch of white people beat up a white person, would it make news?
00:59:43.000Meanwhile, Ken Cober, the president of the Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police, spoke to the Daily Wire about this.
00:59:50.000And he slammed elected city leaders over allegations many have made against the victims of the mob attack on July 26th.
00:59:56.000He said, quote, I speak to our investigators probably every 12 hours.
00:59:59.000There's been absolutely zero evidence so far that suggests these victims caused this.
01:00:03.000I mean, they've looked at video evidence, they've done interviews, nothing suggests these victims were the ones that started this mob attack.
01:00:09.000After videos of the mob attack began circulating online, Cincinnati City Council President Pro Tem Victoria Parks wrote a Facebook comment saying the victims, quote, begged for that beatdown.
01:00:18.000I am grateful for the whole story, which is insane.
01:00:22.000Vice Mayor Jan Michelle Kearney said, quote, let us be clear, we do not condone violence.
01:00:26.000We condemn the violent actions of the instigators of the fight, as well as the violent actions of those who responded to the provocation.
01:00:32.000Opportunists are trying to use this incident as a way to divide us racially and politically and cast our great city in a false and negative light.
01:00:38.000Cobra said, quote, I think a lot of it is pandering to their constituents.
01:00:42.000They do it in the face of what the investigation says.
01:00:44.000These investigators have met with city officials, explained to them, here's the evidence we have.
01:00:48.000And they just snub their nose at that.
01:00:52.000Now, apparently, the city's police force, according to Daily Wire, has operated understaffed by roughly 20%.
01:00:59.000Republican Senator Berry Moreno of Ohio ripped into Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Peraval last week after the mayor's response to the attack.
01:01:07.000He said, nice words don't mean anything unless you have actual actions in order to improve policing in Cincinnati.
01:01:15.000So, again, the fact that this is turned into a sort of apparent racial defense, racialist defense by some members of Cincinnati government is totally insane, but indicative of where we are politically.
01:01:27.000Okay, meanwhile, in foreign policy news, Dmitry Medvedev, who is the deputy chair of the Security Council of the Russian Federation and was for just a brief moment a Potemkin president of Russia before Vladimir Putin decided to get rid of the facade and just do what he wanted.
01:01:46.000He had been threatening nuclear action based on American support for Ukraine and NATO support for Ukraine.
01:01:52.000And he had threatened the possibility of nuclear action.
01:01:55.000He put out a tweet, quote, Trump's playing the ultimate game with Russia.
01:01:57.00050 days or 10, he should remember two things.
01:02:09.000Well, President Trump responded to that by positioning two nuclear submarines closer to Russia in response to the recent comments.
01:02:18.000He said, quote, based on the highly provocative statements of the former president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the deputy chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I've ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that.
01:02:34.000The U.S. does have strategic submarines at sea that carry nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.
01:02:38.000But the bottom line here is that this is obviously President Trump backing the Russians off, saying, listen, you guys really think you're going to go to nuclear war at the United States?